Talking doesn't work

In the mid-1970s, I attended a seminar that promised to train me to become an instructor in positive discipline methods. It turned out that the methods amounted to one: talking.

Any behavior problem could be solved, the trainer told us, by properly reasoning with a child. Furthermore, he said, adults should answer children's questions honestly. To not do so is to disrespect them, to deny that they are intelligent.

I had had enough experience with trying to reason with my own kids to recognize baloney when I heard it. I argued with the trainer and was informed that even if I completed the class, I wasn't going to be certified.

Notwithstanding my perennial incorrectness, the nouveau philosophy promoted in that seminar captured the popular imagination, one sign of which is the fact that today's parents, by and large, believe in talking. When their children misbehave, they talk. I call it "yada-yada discipline." They also seem to feel that if a child asks a question, he is due an explanation. The problem, as the mother of a 5-year-old girl discovered, is that children -- to borrow from the title of a popular 1950s television show -- sometimes inquire about "the darndest things."

Said mother and her daughter are sitting together one afternoon when the child asks what "hump" means. (At this point, it is my obligation to inform my audience that this column contains adult material and should not be read to children or even left lying around where one might find it.) The mother, startled, blurts out that a hump is what one finds on the backs of camels. So far, so good.

This little girl is not so easily bamboozled, however. She persists. "I know that," she says. "I mean what does it mean for one person to hump another person?"

By now the mother is sweating bullets. She asks her daughter why in the world she is asking such a question. Who told her that people hump each other? The child answers that a boy (no surprises here) at school told her adults sometimes hump each other. "Like this," she says, and then proceeds to demonstrate a pelvic motion familiar to fans of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." She then asks the most dreaded question of all: "Do you and Daddy hump?" The mother's bullets turn instantly into cannonballs and she begins, yes, talking.

She tells her daughter that this is an inappropriate question and that the topic itself is inappropriate and that it is inappropriate for children to be talking about such things with one another and that making that particular motion with one's hips is inappropriate. All this talking, I will bet, only further inflamed the child's curiosity. She probably went to school and told her friends that her mother said that to talk about humping was "inappropriate"; therefore, they will certainly talk and giggle some more about it and even make that motion with their hips.

The mother's sister asks, "What would you have done?" Easy. I would have given the camel answer (or said that it means to carry something), but then, when the child persisted, I would have said, "I have no idea what you are talking about. Your friend at school is mistaken" and I would have followed up on this, immediately, with something like "I feel like a bowl of ice cream. How about you?" And the matter would have probably died a natural death.

Children are not entitled to answers to all of their questions. They are only entitled to answers to questions that they should be asking. If that means that they are sometimes "disrespected," I'm all for it.