Connecting the Dots

Connecting the dots is an American idiom or slang for scientific, logical thinking. It's sometimes used to belittle and shame anyone who doesn't agree with the meaning of information from the speaker's point of view. So, how you say it can mean the speaker is saying you are stupid and worthless or the speaker is showing you how she or he came to a conclusion. In this book, it's meant to describe the scientific process of analysis that leads to logical conclusions or how to connect separate pieces of information to understand an underlying problem. It makes a make a reasonable connection between cause and effect. It means collecting information, validating the information, looking for pictures and patterns in the information and connecting possible causes with possible effects. It can be used to help children make decisions and build competence, self-confidence and self-worth. Children can do this complex thinking at a very young age. On the other hand, it can be used to teach a child to question her or his own perceptions and understanding of the world and shake her or his self-confidence and sense of self-worth.

For a negative example, two-and-a-half-year-old Joey had an upsetting series of interactions with his grandfather. Joey is just starting to use language and understand the world around him. His grandfather is a retired litigation attorney. Litigators debate their opponents to earn their living by using language. Part of Grandfather's professional craft is using language to undermine the opponent's use and interpretation of basic sensory facts. In the following exchange, he used his entire debating skills to undermine his young grandson's competence.

Grandfather greeted Joey with a friendly, "Hi, Puppy!"

Joey said, "I'm not a puppy, puppies are dogs and I'm not a dog!" Grandfather (upset by Joey's disagreement) walked away in a huff.

Subsequently, Grandfather sees Joey playing with his Star War toys. He greets Joey with,

"Hi little monster!"

Very upset, Joey started crying, "I'm not a monster! I'm not, I'm not! I'm a boy!"

Grandfather said, "Okay, then you're R2D2!" (The robot from the movie Star Wars.)

Joey, very upset and crying, "I'm not, I'm a boy!"

Grandfather, "Okay, you're Chewbacaa!" (The apelike-like alien Wookie partner of Han Solo, the hero of Star Wars.)

Joey, frustrated and upset, ran to his mother, crying and crying, "Grandpa says I'm not a boy."

When he was confronted by other adults, Grandfather defended himself by saying, "I'm a litigator, I'm passionate about winning. I can't help it." Some people think he may also have been trying to "toughen up Joey." Let's look at this interaction.

First, Grandfather isn't litigating a case in court. Is he being a warrior, out to kill the opponent? Where's his judgment? This is his toddler grandson, who's apparently very intelligent but just learning to use language to understand his world and use logical analysis. Joey needs to have his observations and deductions about the world validated, not denied and ridiculed. It's a ridiculously uneven match and totally inappropriate. It's bullying. What's the purpose of making his grandson feel less than human and mistaken just so he can win the argument? In fact, he was logically wrong and he didn't want to admit it. His grandson had a valid point, he isn't a dog. He is a boy. Grandfather could have said, "You're right but I was thinking of how cute puppies are and you're as cute as a puppy." Grandfather, you have a problem admitting when you're wrong and making corrections. You're spiritually abusing an innocent person. In this case, you're making this toddler incompetent by making him doubt his own senses and logical thinking. At this age, Joey needs to be protected from abusive people like his grandfather. He needs to be reassured that his logic was correct and Grandfather was incorrect. Allow him to ask questions and answer as truthfully as you can.

Second, instead of toughening Joey up, this interaction probably worked to weaken his self-confidence in using language and interpreting facts and made him question his self-worth as a boy (human being.) What's the point of incorrectly winning the argument that Joey is not a boy? This denial of his humanity may lead to Joey believing and acting as though he were second class and becoming overly aggressive or overly passive. Of course, life will hand Joey some tough situations and people, and he needs to be able to handle them. On the other hand, he needs to learn to use language and make comparisons. He needs more information and experience than he has at two-and-a-half!

Third, although he may not be able to verbalize it, this interaction taught Joey that Grandfather was hurtful and self-centered. This belief may generalize to include all men. Joey should be taught to discriminate between supportive men and abusive men. Joey should be taught that his feelings can give him information. It is an unfortunate reality that children are often exposed to people with poor sense, self-worth and self-competence. Until they are able to handle such people, it is a parent's responsibility to protect them from these situations as much as possible.

Fourth, Joey was learning to collect and connect the dots when he said, I'm not a puppy, puppies are dogs and I'm not a dog. That's very superior dot collecting, validating and analyzing. That's also very impressive using language in communicating cause and effect. He should continually be encouraged to do so. Someone is teaching him the right thing by taking "conversational turns" with him as described by the Rachel Romeo's MIT-Harvard 2018 study.

Grandfather is being spiritually abusive in regards to the Four Rights and Needs. Truth: He lied to himself and his grandson when he refused to admit that Joey is not a dog, and is a boy. Competence: He is also keeping Joey from developing his intellectual competence and self-confidence when he denies the correctness of Joey's connection of the dots. Correction: He is also abusing both himself and Joey by not admitting his mistakes and correcting them. Replenishment: He is certainly not helping Joey replenish himself spiritually by making him doubt his self-competence and self-worth. To the contrary, Joey had to spend some of his energy and assets to process, assess and defend against the false information. I recommended that Joey is always accompanied by another more compassionate and wise adult when in Grandfather's presence. Someone who will help Joey discriminate truth from fiction and reality. This adult will need to be able to stand up to grandfather's subsequent anger and tantrums and not join forces with grandfather. When adults join forces in faulty validation and illogical thinking, it creates lifelong problems in decision making for the child.

Let me connect some of Joey's dots with another case. MacKenzie is an intelligent 46-year-old woman, who makes poor social decisions. She is an example of a person who's early dot collecting and connecting was continually undermined. One day, she excitedly came in for her appointment saying, "Dr. Rosie, Dr. Rosie! I know what's wrong with me! My thinking's messed up."

She said, "While I was growing up, I would get into screaming and crying matches with my mother. It was like my Mom would insist that the dog was a goat and I knew that wasn't right but I couldn't get my mother to agree with me. Mom would insist on talking and acting as though the dog was a goat. My father would come into the room to find out what the yelling and screaming was about. I would tell him that Mom is insisting that the dog is a goat. I would beg my logical, intelligent and successful father to say the dog was a dog and not a goat. My father would say, "It's whatever your mother says it is," and walk away.

"As time went on, Mom would say the goat was now a bird. I knew it was no use asking my father for help. In fact, as I got older I often just did it Mom's way to protect my father from her weeks long tantrums or silent treatment. So now the dog who became a goat, often became a bird or something else. If Mom was losing an argument, she'd change the rules by changing the definitions. It was a different world at home than at school or with other people. I got really good at living in both worlds. Until I didn't."

MacKenzie did well in school and outside of home. School was easy to navigate because dogs were dogs, goats were goats and birds were birds. However, her judgment and decisions were very poor when it came to social relationships and her personal life. Normal facts and rules, such as cause and effect, don't seem to apply. So, she always did well at work until she had to deal with other people. She was either too accommodating or oblivious and got into trouble. She acted like her mother, and treated situations the way she wanted it to be (fantasy) and not the way things really were. Cause and effect relationships and consequences became irrelevant and confusing. She still has trouble looking at things the way they really are. Therefore, she has trouble moving things to where she wants them to be. She is still struggling with the lack of confidence in her interpretation of the facts, poor decisions and poor self-worth.

Children basically learn about the world around them through their senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch and feelings. If they can't rely on their basic information, they can't rely on their analyses and decisions. Through their experiences, they make predictions and decisions about what happens around them. They decide whether something is safe or dangerous. They must decide whether a person, place or thing is useful or destructive. The basic building blocks of knowledge come from their sensory experiences and the interpretation of those experiences. They figure out the relationships and relative importance of people, places and things through the process of cause and effect. Furthermore, they depend on the belief that they truly understand the world around them because of what they see, hear, taste, touch, feel and think. Otherwise they cannot rely on their interpretations of the world and their judgment. They believe they need to rely on someone else to survive. When they're taught to be uncertain of their knowledge, they develop poor self-confidence, poor self-esteem and self-worth. Children need accurate confirmation of what they know and how they're processing information. They learn to connect the dots through naming things and events and making logical sense through language, experience and actions.

Children develop their self-confidence and sense of self-worth based on their sensory experiences and their deductions about this evidence. The adults around them have a lot of influence on this developmental skill. Healthy parenting requires nurturing this skill as well as protecting them from spiritual bullies, until they are able to nurture and protect themselves.

Like Joey, MacKenzie had an important adult in her early life, who was spiritually abusive. You can see how the early conditioning of uncertainty of the validity of her sensory information (her dog was a goat) created her lack of confidence in her understanding of the world around her. In other words, her mother would then insist on MacKenzie dealing with the dog as a goat. Depending on how her mother felt, the goat often changed into something else and everyone would have to change their definitions and problem solving methods. Basically, Mom wouldn't admit she was wrong nor deal with the way things really were. Their family life was built on lies to accommodate her. This continual denial of MacKenzie's perception and understanding of the world around her taught her that her interpretation of situations was usually wrong. This in turn created a lack of self-confidence in her analyses and decisions, lack of self-worth and self-esteem.

SUMMARY: In early childhood, we begin to learn to understand and deal with the world around us through our sensory experiences: sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, physical and emotional feelings. We learn to see cause and effect relationships or correlations from which we solve future problems. We learn to apply information from one situation to another. It's important to make sure your child's valid collection and evaluation of information are not undermined.

This post was edited on August 1, 2018