I started out helping parents I was babysitting for understand their kids, from a teen's perspective --I remember (still) being 6 years old, and 4, and even 18 months old. More than episodic memory, I remember how I felt, and what I thought –about what the adults were doing and saying.
I suppose that's a bit unusual, although I know Ray Bradbury has similar recall of early childhood. I happily dree my own weird, as my ancestors in Scotland would say.
I read a lot of psychology, a fair amount of philosophy, a great deal of science fiction and murder mysteries ... the best of all of those are founded on high fidelity observations of people responding to their environments. People seem to be this way.
What's the Foundation?
Still, the question of 'why architecture instead of advice' was waiting to be uncovered.
Threading through all of this –my memories of being 4, fiction, studying psychology, and helping parents understand their kids more accurately– has been a persistent sense that under it all, behind it all, or maybe surrounding it all, there is a sensible, teachable, somewhat obvious-when-you-see-it structure that more accurately explains behaviour, beliefs, decisions and even emotions.
Byron Katie got very close when she described how 'once you know, you can't unknow' in a story about a snake. Walking in the desert, she came across a snake, one of the fast, venomous ones. Stop, panic, sweat, maybe even scream... our body's natural response to a dire threat includes sharpening vision in a very narrow field, in this case, on the snake.
Which turns out to be a rope. See the frayed ends?
No amount of belief or determination or even brainwashing can ever get this person to react 'as if' the rope is a snake. Once we see, we cannot unsee. Once we know, we cannot unknow.
What if it's ALL rope?
Here, the architecture reveals itself.
What if all the misbehaviour that adults are blaming and shaming kids for, and rewarding them for not doing and punishing them for doing, and trying to control all the time... what if all that behaviour is simply the natural product of a child working with an incomplete map of reality?
What if showing the child the missing pieces of reality (it's a rope) would eliminate the behaviour forever?
What if kids are not crazy, malicious, feral, monstrous, naughty little a$$holes who are trying to make their parents mad, or get away with everything, or even get their own way at all?
What if kids are working with an inaccurate, incomplete map of reality –because their experience is counted in months, not decades? Because they haven't seen it yet, or had it explained in a way that they can understand? Because they lack the brain components necessary to have the capacity to see it at all?
What if we could go upstream from the behaviour, to the 'reality' where the behaviour originates?
This isn't a tip or trick to more successfully manipulate kids. This is a fundamentally different way of seeing how behaviour arises, and offers a way to intervene far earlier in the process to eradicate any need for the behaviour.
Advice tries to change behaviour. Architecture changes what behaviour is responding to.
That's why it's architecture instead of advice.
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