The brilliance of Peterson (actual quote):
Mother made some pancakes for Billy, but the dragon ate them all! Mother made some more, but the dragon ate those too. Mother kept making pancakes until she ran out of batter. Billy only got one of them but he said that’s all he really wanted anyway. So I’ll tell you another story about that. So, when I lived in Boston, I had little kids and my wife took care of some neighborhood little kids because she didn’t have a green card and that was she was home with the kids anyways, and anyway, she took care of some other little kids. One of them would only eat hot dogs that was quite funny. He’d only eat hot dogs at his mother’s place but at our house he ate all of his lunch and he was perfectly happy about it, so I thought that was quite amusing too. But anyways one day a neighbor came by and the neighbor had a four year old child and the neighbor was looking for someone to take care of the child because her nanny had been in a car accident and couldn’t take care of the child temporarily. So the child had sort of been circulating around neighborhood houses for a couple of days and you know people were taking care of him and then he ended up at our house. Which was fine. And so he’s a cute little guy and his — the mother came to the door and she said she’s pushed the boy in he was kind of like this [sulking], he wasn’t very happy and she said, “He probably won’t eat all day but that’s okay.” And I thought hmm that’s a remarkably interesting statement to you know, to put forth as a proposition the first time we meet your son. It’s like, he won’t eat, all day, which by the way is not okay, it’s not okay, and you’re going to tell us that it’s okay and you’re going to expect that we’re just going to accept the fact that you think it’s okay. And that’s the whole story, you deliver all that information in one little sentence. So I thought, well that’s pretty damn peculiar. I believe she was the psychologist too, which was quite interesting [sniffs]. So okay. So that’s fine. So I went out to do something and there was four kids playing in the house and when I came back the little guy was in the porch like where the boots were and everything and he was sort of standing there like this [sulking] and I thought hmm that’s not good because there’s all these other kids like he should have been in there playing eh? That obviously that’s what a child is primed to do! He should have been in there, messing about with I think there was a two year-old and a three year-old and another four year-old. He should have been in there you know causing trouble and having fun and playing but he wasn’t, and he was standing on the porch like this [sulking] and he wasn’t happy. He wasn’t happy. So I looked at him for a bit and then I poked him a couple of times because I thought, you know, if you’re interacting with little kids they’re very playful eh? They’re kind of like puppies and so if you tease them a bit, and tickle them a bit, then usually even if they’re crabby, you know a smile will break out despite their best efforts and then they’ll sort of giggle and maybe you know they’ll try to whack you away and you know they go into a play routine. And although you may not know it, mammals like us HAVE A PLAY CIRCUIT! You know? So we’re intrinsically playful which is partly why we can get along with dogs because of course dogs are intrinsically playful and most people know how to play with a dog and you know when a dog wants to play right because it sort of puts its paws down and looks up at you and sort of grins and puts its tail in the air and goes like this it’s like CLUE IN, PRIMATE you know it’s time to engage in some playing and you know you basically you know how to do that and even the dog knows how to do that. So I’m poking this kid and trying to get him to, smile but there’s no damn way you know I’m poking him he’s just ignoring me like mad and I thought that’s not good, you know, because you don’t want your four year-old to have learned that you should, that it’s okay to ignore the adults, or that you should ignore the adults, or that you can ignore the adults. That’s all BAD because the world’s full of adults and they know a lot of things and they control all the resources and so you BETTER GET ALONG WITH THEM PLUS you’re going to end up… AS an adult for most of your life, so if the general, so if the first rule is adults can and should be ignored then what the hell are you headed for? You know? And it’s one of the reasons why it’s really useful to make sure the children respect adults because they’re going to be adults so if they don’t respect adults then of course they don’t have any respect for what they’re going to BE why the hell grow up? You end up like Peter Pan because that’s what Peter Pan’s about right Peter Pan wants to stay in Neverland, with the Lost Boys, where there’s no responsibility because you know, he looks at the future and all he sees is Captain Hook. A tyrant who’s afraid of death, that’s the crocodile right… that’s chasing him with the clock in his stomach. And it’s the same thing as this dragon. So you know… KIDS HAVE TO RESPECT ADULTS. It’s, you’re doing them a disservice if they don’t! So okay so fine, I’m poking this kid, there’s just no damn way, I’m not getting anywhere with him and I thought this isn’t good. There’s something deeply wrong with this little kid. So that’s fine. So then we sit all the kids down for lunch, and the rule is: eat your DAMN lunch and be THANKFUL FOR IT. Because, think about this, Leonard Cohen wrote this song once about I don’t remember the song particularly but he talked about the homicidal bitching that goes down in every kitchen about who’s going to serve and who’s going to eat. It’s like, if you haven’t encountered that then there’s something terribly wrong… you know… because a lot of the tension in households is domestic tension. The tensions between husbands and wives they are husbands wives and children it’s like just WHO THE HELL’S going to do the domestic duties and how and when and the answer can’t be well we’re not going to do them because then you know you eat Cheetos and popcorn and you know for the rest of your life and that’s not good. It’s gotten to the point in England because the domestic situations have deteriorated the rituals have deteriorated to such a point that about 1/3 of families no longer have a dining room table and you can buy PRE-COOKED hard-boiled eggs, yeah, yeah, right, so it’s not a good thing, and you might ask yourself why the hell everyone is fat or has an eating disorder and you know part of the reason is that the entire domestic routine around regulating food intake has disappeared that’s a terrible thing for people because we’re social eaters. So you might say, well, if you sit down with a bunch of other people… at a table… how much should you eat? And the answer is: you should eat on average what everyone else eats. And that’s exactly what you do, even if you don’t notice it. You know people are so wired into we did experiments like this if you bring undergraduates who don’t know each other… into a lab… and you give them a snack while they’re doing something like watching a movie, they will eat the same number of chips. So you know if one of them eats the whole half the thing, the other will eat half. If one only has one, the other will only have one. The correlation between the food intake, between the dyads was about 0.8 it was staggering. Seemed to be a little higher for extroverts than for introverts, but it was remarkably concordant. You can understand why right? Because human beings share food it’s like you are not going to be a popular tribesperson… if you eat you know 30% of the food when food is in short supply. You better be bloody awake and make sure you don’t take more than your share. And you know it’s a fundamental of human nature to do that. And you know, we also regulate our sense of satiety by cues that are external to us. So regulating our food intake, also because we’re omnivores turns out to be a tremendously difficult thing and anyways, back to this kid. So, we bring all the kids to the table and they’re sitting around and they’re having lunch and the rule is, as I said, eat what is in front of you and be PLEASED AND HAPPY ABOUT IT. So you might say well why would that also be a rule? It’s like okay, put yourself in this position now because you’ll be in this position. You’re going to cook your damn kid some lunch. And you’re going to do that… well let’s calculate it out because I like doing arithmetic. So let’s say it takes you a half an hour a day, and you do it seven days a week. But we’ll multiply that by three because there’s three meals so it’s an hour and a half a day right? So okay fine seven times an hour and a half is roughly ten. So it’s ten hours a week it’s forty hours a month right, forty hours a month is a full work week. So forty hours a month times twelve, twelve full work weeks, right? Yes? That’s three full months of 40 hour days of COOKING SOMETHING FOR YOUR DAMN KID. Now, that’s a lot of time, and then you’re going to do that for 18 years. SO then you might ask yourself… what sort of response do you need… from your child… in order to not feel resentful and miserable about the fact that you have to do that for three bloody months this year. You know you just have to think about this, and this is also why it’s necessarily to know that inside yourself you carry a monster just like the world outside you carries a monster. Do not think that you’re going to be able to maintain a healthy attitude towards your child or towards your food or towards yourself if all you can muster up for the effort of cooking and preparing food is the attitude of a slave and continual punishment from the people you’re offering food to. It’s like who the hell wants that?! So you want to teach the miserable little blighter that he’s lucky that there’s any food there at all and that the proper attitude is to say really thank you very much mom or thank you very much dad I’m glad that you produced something and then you know you can be all happy about the fact that you were slaving away in the kitchen and you can like your kid! And so you might think well everybody likes their kids. It’s like yeah right, no. That’s not true. That’s not true. And now and then you know you read in the newspaper about someone who’s, you know, being pushed a little bit too far on some day that they’re unemployed and hungover and you know their relationship is just broken up and they do something absolutely brutal to their child and you think well “how could anyone do that” it’s like there’s a lot of history of terrible interactions between the mother and the child or the father and the child before something like that happens. So you know if you want to protect your child against the beast that’s inside you you might want to teach them to treat you with some respect so that you’re much more likely to be a civilized human being around them. So, alright so anyways so this kids sittin’ there and there’s no damn way he’s going to eat anything! So we decide we’re going to feed him, which I am an expert at, because my son, the one who said no all the time he is the most stubborn little cuss you could possibly imagine and one time when he was about nine months old he got ahold of this spoon and it was like he was not going to be fed anymore. So that’s fine good you feed yourself. But no, kids, eh? They’re too damn curious and playful really to feed themselves so you sit them in a high chair and you know they fling the food onto the floor because that’s pretty cool and they can watch that over and over you know or they mess around with it or maybe they, you know, put some in mom’s hair because that’s interesting too and they have two or three bites and then they’re not ravenous and then they’re much more interested in playing, and that’s fine except that if the kid doesn’t eat then it gets crabby and you know whiny and miserable and then it disturbs the mother or the father and then it won’t sleep at night it’s like that’s no good. So after about three days of that I took the spoon back from him and he was not happy about that man. Trying to get that little kid to eat once I got the spoon it was like a four hour battle. It was really remarkable. So I have a lot of respect for his ability just to withstand stubbornness you know but I’d learned by that time as a parent that like if you want to discipline your child, there’s an attitude that you have to take which is I am going to win this. It’s like I don’t care how stubborn you are I am GOING TO WIN! And because I know I’m going to win I am not going to get angry. I’m just going to out-stubborn you, so I take up some food and put it in front of him he’d go like this [winces] so that was a good trick and so I tried to get the food in there and his teeth were gritted so I’d poke him poke poke poke poke and after about ten pokes he’d get annoyed and go agh and I’d put the food in and he tried to spit it out so I’d hold it in. So then that was like three minutes you know and then we did it with another spoonful and you know after about I’d say an hour of this my wife had to leave because just you know she couldn’t handle it. And about an hour after this he decided that you know it was ok and that he would let me feed him, but like it was brutal, and it was amazing I mean little kids are so damn tough you know they’re really cute and everything and but they’re so tough you just can’t believe it so anyways. So… we had this kid at the table and he was not going to eat so my wife, who had learned these tricks by this time, decided to feed him. And he had a lot of sort of nine month old or eight month old behaviors because you know kids have different strategies of resistance if they don’t want to do something and those strategies get more sophisticated as they get older but and he had some strategies but they weren’t sophisticated you know like he didn’t make jokes or knock the spoon away or get angry or run away or any of those things. He did kind of nine month old things which means he just put his head down and when she put the spoon towards him he just averted his head one way or another so so that was interesting because I knew his parents had given up feeding him when he was about eight or nine months old, because those tricks worked and so that’s why she could come to the house and say [in high pitched voice] “he probably won’t eat all day but that’s alright” which it ISN’T. IT’S NOT ALRIGHT. So, fine, so my wife is trying to feed him and he doesn’t open his mouth so she pokes him a bit and sooner or later he gets mad and goes AGH and she puts the food in and then she pats him on the head as soon as he swallows it and says look you’re being a really good kid you know you’re doing a good job and so he’s wondering what the hell’s going on and then it was so interesting because she kept feeding him and he was still doing this [winces] but as she patted him on the head he’d be doing this and he’d open his mouth, so it was like there was this weird conflict between his habitual behavior and this thing that was being reinforced so then she’d you know put the food in and pat him and he’d you know he’d be kind of happy about that and then he’d kind of go back to his routine and then she did that for about — I think it was about 20 minutes it wasn’t disruptive like all the other kids ate they didn’t really notice what was going on. It wasn’t a big deal you know but I was watching because I knew something was up because the stupid thing that his mother said and then the fact that he wouldn’t play, and he ignored me I thought nah nah there’s something really not good here, there’s a dragon here, and it’s a big one… So… she feeds him and then he finishes the whole bowl! And she says you’re a good boy you ate the whole bowl. Jesus, you should have seen what happened to that kid man it just about broke my heart like really, like his eyes got big and he smiled and he was just like he was super thrilled because he’d finally accomplished this ABSOLUTE BASIC NECESSITY… that he hadn’t mastered in FOUR YEARS. He FINALLY GOT IT RIGHT. You think of all the meals he went through, either being ignored or failing, three times a day, for like three years. Nothing but failure and bad responses and you know, he’d internalized all that he thought he was a bad kid and then all of a sudden POOF he figured this out and you know got a little reward for it. It was like he just lit up and that whole shell that he had on that he was like using to protect himself when he was in the porch that just melted away. It was like horrifying and amazing at the same time and that he followed my wife around after that, in the house, just like a puppy dog. Like he wouldn’t get he would not more than one foot away from her. It was unbelievable and then we went downstairs to watch like a movie with the kids and she sat on her rocking chair and he climbed right up on her lap and grabbed her just like that Harlow monkey grabbed the you know the little soft mother instead of the wiry mother FROUMP he was like this [grasping] and he was like that for like two hours he wouldn’t let her go. So then the mother came home and she came downstairs and she looked at what was going on and this kid was like [choking sound] glommed onto my wife and he looked at her and he said oh, super mom. And you know, took her kid, and went home. It’s like, Jesus, if you don’t think there’s a dragon in that story, man, you’re not listening to it. It was not good. And her response at the end was terrible. She should have said “well how did you get him to eat? It’s like what the hell is he doing hugging you? He never does that to me!” No way, man, she wasn’t going to let that piece of information in, and it’s no wonder, because the dragon in that story was her, and it was something that she did not want to admit. And she was willing, perfectly willing to sacrifice her child to her failure to realize that she could be a dragon. So that meant that the child was the problem. And that’s a hell of a thing to do to a four year-old. So… It was not pleasant. It was really not pleasant. In fact, we probably did damage to the child by actually getting him to do something good, eh? Because we opened him up to the possibility that he could behave properly, and be rewarded for that… And that gave him hope… And so you can bloody well be sure that hope was dispensed with the next day… So… And that’s why Billy doesn’t get anything to eat.
