Sad but funny story about Jordan Peterson and his wife, trying to feed a child from another family

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 cuz 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 taken care of and then he ended up at our house and which was fine and so he's a cute little guy and his the mother came to the door and she said she's you know pushed the boy and he was kind of like this 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 red that's a remarkably interesting statement too 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 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 a psychologist too which was quite interesting 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 at everything and he was sort of standing there like this and I thought hmm that's not good because there's all these other kids like he should have been in there playing a that obviously that 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 the three-year-old in another four-year-old he should have been in there you know causing trouble and having fun and play but he wasn't he was standing in the porch like this and he wasn't happy he wasn't happy so I looked at him for a bit and then I poked them a couple of times because I thought you know if you're interacting with little kids they're very playful they they're kind of like puppies and so if you if you tease them a bit and tickle them a bit then usually even if they're crabby you know a smile a breakout despite their best efforts and then they'll sort of giggle and maybe you know they'll try to whack you away and they you know they they go into a play routine and although you may not know it mammals like us have a play circuit and also 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 the 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 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 you should that it's okay to ignore adults or that you should ignore adults or that you can ignore adults that's all bad because the world is 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 you know 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 that it's really useful to make sure the children respect adults because they're gonna be adults so if they don't respect adults then of course they don't have any respect for what they're gonna be why the hell grow up you end up like Peter Pan because that's what Peter Pan is about right Peter Pan wants to stay in Neverland with the Lost Boys where 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 that's the same thing as this dragon so you know kids have to respect adults since 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 them and I thought this isn't good there's something deeply wrong with this little kid so that's fine so then we said all the kids down for lunch and the rule is your damn lunch should be thankful for it because you 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 so because a lot of the tension in households is domestic tension the tension between husbands and wives say our husbands wives and children it's like just who the hell is gonna 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 got to the point in 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 precooked hard-boiled eggs yeah yeah right you know it's not a good thing and you might ask yourself why the hell everyone is either fat or has an eating disorder and you know part of the reason is 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 if you bring on 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 world eat half if one only has one the other will only have one the correlation between the food intake between the dyads was about point eight it was I seem to be a little higher for extroverts than for introverts but it was remarkably remarkably concordant you can understand why right because human beings share food it's like you are not going to be a popular tribes person if you eat you know 30 percent of the food when food is in short supply you better be bloody awake and make sure that you don't take more than your share and you know it's a fundamental element of human nature to do that and you know and we also regulate our sense of satiety by queues that are external to us so regulating our food intake also because we're omnivores turns out to be a tremendously difficult thing and well 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 gonna cook your damn kids some lunch and you're gonna do that well let's let's calculate it out because I like doing arithmetic so let's say it takes you 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 10 so it's 10 hours a week it's 40 hours a month right forty hours a month is a full work week so 40 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 eighteen 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 necessary 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 food or towards yourself if all you can muster up for the effort of cooking and preparing food is the out - to the slave and continual punishment from the people that you're offering food - it's like who the hell wants that so you want to teach the miserable little blader 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 produce something and then you know you can be all happy about the fact that you were you know slaving away in the kitchen and you can like your kid so and you know 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 the relationship is just broken up and they do something absolutely brutal to their child if 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 all right so anyway so this kids sitting there and there's no damn way he's gonna eat anything okay so we decide we're going to feed him which I'm an expert at because my my Stodden 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 a hold of the spoon and it was like he was not gonna be fed anymore hey so that's fine good you know it's like feed yourself but no kids eh they're too damn curious and playful really to feed themselves so you sit them in a highchair and then you know they fling the food onto the floor cuz that's pretty cool they can watch that over and over you know are they mess around with it or maybe they you know put some in mom's hair cuz that's interesting to it 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 need then it gets crabby and you know whiney 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 to the spoon it was like a four-hour battle it was really remarkable so I I'd love 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 you there's an attitude 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'm not going to get angry I'm just gonna out stubborn you and so so I take up some food and put it in front of him II go like this so that was a good trick and so I try to get the food in there and his teeth regreted so I poked him you know poke poke poke poke and after about 10 pokes he'd get annoyed and go and I put the food in and then he tried to spit it out so I'd hold it in this so then so 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 it was like she just couldn't handle it and about an hour after this he decided that you know it was okay and that he would let me feed him but like it was brutal and 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 him so anyways so we had this kid at the table and he was not gonna eat so my wife who'd 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 not the spoon away or or get angry or 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 diverted his head one way or another so so that was interesting because I knew that 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 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 from a bit and sooner or later he gets mad and you know goes ah and she puts the food in and she does and then Pat's 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 then 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 but as she patted him on the head he'd be doing this and he'd opened 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 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 go back to his routine and then she did that for I think about 20 minutes it wasn't disruptive like all the other kids ate they didn't even really notice what was going on it wasn't 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 dragon here and it's a big one so she feeds him and then he finishes the whole ball it's like and she says you're a good boy you ate the whole ball and 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 that 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 didn't turn alized all that he thought he was a bad kid and then all of a sudden poof he figured this out and you know get a little reward for it was like he just lit up and that whole shell that he had on that that he was like using to protect himself when he was in the porch that just melted away it was like it was horrifying and amazing at the same time and it he followed my wife around after that in the house just like a puppy dog like he wouldn't get he would not get 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 a rocking chair 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 Boop he was like this and he was like that for like two hours he wouldn't let her go so then the mother came home his mother came home and she came downstairs and she looked at what was going on you know and this kid was like oh I'm dawn to my wife and she looked at her and she said oh super mom and you know took her kid and went home it's like Jesus like 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'd he get him to eat it's like and what what the hell is he doing like hugging you he never does that to me no way man she was 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 she did not want to admit and she was willing perfectly willing to sacrifice her child to that 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 to do something good because we opened up 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 that hope was dispensed with the next day

Channel: Pragmatic Entertainment

Views: 718,021

Rating: 4.9178925 out of 5

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, rasing kids, How to get my child to eat, how to get my 2 year old to eat, caos, order, psychology, how to discipline a child

Id: 4baRTivL_fQ

Length: 16min 54sec (1014 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 18 2018