Empty threats

Marxem!” (We’re leav­ing!) “Ja esta, anem cap a casa de l’avia!” (That’s it, we’re going to grandma’s house!) “S’ha aca­bat!” (It’s over!) ”Ja no hi ha més!” (That’s it, no more!). All de­liv­ered in a raised voice and with a huge amount of emo­tion. And yet they’re still there half an hour later. What’s that all about?

I’ve al­ways been wholly per­plexed by how par­ents here warn their chil­dren of con­se­quences they are both aware will never ma­te­ri­alise. It began for me when my son first started at­tend­ing school, so some 14 years ago, as par­ents would gather out­side the gates to col­lect their chil­dren after school. Nat­u­rally, the kids would want to play after com­ing out and would be al­lowed to run around, climb trees, jump in pud­dles, scale rocks, and so on, as young chil­dren are wont to do. What at­tracted my at­ten­tion, and also some pass­ing com­ments, me being an in­ter­ven­tion­ist kind of guy, were the empty threats is­sued con­stantly by the par­ents around me, like the ones men­tioned at the be­gin­ning of this ar­ti­cle. When I did men­tion that it seemed point­less to keep is­su­ing the same threats and then do noth­ing about it, I was met with a gen­er­alised a) dis­com­fort at me pub­licly com­ment­ing on other peo­ple’s par­ent­ing skills – fair enough, and be­lated apolo­gies to those af­fected, I have learnt to be less vocal and more diplo­matic nowa­days – and b) con­fu­sion at what I was talk­ing about. Didn’t every­one threaten their chil­dren with con­se­quences for their non-co­op­er­a­tion? Yes, of course they did, but then they fol­lowed through with them, oth­er­wise the child will ob­vi­ously learn to ig­nore any threat – and quite rightly be taken aback if the par­ent does ac­tu­ally fol­low through with it, i.e. change their ac­cus­tomed be­hav­iour at some point in the fu­ture – and per­haps more im­por­tantly learn not to be­lieve what their par­ents say. This to me rep­re­sented a com­plete com­mu­ni­ca­tion break­down with your child, surely they need to know that when you say some­thing you mean it?

So is this a cul­tural thing? I think it is, as in other cul­tures I’ve lived in I think there tends to be more con­sis­tency be­tween what par­ents say and what they do. In fact, I found my­self lis­ten­ing to par­ents here jok­ing about say­ing one thing but then ob­vi­ously not ac­tu­ally doing it, it just being a way of get­ting their kids to co­op­er­ate.

By con­trast, much to my son’s cha­grin, when I told him we were leav­ing, we were leav­ing. Other par­ents and chil­dren looked on baf­fled when I al­ways did what I’d said I was going to do. In other words, fol­lowed through with my “threat” be­cause my son wasn’t co­op­er­at­ing, de­spite his protes­ta­tions.

Years later, when I heard the same par­ents make com­ments about how well-be­haved my son was, that I was lucky he didn’t an­swer me back, that he did what he was asked to do with­out com­plain­ing or re­belling, and phrases like “How lucky you are!” “What a good boy you’ve got there!” “He turned out well, didn’t he?” and so on, I would raise my eye­brows in re­sponse. You see, I’ve learnt to keep my mouth shut in sit­u­a­tions like that. And luck­ily for me I have this col­umn to com­mu­ni­cate my thoughts. Here are this month’s: empty threats don’t work.