Every parent learns the hard way that babies and children cannot rule the house.  There are some cultures where things are done differently, but here in the USA, we parents quickly learn, whether we like it or not, that we have to be the adult and keep control.  I was reminded of this recently when my next-door neighbors asked if their baby was keeping us up, as they were working on sleep training.

Babies can, and most do, get into the habit of awakening way too many times in the night, and they must learn the art of self-soothing to get back to sleep, lest the parents come to resemble the walking dead.  It's tough, really tough, to listen to your baby cry.  They can be stubborn; most are, extremely.

At a certain point, parents simply must put in earplugs, and turn over and try to get back to sleep themselves, judging that the time has come for their loved and cherished child to sleep at least three hours between feedings and diaper-changing.  They may not be able to sleep — after all, their baby is suffering, and they have the means to end that suffering.  They wish to comfort that poor little wailing being they love so much.  They also worry that they're misjudging, that something is in fact wrong.

I remember many sleepless nights, sometimes giving in to the need just to take a peek, to make sure there wasn't a diaper explosion or something else wrong.  Now we have video baby monitors to make it a bit easier, but the same principles apply.  The one thing all parents know is that even when a baby cries for an hour straight, they can't give in to it.

By the same token, it's inevitable that toddlers test their boundaries and throw a temper tantrum or six.  Sometimes, in a public place and always at the most inconvenient moment, these meltdowns can, but don't necessarily, correspond to hunger, a need for a nap, or any other real discomfort.  They can just be a part of the growth process, the development of the ego, of self-control, of awareness of self versus others.  Tantrums are a means to test a child's power and will.

Most parents simply recognize what is happening and deal with it depending on circumstances.  At home, they can be ignored.  Eventually, children will realize they are not getting whatever they are raging about and not accomplishing anything by their bad behavior.  They then learn to find better means to get the goods.

It's always a mistake to dangle a bright thing in an attempt at re-direction, because, as parents will learn, that bright object becomes a reward for bad behavior and will tend to encourage rather than discourage it in the future.

When children don't get these early lessons in self-control, they often grow up to be self-centered and have poor impulse control.  They become bullies.  They don't learn to solve problems.  They become narcissists.

Without demeaning the rioters and looters by saying they are literally infants or toddlers, it's still possible to view the rioting in Minneapolis as a series of temper tantrums that "bad parents" (i.e., the Democrats) are encouraging and normalizing for their own ends.  I see the looters and rioters as children being given free rein to give in to poor impulse control, even being encouraged in their outrageous behavior.  I don't see the people who ought to be discouraging the behavior, doing so; rather, I see them encouraging it.

There is no logic to this behavior.  If one wished to protest blacks being killed, one might go to Chicago, where hundreds have been killed — but then the focus, rather than being on police officers' perceived behavior, would be on the actual bad behavior of the rioters' black peers.  More whites are killed by cops than blacks.  More blacks kill one another by a huge factor.  Blacks kill more cops than anyone else, too.

Blacks do this not because they are incapable of other behavior.  They do it because the political class actively encourages them to engage in violence.  Their violence allows politicians to demand gun control, defunding the police, reparations, and a whole lot of other ideas that are bad for individual liberty regardless of the individual's skin color.

So where are the black leaders, telling their people to stop the temper tantrums and learn some adult behavior?  If we are to take seriously the idea that black lives matter, shouldn't the black population of this country learn to be good citizens?

When you witness blacks carrying all the cases of hard liquor out of a store or senselessly destroying the property of another black business, you are witnessing a self-destructive cultural temper tantrum that more powerful people with an agenda are encouraging.  The people rioting gain nothing from their acts; the benefit all flows to the people manipulating them.  One would hope someone would take the parental role, call the rioters out on their behavior, and stop the madness.

Toby Ranley is a pseudonym.

Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay.

To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.