Book Review: Hide and Seek

Title: Hide and Seek

Author: James Dobson

Date: 1974

Publisher: Fleming H. Revell

ISBN: 0-8007-0653-6

Length: 159 pages

Quote: “Our youngsters need not hide in shame; by applying the strategies I have outlined, we can give them the courage to seek the best.”

Credit or blame for our concern with children’s self-esteem does not belong to James Dobson. Several of the ideas found in Hide and Seek are updated restatements of ideas first credited to Alfred Adler. However, not everything in the original writings, either Dobson’s or Adler’s, seems to have been understood by the people whose obsession with their children’s self-esteem seems to others to be making monsters. If you think today’s children suffer from excessive self-esteem, you might appreciate a discussion on page 59 of how it’s “possible to create a spoiled brat by telling him his every move is wonderful.”

My concern about parents reading this book is that specific advice that seemed important to Dr. Dobson, perhaps in the families he was counselling, may not be relevant to every child. Should parents worry if a child forms a habit of self-deprecation, not just telling friends “You’re good at...” or “I wish I had...like yours,” but telling them “I’m so dumb” or “I’m so fat”? Not necessarily about the child’s inadequate self-esteem, or worse, so much as excessive self-esteem. Those who are winners in the beauty/talent/money competitions, and know it, may have become complacent by competing for too long in too small a group. “I’m so bad at math” may not be a way of saying “I’m an inadequate human being”; it might also be a way of saying “You don’t have to hate me because I’m so lucky in every other way,” and the child might benefit more from spending time around someone who is even luckier than from making a learning problem part of per identity.

Does playing with TV-character toys, many of whom are supposed to be teenagers or adults, hurt children’s self-esteem because they’re not teenagers or adults? I’d have to wonder what else was going on if a child’s self-esteem was all that brittle. Children have always imitated teenagers and adults; that’s what playing is all about. Even running, throwing balls, and climbing trees could be considered instinctive rehearsal for hunting and dodging predators in the jungle. I’d be more concerned with whether a child is able to make up his or her own ways to play with toys, or thinks he or she has to have all the pre-packaged accessories to act out only the pre-packaged stories.

One piece of advice in this book that I hope won’t reappear in Bringing Up Girls appears on page 88, where Dobson even tries to answer the question asked by an adult who begins by saying that a “little girl is sometimes sugar-sweet, and other times she is unbearably irritating. How can I get her out of a bad mood?” Dobson actually suggested, in 1974, that the adult should tell the child that she has two personalities, one “sweet and loving” and one “cranky and noisy and silly,” and she needs to stifle the less lovable part of her personality. Based on my experience of being a child, I’ve meticulously avoided saying things like that to children. I can say to adults that that’s about the most counterproductive thing that can be said to a child.

First of all, vague adjectives like “sweet” and “silly,” which can mean several different things to adults, don’t mean anything to a child, except that you, the adult they can’t possibly respect, are caught up in one of your mood swings again; if you’re flattering the child with words like “sweet” you can probably be manipulated, and if you’re attacking with words like “cranky” you’re probably dangerous; you are not saying anything about what you would like the child to do. If you want to see any difference in a child’s behavior, you need to state your wishes in exceedingly clear, concrete, objective terms. Never use any form of the word “be” when discussing the child’s behavior. Use nouns and verbs, not adjectives. Yes, it will take a long time to spell out all the details of what you mean by "be good" in a way that means anything to a child. Yes, do it anyway, because that's the only way to give a child a working definition of "good." “Don't hit people” and “Hang up your coat” are rational, intelligent things to say to a child; “Don’t be mean” or “Be neat” are counterproductive things to say, no matter how obvious and reasonable they seem to you. Constantly telling a child to “be” different than he or she is can do much more damage to the child’s self-esteem, and to per respect for your advice, than merely letting the child notice that, at a particular stage of development, the child’s face isn’t considered beautiful.

Secondly, human beings aren’t supposed to “be sweet”; nobody wants a child to be diabetic. They’re supposed to communicate what they mean in ways that don’t harm others. It may be helpful to try to guide a child to help adults monitor the child’s “bad moods.” Ask whether the child feels “bad” when doing certain things. Keep a logbook, over a few months, to see whether there are consistent correlations between “bad” feelings and physical factors like what the child eats, how much sleep the child gets, how much time the child spends around other children, what the weather is like, where the child has been. Paying attention to “bad moods” can save parents and children a lot of medical expenses. Trying to enforce a permanent “grinny mood” on yourself, the adult, or on a child can do a lot of damage. A permanent "grinny mood" is a sign of brain damage; if you’ve even thought that you wanted a “grinny” child, you were not ready to become a parent, and you need help. 

Because I feel that my own childhood learning experience was confused to the point of emotional abuse by adults who seemed unable to say whatever they really meant, and insisted on throwing meaningless words at me and other children, I’d even add a third caution to parents who are likely to read page 88 of this book. When you feel that a child is in a bad mood, and aren’t sure how to explain your perception in clear objective terms, it’s possible that your child has discovered the many ways to insert an implied insult into an ordinary sentence in English by using word emphasis. The child probably learned the “vaps” (verbal attack patterns) from you. If not, there are plenty of other places person could have learned them; it doesn’t matter. What you must not do is emote about “that tone of voice.” The child’s voice is not the problem, unless of course the problem is that you are feeling a need for quiet time. If, after prolonged consideration of the possibility that your unmet need for solitude may be harming your relationship with your children, you find that bad language habits like not really listening, interrupting inappropriately, judging and labelling, vapping, or nagging still exist in your family, then the whole family can profit from studying The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense books. These books are especially valuable because they're not about labelling and judging emotions, but about building skills.

In an older book on what an older man was learning from fatherhood, Art Linkletter described his initial annoyance with a letter from a young fan asking "What are parents for?" His annoyance subsided as he realized that too many parents and teachers have only told children what they're against. To which I would add, "...and even then they've not explained what they do want." One reason for that is, of course, that often people who seem to be finding fault with something someone else does (or is or has) are merely expressing their own emotional problems. What difference does it make to you what sort of mood you imagine someone else to be in? Do you seriously imagine that you need to try to control someone else's moods? You can reasonably say "Don't slam the door so hard things fall off shelves" or "Even if you don't feel like speaking to anyone, your dog still needs his walk" or "We don't speak to other people unless they hold eye contact and smile," but there is no need to generate emotional problems by projecting your value judgments onto the moods growth hormones are going to continue to produce until the child is about 25 years old.

When he’s dealing with parents less obviously dysfunctional than that one, Dobson gives better advice. “Avoid overprotection.” “”Discussion is to be done without finger-wagging and accusations.” “[Be] very specific rather than general.”

Studies have shown that the majority of words many parents say to their children are directives. The more these directives tell children clearly what to do (and acknowledge when it has been done), and the less they try to judge any way the child might seem to “be,” the more effective the parent’s words can be in helping the child develop an adequate, realistic level of self-esteem...a sense that only God can judge what any living person “is,” but other people appreciate things the individual can do.