No shouting or punishment: golden principles of Inuit education

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In the 1960s, a Harvard graduate student made a remarkable discovery about the nature of human anger. When Jean Briggs was 34 years old, she traveled in the Arctic Circle and lived in the tundra for 17 months. There were no roads, no heating, no shops. Temperatures in winter could drop to minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

In a 1970 article, Briggs described how she persuaded an Inuit family to "adopt" her and "try to keep her alive."

During those times, many Inuit families lived the same way as their ancestors for millennia. They built igloos in winter and tents in summer. “We only ate animal food - fish, seals, caribou deer,” says Myna Ishulutak, a film producer and educator who lived a similar lifestyle as a child.

Briggs quickly noticed that something special was happening in these families: adults had an outstanding ability to control their anger.

“They never expressed their anger towards me, although they were angry with me very often,” - said Briggs in an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).

Showing even a hint of frustration or irritation was considered a weakness, behavior that was forgivable only to children. For example, once someone threw a kettle of boiling water into an igloo and damaged the ice floor. No one raised an eyebrow. “It's a shame,” said the culprit and went to refill the kettle.

Another time, a fishing line that had been braided for several days broke on the very first day. No one escaped a curse. “We'll sew it where it broke,” someone said calmly.

Against their background, Briggs seemed like a wild child, although she tried very hard to control her anger. “My behavior was impulsive, much more rude, much less tactful,” she told CBC. “I often behaved contrary to social norms. I was whining, or snarling, or doing something else that they would never have done."

Brigss, who passed away in 2016, described her observations in her first book, Never in Anger. She was tormented by the question: how do Inuit manage to cultivate this ability in their children? How do they manage to turn hysterical toddlers into cold-blooded adults?

In 1971, Briggs found a clue

She was walking along a rocky beach in the Arctic when she saw a young mother playing with her child, a boy of about two years old. Mom picked up a pebble and said: “Hit me! Let's! Hit harder!”Briggs recalled.

The boy threw a stone at his mother, and she exclaimed: "Oooo, how it hurts!"

Briggs was confused. This mother taught the child the opposite behavior to what parents usually want. And her actions contradicted everything Briggs knew about Inuit culture. "I thought, what's going on here?" - said Briggs in an interview with CBC.

As it turns out, that mom used a powerful parenting technique to teach her child how to control anger - and this is one of the most interesting parenting strategies I've come across.

No swearing, no timeouts

In the Canadian polar city of Iqaluit, early December. At two o'clock the sun is already leaving.

The air temperature is moderate minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 23 Celsius). Light snow is spinning.

I came to this coastal town after reading Briggs' book in search of parenting secrets - especially those related to teaching children how to control their emotions. As soon as I get off the plane, I start collecting data.

I sit down with old people in their 80s and 90s while they dine on “local food” - seals stew, frozen beluga whale meat and raw caribou meat. I talk to moms who sell handmade sealskin jackets at school craft fairs. And I attend a parenting class where kindergarten teachers learn how their ancestors raised young children hundreds - or even thousands - of years ago.

Everywhere, mothers mention the golden rule: do not shout or raise your voice at young children.

Traditionally, Inuit are incredibly gentle and caring for children. If we were to rank the mildest parenting styles, then the Inuit approach would surely be among the leaders. (They even have a special kiss for babies - you have to touch the cheek with your nose and smell the baby's skin).

In this culture, it is considered unacceptable to scold children - or even speak to them in an angry tone, says Lisa Ipeelie, a radio producer and mom, who grew up with 12 children. “When they are small, there is no point in raising their voices,” she says. "It will only make your heart beat faster."

And if a child hits or bites you, you still don't need to raise your voice?

“No,” Aypeli says with a chuckle that seems to underscore the stupidity of my question. “We often think that small children are pushing us on purpose, but in reality this is not the case. They are upset about something, and you need to find out what it is."

It is considered humiliating in Inuit tradition to yell at children. For an adult, it is like going into hysterics; the adult, in essence, descends to the level of the child.

Elderly people I spoke with say that the intense colonization process that has taken place over the past century is destroying these traditions. And so their community is making serious efforts to maintain their parenting style.

Goota Jaw is at the forefront of this fight. She teaches parenting lessons at Arctic College. Her own parenting style is so gentle that she doesn't even consider timeouts as an educational measure.

“Shout: think about your behavior, go to your room! I disagree with that. This is not what we teach children. So you just teach them to run away,”says Joe.

And you teach them to be angry, says clinical psychologist and author Laura Markham. “When we yell at a child - or even threaten with 'I'm getting angry,' we teach the child to scream,” Markham says. "We teach them that when they get upset, they have to yell, and that yelling solves the problem."

On the contrary, parents who control their anger teach the same to their children. Markham says, "Children learn emotional self-regulation from us."

They will play football with your head

In principle, deep down in their hearts, all moms and dads know that it is better not to yell at children. But if you don't scold them, don't talk to them in an angry tone, how can you get them to obey? How to make sure that a three-year-old does not run out onto the road? Or did you not hit your older brother?

For millennia, Inuit have been adept at using an old-fashioned tool: “We use storytelling to make kids listen,” says Joe.

She does not mean fairy tales containing morality, which the child still needs to understand. She talks about oral stories that have been passed down from generation to generation among Inuit, and which are designed specifically to influence a child's behavior at the right time - and sometimes save his life.

For example, how can you teach children not to come close to the ocean, in which they can easily drown? Rather than shouting, "Stay out of the water," Joe says, Inuit prefer to anticipate the problem and tell the children a special story about what is underwater. “The sea monster lives there,” says Joe, “and he has a huge bag on his back for small children. If the child gets too close to the water, the monster will drag him into his bag, carry him to the bottom of the ocean, and then give him to another family. And then we don’t need to shout at the child - he already understood the essence”.

The Inuit also have many stories to teach children about respectful behavior. For example, so that children listen to their parents, they are told a story about earwax, says film producer Maina Ishulutak. “My parents looked into my ears, and if there was too much sulfur there, it meant that we did not listen to what we were told,” she says.

Parents tell their children, "If you take food without permission, long fingers will reach out and grab you."

There is a story about the northern lights that helps children learn to keep their hats on in winter. “Our parents told us that if we go out without a hat, the polar lights will take our heads off and play football with them,” Ishulutak said. - "We were so afraid!" she exclaims and bursts into laughter.

At first, these stories seem to me too scary for little ones. And my first reaction is to brush them off. But my mind changed 180 degrees after seeing my own daughter's response to similar stories - and after I learned more about humankind's intricate relationship with storytelling. Oral storytelling is a common human tradition. For tens of thousands of years, it has been a key way in which parents impart their values to their children and teach them the right behavior.

Modern hunter-gatherer communities use stories to teach sharing, respect for both genders and avoid conflict, a recent study that analyzed the lives of 89 different tribes showed. For example, research has found that in the Agta, a hunter-gatherer tribe in the Philippines, storytelling is valued more than hunter's or medical knowledge.

Nowadays, many American parents transfer the role of the storyteller to the screen. I wondered if this was a simple - and effective - way to achieve obedience and influence the behavior of our children. Perhaps young children are somehow “programmed” to learn from stories?

“I would say that children learn well through storytelling and explanation,” says psychologist Dina Weisberg of Villanova University, who studies how young children interpret fictional stories. “We learn best through what we are interested in. And stories inherently have many qualities that make them much more interesting than just saying."

Stories with elements of danger attract children like a magnet, Weisberg says. And they turn a stressful activity - like trying to obey - into a playful interaction that turns out to be - I'm not afraid of the word - fun. “Don't discount the playful side of storytelling,” says Weisberg. “Through stories, children can imagine things that don't actually happen. And the kids love it. Adults too."

Will you hit me?

Let's return to Iqaluit, where Maina Ishulutak recalls her childhood in the tundra. She and her family lived in a hunting camp with 60 other people. When she was a teenager, her family moved to the city.

“I really miss life on the tundra,” she says as we eat baked arctic char with her. “We lived in a turf house. In the morning, when we woke up, everything was frozen until we light the oil lamp."

I ask if she is familiar with the writings of Jean Briggs. Her answer stuns me. Ishulutak takes his bag and takes out Briggs' second book, Games and Morality in the Inuit, which describes the life of a three-year-old girl called Chubby Maata.

“This is a book about me and my family,” says Ishulutak. “I am Chubby Maata.”

In the early 1970s, when Ishulutak was about 3 years old, her family let Briggs into their home for 6 months and allowed her to observe all the details of their child's daily life. What Briggs has described is a key part of raising cold-blooded children.

If one of the children in the camp acted under the influence of anger - hitting someone or throwing a tantrum - no one punished him. Instead, the parents waited for the child to calm down, and then, in a calm atmosphere, did something that Shakespeare would love very much: they played a play. (As the Poet himself wrote, “I conceived this representation, So that the conscience of the king on it could be, With hints, like a hook, to hook.” - Translation by B. Pasternak).

“The point is to give your child an experience that will enable him to develop rational thinking,” Briggs told CBC in 2011.

In short, the parents were acting out everything that happened when the child misbehaved, including the real consequences of that behavior.

The parent always spoke in a cheerful, playful voice. Usually, the performance began with a question that provoked the child into bad behavior.

For example, if the child hits other people, the mother may start the play by asking, "Maybe you will hit me?"

Then the child has to think: "What should I do?" If the child "swallows the bait" and hits the mother, she does not scream or swear, but instead demonstrates the consequences. "Oh, how painful!" - she can exclaim, and then amplify the effect with the next question. For example: "Don't you like me?" or "Are you still little?" She conveys to the child the idea that it is unpleasant for people to be beaten, and that "big children" do not do that. But again, all of these questions are asked in a playful tone. The parent repeats this performance from time to time - until the child stops hitting the mother during the performance and the bad behavior subsides.

Ishulutak explains that these performances teach children not to react to provocations. "They teach to be strong emotionally," she says, "not to take things too seriously and not to be afraid of being teased."

Psychologist Peggy Miller of the University of Illinois agrees: "When a child is young, he learns that people will make him angry in one way or another, and such performances teach the child to think and maintain a certain balance." In other words, Miller says, these performances give children the opportunity to practice controlling their anger while they are not actually angry.

This exercise appears to be critical in teaching children to control their anger. Because this is the essence of anger: if a person is already angry, it is not easy for him to suppress those feelings - even as adults.

“When you're trying to control or change the emotions you’re experiencing right now, it’s very difficult to do so,” says Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychologist at Northeastern University who studies the effects of emotions.

But if you try a different reaction or a different feeling while you're not angry, your chances of dealing with the anger in an acute situation will increase, says Feldman Barrett.

"This kind of exercise essentially helps you reprogram your brain so that it can more easily portray other emotions instead of anger."

This kind of emotional training may be even more important for children, says psychologist Markham, because their brains are just forming the connections necessary for self-control. “Children experience all kinds of intense emotions,” she says. “They don't have a prefrontal cortex yet. So our response to their emotions is shaping their brains.”

Markham advises an approach very similar to that of the Inuit. If the child misbehaves, she suggests waiting for everyone to calm down. In a calm atmosphere, talk to your child about what happened. You can tell him a story about what happened, or you can take two stuffed animals and use them to act out a scene.

“This approach develops self-control,” says Markham.

When you play out bad behavior with your child, it is important to do two things. First, involve the child in the play with a variety of questions. For example, if the problem is aggression towards others, you can pause during the puppet show and ask, “Bobby wants to hit him. What do you think is worth doing?"

Secondly, make sure that the child is not bored. Many parents don't see play as an educational tool, Markham says. But role-playing play provides a lot of opportunities to teach children the right behavior.

“Play is their job,” says Markham. “This is their way of understanding the world around them and their experiences.”

It seems that the Inuit have known this for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.