The Choice

eir mother kicked me under the table. “Don’t say that,” she
admonished me under her breath. “She’ll end up conceited.”
Aer dinner, while Emma’s mother cleaned up in the kitchen,
Peter, who was still a toddler, was pulling on her skirt, asking for her
attention. She kept putting him off, and his attempts to get her to stop
what she was doing and pick him up became more and more frantic.
Finally he toddled out of the kitchen and went straight for the coffee
table, where there were some porcelain knickknacks. His mom ran
aer him, swooped him up, spanked him, and said, “Didn’t I tell you
not to touch those?”
e spare-the-rod-spoil-the-child approach to discipline had
created a climate in which the children seemed to get only negative
attention (bad attention, aer all, is better than no attention). e
strict environment, the black-and-white nature of the rules and roles
imposed on the children, the palpable tension between the parents—
all made for an emotional famine in the home.
I also witnessed the highly inappropriate attention that Emma’s
father paid her. “Hey there, Hottie,” he said to her when she joined us
in the living room aer dinner. I saw her shrink into the couch, trying
to cover herself. Control, punitive discipline, emotional incest—no
wonder Emma was dying in the midst of plenty.
Like all families, Emma and her family needed rules, but very
different ones from those they were operating under. So I helped
Emma and her parents to make a family constitution that they would
help one another to enforce, a list of family rules that would improve
the climate in their home. First, they talked about the behaviors that
weren’t working. Emma told her parents how much hearing them yell
and blame frightened her, and how resentful she felt when they
changed the rules or expectations at the last minute—what time she
had to be home, what chores she had to ĕnish before she could watch
TV. Her father talked about how isolated he felt in the family—he felt