I was having lunch with a colleague today who has an 18-month old kid. We got onto the subject of tantrums, and how parents should respond to them and the ways in which parents can be responsible for them becoming acceptable behaviour (my colleague was saying he tends to be quite hyperactive around his daughter, so perhaps she expects a certain baseline energy level out of any situation and needs to amp it up to get attention).
Kate and I of course have absolutely no idea what we'll be like as parents. I'm extremely laissez-faire by nature, and am pretty determined not to be prescriptive or judgmental (aren't all soon-to-be parents?), but of course it seems that when kids get to the testing-boundaries stage a huge amount of that is thrown out of the window because the little sweeties are JUST DRIVING THEIR PARENTS MAD.
The argument my colleague was making was that the seeds for this are planted in the behaviours you teach kids from the year dot. And this made me wonder a bit about Jasper.
Kate raised Jasper from a kitten and he was about two when I came along. And if human owners have the same role in shaping a cat's personality as in a child's, we're going to be in for a ride.
Dear Jasper. He's a loving and affectionate beast, never happier than when nuzzling our hair in the morning or waking up from a nap as we come home. He will act standoffish and he's not averse to the odd nip, but he is a companionable beast who likes nothing more than hanging out with his humans. But let's face it, he's pretty much the feline equivalent of a teenage delinquent.
Calm followed by unexplained flashes of aggression; acting out in front of people to express jealousy; absolute dummy-spitting over his food, using wheedling, violence and persistance to get his way; it's all in there. And I can hear a parental tone in the way we always add: "But he is the most gorgeous cat, and we love him."
Anyway, hopefully I'm overdoing the analogy. One thing that strikes me is that he's particularly tantrum-ey at present because I think he is pretty aware that something is awry in Kate's hormones. I think he's smelling all sorts of things that are unsmellable* to humans that indicate he's about to be supplanted. Another is that he is incapable communicating properly with us. I think one side of a tantrum comes from frustration at the sense that one isn't getting the empathy one needs; for a cat, that feeling must be constant.
*Why isn't there a word for smell to go with visible, audible, tangible? I'm going to try to invent "oleable", so imagine you read "inoleable" there.
I think kids need boundaries. They test them to find out where they are. That doesn't have to translate to being prescriptive or judgemental though!
ReplyDeleteWe need to talk about Jasper?
ReplyDeleteI dunno dude, we raised our two babbies from kittens as well, and I doubt we did it any differently from you and Kate. There's a lot of 'nature' in why they do what they do - breed, gender, being an only cat versus being in a group, the other cats on your block, the mice in the skirting boards.
Our two our quite different from each other and from Jasper too and I think as human cat-parents (sires? dams?) it pleases us to significantly over estimate the impact we have actually had on our little darlins. We like to project; is Jaspie really pining for more empathy or just not getting as much attention as he's used to?
Yous are going to be great parents and cat =/= human babby.