5 |
Homework Help Hell (HHH) |
The greatest harm can result from the best intentions. It sounds like a paradox, but kindness and good intentions can be an insidious path to destruction. Sometimes doing what seems right is wrong and can cause harm.
—Terry Goodkind
When the child arrives home, HHH may begin.
When ADHD children struggle at school, it often overflows into homework. This has become a mounting problem for all children, since the average time they spend doing homework is up 51% between 1981 and 1997, particularly for younger children (43).
Helping their child with homework is an almost universal experience for parents. Unfortunately, it often looks more like an inquisition than an enriching, pleasant family educational experience. Not only is HHH a hellish experience for children, it is also hell for their parents. Parents may suffer more than children in the battle over homework because they often feel more pressure than the child does to get it done.
Homework sessions can take the form of one or both parents sitting down with the child to do their joint homework. Parents may use arguments, reasoning, logic, reminding, threatening, or pleading to push the child through each step. The harder the parent works, often the less the child accomplishes. Working very hard to push the child by explaining something while their child seems to become less attentive, more passive, more emotional and non-understanding is a common frustrating and exhausting experience. Parent's frustration usually shows. As they get more upset, the child resonates with this and also becomes more upset.
As one mother put it,
He becomes very agitated and restless when we try to do homework… as if his feet want to run away with his body. These homework sessions normally end with me being very angry and frustrated and Josh in tears. I start to get knots in my stomach when it gets to be homework time. He will sit for long periods of time with minimal fidgeting when being read to, but if asked to read himself, his body becomes tense, his breathing gets shallow and he becomes agitated and hyper-fidgety. His eyes have a hard time staying on the book. He can be VERY quick to anger… and his emotions are becoming more extreme and seem to erupt with very little provocation… he will begin screaming and slamming doors after the most benign requests.
As we all know from our own experience, arousal does not increase our ability to think clearly. In the example above, arousal saps the child's attentional resources thus further reducing his ability to complete homework. This further frustrates the parent. A downward spiraling feedback loop develops in which everyone looses. It makes the parent feel very helpless and frustrated. Though many parents realize that this approach is not working, they continue it for lack of a better alternative.
HHH emerges when emotions dominate the learning experience. The technicalities of solving math problems or learning spelling lists recedes to the background as anger, frustration and anxiety permeate the air.
After walking through the hot emotional fires of HHH, parents also develop conditioned emotional responses to the homework process. They begin to dread homework time as much as the child does. It feels phobic. Parents I work with describe emotionally wrenching homework sessions filled with feelings of frustration, anger, and anxiety. They begin to feel as if their child's lack of success reflects upon them. They feel like failures as parents. One mother described HHH as: “Being in a Nathan prison.”
For many parents, HHH is their biggest family problem. The long hours of battles absorb their time and their life. Free time becomes non-existent. Every spare moment is absorbed by HHH. Homework becomes a black hole that all of the family's energy, resources and happiness are sucked into. Often, the marriage is also damaged.
As obvious as this emotional arousal is, its impact on schoolwork, homework and family happiness is little understood and seldom effectively addressed. In order to break this destructive cycle, one has to focus on the emotional dynamics that drive this chain reaction rather than on the intellectual content of the homework itself. When the emotional issues for both parent and child are resolved, there are often dramatic improvements in the apparent academic skills, homework completion, behavior problems and family happiness.
By the age of seven, Phillip had learned HHH well. He said he hated homework and postponed it as long as possible, sometimes forever. When finally forced by his parents to sit down to do his homework, not much happened. He would sit in front of his books for hours and look out the window, play with a piece of paper, or make shapes with his fingers. There was no sense of struggle, except when directly pressured by his parents. His mother, Janet, would sit with him for hours working on his assignments. In fact, she would even take dictation for him.
Since Janet believed Phillip could not actually write out his ideas when he had to write a story, a book report, or a science project, she would sit at the computer typing what he told her. Of course, she would then edit and reorganize his work so that it sounded much better. Often, they would be up late at night finishing a long-term project that Janet had not heard about until the night before it was due. She worked very hard to complete the assignment, while Phillip looked around the room, taunted his little brother or played.
When I met Phillip and his family, it was apparent that he did not want to be in my office. He rocked in his chair, interrupted his parents and my conversation, moved from chair to chair and squirmed. To simulate homework discomfort, I had him read a book. Rather than sound out words he did not know, he would guess. Then he would look to me to see if he was right, which he seldom was. To flush out the emotional component of his reading difficulty, I gave him little help and kept redirecting him back to reading. As I pressured him to keep reading, he grimaced, squirmed and his feet and legs bounced. I asked him what his legs and feet felt like. He said it felt like he wanted to run.
Three days later, he was excited with his new found reading ability and wanted to show off for his parents. Instead of squirming, he was attentive and relaxed. Following treatment, HHH became a thing of the past for his mother.
How did that happen? I did not change his brain structures or teach him reading. I gave him no magic medicine. In a nutshell, with the help of my patented psychotherapy technology, Computer Aided Emotional Restructuring, CAER, I was able to extinguish the negative affect in Phillip surrounding schoolwork as well as the overly emotional reactions by his parents in maintaining their part of the dysfunctional interaction pattern between them. How CAER works will be explained in detail later in the book. Here is Phillips treatment story.
Phillip had said reading made him “want to run.” At that point, it was time to start extinguishing those feelings. I put him in the CAER machine and had him think about the “want to run” feeling and all the places he could remember it.
Occasionally, while in the CAER machine, Phillip would kick his legs hard trying to get that “want to run” feeling out of them. However, what worked better than kicking was focusing his attention on those feelings and all the situations he could remember them in. We had to work on this for almost an hour before the feeling went away in all the places he could remember, such as sitting in school, doing homework, listening to adults talk, and riding in the back seat of the car. Reviewing the “want to run” memories, while in the dream like state created by CAER, made him quite tired. When the sense of agitation finally went away, he fell asleep for a few minutes. I let him sleep for a little while since he had worked very hard. I wanted him refreshed for another go at reading.
He again began to read. His style was much different than it had been on the first go around. Rather than wanting to run, he was more in contact with the book and there was no grimacing and very little wiggling. When he encountered a hard word, he would attempt to sound it out. When he took the time to do this, vs. guessing, he was actually quite good at phonetics. He was now engaged with reading and though at times frustrated by not knowing a word, he was also very pleased with himself when he could sound out a hard word. We cycled through this process several more times working on the “hard word feeling.” He continued to improve.
He had been disengaged from the process of learning so long that he had some clear reading and vocabulary deficits. However, he was reading much better than when he first began. He could now focus on the reading task without distraction. He now found it fun in a challenging way.
For the last 3 years, I have continued to be in email contact with Phillip's family. He is now a strong reader who reads on his own for pleasure. His overall academic performance is also far better than it was prior to treatment, with a mixture of A's and B's. Moreover, homework is no longer hell for anyone.
Interrogation
The first step in HHH is parents trying to find out what the assignment is. To be helpful, a parent has to find out if the child got his work done in class, if incomplete work was sent home and if there is any homework to be done. The battle begins when the child blows through the front door, or climbs into the car. If there is a history of HHH, sensitivities with both parent and children are high. Homework is often the first issue to be questioned by the parent and avoided by the child as the maneuvering begins.
Extracting this information from the child can be an almost impossible task since queries may be met with “I don't know, no, I forgot it,” or “I lost it” a grunt, screaming rage, the blank stare of feigned stupidity, not bringing materials home, saying there is no homework when there is, etc.
Though most children use a mix of strategies, in the vignettes below, I have abstracted pure forms of three common patterns. Every behavior listed has been reported by many parents.
Diversion
Troy was a master of the diversion strategy. He would melt down when asked if he had any assignments. Rather than answering the question directly, he would scream phrases such as, “I hate school, I hate you, my teacher is a stupid jerk,” etc. Sometimes he would cuss and throw things. When Troy was successful at diversion, all of his parent's energy was put into the uproar and the homework became secondary and often forgotten. His behavior and his parents' response allowed him to escape what he did not want to do.
Helpless
Max was adept at playing helpless. In depressive and listless tones, he would answer “I cannot remember, I lost it, I am so dumb, I wish I were dead,” or “No one told me,” all with a dull look on his face. He would limply hand his notebook to his mother to puzzle out the answer. With this strategy, his homework became his mother's homework, and it became her responsibility to see that it was completed. Max's mother felt like she was dragging a large bag of potatoes uphill.
Overwhelmed
Cynthia was the model of anxious and depressed diligence. She had all her books, assignments, and notes, but did not know which one was today's, or could not read her own writing. She would often cry anxiously as she dug through her backpack. She appeared to be trying so hard. However, she was never able to accomplish much because she was always so upset and frustrated that she could not concentrate. She already seemed so responsible and trying so hard that her parents felt cruel and unloving if they made more demands of her. Her parents too became anxious and depressed.
Each of the above strategies is effective at disarming parents. If the information is eventually extracted, the actual homework battle begins, often at the kitchen table. Battle tactics, from both sides, may take many forms. But they usually continue and intensify the same emotional theme that was established when trying to find the assignments.
Troy's anger problem may provoke the parent into reciprocating in like manner until the situation explodes. The harder the parent works to help Max, the more helpless he becomes. Cynthia's parents are so worried about her that they never put pressure on her to perform. Instead, they encourage and soothe her. This will often take the form of repeatedly telling her how smart and capable she is.
Though completing homework assignments should be part of any child's normal daily routine, when homework becomes a point of contention between children and parents, escalating emotions make the whole process aversive and unproductive for everyone.
A conditioned feedback loop between parents and kids causes spiraling emotional intensity. The child becomes upset with homework. This triggers reciprocal emotional intensity in the parent, which in turn triggers more negative feelings in the child. Night after night, the same pattern is repeated and thus the triggers become stronger and stronger. In spite of best efforts, the intense emotions use up all of the child's attentional resources so nothing is left to do the academic work. Often little homework is completed and parents feel helpless, angry and frustrated. It is HHH.
What is often missed about homework is that the power struggle is about a lot more than just getting tonight's math or spelling done. It is the culmination of a long chain of learning experiences about how to cope with success and failure in these tasks.
If homework has become a problem, the child has experienced a chain of failure, frustration, anger, boredom and agitation-laden learning experiences rather than success. This greatly compounds the child's task. Not only does he have to complete the current math problems, but he also has to manage negative feelings aroused by past assignments that are similar to the current one.
As will be demonstrated below, children are not passive recipients, but active agents working to get what they want… and what they want is a short-term payoff for themselves. Their goal is to escape.
It's very easy to feel someone's pain when you love
them.
—Salma Hayek
So, how do so many parents get sucked into HHH? The short answer is that children can tap powerful neurological mechanisms to control how parents feel, good or bad. Now to the long answer.
Remember the original Star Wars movie? Darth Vader is standing in his Death Star with a bunch of his thugs. One of them standing across the room says something he does not like. From 20 feet away, Darth picks the thug up by the throat by merely gesturing with his right arm and pressing a button on his chest with his left hand. While there is no actual touch, you can see the victim writhing in pain. It took Darth Vader to the year 5000 to perfect this technology. For their own survival benefit, children have been doing essentially the same thing for thousands of years.
If, as a parent you doubt this, notice how badly you feel when you see your child rejected by peers, struggling with homework, or picked on by a bully. You can truly, physically experience their unhappiness. This is not an illusion, but a function of the mirror neurons (research on mirror neurons is reviewed in the next section) in our brains. This phenomenon provides the direct emotional connection to others that we experience as empathy. It is what motivates us to help others feel better because to do so actually makes us feel better. Contrary to pop psychology's axiom “take responsibility for your feelings,” the common expression of “you make me feel…” is both neurologically and phenomenologically accurate.
The distress call from children to parents is not experienced by parents as some ethereal, metaphysical, vague or fluffy kind of response. Children's distress causes a direct physiological effect on parents such as heart pounding, a knot in the stomach, pressure in the chest, sweating, anxiety, fear and anger. These mirroring sensations can be very uncomfortable for the parent.
Because parents actually experience their children's feelings, it provides a strong motivation to resolve their own negative feelings by immediately resolving the child's unhappiness. This strongly motivates parents to provide for the welfare of their children as they would their own welfare, because they literally “feel the pain” and want to stop that pain. This is particularly strong in mothers and is obviously a powerful force for the survival of the species.
Generally, this empathic connection between parents and children works very well, but there are times when this can lead parents to become overly driven by this emotional resonance with their children. They become too empathetic!
We all know that a child will ask the “softer” parent for the goodies or an extra privilege. Children are not dumb. They become increasingly skilled at playing on the parents heartstrings to get what they want, often to their own longer-term detriment. Because young children are not bogged down by culturally driven theories about how things should be, they track immediate behavior and emotions better than adults. Thus, they are better at shaping emotional and behavioral responses in parents than the other way around. This is not sinister, planful or evil. It is all at the automatic emotional level. Children's' survival is dependent on tracking and shaping the big people, and they are very good at it.
For example, a homework session might unfold with Tara sitting at the dining table trying to do homework. Little progress is being made, and Tara laments about how boring, frustrating, impossible and unfair the homework is. Mom, who is not far away, feels her child's distress deep in her gut and is driven to save her young one from such misery. Soon mom is sitting shoulder to shoulder with Tara doing “their” homework because Tara is in need and it is mom's job to resolve her child's distress.
Tara's needy wails are reinforced by mom's attention. Thus, before long she wails more intently and mom works more intently to resolve her own bad feelings by coming to Tara's aid. Mental and educational professionals provide mother with the stories (diagnoses, recommendations, descriptions) she needs to justify this as helping Tara. The child clearly senses that more wailing leads to more help which means she has to do less, which, from Tara's point of view, is a better deal.
Some parents become, from time to time, suspicious that they are being manipulated. This idea is quickly pushed aside by their own physical need to terminate their empathy-driven misery and logically justified by a professional diagnosis implicating the child should not be pushed too hard. They never seriously consider that their child simply does not want to do her homework, does not like homework, wants to find a way out of doing homework, and is a clever young lady at getting “help” from her mother. I use the word clever, not mean, sinister, immoral, or evil. She is just doing what works for her in the short-run. It is adults who put negative labels on this behavior.
One mother I saw for treatment was even writing her daughter's papers for her. The teacher figured out who was writing the papers. She finally returned a paper with two grades, “Mother A+, daughter F.” Mom was embarrassed to say the least, and stopped doing that.
So far, I have emphasized the downside of mirror neurons. However, this same emotional mirroring allows parents to experientially share in their child's joys. All parents live a second emotional life through their children, thanks to mirror neurons. This is why a major goal of this book is to put the power to shape behavior back into the hands of parents and out of the hands of drug companies.
The power of mirror neurons is what gives children the ability to “control” parents' emotions in order to get what they want. What they want is not always the best for them in the long run, but it works in the short run.
Research has only recently uncovered the power and the neurological underpinnings of empathy, mimicry, modeling and rapport. Networks of mirror neurons widely scattered across the motor, speech, visual, and auditory parts of our brain cause us to actually experience what others experience (44, 45). We don't just understand others experience, but we actually participate in it. This greatly enhances our ability to learn from and socially coordinate with others.
Mirror neurons were first discovered when experimenters were placing electrodes into individual motor neurons in a macaque mon-key's brain to record activity while giving them different objects to handle. Neurons in a specific area fired when the monkeys reached for or bit into a peanut. What surprised experimenters was that when the monkey saw the experimenter pick up the peanut, the same neurons fired as did when the monkey itself picked it up. One of those “Wow” moments for any scientist! Of course, this led to testing this concept on humans and lo and behold, it was confirmed that watching others is actual experiential learning (46, 47).
We use this mirroring to understand and forecast the behavior of others. We build complex mental models of others feelings, thoughts and behaviors. These models can be so complete that at times they can be subtly confused for our own (48). The mental models that parents make of their children are what allow them to experience their children's feelings as their own.
Under mirroring conditions, if I snap a rubber band on my wrist, the empathetic, physiological experience of that snap on my wrist can be electronically recorded in your body if you are watching me (49). The point is that you not only understand at an abstract level my experience of the rubber band snapping, but you experience it at a physiological level.
We transform into habit patterns these internal models that are learned from virtually participating in others experiences (50). These vicarious experiences allow us to quickly map other's thoughts, intentions, movements and feelings onto ourselves (51). This mapping allows us to rapidly interact in cooperative activities such as playing games, rowing a boat together, dancing, or taking turns in conversation (52). All of these activities require us to, in real time; plan our actions in relation to others (53, 54). The effect is so powerful that it may be the basis for our developing language and culture (55, 56).
Though we broadly absorb these empathetic “feelings” from our culture, by far the most intense is in the family, between parents and children. Since family members actually experience each other's feelings, this gives them a strong influence over one another because they can actually control how other family members feel. For parents, this can manifest in the sense of pride when our child wins an award, anger when they oppose our requests, fear when they fall, pain when they are upset, or depressed when they fail.
Over the million or so years that the mirror neurons developed in early humans, people in primitive groups had to spend a major part of their time finding food and defending the family. A child's distress signal often meant physical danger. This emotional resonance called the parents back from survival concerns in order to attend to the child's immediate needs. In the early years of man, the situation could have been life threatening to the child, as when a snake slithered closer. In our current civilized state, distress signals from children are far more likely to be emotional bruising than physical threat.
Sometimes this is useful. Other times it is not. It has assured the survival of the species for a million years. However, the conditions in which we live are far different than those in which this response developed.
Empathetic mirroring can exaggerate “mother bear” over-pro-tectiveness of children to the point that it backfires and too much is done for the child, stifling his growth or reinforcing incompetent behaviors such as those described above and below. Unfortunately, this pattern is reinforced by current medical mythology which slaps “defective” labels on children: ADHD, ADD, learning disabled, and the like. This spurs parents on to do “more” for the child instead of restructuring the contingencies for more competent behavior.
When 16 year-old Chris and his family first came to see me, he was so depressed that he would stare into space and say nothing. He sat silently during the first day's lunch, barely answering direct questions. His affect was flat and expressionless. Chris was ending his first semester of his junior year failing most of his classes.
Chris's parents were very bright, caring and attentive. In a classic mirror neuron way, it was painful for both to see him suffer. Before they arrived for treatment, they had tried to resolve Chris's problems by spending many long hours discussing his problems with him as well as seeking extensive professional help. Chris had every possible assistance and advantage that any son could hope for. None of these strategies had worked.
Over the next four days of CAER treatment, Chris focused on his “dumb kid” story. He thought about how he had screwed up almost every aspect of home and school life, how uptight school made him, his conflict with his teachers and his parents, as well as his estrangement from his friends. As CAER extinguished the bad feelings associated with these images, they no longer had the power to depress him. Over the four days of treatment, he became talkative, bright, and animated in his demeanor. His parents beamed as they watched his transformation.
After Chris and his family returned home, he and his father made a deal with his school that would allow him to challenge each class by taking a comprehensive final exam. To continue in honors Chemistry he had to pass that exam with a B. He used his Christmas vacation for an amazing marathon study campaign.
During the first week back at school, he tested and passed all of his courses with A's and B's, except for a C in Honors Chemistry. Though I thought recovering in this fashion from straight F's was phenomenal for him, being demoted to regular Chemistry was a very significant and real disappointment.
Though Chris had taken a giant stride, not all the bumps were out of the road for both he and his parents The first evening after being demoted to regular chemistry, he reverted to his old depressed manner and did not study as he had diligently for many weeks.
Because of treatment, his parents had also changed and did not fall into counterproductive helping. They were momentarily baffled by his sudden reversion and were tempted to fall into a too helpful counselor role by engaging with his depression. However, they rallied and applied the same performance based good parenting that had helped turn his schoolwork around since returning from treatment. When his attempt to drive his parents mirror neurons did not work, Chris's depression promptly cleared up and he proceeded with doing his studies.
The parent's reaction was in strong contrast to their pre-treatment sympathetic, caring, supporting, therapeutic, loving “counselor” approach to parenting that had actually reinforced the very behavior that they were trying to help their son with. I am certainly not recommending that parents should not be caring, but it is how and when this is shown that can produce the wrong result. Performance has to be in the foreground and caring in the background.
Problems with parents being overly helpful seem to have gotten worse in recent times. The natural tendency (due to mirroring neurons) of parents to be over-protective of children used to be countered by cultural mores, which viewed strictness and harshness as necessary to instill moral rectitude, discipline and obedience in children. Any acting out by your child would reflect on your family's stature in the community far more than it does today. Inactivity such as shown by Chris was deemed laziness and not tolerated.
The power of mirroring is not restricted to family and friends. Research has shown that children watching TV mirror the unrealistically fastpaced TV images. Every hour preschoolers watch television each day increases their chances of developing attention problems by about 10 percent. Is it any wonder that more and more children are taking drugs for ADHD? The single act of watching television can shorten attention spans, cause difficulty concentrating, restlessness, impulsiveness, and vulnerability to confusion, obesity and aggressiveness (57).
Even Sesame Street, the Cadillac of preschool educational TV programs has been demonstrated to cause attention problems. The typical sixty minute show presents about 40 short, unrelated segments. Within each segment there is a change of concept, content, format and character (58). Such a rapid sequence of attentional and thought focuses inhibits learning to pay attention and read in school (59).
One study compared two groups of children on academic tasks after eight hours of watching either Sesame Street or adventure films. Children who watched Sesame Street were much less persistent than those who watched the adventure films. The researchers concluded
…it must have been the [children's] willingness to persevere
that was affected by their exposure to the fast-paced, kalei
doscopic structure of the program (Sesame Street) (60).
Most children's TV follows a similar hyperactive pattern.
ADHD and Asperger's children are not supposed to understand the consequences of their behavior. At least that is what one would surmise from the current vogue of teachers and parents asking children to review their “choices” and determine what they should have done. However, a little observation would reveal that they can certainly orchestrate social situations to apply some embarrassing social consequences to their parents.
Parents, particularly mothers, often feel that their self-worth is an extension of their child's success. Feeling proud of your child's successes is one of the natural rewards of being a good parent. The trap comes when success is dictated by the community vs. the parent, and it is measured in the short-term.
At school, the soccer game, or the market, mothers often feel as if their prowess as a parent is on trial at two levels. First, they imagine everyone is watching how their child looks, speaks, walks and behaves. He is their product to be proud of or ashamed of. In such settings, his imperfections may seem much more obvious than his attributes. Though he may be reading five grade levels ahead, if he does not mind immediately and cheerfully, a mother can be very embarrassed. This gives children a great deal of power and sometimes they use it by acting out in public.
If her child acts up in public, a mother often feels as if she is on trial for how she deals with it. She is damned if she does and damned if she doesn't. In the audience as perceived by the mother, there are two polar groups judging her. One group feels that she needs to demonstrate masterful verbal skills so she can quietly persuade and cajole to make her child mind. The other group is rooting for her to take a more motivational approach by doing a little pain induction. No matter what she does, she is likely to see herself criticized by one group or the other. The sense of criticism will stand out more than any approval she may feel from using one approach or the other. The kid in this situation is in control.
In spite of being diagnosed both ADHD and Aspergers Syndrome, Greg understood and was skilled at using the public arena to control his mother, Linda. This nine year old would wait until he and his mother were deep in the heart of the mall. Then he would vanish from Linda's sight and head for his favorite toy store. Panic stricken for not being able to find her son, Linda would search frantically for him. Eventually she would find him in the toy store playing with one of the demonstration games. Often he had charmed one of the store staff into being his friend and advocate.
When Linda finally found Greg, he would leap up from the game and act as if he were delighted to see her. In a very polite manner, he would introduce his mother to the sales person. Then he would vanish back to the game.
At a minimum, this introduction would cause the adults to exchange pleasantries, which would give Greg a bit more playtime. When he was lucky, the sales person would comment on “what a nice young man” he was and begin to pitch the toy to Linda.
When Linda would ask Greg to stop playing the game and leave, he would act up and plead for the toy. She would try to quietly persuade him, plead, or get stern and demanding with him. But, he knew he had her. So, he would continue to escalate. Not wanting him to embarrass her by breaking the illusion of being “a nice young man,” she would often buy the toy for him. Being a bright woman, Linda knew she had done the wrong thing, but she also knew from history that he could and would make a horrendous scene if she did not comply.
Greg was able to read and use social situations very well for his benefit at his mother's expense. This may not be nice, but it is very skillful and most assuredly not a deficit.
Although Linda knew her caving into Greg was wrong, she had been unable to change her behavior. The feeling of being embarrassed had roots back into her own history that were very painful for her. She was a pawn of emotions that were triggered when these situations with Greg arose.
These emotions prevented Linda from making the most enlightened, efficient and knowledgeable choice for the benefit of her child. She had all the knowledge she needed. To change, she had to extinguish the negative emotions that were hooking her in. This is what brought her to treatment. Once she went through the CAER process in treatment, her embarrassment no longer held her hostage. She was able to apply strong contingencies to Greg's behavior that she always knew she should, but that her emotions prevented her from doing. Following treatment, she got tough. Greg made some valiant efforts to pull her back into his game, but found out she was no longer his patsy. Because of her behavior, his behavior straightened up. Post treatment emails from her radiated triumph and pride.
In situations like this, debating the merits of parenting strategy is usually not very productive until the feelings are extinguished from historical memories. After the extinction is done, the choice is usually obvious and requires little instruction. That is, parenting is not rocket science if your head is clear. It is quantum physics if you are swimming in a sea of emotion. One more parenting book will not help until the emotions are dealt with.
Just as children's behavior often serves to exert emotional pressure over adults, the opposite is also true. Adults also exert pressure on children to get them to comply. Being a parent requires that you exercise your adult judgment by asserting control over your child. This is unavoidable. The only question is how you will do this and with what success.
There are numerous strategies. For discussion purposes, I have organized them into three groups. First, there are mirror neuron strategies to apply emotional pressure to create aversive emotions in your child to get him to comply with demands. Parents do this by yelling, threatening or complaining. The second strategy is an attempt at the opposite. It is withdrawal from the mirror neuron connection by shutting down emotions that make you feel bad. This is done by having cool rational, logical discussions of “choices.” The third strategy is the applications of reward and punishment contingencies to shape the child's behavior. For discussion purposes, I will treat each of them separately. However, most situations are really a mix of all three.
1. Using mirror neurons: top-dog or under-dog
Applying emotional pressure utilizes the empathetic, mirror neuron connection from the parent to the child to cause the child emotional discomfort. The child's compliance is thus rewarded by negative reinforcement. In other words, the child complies to get those bad feelings to stop.
Negative reinforcement is an often-misunderstood concept. Unlike common usage, it is not equivalent to punishment. Negative reinforcement results from the relief when something bad stops. An example of this is lying in the sun on the beach until you are uncomfortably hot. You run into the water to cool off. Ending the too hot feeling feels good. The good feeling after running into the water reinforces running into the water behavior.
Therefore, negative reinforcement results from the cessation of aversive stimuli, in this case the unpleasant feelings the parent is causing in the child.
There are actually two major approaches to applying emotional pressure, top dog and underdog.
In the top dog version, the parent tries to use their size, emotional intensity and lung power to create bad feelings in the child to get them to behave as requested. Typical examples are yelling phrases such as, “I am sick and tired of how you keep doing…,” “Aren't you ever going to figure this out?”, “Just shut up and go to your room.” When roared in loud, angry tones, such phrases convey little more than the adult's emotional intensity. The hope is that this will be frightening enough to the child that they will comply to get the fear feelings to stop. Such strategies only tend to be effective in the shortterm and seldom result in long-term change.
The underdog approach is less overtly emotionally intense. The strategy is to trigger guilt or shame in the child. It is hoped that the child will comply to get these feelings of shame to stop. To create this effect, pleading tones are used to utter phrases as: “We never had these kind of problems with your brother,” “I am so disappointed in you,” or “It hurts my feelings when you say that.”
Though this last strategy sometimes works on a temporary basis for little girls, it is notably ineffective for little boys. Boys simply do not have as strong an underdog connection to others. Just as little boys are much more likely to enjoy teasing or wrestling the family dog, they are equally willing to do the same with their mother. For a boy, the yipping of both mom and dog are not much different. He knows that neither of them will actually bite him.
Kids turn strategies back on parents
In the emotional pressure arena, children often become clever enough to turn underdog strategies around on the parent. When they get upset they may screech things like, “I hate you, you're not my mother”, or “I don't love you.” Though there is seldom substantive truth to such phrases, they can be powerful emotional weapons on a parent who has tried to use their own bad feelings in an underdog strategy to control their child. If you hear these phrases from your child, it is likely that you are using underdog emotional control strategies and the child has learned this and is playing it back on you.
The basic message from both parent and child in the last examples is “Don't you care about my feelings”?
Parents sometimes do not recognize this playing back of their own strategies and expect to be able to apply underdog emotional control to children and not have children learn the strategy and play it back on them.
At more dependent, younger ages, children know that they have to maintain adult favor to get their basic survival needs met. As they begin to separate from the family in adolescence, that dependency subsides. If parents have had some success with emotional control until adolescence, they may have a hard time shifting to contingency management (the third strategy) when their child reaches adolescence.
With an ADHD child, emotional control strategies are even more likely to fail. Initial success with such strategies fades because the child's ADHD is a defense specifically tailored to filter out emotional discomfort. The parent yells or pleads and the child mentally vanishes. Parents and child spiral down in a conditioned attentional avoidance loop.
One final comment: emotional control strategies are easy to do because you mostly express what you “feel like” at the moment. More effective contingency management strategies take proactive thought and preparation. Thus, they are not as easy.
2. Logic
Logic is an organized way of going wrong with confidence.
—Kettering's Law
While the above behavior control strategy utilized emotional control as its major change agent, the second strategy is an attempt at its opposite, cool emotional detachment and logic.
As discussed previously, the empathic connection with others can cause us to literally “feel” another's emotions. It can be very upsetting for a parent to be connected in such a strong way to their child. It is terrible to watch your child, red-faced and crying, frustrated with their homework, and screaming, “I'm stupid,” or sitting in the room lonely and depressed because they have no friends. If you have been there as a parent, you know this really does physically hurt. It would hurt less to take the “hit” yourself, than to watch them suffer.
To avoid this pain, some parents, particularly fathers, try to keep their interaction about their child's problems in the cool, calm, unemotional realm of rationality. This is supported by our favorite cultural illusion, that we are rational, logically directed beings.
Parents justify this strategy with the belief that the reason the child does not complete his homework or behave is that he does not understand the behavior that is required, or does not understand the reasons he should behave differently. Parents delude themselves into believing that verbal agreement and understanding will translate into behavior change. They want to talk their child into saying something such as “Yes, I know I did wrong and will never do that again,” or, “I know it is not the end of the earth if I cannot solve this math problem. I will just ask my teacher tomorrow.”
As you can see, that sounds quite absurd when supposedly rational responses are examined closely. If your child was that logical and rational, you would not be having this discussion with him in the first place. Yet this is what parents and teachers do. Are children really that stupid? I can guarantee they are not.
I have told you a thousand times...
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and
expecting different results.
—Albert Einstein
Many parents will say to a child “I've told you a hundred times…” The parent will then go on to repeat some direction as if the child does not understand. Or, they will speak to the child about choices and consequences, but never dish out the consequence.
The problem is not that the child does not understand how to clean his room or to stop hitting his brother. It is that he does not want to or that his emotions have taken over the rational control of his behavior. Research confirms this. Except at low levels, emotions, rather than rationality, control thoughts and behaviors (61).
Lack of understanding by the child of what is required is seldom the problem. Instead, much of what drives children's, as well as adult's behavior is not rational thought, but habit, with much habit emotionally driven. The overriding power of habitual behavior is what makes discussing choices and making logical arguments to children almost worthless as a behavior change strategy.
Habits, not “understanding,” drives behavior
Of all the ways of defining man, the worst is the one which
makes him out to be a rational animal.
—Anatole France
Let me illustrate the fallacy of our ability to rationally control complex behaviors with an example we can all relate to: dieting.
From my experience, most overweight people I have treated are the world's experts on diets, nutrition, food exchanges, and exercise programs. Overweight folks have all the information that they need to control their eating rationally. However, if you place a freshly baked piece of apple pie loaded with vanilla ice cream in front of them, and then walk out of the room, what happens to the pie?
The dieting individual can then tell you to three decimal places how much weight it will add to each hip. This is non-rational behavior, and is the reason that this person is overweight. In the same vein, the majority of human behavior is not rational or consciously directed. Rather, it is driven by emotionally triggered habit chains.
For the overweight person, as for most of us, it is (current or anticipated) feelings that drive our behavior, and not our rational choices. What's more, we do not try to explain our irrational behavior until we are forced to face it. For example, our peers may ask us, “Why did you do that?” The answer we tend to give is not truly why we did what we did. Instead, it is an answer that we conjure for our audience that will allow us to continue the facade of appearing rational. It is, after all, socially desirable to appear to be a rational being to both ourselves and others. For example, the overweight person may tell us that they ate the pie because they skipped breakfast and therefore could afford the calories. We all know that is not why they ate the pie.
In a similar vein, thoughts are habitually triggered by environmental cues. If you drive the same route to work every day, you may notice that you have similar thoughts as you pass the same places each day. This billboard triggers one thought chain, and that store triggers another. In other words, most of moment-to-moment psychological life occurs automatically in response to internal and external cues. Most of this process is adaptive, but some is not. How this all works with children will be explained following a discussion of what habits are.
Habits are huge, sophisticated knowledge structures that control most of our thoughts, behaviors and feelings (62). Habits and skills control the great mass of how we experience ourselves and how others experience us. (We call habits skills when we purposely create them.) Most behavior occurs in an automatic fashion, with minimal conscious awareness or decision-making. Even when we make a conscious effort to do something different than the habitual behavior, it is difficult to change: the smoker who keeps trying to not light up, the dieter who keeps trying not to eat sweets, the couch potato who swears they will exercise today, but becomes “too busy.” You get the idea. Thus, it makes little sense to talk to children about their choices, since that is not what is causing their behavior, good or bad.
These complex habit patterns are what is meant by the terms subconscious or unconscious mind. Since this part of our mind accounts for the vast majority of our behavior, this is what we have to address if we are going to change ourselves or our children.
3. Contingency management to create habits
Bad habits are like a comfortable bed, easy to get into, but hard to get out of.
—Anonymous
Clearly, the first two interventions discussed above, emoting and explaining, do not work very well. The third, and the most effective, strategy is to reward the behaviors you want and punish those you do not want. It is called contingency management. There is nothing new in this concept. It has been around for years. However, it is seldom done properly to effect behavior change. All behaviors, be they thoughts, habits, skills, emotions, spacing out, talking, social interactions, physical effort, etc. are only repeated because they work in some way to improve your state, even if it is in the very short-term. When the ubiquitousness of this principle is not understood or appreciated, things tend to go wrong. Since the majority of our thoughts, feelings and behaviors are really habit patterns, the real goal of manipulating reinforcers and punishers are to create new habits that will serve you and your child well in the future. For example, if tonight you reward your child for doing their homework neatly, accurately and completely, this is not about getting tonight's homework done. It has already been done by the time you reward them. Rather, it is about developing the sustaining habit of repeatedly doing homework neatly, accurately and completely in the future. If you go about shaping this homework doing behavior in the right way, eventually they will do their homework because
of their own internal motivation, be it pride, a sense of accomplishment, industriousness in working for future goals, etc., so that your child no longer needs to be externally rewarded.
The art of parenting is to consistently use contingencies to shape many internally motivated habits so that your child becomes a “self winding” adult. The procedures for effective contingency management are covered in the chapter, “Parenting from a Learning Model.”
That is the how. I would first like to address why parents need to learn skills themselves vs. outsourcing parenting.
After many rounds of TTT and HHH, parents become exhausted and desperate. Many have read numerous books on parenting and tried much of their advice to no avail. Feeling at a loss for what else to do to help their child, they begin to cast about for experts who can help them.
In this age of outsourcing our lives to the service industry, this seems like the natural next step for parents to help their child succeed and for parents to avoid the negative feelings children can evoke in them. Parents may justify this action by the illusion that the experts are so much more knowledgeable and skilled than the parent. Generally, for reasonably sane parents, this is a fallacy.
The illusion that your child needs a little more “understanding” or “patience” the professional provides is the same illusion that keeps the above discussed overweight person looking for the next magic diet that will cause her to lose weight without willpower or being hungry. Just as there is no magic diet, there is no magic expert who can work solely with your child and effect change. Ultimately, changing the child's behavior has to include the parent, and not just to report on how “Josh or Jessica” are doing in therapy! This is why I will never treat a child without including both parents (unless a single parent).
Much of therapists/tutors/teachers/coach's greater effectiveness with your child is not their greater skill, but their lack of dysfunctional (as described above) conditioned and mirror neuron responses to your child. This makes them more imperviousness to pain induction strategies by the child, and the child knows it.
The child realizes that the Darth Vader Effect is just not going to work as well on a tutor or teacher, so they are less likely to try it.
What the experts really offer is emotional distance from Homework Help Hell and Teacher Telephone Terror. Because the emotional reactions of the child do not impact the tutor like they often do the parent, the tutor can stick with their plan as their intellect and common sense dictate. Parents, on the other hand, are often driven by their emotional arousal, be it a guilt, anger, anxiety, depression or frustration. Therefore, what you are buying when you outsource parenting is not technical skills, but planful, vs. emotionally driven, interaction with your child.
There are obviously times when it is appropriate for the child to have other adults instruct them. Examples might be music or sports lessons and coaching, or academic coaching of subjects the parent does not have the skill to do, such as advanced physics. What I am referring to here is “brat” behavior and remedial academic skills. Remediation of these problems should be done by parents. It is simply not possible to “fix” the kid and send him home to parents who do not change their strategies.
One big problem is that quite literally, parents in the current day and age do not have the stomach for letting their children experience some pain. It is not a matter of knowledge, but getting rid of the emotional barriers that prevent parents from doing what needs to be done. Getting rid of emotional barriers moves parents up many grade levels in parenting the same way that I am able to help children move up five grades levels in reading in a morning without teaching reading.
You do not need drug vendors to chemically subdue your child, counselors for him to have someone to talk with, or tutors to help with his homework. You do not need to outsource parenting! Children need real, loving, positively emotionally connected parents, not outside experts, or “surrogate parents.” It is parents who are also positively emotionally connected to their child who can provide positive motivation for their child's success.
This outsourcing of TTT and HHH only cordons off one of the more intense parts of the problem. Usually, if homework help is hell, similar behavior patterns are overflowing into other parts of parentchild interaction. If the overall problem is not resolved, parents will attempt to cordon off the other problems by delegating to drugs, tutors, psychologists, nannies, and sometimes to a residential placement center. It is a slow insidious process that is easy to observe and a nightmare to experience.
Outsourcing parenting is a sad outcome since one of the joys of parenthood is helping your child learn, grow and develop.
There is a positive side to neural mirror neurons. They also give you an immediate personal experience of your child's achievement, joys and success. His success at learning to read a “harder” book, or mastering a new skill during homework, can be experienced as your own personal achievement with all the associated good feelings. This helps bond you to your child and your child to you.
If you outsource parenting, you miss this personal participation in the joy of your child's growth and development. If you are not going to participate in this, why have a child?
In an email, a mother described her and her husband's personal participation in their son Scott's post-treatment success.
Also, that evening he asked Joel (dad) if he could read a story to him. I thought Joel was going to cry! Last night, he worked on homework (to catch up) for a good three hours without complaining. He did an English page that before I could not imagine him being able to do himself. We explained it and he did it!
Can you hear the joy in her pride filled words?
In this scenario, Scott would have experienced his dad's emotion of parental pride in his achievement as a powerful reinforcer. We all want to make our parents proud and so would Scott. That is the powerful reinforcement for Scott's continued performance. Pride is much more powerful coming from a parent than some tutor or psychologist.
The joy is not just in academics. One dad described it when he said, “…at football practice, it was fun to watch him have fun.”
I know you did not plan on homework being hell vs. heaven. And, I know, and so do the parents cited above, that it does not have to be that way.
What is far more important to most children than tutors is having real parents who care for them and telegraph that caring and pride to them via the empathetic mirror neuron connection. No surrogate parent has the emotional connection to motivate a child as a parent does. Be proud when they perform and they will give you more to be proud of.
When there is this positive mirror neuron connection, children know you are acting in their best interest even if the child doesn't feel like it at the moment. For the families I see in treatment, my role is to get parents to the emotional place to be the experts to end all experts, in the literal sense.
I am not the only one to notice this outsourcing problem. Let me excerpt a few lines from A Nation of Wimps (63):
Moms and dads who try to insulate their children from life's little setbacks may not be doing their kids any favors… taking all the discomfort, disappointment and even the play out of development, especially while increasing pressure for success, turns out to be misguided. By shielding children from the “normal vicissitudes of life, …hot house parenting fosters individuals who are risk-averse, psychologically fragile, and riddled with anxiety.
The authors talk about such parents:
Calling in professional back-up… Demanding special evaluations and academic accommodations… Prevent their children from developing healthy strategies for coping with academic and social challenges. American parents today expect their children to be perfect—the smartest, fastest, most charming people in the universe. They'll turn to doctors to make their kids into the people that parents want to believe their kids are. Relentless in their pursuit of an exceptional outcome, parents end up showing kids how to work the system for their own benefit.
I am going to delegate parenting right back to you, with help, ideas and support, but it is your deal, not boarding schools, counselors etc.