Pictures from the past.

[rivka]

I never got around to presenting my dissertation data at the primary conference in my field - mostly because by the time I finished the damn thing, the research I was doing was completely separate from my dissertation topic. I always had HIV stuff to present at the Society of Behavioral Medicine. Besides, it's not a conference that tends to bring in many people with either child/developmental interests, or disability interests, so my dissertation topic was off the beaten track for the meeting.

But this year I thought, what the hell. I submitted an abstract based on my dissertation research, and it was accepted for presentation as a poster. (I knew I wasn't going to be offered an oral presentation, given the off-the-beaten-trackness.) Now I'm putting the poster together, which means, among other things, that I pulled out the photos of misbehaving children which I used for our analog measure of abuse potential.

There's a lot more information about the analog task at that link, but essentially, we showed parents slides of various child behaviors and asked them how they would respond. Some of the photos are normal kid stuff, and some of them are really not. There's a mix of normal behaviors, rule violations, destructive behaviors, and dangerous behaviors.

[photos removed]

I thought people might be interested in seeing the photos, so I uploaded about a dozen of them to my Flickr account. You can see the whole set here. (Photos have been taken down.)

Because they're research items, I'm only going to leave them up for a few days - so look now, if you're curious.

Comments

[melebeth]

They're very interesting photos, but I also have to say that the photography is gorgeous. Are they stock or did someone take them for your project? Whoever took them did a wonderful job.

[ricevermicelli.livejournal.com]

I have to say I agree. I was distracted from the behavior by the composition and lighting, particularly in the photos of more extreme inappropriate behavior. The boy with porn photo is artistically disturbing, whereas the girl baking photo is comparatively flat.

From a cultural criticism standpoint, I note that it's boys who get the more dangerous behaviors. The girls make child-standard messes, boys get fire, knives, and live ammunition.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

And jumping off the roof.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I also have to say that the photography is gorgeous. Are they stock or did someone take them for your project? Whoever took them did a wonderful job.

The measure has been around for quite some time (as you can see by the dated clothes and furniture) - it wasn't created just for my project. I am fairly sure that they hired a professional photographer. The children are all actors, except for the boy with a gun. (He's the son of the man who developed the measure.)

The measure is supposed to get people in the gut - that's what makes it an effective analogue. So they tried to make the slides as good as they possibly could.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

The only one that gave me an inappropriate SPANK NOW reaction was the pages scattered all over the floor. Of course if I ever had a child, they'd grow up knowing that books are sacred.

[ailsaek.livejournal.com]

Me too. *wry grin* Many of them, I laughed at, or just thought "Oh, that's familiar!" (I used to hang out on our garage roof.) Even the kids with cigarettes and porn I looked at and thought "Bad behavior, but pretty normal." The kid with the book and the scissors and the kid with the gun stopped me dead.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

The only one that gave me an inappropriate SPANK NOW reaction was the pages scattered all over the floor.

That's a good observation, and a common reaction. It's interesting to me because typically the justification parents give for physical punishment is that some behaviors are so dangerous that children must be unequivocally and immediately trained out of them - the classic example is "your kid runs into the street."

But in reality, the behaviors most likely to be met with a spanking are the ones that make the parent the angriest. That usually means destructive or defiant behaviors, not necessarily potentially dangerous ones.

Wow.

[dakiwiboid.livejournal.com]

Some of those are really disturbing, like the one with the gun. I felt sure it wasn't a toy.

Re: Wow.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

It is a real gun. That's the only child who isn't an actor - he's the son of the man who developed the measure. He didn't feel that he could ask anyone else to let their kid do that, even just for a photo, but he felt comfortable with his own son's understanding of gun safety.

Re: Wow.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Also, I am really pleased to hear independent confirmation that the pictures cause strong emotional reactions. That's what makes it a worthwhile measure. If most people just saw it as an intellectual exercise, it wouldn't be a good analogue for real parenting.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Some of the photos are normal kid stuff, and some of them are really not.

Like loading a revolver. Yeah. That had me wanting to reach into the computer screen.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

My assistant Steve looked at that slide and said, "the parents need to be spanked for that one."

[pameladean]

Context is a strange thing. I'm not very familiar with Flickr, and I ended up getting a slideshow that started with your research pictures and segued into some photos of Alex at the zoo. Until I recognized her, I kept thinking, "But what's wrong with that?" and trying to find something sinister in those photos. (Standing too close to the glass? Nah. Is that a KID with a raptor on her wrist? Well, no. Some days I'm slow.)

P.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

That's so funny! You must have somehow wound up with a slideshow of all my pictures.

"The misbehavior here is that the child is complicit in the imprisonment and exploitation of animals."

[wiredferret.livejournal.com]

The last time I ever got spanked, it involved a roof, a rope, and a national geographic show on mountain climbing.

I deserved it. ;)

I was really distressed by the gun and the book, and also that the child was lighting the cigarette with a match.

[geminigirl]

Interesting selection of photos. I'm curious to know if you've found any of your responses changing since you've become a parent.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I'm curious to know if you've found any of your responses changing since you've become a parent.

To the Analog Parenting Task? It's impossible for me to say, because I am just so familiar with these pictures and I see them in such an analytical way. They've lost their punch, for me.

To discipline issues in general? Yeah. I am much more in touch with the phenomenon of parental anger than I was before I had Alex. I have a lot more respect for the emotional impact of kids' behavior.

At the same time, I find myself moving further away philosophically from using any kind of punishment (including time-out or lost privileges), and more towards a communication-and-problem-solving approach. I've been strongly influenced by the Faber & Mazlish book How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/1853407054/sr=8-1/qid=1173980635/ref=cm_cr_dp_2_1/103-3308073-8560621?ie=UTF8&customer-reviews.sort%5Fby=-SubmissionDate&n=283155&qid=1173980635&sr=8-1), which encourages parents to be upfront about their feelings, expectations, and boundaries, while respecting the same for their kids and avoiding the use of punishment or shame.

Our discipline of Alex essentially involves prevention, education, and appropriate restitution. If she throws things on the floor during a meal, for example, we tell her to stop and explain what she should do instead. ("No. Don't throw food. If you're all done, you tell Mama that you're all done, and then you may get down.") Then we give her step by step instructions to clean everything up, which we require her to do before she may go and play. Thrown food goes in the trash, thrown silverware goes on the counter by the sink, spiilled milk gets wiped up with a sponge, etc.

[iamjw.livejournal.com]

The four that triggered my immediate "STOP! DANGER" reaction were: the gun, the roof, the peeling an orange with a knife, and the boy holding the football away from the other child, the latter because of the lamp immediately behind them. The last two make me wonder how much my reaction is coloured by having spent the last 30 years supervising groups of children in one setting or another and becoming hyper-aware of the many and varied ways in which children can severely hurt themselves.

There are other things there that would piss me off - the book pages, specifically - and things that cry out for a good long talk, but those are the ones that really triggered me.

I note that I was probably younger than the boy in the photo when I started smoking.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

The kid with the knife didn't trip any alarms for me. Proper knife safety seems to be in place. If the kid had been stabbing through the orange and thus likely to poke the blade into his own hand, it would have been different.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

The picture of the kids and the football triggered my alarm buttons, but not because of concern for the lamp. It looked like a bullying situation, and those make me angry. (Though it's very hard to judge bullying from a still picture. So much of it is a matter of dynamic interaction.) That and the book-destruction picture got much stronger emotional reaction than the smoking or handgun pictures.

[verymelm.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I found it a bit odd that all the children were white, but you mentioned in earlier comments that the instrument is older which might explain that. But similar to the gender discussion from the first set of comments, I wonder if parental reactions might differ if the race of the children differed (either to be like that of the parents or different), but I think that might be an entirely different topic. *smile*

I'm not a parent, and I think because of that had a more intellectual approach to the photos. The gun photo, I have to admit, made me sigh with a bit of resignation and disappointment. Having been raised in a home with guns and taught proper gun safety from the time I was 5 (yes, really; I shot my first gun at age 5, with full parental supervision), it sometimes really irritates me that people automatically assume that a child doesn't understand the power of a gun or how to handle it appropriately.

By the same token, I'm often surprised to find how many adults are actively afraid of firearms in any context - a gun is a tool and, like most tools when used inappropriately, can be dangerous, even fatal. But that doesn't mean people should be afraid of the tool, just that they need to learn how to use it appropriately. How many times have you heard passionate cries for limiting the availability of chain saws because some people use them inappropriately? (Yes, I know it's not that simple, but it is a phenomenon that I find contradictory in our society.)

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I found it a bit odd that all the children were white, but you mentioned in earlier comments that the instrument is older which might explain that.

Developed in Iowa, for use in Iowa. It's not the age of the measure, it's the geography.

I'd love to do discipline research on the population of clients I work with now (inner-city, disadvantaged African-Americans), but it sure as hell couldn't be done with this measure.

[thette.livejournal.com]

The only one that really got my warning bells ringing was the one with the gun. Everything else that's destructive or dangerous, I have a reference to. "Yes, that's about how old my brother was when he started smoking." "Wasn't I younger when I found porn?" "KJ, tell me about that time on the roof of [his parents' three story house] again. Your youngest brother was _three_ at the time?!"

[bosssio.livejournal.com]

what I found interesting in the selection of pictures was that there were no images of a child harming another PERSON or living thing.

Plenty of potentially harming self, and harming property.

But the complete lack of images of a child doing what kids so - hit a parent, another child, or an animal - I actually found that surprising. I can surmise that part of the issue is the desire to have one child in the image (after all, having two kids in an images the question of which one is "mine" - or having an adult in an image might negate the desire to put self as parent.

However, I think this is a major loss in a potential source of anger. I know that one of my BIG buttons is being physically hurt - it is very very hard for me to keep my temper if a child hurts me - even involuntarily. It is a knee jerk reaction I have and I work very hard to control.

In addition, when one has multiple children, trying to keep them from harming each other is a big part of the job - and it is easy to resort to physical force when you are afraid that a big child has harmed a smaller one.

the other lack I noticed from the images you displayed was any indication of interaction with a parent. Again, a huge button for me is defiance. While I don't expect my kids to obey me, I do get pissed when a child is openly defiant or rude to me. I am quite sure that a child telling a parent to fuck off or refusing to do somethign reasonable is a huge trigger for physical violence.

Anyhow, I'd love to learn more about how these specific images were selected for use.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

These are all good points. I think that interpersonal misbehavior is harder to get across in a still photo, because so much of the reaction is based on context. For example, if the still photo shows one kid hitting another, are they fighting? Or is it unprovoked bullying by one child?

I agree that defiance is particularly hard for many parents to take (including me), and that direct challenges to the parent's authority are likely to escalate rapidly. There is a "defiant" slide among the ones I didn't upload. (I posted 12 out of 30 pictures.) In that one, a little girl is sticking out her tongue at the camera - i.e., the parent. But yeah, that's still pretty mild defiance.

You could do a lot more with a video version of the measure - little one-minute vignettes that show a bit of context and interpersonal interaction.