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The term “unacceptable” has become popular among parents in recent years. I find the word unacceptable. Let me explain. The term “unacceptable” does not assist children in understanding their difficult behavior and ultimately adjusting such behavior. Furthermore this word and several other such words are harmful to the children who hear them. Let me explain.

First let me note some of the words that have become popular with parents when dealing with a child’s challenging behavior:

• Unacceptable
• Inappropriate
• Irresponsible
• Immature
• Selfish
• And probably a number of other words

Examine with me the essence of such words and you will find an important, but subtle, element: they all speak about the other person, usually a child who has said or done something that the parent doesn’t like. We who have been parents know a myriad of such things. Since I have a large contingent of children in my practice, I have heard a number of such behaviors including:

• Swearing
• Yelling and screaming
• Hitting a sibling, a friend, or a classmate
• Throwing something at someone
• Refusing to do homework
• Urinating in the toilet without regard for “aim”
• Throwing dirty clothes on the floor
• Slouching at the dinner table
• Whining
• Chewing with one’s mouth open
• And many others

Let me state the obvious. I dislike these behaviors as much as the next parent, or in my case the next grandparent. I have my particular pet peeves with my grandchildren include all of the above plus grammatical errors, like, “Me and Grandma” that my 10-year old tends to say. I recall my father finding it unacceptable (although he never used that term) when anyone would use one’s table knife to get some butter of the butter plate. And he also really disliked (as I dislike it) when someone scrapes food scraps off plates after dinner is finished. He used to say, “This is not the place to display garbage. Please bring your plate to the kitchen.” So “unacceptable” for one person is not necessary unacceptable to another person, as I know many people who find it courteous to scrape their plates after dinner is finished.

I had a conversation with a couple who had been good friends for decades not long ago. They were at our house and we had just finished dinner when Rachel started collecting plates and scraping them at the table. I interrupted and said, “Rachel, please let me tell you something that is very important to me. Scraping dishes at the dinner table is not something I like. Furthermore, it is actually a bit disgusting to me. Now I know that you are doing this as an act of kindness, and I appreciate your kindness. And certainly most people would not be offended by such an act of kindness. But I was raised in a home where my father instilled in me the idea that scraping plates at the dinner table, while common, and even gracious, is not something that he liked. And so I have come to dislike it.” So graciously Rachel stopped her gracious activity that was not gracious for me. I am quite sure, however, that my comment and suggestion was hurtful to her, as she might have thought of the many dinners we had shared over many years, sometimes at her house and sometimes at ours, all of which had had the dish-scraping part of the end of dinner.

I could have said that dish scraping was “unacceptable,” but I didn’t use that term, much less any other term like unkind or stupid. I didn’t say what my father would say, “the dinner table is not a place for garbage.” I simply told Rachel my feelings and then a bit about the origin of my feelings. I told her how her behavior affected me. I told her about me, not about what was wrong with her or even wrong about what she was doing. She wasn’t doing anything wrong. She was doing something that hurt or offended me.

My hope is that parents can do the same with their children, namely speak about themselves. You see, telling a child that what she is doing is unacceptable (or irresponsible or inappropriate) is telling the child that something is wrong with him or her. There is no way children can hear “your behavior is unacceptable” without thinking something is wrong with them, or at least that their parents think there is something wrong with them. We don’t need children thinking there is something wrong with them. Rather…

We need children to understand two things:

• You, as parent, believe there is something wrong with what your child has done.
• Your child’s behavior has affected you in some way, usually in a negative or difficult way
• In other words, I suggest you learn to speak to your children about their behavior and about your feelings. Telling a child that his behavior is “unacceptable” does neither.

Let me give you some examples of how this might work when you encounter difficult, hurtful, or harmful behavior in your child. Let me help you to know what you might say in such circumstances:

• Your child hits his sister. Normally, this would be “unacceptable”, but instead of saying that, you say…
• Johnny, I feel sad that you have hurt your sister. I know that you love your sister and that she loves you. It saddens me when you hit her.
• Johnny says something in his “defense,” like his sister made a face at him or “hit him first.” We’ve all heard these defenses.
• Parent: that may be true, Johnny, and if that is true, Grace’s behavior also saddens me. I feel sad when someone makes faces and teases someone else.

In this proposed encounter, there is no:

• That is unacceptable
• That is mean
• You should know better than that
• What is wrong with you?
• How would you like it if I hit you?
• Because…

All of these statements and rhetorical questions are shaming. Shame is the feeling that there is something wrong with the person. Shaming always leads to hiding and defense. If you shame a child, that child will do both hiding and defending. Children never profit from shaming. They profit from understanding how their behavior affects other people. I think the most important thing parents can do for the psychological well-being of their children is to reflect how they feel when they hear or see something from their children that affects them. These emotional reflections can be:

• Sadness, which is the essence of something that I have lost that I love. “Hurt,” by the way is essentially sadness.
• Fear of danger to someone
• Anger, which is a defense against danger, and always follows sadness and fear
• Joy at what the child did
• And combinations of these feelings like excitement, surprise, disgust, and hopeful

Children can profit from hearing your feelings, both good and bad, that you have when they do something or say something. We don’t have to be “affirming” all the time. We don’t have to mince words. We don’t have to avoid the necessary times of anger, hopefully few. We do need to help children understand that they cause emotional responses in other people, both good and bad.

As a final note (sic), if you continue to use “unacceptable” and the like with your children, it does one good thing: it keeps me in business.

A patient I have seen in my office off and on for a number of years told me of a disturbing experience he had had on Christmas. I diagnosed his problem. He had a love problem. I see a lot of people with love problems. And I am not talking about relationships, at least not for the most part. I am talking about the love problems that we all have every day, problems that turn into anxiety, depression, anger, addictions, and avoidances. Let me explain.

Jim (not his real name of course) told me about what began as a wonderful experience around Christmas as his adult children and their families joined together for the first time. Because of in-law obligations and other duties his extended family had not actually shared a Christmas together since his children had left home and got married. Jim described the gathering as wonderful. He felt overwhelmed with gratitude, being grateful that his daughters had married good men and had found good lives together. This Christmastime seemed to be a time of simply basking in this gratitude and enjoying his family, now together for the first time. His sons-in-law seemed like sons, and they evidently had similar feelings about him as a new father. Nothing was wrong, and more importantly, everything was right. But then an odd episode occurred.

Jim took one of his daughter’s dogs out for a walk in the woods, a woods that he walks frequently, usually daily summer and winter. He knows all the trees and often spends hours there walking and doing yoga in his woods. But while he was out on the walk, he noticed that his daughter’s dog was not around him. Now dogs tend to wander and come back to their masters pretty routinely. (Interestingly, Deb and I were very likely walking about the same time, we with our friend and his dogs while visiting him in his Colorado mountain home.) When he couldn’t see or find his daughter’s dog, Jim became quite worried, so worried that he felt “something” in his chest, a feeling probably akin to panic. Now I know Jim quite well and he is not inclined to fear, anxiety or panic. But this situation of possibly losing his daughter’s dog somehow hit him like a thousand of brick. He looked around for the dog, called for the dog, and began furiously looking in all portions of the woods for the dog, all to no avail. Then he thought he would simply go back home hoping that the dog had somehow found her way home. But at one point on the way back home, he had become so overcome by this…feeling…that he actually felt feint and fell to his knees. After he stumbled home, he was relieved to see that the dog had found his way home, but still somehow overcome with this feeling. In fact, he was so overcome, that he continued to feel “weak” and fatigued. After a few minutes, the Christmastime meal began, something that all had been looking forward to, and he had not yet recovered. He told me that as the meal started, he actually fell asleep, or seemed to fall asleep for a minute seemingly out of some kind of exhaustion. Then understandably, his family became quite concerned, and because one of his daughters is a nurse, they made a quick decision that Jim needed to be attended to professionally. They called an ambulance and soon he was at the ER and then overnight in the hospital. Of course the hospital staff did all sorts of tests but nothing could be found that made any real sense, and he was released the next day.

After hearing this story, I told Jim that he had a “love problem.” What in the world does that mean? This is the way I understand Jim’s “problem.” Certainly, he was very distressed. Certainly, he was in need of some external care. Certainly, there was something “wrong” as evidenced by his physical reactions as noted. But was there something “wrong” with him? Or was there something “right” with him. This is the idea of having a “love problem.” As I saw it, even from the very beginning of his story, Jim was having a “love crisis” of sorts. He was a man seeing the five people he really loved and feeling overjoyed. But Jim is also an internal person by nature, this internality despite his gregarious nature and obvious intelligence. So Jim is inclined to keep most of his deep feelings inside and doing so feel quite satisfied with life. What evidently happened in this circumstance is that Jim was quite overwhelmed by these positive feelings of love for his adult children and their spouses. But he was disinclined to say much about these deep feelings, probably largely due to his internal nature as well as his intellectual and cognitive nature. People we call “introverted thinkers” are very often people of deep feelings but they do not necessarily have a vocabulary for these feelings and are content to just feel them, and perhaps make some intellectual comment, or flippant comment rather than blubbering all over the place with feelings of love. In this case evidently, Jim was not able to adequately express these deep feelings of love, and then when the dog was lost, and possibly lost forever, this potential loss seem unduly tragic. His love for his children had evidently spilled out on the dog, and now, so it seemed to him, he might have lost the dog…and possibly his children. He was just overwhelmed…with love…and potential loss…and he didn’t have words for these deep feelings.

I use the term “love problem” with patients frequently as I see people who have loved, do love, or hope to love something or someone with these feelings causing all sorts of so-called mental health problems, e.g.:
 Anxiety. Anxiety is the fear of losing something I love…in the future.
 Depression. Depression is the loss of something that I have lost…in the past.
 Anger. Anger is the defense against something that I am losing…in the present
 Bipolar disorder-like symptoms. (By the way, this diagnosis is way over used as there are very few people who truly have the disorder.). Bipolar symptoms are a mixture of feelings that are hard to manage, like
o Loving someone but not liking that person
o Wanting something but not wanting what comes with it
o Feeling happy one moment because of loving something, but then unhappy the next moment because you might lose it
 Addictions. Addictions are clearly a love problem in that the individual loves the thing, person, or behavior to a fault, like:
o Loving food
o Loving excitement
o Loving freedom (that alcohol might bring)
o Loving social life (that alcohol might bring)
o Loving the high of drugs (because one’s life is without natural highs)
o Loving things (and hence hoarding)
o Loving frugality (and hence not buying anything)
o Loving intimacy (and hence getting too quickly into intimacy)
o Loving cigarettes. (I tell my smoker patients that smoking is the best thing in their lives. Why? Because it gives them so much joy that they can overlook the health problems. They must really love it that much.)
o Loving sex (and then getting lost in it)
So think about what you love, or who you love, or what experience you love. You might also see some history of loving “to a fault”. But isn’t it nice to have a “love problem” instead of an illness?

As I continue to move onward in my early 70’s I realize more and more how much I don’t know or don’t understand. It seems the natural humbling experience of growing older. Beliefs and assurances now come rarely, and sometimes not at all. Life was so much easier when I was 20 and convinced of this or that. And being an extravert by nature, I felt inclined to share these beliefs and assurances with abandon. I am reminded of a statement in Desiderata that it is necessary in maturity to “gracefully relinquish the things of youth.” Life was so much easier when things were clear for me, and so it is that am finding it necessary to think, and sometimes say, “I don’t know.”

With many people I am greatly dismayed at the tragedy and terror of ISIS, like beheadings, random shootings, and generally creating chaos in various parts of the world. My primary response to each of these tragic incidents is to feel sad, although I must admit that I sometimes fall into Trump-esque thinking of bombing the s…out of them. For the most part I agree with President Obama who a year or so ago admitted that the Administration did “not know what to do” with ISIS. Sadly, his simple-minded, simple-solutioned, and antagonistic political opponents took umbrage that someone as powerful as the President would have the audacity to say “I don’t know.” Now, nearly two years into this horror we still don’t know. And this “don’t know” comes on the heels of not knowing what to do about the new kamikaze-like suicide bombers. What is the thinking of a mother who gracefully straps a bomb on her 13-year old daughter and sends her into a room of Jews to kill herself? Certainly, this Palestinian mother would “know” why she did what seems like a heinous crime, but would her “knowing” satisfy my American mind? I doubt so. Similarly, I “don’t know” how ISIS, and similar Muslim terrorist groups, believes that Sharia law should be imposed. All I can say is that these folks have an easy answer to a complicated dilemma.

I think, and I admit immediately to thinking, not knowing, that part of the origin of the simplistic thinking involved with ISIS et al. is poverty, and the related phenomenon of envy and anger at those who seem to have coming from people who seem to have not. Many underprivileged groups who suffer some kind of poverty have similarly simplistic conclusions about how the world should operate. But not all people in poverty come up with reasons for sending 13-year olds out to blow themselves up. So poverty is clearly not the whole answer to the problem. We might even suggest that the millennia-old rivalry between the sons of Abraham (Isaac and Ishmael) is the “answer,” but this theological origin doesn’t seem to address the whole answer. Or is it the rare but real statements in the Koran calling for violence in name of religion? Perhaps. Or is it because the United States spends billions of aid to Israel and bare millions to the Palestinians. Again, perhaps. So we can only say with certainty that “we don’t know” what to do about the ISIS-based crisis.

There are other “I don’t know’s” in the world at large. Should we raise taxes or lower them? Should we outlaw all guns, regulate all guns, do more thorough background checks on gun-owners, or continue with the current spate of occasional shootings? Should we have universal healthcare, continue with increasing Obamacare, or abandon the effort all together? Should we drill oil more in the arctic or leave it alone? Should be establish former relations with Cuba, North Korea, and Iran? Or should be just bomb them too? We don’t know.

I have been speaking about “honest I don’t know’s, but there are, by the way dishonest I don’t knows. Those of who raise children or have raised children know that our children are inclined to “not know” when they have committed some minor offense. And teenagers are even worse. When you ask your teen where she is going, who she is going to be with, what she will be doing, and when she will be home, how often go you get the answer, “I don’t know.” I actually believe that most of these don’t know’s are genuine, if not always entirely true. But it is not just our kids and teens who have phony I don’t know’s. We are often called to dishonestly answer a question that someone poses that makes us feel awkward like, “Do I look fat in this dress?” or “How much did your drink last night?”

This reminds me of a question a friend of mine asked me not long ago. This was one of the few friends that I have who has very little psychological knowledge, much less interest in the subject. He just wanted to know something that seemed to him to be hard to understand: Why aren’t people honest? I found myself musing a bit and then answering in jest, “I don’t know but if people were honest, I wouldn’t be in business.” I think my jest was largely a statement of truth. “Why did I have that affair/?” a man recently asked me. And my wife often hears the concomitant, “Why do I stay with a man who has serial affairs?” I don’t know seems to be the first best answer. But then the work begins. The work of finding the answer to these questions. I have some ideas of why “John” had an affair but I know him for only one hour and I may need many more hours to help him uncover the reasons for his affair. I know this, and I told him so: there are two simple extreme answers: (1) almost everyone has affairs; it is no big deal. Get over it, and (2) there is dome deep-seated character flaw in you that needs to be rooted out. While there is some truth in both of these statements, neither is very true. It will take work to find the whole truth, the hard truth.

I think that we need to start with “I don’t know” and then work hard to know…although we will never completely know. If we work for answers, the answers we come up with will satisfy us and help on our paths of life. What I “knew” as a 20-something no longer serves me as a 70-something but it was good for me to know, even if my knowing was simplistic. It helped me come to honest I don’t know’s, and then to proceed to know something deeper and something greater.