The kids in the apartment next door have to be some of the worst children ever spawned. Complaining about juice proportions not being fair and pestering parents for toys are well-known television cliches, but many of the things they do (slamming closet doors, arguing about literacy) would only be aired on the worst reality shows. And of course, their mother would constantly yell at them in a language that was half-English, half tobacco-caused throat-rot.

So this weekend I decided I'd had enough and talked to the mother about her kids. I told her, in more or less as many words as this, that yelling at misbehaving children generally just encourages them, since any adult attention at that age is positive attention, and that the best way to control them is to only give them any kind of attention when they're behaving well.

The results were almost immediate. There was a temporary flare-up of crying and door-slamming, followed by a deafening, crypt-like silence.

And BTW: there's a well-known fact that when one segments a population according to whether or not they were raised by single moms, then racial and class disparities in crime rates disappear. People talk about how "our society just doesn't accept single mothers" as if this were enough to explain this phenomenon, but I have a different theory very closely related to this incident. As I said before, any kind of attention to a behavior, even negative attention, will generally encourage children to do more of it. And if any segment of the population that is in regular contact with children is chronically incapable of maintaining equilibrium in the face of childhood misbehavior, it's single mothers. People often talk about how we need a return to "traditional values" to cure the crime problem, but I think that if this kind of response to children behaving poorly were to become more common, American youth culture, and therefore the crime rate, would probably change drastically.