Humans and human behavior can be viewed in light of a Parent, Adult, Child classification and a secondary classification of communication acts with combinations like Parent–Child and Adult–Adult.
Adult and Adult–Adult are usually good; Parent, Child, and Parent–Child are usually bad.
Problems tend to occur when communication acts “cross wires”, as with a Parent–Child meeting an Adult–Adult.
This page is less intended to be of interest in its own right and more to serve as a reference on terminology, so that I do not need to explain certain formulations again and again.
Note that the explanations are with an eye at my own use, which need not match that of others, Berne (cf. below) included.
Also note that I make no claim of originality with the below.
In my twenties, I read a few books by Eric Berne. While I am skeptical to most of his ideas, these readings did leave one very useful tool: A classification of humans, human states of mind, human roles/intents in a communication, and similar, into Parent, Adult, Child.
This, in particular, with the idea that incompatible roles of various parties to communication can, in and by themself, lead to conflict or other problems.
On this page, I give a simplified overview of my own take.
For Berne’s take, see his own works.
While my take has a strong overlap and is ultimately derived from his, factors like the long time since my readings, my continual independent use, the chance that I have used such ideas in different contexts than Berne, etc., imply that my take has almost certainly drifted from his.
A particular issue might be that my interest is almost entirely on communication conflicts, while his might have had a wider range, maybe, especially with an eye at his psychoanalytical/-therapeutical interests. (Where I use words like “might” exactly because of how vague my memories of his works are by now.)
Humans can, to some approximation, be divided into those who currently have the approach of a Parent, an Adult, resp. a Child. (With the understanding that while someone might have a dominating state, the actual state can be different at different times, in different contexts, etc.—even at different portions of a conversation.) While these have similarities with the corresponding lower-case words, they are technical terms that are not dependent on, say, age and presence of offspring. Most of my own (and, likely, Berne’s) uses are for persons who are adults and a child can certainly take the role of Parent or Adult in the right context. (At an extreme, a girl of five can be very much the Parent to her dolls.)
There are three main states:
The Adult state is, for most purposes involving adults, the superior, with a focus on being professional, going by facts and reason over emotion, etc.
The Parental state has elements of “I am the parent; you are the child” (be it literally or metaphorically), and can to some degree be seen as a Pseudo-Adult state with an angle of self-perceived superiority in terms of e.g. maturity, wisdom, moral high-ground.
The Child state has elements of being childlike or -ish, often with a deferment to someone else in terms of who is responsible for what, who solves what problem, who is in charge, but it can also involve, say, irrational acts of reactance.
(However, not everything that seems to be reactance, in the sense of a psychological reaction, need be so on closer inspection. Moreover, failure to comply can have very Adult and rational motivations.)
In all cases, there is (in some sense) two versions of the state, namely the state as it is and the state as it is perceived in a counterpart.
As can be suspected with such a coarse division, the spans of behaviors/attitudes/whatnot are quite large, and I make no claim of having given a complete overview.
In a next step, we have acts of communications, e.g., statements made by the one party to the other. (I will silently assume that there are exactly two parties to a communication in the continuation.) These can then be classified based on how the “sender” views himself and how he views the “recipient”, e.g. in that a Parent–Child communication goes from a Parent (as is and in the first version) to a Child (in the opinion of the Parent and in the second version).
Complications can ensue, in particular, when an exchange has incompatible X–Y combinations when viewed from different directions. (Also note an excursion on crossed wires.) Imagine, e.g., that a boss takes a Parent–Child approach to some (misperceived or actual) error by an employee, calls him into his office, makes a few stern claims, and expects the employee to react with submission and lack of confidence, allowing the boss to magnanimously forgive the employee’s sins. (Which is one way, but by no means the only way, that a Parent could approach the matter.) Imagine, further, that the employee instead takes a factual, Adult–Adult, approach to the matter at hand. (Be it to explain why a misperceived error was, in fact, not an error or to acknowledge an actual error and state that appropriate lessons have been learnt.)
It might be that the boss appreciates the Adult–Adult answer and, in turn, switches to an Adult–Adult mode; however, very often, he will react negatively—possibly, to the point of considering the employee to be “looking for excuses”, “not taking responsibility”, “uppity”, or whatever might fit the case at hand (in the boss’s perception).
Or consider an adult who takes an Adult–Adult approach to a child. Here we might have complications like the child not having the brains or maturity to handle an Adult–Adult conversation, the child being so used to being addressed in a Parent–Child manner by adults that the he acts with suspicion or defaults to a Child–Parent answer, or otherwise has a clash. Vice versa, the adult who receives a Child–Parent answer might be thrown (especially, when unused to dealing with children).
The importance of the difference between what actually is and what is merely perceived/intended to be is demonstrated by the difference between constellations like two persons engaging in a mutual Parent–Parent conversation (e.g. two literal parents complaining about their children) and two persons engaging in conflicting Parent–Child addresses, both viewing himself as a Parent and the other party as a Child. The former works quite well (in terms of compatibility: Adult–Adult would be better in terms of being constructive), while the latter can be a disaster.
A particular complication is those who assume a Parent position for highly spurious reasons, e.g. merely greater age, being a teacher dealing with students, a boss dealing with employees, a politician or civil servant dealing with citizens, or similar. (Note that this is orthogonal to concerns like who-is-in-charge-of-whom. A boss, e.g. and as above, can take Adult positions without in anyway ceasing to be the boss and the idea that a boss should be a Parent would be severely flawed.)
This is the worse, when someone used to some small authority in one context takes this a reason to go Parent in another context, e.g. when someone is given a little authority at work and acts as if that mattered outside work and without considering that those encountered outside work might be intellectually superior, have even more authority at their own places of work, etc.
When and whether a Parent position is suitable at all can be debated, as Adult is almost always superior (again, at least among adults). Similarly, Adult–Adult is almost always superior to constellations that involve Parent–X or X–Parent.
Constellations like Adult–Child are certainly conceivable and might be beneficial in some cases, but have not figured much in my own thoughts, might work best in combination with actual children, and raise the danger of unwittingly gliding into Parent–Child. (With modifications in detail for other Adult–X and X–Adult combinations.)
I would certainly advice to err on the side of Adult–Adult.
A higher level of intelligence or insight into the issues at hand are much better reasons than age, a teacher–student relationship, etc. However, here the problems begin, because superficial signs are often visible while deeper truths are not, and we often see someone of high intelligence or insight pushed into a Child role by someone trailing considerably where it matters (while, in some sense, being ahead where it does not).
Yes, there is a correlation between some such factors and intelligence/insight, but it is very imperfect. Consider e.g. a very bright boy of 15 and a not very bright teacher of 50 and note that the boy might be so much brighter that he considers the teacher outright stupid—and age be damned. How is the boy likely to react, if this not very bright teacher presumes to go Adult–Child against him?
Indeed, that the smartest few kids in the class are ahead of even an average teacher in intelligence at 15, or a dull one a few years earlier, is quite common. Compared to a typical class of high-school seniors, only a very small minority of teachers can claim to be ahead of all the kids in class.
When it comes to insight and other aspects that benefit from time, the tables might well be turned, but even this is not a given, especially, in areas where some student has spent particular effort. To boot, age plays a far lesser role in most of the following examples.
Casting a wider net, early problems of the gifted often go back to a similar issue, in that they, even when still trailing the teachers, might be so far ahead of their classmates that an “undifferentiated Child” approach can cause problems. Even when a Parent–Child approach is justified, it is not a given that the details of an approach suitable for an average child are suitable for the gifted child. (But I am not certain whether this adds non-trivial value over the observation that children vary and are best treated as individuals, regardless of Parent–Child.)
Similarly:
Bosses are often above average, but rarely the proverbial “smartest guy in the [meeting] room” and when a business-student boss is put in charge of engineers, he is often sub-average even in terms of intelligence, let alone understanding of the work, the domain, whatnot.
Civil servants are often complete nitwits, sub-average even by the standards of the overall population.
The average significant politician might well be ahead of the population average, but is incredible arrogant and ignorant when failing to acknowledge how many of the citizens are still ahead, often far ahead, of him. To boot, complete nitwits can make it far in politics too, if the stars align in a sufficiently unfortunate manner. Then there are the many politicians who are not significant, say, random members of some city council.
Swedish almost-prime-minister Mona Sahlin is a good illustration of portions of the above: She is not only widely considered deeply stupid and incompetent, and for good reason, but she presumed to literally talk down to the voters as if they were children (and, no, not just Children—actual children). Even her voice modulation was as if she were a kindergarten teacher talking to the kids in her care.
(To the mixed tenses: It is virtually inconceivable that she has grown competent since I moved from Sweden, but I have not heard her talk in more than two decades, and she could conceivably have mended her ways in that regard—I am far from the only one who was disgusted by her extreme approach.)
The above is comparatively strongly focused on what applies to my own actual and typical writings and leaves out a great many complications that might apply to thoughts un- or more rarely written. (Let alone what might yet be unthought-by-me.)
Consider a woman who behaves somewhat like a child towards a romantic partner. Here we can certainly have two adults taking Child–Parent resp. Parent–Child positions in a broadly consensual and, maybe, even positive way. To boot, this can be done with very different variations, ranging from sexual role-play to a wife taking a more daughter-to-father approach to coax her husband into buying her something.
However, many other constellations exist, and not all of them need be so obvious. An adult-to-adult Child–Parent might e.g. arise between a woman and another adult (not necessarily a man) in a lesser coaxing situation, say, a request for food sharing, while a Child–Child exchange could result when two women engage in giggling gossip or two men go to some sports event. Many adult children and their (by implication adult) parents might regress towards roles of the past and then take somewhat Child–Parent resp. Parent–Child attitudes, even when Adult–Adult would be more appropriate.
As a caveat, many types of interaction make dubious matches for at least my version of these terms, and it is possible that e.g. a childlike or -ish behavior during a sports event might need a very different treatment. (And the jump from childlike/-ish to Child, while very tempting, need not always be justified. Indeed, going Parent, when Adult is called for, is often a sign of exactly childishness.)
In particular, the role of “adult Child” seems less unnatural for a woman than a man. (The more so in specifically Child–Parent scenarios.)
Other complications yet include that this type of classification makes little or no differentiation based on motives, mechanisms, and similar, fails to differ between wide behavior ranges hidden behind a single label, has no natural way of accommodating border cases, etc. As useful as the ideas of Parent, Adult, Child are, they must be taken with a grain of salt.
The typical order of Parent, Adult, Child has some benefit from a “crossing wires” perspective:
Write them down twice in two columns or rows and then draw lines from the first column/row to the second to reflect the X–Y classification of a communication act from the perspective of the one counterpart and from the second to the first to reflect that of the other counterpart.
It will now be seen that combinations like Parent–Child + Adult–Adult and Parent–Child + Parent–Child “cross wires”, while e.g. Adult–Adult + Adult–Adult and Parent–Child + Child–Parent do not. Here the idea (to my recollection of Berne) is that exactly the combinations that cause crossed wires are dangerous. A sad observation is that such crossings are unusually likely with Adult–Adult, which, however, is not an argument to abandon Adult–Adult but to abandon Parent–Child and Child–Parent.
(However, this is not to say that other combinations are automatically good. For instance, Parent–Parent + Adult–Adult does not cause a crossing, which implies that the risk of conflict/whatnot is low, but it can still be expected to be inferior to Adult–Adult + Adult–Adult.)
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