Kids, war, and other traumatic things
Finally started watching the latest season of SPN. I think it's hilarious that Dean, as 
justabi said a long time ago, has so much love to give that he ends up loving anyone who hangs out with him long enough--see, e.g., Crowley. I can't wait for the same process to work on Jack.
Barbara W. Tuchman, The Zimmermann Telegram: Chock full of pithy, judgmental descriptions of historical figures, this book tells the story of the intrigue that helped push the US into WWI, as a result of the Kaiser’s attempt to recruit Mexico into an alliance with Germany and Japan to take US territory-by sending coded messages via the US’s own diplomatic messaging. Some of the incidents are so bizarre they’re funny-this was at the end of the Great Game, and spies did some pretty incredible things, even as the War to End All Wars ground on.
Reid Wilson & Lynn Lyons, Anxious Kids, Anxious Parents: A useful reminder that parents don’t do kids any favors by trying to remove all sources of anxiety (or, as a friend of mine said, heralding the kid’s arrival by announcing ‘hark, here comes an anxious kid, be careful’). Instead, the authors advocate helping the kid accept uncertainty as a part of life, just as we must do in some situations as adults. Not exactly the situation I’m in, but still a bunch of helpful advice about how to talk about challenges.
Dave Grossman with Loren W. Christensen, On Combat: In combat, it’s normal to pee or shit your pants, but very few people tell you about that. Grossman does, along with other normal reactions to situations in which other people are trying to kill you and you are trying to kill them. Police and soldiers are “warriors” who need a “sheepdog ethic” to protect normal people/sheep-Grossman says this isn’t a judgment and that sheep are perfectly valuable, but civilization would collapse without warriors to protect against the wolves (warriors gone wrong). There’s also a lot about the importance of practice-in extremis, people sink to the level of their training; if they don’t freeze, they do what they have been in the habit of doing. Thus it is vital to create proper habits that increase the chances of survival in battle, including “tactical breathing,” which is really just deep breathing/Lamaze breathing with a manlier name. It’s a mix of new agey with worshiping militarism that I wouldn’t have expected, but found thought-provoking. He spends a lot of time attacking the media, especially violent video games, for creating killers who aren’t warriors, who are trained to kill and keep killing without thinking about it. The biggest weakness is Grossman’s inability to discuss the ways in which police are not soldiers in war, facing enemies in uniform. The elephant in the room is all the people the police are killing unnecessarily; while Grossman talks a lot about deciding in advance that one is willing to kill to protect the lives of other people, or even oneself, he does not talk about how to mentally prepare oneself for making a life-or-death decision in a way that decreases the likelihood that anyone will die.
Barbara Ehrenreich, Natural Causes: This is a weird book. It’s half about our obsession with controlling our own bodies-and the resulting mind/body dualism, which makes our newer obsession with controlling our own “selves” a bit hard to parse; who’s doing the controlling? The other half is about our cells, like the macrophages that are important parts of the immune system but also help cancer spread and kill us. Rather than being a community of cells working in harmony, we are made up of competing and occasionally rogue cells, whose reasons for going one way rather than another are and may forever remain mysterious-just as we now understand pregnancy as in part a competition between mother and fetus, each with its own aims. Also, she spends a lot of time reminding us that no matter how much we try to control things, we will nonetheless die.
Giles Milton, Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: The Mavericks Who Plotted Hitler’s Defeat: The story of a special projects bureau, operated by some very British characters (despite the objections of military officers who thought that guerrilla tactics were Not Done) and protected by Churchill. Women and men both played significant roles; one woman, Joan Bright, was supposedly the inspiration for Miss Moneypenny.
It takes a while to get going-the book and the bureau both-but there are some fascinating stories. I didn’t know that blowing up pylons should be done by planting charges under 3 of 4 corners, so it tips over instead of just going down. They also invented new bombs and new timers, which were made with Alka Seltzer because they could be trusted to dissolve with perfect regularity. There was a raid on a Spanish harbor that stole three ships out from under their captains’ noses-but it was nearly derailed by the fact that they didn’t correct for time zones, which somehow makes the story better. A later, better raid destroyed a key sub harbor-it involved ramming a boat packed with explosives into the dock-while another cut Rommel’s supply lines for six weeks by destroying a remote bridge in Italy. They delayed the arrival of a key division to Normandy by sabotaging the flatcars that were to take the tanks to the front (tanks being too slow, gas-guzzling, and heavy to make it on their own) by replacing the axle oil on the transports with axle grease laced with abrasive. With this and other traps, a 72-hour journey took seventeen days, and the Allied beachhead was secure.
They made bombs that could be attached to German planes on the ground, but which would only explode at a certain height when the pressure changed enough to force two wires to connect and detonate. They developed shaped charges that could punch through the strongest German tanks and concrete pillboxes, as required for D-Day-and inspired a solution to the problem of detonating the first nuclear bombs through implosion. They made sub-killing bomb groups called the Hedgehog, which sank six subs in a row-“a record unbeaten in the history of naval warfare.” The largest triumph was the destruction first of the only significant source of heavy water for the Germans, in Norway, and then of the remaining stockpile, both with brilliant and gutsy raids. The first was carried out after an initial failure, which had increased security, but the commandos scaled a sheer rock gorge that the Germans thought was impassible.
I also liked the emphasis on training-if you want to do something right, train to do it in as realistic a manner as possible; that’s why they built mock facilities based on plans smuggled out of Norway at great risk. Similarly, later saboteurs trained on models of the Peugeot machines they intended to sabotage to shut down the German production of aircraft parts in France-which they did by convincing Rodolphe Peugeot to assist them by telling him that his factory would either be destroyed by sabotage or by large-scale bombing, and that sabotage would be easier to rebuild from after the war ended. That story also has its funny/scary moments, as when the German guards were kicking a football around and demanded that the saboteurs, dressed as ordinary workers, have a German/French match. One of the saboteurs kicked the ball and a limpet mine fell out of his pocket. A German guard handed it back to him-and the game continued. Later, the same group sabotaged the new compressor that had just been delivered to replace the one destroyed in the first attack.
Orly Lobel, You Don’t Own Me: How Mattel v. MGA Entertainment Exposed Barbie’s Dark Side: Behind every great fortune is a great crime, the saying goes; Lobel illuminates those behind the success of Bratz dolls as well as Barbie dolls. Mattel began as a pirate, copying a German doll and then denying the copying, but turned into a vigorous enforcer, almost wresting control of the competing Bratz dolls created by a former employee. Mattel was enraged because the Bratz beat Barbie out for top-selling doll for the first time since her introduction. Lobel tells the story of the legal battle, interspersed with digressions into Barbie’s history and Mattel’s other battles against unauthorized users of Barbie. I wished she hadn’t seemed to conflate other countries’ less speech-protective laws with US law when she discussed a short film, Barbie Gets Sad Too, which was enjoined by a Mexican court “because the sexual content would threaten Barbie’s image”-a lay reader might not understand that this wouldn’t have worked in the US. Lobel does make clear how much the jury’s feelings about the parties as people matters, though; in the first trial, there might well have been some bias against MGA’s Iranian-Jewish immigrant founder, while at the second trial a new lawyer brilliantly portrayed MGA as the inventive, caring victim of Mattel’s malice and creative stagnation.
Side note: Mattel portrayed another employee, Lily Martinez, as the true creator of Bratz; they featured her prominently, (apparently) dressing her to emphasize her physical resemblance to the Bratz and presenting her as if she were a significant designer, when in fact she hadn’t ever made a toy line that Mattel actually produced. (Martinez declined to be interviewed for the book.) At the second trial, she was torn apart on the stand, and subsequently left the toy industry after seventeen years. Given the current discussion around how discrimination and harassment have destroyed so many women’s careers, I wonder whether this is just a very unusual version of the same old story.
Lobel uses the story to decry restraints on competition such as restrictive employment contracts; the writing is punchy if at times a bit cute. The case is indeed part of a bigger story: the attempts by big market players to use the law to prevent successful competition. Mattel spent $400 million on this litigation, while MGA (maker of Bratz) spent $200 million-and was lucky to be able to do so (also, it’s not entirely clear they ever fully paid any of their lawyers). MGA ultimately won, but only after two trials and a trip to the court of appeals. Lobel argues that Mattel’s litigiousness was both personal-the men in charge felt that Barbie was like a real person, being “genocid[ally]” attacked-and professional, in that Mattel’s own lines were stagnating and they stifled internal attempts to add new life into their product lines. Lobel connects this to the classic problem of currently successful businesses-they often reject innovation because of the threat of cannibalization of their core product line.
The personal story here is also tragic-Carter, the original designer of Bratz, who conceived of them while on a break from working for Mattel, was first written out of the Bratz origin story and then had his life basically destroyed by the litigation. When he mentioned seeing a Steve Madden ad with oversized heads and feet and small torsos as part of his inspiration, he was quickly sued by the photographer who took that photo-even though ideas aren’t protectable. The designer engaged in some shady behavior before finally leaving Mattel-he took money from MGA without quitting Mattel for a few months, and engaged fellow Mattel workers to help with the doll after hours (the Mexican-American seamstresses who did the sewing got fired after this came out, even though they’d worked for Mattel for decades). And Lobel suggests that MGA’s erasure of the designer was only in part to buttress the myth of the entrepreneur-creator, Larian, who claimed to have been inspired by his daughter-contemporaneous emails made clear that MGA was also worried about getting caught by Mattel. But Mattel definitely comes off worse, especially once it develops that Mattel had a massive scheme in place to steal competitors’ secrets by sending people who pretended to be independent toy store operators to get intel. Ultimately this led to a $309 million verdict against Mattel, reduced on appeal to $139 million. But the real problem, Lobel concludes, is the increasing willingness of corporations to claim ownership over everything their employees do, hampering their ability to move their skills and dampending their motivations even when they stay.
Jess P. Shatkin, Born to Be Wild: Why Teens Take Risks, and How We Can Help Keep Them Safe: Very interesting book! Shatkin argues that, contrary to our image of teens as not thinking before they leap, kids are very aware of risk. In fact, they run cost-benefit analyses on almost all the risky things they do, and conclude that the risk is low versus the short-term benefit (e.g., sex without a condom, jumping off a roof)-and they believe that they in particular “have unique ways of minimizing those risks,” even though they don’t-they have a profound optimistic bias, as well as greater reward-seeking behavior related to brain development that leads benefits to seem more important than costs. Worse, being around peers seems to make potential rewards even more tempting-and it definitely makes them worse drivers. At about 25 or 26, the brain is finally developed enough to avoid the excesses of youth. Shatkin argues that adults typically don’t run cost-benefit analyses on individual risky acts; they think about risk in absolute/categorical terms and just don’t drive drunk ever, or smoke cigarettes, or have sex without a condom, because you don’t know who’s going to be the unlucky one and it shouldn’t be you-and that this is the mentality we should inculcate in our teens. By contrast, risk-emphasizing programs like Scared Straight don’t work (and may backfire by making criminals seem powerful and important); driver’s ed classes don’t work (and may backfire insofar as they lead kids to get licenses at a younger age and thus have more accidents); zero tolerance also doesn’t work to increase safety or lawfulness (and backfires by diverting more teens, especially minority teens, into the criminal justice system). Also, testosterone in adolescents doesn’t make them aggressive as such; instead, it makes them more concerned with how they’re perceived by others, which then leads to aggressive behavior in societies that reward such behavior. Likewise, oxytocin, another hormone on the rise in teens, “increases our empathy and trust for members of our peer group, but increases aggression and defensiveness toward members outside of our peer group.”
Shatkin advocates for developing “resilience” in children. Partly this involves teaching them various cognitive traps to avoid, such as personalization/thinking that everything that people do is a reaction to you; it can include mindfulness and communication skills. It includes practicing safe responses to dangerous situations before the fact, so that they have a gut instinct instead of engaging in cost-benefit analyses in the moment. Ask “What will you do if you get pregnant?” Walking them through an uncomfortable conversation like this makes the risk emotionally real, not abstract. Role-playing how to turn down a ride from a drunk friend seems dopey, but helps when they’re in the moment. Practice, practice!
Shatkin’s approach also involves exposures to opportunities that satisfy risk-seeking while not being super dangerous to their health and future-rock climbing and skateboarding with proper equipment, not drunk driving. Make them see the benefits of good choices, rather than highlighting the risks of bad ones. E.g., do say “Study hard in school so that you can apply to any college you like,” or “Drive safely tonight, so you can use the car next week,” rather than “If you don’t study hard, you won’t get into a good college,” or “If you don’t drive safely, you might get hurt.” It won’t work to tell teens not to drink, but it might work to emphasize friendship and loyalty-staying sober to protect friends. Rewards for desired behavior should outnumber punishments by at least four to one, and punishments shouldn’t be overly harsh or kids just give up/convert everything into a power struggle. Shatkin also emphasizes the negative consequences of seeing lots of media violence, and separately of having screens available at bedtime.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
justabi said a long time ago, has so much love to give that he ends up loving anyone who hangs out with him long enough--see, e.g., Crowley. I can't wait for the same process to work on Jack.
Barbara W. Tuchman, The Zimmermann Telegram: Chock full of pithy, judgmental descriptions of historical figures, this book tells the story of the intrigue that helped push the US into WWI, as a result of the Kaiser’s attempt to recruit Mexico into an alliance with Germany and Japan to take US territory-by sending coded messages via the US’s own diplomatic messaging. Some of the incidents are so bizarre they’re funny-this was at the end of the Great Game, and spies did some pretty incredible things, even as the War to End All Wars ground on.
Reid Wilson & Lynn Lyons, Anxious Kids, Anxious Parents: A useful reminder that parents don’t do kids any favors by trying to remove all sources of anxiety (or, as a friend of mine said, heralding the kid’s arrival by announcing ‘hark, here comes an anxious kid, be careful’). Instead, the authors advocate helping the kid accept uncertainty as a part of life, just as we must do in some situations as adults. Not exactly the situation I’m in, but still a bunch of helpful advice about how to talk about challenges.
Dave Grossman with Loren W. Christensen, On Combat: In combat, it’s normal to pee or shit your pants, but very few people tell you about that. Grossman does, along with other normal reactions to situations in which other people are trying to kill you and you are trying to kill them. Police and soldiers are “warriors” who need a “sheepdog ethic” to protect normal people/sheep-Grossman says this isn’t a judgment and that sheep are perfectly valuable, but civilization would collapse without warriors to protect against the wolves (warriors gone wrong). There’s also a lot about the importance of practice-in extremis, people sink to the level of their training; if they don’t freeze, they do what they have been in the habit of doing. Thus it is vital to create proper habits that increase the chances of survival in battle, including “tactical breathing,” which is really just deep breathing/Lamaze breathing with a manlier name. It’s a mix of new agey with worshiping militarism that I wouldn’t have expected, but found thought-provoking. He spends a lot of time attacking the media, especially violent video games, for creating killers who aren’t warriors, who are trained to kill and keep killing without thinking about it. The biggest weakness is Grossman’s inability to discuss the ways in which police are not soldiers in war, facing enemies in uniform. The elephant in the room is all the people the police are killing unnecessarily; while Grossman talks a lot about deciding in advance that one is willing to kill to protect the lives of other people, or even oneself, he does not talk about how to mentally prepare oneself for making a life-or-death decision in a way that decreases the likelihood that anyone will die.
Barbara Ehrenreich, Natural Causes: This is a weird book. It’s half about our obsession with controlling our own bodies-and the resulting mind/body dualism, which makes our newer obsession with controlling our own “selves” a bit hard to parse; who’s doing the controlling? The other half is about our cells, like the macrophages that are important parts of the immune system but also help cancer spread and kill us. Rather than being a community of cells working in harmony, we are made up of competing and occasionally rogue cells, whose reasons for going one way rather than another are and may forever remain mysterious-just as we now understand pregnancy as in part a competition between mother and fetus, each with its own aims. Also, she spends a lot of time reminding us that no matter how much we try to control things, we will nonetheless die.
Giles Milton, Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: The Mavericks Who Plotted Hitler’s Defeat: The story of a special projects bureau, operated by some very British characters (despite the objections of military officers who thought that guerrilla tactics were Not Done) and protected by Churchill. Women and men both played significant roles; one woman, Joan Bright, was supposedly the inspiration for Miss Moneypenny.
It takes a while to get going-the book and the bureau both-but there are some fascinating stories. I didn’t know that blowing up pylons should be done by planting charges under 3 of 4 corners, so it tips over instead of just going down. They also invented new bombs and new timers, which were made with Alka Seltzer because they could be trusted to dissolve with perfect regularity. There was a raid on a Spanish harbor that stole three ships out from under their captains’ noses-but it was nearly derailed by the fact that they didn’t correct for time zones, which somehow makes the story better. A later, better raid destroyed a key sub harbor-it involved ramming a boat packed with explosives into the dock-while another cut Rommel’s supply lines for six weeks by destroying a remote bridge in Italy. They delayed the arrival of a key division to Normandy by sabotaging the flatcars that were to take the tanks to the front (tanks being too slow, gas-guzzling, and heavy to make it on their own) by replacing the axle oil on the transports with axle grease laced with abrasive. With this and other traps, a 72-hour journey took seventeen days, and the Allied beachhead was secure.
They made bombs that could be attached to German planes on the ground, but which would only explode at a certain height when the pressure changed enough to force two wires to connect and detonate. They developed shaped charges that could punch through the strongest German tanks and concrete pillboxes, as required for D-Day-and inspired a solution to the problem of detonating the first nuclear bombs through implosion. They made sub-killing bomb groups called the Hedgehog, which sank six subs in a row-“a record unbeaten in the history of naval warfare.” The largest triumph was the destruction first of the only significant source of heavy water for the Germans, in Norway, and then of the remaining stockpile, both with brilliant and gutsy raids. The first was carried out after an initial failure, which had increased security, but the commandos scaled a sheer rock gorge that the Germans thought was impassible.
I also liked the emphasis on training-if you want to do something right, train to do it in as realistic a manner as possible; that’s why they built mock facilities based on plans smuggled out of Norway at great risk. Similarly, later saboteurs trained on models of the Peugeot machines they intended to sabotage to shut down the German production of aircraft parts in France-which they did by convincing Rodolphe Peugeot to assist them by telling him that his factory would either be destroyed by sabotage or by large-scale bombing, and that sabotage would be easier to rebuild from after the war ended. That story also has its funny/scary moments, as when the German guards were kicking a football around and demanded that the saboteurs, dressed as ordinary workers, have a German/French match. One of the saboteurs kicked the ball and a limpet mine fell out of his pocket. A German guard handed it back to him-and the game continued. Later, the same group sabotaged the new compressor that had just been delivered to replace the one destroyed in the first attack.
Orly Lobel, You Don’t Own Me: How Mattel v. MGA Entertainment Exposed Barbie’s Dark Side: Behind every great fortune is a great crime, the saying goes; Lobel illuminates those behind the success of Bratz dolls as well as Barbie dolls. Mattel began as a pirate, copying a German doll and then denying the copying, but turned into a vigorous enforcer, almost wresting control of the competing Bratz dolls created by a former employee. Mattel was enraged because the Bratz beat Barbie out for top-selling doll for the first time since her introduction. Lobel tells the story of the legal battle, interspersed with digressions into Barbie’s history and Mattel’s other battles against unauthorized users of Barbie. I wished she hadn’t seemed to conflate other countries’ less speech-protective laws with US law when she discussed a short film, Barbie Gets Sad Too, which was enjoined by a Mexican court “because the sexual content would threaten Barbie’s image”-a lay reader might not understand that this wouldn’t have worked in the US. Lobel does make clear how much the jury’s feelings about the parties as people matters, though; in the first trial, there might well have been some bias against MGA’s Iranian-Jewish immigrant founder, while at the second trial a new lawyer brilliantly portrayed MGA as the inventive, caring victim of Mattel’s malice and creative stagnation.
Side note: Mattel portrayed another employee, Lily Martinez, as the true creator of Bratz; they featured her prominently, (apparently) dressing her to emphasize her physical resemblance to the Bratz and presenting her as if she were a significant designer, when in fact she hadn’t ever made a toy line that Mattel actually produced. (Martinez declined to be interviewed for the book.) At the second trial, she was torn apart on the stand, and subsequently left the toy industry after seventeen years. Given the current discussion around how discrimination and harassment have destroyed so many women’s careers, I wonder whether this is just a very unusual version of the same old story.
Lobel uses the story to decry restraints on competition such as restrictive employment contracts; the writing is punchy if at times a bit cute. The case is indeed part of a bigger story: the attempts by big market players to use the law to prevent successful competition. Mattel spent $400 million on this litigation, while MGA (maker of Bratz) spent $200 million-and was lucky to be able to do so (also, it’s not entirely clear they ever fully paid any of their lawyers). MGA ultimately won, but only after two trials and a trip to the court of appeals. Lobel argues that Mattel’s litigiousness was both personal-the men in charge felt that Barbie was like a real person, being “genocid[ally]” attacked-and professional, in that Mattel’s own lines were stagnating and they stifled internal attempts to add new life into their product lines. Lobel connects this to the classic problem of currently successful businesses-they often reject innovation because of the threat of cannibalization of their core product line.
The personal story here is also tragic-Carter, the original designer of Bratz, who conceived of them while on a break from working for Mattel, was first written out of the Bratz origin story and then had his life basically destroyed by the litigation. When he mentioned seeing a Steve Madden ad with oversized heads and feet and small torsos as part of his inspiration, he was quickly sued by the photographer who took that photo-even though ideas aren’t protectable. The designer engaged in some shady behavior before finally leaving Mattel-he took money from MGA without quitting Mattel for a few months, and engaged fellow Mattel workers to help with the doll after hours (the Mexican-American seamstresses who did the sewing got fired after this came out, even though they’d worked for Mattel for decades). And Lobel suggests that MGA’s erasure of the designer was only in part to buttress the myth of the entrepreneur-creator, Larian, who claimed to have been inspired by his daughter-contemporaneous emails made clear that MGA was also worried about getting caught by Mattel. But Mattel definitely comes off worse, especially once it develops that Mattel had a massive scheme in place to steal competitors’ secrets by sending people who pretended to be independent toy store operators to get intel. Ultimately this led to a $309 million verdict against Mattel, reduced on appeal to $139 million. But the real problem, Lobel concludes, is the increasing willingness of corporations to claim ownership over everything their employees do, hampering their ability to move their skills and dampending their motivations even when they stay.
Jess P. Shatkin, Born to Be Wild: Why Teens Take Risks, and How We Can Help Keep Them Safe: Very interesting book! Shatkin argues that, contrary to our image of teens as not thinking before they leap, kids are very aware of risk. In fact, they run cost-benefit analyses on almost all the risky things they do, and conclude that the risk is low versus the short-term benefit (e.g., sex without a condom, jumping off a roof)-and they believe that they in particular “have unique ways of minimizing those risks,” even though they don’t-they have a profound optimistic bias, as well as greater reward-seeking behavior related to brain development that leads benefits to seem more important than costs. Worse, being around peers seems to make potential rewards even more tempting-and it definitely makes them worse drivers. At about 25 or 26, the brain is finally developed enough to avoid the excesses of youth. Shatkin argues that adults typically don’t run cost-benefit analyses on individual risky acts; they think about risk in absolute/categorical terms and just don’t drive drunk ever, or smoke cigarettes, or have sex without a condom, because you don’t know who’s going to be the unlucky one and it shouldn’t be you-and that this is the mentality we should inculcate in our teens. By contrast, risk-emphasizing programs like Scared Straight don’t work (and may backfire by making criminals seem powerful and important); driver’s ed classes don’t work (and may backfire insofar as they lead kids to get licenses at a younger age and thus have more accidents); zero tolerance also doesn’t work to increase safety or lawfulness (and backfires by diverting more teens, especially minority teens, into the criminal justice system). Also, testosterone in adolescents doesn’t make them aggressive as such; instead, it makes them more concerned with how they’re perceived by others, which then leads to aggressive behavior in societies that reward such behavior. Likewise, oxytocin, another hormone on the rise in teens, “increases our empathy and trust for members of our peer group, but increases aggression and defensiveness toward members outside of our peer group.”
Shatkin advocates for developing “resilience” in children. Partly this involves teaching them various cognitive traps to avoid, such as personalization/thinking that everything that people do is a reaction to you; it can include mindfulness and communication skills. It includes practicing safe responses to dangerous situations before the fact, so that they have a gut instinct instead of engaging in cost-benefit analyses in the moment. Ask “What will you do if you get pregnant?” Walking them through an uncomfortable conversation like this makes the risk emotionally real, not abstract. Role-playing how to turn down a ride from a drunk friend seems dopey, but helps when they’re in the moment. Practice, practice!
Shatkin’s approach also involves exposures to opportunities that satisfy risk-seeking while not being super dangerous to their health and future-rock climbing and skateboarding with proper equipment, not drunk driving. Make them see the benefits of good choices, rather than highlighting the risks of bad ones. E.g., do say “Study hard in school so that you can apply to any college you like,” or “Drive safely tonight, so you can use the car next week,” rather than “If you don’t study hard, you won’t get into a good college,” or “If you don’t drive safely, you might get hurt.” It won’t work to tell teens not to drink, but it might work to emphasize friendship and loyalty-staying sober to protect friends. Rewards for desired behavior should outnumber punishments by at least four to one, and punishments shouldn’t be overly harsh or kids just give up/convert everything into a power struggle. Shatkin also emphasizes the negative consequences of seeing lots of media violence, and separately of having screens available at bedtime.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.