... and spoil the child.
Sep. 24th, 2015 08:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberett(CN abuse.)
azurelunatic, elsewhere, a while ago:
So since then I've been trying to catch myself when I tell a partner they're spoiling me, because what I'm actually doing with that, I think, in addition to the you shouldn't (because I don't deserve nice things; because I shouldn't get used to them; because they'll end up resenting me for it or holding it over me; and on, and on...) is -- distancing myself from it, reframing it as something I understand, as something that is not a gift freely given for the sake of maybe making me smile, but a calculated transaction to keep me quiet and buy my time and my energy and my compliance. I'm trying to turn it into something that makes more sense to me; what I mean is you don't mean this.
And that's not fair to my partners, and it's not fair to me, so I'm trying, ever so gently, to retrain myself on this one.
azurelunatic, elsewhere, a while ago: When people say "spoiled child" I look for not enough love, not too much. It seems to me that often people who could be described as a "spoiled child" come from backgrounds where a child is "cared for" by starving them of attention, affection, and approval, but they do have all their apparent physical needs met, and are given expensive things instead of giving them the positive human contact they need. It's a really insidious form of neglect. [...] When the expensive thing is exactly the way the child would like it, it's a sign that the parent is paying attention to the child's hopes and preferences. When the thing is not exactly right (since the parent is perceived to be infallible in making material things happen), it is a sign of inattention/disapproval and is a horrible catastrophic sign of a degradation in the relationship.
So since then I've been trying to catch myself when I tell a partner they're spoiling me, because what I'm actually doing with that, I think, in addition to the you shouldn't (because I don't deserve nice things; because I shouldn't get used to them; because they'll end up resenting me for it or holding it over me; and on, and on...) is -- distancing myself from it, reframing it as something I understand, as something that is not a gift freely given for the sake of maybe making me smile, but a calculated transaction to keep me quiet and buy my time and my energy and my compliance. I'm trying to turn it into something that makes more sense to me; what I mean is you don't mean this.
And that's not fair to my partners, and it's not fair to me, so I'm trying, ever so gently, to retrain myself on this one.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-09-24 09:06 pm (UTC)*goes to sit with that definition of spoiled child for a while*
(no subject)
Date: 2015-09-24 09:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-09-24 09:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-09-24 09:20 pm (UTC). . . BABBLE ALERT? Ahem.
Date: 2015-09-24 09:37 pm (UTC)The idiolect I exist in - well, actually, it has a number of meanings for "spoiled" depending on intonation and context (including "other people call this child spoiled but other people are stupid"), but when we actually mean spoiled, it tends to be about giving too much power, not too many things. Spoiled children are given way to any time they want: they are children who are never told "no", even when it's "no, don't hit that other child" or "no, you don't get to break your sister's toy because you're angry at her for not giving you the other toy" or "no you do not get to bite me because I've said you have to take a nap" or "no, you don't actually get to decide NOT to have a nap" (at appropriate ages: a five year old deciding not to have a nap is very different from a two year old trying to decide the same thing).
They are children who have never been taught that their desires and emotions are not actually the centre of the universe and that universe's overwhelming drive.
This can overlap very much with what ~azurelunatic describes, in that it's parents trying to "make up" for their absence or inability to parent correctly or whatever by giving way to every whim of the child. But it can also be its own thing; most of my childcare existed in Left Coast Whitesville and there's a reason my reactions to anti-vax are as honed as they are, you know?
The thing is, letting your child be an actual complete tyrant isn't good for them either, because they're cognitively not ready for it: they do not have a sense of cause and effect, they do not have a sense of time, they do not have the capacity to weigh future outcome over current impulse, and children are born with the CAPACITY for amazing empathy and love, but not its manifestation and really and truly, the difference between the child who stands in front of the bullied kid in her class and defends her, and the child that is the bully, is frequently found in how firmly the guardian adult at even a very young age went no, this is not what we do to antisocial behaviours.*
Even at five, explaining to S that part of the reason $child didn't want to play with her is because S insists on always being the boss of the games, and taking over the games, and telling people what to do (and no it's not the dreaded "little girls are bossy, little boys are leaders"; I hope you can trust my judgement on that one) was massively uphill going and watching her try to remember to modify her behaviour while at the same time figuring out how to play AND watch the emotions on her play partner's face AND remember how to climb the jungle-gym AND remember she's supposed to stay within my line of sight AND AND AND . . . that's huge cognitive load.
Which is why her two-year-old sister is given "no, we do not grab *takes toy away and gives back to child grabbed from*." Because ALL Banana has room in her head for is, she wants that toy to play with, so now she will take it; maybe she has a LITTLE bit of room for "wait M doesn't like it when I take toys from other children", but even that may in fact be totally overwhelmed by the INTENSE NEED to play with that toy and everything she is thinking of doing with that toy and how she feels BAD when she doesn't have that toy and how maybe even she feels THREATENED by the fact that the other child has the toy and she doesn't: expecting her to accurately model the emotions of the other child, experience them, and use that to make not only an abstract moral decision about whose feelings are more important, her current INTENSE NEED to have that toy and the child's upset at having the toy taken, but also what her actions will lead to in future (when she can barely wrap her head around the idea of "Daddy will be home at supper-time") . . . .
Yeah. Not so much.
(S's grandmother spoils her, in this light. *facehands* An overnight with her grandmother means the world REVOLVES around S even into ways that are detrimental to S's health like not eating proper food or in staying up too late, because S really WANTS candy, or S doesn't WANT to stop watching her movie. Outright rude behaviour like screeching in response to being asked to get her shoes on in order to go do something SHE WANTS TO DO is more or less let go. Etc. Drove me NUTS.)
So for me "spoiling" tends to be "giving way to something I want in a way that is not required by general good behaviour" with a proooobable lean into "in a way that puts the person 'spoiling' me out/requires extra effort or expense on their part."
So it's interesting to me that the shape for you is more or less the opposite, and yet ends up in a lot of the same places, because I ALSO worry about the resentment, about "okay you've decided to do this thing NOW but what about in a month, are you going to hate me then?"
tl;dr: People are complicated and differences are fascinating.
*n.b.: on the other hand one of the big, big obligations that being the holder of that kind of power over any child in your care creates is that you not misuse it, that you exert the control/etc where appropriate and not where inappropriate, etc etc etc. S's mom and I occasionally rubbed wrong on this one in that I view worrying too much about children's clothes (beyond "decency, warm enough") as excessively controlling: let them pick what they want to wear, where she was very conscious about other people's opinions of HER via her children's clothes and thus got upset if she thought the outfit looked Wrong. My eyes may have sometimes rolled out of my head.
Re: . . . BABBLE ALERT? Ahem.
Date: 2015-09-24 09:49 pm (UTC)Re: . . . BABBLE ALERT? Ahem.
Date: 2015-09-24 09:54 pm (UTC)-- wow I need to shut up and go to bed, but ooi, what would my flavour of experience-of-neglect be called in your idiolect?)
Re: . . . BABBLE ALERT? Ahem.
Date: 2015-09-24 10:00 pm (UTC)Which sounds pithy, but honestly it's true: your father was actively avoiding having any emotional interaction with you and was acting specifically to make your emotional needs stop being part of his experience of the world or anything he needed to pay attention to.
Like it's not even, "I am failing at being the emotionally invested parent I should be, but if I buy this candy it will make up for it and my kid will know I love them because I give them things*", it's (from your description) literally the equivalent of oiling the squeaky wheel: "this thing I do not want to experience is happening, I will apply money/stuff, the experience will stop."
And that's emotional neglect. So.
(*or the patented Tony Stark "I know I am absolutely Hell to deal with but have neither the capacity to apologize in a way that's not also going to make you hate me more, nor apparently the ability to STOP, here I will find you your heart's desire as your payment for dealing with my shit.")
Re: . . . BABBLE ALERT? Ahem.
Date: 2015-09-25 10:51 am (UTC)(And yeah, as I remarked to Azz last night, he did actively avoid emotional interaction; sometimes he achieved that by giving us what we wanted until we shut up and went away, sometimes he achieved it by hitting us - and oh boy are my hang-ups from that still evident in how careful I have to be about handling conflict - and then sometimes he used it & us as weapons against my mother, in that he'd decree that The Only Possible Time he could do a thing with me that I desperately wanted to was... during Mass the one High Holy Day a term he'd let me go to Church. So.)
(And yet he's really good with children up to the age of five or six or so, in the playing with them and being engaged and so on and so forth sense; it's just once they - we - develop any... consistent independent desires or personality traits that he switches off.)
Re: . . . BABBLE ALERT? Ahem.
Date: 2015-09-25 04:39 pm (UTC)Granted I would hesitate to give a person like that EVEN a dog, given that if the dog gets sick or upset and stops behaving as per spec the dog too would get dumped, but.
And as noted below, for me "spoiled" also isn't blaming the child, although it can be seen as (I mean full disclosure: I very INFREQUENTLY use the term when I'm not in a space where I know it's going to be parsed correctly, and usually when I do I use it in the sense of "he's spoiled, by which I mean his parents utterly failed at teaching him boundaries or consideration or what happens when he's told 'no' and as a result he has these certain behaviours", because it's a term people recognize period but then I can redefine it to what it usefull y means); it's a . . . description of a cluster of traits and their origin?
And what it means to me is "this person is inadequately socialized in These Particular Ways; if I want to have rewarding interactions, we're going to have to resocialize." (Often, admittedly, I . . . do not care that much/have that much energy? But I am only human. :/) Or "I have to handle this person, so this is how I work around this version of bad socialization." Sooo yeah.
(Words, man.)
*and then people call the kids that don't react well "bad" or "difficult" children
Re: . . . BABBLE ALERT? Ahem.
Date: 2015-09-24 10:28 pm (UTC)Re: . . . BABBLE ALERT? Ahem.
Date: 2015-09-25 10:51 am (UTC)Re: . . . BABBLE ALERT? Ahem.
Date: 2015-09-24 11:00 pm (UTC)You've worked out that you were spoiled/bribed/whatevered with anything that could distract you into being not-annoying/not-present/not-a-person, so your instinctive reaction is to shy away from anything which overlaps with or echoes that bribery. But your subconscious is confusing the act and the item. It wasn't bribing you with raspberry lemonade or whatever that was bad, it was the bribery itself. Whether it's the gift freely given, or the bribe, the lemonade is incidental, it's the action and the emotion driving its offering that is at issue, but your subsconscious is still fixated on the item (because of the synergy with 'I don't deserve good things'?)
We have a good Northern expression for this, we call it cutting off your nose to spite your face.*
Might be worthwhile thinking about why you're focusing on the item, not the action.
*Readers, this sentence is brought to you by highly trained stunt metaphors, please do not try this at home)
Re: . . . BABBLE ALERT? Ahem.
Date: 2015-09-25 10:59 am (UTC)Re: . . . BABBLE ALERT? Ahem.
Date: 2015-09-25 09:54 pm (UTC)Re: . . . BABBLE ALERT? Ahem.
Date: 2015-09-25 12:11 am (UTC)a partner "digging his heels in"
you talking about being "allowed" things
you being required(?) to make a choice about which thing you want, when you might not really want any of them, in the middle of a shop,
financial inequality in the relationship
Forcing(?) you to make a choice about something you might/might not want, in a public space, so that someone with many more financial resources can 'treat' you to something doesn't sound to me like a pleasant way to interact with them. The risk I see here is of this pattern of interaction becoming financially/emotionally abusive. ie. You're the one "allowed" "nice things". He's being ever so kind by giving you the "nice things", so you should be grateful for them. He's working ever so hard to earn money to buy you this stuff.
The other side to it being OK for you to have things you consider nice, is that you don't have to accept gifts you don't want, whatever the apparent motivation of the gift giver.
Forcing things on you, rather than leaving you free to choose seems to undermine the concept you're talking about in other comments/the original post about gifts from most people not being attempts to manipulate/avoid emotional closeness etc. If it's not really a choice to refuse to accept or gift giving has become something that's happening without being negotiated as something you both want, then there's still strings attached to it, just different ones.
And wanting some degree of financial equality, rather than one sided gift giving is perfectly reasonable.
Re: . . . BABBLE ALERT? Ahem.
Date: 2015-09-25 10:42 am (UTC)In fact in this instance (1) we've talked about financial inequality and how to handle it and that's all actually negotiated and fine, it just... still sometimes manages to set some of my stuff off a little, in a way that it is absolutely fine for me to deal with and get a handle on myself; and (2) I do always actually want the thing and opinions on what I want, it's just that I'm so used to working in a scarcity model that I go a little wrong about the idea that, perhaps, I am not.
And the other thing is, if I were actually willing to say "no, I don't want this" to him, he'd drop it instantly - but I don't say that, ever, I just try to give him clearly-spurious reasons why he shouldn't and why I don't deserve it, and I'm pretty much cool with his refusal to buy into that bullshit. I've always got a choice; he's just making sure I know I've got space to choose based on the present not the past.
Re: . . . BABBLE ALERT? Ahem.
Date: 2015-09-25 04:40 pm (UTC)Re: . . . BABBLE ALERT? Ahem.
Date: 2015-09-25 11:21 am (UTC)And it's that I have very very strong memories of being called spoiled by adults-not-in-my-family for some of my behaviours. Specifically, there was the point in year 3, so when I was 6 or 7, where I was informed that I'd been put on a PE team with the two kids who had up til that point in that school bullied me most consistently and unpleasantly, and what I said was "I don't want to, I want to be on a different team", with a great deal of urgency and poor volume control and emotional regulation and stamping my foot, because as it turns out I was terrified and I'd been taught that you'll only piss people off and reduce the chances of getting what you want if you waste their time with explaining why, and there's no point saying what you want or that you're scared anyway because you'll just get hit for it and told that the authority figure doesn't care provided whatever's being done to you doesn't make enough noise to disturb them, so by the time I was scared enough of something to think it worth risking saying anything I was out of my mind with terror.
And apparently, to more than one adult in my life who'd had training in what abused kids looked like and appropriate responses to them, that read instead as entitlement and an expectation that the world would do what I wanted it to because nobody ever said no to me, so they should say no to me ~for my own good~.
So. Superficially similar behaviour of "child has apparent tantrum when not getting its own way", just a very different cause; and I've internalised how people described me as a small to the point that I apparently consider it a standard usage despite the fact that I broadly agree with your description.
(And, for the record, seeing you talk about how you interact with children is always such a goddamn relief and a comfort; thank you.)
Re: . . . BABBLE ALERT? Ahem.
Date: 2015-09-25 04:28 pm (UTC). . . except that . . . acting out and lashing out and random outbursts with no apparent reasonable cause are classic abused child behaviour . . . .? (Like this is in the abbreviated literature in like, pamphlets handed to class leaders, even!)
*mentally resets timeline* Okay, to be fair, WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD, they may legit not have known that. We have learned much in the last few decades about what abused children actually look like (and the VAST SPECTRUM) as opposed to what our narratives say they should. *scrubs face*
(nb: actual appropriate response, applicable all children: "wee!kab, inside voice, and we do not stamp our feet." because repetition of expected behavioural standards is important because sometimes kids legit just forget in the momentary grip of emotion, and then one of two options: one is the one where there is Non Movable Reason for grouping, which does not really apply to "being on a team in PE" but would go something along the lines of EXPLAINING non-movable reason etc - this is more along the lines of "yes you have to stand in this order to get your shots/no you cannot go on the fieldtrip without a signature from your guardian" etc; two is more appropriate for "being on a team in PE" which is "establish reason for Unexpectedly Vehement Reaction and go from there." Among other things, if it IS a child just being mean zirSELF, in the "but they're UCKY and I don't LIKE them", it's going to be much more effective to pull that out and detail why THAT's not acceptable or correct behaviour than to just make the child go over there, at which point the child will just continue to misbehave and act out, because this is what children DO when stressed. BUT I DIGRESS.)
But yeah I can see how that gets there easily.
And I mean fwiw, shit that got me literally attacked with "spoiled" when I was young: getting to have music lessons, going to see my grandparents, completely imagined gifts and stuff that I "must" be getting because my parents were "rich", being designated user of one of the two family cars (because this in turn allowed my mother to deploy me for family errands/picking up siblings/etc), having a cell-phone (because this let my anxious mother be able to find me AT ALL TIMES), having weird emotional needs that involved things like needing to avoid people at times that were disapprove of by adults around me . . .
Shit I attack MYSELF for being "spoiled", to this day: parents continuing to help me financially (they own the condo, the car is a family car, etc), getting support and help when severely depressed, etc.
But these were . . . *waves hand* they included versions of "spoiled" that even I back then would stop and think "but that's not what that means, I don't act like that", it's just, even if you don't think you are $thing, if people call you $thing all the time you start doubting your sanity, whee, gaslighting! Even inadvertent!
So yeah. When I say "in my idiolect" I mean "as ever used by actual well-intentioned adults around each other to describe a phenomenon now that I am also an adult", and it's also pretty much always a judgement on the parenting going on, not on the child, it's just that for whatever reason it's the child we have to deal with.
ANYWAY.
Re: . . . BABBLE ALERT? Ahem.
Date: 2015-09-25 10:24 pm (UTC)Maybe you weren't in full meltdown, when confronted by that team decision, but poor volume control and having difficulty expressing yourself and negotiating emotions all have an explanation in autism as well as in abuse. So that's another pattern your teachers missed, and a combination likely to feed on the interaction of each aspect with the other in the worst way possible
When you combine inconsistent emotional abuse, with your need to model behaviour in order to negotiate it, that's a pretty horrifying combination for the development of a child. It's no surprise you find difficulties in this, I'm surprised you manage it at all.
Re: . . . BABBLE ALERT? Ahem.
Date: 2015-09-25 11:35 pm (UTC)Thank fuck for taxpayers and the NHS, hey?
Re: . . . BABBLE ALERT? Ahem.
Date: 2015-09-26 03:15 am (UTC)*headdesk*
(no subject)
Date: 2015-09-29 01:22 am (UTC)We had a GRAND time beating some stuff through the heads of one of my cousin's schools: they could not wrap their brains around the idea that, when he hit RAGE ESPLODE, putting him in a corner with a computer game was NOT, in fact, "rewarding the bad behaviour". It was "allowing him to systematize and process sufficiently to interact with the rest of the world instead of dissolving into a ball of red-hot overstimulated mess."
We got there. Eventually. In a family with a physician and a lawyer and all of us pushy as Fuck.
*there are a handful of exceptions, except that one of them has severe GAD, one of them's bipolar, and one has severe dyslexia. We're also waiting for two of the others to give up and get diagnosed already.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-09-29 10:32 am (UTC)Ugh, this is making me reflect, wincingly, on how much damage was likely done to people before the idea of ASD and SpLDs got some traction in schools.
(Rant based on personal experience deleted, apparently it's even more of a hot button issue than I realised).
(no subject)
Date: 2015-09-25 01:13 am (UTC)The Husbandthing does the same thing. He insists that I am totally allowed nice things without them being something that he's doing nice for me. It is more the 'Here I am, the Husbandthing, forcing you to be nice to yourself. You are totally allowed the nice things you want in moderation and I will make sure you get them, either by getting them for you myself or getting you to get them yourself.'
(Also a child of emotional neglect and abuse.)
(no subject)
Date: 2015-09-25 10:43 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-09-25 04:49 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-09-25 10:43 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-09-25 02:43 pm (UTC)I need to take this off somewhere and chew on it, because: similar experiences and I use similar rhetoric about "spoiled" when I feel I'm being given something I don't deserve and I am willing to bet that it's the same pattern. I don't want to look at it (in the way that indicates, I really need to look at this, at a time when I have time and space to work through it.)
As an adult who can choose circumstances/definitions/et cetera, my working definition of spoiled is, "this child wants things/wants things in ways I find unacceptable."
(no subject)
Date: 2015-09-25 02:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-09-25 04:21 pm (UTC)Now combine with a mother who honestly believed we didn't have enough money, and a stepdad who didn't want me to exist and spent monry (some of it actually mine) on himself and never on anyone else, and I get caught between "Never trust people who give you treats they will only leave you alone when you most need help" and "If you ever have any money of your own spend it on treats Right Away because otherwise it will be Gone and it's back to eating Nothing Soup for lunch for the forseeable future".
(Nothing Soup = basically a clear stock from a mix. I don't know why my mother thought it was enough food.)
(no subject)
Date: 2015-09-25 11:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-09-26 10:13 am (UTC)Thank you.
Life now is actually pretty good. I have a lot of stubborn bloodymindedness, and people close to me who both understand and treat me with respect and care.
However, it occurs to me that my various coping workarounds are, well, a lot of work, and maybe it is time to dismantle some more of them and do some brain re-wiring again. And some of your recent posts (including this one) are examining similar things, at a point where it is safe for me to think about them. And this is very helpful: like trying to travel through undergrowth but someone has already been through, several metres ahead, and so a possible path is clear.
So, thank you.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-09-26 08:18 am (UTC)Meanwhile, i am currently having a big problem in my life/in my head with [wanting things that i can't have, and feeling bad for having wanted them]. I just read an article someone linked to on my fb about the cult of busy-ness [/paraphrase] and while (as i frequently do) i got a annoyed because the author doesn't consider the impact of disability, i was struck with the bit at the end about how it's not simple or easy, and the hardest part is learning to say no to things that actually do matter.
Ugh, self, it is okay to want things, even things we know we can't have, or don't work out, or the things where we have to make a decision and choose something else, or not-that-thing-that-we-wanted. Wanting does not make us bad. /o\
(no subject)
Date: 2015-09-27 04:09 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-09-27 04:39 pm (UTC)*sits for a minute*
When I was a small child I started getting an allowance, like I think a quarter at first? which is actually what all the financial literacy things advocate for teaching your kid about money + heading off tantrums in the grocery store ("You want the candy? Did you bring your allowance?")
All well and good.
When I was in high school, my parents had me figure out a budget for, oh, any food outside the house and clothes and BOOKS and any gas/public transit. That was my allowance. (Coincidentally around this time I also started picking up a lot of outside jobs to supplement because I was constantly worried about money.)
My friends found out how much I got once and called me "spoiled," which it was a lot of money to give to a teenager *except it was for necessities*. But. I knew that I then *could not ask for things* because my father would cut off all the money, take away any independence, etc. My parents also then gave me no help with budgeting. My mom, meanwhile, would occasionally sneak me clothes or food or books as "presents", but only periodically and it was a thing we didn't talk about with my father.
...
I also learned pretty early on that the fastest way to never, ever get something from my father was to obviously want it. Or if I did get that thing I really wanted, it will forever be something used as a bartering chip or potential punishment.