The New Dare to Discipline

by James Dobson

  The best policy is to provide your children with many interesting books and materials, read to them and answer their questions. Then let nature take its unobstructed course.

  Q Should school children be required to wear clothes which they dislike?

  A Generally not. Children are very concerned about the threat of being laughed at by their friends and will sometimes go to great lengths to avoid that possibility. Conformity is fueled by the fear of ridicule. Teens, particularly, seem to feel, “The group can’t laugh at me if I am identical to them.” From this perspective, it’s unwise to make a child endure unnecessary social humiliation. Children should be allowed to select their own clothes, within certain limits of the budget and good taste.

  Q Do slow learners and mentally retarded children have the same needs for esteem that others have?

  A As I have explained elsewhere, I sometimes wish they didn’t, but their needs are no different. During a portion of my early psychology training at Lanternman State Hospital in Pomona, California, I was impressed by the vast need for love shown by some of the most retarded patients. There were times when I would step into the door of a children’s ward and forty or more severely retarded youngsters would rush toward me screaming, “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” They would push and shove around my legs with their arms held up, making it difficult to avoid falling. Their deep longing to be loved simply couldn’t be satisfied in the group experiences of hospital life, despite the exceptionally high quality of care at Lanternman.5

  The need for esteem has led me to favor a current trend in education, whereby borderline mentally retarded children are given special assistance in their regular classrooms without segregating them in special classes. The stigma of being a “retard,” as they call themselves, is no less insulting for a ten-year- old than it would be for you or me.

  NINE

  The Barriers

  to Learning,

  Part 2

  As we saw in the previous chapter, millions of children fall short of the standards expected of them in school, and thereby wind up as “academic casualties.” These youngsters can be grouped into three general categories, including late bloomers and slow learners. In this chapter I will describe the unique characteristics of the third group:

  THE UNDERACHIEVER

  The underachiever is a student who is unsuccessful in school despite his ability to do the work. He may have an IQ of 120 or better, yet earn D’s and F’s on his report card. In recent years, underachievers have attained a rather high profile, thanks to Bart Simpson’s self-proclaimed “UNDERACHIEVER, AND PROUD OF IT!” Despite this dubious publicity, underachievers are less understood (and more numerous) than either slow learners or late bloomers.

  The apparent confusion about this group is related to the fact that two specific qualities are necessary to produce academic excellence, the second of which is often overlooked. First, intellectual ability must be there. But mental capacity is insufficient by itself. Self-discipline is also required. An able child may or may not have the self-control necessary to bear down day after day on something he considers painful and difficult.

  Intelligence and self-discipline are frequently not correlated. A child often has one without the other. Occasionally, an untalented child will struggle to achieve above his expected level. This phenomenon is called overachievement. The opposite combination, known as underachievement, is much more common. It is typified by the child who has considerable intellectual potential but insists on wasting it.

  It is apparent that underachievers are handled in a way that compounds their problem. This is because, as indicated in chapter 7, we often fail to acknowledge that learning requires the hardest kind of effort. Examine for a moment what is required of a high school student in a daily homework assignment. He must understand what the teacher wants, including page numbers and other details. He must remember to bring home the right book. He must turn off the television set and ignore the phone in the evening. He must concentrate on the task long enough to do it correctly. He must take the finished product back to class the following day and turn it in. He must remember what he learned until the next test. Lastly, he must complete these homework assignments more than once or twice; they must be done repeatedly throughout the year.

  This kind of performance requires more than intelligence. The fact that a child has a good vocabulary and can piece together various manipulative puzzles does not mean he can push himself week after week, year after year. Some children succeed through the elementary school years, but give up later. In fact, it has been estimated that 75 percent of all students experience an academic slump sometime between the seventh and the tenth grades. Despite this common occurrence, neither the school nor the home is usually prepared to deal with it.

  The typical parent reacts one of three ways to their underachieving child:

  The first reaction is treating the problem as though it resulted from sheer stubbornness. Thus, parents may take away the bicycle for six months, ground the youngster until spring, or tear into his personhood and position in the family. Assuming the accuracy of my premise (that the behavior results from an understandable, childish lack of self-control), this reaction will not make consistent bookwork any likelier. Under these conditions, school takes on the blue hue of threat, which hardly makes the youngster more diligent.

  Parents who become angry about underachievement in their child might also find studying difficult if they were suddenly thrust back in school. Resistance to mental exercise is considered natural in a mature adult but in an immature child it is assumed to reflect stubbornness.

  The second approach is to offer the child a long-range bribe: a new bicycle in a couple of years or a hunting trip next fall. These delayed offers are also ineffective for reasons outlined in a previous chapter. Postponed reinforcement is tantamount to no reinforcement.

  The third parental reaction is to say, “He’s got to learn responsibility sometime! I can’t always be there to help—so it’s his problem.”

  If parents seem unrealistic in handling the difficulty, some schools may not be any more helpful. Teachers and counselors sometimes tell parents, “Don’t worry about it. Johnny will outgrow the problem.” That’s the biggest falsehood of the year. Johnny usually doesn’t outgrow the problem—gross underachievement in the elementary years tends to be rather persistent. Furthermore, I’ve observed that most underachievers are lifelong “messies.” They are often sloppy and disorganized in everything they do. It is a persistent trait that goes cross-grain to what is needed in the classroom.

  Over the years I have dealt with more than five hundred underachievers and have concluded that there are only two functional solutions to this syndrome. The first is certainly no panacea: Parents can become so involved in the schoolwork that the child has no choice but to do the job. This is possible only if the school takes the time to communicate assignments and progress to the parents, because Junior certainly won’t carry the message! Adolescents, particularly, will confound the communication between school and home as much as possible.

  In one of the high schools where I served, for example, the students had a twenty-minute homeroom experience each day. This period was used for council meetings, announcements, and related matters. Very little opportunity for studying occurred there, yet each day hundreds of parents were told that all the homework was finished during that session. The naive parents were led to believe that homeroom was a lengthy block of concentrated effort. Parents must know what goes on in school if they want to influence their child’s academic responsibilities.

  Also, the parents should provide support in areas where pure self-discipline is needed. The evening study period should be highly structured—routine hours and a minimum of interferences. The parent must know what was assigned and how the finished product should look. Ongoing research by the Center for the Study of the Family, Children, and Youth at Stanford University is finding that one method of helping the underachiever that results in a sustained impro
vement in grades is parental involvement. When Mom and Dad offer regular encouragement, praise for a job well done, and meaningful assistance, grades tend to go up.1

  I must hasten to say that this can be quite difficult. Intense parental involvement can rarely be sustained for more than a week or two, because many moms and dads don’t have the required self-discipline themselves. There must be a way to supplement their effort, and I believe there is.

  The underachiever often thrives under a system of immediate reinforcement, as described previously. If the child is not challenged by the rewards and motivators given at school, he’ll need additional incentives. These positive reinforcements should be based on definite, reachable goals. Further, the payoff should be applied to small units of behavior. Instead of rewarding the child for earning an “A” in English at the end of the semester, he should be given a dime or quarter for each math problem accurately computed.

  “Bribery!” some readers will charge.

  “Who cares?” is my reply, if it puts the child to work.

  The use of immediate reinforcement serves the same function as a starter on a car. You can’t drive very far with it, but it gets the engine going much easier than pushing. For the idealist who objects to using this extrinsic motivation, I would ask: “What alternative do we have, other than to ‘let the child grow out of his problem’?”

  Several examples may illustrate the specific application of reinforcement within the school setting. One of the most successful uses of this technique occurred with a classic underachiever named Billy, who was repeating second grade. His motivation had been assassinated by early failures, and he did nothing in school. Furthermore, his younger sister was also in second grade, having been promoted the same year Billy was held back. And wouldn’t you know, she was an academic whiz while Billy was mired in intellectual despair.

  After talking with his mother, we agreed upon a motivation system to be implemented at home. On the basis of our conference, Billy’s mother quickly constructed the following chart:

  For each five minutes Billy spent working on his weekly spelling words with a parent, he got to color in a bar on the chart. When all bars were colored, he would receive a new bicycle seat. He also colored a bar for each ten minutes spent working on arithmetic flash cards. Fifty bars would earn him a bowling trip with his father. Billy’s mother considered reading

  to be his greatest problem. Thus, reading provided the pathway to a day at the amusement park (in this case, Disneyland). As the biggest prize, it naturally took longer to earn (one bar was colored for each fifteen minutes of reading).

  By staggering the reinforcement, one pleasant reward could be earned quickly, another soon after, and a grand prize waited at the end. Billy quickly caught the excitement of the game. He rushed home after school and went to work with his mother. Whereas she was previously unable to make him open a book, he suddenly wanted to “study” throughout the evening. The reinforcement system worked so well that it had an unexpected consequence. Billy’s mother called me the following week to complain about not being able to get her work done when Billy was at home!

  After a while, a strange thing began to happen. Billy began to learn, though that was not his intent. He spelled all his words correctly on the weekly test for the first time, and enjoyed the feeling of success that followed. When the class was discussing arithmetic he knew the answers, and waved his hand for a chance to prove his knowledge. His reading improved noticeably, and his teacher moved him out of the slow reading group. Without meaning to do so, Billy discovered the joy of learning. The vicious cycle of failure had been broken.

  It would be wrong to imply that all learning problems can be eliminated as easily and successfully as Billy’s. Some underachievers are “hard-core” and nothing will shake them loose. Yet reinforcement offers the best possibility for improvement. This system has been employed throughout the world, often with remarkable results.

  In New York City, for example, it was used to help many delinquent youth who couldn’t read. The young rebels, who would have laughed off a direct offer to teach them to read, had to be enticed via the back door. That’s exactly what happened. Researchers told them, “Look, we’ve got some machines that might be able to teach reading, but we need your help to determine if they work. There’s money involved: we’ll actually pay you for each right answer.” The amount of money was decent for the summer program, and most of the adolescents who accepted the offer learned to read. This, in turn, helped steer them off the street and into the classroom, thereby opening new academic challenges to them.

  A similar system was applied in the Alabama prisons, whereby inmates could earn money by learning new skills and completing instructional courses. The future will bring even wider application of these principles to difficult behavioral problems, including the one of academic underachievement.

  Children and adolescents, like people of all ages, want to be responsible. They want to feel the self-respect and dignity of doing what is right. The ones who fail in school are often the most miserable, but they lack the self-discipline to overcome their own inertia.

  SUMMARY

  In these past two chapters, I have described three great barriers to discipline in the classroom. Of course, there are additional problems which I have not presented in detail. Anything that worries or troubles a child can result in school failure. For example, deep feelings of inadequacy and inferiority can prevent academic concentration. The child who must cope with such emotions has little time for less important matters. Adults who have tried to work or think while awaiting a threatening medical report, such as a lab test for cancer, may understand this mechanism of mental interference.

  Parents and teachers must never underestimate the threats a child associates with school. Regardless of whether or not he verbalizes his fears, he is often aware of many “dangers” which lurk just inside the school gate. That is, other students might laugh at him. He may be ridiculed or criticized by teachers. He could be rejected by members of the opposite sex. He may fail despite his best efforts. These and similar fears can permeate the entire world of a bewildered young student, causing him to act in ways which appear lazy. Thus, the solution to school failure often requires dealing with problems which seem unrelated to classroom work.

  One further thought strikes me as very important at this point. We have discussed three categories of children, those who are late bloomers, slow learners, or underachievers. But how can a parent or teacher know if a child has one of these problems or some other intellectual deficit? The answer in a particular case can only be determined from a complete educational assessment conducted by a person trained, certified, or licensed to evaluate children. In each of the three categories I have described, a test of intelligence (IQ) is necessary to identify a child’s problem. How can we know the underachiever is not a slow learner unless we measure basic intellectual skills? How can we separate the late bloomer from a child with a severe learning deficit without assessing fundamental abilities? The IQ test is an extremely valuable tool in this differentiation.

  Unfortunately, IQ testing has all but disappeared in many school districts. Because these instruments (such as the WISC-R or Stanford Binet) were perceived to be unfair to minorities, their use has come under increasing criticism in recent years. Thus, it is no longer “politically correct” to use them. As a result, parents who desperately need the information previously available from testing in public school settings now have to seek out a psychologist or counselor in private practice who can conduct the evaluation. Those who lack the funds to obtain this expensive assistance, including many minorities, are deprived of the help their children need. I regret the political situation that prevents school districts from evaluating their students with the best tests available.

  But what about minorities? Are standardized IQ tests unfair to African-Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans? I do not think so. It is true that minorities sometimes do more poorly on these tests because their cultu
res do not prepare them for that kind of exam. But read carefully, now: The same cultural factors that affect the test results also affect school performance. Performance on test questions is correlated with classroom work. If we seek a test that does not reflect the impact of an inner-city culture, then it will be useless because it will no longer predict classroom performance.

  Let me say it once more. The purpose of testing is to estimate how well a given child is likely to do in an academic setting. To create an instrument that will not reflect the handicap his culture will place on him, when that culture will definitely handicap him in the classroom, is to play games with “political correctness.”

  If you didn’t understand what I just wrote, please remember this. All children with learning problems, including some minorities, need to be evaluated with standardized tests of intelligence. Until that occurs, we don’t know what the difficulty is and how it should be treated. I say, bring back the IQ test.

  QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

  Q It is my understanding that we forget 80 percent of everything we learn in three months’ time and a higher percentage is forgotten as time passes. Why, then, should we put children through the agony of learning? Why is mental exercise needed if the effort is so inefficient?

  A Your question reflects the viewpoint of the old progressive education theorists. They wanted the school curriculum to be nothing more than “life adjustment.” They placed a low priority on intellectual discipline for the reasons you mentioned. Even some college professors have adopted this “no content” philosophy, as I mentioned in a previous chapter. They reason that the material we learn today may be obsolete tomorrow, so why learn it? I strongly disagree with this approach to education. There are at least five reasons why learning is important, even if we forget much of what we’re taught: