After Its Kind, and then some
When I see orange, the same shade as the fruit, I experience an involuntary citrus constriction in the muscles of my jaw.
When I smell hickory wood smoke, I feel good all over. When I see a chalk board, I feel pained and anxious. I know I am going to be called on to write my spelling words for the entire third grade class. These involuntary responses are the result of prior conditioning.
I recently received a letter from a mother who told of her little girl’s conditioning to potty when she hears the sound made by a certain crib toy. The Mother does not know how it happened, but somehow the child came to associate the sound of the toy with the release of her bladder. (I think she said the child was six months old.) The mother is now trying to use this happenstance conditioning to induce the child to go on the potty instead of in her crib.
Where smaller children are concerned, conditioning is a powerful tool. It can work both ways. All children are conditioned to respond to stimuli. It is inevitable. I have been in homes where the children went joyously nuts when they heard Daddy driving up at five in the evening. Later in life, without knowing why, they will still experience a leap of the heart when a car pulls into the driveway. Children, dreading the sound of a car bringing home an abusive father, will grow up to feel anxious at the sound of a car in the driveway.
When emotionally disturbed or bored children are pacified by a pacifier, they grow up learning to cope by enacting the sucking motion. Later they are pacified by having a cracker or sucker stuck in their mouths. The parents purchase peace by teaching their children to indulge their lusts to satisfy their feelings. Rather than learn self control, they are directed in their lack of control. The children are thus conditioned to resort to eating as the answer to all stress, anxiety and boredom. In other words, they are conditioned to eat. This not only generates lack of self control in eating but produces a general approach to life that is one of indulgence and intemperance. The first sin involved putting something in the mouth. Christ’s first temptation was to provide bread for his hunger. The mouth is the central focus of the lust of the flesh.
Your child is not evil in his desire to indulge, anymore than a dog is evil when he eats meat until he regurgitates. But the dog never grows up to face moral duty. Their reason never develops so that they can place a value on something beyond its ability to satisfy their animal needs. The child is to grow to be more than a mammal seeking survival. The animal takes and devours with no thought to the needs of others. The human is to grow to the point where they can choose to ignore even strong appetites and passions, and to give to the point of suffering that others might have their needs met. Indeed, true humanity is not found at the table, but at the altar. Not taking, but giving. The more costly the giving, the higher the humanity. The stronger the passion resisted, the deeper the soul of the man. Humanity increases in proportion to the difference between the strength of the pull of the flesh and the strength of soul to resist pure animal indulgence.
