“But the culture is changing at a rate faster than their education and values have trained them to accept. That in itself is a form of oppression—to neglect some people from educational and economic opportunity, then judge them when they can’t get on board with the agenda of the more progressive element of society.”

Richard Lindsay from Pop Theology, writing about Kim Davis (the Clerk of Rowan County, Kentucky who was jailed for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same sex couples), makes an astute observation above. And while I completely understand and sympathize with the outrage and impulse to want to condemn this lady (I absolutely HATE IT when conservative, fundamentalist Christians use their warped, hateful theologies to oppress people, and give the beautiful faith I practice a bad name) I also agree with Lindsay, and psychologist Ross Greene, that people are inherently good, not evil.

Ross Greene is a clinical child psychologist who was trained in the ever-popular behaviorist school of psychology, ala Skinner. Greene began to question his training early on in his career, however, because he saw repeatedly that attempting to alter children’s behavior with rewards and consequences did not work much of the time. Greene felt he was merely treating symptoms of a larger malady.

Thanks to fMRI technology Greene was able to learn that the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for executive function (impulse control, prioritizing tasks, and organizing/planning), in aggressive children had not developed or was developing slowly. This meant that challenging kids simply were not able to regulate their behavior like other kids. After getting up-to-date with this latest neuroscience, Greene changed his philosophy; he no longer believed that ‘kids do well if they want to’ and instead started to insist that ‘kids do well if they can.’

This is a little change, but it makes a BIG difference in how one approaches kids (or anyone, I submit) with challenging behavior.

I for one appreciate this more positive, optimistic approach. Perhaps, like Lindsay alludes to above, challenging/bad behavior is not the result of depravity and/or moral stain, but of simply lagging skills and unsolved problems (or problems of consciousness, as I’ve suggested before).

As Greene likes to say, when a child exhibits challenging behavior, it’s most likely that “something about life has succeeded his/her ability to respond adaptively.” I think this is what Lindsay is trying to say about Kim Davis; not that she’s a child, necessarily, but that the world has indeed changed (as it always has and always will), and in order to thrive and be fit we need to learn how to adapt to it because, as Alvin Toffler says so well, “change is not merely necessary to life—it is life.”

Tags:AdaptationKim DavisneurosciencepsychologyRoss Greene