Discussing parenting today with a client who is a young father and will take the next three months off for parental leave, we discussed the different strategies that people use for raising their kids. This client is a procurement specialist, which means that he is familiar with negotiation techniques and comfortable applying them in his daily work. One of the common approaches when pricing or agreeing upon terms, is using anchors to set a range frame to work with.
Anchoring effect
The anchoring effect is a psychological phenomenon in which an individual's judgments or decisions are influenced by a reference point or "anchor" which can be completely irrelevant.
For a simple example of this, if I were to sell a car and wanted 10,000 for it, if I set the price at that, I am highly unlikely to get it. However, if I set the price at 11,000, the buyer would be able to negotiate down and feel good about getting a discount, and I can feel good about getting what I wanted, or perhaps even more. Each walks away with a win.
Yet, anchoring effects happen in many other areas of life too, where our direction is chosen based on the assumption that the anchor provides. For example, if the car in the above example was placed next to a similar but higher priced car. In comparison to the higher price for similar, the cheaper car seems like a bargain. But it also works in relation to other aspects of life, like when we estimate how long something will take, because once the estimate is made, our brain says the estimate is correct, and we are unlikely to change our estimate, even in light of new information.
But with parenting?
The common examples are in a pretty short-term timeframe and are pretty contextual. However, they are all about assumptions made about the initial information which creates the anchor. When it comes to parenting, our initial information about how to do it comes from our own parents and we base our future assumptions about how and why anchored to those points. This means that the anchor weighs down our range of cognitive movement we will make. Often this means that if we have a positive view of the anchor, we are likely to want to repeat that with our own kids. And if we have a negative view of the anchor, we will move in the other direction.
Now while a price from a sales anchor can be up, down or no sale, when we are looking at behavioural anchors, there is a far wider selection of choices we can make, but it often sets up a kind of false dichotomy. My parents did this badly, so I will do the opposite with my own children. My parents did it this way and I think I am okay, so it is the right way to do it for my own children.
But imagine a child that has been "raised by wolves" and has learned behaviours that are very different to that of society. The same behaviours required for successful survival in the forests, aren't likely to track well into a human community in the modern world, because the context and requirements of survival have changed. However, at a conceptual level, there would still be a lot of overlap in behaviours, where things working together as a pack will yield better results than becoming a lone wolf.
But, whether raised by wolves or by humans, a child will identify anchor points and proceed according to the direction they suggest, largely on autopilot. This means that activities will be limited by the starting point, and even if there are better directions to take, these will be ignored or unrecognised because they lay outside of the familiar. What many might not know is that "familiar" originally means belonging to a household, and was extended to the servants.
We are slaves to the familiar.
We do what they say like an obedient child - or we go against what they say like a rebellious child. Whichever way we choose, we are still enslaved by the implication of the rule. We move in the same direction, or we go in the opposite direction, like with the flow of the river or turning upstream.
But we are actually in an ocean.
Children resemble their parents in more then the information genetics provides. And the more we anchor against who they are and their behaviours, the less deviation from the path. However, they themselves also went into parenting holding their anchored positions, perpetuating some aspects, and going in the opposite direct of others. But, if we were to take a step back and actually think about 2hat is best for a particular child, it is likely our subsequent actions based on our anchors is not the right way to go.
But it feels right.
Because remember, we are comfortable with what we know - our familiars. We "own" our behaviours and we have made them a part of our identity, even though we never chose them at all. So what we are actually doing is identifying with something that is not us at all, but an imported and highly customizable set of beliefs and habits. We could change them for healthier options, but we generally don't, because they feel like us, they feel natural, they feel like the right thing to do - even if the results are anything but good.
I wonder, if a parent had to choose the behaviours of another person to be the parent of their child and everything was on the table without anchors - what would they choose? It is a hard thought experiment as we are all anchored already, but I suspect that a lot of parents would end up choosing a set that didn't match one to one with how they are currently parenting - so what does that imply?
Wolves live by instinct, doing what they do in the moment, based on the information they carry with them. They can't predict what will happen in their future at a significant distance, so they train their pups to do what they do. And the pups grow to do just that. They do adapt to environments over time, but again, this is an instinctual shift in behaviour based on survival.
But our own instincts as a human are not much different, becoming replicators of what we know and carry around with us. Our baggage. Some of the baggage is useful, some is harmful, but our automatic behaviours are our instincts saying that what we do is the right thing to do, and when we do it we get rewarded with the feeling of doing the right thing. Even when it isn't working.
Even wolves adapt to their environment. Will we?
At a base level, parenting is very simple in terms of survival, because the basic needs and processes for children is pretty much the same in the vast majority of cases. However, there are also differences in the needs of children, and there are differences in the changing environment. This also means that if we are applying all of the rules from the past to the current situation, they aren't all going to nurture a good result. We need to be sensitive to the current situation, and the current child.
But habits are convenient.
And the assumptions we make about the way things should be, including the way we parent, interact with others, or decide what we like, are usually habitual too. It is far easier to live life by the anchors we know, than discover a new path in unchartered waters, or a trailless forest.
Taraz
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