Parenting: One realm where you've got an infinite diversity of resources.
Following up a Valentine’s Day post about marriage with a post about kids!
Last year, I spent a lot of time thinking about some Game Theory stuff, as I was reading “The Strategy of Conflict,” by Thomas Schelling1.
It made me wonder about scenarios where people assume they are in a zero-sum game with with each-other, but have options that make it actually a non-zero-sum game (a situation in which there is a mutual interest).2
I came up with examples like these:
If a specialized tutoring guy is negotiating with the mom of a potential student, and he wants more money… it will cost the student’s mom more MONEY in an amount exactly equal amount to his gain. BUT if in the process of negotiating with her, he speaks in such a way that she discovers that he is a more prestigious tutor than she originally realized, then she can have really good “cred” with her husband for hiring him as a tutor—and maybe bragging rights with some of her friends if she is inclined that way.
If two young kids are arguing over whether to play Game A or Game B… (Both two-person games, of which only one kid wants to play each.) but there is an older sibling about, who can run a marvelous game of “A Monster Chases You Both!!” (which, of course, both would fervently love to play), the first child to think of that option gets to GIVE something awesome to the other little kid (and also wind up better off herself) if one of them can convince the older sibling to do it. (Note: sometimes you get better results if you have the friend or neighbor be the one to ask your older sibling to play.)
So, this is not going to be a giant post focused on game theory with kids. Game theory just got me thinking about resources, and what each side in an interaction hopes to gain from it.
Because within a family—especially when interacting with youngish kids—we have AMAZING power to generate valued resources straight out of thin air.
They are pleased and impressed by the most ludicrous things some days. Once, my younger son suggested he would like to go out into the big, empty field adjacent to our apartment building and yell the word “DOT!” I turned to the older kid, and made it obvious I was giving some thought that suggestion. Pretty soon we were co-consiprators giggling together and getting on boots and shoes to bring the little one’s expressed desire into existence. Why? No reason; just, “Hey, why not?”
Also, they welcome boundaries and clear definitions of things.
Back when my older son was 2, I was determined to get across the category difference between “an order,” which he must obey, and “a request,” to which he was free to say either “Yes,” or “No.”
Thanks to our/my investment in these nice clear explicit categories in our house, he would sometimes be nice and direct about asking which category another adult’s pronouncement was in. Great—I just gave my kid a set of categories that are not suitable to the suburban social wasteland “niceness culture” that our lives are set within! (I want to say that 9 out of 10 adults around here REALLY wouldn’t be prepared for such a challenge, and maybe didn’t even want to answer THEMSELVES about whether they had just given an order, and was it to be obeyed?) Fortunately, the one time he did it, it was with Maureen. She was running a “homeschool preschool” for her older child and like 3 other kiddos twice a week. And why did she decide to do that? Because she had been a Kindergarten teacher! And what does that tell you was likely to be the case about her? She was canny!
Maureen had just instructed the four munchkins at the table: “Now draw spots on your cow." Which was why my son piped up with, “Is that a request or a demand?” Maureen paused for a moment, looked thoughtful, and replied, “Consider it… a strong suggestion.” Yay—independent-minded, and refusing to be bound by the 2-option question of a four-year-old child! Just because I taught my kid those categories doesn’t mean there aren’t OTHER relevant categories! Also, he drew spots on his cow.3
So, all that to say is… we adults have lots of expertise about what I call “the relational world,” and we get to share it. Somewhat connected to that—we know what things are beautiful and of value, and how to point our children’s little faces in that direction.
Just yesterday, I got this anecdote from the
Substack in my inbox.. where the writer recalls her families' weekly jaunts to the still life room in the Ashmolean museum last year:It was tucked away in an upstairs corner, only accessible through opaque glass doors, with dark green walls and glossy wood floors. As soon as you walked in, you felt a hush and a sense of separation from the rest of the museum. You sensed an opportunity to slow down and ponder, quietly, the simple beauties within. I gave my then-6-year-old and 3-year-old a “treasure hunt” list of items to find. As they travelled from painting to painting, they spotted caterpillars, spiders, lemons, pocket watches, knives, cups, butterflies, buttercups, and more. Every week, they spotted different things. Every week, they fell more in love with the “green room.”
—Gracy Olmstead
So her gift to her two girls was one of anticipation and vision and imagination. And a gift of planning. By planning a scavenger hunt—which appealed to young kids’ seek-and-destroy skillset busy, active exploration tendencies that they were highly-motivated to engage in—she drew them into the pleasure and beauty of the paintings.
She knows a good thing she wants to share with her daughters, but she doesn’t just assume they’ll instantly see all that she sees, value it as she values it. They need their awareness TRAINED. Where we place our attention is so significant. It affects our ability to focus our attention there the next time, and the next time. (My older son initiated a habit of walking around the house when he wakes up in the morning and putting away like 10 things he finds that need putting-away. He told me that after he’d been doing that for a few weeks, he had a major increase of awareness of how MANY things were out of place. In our house—all I can say is “poor guy!” Wait—no, why am I saying that? Misery loves company!)
Sadly, I am not as flexible as those two little girls, and I still don’t enjoy the aesthetics of those still lifes! (“Give me landscapes, people, horses, and/or great deeds in my paintings, please!”) Even in spite of the fact of Olmstead revealing the connection between them and freaking Ecclesiastes, hellll-lo, what is wrong with me? Aesthetic of mine, you know you are just not changing fast enough?!
You get to develop a shared language with your kids as you can invent words & concepts for things you need.
“Besides a common language... there will also be, within the same group, many specialized vocabularies… Such ‘working languages’ are filled with jargon and idioms. People in the same profession typically have a language of the trade. Other people cannot understand the conversations… In every school and even every dormitory room, specialized vocabularies develop. The most widely occurring ‘working language’ is that which develops between mothers4 and their children.”
—Fei Xiaotong, in “From the Soil: the Foundations of Chinese Society.”
My favorite anecdote was how I accidentally created a form of currency one of my kids valued a ton. I thought of lightly tapping his cheek with my thumb while saying the word “boop!” It’s… I don’t know, maybe a noise that evokes pressing a button? It’s the sort of uncreative thing you can come up with even if you’re tired a lot, which is probably why it came to me.
That and the fact that he was a slow, disinterested eater at that time. There are few things more boring than watching a baby eat. (He was probably somewhere between 8 and 16 months old.) You’re just like chained to a spot beside the little guy’s high chair, and he happily dawdles away within the warm glow of mandatory mom-attention, (here I mean mandatory for you, not him) while you languish, looking about the room for something with which to occupy yourself. I think I had decided to teach myself shorthand at the time, because it seemed like the kind of kinesthetic skill that would be pleasant and amusing to me… AND/OR because I could practice it in short bursts and then put it down again.
So I’m sitting at the table, contemplating that if I pick up the shorthand book, I will probably prompt him to dawdle even more when it comes to eating… when I get my brilliant brain burst of “HEY—I could reward each bite of his eating with a ‘boop’; and I could deliver the ‘boops’ in batches of ten.” So I proffered this to the youngster, and we cooperated. After 10 bites of food, 10 boops. Et Cetera.
A few days later, I came upon him, flopped out on the floor, looking at a flattened box. The box was a diaper box, and like most diaper boxes, I guess, had a picture of an adorable baby on it. My kiddo looked down at the baby in the picture—no doll needed for imaginative play, and declared to it, “Beyh-beh, I give you twenty boops, Beyh-beh.” And then he placed his thumb gently against the cheek of the baby, and gave him “boops.”
Once again, I was seeing evidence that a kiddo would assume that what was normal inside our house would be normal (and immediately comprehended!) if busted it out in an interaction with a random person outside the family. Ah, well! As was the case when his older brother picked a former Kindergarten teacher to query as to whether something she told him to do was REALLY a command—the younger kid’s interaction with Photograph-on-a-Box Baby didn’t cause a significant ripple. Whewww.
Yes, the Schelling of “Schelling Point.” Also, reading through “The Strategy of Conflict” caused me to notice that a lot of current RatSpace usage of the term “Schelling Point” is inaccurate! Because Schelling Points are the “points” (in geography / time / agreement upon an amount etc.) upon which 2 or more people converge in the absence of communication (about where to meet, etc.) but simply by modeling the other person(s) thinking about the goal.
More fun, though would be these cases:
A person who feels “locked in” to a zero-sum game with another party creating (or discovering) another, larger, non-zero-sum game which their conflict was embedded within. (That one’s practically worth its own “My Hobby:” XKCD!)
That same afternoon, I saw Maureen masterfully handle another question: “What do you think of Spiderman?”
She shrugged and went, “Eh, I could take him or leave ‘im.”
Ruthless honesty for the win!!
But really, a big part of this is seeing children as humans—not just as little entities you need to say only nice words to because you want to stay on good terms with their parents. (the “real humans”!) I don’t know what’s made the suburb I live in so dysfunctional, but people usually expected that small children would be incapable of or uninterested in carrying on a conversation, and would only want to hear “nice, positive” things said to them—not the direct and honest kinds of interactions they craved.
Note: I don’t want to romanticize the relationship between mothers and their children over and above, say, the relationship between fathers and their children! That was simply how the original quote was actually written—that was Xiaotong’s observation at the time.