The third paper I read, published in 1991, reported on a survey of 4,100 teenagers in Wisconsin and California and classified their parents as authoritative, authoritarian, indulgent, or uninvolved. The researchers looked at the kids’ psychosocial development, school achievement, problem behavior, and “internalized distress,” which means symptoms of depression, anxiety, and the like. “Psychosocial development” refers to the maturation of a child’s individual personality within the social context of school and home.
They found that teens with authoritative parents scored highest on measures of psychosocial competence and lowest on measures of psychological and behavioral dysfunction; the reverse was true for those with uninvolved parents. Adolescents with authoritarian parents did pretty well on obeying rules, but experienced poorer beliefs about themselves than their peers. By contrast, teens from indulgent homes felt more self-confident, but more often abused substances, misbehaved at school, and underperformed academically.
I gathered that children of authoritarian parents behave better but may have worse mental health, whereas kids of indulgent parents experience fewer internal symptoms, but have more behavioral problems: they’re more likely to act out with neglected academics, drugs, sex, and the like.
Those parents of the 1980s and 1990s, trying to improve on their parents’ stern discipline and emotional distance, had swung the pendulum too far. In trying to be close to their children, they sacrificed important limits that kids need. It turns out that permissive parenting is even worse than authoritarian parenting in the long term. A slew of research studies from the 1990s to the present show that, with both parenting styles, children have an increased risk of depression and lower self-control, and that permissive parenting also is associated with lower academic achievement.
My research convinced me to walk that middle path: close emotional connection with clear boundaries. I would respect my children as individuals with their own goals and perspectives, while insisting that they contribute to our family and abide by our overall values and rules. I sorted through the many techniques that seemed to work, distilling their core principles into what I now call “the Apprenticeship Model” of parenting. All the successful systems in this book share these three threads: connection with children, communication about problems, and building kids’ capability. Upon this foundation, adults and children together set healthy limits and boundaries.
Brian and I adopted this motto as a family value: work first, play later. As typical eldest children, we both willingly delay gratification when there’s a big task in front of us. Our children are still in the process of deciding whether to embrace this mind-set. Rather than nag them into doing their household jobs, we simply state the rule: “When the dishes are in the dishwasher and your backpacks hung up, then we can go to the pool.” Sometimes they jump into cleaning, but often they dawdle, read a book, do a puzzle, or play with the dog. Eventually they may decide to do their jobs. That’s their choice.
We calmly go about our day, resisting the urge to lay into them. If they delay until the sun has set or it’s too chilly to swim, we swallow our own disappointment. We’re in this for the long haul: better to teach our kids responsibility for life than to get them to do their chores on our time frame this afternoon. When they’re disappointed they missed the outing, we empathize. We don’t say, “I told you so,” or goad them with, “Next time you should.…” We let the experience do the teaching.
When I talk about authoritative parenting, some parents say they’re exhausted just thinking about the time and effort it must take. But I’d argue that permissive parenting is actually even more work. With no children doing household chores, you’re the one cleaning, cooking, shopping, and organizing the schedule, sometimes even into their young adulthood. Why not hand over responsibility as soon as possible, even if it takes more time to teach children to take on these tasks?
I have a similar view of authoritarian parenting. It may seem simpler to lay down the law, but that works only as long as children continue to obey. As they grow, they naturally will seek more independence, so you’re likely to face tween or teen rebellion—either outright or sneakily, behind your back. I suggest setting up systems and habits for negotiating disagreements when the kids are young, so that by the time they start asserting themselves you’ve developed resilient ways to set limits (more on this in Chapter 9).
Regardless of the type of parenting we use, modern parents stand willing to put in the time.
Even as more women entered the workforce between 1965 and 2015, expanding the working mom population from 41 percent to 71 percent, mothers’ time spent caring for children climbed from ten hours to fifteen hours a week. Fathers’ time spent on child care nearly tripled over the same period, from two and a half to seven hours a week. Overall, parents have become more hands-on and collaborative in the last thirty years as attachment parenting and positive discipline increasingly replace command, control, and punish models. Although far from universal, these trends represent real shifts in the way large chunks of the middle-class population raise children.
Recent research shows, however, that kids need something other than additional time with their parents. The quality of the time matters.
In 2015, a team of sociologists tackled the myth of intensive mothering, the idea that moms should lavish their time and energy on their children to ensure their healthy emotional and academic development. They looked at data from the University of Michigan, which since 1968 has followed a sample of 18,000 people through their lives to evaluate their well-being. The surveys ask questions about the individuals’ employment, income, health, relationships, education, and other topics every other year. Since 1997, these researchers have also been following the development of the children born to those individuals, with four additional surveys about their kids’ well-being and behavior.
The Michigan data set yields especially valuable findings because, in addition to the large sample size, it relies on time use diaries. These are considered the gold standard for accuracy because they catch people in the moment they’re doing something, rather than relying on their memories of what activities they engaged in at some time in the past.
Melissa Milkie, a University of Toronto sociologist, led a team that unpacked the data from 1997 and 2003, examining the impact of parental time on children’s development. They looked at behavioral problems, emotional issues, and academic success. The behavior-related questions included whether the child cheated or told lies, argued too much, struggled to concentrate, bullied others, or appeared hyperactive. For teens, they also assessed risk-taking behaviors: drug, alcohol, and cigarette use and sexual activity. On delinquency, they asked whether teens broke curfew, stole items, damaged property, got in trouble at school, or had hurt another person badly or attracted police attention. They divided parental time into two measures: available time and engaged time.
Remarkably, they found zero association between the amount of time moms and dads spent with children under age twelve and any of these measures of behavioral, emotional, and academic performance. Zero. This held for both engaged time and available time.
When it came to adolescents, however, there was a split. Teens who spent more time engaged with their mothers reported less delinquency. And those who spent more time engaged with both parents experienced fewer behavioral problems, substance use, and delinquency. They also improved in math. Teens who enjoyed access to both parents were less likely to use drugs.
This research convinced me that quitting my job and lavishing every spare moment on my kids wouldn’t help, even if it were financially possible. Rather, I would continue to learn how to be an authoritative parent. I would focus on the quality of time I spent with my kids.
Not only does authoritative parenting feel right to many parents, but it’s supported by a growing body of research finding that autonomy, competence, and a sense of connection drive an individual’s intrinsic motivation and happiness. We increasingly see how our first i
nstincts—whether to punish our kids, offer them rewards, or rescue them—can backfire. A new wave of advice has been prompted by research by scholars such as Stanford’s Carol Dweck, who shows how praise undermines kids’ motivation and risk-taking, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Angela Duckworth, who has detailed the importance of setbacks in developing resilience. Popular books like How to Raise an Adult and The Gift of Failure urge parents to worry less, let kids experience failure, and stop pushing achievement so hard.
Parents now are seeking the middle ground between the authoritarian style of an earlier era and the permissive parenting of the 1980s and ’90s. But while they’re increasingly skeptical of punishment and subscribe to the value of communication and mutual respect, the crucial piece that’s often missing is discipline. When everyone in the family is respected, and with democracy being one of the highest values in our world, adults may feel awkward imposing limits. Authoritative parents-in-training often resist imposing their will on children until the moment when the whining or the messy house pushes them over the edge. Then they fall back on the authoritarian tones embedded in our collective memories.
When I started looking for answers about kids’ behavior, the quest seemed useful and important. I was hoping to eliminate the daily meltdowns and the constant scramble for lost homework or belongings. But as I learned about the severe long-term impacts of parenting style, I grew more concerned about future generations. Visiting the nation’s heartland convinced me that the country is already in crisis.
DARREN HENRY HAD THE SLOUCH of a man not entirely defeated by a hopeless task, but doubting that he would prevail. In his small office by the entrance to Leipsig Elementary School in Putnam County, Ohio, he reclined his chair as he considered my questions: Why do kids misbehave? What methods work nowadays?
“What seems to work? Do you have any answers for me?” he replied.
When we talked by phone before my visit, Henry had explained that he grew up in the rural Ohio community before becoming a teacher and then taking over as principal at Leipsig. The repeat offenders who turn up in his office are often the kids whose parents were chronic problems in his early years of teaching more than twenty years ago. The cycle of misbehavior makes it hard for him to believe that anything could change. Indeed, it seems to be getting worse. Compared to their parents, five-year-olds now arrive at school less able to sit still and more likely to grab or hit in response to a provocation. He sees a connection to the erosion of family life and community.
“Some of these kids go home and they’re not worried about doing any homework, it’s what kind of meal am I going to have, is anyone going to be home?” he said. I looked around his office at piles of school documents and crayon-etched thank-you notes from students.
Two decades ago, he said, he could walk through town and see kids shooting baskets, riding bikes, or playing together on the baseball field. Nowadays, that’s a rarity, he explained.
“For a small town, we’re lucky to have two different parks. You don’t see kids in the parks as much,” he said. “School is more than the standardized tests. We’re trying to teach social skills and how to get along in a group. Kids need to learn how to play together.”
The spring day I visited, a third-grade boy cooled his heels in a nearby office as Henry and I chatted. He’d received too many marks for bad behavior to participate in the class party to celebrate the end of the quarter. The boy fell in the middle of three brothers, all frequent fliers in detention.
“They are three of the smartest boys we have in their respective classes,” Henry said. “They’re tough. They’re such tough cookies. When they don’t want to do something, they’re not going to do it.”
This day the middle boy flatly refused when his teacher told him to go to the principal’s office at the start of the party. She called Henry, who headed down to the classroom with some trepidation. He was tired of physically manhandling the boy out of the room—as he’d had to do earlier in the quarter when the boy was digging snot from his nose and rubbing it on classmates.
“I didn’t feel good about doing it,” he said. “I’m tired of dragging those boys out of the room. And I don’t want to lose my job.”
Instead, he tried a strategy he’d adopted in the last two weeks: smothering them with kindness. When he got into the classroom, he knelt down at the boy’s level and asked him to come to the office.
“He bucked me at first a little bit. I said, ‘Come on, I really need you to.’ I patted him on the back. Trying to give him all the positives. He came down with me. That worked,” Henry said. “I hope that keeps working.”
To educators, when parents who can’t control their behavior have kids of their own, it can seem hopeless that the kids will ever learn self-discipline. “Sometimes this position overwhelms me. You want to help them all and it consumes you,” Henry admitted. “A lot of our kids, all they hear at home is yelling, so I find that just doesn’t work. I try to get through to some of the teachers that yelling doesn’t work. If you’re going to browbeat them every day about homework and this and that, they’re going to buck you even more. That’s their mechanism.”
I heard a similar story just a few states west from Henry’s Leipsig Elementary, in Wisconsin. The elementary school teacher Mikki Retic had seen dramatic changes in both the families whose children she teaches and their behavior in the last two decades. In 1998, her first year, the vast majority of families had one stay-at-home parent. Now both parents work in most families, and many of the families are blended. “Mom and Dad may be married and in the home, but they’re not around a lot. That is the single greatest factor because that causes the domino effect,” Retic said. “The kids we see coming into school at four or five, Mom and Dad are carrying some guilt for not being around so much, so they want to be the little one’s friends.”
Not only are the children less obedient and respectful of authority, but teachers have a tougher time getting parental support when they need to call home about a discipline issue. “They say, ‘My kid wouldn’t do that!’ or they look to blame other kids for their children’s behavior,” she said. “It’s almost like the parents are afraid to discipline their kids at home and when they come into it at school it’s a new thing.”
More children will cry or throw temper tantrums than when she first started teaching. But the biggest change she sees is the way kids question directions and look to get revenge on other children when they think they’ve been wronged.
“They don’t know how to play fair. They don’t understand that to be given respect, you have to give it first,” she said. “There’s this entitlement that I should get my way all the time. That carries over to the classroom.”
It can take forever to get through to children in the classroom with even a simple direction like “put your pencil on the desk.” They continue chatting and seem to think the instruction doesn’t apply to them, Retic said. Years ago, perhaps one or two children in the classroom would have needed to be redirected, but now it’s the majority.
“They don’t realize they’re part of something bigger and greater. They don’t realize their presence in the world can make it a better place. They’re so egocentric,” she said. “Everything is so instant gratification. There’s no conversation anymore. I only care about you if you can do something for me.”
In addition to the societal changes, she blames the increased use of technology in homes and the classroom. Children spend more time sitting or being still during the school day and also during their free recreation time. “The social interactions and personal responsibility that would naturally happen on the playground or at a park are now being replaced with one-on-one time with a device, where feedback is instant and you can hide behind a screen,” Retic said.
AS A PEDIATRICIAN, JEFFREY BROSCO often sees children who don’t fit into the norm of expected behavior. When he started to think about the rising rates of ADHD—the percentage of childern receiving a diagnosis had doubled since the 1970s�
�he grew interested in whether changes in academic expectations might be skewing the picture. After all, ADHD is diagnosed by observing behavior in an educational environment and asking how well the child is able to learn, get along with peers, and follow the rules—that is, get along with adults. Since school has become more academic and sedentary over the years, it seemed reasonable to Brosco to ask whether more children are having trouble behaving themselves in that environment.
“When I went to kindergarten, it was half a day, we ran around, never had homework until I was probably in high school. There’s been a large change in the last fifty years or so that says we need to be more academically rigorous with young children,” said Brosco, a professor of clinical pediatrics at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. “We know if you look at the neurobiology of ADHD, it has to do with the maturation of your frontal and prefrontal lobes. Children with ADHD are less likely to resist their impulses, and they have more trouble focusing. They’re not quite ready for what the environment demands of them.”
Brosco and medical student Anna Bona pored through databases that got at the question of changing academic demands, like US Education Department statistics on the amount of assigned homework in each grade and surveys on how children spend their time. “They all pointed in the same direction,” he said. “In pre-K, four-year-old kids are doing letters, numbers, and journaling. The demands on six- to eight-year-olds have gone up as well in terms of the amount of homework and lack of recess.”
Brosco and Bona found a nineteen-percentage-point increase in the time spent teaching three- to five-year-olds letters and numbers over two decades, according to their study published in JAMA Pediatrics in 2016. In addition, more young children went to school for a full day: 58 percent in the mid-2000s versus 17 percent in 1970. In 1997, the paper said, six- to eight-year-olds spent more than two hours a week on homework, more than double the time spent on homework a decade earlier.
The Good News About Bad Behavior Page 8
