Quick post to share a term coinage.
Baby Dog Climbing The Stairs Moment: a child (or pet, or adult) unpredictably, unrepeatably is especially malleable, and undergoes a formative experience. The experience can be intentional or unintentional.
Background.
I’m no expert on child-rearing, nor on dog training, but it’s easy to notice that even siblings (with similar genetics and similar parenting) wind up wildly different from each other. By naming the ‘baby dog climbing the stairs moment’ phenomenon, I’m not pretending to know how or why—I’m just putting a handle on a concept so it can be easily wielded.
We train our dogs in the Family Dog model (with a few adaptations), where a dog is trained to be good by never being in put into situations where she is able to fail. When my puppy doesn’t understand ‘sit’ yet, I never say ‘sit’ unless I am close enough to push her butt to the ground if she doesn’t sit on her own. So she simply never even finds out what would happen if she didn’t sit when I say sit—because (with the help of an agreeable situation) she has never not sat the first time hearing the command. Now that she knows what ‘sit’ means, I can yell ‘sit’ from across the yard if a car is coming up the driveway, and she sits even though I’m not there to ‘make’ her. But initially practicing ‘sit’ took… oh, I don’t even remember, but ~months of practice twice a day.
The Name-Initiating Anecdote.
Mom was in the year+long training process of training our new family dog, GR. GR started to climb the steps to the 2nd floor when he was at exactly the right moment to be imprinted upon. Mom swatted him—the same punishment for many other things he was not to do—but all the other unallowed acts, he’d try multiple times and get a swat with each try, before eventually settling into being trained. With climbing the stairs, he never tried again in his entire life.
GR could use stairs—he used the stairs to get onto the porch and into the house, and he used the stairs from the main floor to the basement. But he would not use the stairs to the 2nd story. I impishly tried to carry him up once (“for science” I’m sure) and he freaked out and scrambled out of my arms on about the 5th step.
So, a Baby Dog Climbing The Stairs Moment is when a child forms an unexpectedly strong association.
Example Applications.
“Parenting definitely has effects—it’s just not predictable.”
My dad attempting to explain the OCD of my uncle, who has inappropriately tiny tolerances for coarse build projects: “He must have gotten a lecture about sloppy cutting at a Baby Dog Climbing the Stairs Moment.”
A friend, describing (of herself): "parental attempts to instill frugality backfired"
This quote (from the play Equus, which I’ve not seen) “A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave. It sniffs—it sucks—it strokes its eyes over the whole uncomfortable range. Suddenly one strikes. Why? Moments snap together like magnets, forging a chain of shackles. Why? I can trace them. I can even, with time, pull them apart again. But why at the start they were ever magnetized at all—just those particular moments of experience and no others—I don't know.”
In myself: Driving by a turkey farm with the windows rolled down, 8-year-old me remarked to the car in general “I sure don’t want to work on a turkey farm!” and in my memory Dad pulled the car over and gave a stern lecture about how our country relies on the work of people on the turkey farms and the turkey butcheries and even if it doesn’t smell good, the people who work there are no less than I am, and I should count myself lucky to be allowed to eat turkey at all if I couldn’t be more respectful. My mom and my siblings don’t remember this happening. Dad does, but says he doesn’t think he pulled the car over. But when I hear people brush off blue collar workers, as I politely explain my objection to their disrespect—I may be imagining it, but I could swear I catch a whiff of turkey manure.