12 Rules for Life (Full) ENGLISH

Emotions, positive and negative, come in two usefully differentiated
variants. Satisfaction (technically, satiation) tells us that what we did was
good, while hope (technically, incentive reward) indicates that something
pleasurable is on the way. Pain hurts us, so we won’t repeat actions that
produced personal damage or social isolation (as loneliness is also,
technically, a form of pain). Anxiety makes us stay away from hurtful people
and bad places so we don’t have to feel pain. All these emotions must be
balanced against each other, and carefully judged in context, but they’re all
required to keep us alive and thriving. We therefore do our children a
disservice by failing to use whatever is available to help them learn, including
negative emotions, even though such use should occur in the most merciful
possible manner.
Skinner knew that threats and punishments could stop unwanted
behaviours, just as reward reinforces what is desirable. In a world paralyzed
at the thought of interfering with the hypothetically pristine path of natural
child development, it can be difficult even to discuss the former techniques.
However, children would not have such a lengthy period of natural
development, prior to maturity, if their behaviour did not have to be shaped.
They would just leap out of the womb, ready to trade stocks. Children also
cannot be fully sheltered from fear and pain. They are small and vulnerable.
They don’t know much about the world. Even when they are doing
something as natural as learning to walk, they’re constantly being walloped
by the world. And this is to say nothing of the frustration and rejection they
inevitably experience when dealing with siblings and peers and
uncooperative, stubborn adults. Given this, the fundamental moral question is
not how to shelter children completely from misadventure and failure, so they
never experience any fear or pain, but how to maximize their learning so that
useful knowledge may be gained with minimal cost.
In the Disney movie Sleeping Beauty, the King and Queen have a
daughter, the princess Aurora, after a long wait. They plan a great
christening, to introduce her to the world. They welcome everyone who loves
and honours their new daughter. But they fail to invite Maleficent (malicious,
malevolent), who is essentially Queen of the Underworld, or Nature in her
negative guise. This means, symbolically, that the two monarchs are
overprotecting their beloved daughter, by setting up a world around her that
has nothing negative in it. But this does not protect her. It makes her weak.