Think Like a Neanderthal Child

How should you stop a child’s tantrum?  Think like a Neanderthal, reports Live Science.  Dr. Harvey Karp, a pediatrician, “sees our little darlings as less-evolved savages driven by instinct and emotion, not thoughtful reasoning, and he suggests it’s our job as parents to civilize them into Homo sapiens.”
    It’s fruitless, therefore, to talk like a Homo sapiens to your little cave boy or girl.  Karp suggests you just speak short phrases to the child, like “You are angry,” rather than try to reason with him or her.  To prepare for this, you need to do a mind meld with your evolutionary past:

And so parents need not read the history of human evolution to know how to deal with their unruly kids.
    All we have to do, even in the middle of the most embarrassing public tantrum, is to reach inside and feel that same frustration and anger with the world, and then bend down and say, as Dr Karp would, “I know just how you feel.”

Since Neanderthals supposedly went extinct, it is not clear exactly how Dr. Karp was able to know how they feel.  Reporter Meredith F. Small (anthropologist at Cornell), however, joined in the experience knowingly.  She said, “Apparently, nothing infuriates these little Neanderthals more than Homo sapiens logic.”  How much better to say, “I hear you.  I feel you.”
    The article did come to the defense of Neanderthals somewhat:

Of course, Dr. Karp maligns Neanderthals by suggesting there were instinctual creatures swayed by emotions rather than thought.  Neanderthals didn’t have language, but they had bigger brains than modern humans and could probably do logic problems with the best of us.
    His advice is better couched in the notion that Homo sapiens, and presumably our ancestors, were designed to feel very deeply, and little kids simply want their emotions acknowledged, just like adults.

Even with these acknowledgements, though, it is not clear how Small knows that Neanderthals could do logic problems without language, or to what extent her own adult logic was driven by a desire to have her emotions acknowledged.  One thing is clear: she does not believe in intelligent design.  Her phrase “Homo sapiens… were designed” must be interpreted in the light of the “history of human evolution” she referred to later in the article.

Remember, this is the same Live Science news site that recently embellished tales of a frog-amander (05/28/2008), told us the platypus holds clues to evolution (05/09/2008) and explained that evolution made us adulterers (03/19/2008) but called the movie Expelled bad in every way (04/07/2008) and called creationism creepy (05/22/2008) and anti-science (05/17/2008).
    So now we have the little evolutionist darlings doing mind-melds with people they never met, whose intelligence and parenting skills they know nothing about, and converting their imaginations into bad parenting.  Would any parents of toddlers like to vouch for the effectiveness of Neander-therapy?  If it works on children, why not on heads of state?  After all, Small said that adults have the same needs for acceptance as children.  Why don’t we tell the president of Iran, who is having a little nuclear tantrum right now, that we know just how he feels?
    Sometimes debunking the Darwin propagandists is too easy.  All we have to do is quote them.