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There is a very common phenomenon among the children that I see in my office. I call it the “4-8-12” phenomenon although I also call it the “5-7-9” phenomenon and other variations depending on how old the child is. However, these number can be multiplied in many ways as I will explain.

I have been a child psychologist for almost 50 years and continue to see a number of children in my office. It intrigues me that I can still enjoy sitting on the floor with a child, like I did yesterday, as we played marbles on the floor. I thoroughly enjoyed playing marbles with Jacob, as did Jacob himself. I often wonder what it is like for such a child, like Jacob, to go home and engage in video gaming and sibling arguments after we have had such a lovely cooperative/competitive game of marbles.

Most of the children that I see have some kind of “behavioral problem.” In Jacob’s case he has periodic “meltdowns”, usually when he doesn’t get his way, which can be yelling and screaming or throwing and breaking things. I never see these things in my office, but I do see a child who is “immature” in many ways, his immaturity showing in great difficult with losing, but more importantly, great difficulty in now getting what he wants. Jacob is eight; hence the “8” in the 4-8-12 phenomenon. Importantly, and in a way…”unfortunately,” Jacob is very bright. His IQ puts him on a par with someone who is about 11 or 12. He has good abstract reasoning, which is the heart of intelligence. He can figure things out. He likes math a lot and does well in it. He is less interested in some aspects of language arts, especially writing. Because his abstract reasoning is so high, his intellectual ability is about that of a 12-year old; hence the “12” in the “4-8-12” phenomenon. What about the “4” element in this 4-8-12 phenomenon

Jacob’s penmanship is pretty sloppy, quite a bit worse than we would even expect from an eight-year old. But the real problem is not how he writes; it is how he explodes, although sometimes he “explodes” when he can’t seem to write as fast as he thinks. His explosions might be described as coming from an inability to adjust to conflict, particularly the conflict between what he wants and what someone else wants. Jacob’s inability to deal with loss and conflict suggest that his “emotional/social age” is about four; hence the “4” in the “4-8-12” phenomenon. As you can imagine, these age numbers could be 5-7-9, 10-15-20, or any other combination. The key is that the kid is “smarter” than people his age, hence talks like people older than he is, and hence learns to debate and eventually argue like someone older than his age. What I find with these 4-8-12 kids (or 5-7-9, etc.) is that their parents have talked to them at a level above their physical age from the time they began to talk. So when the kid was two, he was talking like a four-year old, and when he was four, he was talking like an eight-year old, and so on. This doesn’t seem so bad on the surface because it seems that if a parent can “reason” with a child, all would be better. Talking and reasoning is much better than saying something like, “…because I said so” and certainly better than punishment. Right? Wrong.

The problem with 4-8-12 kids is that they have not matured emotionally, and have not matured socially. Jacob, like many other bright eight-year olds, walks like an eight-year old, talks like a 12-year old, and feels like a four-year old. When he doesn’t get what he wants, he feels absolutely awful. Likewise, when he loses a game, he feels completely awful. This awfulness is a four-year old phenomenon, not an eight-year old phenomenon, and certainly not a 12-year old phenomenon. You can’t argue with a four-year old. You certainly can’t debate with a four-year old.

By the way, an argument is a debate plus emotion. I often suggest that when people discuss things, they separate emotion from facts and begin with emotion. You can’t do both at the same time. So when a parent is arguing with a four-year old, whatever the chronological age of the child, that parent is engaging an activity that is not reasonable for any child, much less a four-year old child. “Starting with emotion” means allowing emotional expressions without much restraint. If a child of four is also four intellectually, that child will express extreme emotions. She will say things like, “I hate you,” “I want to kill you,” “Nobody loves me,” or even, “I want to die.” Some kids rage without words. Other kids swear in whatever language they have learned. So expressing emotion is good, but it is not the same as dealing with facts. So I ask parents to separate the emotion and fact and allow for the emotion first. Most of the time this functionally means, “I don’t get what I want and I hate the world.” This emotion. It is not fact.

So the 4-8-12 kid is in a difficult place. He has the body of someone eight, the mind (more accurately the brain) of a 12-year old, but he has the emotional development of a four-year old, and hence the social development of a four-year old. Emotional development means that one knows one’s feelings and adequately expresses one’s feelings. Furthermore, by the time a child is eight, the child should have added the ability to contain these feelings, i.e. not insist on expressing his feelings all the time. A lack of social development means that the eight-year old Jacob sees the world of people the way a four-year old sees the world, namely, a world of people who serve him…or don’t serve him. So the world for this four-year old is wonderful or awful depending on how much he gets of what he wants.

The real world of a four-year old (or perhaps as young as three and as old as five normally), is one in which the child gets very little of what she wants. She got most of what she wanted when she was 0-3, but pretty soon she wanted more and more and seemed to get less and less. She got “less” because she wanted more. So these 3-5 years are fraught with a great deal of frustration, disappointment, and anger. These are crucial years for a child to get the idea in her head that she doesn’t get most of what she wants. This is a lesson that many people seem never to learn, but it is a very important part of getting through the 3-5 years when I want more and more and get less and less of what I want. Actually, I get more of what I want, but because I want so much more, the percentage of getting what I want decreases from about 75% at age two to about 10% at age four. Raise a child right, i.e. with lots of limitations and “no’s”, and children who are five or six come into the school years prepared to share, lose, and face limits. The 4-8-12 child has not learned that lesson.

So what is there to do with the 4-8-12 child? The answer is quite simple…but also difficult. The answer is what I tell parents of these kids: “limit, limit, and limit;” I also recommend “100 no’s for every yes.” This is what we should be doing with four-year olds: limiting and no-ing. Few parents seem to know how to do this. Reasoning is fine…for a 12-year old, and to some degree for an 8-year old, but not for a 4-year old. The four-year old needs primarily to learn that she doesn’t get most of what she wants. And that is very hard on her. But it also builds character, something that is lacking in many children and many adults. So if you have a 4-8-12 child in your home, or any other such combination, I suggest you love the child completely, value the child for her intellectual ability, and treat the child the way you would treat any four-year old: limiting.

Limiting, by the way, is not punishing. In fact, the more you limit, the less you will have to punish. Furthermore, punishment is usually too late because it comes after some kind of fruitless argument or outrageous behavior, and never really helps. Neither does reward help. Many parents tell me the same thing: it seems that neither rewards nor punishment seem to help with Johnny. Of course not. Johnny is four years old emotionally, not eight, and certainly not 12 where rewards and punishment might be better motivators. But not for four-year olds. Children of an emotional age of four need limitation, not rewards for “good” behavior or punishment for “bad” behavior. They simply need to learn that they don’t get most of what they want. There is no explaining to a four-year old why he can’t have everything he wants, nor should there be explaining. Explaining is for a 12-year old, or to some degree an 8-year old.

The limiting I am suggesting should be done sans words…except “no.” No explanations and no justifications. And no punishments. A four-year old child shouldn’t be punished for raging. Perhaps if the raging turns into physical damage, then there might be some further limitation…but still no words. This is very hard to do. After explaining this process to parents with their beginning to understand the concept of limitations, it is interesting that these same parents go right into “talking” to their child as they leave my office, instructing the child to “not touch” or something. I advise against all of this instruction. Just limitation.

This limitation usually means some kind of physicality. I do not mean spanking or hitting. I am not completely opposed to the rare swat, but it should be rare…very rare. In place of hitting, and in place of talking, I suggest holding the child, moving the child, taking the child by the hand, and picking up the child. Unfortunately, this is a lot easier to do with a chronologically four-year old than an eight-year old, much less a 12-year old who is acting like a four-year old. It takes some real practice to be “physical” with a child and not be punitive. What parents find when they stop talking, threatening, arguing, and yelling, is that they need to be more physical. What is even more interesting is that children respond favorably to physical limitation. When a child is limited, he feels safe. Thus, if you are even carrying Jennifer to her room while she is screaming and crying, she feels that she is safe in your arms. It doesn’t matter that she says she hates you. What matters is that she doesn’t get her way.

Limitation (not punishment) needs to be immediate, severe, and short. This means “grounding” for a year doesn’t work. It doesn’t even work for a week or a day. It is too punitive, and it is too long. “Severe” means that it restrains the child from doing anything that she wants. There is no mediating and discussing. She just doesn’t get to watch TV, be with the puppy, or sit at the dinner table. She is in her room. And you might have to stay in her room (without talking) for a while, or you might have to hold her for a while. “Immediate” means right now. Not at the second infraction; at the first infraction. No threatening; no saying, “One more time and…” none of that. Immediate, severe, and short. As short as possible. Perhaps just a few minutes, and rarely longer than 15 minutes. There is no scaling the limitation to the level of the crime. Big infractions don’t need to have big limitations.

Ron Johnson

There is a relatively new body of thinking and research in psychology that examines the phenomenon of intuition. Intuition is commonly expressed as “gut feeling”. Previously, gut-feelings and the like have been seen with some derision because the thinking was that decisions were made with some combination of thinking and feeling. Now, it seems there is a “third force” in the decision-making process that includes both thinking and feeling but adds a dimension between them called intuition. The data, as well as the thinking, on this matter, are not yet clear, but it seems that there is, indeed, this thing that most people call gut-level feeling (or more rarely, gut-level thinking) that does not fit exactly into the thinking or the feeling realm.

So what does all this about intuition have to do with the title of this blog, “10-2-1”? I need to backup a bit before we go forward with this “10-2-1” model. This model came out from several sources: Carl Jung’s ground breaking understanding of the two elements of decision making: thinking and feeling; some recent literature about the whole business of intuition; our combined 90 years of experience conducting psychotherapy; and our own intuition. More accurately, the 10-2-1 model is Deb’s idea. So we give acknowledgement to Jung, other theorists and researchers, and to the many hours of helping peole do the right thing.

“Doing the right thing” is what this 10-2-1 model is all about. We want to do the right thing, and as therapists we want to help our patients do the right thing. In fact we are daily asked by the people we see in our offices what they should do in some particular circumstance: Should I get married? Should I stay married? Should I speak to my boss about my dissatisfaction at work? Should I change jobs? Should I have another child? Should I go back to social drinking after three years of complete sobriety? And sometimes the questions we field are even more serious: Should I tell my spouse about the affair I had 10 years ago? Should I admit to my agnosticism even though I am a pastor? Should I admit to my homosexuality to my fellow church goers? Should I continue to live?

It is the questions of life that we need to find answers for. But these questions are difficult to answer because these questions have no easy answer. As I write these words the world and world leaders are trying to decide how to deal with extremist jihadists. There is no easy answer on how to deal with the likes of Boko Haram and ISIL. How do you deal with people who rape, pillage, steal, and murder with impunity? But for most of us the questions we ask are not so world-shaking and world-changing. They are just questions we need to answer so we can get through the day, the week, the year, or life.

Now let us return to my first words about feelings, thinking, and intuition because we think the way to answer important questions is to utilize all three of these elements. I won’t belabor the discussion about what “feelings” are beyond saying that feelings are extremely important, central to life and loving, and the groundwork of the decision-making process. Feelings include outright emotions like joy, sorry, sadness, and fear. I can be sad or joyful depending on whether I have something I love or lose something I love. I can be fearful or angry when I am under some kind of perceived threat. These basic feelings and their combinations (like excitement, which is a combination of fear and joy) always come with a visceral experience, like smiling, frowning, crying, or an agitation in your stomach.

But “feelings” are not always exactly emotional or physical. I can have a feeling that is more like a thought, a fantasy, a picture in my mind, or a brief idea. When I think of some of the time we recently had with our granddaughter at our home, I certainly have some emotion, but I also have pictures of what she did, and of what we might do the next time she pays us a visit.

Feelings can also be intuition (gut-level feeling), but let us defer that part of understanding for just a minute.

We believe that feelings are the basis of decision-making process. Feelings are the “10” part of the 10-2-1 decision-making process. Feelings are the “10” part of this process because we need to feel a lot about something before we think and before we act. We need to feel 10 times and think two times so we can act once with some kind of certainty that our decision is the right one.

The feeling part of this 10-2-1 process is first and foremost, and it is where most people go wrong. People are inclined to make one of two mistakes: (1) they choose to act out of their feelings, or (2) they ignore their feelings and act strictly out of thinking. I have fallen into both categories of mistakes, but I am inclined towards the latter one more often because of my thinking-based personality. My mistakes in decisions have been out of my failure to feel enough about things before I thought about them. Thus, I have done what seemed to be the right thing because I thought it through. But I hadn’t felt it through, and so my feelings weren’t a part of the process, and as a result my decision was not fully grounded and ultimately wrong. Peole who are more feeling-based in personality tend to act out of feelings without allowing those feelings to lead to good thinking.

Here is the key to the feeling part of this 10-2-1 process: you need to feel until you no longer have feelings about the decision. Once this happens, you can think clearly, and eventually act clearly…and rightly. This must sound very odd: “feel until you no longer have feelings.” But that is exactly what we are proposing. We are not suggesting that you no longer want something, see something, or feel something. Rather, we are suggesting that your feelings settle down and become a part of you. Whether you are joyful, sad, afraid, angry, or experiencing some combinations of these feelings, you need to feel them fully and completely. When you have felt these feelings enough, they will no longer be the central ingredient of deciding on something.

When you have felt and finished feeling, then you can think. You can think more clearly without the intrusion of emotions, pictures, or fantasies. When you have finished feeling, you can honestly look at a situation and more adequately decide what to do. If you finish feeling angry, for instance, you can decide to do something out of clear thinking instead of out revenge, punishment, or retribution. If you have been afraid of something, you can move in a certain direction without paranoia or undue hesitation. If you have been very joyful about something, you can decide what to do instead of just feeling happy about something and jumping right in. Several years ago Deb and I bought what amounted to “swamp land” in northern Wisconsin on a whim because the piece of property seemed fun. We thought better of it within the day and were able to renege on our purchase, and later on found our wonderful cabin “up north” that we have truly enjoyed for 10 years.

I originally told patients that they could come to decisions with the process I called, “feel, feel, feel, think, act.” I thought this was a valuable way of valuing and experiencing feelings and then thinking and acting once these feelings had properly been felt and finished. Deb reinvented this process by suggesting that the feeling part needed to be much longer than feeling three times, and the thinking part a bit longer than thinking once. Feelings need to be given a wide berth, so “feel, feel, feel” wasn’t enough. More often we need to feel a lot more than a few seconds, a few minutes, or even a few days. But the key is the same: feel until you no longer have a predominance of feelings. Then you can think. Then you can get to the place where you can rationally evaluate a decision and make the right decision.

When you can think clearly and rationally, you get to a go/no-go place. This is a place where you decision is clear. The decision might be 90% in one direction and 10% in another direction, or it might be 51% vs 49%, but it is still clear. And sometimes you conclude that it is best to make no decision for a while. You might simply need to wait, but this waiting is no longer feeling, fretting, worrying, and fragmenting. It a time where you allow your mind to muse over the decision.

Then you act. This is the “1” part of the 10-2-1 process. You have felt it through and finished you feelings on the matter. You have considered options and come to a rational and right decision. You have moved in a certain direction and done what you hope will be the right thing. You have acted with the best of feeling and the best of thinking; the best of emotion and the best of justice.

And you might still make the wrong decision. Not all well felt-through and thought-through decisions are ultimately right. But if you decision is wrong, you can admit to your error, make corrections, make amends and be farther ahead of doing the right thing the next time.

I just spent the weekend with my grandchildren: Alexis, three and a half, and her brother, Gavin, 9. The negative rules of our house are: no TV, no electronics, and no snacks. The positive rules of the house are: play table games a lot, talk a lot, read a lot, and generally explore the world outside a whole lot. Deb and I are blessed with a house on the edge of our little town of Lodi behind which is a kind of city storage area where there are huge mounds of gravel, road tar, blocks of various kinds, sand, and dirt. We call this our “west 40” (actually about an acre), as compared to our “south 40” (about a half-acre), and the “north 40” where we store all kinds of firewood. For the grandkids, however, the west 40 is “the park.” It is the favorite place to go and play when they are with us. We also frequent the nearby creek where we play “boats”, namely throwing pine cones into the creek to see whose “boat” goes the farthest. Gavin and I also play “swords,” namely picking up some sticks and attacking each other…well, usually just attacking our opponent’s “sword.” We used to play “whips” made of small branches from a local weeping willow, but alas, the tree was cut down. Nevertheless, we have this array of outside thing to so when the kids are here in addition to swinging on our homemade swings in our back yard, and occasional walks around the neighborhood, which happens to be Alexis’ second favorite activity after the “park” “mountains.”

I have been thinking about writing this “Don’t be Careful” for some time because I so often hear, “Be Careful!” coming out of the mouthers of parents speaking to their children. Now at 70 my exact memory for my childhood is fading, but I don’t remember hearing many “Be Careful” words from my parents. We lived on “the lake” (as Lake Wisconsin is known in these parts), a great place for being outside. My brother Bill and I, often together with our neighbor, John, used to swim, boat, and water ski. We would sometime swim to “the island,” which I suppose was maybe 200 meters from our shore, and perhaps a bit scary when you are halfway or so. But the more challenging things we did on the water had to do with the boat. We weren’t irresponsible with racing the boat into dangerous places; it wasn’t our style. We did, however, “ski” with various things that are not exactly designed as water skis, like logs and tables. The logs didn’t really work, as I remember, because as soon as the boat gained a bit of speed, the log would go directly under water carrying it’s rider with it. The table, however, worked a bit better, upside down, of course. It took a bit of maneuvering to ride this table/ski because an upside down table is, perhaps not the most stable of things, and not, perhaps truly designed as a water toy. We tried various kinds of tables, finding the round ones best. One of the round tables, however, was metal, and we soon found out that it didn’t float for long, and when it tipped, it was worse than the log. I don’t recall if my mother knew of our odd activities on the lake, but if she did, she didn’t say “Be Careful”. I think she trusted us. Perhaps more importantly, she just expected that we would be careful. More important yet, she wanted us to have a good time and explore the world we lived in, which happened to be a lake. Bill and I survived, and I think we were all the better for it. Yah, we broke a few things, got a few scratches, and challenged a bit of life. Once Bill broke a water ski coming off a water ski jump. He survived.

My weekend with the grandkids was without Grandma who was in parts West including Santa Fe for a conference and God knows where after the conference hiking canyons and visiting Native American cliff dwellers. It was a bit of work being alone with the kids but not so much as I let them do a lot of things on their own or with minimal supervision. For instance, in the “park” (read, city gravel and sand storage area back of our house), the kids love to run up the “mountains” and try to be king or queen of the mountain. To my surprise, they both wanted to slide down, including the gravel mountains. Ouch. Somehow they didn’t get scratched up, and their little butts seemed no worse for the wear after these experiences. I did wonder how Mom might have responded as they were sliding down these hills of sand and gravel. And I wondered more about Mom when Gavin decided to throw stones in the neighborhood of his sister, trying to get close but not hit her. Should I say, “Be careful, Gavin, not to hit your sister?” or should I just let him throw stones hoping that he doesn’t hit her? I went for the hope. I found it a bit of a challenge to avoid the “Be careful” words that certainly sound more like an invective than an instruction.

I think “Be careful” should be replaced with, “Be courageous.” Helping kids learn to be courageous rather than being careful might help them overcome the irrational fears and undue fear that so many kids seem to have these days. Being courageous means willing to do something that might result in a reward rather than in safety. “Safety first” might be a good sign to have when working with high voltage equipment, but I don’t think it should be the first instruction when kids decide to do something, like swing high on a swing, run into a forest, or slide down a mountain of gavel. The etymology of the word courage comes from the French word for heart (cuer). So “courage” means something like, “take heart” or “trust your heart.” When I trust my heart, I am not always right, and I am not always safe. But when I engage in heart-based courage, I just might improve my heart while conquering undue fear of the unknown.

There is something very important and very special about the unknown, largely because there is a lot more unknown than there is known. Estimates are that we understand less than one per cent of the functioning of our 100 billion celled brains, and neuropsychologists continue to work on increasing those percentages while knowing that it will be centuries, millennia, or never before we really understand how the brain works. It is the unknown that stimulates science of all kinds. It is the unknown, as well as the scary, that gets us to go into haunted houses on Halloween. It is the unknown that helps us discover cures for Ebola and other diseases. But when we face the unknown, we will always to scared…or will we be excited…or will we be courageous?

So what about the caveat to my challenge to the “Be careful!” expressions. Shouldn’t be want our kids to be careful so they don’t get hurt? Shouldn’t we want them to avoid broken bones? Shouldn’t we want them to be alive rather than dead from some foolish experiment? Yes to all these questions: we want them safe, we want them alive, and we don’t actually want them to be hurt. The problem as I see it, however, is that we have sacrificed most of the “Be courageous” for the “Be careful!” And as a result we have a lot more care than we have cuer. We need to be hurt in order to prevent further hurt. But more importantly, we need hurt in order to realize that hurt is necessary in life. More important yet, we need hurt in order to rise above hurt and not be stifled by it. We need hurt that comes from courageous actions, whether going over a water ski jump, sliding down a hill of gravel, or walking in an unknown woods. If we sacrifice too much courage for too much safety, we are impaired both in vision and in action.

So let’s be practical. How should a parent deal with a child who is about to do something that might be hurtful to him/herself or to someone else. My answer, for the most part, is to watch…at a bit of a distance. I think parents would find that in most circumstances the child will be safe. In some circumstances, the child will be physically hurt. In other circumstances, the child will be emotionally hurt. And, of course, in some circumstances the child will suffer some kind of more serious harm. We don’t want to put our kids in “harm’s way” but we actually do want to put our kids in “hurt’s way” so they can learn to live with hurt, learn to recover from hurt, and learn that hurt is not the same as harm. Fear of hurt is a much worse condition than hurt itself.

I was afraid of being hurt in football, so as a result I was never very good at football. My brother, on the other hand, was not afraid of being hurt, and became quite good. He also came home after one game with a broken front tooth derived from an illegal block by his opponent. I was quite upset, being a boy who was too afraid of being hurt, but Bill said that after the illegal block, he got so mad at his opponent that he played his best game ever. Was his “best game ever” worth the broken tooth? I think it was. I never broke any teeth, much less legs or arms, but I was never any good in football. I played for four years but never lettered in the sport, rightfully so. I just didn’t have what it took to be a good football player: courage…courage to be unafraid of hurt.

I saw a young man of 18 about a year ago who was not going anywhere in his life. He said that he really wanted to be a football player, and evidently had a natural skill at it. But his mother refused to allow him to play because he had only one kidney due to some kind of birth defect. So he never played football. And he never did anything else either, eventually falling into illicit drug use and generally finding little purpose in life. I have to wonder: might his life been better had he played football even though he might have lost his remaining kidney, or worse yet, died as a result of an injury? How many kids have kidney injuries in football? Some? Yes. Many? No. Should his parents waived their own worry about their son getting hurt in football for the promise that he might actually gain some self-esteem from it? This is a judgment call that most parents would make against football. I am not too sure that was the right call. Perhaps his parents might have helped him find some other way to challenge life, be courageous, and experience necessary hurt so that he could find his place in life.

Courage is not jumping right in “where angels fear to tread” but sometimes it is jumping in where we pray, “May angels and ministers of grace protect us” as Shakespeare suggested as quoted by Bones in Star Trek IV.