A Mom texts me:
“We’re at a barbeque—mostly family members—and my 13-year-old son, Isaac, keeps talking to everyone in a baby tone of voice. It’s embarrassing. I’ve told him in the past not to talk like a baby. Why is he doing this?”
I said, “That’s easy. Almost invariably, children are either protecting themselves or getting attention. When they lack the Real Love they need, they seek attention—a form of approval—in order to feel worthwhile, and they protect themselves from disapproval.
"You already know that Isaac doesn't feel good about himself, and he doesn’t have the social skills to get attention at school. He doesn’t know how to find friends. He wouldn’t dare do this baby talk thing at school, because he knows he’d be seriously mocked—if not beaten up and thrown into a dumpster.
"But he feels safer with family, so he’s trying something different to see if he can get some attention. What he gets is not unconditional love—like he now gets from you—but in the short term he’ll settle for whatever he can get from these people. I do have some suggestions, but I can save those for when the event is over. There’s not much you can do about teaching him while he’s with all these people.”
A few minutes later, she wrote:
“Now he’s showing everybody his school grades. Then he asks silly questions or questions he knows the answers to. He’s behaving like a four-year-old.”
“Exactly like a four-year-old,” I said. “Emotionally speaking, he IS about four years old.”
Mom wrote: “I’m guessing that he needs to feel loved, right? Anything else?”
“First love,” I said, “but that evolves over time. You’re getting better at it, but you’re not consistent enough yet to heal him. He doesn’t quite trust you yet. In the meantime, there are some things you could do. First, it’s pretty obvious that you’re embarrassed by his behavior, perhaps even disgusted. And you want to control him.”
“Yeah, that’s true.”
“So, what can you do? Nothing right now at the barbeque, but over time? First, you have to learn to unconditionally accept your son and love him. How can you do that?
- First, get all the love you can find for yourself. From me, from others.
- Second, remember that love and carry it with you so that you have no need to control your son for a sense of worth and control.
- Third, remember that you caused this problem in the first place. It’s the lack of unconditional love in his life that has caused him discomfort and led him to find attention in less than productive ways.
- Fourth, remember that only your LOVE will help him—not controlling him with embarrassment or pushing or anything else.”
“That’s all?” she asked.
“No, in addition to loving—and while you’re learning to love—you can teach him. He believes that he’s getting a lot of attention from his behavior, and he’s partly right. But you can teach him the rest of the truth. You have to teach him the whole picture.
"Tell him that he IS getting attention, but (1) he’s getting the attention a CHILD gets, and (2) he has to keep acting LIKE a child in order to get it. This might seem fun for now, but over time (1) people won’t keep giving him the attention of a child, and (2) he will be stuck acting like a baby for life. He will feel smaller and smaller, with less and less reward. He’ll be crippled as he acts like a child in an adult world, the world that is already falling upon his shoulders.”
We must teach our children how they can thrive in the world. We have to teach them the behaviors that will work, along with those that don’t. We’re here to save their lives, not to enable them or provide them entertainment or temporary comfort.
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