Take the business of swearing.
You are trying, like every respectable family, to run the household in a relatively polite verbal climate. And then one day, during a routine confrontation between the youngest and the eldest, the infantile impulse flares. The small one chases his sister trying to recover a toy that was snatched. She returns a mocking smile from the height of her nine years. Steam issues from his ears and he hurls at her an obscenity of considerable force.
Astonishment strikes the household. Family activity halts at once. There is no point continuing with the business of the day. An acute educational challenge lies before us. A parent takes the child and explains to him at length how terrible, revolting and unacceptable the expression he has just used is.
Listen, children are exposed to swearing all the time. They are exposed to its special status and its immediate effect on those around them. It is safe to assume that if such a powerful psychological toy falls into a child's hands, he will use it at some point.
And you know what? I did not intend to talk to you about swearing at all. If we are dealing with obscenities, my position is that granting excessive weight to a random curse creates a problem out of nothing rather than solving one.
So what is this column about? About a common error of identification that occurs in human life generally and family life in particular. I mean the frequent confusion between a difficulty and a problem.
A difficulty is a state of affairs you dislike which is nevertheless a normal feature of the territory. A child swears occasionally. A four-year-old has tantrums. An adolescent is contemptuous. Siblings fight. These are difficulties. They are unpleasant, they are managed rather than solved, and they pass largely on their own.
A problem is a state of affairs that is not developmentally normal, that is not passing, and that responds to intervention.
And the entire art here is telling them apart — because applying a solution to a difficulty is what produces the lecture, and the lecture is what converts a passing irritation into a subject, a subject into a battleground, and a battleground into a feature of your relationship that outlasts the original behaviour by fifteen years.
Most of what parents lecture about would have resolved itself unaided. The lecturing is what makes it permanent.