Comment by sinuhe69
6 years ago
I believe telling small children scary stories so they would refrain from doing something particular damaging is quite common among many cultures. Vietnamese in the old days for example were doing exactly the same. The problem is however that people can easily abuse this technique to manipulate children to get whatever they want. And when children once grow older or are particularly smart, they would mistrust it and everything adults had told them, clearly more damaging than beneficial. Ghosts story in one’s childhood was very common in Vietnam and no doubt they have contributed much to the widespread superstition and belief in supernatural things in Vietnam. Which is supposedly no problem for the Inuits but undeniably very problematic for any modern economy.
Using story telling and personification to teach children empathy is another common technique. In general I find them quite effective and would recommend them unconditionally if there is no problem with the time constraint modern life must be facing. In a culture where a time span of days have not much meaning, I guest all people can sit down, wait for the child to calm itself and then talk and tell stories to teach them. However it is sometimes almost impossible or at least very very hard to wait for a naughty, tantrum throwing child to calm itself down in a modern society. I think of the situation in a supermarket where a mother has to obey certain rules and at the same time has to finish the shopping to make supper on time or in a packed classroom where teachers has only 45 minutes to achieve something or on an airport/airplane.
Certainly, yelling at small children or even spanking them is not optimal and often not very helpful but anger is not the evil per se either. The key is to choose wisely how to act on this particular feeling. Suppressing or even disguising it under a friendly facade is not helpful, often even damaging for one’s mental health and relationships.
Tangentially related here, but I think it's another interesting dichotomy of children across cultures (and how parents deal with them).
I can't remember where from, but I heard a fascinating take on how countries in Europe, with predatory animals and other dangers outside the village, would cultivate myths of things like werewolves, vampires, and other beasts that would kill/maul/bite you. This prevented children from wandering too far.
Meanwhile, in Japan (where there's very few predators to be afraid of), the myths are much more wholesome [1]. There's spirits that wash beans, lick oil, follow you around, and so forth, but few/no myths of the dangerous creatures you'd find documented in Europe.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_legendary_creatures_fr...
Another counter-example to the claim that "there are few/no myths of dangerous (Japanese) creatures:
"Kappa have been used to warn children of the dangers lurking in rivers and lakes, as kappa have been often said to try to lure people to water and pull them in. Even today, signs warning about kappa appear by bodies of water in some Japanese towns and villages."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kappa_(folklore)
That still fits with the general theme though: myths are designed to warn children about danger - in this case, drowning.
In Japan you have Namahage in the north. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namahage And you have "oni" (demons) everywhere else in the folkore too (see Momotarou's story for example).
There are plenty of dangerous mythical characters too in Japan, ghosts, spirits and non-humans creatures, I am not sure where you got the idea that there's less than anywhere else in the world.
My favorite is the "akaname", a youkai that licks the filth of uncleaned bathrooms leaving the place clean. However its saliva is poisonous and so if you don't clean your bathroom properly, you can succumb to sickness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akaname
Pagan Europe used to be more diverse before Christianity came over.
Just let's take Slavic folklore of Central/Eastern Europe with creatures like Baba Yaga (forest), Poludnitsa (summer fields, noon time heatstrokes), Rusalka (water), Vodnik (water) lot of fire and swamp daemons - everything which was considered harmful for kids.
These remains are still part of children education mostly with literature, rituals from pagan times and of course grand parents passing these stories.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavic_folklore
I wish American “scientists” stop misleading people. The amount of “scientific” nonsense I heard is stunning. Growing up in the culture, I do not recall a single story where Rusalka was threatening to humans. Rusalkas are beautiful young women with fishtails living in seas, lakes, etc. Vodyanoi, -not Vodnik -, a male creature living in swamps, may be. Though in a famous animated cartoon, Vodyanoi was a very kind creature dreaming about flying https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f3VxRhYbqiM. Baba Yaga, an old cranky woman, who lived in a forest in a house which stood on chicken feet, certainly. But in the same cartoon Baba Yaga was quite attractive too. In Russian mythology/ fairytales there have been a plenty of creatures to scary kids.
India has plenty of things roaming around that can kill you, but I don’t remember hearing an abundance of stories about vague spirits that can kill me. Tigers and leopards and snakes are scary enough on their own.
I remember a number of stories involving vague spirits. This was a long time ago, and I have forgotten quite a bit as I immigrated to the west when I was very young.. but at least one of them sticks with me:
It was a story about a demon that would hang in trees late at night, and if you were to walk under the tree the demon would drop down and latch onto your shoulders, and then eat you.
There was a mechanic in the mythology that involved telling stories with cliffhanger endings, or guessing the ending - the details are lost to me now.
All I know is that as a young child walking around at night, my pace would quicken when going under large trees. Those solemn rural nights, under the large jackfruit trees in the moonlight, the wind a steady whisper - you could almost get a glimpse of the demon's gleaming teeth in your mind's eye - inspiring a foreboding sort of solitude, a primal fear.
I do miss it at times.
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Have you seen the Japanese hell? http://matthewmeyer.net/blog/2014/03/02/jigoku-japanese-hell...
The Japanese have like a pantheon of oni, ayakashi, etc. A lot of old Japanese art is honestly pretty freaky - almost completely opposite to the cute style that permeates Japan's pop culture today.
Interesting idea, not sure whether there's any similar anthropology theory.
> Ghosts story in one’s childhood was very common in Vietnam and no doubt they have contributed much to the widespread superstition and belief in supernatural things in Vietnam.
It's not limited to Vietnam: 58% of Americans believe in Hell[1]. I'd call that widespread superstition.
[1] http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/belief-in-...
Hey, we're talking superstitions, not 100% true facts like the existence of Hell.
That said, I'm inclined to distrust Pew's evaluations on this matter, since so many of their surveys are done by phone, and the methodology seem almost certain to cause a disproportionate focus on those people who have a landline and are either without caller id or who just go ahead and answer calls from unknown callers. This was true just a year or two ago, and I'm not really inclined to re-evaluate their methodology. Actual numbers of church attendance don't seem to reflect the trends that Pew finds, and tend to point to even more dramatic declines in observance. Obviously this is biased towards larger cities, but so is the population density so it isn't a total illusion.
>It's not limited to Vietnam: 58% of Americans believe in Hell[1]. I'd call that widespread superstition.
The belief that shitty people will get what's coming to them through some external mechanism serves the useful function of allowing people to rationalize not engaging in settling scores and vigilante justice. I expect belief in the existence of hell to persist much longer than other "religious superstitions" (or whatever you want to call them).
> The belief that shitty people will get what's coming to them through some external mechanism serves the useful function of allowing people to rationalize not engaging in settling scores and vigilante justice.
I'd say it's a wash. Plenty of people who believe in hell do monstrous things, and plenty of people without this delusion behave as model citizens. Religious people constantly plead that without their belief system everyone would engage in wanton immorality, but this is just the self-reinforcing aspect of the meme.
> telling small children scary stories so they would refrain from doing something particular damaging is quite common among many cultures.
I mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnation right?
I believe telling small children scary stories so they would refrain from doing something particular damaging is quite common among many cultures.
In Grant Morrison's seminal "Doom Patrol" run, he talks about fairy tales as a means of traumatizing children to prepare them for life.
And when children once grow older or are particularly smart, they would mistrust it and everything adults had told them, clearly more damaging than beneficial.
A lot of this has been lost in modern sanitized re-tellings, but lots of traditional culture is rife with double meanings and subtexts. (I was in a trad fusion band, and I remember the moment when our lead singer started to realize this. Much good-natured ribbing was to be had that day and days after.) My take is that the smart ones are meant to realize that these things aren't to be taken literally. Rather, they are meant as cautionary tales and as a sort of map to the maze of inner feelings and impulses within all human beings. [1]
There is a scene in Larry Niven's The Magic Goes Away where one wizard (Clubfoot) is talking about being one of many young apprentices taken up to a mountaintop by his master. The master wizard enchanted a cloud and let them play bouncing around on it, no warnings, no explanation given. Clubfoot speculated that it might be a sort of implicit test. Any apprentices stupid enough to go back up the mountain and try to jump on an unenchanted cloud would effectively take themselves out of the apprenticeship and the gene pool. This has a lot to do with how I think of traditional stories and myths.
Certainly, yelling at small children or even spanking them is not optimal and often not very helpful but anger is not the evil per se either. The key is to choose wisely how to act on this particular feeling. Suppressing or even disguising it under a friendly facade is not helpful, often even damaging for one’s mental health and relationships.
A lot of this has to do with the cultural environment. If a child is surrounded by people who implicitly enforce certain values and have a certain demeanor, the child will tend to pick that up. Inuit children are the way they are because they are in that particular culture. What US culture apparently does to children strikes me as horrifying. One thing I love my wife for, is that I can see that she's wonderfully nurturing, while I also very much see the "Tiger Mom" within her.
([1] Jordan Peterson's work in this regard is very interesting. Look up his take on Pinnochio.)
I think people forget that the human mind is not magic. It does not (easily) create information, and thus you cannot expect that to happen. But we do.
Why these stories (and the pebble technique from the article) work is that they enable kids to predict what the consequences of their actions will be. They can't do that without at least being told what they would be, and when they're violent, angry and panicking (ie. during violence) is not the best time to learn.
Violence is mostly the result of losing control. And most parenting strategies boil down to immediately using more and stronger violence to stop whatever behavior parents don't like. This, of course, prevents the kid from exploring that behavior, and of course teaches that an immediate escalation of the violence is the way to go (which is how you very often see kids behave to eachother). You should always let kids fight until one actually gets some small amount of actual physical damage (enough to, say, make them scream, at least), before interfering. If you have to interfere before this point (e.g. involving the eyes), you have to tell them not just not to do it, but what would have happened, and then answer their questions on it. These questions will be very cold and direct ("Why can't I poke out her eyes ? She stole my doll !") and that does NOT mean your kid is evil.
You might say "parents don't use violence". No ? Dragging kids physically away from whatever they're doing. Limiting them to their room. Going to bed without dinner. I'm not saying these are always bad things to do, far from it. In fact after doing what I suggest you do, I think dragging kids away is not necessary, but some measure of punishment should probably still be demanded, AFTER explaining the situation AND answering questions about it.
The problem with the western way of protecting kids before they get into trouble is that this escalation by parental violence (physically preventing the child from doing anything wrong and/or "evil") is that it doesn't work. Sometimes YOU are wrong. Believe it or not, it happens. Sometimes the teacher IS WRONG. Sometimes the police is outright evil (or at least morally questionable). Sometimes multiple parties may be wrong at which point "who's at fault" is probably a stupid question.
(e.g. kid lends toy to kid2, kid2 insults kid, kid demands toy back, a fight ensues, parent intervenes, kid still fights to get toy back, parent's hand hits the table, plates break and chair falls on kid2. Who's at fault ? Technically the insult, then not giving lended toy back, then trying to physically get the toy back and presumably the parent could have been more careful too. All participants are "at fault", BUT I guarantee you not all will be punished)
What you have taught the child is, in that case, to immediately escalate the violence. Guess what ? You're not going to like the result. And of course, this cannot be understood, and what do we do ? Escalate AGAIN.
If your kids fights you, fight back (MEASURED of course, I'm not saying knock them out). If you do this when they're 5 you can keep the fight perfectly under control and they will get the point: they shouldn't fight their parents because it's not an effective strategy to get what they want. Again, questions will probably follow, and they'll really learn something.
A kid should NEVER be taught to react violently to enforce some standard of "justice", but that's exactly what we do. And now you might argue, but justice exists, doesn't it ? One, there's the philosophical point that no, it doesn't. Two, you don't have the information to make correct judgements about what is just or not. And three, just or not, it is more important that the situation remains livable for everyone.
At what point do we say that modern society is the problem, and not the children's behavior?
Do we really want to teach people that their innate nature is wrong, and that exposing it will be met with anger and wrath, because it is more important to... keep on going in a rat race to pay rent to landlords and capital owners?
Yes, absolutely. Do you have kids? Their innate nature is not all cute. All (normal developing) kids at one time or another will hit and bite and lie. Kids are selfish. They have to be taught how to behave in any society, let alone modern society.
But even if it's true that modern society is at fault, you can't change that alone. Kids still have to be raised in a world that is not fair, it's judgemental and full of selfishness. Your kid still has to navigate that world and understand its rules, even if we might disagree with them.
I agree though that we should be a lot more tolerant of things like kids throwing tantrums in a grocery store. I've been through that, it's not fun. Thankfully, people understood what I was doing when I refused to react to my son's behavior. I got understanding nods instead of anger while he melted down on the floor.
I think people without kids romanticize children as these pristine entities, but the truth is they are ruled by fear and greed just like anybody else. The difference is they are generally ignorant of social norms, expectations of performance, and their own biases. It is exhausting raising kids, explaining every detail in a way that they will understand over and over again until they finally get it, sometimes taking years; teaching people how to actually fit into the norms our society sets takes a lot of work. Teachers deserve higher esteem as they do take a lot of this on... kids having peers helps.
Don’t disagree but would appreciate taking meltdowns outside.
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Why is one's innate nature right?