“Children are completely egotistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.” – Sigmund Freud.
Infants should not be disciplined – ever. Discipline is a form of behavior control, necessary only for those who understand good and evil, right and wrong. Infants are without guile, and therefore the justification for their discipline does not exist.
I have watched countless hapless parents yell at, spank and even beat infants. The ignorant and despicable acts of these clueless people reveals starkly their self-loathing and their misunderstanding of infants. Let me enlighten you now so that you do not make these same abominable mistakes, which may irreparably damage your child and will – with certainty – open the gates of hell for you in the afterlife.
The purpose of human infancy is to explore the world, mainly for the purpose of understanding human society and the laws of physics.
An infant is interested in everything it sees. It watches how adults walk, talk and interact. It wants to grab, pull and taste everything. I once told Gabriel, before I was sent away from heaven, that it seemed as if infants do everything in their power to kill themselves as their exasperated parents rush around trying to prevent disaster. He laughed. I miss Gabriel’s laugh.
And so, your child is simply exploring the world, like a puppy exploring a new yard. Your job is to supervise, not to discipline. If your child gets into danger, do not scold the child, but warn the child to be careful or to avoid putting its fingers in the electric socket. Think of the mother cat who grabs her kittens by the neck to reposition them when they get too far away from her. She does not cuff them; instead, she makes it easier for her to supervise their activities. If you start to feel anger toward your baby for its explorations, let the mother cat be your example.
If you discipline your child for its curiosity or out of rage that you cannot watch television uninterrupted, you are instilling fear and uncertainty in your child. This is simply the worst thing you can do. It increases the odds your child will grow up with some form of neurosis and live a life of undeserved mediocrity.
Such senseless discipline begins the process of destroying your child’s natural inborn growth mindset and replacing it with a fixed mindset, which predisposes your child for failure and lifelong disappointment. If you have not heard about these types of mindsets[4], let me enlighten you.
With a fixed mindset, one believes one’s basic qualities, like talent, intelligence or ability in a particular area, are simply fixed traits. Such people spend their time documenting their talent or intelligence instead of developing them. They wrongly believe talent is the sine qua non of success and that success should, therefore, be effortless. Anytime people with a fixed mindset are unable to perform a task on the first attempt, they immediately think they are stupid and give up. Do you want your child to be a quitter who hates himself?
Someone with a growth mindset believes his or her most basic abilities can be developed through hard work, dedication and perseverance. Intelligence and talent help, but work is what makes all the difference. People with a growth mindset tend to have much greater resilience and can endure more trying times and hardship to reach their goals. Sounds good, right?
And so, you should allow your infant to do whatever he or she feels like, so long as it does not pose a danger to that child’s life and limb, or to the life and limb of others.
One of the more difficult parts of parenting is determining when the period of amoral infancy ends and when the manipulative toddler years begin. At that point, discipline is both justified and necessary.