https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/03/13/685533353/a-playful-way-to-teach-kids-to-control-their-anger

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How Inuit Parents Raise Kids Without Yelling -- And Teach Them To
Control Anger : Goats and Soda At the top of the world, the Inuit
culture has developed a sophisticated way to sculpt kids' behavior
without yelling or scolding. Could discipline actually be playful?
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The Other Side of Anger

How Inuit Parents Teach Kids To Control Their Anger

March 13, 20199:01 AM ET

By 

Michaeleen Doucleff 2016 square

Michaeleen Doucleff

, 

Jane Greenhalgh, NPR

Jane Greenhalgh

[inuit-ange]

For more than 30 years, the Inuit welcomed anthropologist Jean Briggs
into their lives so she could study how they raise their children.
Briggs is pictured during a 1974 visit to Baffin Island. Jean Briggs
Collection / American Philosophical Society hide caption

toggle caption
Jean Briggs Collection / American Philosophical Society

Back in the 1960s, a Harvard graduate student made a landmark
discovery about the nature of human anger.

At age 34, Jean Briggs traveled above the Arctic Circle and lived out
on the tundra for 17 months. There were no roads, no heating systems,
no grocery stores. Winter temperatures could easily dip below minus
40 degrees Fahrenheit.

Briggs persuaded an Inuit family to "adopt" her and "try to keep her
alive," as the anthropologist wrote in 1970.

This story is part of a series from NPR's Science desk called The
Other Side of Anger. There's no question we are in angry times. It's
in our politics, our schools and homes. Anger can be a destructive
emotion, but it can also be a positive force.

Join NPR in our exploration of anger and what we can learn from this
powerful emotion. Read and listen to stories in the series here.

At the time, many Inuit families lived similar to the way their
ancestors had for thousands of years. They built igloos in the winter
and tents in the summer. "And we ate only what the animals provided,
such as fish, seal and caribou," says Myna Ishulutak, a film producer
and language teacher who lived a similar lifestyle as a young girl.

Briggs quickly realized something remarkable was going on in these
families: The adults had an extraordinary ability to control their
anger.

"They never acted in anger toward me, although they were angry with
me an awful lot," Briggs told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. in an
interview.

[inuit-ange]

Myna Ishulutak (upper right, in blue jacket) lived a seminomadic life
as a child. Above: photos of the girl and her family in the hunting
camp of Qipisa during the summer of 1974. Jean Briggs Collection /
American Philosophical Society hide caption

toggle caption
Jean Briggs Collection / American Philosophical Society

Even just showing a smidgen of frustration or irritation was
considered weak and childlike, Briggs observed.

For instance, one time someone knocked a boiling pot of tea across
the igloo, damaging the ice floor. No one changed their expression.
"Too bad," the offender said calmly and went to refill the teapot.

In another instance, a fishing line -- which had taken days to braid --
immediately broke on the first use. No one flinched in anger. "Sew it
together," someone said quietly.

By contrast, Briggs seemed like a wild child, even though she was
trying very hard to control her anger. "My ways were so much cruder,
less considerate and more impulsive," she told the CBC. "[I was]
often impulsive in an antisocial sort of way. I would sulk or I would
snap or I would do something that they never did."

Briggs, who died in 2016, wrote up her observations in her first book
, Never in Anger. But she was left with a lingering question: How do
Inuit parents instill this ability in their children? How do Inuit
take tantrum-prone toddlers and turn them into cool-headed adults?

Then in 1971, Briggs found a clue.

Science

How To Discipline Your Kids Without Yelling

Storytelling Instead Of Scolding: Inuit Say It Makes Their Children
More Cool-Headed

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Science

How The Inuit Teach Kids Not To Get Angry

Teaching Kids To Control Their Anger

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She was walking on a stony beach in the Arctic when she saw a young
mother playing with her toddler -- a little boy about 2 years old. The
mom picked up a pebble and said, "'Hit me! Go on. Hit me harder,'"
Briggs remembered.

The boy threw the rock at his mother, and she exclaimed, "Ooooww.
That hurts!"

Briggs was completely befuddled. The mom seemed to be teaching the
child the opposite of what parents want. And her actions seemed to
contradict everything Briggs knew about Inuit culture.

"I thought, 'What is going on here?' " Briggs said in the radio
interview.

Turns out, the mom was executing a powerful parenting tool to teach
her child how to control his anger -- and one of the most intriguing
parenting strategies I've come across.

[inuit-ange]
Enlarge this image

Iqaluit, pictured in winter, is the capital of the Canadian territory
of Nunavut. Johan Hallberg-Campbell for NPR hide caption

toggle caption
Johan Hallberg-Campbell for NPR

Iqaluit, pictured in winter, is the capital of the Canadian territory
of Nunavut.

Johan Hallberg-Campbell for NPR

No scolding, no timeouts

It's early December in the Arctic town of Iqaluit, Canada. And at 2
p.m., the sun is already calling it a day. Outside, the temperature
is a balmy minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit. A light snow is swirling.

I've come to this seaside town, after reading Briggs' book, in search
of parenting wisdom, especially when it comes to teaching children to
control their emotions. Right off the plane, I start collecting data.

I sit with elders in their 80s and 90s while they lunch on "country
food" --stewed seal, frozen beluga whale and raw caribou. I talk with
moms selling hand-sewn sealskin jackets at a high school craft fair.
And I attend a parenting class, where day care instructors learn how
their ancestors raised small children hundreds -- perhaps even
thousands -- of years ago.

[inuit-ange]
Enlarge this image

The elders of Iqaluit have lunch at the local senior center. On
Thursdays, what they call "country food" is on the menu, things like
caribou, seal and ptarmigan. Johan Hallberg-Campbell for NPR hide
caption

toggle caption
Johan Hallberg-Campbell for NPR

The elders of Iqaluit have lunch at the local senior center. On
Thursdays, what they call "country food" is on the menu, things like
caribou, seal and ptarmigan.

Johan Hallberg-Campbell for NPR

Across the board, all the moms mention one golden rule: Don't shout
or yell at small children.

Traditional Inuit parenting is incredibly nurturing and tender. If
you took all the parenting styles around the world and ranked them by
their gentleness, the Inuit approach would likely rank near the top. 
(They even have a special kiss for babies, where you put your nose
against the cheek and sniff the skin.)

The culture views scolding -- or even speaking to children in an angry
voice -- as inappropriate, says Lisa Ipeelie, a radio producer and mom
who grew up with 12 siblings. "When they're little, it doesn't help
to raise your voice," she says. "It will just make your own heart
rate go up."

Even if the child hits you or bites you, there's no raising your
voice?

"No," Ipeelie says with a giggle that seems to emphasize how silly my
question is. "With little kids, you often think they're pushing your
buttons, but that's not what's going on. They're upset about
something, and you have to figure out what it is."

[inuit-ange]

Traditionally, the women and children in the community eat with an
ulu knife. Johan Hallberg-Campbell for NPR hide caption

toggle caption
Johan Hallberg-Campbell for NPR

Traditionally, the Inuit saw yelling at a small child as demeaning.
It's as if the adult is having a tantrum; it's basically stooping to
the level of the child, Briggs documented.

Elders I spoke with say intense colonization over the past century is
damaging these traditions. And, so, the community is working hard to
keep the parenting approach intact.

Goota Jaw is at the front line of this effort. She teaches the
parenting class at the Arctic College. Her own parenting style is so
gentle that she doesn't even believe in giving a child a timeout for
misbehaving.

"Shouting, 'Think about what you just did. Go to your room!' " Jaw
says. "I disagree with that. That's not how we teach our children.
Instead you are just teaching children to run away."

And you are teaching them to be angry, says clinical psychologist and
author Laura Markham. "When we yell at a child -- or even threaten
with something like 'I'm starting to get angry,' we're training the
child to yell," says Markham. "We're training them to yell when they
get upset and that yelling solves problems."

In contrast, parents who control their own anger are helping their
children learn to do the same, Markham says. "Kids learn emotional
regulation from us."

I asked Markham if the Inuit's no-yelling policy might be their first
secret of raising cool-headed kids. "Absolutely," she says.

Playing soccer with your head

Now at some level, all moms and dads know they shouldn't yell at
kids. But if you don't scold or talk in an angry tone, how do you
discipline? How do you keep your 3-year-old from running into the
road? Or punching her big brother?

For thousands of years, the Inuit have relied on an ancient tool with
an ingenious twist: "We use storytelling to discipline," Jaw says.

Parenting: Difficult Conversations

Jaw isn't talking about fairy tales, where a child needs to decipher
the moral. These are oral stories passed down from one generation of
Inuit to the next, designed to sculpt kids' behaviors in the moment. 
Sometimes even save their lives.

For example, how do you teach kids to stay away from the ocean, where
they could easily drown? Instead of yelling, "Don't go near the
water!" Jaw says Inuit parents take a pre-emptive approach and tell
kids a special story about what's inside the water. "It's the sea
monster," Jaw says, with a giant pouch on its back just for little
kids.

"If a child walks too close to the water, the monster will put you in
his pouch, drag you down to the ocean and adopt you out to another
family," Jaw says.

"Then we don't need to yell at a child," Jaw says, "because she is
already getting the message."

Inuit parents have an array of stories to help children learn
respectful behavior, too. For example, to get kids to listen to their
parents, there is a story about ear wax, says film producer Myna
Ishulutak.

"My parents would check inside our ears, and if there was too much
wax in there, it meant we were not listening," she says.

And parents tell their kids: If you don't ask before taking food,
long fingers could reach out and grab you, Ishulutak says.

[inuit-ange]
Enlarge this image

Inuit parents tell their children to beware of the northern lights.
If you don't wear your hat in the winter, they'll say, the lights
will come, take your head and use it as a soccer ball! Johan
Hallberg-Campbell for NPR hide caption

toggle caption
Johan Hallberg-Campbell for NPR

Inuit parents tell their children to beware of the northern lights.
If you don't wear your hat in the winter, they'll say, the lights
will come, take your head and use it as a soccer ball!

Johan Hallberg-Campbell for NPR

Then there's the story of northern lights, which helps kids learn to
keep their hats on in the winter.

"Our parents told us that if we went out without a hat, the northern
lights are going to take your head off and use it as a soccer ball,"
Ishulutak says. "We used to be so scared!" she exclaims and then
erupts in laughter.

At first, these stories seemed to me a bit too scary for little
children. And my knee-jerk reaction was to dismiss them. But my
opinion flipped 180 degrees after I watched my own daughter's
response to similar tales -- and after I learned more about humanity's
intricate relationship with storytelling.

Oral storytelling is what's known as a human universal. For tens of
thousands of years, it has been a key way that parents teach children
about values and how to behave.

Modern hunter-gatherer groups use stories to teach sharing, respect
for both genders and conflict avoidance, a recent study reported,
after analyzing 89 stories from nine different tribes in Southeast
Asia and Africa. With the Agta, a hunter-gatherer population of the
Philippines, good storytelling skills are prized more than hunting
skills or medicinal knowledge, the study found.

Today many American parents outsource their oral storytelling to
screens. And in doing so, I wonder if we're missing out on an easy --
and effective -- way of disciplining and changing behavior. Could
small children be somehow "wired" to learn through stories?

[inuit-ange]

Inuit parenting is gentle and tender. They even have a special kiss
for kids called kunik. (Above) Maata Jaw gives her daughter the
nose-to-cheek Inuit sniff. Johan Hallberg-Campbell for NPR hide
caption

toggle caption
Johan Hallberg-Campbell for NPR

"Well, I'd say kids learn well through narrative and explanations,"
says psychologist Deena Weisberg at Villanova University, who studies
how small children interpret fiction. "We learn best through things
that are interesting to us. And stories, by their nature, can have
lots of things in them that are much more interesting in a way that
bare statements don't."

Stories with a dash of danger pull in kids like magnets, Weisberg
says. And they turn a tension-ridden activity like disciplining into
a playful interaction that's -- dare, I say it -- fun.

"Don't discount the playfulness of storytelling," Weisberg says.
"With stories, kids get to see stuff happen that doesn't really
happen in real life. Kids think that's fun. Adults think it's fun,
too."

Why don't you hit me?

[inuit-ange]

Inuit filmmaker and language teacher Myna Ishulutak as a little girl.
Anthropologist Jean Briggs spent six months with the family in the
1970s documenting the child's upbringing. Jean Briggs Collection /
American Philosophical Society hide caption

toggle caption
Jean Briggs Collection / American Philosophical Society

Back up in Iqaluit, Myna Ishulutak is reminiscing about her childhood
out on the land. She and her family lived in a hunting camp with
about 60 other people. When she was a teenager, her family settled in
a town.

"I miss living on the land so much," she says as we eat a dinner of
baked Arctic char. "We lived in a sod house. And when we woke up in
the morning, everything would be frozen until we lit the oil lamp."

I ask her if she's familiar with the work of Jean Briggs. Her answer
leaves me speechless.

Ishulutak reaches into her purse and brings out Briggs' second book,
Inuit Morality Play, which details the life of a 3-year-old girl
dubbed Chubby Maata.

"This book is about me and my family," Ishulutak says. "I am Chubby
Maata."

In the early 1970s, when Ishulutak was about 3 years old, her family
welcomed Briggs into their home for six months and allowed her to
study the intimate details of their child's day-to-day life.

[inuit-ange]

Myna Ishulutak today in Iqaluit, Canada. As the mother of two grown
boys, she says, "When you're shouting at them all the time they tend
to kind of block you. So there's a saying: 'Never shout at them.' "
Johan Hallberg-Campbell for NPR hide caption

toggle caption
Johan Hallberg-Campbell for NPR

What Briggs documented is a central component to raising cool-headed
kids.

When a child in the camp acted in anger -- hit someone or had a
tantrum -- there was no punishment. Instead, the parents waited for
the child to calm down and then, in a peaceful moment, did something
that Shakespeare would understand all too well: They put on a drama.
(As the Bard once wrote, "the play's the thing wherein I'll catch the
conscience of the king.")

"The idea is to give the child experiences that will lead the child
to develop rational thinking," Briggs told the CBC in 2011.

In a nutshell, the parent would act out what happened when the child
misbehaved, including the real-life consequences of that behavior.

The parent always had a playful, fun tone. And typically the
performance starts with a question, tempting the child to misbehave.

For example, if the child is hitting others, the mom may start a
drama by asking: "Why don't you hit me?"

Then the child has to think: "What should I do?" If the child takes
the bait and hits the mom, she doesn't scold or yell but instead acts
out the consequences. "Ow, that hurts!" she might exclaim.

The mom continues to emphasize the consequences by asking a follow-up
question. For example: "Don't you like me?" or "Are you a baby?" She
is getting across the idea that hitting hurts people's feelings, and
"big girls" wouldn't hit. But, again, all questions are asked with a
hint of playfulness.

The parent repeats the drama from time to time until the child stops
hitting the mom during the dramas and the misbehavior ends.

Ishulutak says these dramas teach children not to be provoked easily.
"They teach you to be strong emotionally," she says, "to not take
everything so seriously or to be scared of teasing."

Psychologist Peggy Miller, at the University of Illinois, agrees:
"When you're little, you learn that people will provoke you, and
these dramas teach you to think and maintain some equilibrium."

In other words, the dramas offer kids a chance to practice 
controlling their anger, Miller says, during times when they're not
actually angry.

This practice is likely critical for children learning to control
their anger. Because here's the thing about anger: Once someone is
already angry, it is not easy for that person to squelch it -- even
for adults.

"When you try to control or change your emotions in the moment,
that's a really hard thing to do," says Lisa Feldman Barrett, a
psychologist at Northeastern University who studies how emotions
work.

But if you practice having a different response or a different
emotion at times when you're not angry, you'll have a better chance
of managing your anger in those hot-button moments, Feldman Barrett
says.

"That practice is essentially helping to rewire your brain to be able
to make a different emotion [besides anger] much more easily," she
says.

This emotional practice may be even more important for children, says
psychologist Markham, because kids' brains are still developing the
circuitry needed for self-control.

"Children have all kinds of big emotions," she says. "They don't have
much prefrontal cortex yet. So what we do in responding to our
child's emotions shapes their brain."

[inuit-ange]
Enlarge this image

A lot has changed in the Arctic since the Canadian government forced
Inuit families to settle in towns. But the community is trying to
preserve traditional parenting practices. Johan Hallberg-Campbell for
NPR hide caption

toggle caption
Johan Hallberg-Campbell for NPR

A lot has changed in the Arctic since the Canadian government forced
Inuit families to settle in towns. But the community is trying to
preserve traditional parenting practices.

Johan Hallberg-Campbell for NPR

Markham recommends an approach close to that used by Inuit parents.
When the kid misbehaves, she suggests, wait until everyone is calm.
Then in a peaceful moment, go over what happened with the child. You
can simply tell them the story about what occurred or use two stuffed
animals to act it out.

"Those approaches develop self-control," Markham says.

Just be sure you do two things when you replay the misbehavior, she
says. First, keep the child involved by asking many questions. For
example, if the child has a hitting problem, you might stop midway
through the puppet show and ask,"Bobby, wants to hit right now.
Should he?"

Second, be sure to keep it fun. Many parents overlook play as a tool
for discipline, Markham says. But fantasy play offers oodles of
opportunities to teach children proper behavior.

"Play is their work," Markham says. "That's how they learn about the
world and about their experiences."

Which seems to be something the Inuit have known for hundreds,
perhaps even, thousands of years.

[inuit-ange]
Enlarge this image

Inuit parents value the playful side of kids even when disciplining
them. Above: Maata Jaw and daughter. Johan Hallberg-Campbell for NPR 
hide caption

toggle caption
Johan Hallberg-Campbell for NPR

Inuit parents value the playful side of kids even when disciplining
them. Above: Maata Jaw and daughter.

Johan Hallberg-Campbell for NPR

Share Your Tips

How do you get your kids to do things without yelling or shouting?
Or, how did your parents get you to do things without yelling or
scolding? Share your advice, tips and stories, and we may include
them in a story for NPR.

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