Someone recently asked me ” What are parents worried about?” My short and, probably too flippant, answer was “Everything”. Parents of young children have always sought advice. Just Google How to handle a picky eater, How to potty train a toddler, or How to deal with sibling rivalry, and you will find just a sample of what keeps parents up at night. Every day I check in on parenting groups across social media platforms to see if there is an overarching concern. Lately I have seen an uptick in cries for help with behavior management from both parents and educators. They describe troubling tantrum behaviors, aggression towards others, growing concern for their child’s expressions of feeling helpless and hopeless, and alarm at their own emotional reactions to these behaviors. I bring some personal and professional experience to this problem. Just reading these posts brings back some hurtful memories. But I also found a way through to the other side that I hope will offer real solutions for families…And, since this is the Gabbing Blog, it is designed to be positive and fun for all concerned.
I’ll start with the end of my story, because we all love a happy ending. My now socially and professionally phenomenally successful adult daughter has given me her permission to share some of her early school experiences. Always verbally precocious and highly energetic, our family all thought that school would be a breeze. It was not. Almost from the start we had reports from her teachers that she talked too much, would not sit still, and had difficulty following classroom routines, although she excelled academically. It hit a crisis point at the start of second grade when she had the misfortune of being assigned to a particularly ridgid teacher who took the stand that she would punish these behaviors into extinction. The result was a child who had melt downs at school, cried at home, and was bullied by the other children. I awoke at night to the sound of her grinding her teeth in her sleep. My husband and I began to doubt our parenting skills, even though our older child was doing well. Keep in mind that I was already an experienced professional, educated in child development and therapeutic intervention. I could only imagine how someone without these resources would feel trying to help their child. After several weeks of crying myself to sleep and some strong prayers I got to work, starting with research. That is when I came across the book that changed our lives in so many ways. Driven to Distraction by Edward Hallowell and John Ratey, originally published in 1992, is still in print and widely available. Although Hallowell and Ratey address Attention Deficit/Hyper-Activity Disorder in their books, the behavior management techniques they describe do not require a diagnosis or medication to be effective. My daughter and I had faster than expected, positive results that continue to benefit our relationship into her adulthood. She describes me as her best friend. Now, that’s music to a mother’s ears!
How to Change the Conversation
Let’s start with the one of the most frequent concerns that appear in the parenting posts. Parents, particularly mothers – but not always- feel as though they are always punishing their child’s behaviors. Time outs just seem to escalate tantrums and aggression and don’t reach the desired goal of peaceful compliance. Parents report feeling out of control and frequently yelling at their child. Everyone is miserable. One of the methods recommended by Hallowell and Ratey is to begin by changing the focus your efforts to concentrate on the positive things the child already does rather than fon the things you want to change. Here is how I did it all those years ago.
In true Gift of Gab style, we will start with the skills that we are targeting. There are parent skills as well as the child skills because communication is a two-way street.
Targeted Skills: Positive language (good job, thank you, I knew you could do it, You can do hard things.), Identifying accomplishments (self help skills, academic tasks, helpfulness at home, polite language) Categorization, Values, Recognition, Rewards and Consequences (not punishments).
Materials: Paper, pencils, markers or crayons, currency (play money, poker chips, or sticker charts)
Object of the Activity: To improve family relationships and establish positive behaviors at home and at school, parent and child will work together to create a positive and meaningful reward system to recognize those positive things the child already consistently does, and work together to add positive behavioral skills to this list of accomplishments.
Step One: A Heart to Heart Talk Choose a moment when you are both relaxed and not in a highly emotional state. This is important. Your goal here is to set a tone of recognition of your child’s feelings, and to offer your support. You want to explain how you want to change things to make it better for everybody. Here is a script to start with. Feel free to use your own style, but do not change the meaning.
“You know, we have both been unhappy lately. I feel like I have been yelling at you too much. I’m sorry. I want you to know that I have been thinking about what a good kid you really are. You do so many things all the time that are just terrific, and I think we have been too focused on other things. I want to change that. I have some ideas about how it could be fun, too, and I want your ideas. What do you think? Want to hear my ideas?”
Of course, you know your child best. Speak from the heart about how you want to be a part of the solution and not part of the problem. As the adult. You are the most powerful person in this relationship. Your child needs help to get over this hurdle. You will most likely be met with tears, a need for a hug and enough agreement to move on to Step Two
Step Two: Explain your plan. Explain that you want to start a regular reward system for the things he already does everyday that are good and should be recognized. To do this you are going to make a list of all the good things you both can think of that he does all the time and assign each a point value. He will earn points every day for doing what he already does, so he is guaranteed to have points at the end of the week. These points can be “spent” for “rewards” on a weekly monthly or any longer time period of your choice. For example, when we started our plan my daughter got points for getting out of bed without a fuss (5 points), getting dressed without help (5 points), brushing her teeth without being reminded (10 points) and being ready to leave for school on time (15 points). She already did all these things but leaving the house on time was especially helpful to me as I needed to get to work, so it was worth more points. At the end of the week she could spend her points on a trip to the library (10 points), an ice cream treat (15 points) or a visit to Grandma and Gramps for lunch (20 points). She could also choose to bank her points for a movie (50 points) or save up for a trip to Disneyland (10,000 points) over spring break. (The Disneyland reward is an indication of how desperate my husband and I were to make a positive change for our family.)
Step Three: Create A List of What is Already Accomplished You will guide the conversation. To keep it small and simple go through the activities he does well every day with minimal or no oversight from you, no matter how small. Assign each a point value. The more complicated the task or the more helpful it is to you and others; the more points are awarded. Here are some ideas:
Morning: Gets up, straightens up the bed, gets dressed, washes up, brushes teeth, helps siblings get ready, puts breakfast dishes in the sink, leaves for school on time
After school: Brings in his bookbag and stores it neatly, gets a snack for himself and/or others, puts dishes in the sink, shares a cookie or apple, does his homework without fuss, reads quietly, plays a game or watches tv with sibling without fuss
Dinner time: Helps set table, cleans up toys before dinner, eats a new food, helps clean up
Bedtime: Takes a bath or shower, puts on pajamas, brushes teeth, gets into bed without fuss
You get the idea…You are not looking to improve anything. Choose behaviors to reward that are already in place. You will also notice that I did not target at school behaviors. Those will come later.
Step Four: Choose a Set of Rewards and a Method for Tracking Them This is where your child will be the most help. He knows best what is rewarding to him. Big items, like my daughter’s desired trip to Disneyland, require a huge point value as well as a huge investment for you and your family. That is fine, if you can do it, but you both also need some more attainable goals that can be offered for more immediate satisfaction. Think of activities that do not cost a lot of money but are fun to do together like baking cookies, visiting Grandma, reading a book together or an afternoon at the park for a picnic. These rewards should be positive for you both. We found that buying things was less rewarding than experiences.
You can choose to track his points in many ways. We used small, coin-sized poker chips with values of 5, 10, and 25 on them. She had a coin bank she kept them in. At the end of the week she counted them up (great math lesson) and decided if she wanted to spend them on a reward or note them in her “bank book” for the future (Disneyland was waiting). You can use a sticker chart, monopoly money, or pennies. Just be sure you have enough for the week and a way to “bank” them. These points add up quickly.
Step Five: WEEKS ONE AND TWO Start the very next day. Be diligent in recognizing every time he does something on the list with a prompt awarding of points. In our experience, this changed the tone of our conversations right from the start. There were more expressions of “That’s great! 5 Points” and “Wow! You did it again!” and much fewer outbursts of frustration. At then end of week one count the points together and let him choose an immediate reward or to bank his points. After you have done this at the end of week two it is time to expand the program.
Step Six: The Talk at the A The Start of Week Three After counting and spending the points of week two, it is time to expand the focus of your efforts. Congratulate him on doing such a good job with earning and spending his points the past two weeks. Now he has shown that he is grown-up enough to start to expand his skills. What would he like to do better? He gets to add a goal to work on something he thinks is a problem for him. Let’s say it is a big problem for him that he loses his temper when his sister uses one of his toys and then he gets punished for it. You can discuss how he can handle that better in the moment. Perhaps suggest that he comes to you to set a timer to allow his sister to play with the toy for 5 minutes. Then it becomes a new family rule that his sister must return the toy when the timer goes off. If he follows through with the plan, he earns 50 points. If he does not follow through and chooses to fuss, he loses 30 points. This is where the concept of consequences comes in. The reward must be bigger than the consequence to encourage the change. Help him to choose a behavior that is troubling to him, then the benefits of the change will be felt by him.
Step Seven: Every Week for the Next 6 weeks It takes 6 to 12 weeks to establish a new behavior pattern. This method gives you an opportunity for a weekly review followed by a reward. As new positive behaviors are mastered, you can address other concerns. For my daughter, once we established a more positive home environment, we focused on school. We had absolutely no cooperation from her teacher. But by this time my daughter knew that her father and I were in her corner and would work on everything with her. We would not give up on her. We focused on giving her the skills to deal with bullies. Every time she used one of these skills at school, she told me about the experience at home at the end of the day. We did not focus on changing the other kid’s behavior, only her own. It was treated like a science experiment. Did that technique work? No? What technique will you try next? (We had a great counselor who focused on her reactions and gave her several ways to react to bullying. It empowered her.) Every time she used a technique, successful or not, instead of losing her temper she earned 50 points. If she lost her temper and got a bad report, she lost 30 points.
Step Eight: It is OK to Back Track. Do not pile on the behaviors to work on. Two difficult improvement behaviors a week is probably the most to keep track of. If it proves too much, back off to the last successful level.
Seek out help from others. As I mentioned we had a terrific behavioral counselor who taught my daughter coping skills to use when she was being bullied. She learned that she had choices in her reactions to the bad behaviors of other people. While it would have been terrific to have a cooperative classroom teacher, my daughter found support from another teacher on her campus who welcomed her into his classroom before school where she worked on math problems. He liked having a student who just liked to learn, and she had a safe haven. It made a world of difference. She added her own goals every week. Some were solutions to problems, some were just things she wanted to learn, like how to make her bed herself, which helped us around the house, and looking after the dog. It was a long journey, but it paid off big time. She “banked” the 10,000 points needed for her trip to Disneyland in just 3 months. We continued to use the point system until the end of the school year when she informed me that she did not need it anymore. I didn’t either.
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Communication is the key. A recognition that when your child is suffering through a bad time, they show it through disruptions in their behavior. The whole family suffers. Take a long, hard look at what is happening, identify the problem and develop a plan to make things better. Look for resources in the Parenting section of bookstores or the local library. You will find Driven to Distraction, among other titles that may be helpful. You may also find The Gift of Gab to be a helpful resource in selecting targeted activities to develop and improve communication with your child.
I hope your family finds this helpful.