Utopia in the time out chair

We like to impose limitations on ourselves.  When I was in college, I was taking a course on utopias.  What I found most interesting about utopias was that people don't really want utopias as much as they think.  A society starts out as a utopia, then a governing body forms, rules are put into motion.  The original ideals around which  the utopia was formed blur and it becomes a society not dissimilar to the society they were trying to escape.  They want to be told what to do.  They want to know the lines between right and wrong.  The idea of complete freedom from authority is ultimately too scary. 

 I went to school in Spain and studied and wrote all about anarchy.  I read Marx and Lenin and the anarchist manifestos that came out of the Spanish Civil War.  After all, anarchy was successful briefly in Barcelona.  

As we began to impose the timeout chair, something very interesting occurred, Edie will sit in timeout, as though physically bound, screaming and crying, without moving out of her chair.  There is no safety belt or other apparatus to keep her in her chair, yet she doesn't move out of it.  This phenomena serves to reinforce not only my philosophical college belief that people want rules, but it tells me that children want boundaries.  They want someone to define right and wrong for them.   It is as painful for parents as any other training can be.  But with each of these things, the promise of a self-composed person who can make good choices for themselves and their interactions with others makes it work.  As I watch the emotions appear in the little god filled beings that we call two year olds, I understand how scary it must be.  We always de-brief after an out of control emotional outburst and each timeout gets briefer and briefer. 

There is still the utopian stronghold that fantasizes that the undeveloped mind with raging emotions can somehow make the right choices without any guidelines.  I have witnessed those children, pouring paint on sofas, drawing all over their toys,  hitting and biting, and creating little Lord of the Flies communities inside of their households. Anarchy only works if it is self-rule for one little self.