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Is that the reason our children don't care?
By Jef Gazley
It certainly is a cliché that parenting is a tremendously hard job, but it is also true. There are so many different aspects and roles that have to be undertaken. Parents are taxi-cab drivers, doctors, teachers, and caregivers. The amount of care that one has to give is essentially a 24-hour job. There's absolutely no way that a person can be there with a child fully, to interact with them, to teach them and value them while maintaining a balanced life of their own. It simply is an overwhelming job. A parent has to do the best that they can. The most difficult part is that one has to be a whole, independent person if they are going to be a good parent. A good parent really cares about themselves, really wants to be a parent and has enough emotional and financial resources to be a good parent. That is often a rarity.
The chances of most parents being individuated and of having had healthy models for their own parenting are extremely slim. It's a job that people don't get training for. There are very few classes for it and most people only take classes after they've already gotten into trouble with parenting and are ordered to do so by the courts. Or they take the classes if they get divorced. They are required in some states, by law, to make sure that they take parenting classes to help with the children. What would be much more effective, of course, is if parenting were offered in the schools, like other important subjects. It would also be helpful if parents had parents who were loving and giving and truly available for them, because if a parent has infantile, childhood needs that have not been met, they very simply cannot be there for their child to the degree the child will need them.
Many parents don't really know how children think. In some ways, children are very different, and in some ways, they're very similar to adults. Time for a child is extremely different than time for an adult. For a child, a minute feels like an hour, so when they hear, “just a moment,” they're going to interrupt a person in about twenty seconds, if they're lucky. Five seconds is more likely. The child is not misbehaving. They have waited the right amount of time given the time sense of a child. But oftentimes parents feel that the child is being willful or inconsiderate. In other words, they attach adult thinking and adult reality to the child. If they believe it is misbehavior they're going to want to punish it. If they knew that it was just a mistake in perception they would view the problem more as an educational opportunity. They would understand, detach, and teach. Educating a child is the most difficult part of a parent's job.
It is imperative that parents teach their children the difference between personhood and behavior. Up until the age of 12, children are unable to see grey. Children are concrete thinkers and are congenitally only able to think in black and white until the age of 12. Therefore, if they do poorly on a test, they will take that moment in time, or that particular subject they are studying, and will generalize and decide that they are incredibly stupid. That feeling is about personhood, and personhood has to do with shame. If a person views himself or herself as a failure, they believe that their core being is insufficient. They lose heart in their own basic worth as a human being.
One of the parents' most important jobs is to teach the child that poor behavior should elicit guilt and not shame. In this view behavior is something that is changeable. Behavior is flexible. For example, if a person is a good golfer, most days he or she will play a decent game. But for any particular game he or she would be totally capable of playing a horrible game, or playing much better than usual. Adults, for the most part, know that the only way to really assess a particular level of expertise is over a 20-year span and 80 per cent of the time. That'll give a rough idea of how skilled that person is in golf or any other activity, and one might, at that point, be able to talk about a general characteristic. But the day-to-day fluctuations are simply about behavior. In our society, unfortunately, we mix up the words guilt and shame. Guilt is used in place of shame. Guilt is actually a good thing. Guilt is felt when a mistake is viewed as behavior. Mistakes are viewed as normal in this schema and do not define the individual. The mistake should be taken seriously, apologized for and changed, but shame is something that never goes away. If a person feels defective in some way, they will never be able to overcome it, but the tendency will be to try. The way people try is to become shameless, god-like, and perfect. That leads to heartache and failure.
A corollary of this problem is there's no real sense of history for a child. Up until the age of twelve, now means everything. So if a parent takes a child to a movie, the child is going to come out of the movie and be very grateful. However, if they want some ice cream and the parent tells them they can't have it right now, that they need to go home and eat, and maybe have a dessert later, what they'll often hear from the child is, “I hate you. You never do anything for me.” It is a very black/white statement, an all-inclusive statement, and very often it confuses the parent completely. They often view the child as being spoiled or misbehaving.
The rules of our society are very black and white themselves. We've had a long history of children parenting children and parents really wanting subconsciously to be parented by the kids. I'm not going to go over the dysfunctional family rules in extensive detail because they have been discussed fully in the dysfunctional family section, but I am going to talk about the first three, that I think happen a lot. The first one is to always be perfect. This is totally impossible, and most people would deny intellectually that anyone can be perfect. They would think that a person must be crazy to suggest it. But in reality, what one often sees is a child spilling a glass of milk, and the parent saying, “What did you do that for?” The situation is absurd. It is as if the parent really believes the child is thinking, “Well, I just thought it would be a good day to be yelled at so I decided I'd throw my milk down.” In reality, we act as if things should be perfect. We know better, but day to day, we don't often show it.
The second rule in dysfunctional families is to always be in control, and not only of ourselves, but of other people as well. It's totally impossible to be in control of other people. It's almost impossible to be in control of ourselves a good amount of the time. The third rule is that if a person does make a mistake, somebody needs to be blamed in a very shame-bound way. What that leads to is the belief that everyone else is fine, and that somehow the family member is greatly disturbed. If a person feels that way, he or she will tend to keep those thoughts to himself or herself. This creates a wall where one person is inside, the other person is outside, and the person on the outside is probably feeling exactly the same way but no one knows it. So everyone walks around believing that everyone else is more capable or more valuable than they are themselves. It perpetuates grandiose thinking and behavior; that somehow people can be more than just human. In order to be an effective parent, it is essential to understand how children see things. When a parent has taken care of their own needs, they will tend to see things in a more realistic fashion. To be a good parent it is essential to reject these crazy rules.
It's also important to realize that children need to belong, that the first desire that human beings have is to belong and to be a part of humanity. Therefore, if a child is allowed to be included, even with work, they will usually jump at the chance. This might sound strange to parents of a 10-year-old or a 13-year-old, but remember how kids were when they were three or four, and how much they were getting underfoot trying to help with the dishes, trying to copy what dad was doing with the hammer; attempting to pick up things to give them to the parent, or to wipe off the table.
Children practice at being adults. They practice being capable and competent, and they ask to be included, and they ask to help. Only when a child becomes disillusioned, with their parents or their own ability, will they tend to turn from the constructive side of life, and either pull inside and do very little at all, or to actively identify with the negative side of life. If a person is bad or incompetent, they can at least be the best incompetent person they can be. This is the Jesse James complex. If a parent expects realistic goals from a child, if they are patient and detached, allows them to help, and understands what children are capable of and how they think, the tendency is that the child will stay very giving, warm, and cooperative and will develop in a very healthy manner. |
| Is that the reason our children don't care? |
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I've mentioned many differences between children and adults, but there are many areas where kids are also very much like adults. Just like adults they are deserving of respect, they are able to think constructively and to do a lot more than adults give them credit for. Often times, parents act as if children wouldn't understand. If a parent is talking to their spouse, they tend to lower their voice and whisper acting as if the child is not going to hear them, even if they're sitting right next to the parent. If they spell a word out the child has many times already learned that word. Parents often act like the kids are invisible.
In this country, during the early 1950's, many physicians didn't believe that kids could feel much pain, so they did not give pain medication after operations. They assumed that children were resilient and didn't feel the same sense of pain that adults do. That's absolutely absurd! Although there are many differences between children and adults, there are many more similarities, and very often children are not treated with the same respect that adults are. In order to be an effective parent it is important to have an accurate picture of how children and adults perceive their world and the differences in how they think. This is something that many parents are unable to do. They often expect too much from their kids and are confused by their behavior. This leads them to take things too personally and feel they must be doing something wrong because the child is not able to comply with their wishes. They then take “misbehavior” too personally and overreact themselves. Often after they have raised one or two children they realize these limitations, feel better about their own skills and then relax. This allows them to take what their children do less seriously and they become better parents. This is often why grandparents seem to parent better than a child's own parents.
Grandparents tend to take what children do less personally. They do not seem to believe it is a reflection on them. These same grandparents could have been atrocious parents. They are often better at parenting now because they've already done it once, and they've proven something to themselves. They've realized that kids are simply to be enjoyed and they try to teach them the best they can. What the child does is not a reflection on them. It doesn't say whether or not one is a good parent if the child does something wrong or right.
The following is a list of characteristics of good parenting and effective disciplinary techniques, but it is more than just disciplinary techniques. It is more than just discipline. It is really a way of being. It's important to realize that disciplining a child is setting healthy limits and teaching. This is an important task of parenting. The other part of parenting is showing attention, encouragement, and love. They go hand in hand. One without the other is a skewed system that will lead to either children feeling unloved or unruly children.
Characteristics of Good Parenting
1. Give only one warning before issuing a consequence.
I use the word consequence for a particular reason. A punishment has to do with getting back at, or exacting a pound of flesh when some mistake has been made. A consequence is simply something that happens, a limit, or a result of one's behavior. A consequence ties reality together and that helps children learn. If parenting is supposed to be about loving, teaching, and setting limits, giving them consequences rather than punishment would be appropriate. If a parent gives only one warning, it says to a child that the parent is a person of their word. They are consistent, mean what they say, and they are someone they can count on. If a parent gives more than one warning, what they've really done is told the child that more chances are to come; that they've got a little bit more room to wait, kind of like a snooze alarm. The child knows that and so they push the limits, and then parents feel aggravated, but it was really a breakdown in parenting. In most cases, children's misbehavior is going to be exactly that. It's more about a breakdown of effective parenting than a bad child or a disturbed child.
2. Make sure the consequences are natural and logical for the given situation.
Natural consequences make sense and they come right out of the actions themselves. If a person puts their hand on a hot stove it will be burned, and therefore, they will learn not to put their hand there again. But if somebody charged a person $50 for trying to put their hand on a hot stove the person will feel things are unfair and be tempted to put it on the stove again. The consequence makes no logical sense. It's difficult at times to find the logical consequence, but if parents really look hard enough they should be able to find it.
3. Be consistent and follow through on all consequences given.
If one is inconsistent as a parent, the child becomes confused, and if the child becomes confused, they get erratic, don't know where limits are, and will actually push the limits all the more in an effort to find some sense of safety. Unfortunately, most parents often think that again, it's an example of misbehavior. Only if children have lost hope and have been mistreated, do they get to the point where they actually fight back and try to hurt.
4. Keep a calm, business-like tone to your voice.
This tip is a whole lot easier to say than to do. It's a hallmark of good parenting. One can only do that if they know that they're separate from the child. If they feel that the child is a reflection on them, if they feel their own shame because of difficulty with their own upbringing, then they're going to over-react. In other words, the parent is going to act child-like, and the child will not take the parent seriously. If the parent is calm, and realizes that the behavior is just about a child growing and learning, then the parent will not overreact.
There is another good reason to keep the voice calm. If a young person sees an older person get tremendously upset, that makes them feel very powerful. They don't really connect that they are hurting the older person. All they know is that they were able to get an adult to act like a kid, and that is marvelous to them. If a parent keeps detached, and knows that children don't behave because that's the nature of being a child, then the parent can calmly tell them what they want done. If the parent gets hung up on controlling the behavior and getting their first desire, then there will be trouble. The parent should feel content with getting their second wish, and the second wish is always the teaching consequence.
5. Stay detached and don't take the misbehavior personally.
Usually children are just testing limits, which is how they learn. They are not really challenging the parent. This is one of the most common mistakes that parents make. When they take things personally they often drop down to the level of the child in their actions. It often degenerates into a power struggle. Only children win power struggles because once a parent acts childlike they lose their credibility.
6. Don't argue or discuss the issue with the child until after the consequence. Then reinforce and welcome the child back from the consequence with encouragement, and discuss what took place.
Parents often feel more comfortable with the encouragement and loving part of the job. They want to discuss things and get a logical adult-to-adult decision with their children. Kids are not capable of that when they're young. After the consequence is given, then reinforcing and welcoming the child back from the consequence makes sense, and discussing what happened and why it happened would make sense as well.
This is applicable for rules that have already been talked about within the family. If it's a new situation, one in which the child would not understand what was happening then a parent might want to talk with the child. But if they are talking back, or making a mistake that is against the rules that they know about, the parent should rely on immediate consequences to help the child learn. If the child doesn't sit still and eat in a polite manner at the dinner table, then they simply shouldn't be allowed to finish that meal. They should go to their room. It's not going to kill them. They'll quickly make the connection between the behavior and consequence. |
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7. Provide a quiet place for the time out, and isolate them from other family members.
Ignore the child's verbalizations while they are in time out. (The time only starts after they are quiet and starts over if the child speaks or comes out of the room). The length of the time out should be age-appropriate: 1 minute for each age of the child. A parent needs to ignore the child's verbalizations while they are in time out, and the time out should only start after they're quiet. If a parent has to hit or spank a child, it's a breakdown in parenting, especially if a parent hits with anger. It does not need to happen if one is an effective parent. A parent should take things calmly, and do things in a business-like tone. They need to be consistent, act early enough so the behavior does not escalate, and they will not need to resort to physical violence. If a parent does resort to physical violence, a child is usually going to forget about whatever infraction they have committed, and focus on how badly they are being treated. If a parent treats a child unfairly they will fight. In a power struggle, the parent will always lose, because a child can act more child-like than an adult for a longer period of time. They will not stop.
The time out needs to be in absolute isolation. Time out simply means that the child is going to take a little bit of time by themselves, taking them away from the family society, and giving them a chance to calm down. It's an effective way to do it. The time out shouldn't start until after the child is quiet, and then anything that's said should be ignored. Very often parents will try to come in and negotiate, or yell at the child to get them to stop. All that does is reinforce to the child that the parent is still involved, and one wants to take away that involvement. Isolation is painful enough for a child. A parent wants to make sure that the length of time is age appropriate. I would suggest 1 minute for every age of the child. Time out provides a place for a child to learn how to self-calm, not to punish a child once he or she is already calm.
Parents should make sure that whatever consequence is used is small enough in nature that if the child repeats the misbehavior again, time can get tacked on or doubled, so the child basically begins to learn that a parent means business. If the parent starts with a gigantic consequence or one that is not possible such as, “You're grounded for the rest of your life,” the child is not going to take it seriously, there's nowhere for the parent to go, and the parent has painted themselves into a corner. Usually, when someone makes an inappropriate suggestion for a consequence, it means that they are out of control themselves.
8. Work together as parents.
If you disagree with a particular consequence, try waiting until after the incident to discuss it with your partner, and try not to take suggestions as a personal affront.
Very often, I see one parent who plays good cop and another who plays bad cop, and what they're really trying to do is balance each other out. In reality, one parent is probably much more comfortable with the encouragement and affection part of parenting, and another sees the discipline and the limit setting as the more important. If parents are split, they will try to balance each other by moving further out into a skewed position. So if one parent feels that the other parent is being too lenient, they'll become more rigid. The more lenient parent will see that rigidity and they will take an even more tolerant position. Eventually, there is no meeting in the middle, and the child will see and manipulate that split easily. This is not misbehavior. The child learns how to get their way and that is what they're supposed to do. Only later will they develop a sophisticated conscience.
9. Use praise and encouragement often, but not excessively.
Men often seem to specialize in limits and discipline, which is an important part of parenting, but encouragement and affection are equally beneficial. However, if a person uses praise too much, it begins to mean nothing to the child.
10. Remember that up to the age of twelve, children see things as black and white and are unable to understand exceptions to the rule. If you exhibit inconsistency, they will believe they have been lied to.
One has to explain exceptions patiently to the child and not expect too much. If a parent exhibits inconsistency, the child will tend to believe that they've been lied to, and the parent then has a difficult job of persuading them that there are exceptions. It's something that children will understand later in their development.
11. Keep in mind that children personalize everything!
They are unable to see their mistakes are only about behavior. Instead, they will view it as if their personhood is bad, and they are, therefore, not good enough. This will produce shame. Reiterate that mistakes are about behavior, not personhood. Children are unable to make this connection, therefore it has to be taught to them patiently.
12. Offer the child numerous opportunities to help with tasks that the parent is involved in.
Children love to belong, and to feel useful, especially when very young. They often become discouraged if told they are too young to be helpful. When this occurs, the child often becomes rebellious.
13. Remember that children have a different sense of time than adults do.
To them, one minute is 'an hour.' Therefore, if you tell the child you will be back to talk with them in a minute and they begin to bother you in 10 seconds they are really complying with what you have asked.
14. Sometimes the best parenting is the 'least' active.
Think about intervention and whether it is needed, or not. Children often resolve their difficulties with each other unless a caretaker tries to fix or control it. Interference could actually cause children to spend the rest of the day misbehaving in order to 'finish the fight.'
Parents often try too hard. It appears that they're more worried about how they look to other people and if they're doing a good job. Therefore, they try to manage every little bit of behavior. Parents need to really pick and choose their battles. Most often when they let children do things by themselves, or trust to the natural consequences to teach, things go better. |
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When I was doing my graduate work at the University of Oregon , they had a wonderful family studies program there. A particular instructor would take over an elementary school one Saturday a month, and he would invite everyone from Eugene , Oregon to come. They could bring their children and the kids would be looked after by the counseling students. The parents could have either marital therapy or family therapy free as long as the counselors were able to observe and to watch. The teacher, Ray Lowe, would take half of the counselors, put them up in the bleachers, and then he'd watch the interaction with the kids and the other half of the counselors down in the orchestra pit.
Invariably, one of the kids would come up and push another kid. Ray would point out to the counselors to watch how the counselors in the pit were going to respond. Before the other kid had a chance to push back, there were at least three counselors all over them, because counselors love to help and they want to be involved. For the rest of the afternoon, those kids would try to finish their fight. The counselors would have to get involved over and over again to no avail. If the counselors did not get involved, didn't try to do any kind of interaction, the other kid might push one more time, and then the fight would be over. The only time parents need to get involved is if it is really dangerous. It is helpful for children to try to take care of their problems themselves, and for the most part they can do it.
15. Be careful to discipline only when really necessary.
Oftentimes, parents try to control their children because they (themselves) are responding to feelings that are coming from their own history and that do not match the present situation. An example would be when parents are feeling overly anxious by their child's behavior, when, in reality, most people would not view their actions as misbehavior.
This reinforces what I said at the very beginning of this section, which is that very often any unresolved issues out of childhood are brought back up again with the parents own kids, especially when they are relatively close to the same age that the event occurred in the parents' lives. It's part of a repetition compulsion that is talked about more in the Love Addiction and Dysfunctional Family sections. It's uncanny the way that this dynamic tends to happen.
It is the most dramatic and easiest to understand if a person was abused physically as a child. The overwhelming tendency is for them to abuse someone else, or to get abused over and over, and very often they take that abuse out on their kids, when they're the same age as it occurred in their lives. It isn't deliberate, it just tends to happen naturally, but it is certainly a parent's job to figure that out and to stop it. If a parent feels overwhelmed, if a situation is creating too much emotion, they need to look at the idea that they might be reacting partly from history. They need to try to figure out what that history is, and fix themselves rather than fix the child.
16. View discipline as teaching and caring because that is what it is.
There is no need to feel guilty for helping your child. Being firm with a child is absolutely fine. It's part of a parent's job.
There are a couple of other things I want to discuss and one of them is addressed more fully in the Dysfunctional Families section. There is a tendency for parents to get involved in what's called inverted parenting. If a parent wasn't parented as a child, they will have a tendency to want other people to parent them. A good example occurred about ten years ago, when two girls came into my office, about fifteen or sixteen years old. They came in separately. They were both pregnant and they both wanted to have their kids, but they did not want the father involved. When I asked them why they wanted to have kids, they gave me the same answer, “I always wanted to have somebody there who will love me no matter what.” That's a horrible reason to get a dog, let alone have a child. Parenting is supposed to be about giving, not about getting. Getting is just a by-product of it. It's one of the perks.
Any kind of inverted parenting will lead to parentified children. Children who are parentified take care of their parents emotionally. They often are treated by the parents as equals. Then they are relegated to the child position again. It is very confusing to them. The child is given information that is inappropriate, leaned on too heavily emotionally, and what that tends to do is make the child feel not good enough and at the same time, as if they're too good. They develop a sense of shame on the one hand, and grandiosity on the other. This is a subtle form of sexual abuse. It is inappropriate to talk about mommy's little boy, daddy's little girl. Children need to be treated with respect and they need to be treated as children.
The last thing I want to talk about is what is called the symptom bearer in therapy. The symptom bearer is someone who's brought in, usually a youngster, who is perceived as the problem by the family. This is a child who is not going to school regularly or a child who is depressed. What a family systems therapist is going to do is try to figure out why this child is coming in alone, because usually, although not always, a problem with a child is just a symptom of a dysfunctional family system, and that simply means a family that is not doing as well as it could. Something is not working. Some therapists, unfortunately, tend to buy the idea that the child is the problem. Most often, it's a lot more complicated than that. This problem is also closely related to the idea of alliances. Very often, one parent will align themselves with one of the children, the other parent will align themselves with the other, and they'll cause a split family situation that is very damaging for the children and very damaging for the entire family. Sometimes one child is isolated as the problem in these types of families.
In conclusion I would suggest that parents try to be as detached and consistent as possible while disciplining a child. Parents should try to focus on the reasons that they had the child, and not work too hard on the job itself. Although parenting is a daunting task, most parents make it much harder than it has to be by focusing too much on how they are performing it than remembering how much they love their children and why they had them in the first place. It is and should be a joy. |
