Not so long ago,
when my daughter was 16 months old, she began swinging her hand at my face as I
nursed her. Purposefully, I thought. Pointedly. She smacked me once, and then
again, turning her eyes up toward mine and grinning in that devilish way she
did when she cruised over to the TV and held out her hand as if to touch its
delicate flat screen. Her father and I had been encouraging her to keep her
hands off. “No touching the TV, Liv,” we’d stay sternly. “Do you want a time
out?” She’d giggle and say “No,” shaking her head so emphatically that her
curls bobbed. But she usually touched the set anyway.
A “time out”
meant sixty seconds of isolation on the couch. We weren’t sure she was able to
make sense of the concept yet, though it felt like something we should’ve
known, given that we are both psychologists. In grad school, where we met, we
studied psychoanalytic theory, which has a lot to say about the emotional
development of children, but less about learning theory tactics like negative
punishment. I Googled “time out” but the results were mixed. What I couldn’t
look up was how to resolve the inner conflict about my baby hitting me: I
didn’t like being struck, but if I stopped her was I communicating that it
wasn’t okay to express her ambivalent feelings toward me?
I presented my
dilemma to my friend, Megan, who is not a psychologist and doesn’t have
children. “Well you don’t want her hitting other kids, right? She’s got to
learn.” Megan was always so reasonable. I nodded, but secretly wasn’t sure that
even the gentle blows delivered to her pre-school classmates were problematic,
at least until she had the vocabulary to put the feelings behind hitting into
words.
I ran my ideas
by a supervisor I sometimes work with—more than a little abashed to be bringing
up my personal concerns—but I thought another psychologist would understand
where I was coming from. “Try telling her ‘that hurts Mommy,’” he suggested.
Yes, encourage empathy. His kids were older. That probably worked with them.
Some time went
by and my daughter started physical therapy; at 18 months she still wasn’t
walking independently. She’d stroll long distances slowly, always holding my
finger. “I think she’s just scared,” her therapist told me. “Start pulling your
hand away.” She might as well have told me to throw my baby girl into a
swimming pool, or to pretend to abandon her on the subway. My hand, I thought,
if whisked away without warning, might impede her ability to trust. How could I
do that to my child, who I loved to the moon and back?
“It’s just the
first of a series of things you’ll have to do that will seem mean but are for
her own good,” my mother said to me in a singsong voice when I updated her
about the PT on the phone. I held back the first thing that came to mind, which
was biting and had to do with her apparent wish to justify all the not-nice
things she’d done to me as a child. They were only to promote your growth.
I’d learned long ago, and many times over, that my mother was not comfortable
with my ambivalence. Talking about my daughter with her often felt loaded.
My therapist and
I shared a laugh about my mom’s comment. And really, her office was the place I
needed to be airing my idiosyncratic parenting concerns. I thought they were
the worries of one who is (perhaps overly) informed, when really they were
rooted in my own experiences of being mothered, by someone who wasn’t as
thoughtful about her parenting as I would’ve liked.
In the end, I
decided to stop my daughter from swinging her little hand at me. “No hitting,”
I’d say. Straightforward. She kept trying anyway.
Darcy Lockman
is a clinical psychologist in practice in New York City. Her memoir about her professional
training will be published by Doubleday in 2012.
