Behavior-Coach

The allegations of child abuse regarding the former defensive coordinator for Penn State University’s football team, whether true or not, highlight an important point regarding the mistreatment of children: kids generally have more to fear from adults that they know than from those that they don’t.

Parents are universally worried about the dangers posed to their children by strangers. But overwhelmingly, children are abused more by trusted adults than by the feared stranger lurking in the dark.

We need to teach our children to interact prudently and carefully with unknown adults. But more importantly, we must keep our personal radar sensitive for those adults involved with our kids–youth ministers, coaches, teachers, clergymen, family friends, scout leaders, neighbors–who display an inordinate interest in our children.

The typical approach for someone intent on sexually molesting a child is not to leap out of the bushes, but rather to spend time cultivating a relationship of trust that is thereafter abused.

The balancing act for parents is to avoid unwarranted suspicion while monitoring for danger signs in the adults to whom we entrust our children. It may be difficult to come to grips with the fact that we need to be more vigilant about those who profess regard for our children than those that we don’t know, but that is more typically where the dangers lie. Avoid paranoia, but maintain awareness.

Upon hearing these words, some parents freak out. They think their children are considering suicide. They have concerns about their child’s mental and emotional stability. They worry that their children are unhappy.

It’s probably true that the child is unhappy. This unhappinesss in not a bad thing. It is likely temporary and in response to frustration, a frustration perhaps caused by their parents. And seeing to it that your children are occasionally frustrated is a good thing.

Typically, when kids say any of the following things–”I wish I was dead” or “I hate my life” or “I can’t stand it here” or “You’ll be sorry when I’m no longer around,” it is typically code. It is not meant literally. Instead it should be translated as “I really don’t like the way things are going right now” or “I’m very unhappy with the decision my parent just made.”

These comments are usually made when the parent has said that the child cannot do something they wish to do (go to a party; have their own cell phone; wear unacceptable clothing) or they must do something they’d prefer not to (turn off the video game; get ready for bed; do homework). If this is the manner of their remarks, there is no worry about suicide.

While any comment regarding suicide must be evaluated for its seriousness, the context of the statement must be taken into consideration. Said in the fashion described above, there is no sense of serious suicidal intent.

If your child were to calmly make comments such as “Sometimes I wish I were dead” or “No one would miss me if I weren’t around” then these statements should raise a parent’s concern. They likely reflect, if not clear suicidal intent, some depression of mood which should be taken seriously and be addressed accordingly.

At that point the parent might wish to consider scheduling an appointment with their pediatrician or obtain a referral to a mental health professional who can assess the child’s suicidal risk.

But if the child is merely temporarily unhappy with the limit-setting or value enforcement of his parents, then the comments should be seen as such and cause little alarm.

An recent survey of American kids revealed some fascinating facts.

The question asked of kids was: “What do you want from your parents?” The top two answers would probably surprise most parents.

The first response was that kids want their parents to spend more time with them. Not necessarily time spent in active, stimulating activities, but simply having their parents present. The mere presence of parents seems to be stabilizing and comforting for children. There is no real surprise here, but many parents might be startled to discover that kids take some comfort from having parents involved in their lives. Not coaching their team or haggling over homework, but simply the casual interaction in their day-to-day lives.

The second from from this survey of kids was, in essence, “Just tell us what to do.” In other words, forget the long explanations or logical rationales for what you wish them to do–simply tell them. If they have a chore to complete, tell them to do it. Leave out the rationale for why it has to be done, or the amount of chores you had as a kid, or the lessons they will learn by doing it.

This finding dovetails precisely with the advice I have been giving parents for decades–”Save your breath.” Avoid the lecturing and sermonizing, as well as the carping, nagging, threatening, cajoling, and hectoring. Just state the expectation. This doesn’t guarantee compliance, but it certainly increases its likelihood.

So, enjoy some time with your kids and say a lot less.

…

A few weeks ago, news outlets ran saturation coverage of the story of a 23-year-old-woman who was reunited with her biological family after being abducted from the hospital as an infant.

This story played into our national anxiety. While both true and heartbreaking, the abduction highlighted how amazingly rare this sort of incident is. Since 1983, there have been 267 incidents of this type reported. During that same time period, 108 million babies were born. The chances of a baby being abducted from a hospital are 1 in 400,000. A child is much more likely to be killed by a lightning strike than taken by a stranger.

Similary, the Department of Justice reports that 100 or so children and teenagers are abducted by strangers annually. This places the chances of an abduction at 1 in 3 million. (By comparison, you have a 1 in 3.8 million chance of being crushed by a large reptile.) 

While these abductions are unspeakable tragedies for the children and families involved, there is a larger social cost being paid. Fearful children will be less likely to develop the sort of self-efficacy that will permit them to lead a satisfied life.  Being unnecessarily afraid lays the foundation for the development of depressive or anxiety disorders.

A culture of fear has developed in this country that is best exemplified by the “fear of the stranger” phenomenon. Parents, with the best of intentions, frighten their children by teaching them to fear those that they don’t know. (And, an uncomfortable fact for us to consider is that children have much more to fear from people they know than from people they don’t.) They are inadvertently being taught to fear that which is different.

I frequently hear parents say, in defense of their over-protective ways, “You know how things are these days,” as though evil was invented 25 years ago. There is no reason to believe that the current low rate of child abduction is any higher than in years past. But with vastly more media outlets available many more hours than a generation ago–with one TV channel devoted almost exclusively to this topic–it is understandable that one might conclude that its rate is indeed higher, despite the facts to the contrary.

We can and should teach children prudence, caution, and judgement. We should not teach fear.

I recently finished reading Amy Chua’s “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” in which she takes American parents to task for expecting too little of their pampered, indulged, and entitled children. Describing her efforts in raising her two daughters, she paints a picture of herself as a demanding, stern, strict and perhaps cruel taskmaster, denying her children, among other things, crafts, television, video games, and sleep-overs. Her children seem to do little more than study and practice music in a manner that would seem barbarically excessive to most parents.

The results are impressive. Her daughters are exceedingly high achievers, top-notch students and award-winning musicians. Most parents, however, would recoil from the severity of her methods (threatening to burn stuffed animals as punishment, demanding 2000 math problems be done each night). But my critique is in a different direction.

The push for excellence has a good deal of merit. But the overwhelming bulk of the children’s efforts are solitary. They are plugging away at the library, or the study table at home, or the piano keyboard–alone. What’s missing is involvement with others. While the skills these children are developing are indeed impressive, other skills–those that flow from human interaction–are ignored.

And these soft skills–the ability to read social cues; navigating between the self and the group; empathy; getting a feel for group dynamics–are just as essential to life success and satisfaction as the hard skills of geometry, physics, or playing etudes.

It may be the case that some American parents expect too little from their children. But in expecting more, care needs to be taken that it is not only in the form of individual, nose-to-the-grindstone efforts. What’s lost in that approach are all of the benefits–and joys–of being engaged with others.

Stress has gotten a bad name.

Stress has become a buzzword in this country. People complain of “being stressed” on the job and at home. They speak in a general manner of the stress of everyday life as it involves work, traffic, shopping, kids, and money among the many hassles they experience. All this talk of stress as though it were an unequivocally bad thing overlooks the positive aspects of stress.

The stress that we experience as we go through our lives is of two types: chronic, unrelenting demand or acute, short-lived stress. It is the first type that has negative effects for people. Long-term, unremitting stress adversely affects our health in physical, emotional, and psychological ways. Acute stress, however, that flows from the situations that arise in all of our lives is inescapable and not damaging.

When it comes to your children, the goal is not to have them avoid stress. Learning to problem-solve their way through the demands and stresses of daily living is one of life’s great lessons. Your goal should be to help them learn to manage the stress so that they may gain the satisfaction and sense of self-worth that comes from successfully meeting and overcoming adversity.

Here is one way to accomplish this: see to it that your kids are regularly stressed physically. The physiological reactions to physical exertion–rapid breathing, accelerated heart rate, perspiring–precisely mimic the reactions to psychological stressors. So experiencing physical stress through exercise or mowing the lawn or riding their bike to school amounts to rehearsal for handling psychological stress.

Completing a difficult homework assignment with strict time demands will stress your children, but in a good way. They will learn how to attack a problem, persevere through frustration, manage time, and feel a sense of satisfaction at a job well-done once the assignment is finished.

So, stress is not to be avoided. Rather, give your children the opportunity to learn that they can make it through stressful times by addressing the stressor and, with the support of their parents and others, meet the challenge.

If you are a parent of unmotivated teenagers, you worry a lot about their performance. You see failure in their future and will do whatever it takes to assure their success. You step up your efforts to control them and their behavior, doing whatever you can to get them to do the right thing.

You may dictate when and how much they study, threaten them with dire consequences, or punish them in whatever manner you think will get the result you want. You try to prevent poor behavior and instill goal-directed performance by directing what they do, all the while offering your rationale for why it makes sense. And your logic is impeccable–it just doesn’t motivate your teenager.

Why? Because try as you may, with the best intentions in the world, one person cannot control another. And as true as this is for people in general, it is that much more true for parents and their teenagers. You cannot control them; the best you can hope for through these approaches is to make them sorry that they behaved in a certain manner. But you can’t make that behavior happen.

This is why I recommend that you stop thinking in terms of control, of which you have little, and start thinking in terms of influence, of which you have a great deal. What is the difference between these two?

Control is a matter of trying to force a certain outcome, attempting to get someone to do something about which they may be ambivalent or even opposed to. It is about pushing your agenda with no regard to your teenagers’. Influence, on the other hand, flows from your relationship with your teenagers. Its key aspects are the core values you share with them and your acceptance of them, the acceptance which makes change possible.

Control is a function of power, with you in the position of authority trying to force an outcome from the outside. Teenagers resist these efforts. Power is an obstacle to change, while influence oils its gears. Influence is subtle and gentle, existing within a collaborative relationship which gives as much credibility to your teenagers’ perspective as your own. Your efforts are in the service of eliciting rather than forcing behavior change. Power doesn’t listen; influence listens intently with the desire to understand.

Your power is limited, perhaps even non-existent. But your influence is vast. Abandon your futile attempts to use the power that you acutally don’t have. Find out what they want. Discover what is important to them. Explore their fears, anxieties, and insecurities which likely lurk behind that seemingly uninterested demeanor. Listen without prejudice in a genuine attempt to understand. This is the source of the influence that can spark their internal motivation.

In the 1970′s, the combination of rising divorce rates and the self-esteem movement resulted in the creation of the myth of “quality time.”

Wracked by guilt, divorced parents consoled themselves with the notion that they could make up for the limited time they had with their children by packing that time with so much activity and intensity that the “quality” of it would compensate for the parent’s absence from their lives.

At the same time, the self-esteem movement contributed the notion that kids need a lot of high-quality attention from their parents.

Both of these ideas overlook the fact that what kids need from parents is their presence. The security provided by the mere availability of their parents over an extended period cannot be made up by the intensity of the parent/child interaction. Children take a lot of security in the knowledge that, for example, while they are playing in one room Dad is reading the paper in another, even in the absence of interaction between them, high quality or otherwise.

The fact of the matter is that quality time is inextricably linked to quantity time. The self-esteem and well-being of your children does not depend on frequent stimulating experiences between you and them.   Your kids don’t need a lot of attention from you.  However, your children will benefit from the not-very-exotic nor particularly interesting routine of just having you around.   Especially as they might just want to talk with you without having to schedule it.

As family sizes decreased, affluence increased, and parents invested more of their energy into child-rearing, familes evolved from being adult-centered to child-centered.

The concerns of the child came to trump those of the parents. The hierarchy of families flattened and children had more voice than ever before. Parents became hesitant to be viewed as authoritarian, and many were concerned that they had a good relationship with their children, an issue that would not have even made it on the radar screen of their parents.

The self-esteem movement brought children’s feelings into the spotlight and, in a way that was historically unprecedented, parents focused on those feelings. It was thought that no child should ever feel bad (even when circumstances suggested that they should) and the parents’ duty was to see to it that their children felt good about themselves.

Now, it is no longer enough that a child play soccer–his parents must now announce that fact to the entire world by placing a decal to that effect on the rear window of their car.

The connection between performance and self-esteem was severed. It was important for kids to feel good about themselves no matter what they did. “Good job!” became the universal parental acclamation in response to whatever their child did on the baseball field, with their coloring book, or at the homework table.

With all this attention to their feelings and performances, it is no wonder that modern kids have come to view themselves as important. And this sense of importance has come to be seen as disconnected to any manner of performance or accomplishment. Recognition has become more important than achievement–much to the detriment of the child.

The current approach to raising children in America is considerably different than it was as recently as fifty years ago. A number of factors have contributed to this evolution, but let’s consider just one: the amount of energy and emotion invested in children.

Parents rearing children at mid-century–the Greatest Generation raising Baby Boomers–had true survival issues. These parents had lived through the Great Depression and had experienced the deprivations of World War II. Their life view was shaped by these difficult times. Making a living was, understandably, of paramount importance to them.

When they began raising families after the war, they had a seriousness of purpose born of those experiences. Their approach to child-rearing was not marked by sentiment. The focus was more on conduct and character than on more subjective concerns like contentment and self-esteem.

Their children, by contrast, came to adulthood at a time of relative affluence. As literal survival was, for most, not a concern, their energy was directed elsewhere. One of the places their energy went was toward their children. And this focus on their children moved from the visible–behavior, conduct, responsibility–to the invisible: self-esteem, contentment, happiness, self-actualization. Parents became less concerned with the concrete and more with the ethereal. For the first time in child-rearing history, parents became more interested in how their children felt than in how they performed.

Children came to feel more important in their parents’ lives than previously. Family life became more child-centered where it had historically been adult-centered. Family hierarchies flattened. And with these changes, children, as measured by surveys, came to see themselves as important in a way which was historically unprecedented.  And this evolutionary development has not served children well.