Sisters- High Chairs and High Expectations
Mom had a way of getting results out of little kids. She used to joke that all little kids were afraid of her except her own. She thought it was really funny. It wasn’t the only joke I didn’t get.
Mom didn’t go to college. She didn’t sit in a classroom and read about Pavlov and Skinner.
Food Addiction is Real, and it’s ON PURPOSE!
There’s so much the government doesn’t want you to know.
My mom did know a lot about training dogs and horses, which overlaps significantly with operant conditioning, and she used the exact same logic on kids.
At first it’s all shaping and treats. She would build trust, and ensure their interest in the reward. She would find out which rewards motivated them the most.
Then she would slowly raise the bar, and make it harder to get the “treats.”
My mom loved winning a good power struggle. “Good kids,” did the target behaviors without needing to be asked without any thought to the reward. Of course there was a little time to learn the target behavior.
If the child became focused more on the reward than the behavior, the reward would be withheld, and negative stimuli would be introduced. It was clear at that point that the expectation was to do the target because she said so, just to please her. Any reinforcement was to be regarded as secondary.
It’s clear from the outside that this was gaslighting used on little kids. Of course they all wanted to please her, but they felt like they were crappy selfish kids because they wanted the cookie.
The result is kids having to perform how willing they were to please her, to anticipate what she would want, to gain her approval.
Then incentives would be abandoned entirely. Either you were a “good kid,” or you needed more work to become a “good kid,” and she would focus on the kid after that.
My sisters didn’t push back much, so it wasn’t obvious at first. My aunt had been pregnant with my mom both times so Cousin A was 6 weeks older than Sister A, and Sister B was 5 days older than Cousin B.
My aunt lived in Nebraska, but with that many babies there was a lot of visiting. My sisters were always ahead on their milestones, which Mom loved to boast about. The cousins were compared to them constantly.
They told the SCRIPTs of my aunt’s “mental giants,” all the time.
Cousin A was once playing in the sand with cups, and spoons, and other kitchen stuff while we were camping. She filled up a cup, stuck in one of those long ribbed straws and sucked with all her might. She choked on the sand.
We got her airways cleared, and got her a drink, but instead of someone just helping her regulate, she got to hear how stupid she was. She got to hear that story endlessly.
Cousin B, on the same camping trip, leaned against the flimsy screen door of the camper and fell out. He was ok, but pretty scared. They brought him back in the camper and dealt the next hand of cards, and he did it again. He too got to hear how stupid her was.
These stories are still told.
Cousin B was my boy. He would squirm out of anybody else’s lap except me. I loved that kid so much.
He struggled to form words when he was little, and my mom was determined to fix it. She would focus on it throughout dinner. Each bite of food was an opportunity to use his needs and drives against him.
She specifically focused on how he said hippopotamus and rhinoceros. He couldn’t have been more than 3. The way he sounded was more like hippopotamit and wynotowit.
It was so stinking cute, and he had the cutest little dimples and would glow when he said it, because these words are intrinsically fun to say.
Mom would make him try over and over and over and over again. He was hungry. The battle would last all through dinner with only a few bites being granted.
She would repeat over and over again, “He’ll say it if he wants to eat.”
NOBODY STOPPED HER. Nobody intervened. Nobody spoke up.
She would hand out cookies to all of the other kids.
“Say hippopotamus,” and each of them would say it “right” and get a cookie. His turn would be last, and he would say it the way he said it and he wouldn’t get the cookie. He would cry, and I was told not to comfort him so he’ll learn.
She really enjoyed watching the hurt of it. Watching it break things inside of them. Watching it create obedience in her presence.
I snuck his food, and I really want to think that his mom did too, but nobody ever went up against Mom.
My sisters definitely felt like they were better than their cousins and they let them know it constantly.
Mom would make fun of any gentle parenting. Back then it was mostly Dr. Spock, and Mom (without ever going so far as to read the book) adamantly opposed even the thought of him. She did not believe in coddling or sheltering children. She considered this California Liberal Nonsense. She was angry that someone who went to a fancy school would have the audacity to tell her how to be a parent. She wasn’t about to do something “just because it’s in some book.”
This was not only a belief that spurred behavior, but something that she had to make true through behavior.
Mom believed in spanking. Mom believed children should follow rules because they are children. Mom thought that adding more pressure was always effective.
Mom did not approve of me watching Mr. Rogers when I was younger (and when I was caught watching it by my cousins they had a blast making fun of me for it). I was not allowed to expose the girls to Mr. Rogers either.
Life wasn’t fair, and we needed to know that.
We all played along
Mom was certainly the driving force, but she didn’t act alone. She would instruct me to withhold food, to spank, to spray my sisters in the face with water during their baths.
It was incredibly clear that Mom was functioning from within the rules about “how our people do things,” and that she expected me to do the same things and believe in them just as much as she did.
When it really seemed overboard, I would look at Grandma and she would just shrug her shoulders and maintain her silence. Grandpa would turn on the TV, and turn his chair around in the other direction.
No one dared look too uncomfortable or Mom would turn on them.
“You think I’m going too far? Do you want me to show you too far so you know the difference?”
It’s hard for me to admit now, but I felt honored to be trusted with spanking. Everyone performed this SCRIPT that it meant that I was trustworthy and mature. I felt important. I felt like it made me belong. There was no tolerance for me noticing they were “wrong,” and expecting an adult to step in.
I was the adult.
I handed out a lot of spankings.
I grabbed a lot of arms, yanking them around.
I would leverage anything I had control over.
It was one of the few things that made Mom actually seem proud of me.
References
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3076385/
Operation **Reclaim** Loveland 
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