Instead of sticker charts, promises of ice cream or toys, praise, time-outs, and punishments, Camila and Colin began to rely on reflective listening, respectful language, routines set by the entire family, and consequences agreed upon in advance. To build stronger relationships, each parent started regularly expressing appreciation for the children’s actions and spending one-on-one “special time” with each child. (I’ll have more to say on all of these tools in the chapters ahead.)
The Cullen family created a laminated “Listo Para Hoy” (“Ready for Today”) with pictures of each step in the morning routine and hand-drawn clock faces showing the time for breakfast, brushing teeth, hand lotion, and sunscreen. They turned one wall of the kitchen into a chalkboard where they wrote the afternoon routine and the kids’ favorite activities for special time.
Both parents adjusted their work schedules and the family cut way back on the kids’ after-school activities to make room for more relaxed family time together. They also began to create their own community of support, recruiting several parent friends from the kids’ public charter school to take PEP classes and swapping books with people whose ideas about parenting resonated with them. As a volunteer room parent at school, Colin shared PEP ideas via email and in person. Gradually, positive ways of interacting with children were taking root at the school and in the community.
You can benefit from these ideas without changing your life wholesale. Certainly, there’s no need to discard something that’s working for you. Look for incremental change as you adopt new habits. And please read this whole book before dismissing certain notions—you’ll soon see how they play out.
Under an authoritative parenting model, some of the strategies may look similar to your previous parenting style. For instance, my children may enjoy thirty minutes of screen time after school once their household jobs, homework, and music practice are done. This routine doesn’t seem that different from the computer reward that the home-schooling mom in Vicki Hoefle’s class felt reluctant to give up.
The key is that under the Apprenticeship Model, parents negotiate agreements about responsibilities and privileges ahead of time, in discussion with their children. They don’t dictate limits unilaterally. Whenever possible, the rules apply to everyone, not just the kids. So if a parent’s chores are incomplete, they also must finish up before relaxing in front of a screen. And the agreement is consistently enforced—it applies all week and all month. Screen time after responsibilities are taken care of, for instance, is not a reward the parent pulls out simply to motivate a child to perform one task on a given day.
The psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan of the University of Rochester first showed how connection, competence, and autonomy motivate people more strongly than a reward-punishment scheme. Indeed, rewards actually undermine an individual’s intrinsic interest or motivation.
For example, in one study, researchers rewarded one group of people for finding the word “Nina” in drawings by the artist Al Hirschfeld, while offering no reward to a control group also tasked with looking for the word. Then they pretended the experiment was over but left the drawings, along with other materials, in the room while study participants were waiting. They found that the group that had received a monetary reward for finding Ninas spent less time looking for Ninas for their own enjoyment than those who had not been rewarded. Performing the task in exchange for the rewards seemed to drain the joy out of an otherwise fun activity, reducing intrinsic motivation.
Rewards have the same impact on children. Whether given for grades, household jobs, or behavior, they erode the child’s interest in the activity and risk turning a potentially fun challenge into a task to be dreaded.
LINDA JESSUP GREETED ME IN stocking feet. Opening the sliding glass doors to her modest rambler in Silver Spring, Maryland, the otherwise elegantly clad seventy-four-year-old explained that she lent all her dress shoes to be shined at the recent “Can Do Kids Fair,” an annual PEP event that teaches children a variety of useful household skills in a fun environment. She would retrieve the shoes later that evening at the final session of the eight-week parenting class she was teaching.
With the help of a polished, dark wooden cane, Jessup crossed the large open central room of the house, her head almost perpendicular to her chest, a legacy of childhood polio. A white and gray collie trailed her. “Now, Promise,” she told the dog firmly as we seated ourselves on the sofa. “We’re going to be sitting here talking for a bit, so you must lie down at my feet.”
Promise obediently flopped onto the hardwood floor as we began to chat, but couldn’t resist lifting her nose and inching closer to the human legs beside her. Soon she rose on all fours and her back knocked over a lightweight table. “Dogs can be like children,” Jessup said with a rueful smile, as we righted the table and restored the colorful centerpiece to its spot. “She’s in undue attention.”
“Undue attention” is the mildest of the four types of misbehavior that children exhibit, which psychologist Rudolf Dreikurs described in his writings on Adlerian psychology. It happens when the child doesn’t really need the parent’s attention, Jessup told me, as opposed to when the parent is teaching skills, reading, connecting, or engaging in another useful activity. Jessup calls it “undue attention getting” because the child is seeking attention in a socially useless way. We all deserve attention from our loved ones, after all, and it should be built into our daily and weekly activities.
The classic example of undue attention is when your child is playing quietly while you putter in the kitchen, but as soon as the phone rings and you start talking, they come over and start whining for your help. If a child grows more discouraged, undue attention can morph into a power struggle, such as refusal to put on their shoes to leave the house.
If your toddler throws that shoe at you—or your tween slams the door—they could be seeking revenge, the third type of misbehavior. The most discouraged children simply give up, feeling they are inadequate—the final category. This is the child who simply stares at a sheet of math homework with slumped shoulders, or says they’ll never learn to tie their shoes.
All these actions are attempts to belong, but in each case the child has come up with a useless or harmful way of belonging. That’s why Dreikurs labeled these four kinds of misbehavior “mistaken goals.” The child mistakenly thinks, I belong when I’m the center of attention (undue attention), or, I belong when I’m the boss (power struggle). If a child’s unwanted behavior occurs repeatedly and provokes a strong emotional response in you, it’s probably a mistaken goal.
Over a dinner of tortilla soup and spinach salad served on vibrantly colored dishes evoking the American Southwest, Jessup and her husband, David, reminisced about the early days of PEP. The house in which they parented three biological and four foster children served as PEP’s office for the first eight years. Once, when David threw out his back, the volunteers continued their usual practice of putting together class packets on the couple’s bed. “We told him to lie very still as we collated around him,” Linda recalled, her vivid blue eyes crinkling as she smiled at the memory.
The conversation drifted further back, to Linda’s childhood in a Quaker-Methodist family of four girls living in Mormon-dominated Utah. “I was a troublemaker in school, fighting, and just not able to sit in a seat for any length of time,” she said, speculating that she probably had undiagnosed ADHD. “My two older sisters navigated socially by being smart and well behaved, and I navigated socially by fighting. Kids gave me a hard time and I fought.”
This early tendency toward mischief inclined Jessup to try to understand her own children when they started acting up. She first discovered Adler through a book discussion group at the Individual Psychology Center, focused on Dreikurs’s book Children: The Challenge. Soon she was teaching classes out of her home. She taught parents that in order to understand their child’s misbehavior, first they had to notice their own emotional response. If they felt annoyed or irritated, the child w
as probably seeking undue attention. If they felt angry or challenged, it was a power struggle. If they felt hurt or desire to punish, it was most likely revenge. And if they felt despair or hopelessness, the child’s assumed inadequacy was the problem.
It’s a bit counterintuitive. You may think that your reaction will differ based on your mood or personality, but this Adlerian framework is actually a remarkably accurate way of diagnosing misbehavior regardless of individual characteristics. That’s because we are so deeply connected to our children, and so much a part of our family system, that we play out the same patterns repeatedly. You should help your child find positive ways of belonging that address their specific mistaken goals. You might redirect a child who is seeking undue attention or set up routines to avoid the annoying situation. Because a child seeking revenge is feeling hurt, you might assuage that hurt by apologizing or showing that you care. The goal is to shift the child from trying to get something—whether undue attention, power, or revenge—into being able to contribute something to the situation or family needs.
At age nine, Jessup contracted polio in Brisbane, Australia, where the family spent a year during her father’s Fulbright fellowship. “Polio was a really good experience for me, in a lot of ways,” said Jessup, who was paralyzed for weeks by the virus. “For a really hyperactive kid, it brought me to an abrupt halt. I was isolated at home since I didn’t need to be in an iron lung, when they weren’t sure how it spread. We always say I discovered my brains.”
Those brains serve her well at PEP, where Jessup is legendary for her wisdom about how to handle thorny parenting problems. She can hold a class spellbound with a story of her creative solution to a recalcitrant child. She acts so realistically in classroom role-plays—perhaps channeling her own rebellious youth—that she can reach parents who are resistant to PEP’s methods and not responsive to lecturing.
She’s also famous for committing herself so completely to the present moment that she loses track of time. That’s where we found ourselves now, as David Jessup asked what time she had to leave for class.
Linda Jessup glanced quickly up at the wall clock. “We have to be gone now,” she said calmly. “Don’t forget your shoes,” her husband reminded her. We were soon hurtling along the road in Jessup’s maroon Nissan Rogue, seeming to hit every pothole possible. A dozen parents were gathering at the Kensington Baptist Church to pour their troubles into Jessup’s sympathetic ear.
WHEN TALKING TO PARENTS ABOUT discipline, I regularly field a range of objections to replacing rewards or punishments with democratically agreed upon limits. One dad told me that time-outs worked with his four-year-old and six-year-old. The kids stopped misbehaving because they were scared of the time-out. I responded that I wouldn’t call that “working.” “Are you really teaching children what they need to survive in life? Or are you teaching them to be sneaky so they don’t get caught?” I asked him. Surely, he was in a parenting class because something needed to be tweaked—could the disrespect and noodling he complained about on the first day of class be evidence of clever children taking revenge for punishment?
He conceded that he’d signed up for parenting education because he was tired of always being the enforcer and wanted quieter, more loving family moments together. “Are time-outs nurturing their relationship with you, or creating distance?” I asked. “And even if they do work in the moment, do you want to succeed by instilling fear in your children?”
So how do you get the kids to do what you want? The painful secret of this book is that you, the adult, truly have to give up control of the outcome. Let your child struggle with life and its real consequences, rather than battle you.
That’s possibly the hardest thing for a parent or teacher to do—to have faith that an inexperienced child will grow in the right direction without us guiding every step. But the lessons of experience stay with a child longer.
Take the situation of a child refusing to carry a coat on a chilly day. If you nag him into bringing a coat—or say, “I told you so,” when he gets cold—he focuses on the annoying parent. If he experiences being cold without a comment from you, he may be more likely to decide to bring a coat next time. Some parents ask: what if he doesn’t care? Then you have to stop caring about the coat too. (And you have to stop caring about what other people—whoever that means in your life—will think of your parenting when they see your coatless child.)
No matter where you are in the parenting journey, you can start using the Apprenticeship Model today. Customize your actions to your child’s age. If your children are under three, your focus will be on connecting with them, encouraging independence, redirecting strong emotions, and beginning the routines that will eventually turn into household jobs. By ages four and five, children become more logical. Defuse tantrums by offering them limited choices; do household work alongside them, and give them as much independence as possible in dressing, bathing, and other daily tasks. Although this is an exhausting phase of parenting, you’re lucky to be able to start with positive messages while your young children are still extremely impressionable.
I came to PEP when our middle child was five, and my heart sank when I learned that by this age children have already formed their beliefs about who they are and where they fit into the family and the world. Maddie was often in a power struggle with us because her frequent mistaken goal was to belong by being the boss. It was our fault—both Brian and I are control freaks at heart, so we imparted the message to her that power is valuable.
But starting later, when your children are older, doesn’t mean the cause is lost. Ages six to eleven present many opportunities to engage children in problem-solving, coach them through emotional struggles, and enlist them in cooking and cleaning while they still think it’s fun to work alongside you. With their greater capacity, you will find that their help is actually useful—unlike the contributions of younger children, whose assistance takes more supervision and time than if you had done the work yourself. This is also the prime time to make sure your kids master all the elements of self-care, from bathing and dressing to organizing and caring for their belongings. If they’re overwhelmed by the quantity of clothes or toys they need to tidy, give some of it away. They may simply own too many things.
Ages twelve through eighteen are often seen as a more challenging time for parenting, as children focus more on their peers and less on their parents and seek independence in a way we may misinterpret as rebellion. But in a sense, this is your last chance to build a strong relationship with your children before they venture beyond your orbit. Seize it. With teenagers, the key is to respect their privacy and independent identity, being very clear about your expectations and the consequences for breaking family rules. Think of your growing teens as being surrounded by a set of limits and family agreements, with the boundary expanding as soon as they show they are able by accepting greater responsibility. Instead of looking for ways to constrain them because you fear they’re not ready, look for ways they can demonstrate responsibility and increase their freedom. Remember to focus on your relationships with your teens as well. Don’t be dissuaded if they sneer or seem dismissive of your opinion; keep reaching out. They still want to be asked for hugs and special time together, even if they accept these ways of connecting only rarely.
At every age, remember always to take a long-term view. It may seem crucial to solve today’s bedtime drama or ensure that the math test goes well. But the lessons of responsibility, accountability, and organization that your child could learn today are ultimately more important than one night’s sleep or a single grade. We have a bias toward action in our culture, but in many scenarios, wise parents simply do nothing. Let things unfold and don’t be afraid of a messy outcome. Like Niamh Grant, you may find that you need to leave the room, or house, to escape your impulse to intervene. Take note of what works and persevere. Just as your kids are, you are learning self-control and new patterns of behavior. Your patience in the moment will pay off in the end.
6
Connection
MADDIE DASHED AWAY FROM ME on a crowded New York City sidewalk. I grabbed Ava’s hand and speed-walked to catch up with Maddie. We dodged a hipster college student in line for the food truck. Maddie’s dark mop of hair came into view.
I grabbed her shoulder.
“Maddie, let’s get some food,” I said. “We’ll all feel better after lunch.”
“I’m not hungry,” she snapped at me. She pulled her body out of reach.
“Look, there’s a Chinese dumpling food truck,” I said, relieved that she’d stopped running.
Anger had sometimes sent Maddie stalking away from the family, out of sight even on unfamiliar city streets. Now she stood a safe distance away from me, face knotted in a scowl.
Ava and I ordered three different kinds of dumplings and noodles. We perched on a nearby bench. Ava devoured the food. I picked at the cheap, doughy noodles. Maddie sat with us, but spurned the food. I urged her to eat. It was the spring of 2016, when she was twelve years old and Ava was nine. We’d just left the Developmental Affective Neuroscience Lab at Columbia University, where Nim Tottenham, an associate psychology professor, attaches electrodes to mothers and their children, measures their saliva, and scans their brains to assess their emotional connection.
I didn’t need a scientist to evaluate my connection to Maddie right now. Any of the random passersby looking at her rigid back and clamped-shut mouth could have seen that it was strained.
Sweat dotted my hairline, from the humid air and the fast walk. And perhaps also because my plans for the weekend—for reporting this section of the book—had just fallen apart.
THE DAY HAD STARTED SO well.
I’d brought the kids to New York City on their spring break to see my brother and also to visit Tottenham’s lab. Her research builds on decades of studies that have found that maternal neglect harms growing children by asking the opposite question: how does a healthy, nurturing relationship affect the brain? They were studying how children learn from their mothers’ responses and how mothers’ physiology affects their children’s heartbeat and stress levels. To help them in that effort, Ava and I had signed up to have our parent-child bond judged by an fMRI machine and a battery of psychological tests.
The Good News About Bad Behavior Page 11
