>So I left the second floor apartment and stood below her bedroom window
>and began yelling up, "Child abuse! Child abuse!" (as in "this child is
>abusing me"). Things got quiet, then her little head popped into the
>window with a look that said, "I can't believe that he's doing that!"
>
>If you don't want to beat them, you have to outsmart them.
>
>Eventually she got over the behavior, of course.
Great stuff. It does seem true that lack of docility can be a sign of intelligence. And teaching/training/interacting methods have an enormous influence on results. ...Dog story alert... My young French shepherd was bright, touchy, domineering and hyperactive; and a total failure in puppy classes, which were taught in the old coercive style. He spent most of his time misbehaving (call it experimenting with ways of getting desired responses from the rest of us). After a couple of sessions of this I pulled him out of class and trained him myself, entirely off lead, using a frisbee, cheerios, and praise for motivation. As soon as he got the chance to use his intelligence to make me give him rewards, he was golden. I would propose an exercise, and he would direct our activity by experimenting with this or that behaviour to see which would be rewarded. Instead of issuing commands and making him comply, I named the things he was doing voluntarily (fetch, sit, come, jump). We had to keep the sessions short because they exhausted him; but he was happy, he learned fast, he kept his knowledge -- and those three are linked, in human as well as in non-human animals.
It seems obnoxious a lot of the time, but it's part of being a young social animal to test boundaries (as they say), engaging in all kinds of experimental theatre to see how the leaders will react. And if we're boringly predictable in our responses kids can get the disturbing, disorienting feeling that they control the game. Probably better to take a leaf out of their book whenever we have the energy, and the insight.
Anyway, good onya, Peter.
cheers Joanna S.
www.overlookhouse.com