I recently caught up with a friend from school who I hadn’t seen for many years. Our conversation included me telling her of my latest tactic for getting the girls to school on time. ‘No problems’, I told them. We don’t need to go to school now. We can go when you want to, and we’ll be late and have to go through the front office.’ Because I don’t work on my drop-off day it shouldn’t matter to me whether we are late or not.
My friend asked how that tactic had worked. ‘Not too well. They have no sense of time.’ She nodded understandingly. ‘Children don’t have the capacity to understand consequences at that age’, she pointed out. She was right, and I should have known better. Steve has recently undertaken eight weeks of evening parenting classes and I have studied two parenting books which we have discussed together to reinforce our learnings. Overall this experience has revolutionised the way I approach discipline, enabled me to feel much more in control and also helped me feel confident that I am nurturing Rhea and Lara’s development in the best possible way. It has also reduced any feelings of guilt when I say or do things that are not ideal. As in the above example – and many others.
Siegel and Payne’s book No Drama Discipline: The Whole- Brain Way to calm the chaos and nurture your child’s developing mind draws on recent developments in child neurological research to note that children’s brains are not physiologically capable of undertaking certain tasks and thought processes such as understanding consequences, planning ahead or organising thoughts and so it is really quite pointless if we get annoyed that they can’t. As my friend also joked, ‘why can’t they be born fully formed?’ The book then suggests that we should harness the knowledge of children’s developing brains to reinforce and nurture their problem-solving skills, hardwiring these from childhood, rather than training children to do as they are told without question or stifling their curiosity or initiative.
This approach encourages parents to listen to their children actively, reflecting their speech so that they feel heard, and then work with their children to find solutions to problems that affect them by problem-solving together. So for example if Lara tells me that she really doesn’t want to go to school today, I say ‘you really don’t want to go to school today. You really don’t want to go.’ This opens the door to her feeling heard and validated, often leading to her explaining exactly why she feels like that: ‘I want to stay with you.’ Knowing what the problem is, I can validate her feelings, explain why I can’t stay with her on a school day and ask her to think about how we can make her feel better about going to school. I’m teaching her to think through her own problems, supporting her to find a solution, which is more likely to address the issue and also build resilience for the future. It’s empowering for her.
The book accompanying Steve’s course that I’ve also been reading is Dr Thomas Gordon’s Parent Effectiveness Training. It takes a similar approach using respect as the starting point for communications with your child, together with active listening. Rather than the child ‘winning’ through permissive parenting techniques or the parent ‘winning’ through authoritative parenting techniques, it promotes a ‘win/win’ approach where the parent helps the child to work out a solution to a problem that troubles them or the equilibrium of both of you. The solution needs to be acceptable to both of you.
This technique is hard. My first instinct is to solve the problem for them, like when Rhea confided in me last week that she didn’t want to go to school with a missing library book and I told her that we’d look for it that night. It would have been better had I just acknowledged her worry rather than reassuring her immediately because I didn’t validate her concern first. But I don’t beat myself up about things like this, or even if I get angry with the girls. The first book highlights the desirability of parents being ‘authentic’ and not pretending to be perfect because no-one is perfect, parent or not; children can sense inauthenticity; and by honestly acknowledging feelings of anger or frustration you teach your child that these feelings are normal. The important thing is that the relationship is repaired through an apology to your child if you were hurtful or disrespectful towards them. As in adult communication, this open communication strengthens relationships rather than weakening them. It’s empowering for me to know that it’s OK to be imperfect: in fact being imperfect is helpful in teaching my children to follow my example of how to resolve the inevitable conflicts that arise in life.
It’s not socially acceptable anymore to be violent towards children, but most people are very comfortable taking the ‘do as I say’ approach to disciplining children. I don’t find that this works for me, and in the longer-term I agree with these books that such approaches miss the opportunity to teach children that they deserve respect at any age; or teach them problem-solving or effective conflict resolution skills.
Nevertheless, even knowing all this, on their first day of school after holidays last week, after asking them to get dressed several times then explaining how their tardiness made me feel, I still delivered an ultimatum that if they weren’t dressed within five minutes I would put their uniforms in the car and take them to school in their pyjamas. I would have dragged them into the car and had thrown their uniforms in and it was only Steve’s kindness that avoided this outcome (though not the accompanying tears).
The books would have suggested I instigate a problem-solving discussion instead, leading to their buying-in to their own solutions. I’m not always in the mood. The PET technique says to find the right time for the discussion. I’ll work on that.
Overall though, my indicator of success is that I feel more in control. Theirs is that the frequency and severity of their tantrums has reduced from two to four each day to becoming a rare event.
The challenges highlight to me another aspect of parenting: that it takes a village to raise a child. As I might have mentioned before, it’s all so much easier with help.
References
Siegel, Daniel and Payne, Tina, 2015. No Drama Discipline: The Whole- Brain Way to calm the chaos and nurture your child’s developing mind. Scribe publications.
Dr Thomas Gordon’s Parent Effectiveness Training, 2000. Harmony books.
