connections between behavior and outcome, and often do not have to do much more.
Turning Intentions Into Actions
The Intentional Parent takes a “broad stroke” approach to teaching you the essentials of leadership parenting. For one thing, it is impossible to “micro manage” someone else’s family without knowing a lot more than I can assume in this book. Second, I try to 45
discourage a “cookbook” philosophy with parenting issues. I would prefer to encourage “philosophy” over “methodology,” but by the same token I will always tell parents that learning a reliable set of concepts will get you most of the way through many difficult parenting experiences.
In this section the “broad stroke” I am prioritizing is teaching children the relationship between behavior and outcome. This is important at every developmental age and station in a child’s life. It becomes super important during the teen years when often all you can do is point out the natural consequences of poor behavioral choices.
Infants come “pre-programmed” to experience the cause and effect nature of their interactions between themselves and the sur-
rounding environment. They “connect” their actions with the consequences of their actions, favoring the successful connections and avoiding repetition of the unsuccessful ones. The natural behavior of infants is circular and repetitive and we have all watched infants trying to get their hand or foot into their mouths, shake a rattle, and otherwise grapple with the demands of their environment. They do not do it, “just once,” they do it over and over again, “stamping” the behavior into their developing nervous systems.
That might work within the safety and controlled nature of the home environment (and even that can be a challenge when we realize how important it is to “baby-proof”), but as our options for interacting with the environment expand, so does the range of actions and potential consequences. As children become more psychologically and intellectually complex, the consequences of their actions (lying, cheating, selfishness, manipulative behavior) also become much more complex, because the social consequences of behavior become more complex.
Explorations into the world of cause and effect form the foundations for learning good judgement which, in turn gives us the opportunity to learn about social success and failure. While consequences for poor judgement can be harsh in the “real world,” parents need to pay close attention to how to deliver consequences in the “family world.”
It is always better for parents to work and act on the positive side of behavior and we will be doing that in the next chapter, but when we talk about imposing consequences we are usually referring to the interactions parents have with children about the negative aspects of their children’s behavior.
Here is a list that covers most of the major “behavioral transgressions” children test their parents leadership with:
• active opposition
46
• passive opposition
• dishonesty
• overindulgence
• risk taking
• failure to prepare (as in not getting ready, not doing homework, not studying, etc.)
• transgressions of civility
• opportunism
• laziness
Before we go any further, let me point out that all of these misbehaviors are completely normal ways that kids test their parents authority. Breakdowns in leadership happen when children’s stubborn temperaments are far outside the normal range, and when
the limits of a parent’s tolerance are exceeded, and what I mean by that is when a parent’s patience is exhausted, which is normal and which happens (a lot) with every parent and child.
Parental patience is very much like a child’s tendency to be oppositional. Parents have different capacities to be patient. So, obviously, the worst parent-child combination of traits is the parent with limited patience and the child with endless stubbornness.
This results in the kind of head-butting that makes every day difficult for both the parent and the child. Leadership is challenged many times a day, every day. That is why a common point in every parenting strategy is to choose your arguments carefully.
Long term problems occur when leadership is challenged and the leader fails to restore what should be the balance of power in the family structure. Consider this anecdote from my practice:
Mark had always been a difficult child. As an infant he was hard to soothe. As he grew older he was impatient, demanding, and very aggressive to his parents -- but he also had a very warm side. He could be cuddly, polite (to the point that almost all of the parents of the children he played with mentioned that to his parents) and very helpful around the house. Mark was the classic case of the boy who, “when he was good he was very, very good, but when he was bad, he was horrid.” I decided that I would do 47
an eight hour observation of Mark (he was nine at the time) at home with his parents and discovered that Mark’s moods and behavior determined the level of stress in the household. When Mark was demanding, his parents first response was to try to figure out a way to yield to his demands. When his demand was impossible, (he asked to be taken out to buy a video game thirty minutes before dinner), they would try a “compromise.” Saying “no,” was not an option because they feared his wrath which included cursing at them, throwing objects, breaking furniture, etc. My main piece of advice to the parents was to “lay down the law,” and then let him throw whatever fit he chose. Then wait until Mark wanted something else. Then inform him that because of the fit he threw it would not be possible for them to do what he asked. If he threw another fit, the natural consequence would be to point out that privileges and “extras” could not be considered until his behavior changed. Havoc ensued for the next two weeks and then the new leadership fell into place.
Mark’s moods and demands were the authoritative force in the household. His parents had given him so much authority that he became insulted when they would not yield to his (often outrageous and inconsiderate) demands. I only needed to teach these two simple facts to re-balance the power and control issues in their household:
Mark depended on his parents for the things he could not do for himself (like take him to a friends house for a play date).
That Mark determined the outcome of his behavior based on his parents requests for civility and his ability to abide by those requests.
The example above is an example of “natural consequences.” Using natural consequences involves having enough patience to avoid lecturing and threatening. It also involves confidence in the knowledge that your children need you and rely on you and that much of what you do for them is optional. Kids can easily get to the point where they treat their parents as indentured servants -- but that can only happen when parents allow it by abdicating their leadership role. Setting things back in the proper balance takes time and patience, but sticking to your guns works more times than it doesn’t
Timing Makes a Difference
Depending on the nature of your child, the timing of how you express the relationship between behavior and outcome (conse-
quence) can make a difference. The younger a child is (and also the more stubborn a child is) warning about a consequence might not have much of an effect.
48
However, most children whose temperaments show that they can be influenced by parental authority (most five through twelves)
are quite impressed by conversations which point out the relationship between behavior and outcome. You can tell most children things like:
“No video games until after you’ve finished your homework and I check it.”
“If you come home past curfew you are grounded for the next two days.”
“No special privileges if you are aggressive to your sister.”
As long as you stick to the consequences you lay out, the behavior you are looking to mold will occur much of the time (but do not expect perfection as kids test parental limit setting constantly.)
If children do not yield to the relationship between behavior and consequence enough to meet your expectations, delivering the consequence is still a “natural outcome.” The difference between simply delivering a consequence and “laying it out” before the undesirable behavior occurs really depends on whether your kids ignore you when you talk about their behavior. If they do, stop talking about it, and show your child you mean business by acting on their “bad” behavior (there, I said it). Another way of saying this is that if your threats do not deter your kids from behaving badly, don’t threaten, just act.
For whatever it’s worth most parents need to “do less talking and do more doing.” I have seen too many parenting experts extoll the virtues of “counting to three” before taking action. I think parents should simply show kids that there are consequences to their actions. I don’t know of too many bank robbers who are given a count of three to return the money to avoid going to jail.
Make Certain the Consequences are Reasonable and Enforceable
In order for you to be able to accomplish the goal of encouraging better behavior and teaching the relationship between behavior and outcome, the consequences you set forth have to be reasonable and enforceable. If you can’t follow through on the consequences or if you follow through inconsistently, you might encourage your child to be ignore you more frequently in the future.
For instance, if you tell your child that as a result of bad behavior they cannot go to a friend’s party, but then relent because recent behavior was better, you are not teaching your child the value of good judgment. Instead you are teaching that previous consequences can be avoided by better future behavior. “What’s wrong with that,” you might say? It’s not a question of right and wrong, 49
it’s more a question of whether that is a good model of how life works outside the context of the family environment, and good leaders aim to teach kids how to operate better in the real world. If I speed and get a ticket that ticket does not go away if between when I get the ticket and when I pay the fine, I slow it down and obey the speed laws.
Unreasonable consequences do little more than allow you to vent your spleen when your kids are misbehaving, and if you can’t follow through your children will ultimately scoff at your hollow threats. “You won’t go out for a year, after what you have done,” is a tough threat to follow through on, and in the end might make you more miserable than it will make your child attentive to their behavior. Much better to link your consequence to something about to happen in the near future.
Time Out
The term “time out” is a term most parents are familiar with but the practice of giving a time out is poorly understood and therefore poorly utilized. Time out is a consequence, which parents often mistake for a short stay in “home jail.”
Time out is a term derived from behavioral psychology but lots of my colleagues even forget that the term is a shortened version of the term “time out from reinforcement,” which means that one aspect of time out which motivates different behavior is the associa-tion of having been taken out of an environment that is reinforcing. Bottom line is that if your child is being removed from an environment that is chaotic and poorly structured in the first place time out is unlikely to have any direct positive effect on behavior.
Your child might actually seek negative attention and a time out to go to a place where he has more control. Returning to the chaotic environment then only produces more bad behavior.
Time out might improve parenting behavior by disrupting a circumstance which is causing the parent to be overly angry or aggressive. So, a second purpose of time out is to give the parent some time to regroup and regain composure.
Parents frequently ask how long is an acceptable period of time out. That’s very hard to say and often depends on the child. As a rule of thumb I think twenty minutes is a long time out, and I think telling a child to stay in their room “all night” or “all day” can breed resentment and might cause the child to isolate themselves from the family as a means of retaliation. Some parents offer a way out of time out by asking the child to explain WHY what he or she did was wrong. This is a good approach for parents whose children already have insight into their behavior. For children who do not have good insight into WHY their behavior was wrong, you should TELL them why it was wrong, ask them to stay in time out for twenty minutes (or however long is reasonable based on 50
the child and the circumstance) and then give them the opportunity to repeat the “why”, and promise to be more mindful in the future.
Similarly, focusing a child on their intentions, actions and outcomes is a great way to use time out. Ask your child:
What were you thinking?
What could you have done differently
What did you expect to happen? What would have happened if...[ you supply the appropriate behavior ]?
Children will almost never be able to answer the first question. You might have to supply the answer, “Maybe you weren’t thinking enough about the consequences.” Most children can hazard a guess about the second question, but will often shrug their shoulders because they do not want to face the responsibility of having to correct their behavior. When this happens, walk away and say,
“we’ll talk about this more later.” The third question you will always supply information with (for instance, “What do you think would happen if you told the truth about whether you did your homework”?) because that is how you will be teaching your child how to avoid a bad consequence.
So, to reiterate, parents can add an “educational” requirement to time out by incentivizing children to ask for their “release” contingent upon showing insight into their previous behavior. I recommend this technique -- but only for insightful children. I don’t see much of a point in telling a child they can come out of time out if they can say why it is wrong to shave the cat, or beat up a sibling if the child is simply giving the parent what the parent wants to hear without remorse or a promise to change.
It can become a slippery slope for parents at this point. Children often know why their behavior is bad, but continue doing it anyway. I do think it is worth a try to see if it is useful to permitting a child to explain why what they did was wrong, and teaching them if they don’t know. However, I think you have to decide as a parent whether that brings you to a point of diminishing returns with respect to future behavior. This presents a challenge for parents and when children repeatedly defy a parents rule or leadership and show little progress toward behavior change, then it’s time to think about removing privileges as a strategy. If oppositional behavior becomes a long term struggle it might help to consult a child behavior specialist.
51
Time Out Is For Parent’s Too:
It might be that time out works more for the parent than the child, and if so, that is important. Manage your expectations and use more than one technique. Some parents might find it helpful for a child to enter time out, then merely come out when they can be calmer. Also, it can be helpful for children to come out of the time out place with a requirement to stay in a less restrictive but still somewhat limited space in the house. All of these things give parents some time and space too, but don’t turn “time out” into a bat-tleground in and of itself.
Also, parents sometimes find, with children who have very difficult personalities that the child will either trash their time out environment out of spite, or wait for their sentence to pass, come out and wreak havoc in the same or worse manner than before they went in. Suffice it to say that “time out” is not a universal cure for bad behavior.
Finally, remember that if your child will not accept a time out, you can “disconnect” and take a time out. Removing yourself from a situation can be a stress reliever for you. Your best approach here is to ask yourself if being in the same place at the same time as your child is escalating the conflict to a point of one or both of you are totally out of control. If the answer to this question is yes, take a break. Obviously, you cannot do this in every environment. Do not disconnect and take a time out when you are in the car for instance! (Just a little joke there). Mostly, you will employ this at home.
Talk About Good Consequences Too
Finally, you can and should show your child the relationship between good behavior and good outcomes:
I have a part of my business in London, England and I recently heard a proper British mum tell her toddler aged child, “You will get a balloon if you eat the rest of your porridge.” When the mission was accomplished, the balloon was handed over. It was nice to see that incentivizing good behavior works on both sides of the pond! Our next parenting action covers the very misunderstood concept of “rewarding a behavior,” which is just another way of expanding on the topic of providing “positive consequences.”
Summing Up
This chapter highlights the importance of the family leader’s job of helping children make connections between behavior and outcomes (consequences). Your home environment should aim to approximate the “real world” because when kids get old enough to
establish themselves independently that is the only world that counts.
52
If your child has a stubborn, oppositional nature, then talking about consequences will probably provide very little deterrence from bad behavior. The more difficult a child is, the more you will have to do and that often means showing your child that many of the things you do for him or her are optional and do not occur without respect or appreciation. Hence, if talking about consequences fails to work, you must help your child learn that the “natural consequence” of bad behavior is a lack of motivation on your part to provide “the extras” that most parents provide numerous times a day. You are under no obligation to drive, fetch, buy and reward a child with privileges that are returned with negative, demanding and unappreciative behavior from your kids.
When you do apply consequences, make sure you stick to your guns, and do not lay out a consequence that is impossible to deliver or enforce, because it will weaken your family leadership role.
PARENTING ACTION -- REWARDING BEHAVIOR
I was once giving a lecture, talking about the importance of rewarding good behavior when a parent jumped up and said, “I refuse to bribe my child to behave in ways they should behave without any reward but the knowledge they have done the right thing.”
Similarly, when I was in professional school for psychology some thirty years ago, we were taught that people who perceived rewards as bribes should consider what happens every Friday when they are paid for the work they do. Was that a bribe? Now that I am an all grown up psychologist I don’t have to listen to everything I was taught in school, and I can still take exception to the parent who tells me they won’t bribe their children. Here are the reasons, in short form:
First, reinforcing a child’s behavior is not a bribe, because a bribe helps people achieve something that is usually underhanded and immoral. A bribe is an incentive for people to perform bad behaviors for self serving reasons. It is meant to incentivize people to overcome their resistance to doing things they should not do. I can’t think of a single appropriate comparison to the behavior between a parent and a child unless a parent offers their child a lollipop if they would steal a car for them.
Second, when people go to work, there is (or should be) a pre-existing and perfectly understood relationship between work and pay. It is not a bribe, once again, for the reasons I mention in the previous paragraphs. Lack of work provides more of an incentive for your boss to punish you by firing you or threatening to fire you. Punishment is the “opposite” of reward. Punishment would be meant to decrease your slacker behavior at work. I suppose you could make the case that people who work for commission are “incentivized” to work harder for more reward -- and we can capture the importance of the idea of reinforcing a child’s behavior right here, with the word “incentivized.”
53
Bribery, in every connotation of the word is not a good leadership strategy.
Different words, even scientific words can have different meanings in different contexts, especially when we are trying to take terms that were constructed to explain the results of experiments and bring them into the real world. The word “reward,” from a technical point of view, refers to something that increases the probability that a behavior will increase in frequency over time.
Training a dog to sit with bacon treats is an often used example, although scholars still argue over whether this represents a pure reward-based paradigm. In any event, if you want to teach your dog to sit, push his butt down, say “sit” and shove a doggie treat in his mouth. The more you do it, the more your dog will sit when you say “sit” with the expectation of receiving a treat. Many dogs (especially puppies) are so compliant and generous with their behavior that they soon learn to sit without the treat, or they will sit just to get a pat on the head, or they will sit to hear you say “good boy,” or they will sit just out of habit, presumably because they have a history of getting a reward for that behavior.
Professionals have written books suggesting that raising a child is just like raising a puppy -- yeah okay -- it should only be that easy, and that relatively inexpensive. However, I won’t deny that there are elements of the processes of raising a child and raising a puppy that are common to both.
You can reward a child:
• materially with toys, food (not always recommended), money, etc.
• with activities or privileges
• socially, with praise and affection
Giving money, tokens, stars, toys, presents, etc. are examples of material rewards. “You do this -- you earn that,” (where that is a material thing). I don’t recommend rewarding kids that often with ice cream, soda, candy or nearly any type of food. The reason for this is that our culture emphasizes rewarding ourselves with food and the more we learn to reward ourselves with food, the more obese we seem to get as a society. Parents looking to teach their kids proper nutrition should emphasize that food is not the center of our being. There is a separate book I could write here about the role food plays in our psychology and our parenting, but that would be too far afield of our topic in this book.
54
Activity rewards exchange a promise for permission to do an enjoyable activity (watch television, play a video game, etc.) paired with the performance of some desirable behavior (doing homework, chores, etc.).
Social rewards include praise, smiles, hugs, snuggles, “I love you’s” and any behavior that makes a child feel loved. Social rewards can and should be given out generously, but they can be overdone. Some parents hate when I say this because it sounds like I am telling them to “ration” love. I am not saying this at all. What I am saying is that you cannot raise a child to be a competent person if you don’t distinguish acceptable versus unacceptable behavior for them. That is part of your leadership function. It starts in the toddler years when kids are mobile enough to destroy their surroundings but perhaps not advanced enough to understand the
logic of why it is not a good idea to turn the caps on bottles decorated with those pretty little skeleton heads, (Yes, I know those bottles are child proofed, but presumably you get the idea.) Even as babies you can’t always use a sing-songy voice to steer them out of trouble. “Learn to be stern.” It’s also a part of loving kids. I know you adore your kids, but the world outside might not, if you don’t teach them the basics of politeness, self control, and managing the space around them. It’s all connected and if you don’t believe me, come visit some public spaces in New York City where there are so many people from so many cultures, screaming into their cell phones without the slightest regard for anyone else around them. Selfish, rude behavior seems to be all around us. If you want to set your kids apart from the “mob,” that is aimlessly led by popular culture, media, commercialism, etc., it is you who must lead them.
You can provide any of the above in any volume or proportion but if you do not do it systematically, as a part of your leadership role, it might not have much of an effect on your child’s behavior even if we can all agree that “reinforcing a child’s behavior is good.” I would say that reinforcing a child’s good behavior is good, but reinforcing a child, especially materially, for no particular reason except that you want to show that you love them is not so good. The practical explanation for this is that if you reward your child materially for no particular reason except that you love them, and they then ask you for things you refuse to provide, they will act as if you don’t love them. Put a star next to that last sentence.
Non Contingent Reinforcement
Non contingent reinforcement is a fancy way of saying, “rewarding a child for no particular reason.” Can there really be anything wrong with hanging every piece of art your child draws on the refrigerator? Is it bad to hug, kiss and say “I love you,” to your child a dozen times a day? The issue these questions are getting at is whether you should provide rewards (these are social rewards but the same goes for material rewards) for kids who don’t necessarily do anything to earn these rewards. Should a child have to earn everything?
55
The short answer is “of course not.” But like everything else in life, you can overdo what some parents insist is “unconditional love” but in reality is merely spoiling kids with expensive material possessions. To put it in perspective, three hundred dollar smartphones for kids who “just want them,” granting a child’s every material wish, putting no limits on spending, indulging a child’s addiction to soda and candy, unlimited media consumption is nothing short of buying your child’s attention. Same goes for over-the-top praise for performance that is below what you know your child can achieve.
The Intentions
Don’t be afraid of your kids not loving you enough. If you lead with the fear that your children will not love you, they will manipu-late and disrespect you. Permit your children to be mad at you. If you have the type of child who goes ballistic, walk out of the room when he or she is having a tantrum. From a leadership perspective a tantrum is nothing more than an aggressive move to become the decision maker or leader. Here are some intentions to help remind you to stay in charge of incentivizing your kids:
I will remember how important it is to accentuate the positives and not react as much to the negatives.
Compliments and praise are important motivators but they should also be consistent with a child’s level of per-
formance. “Good,” “Very Good,” and “Great” are all forms of praise for different levels of performance.
I can give my child “unconditional love” while still expressing high levels of expectation for performance.
Material possessions do not a well behaved child make.
Non-contingent reinforcement (random acts of parental kindness without the expectation of performance of
any kind) is a parents right, privilege and responsibility, but I promise not to overdo it.
If my kid gets mad at me, he or she will get over it.
I don’t have to be my child’s friend to be a good leader. In fact, it is often harder to lead your child when you con-
sider them your equal.
I wi