020: How do I get my child to do what I want them to do?

Parenting is tough, huh? Sometimes it feels like we spend a lot of our time asking our daughter to do things…and asking again…and finding a more creative way to ask. We’re going to get some great advice on this next week from Julie King, co-author of the new book How to Talk so Little Kids will Listen – but for this week I want to set the stage and think about why we should bother with all of this. Why not just force our kids to do what we want them to do? And, is it possible to raise obedient kids who can also think for themselves? Reference Baldwin, A.L. (1948). Socialization and the parent-child relationship. Child Development 19, 127-136. Retrieved from: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1125710 Baumrind, D. (1978). Parental disciplinary patterns and social competence in children. Youth Society 9(3), 239-267. DOI: 10.1177/0044118X7800900302 Collins, W.A. (Ed.) (1984). Development during middle childhood: The years from six to twelve. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press. Full book available as a pdf at: http://www.nap.edu/catalog/56.html Crockenberg, S.C., & Litman, C. (1990). Autonomy as competence in 2-year-olds: Maternal correlates of child defiance, compliance, and self-assertion. Developmental Psychology 26(6), 961-971. DOI: 0.1037/0012-1649.26.6.961 Hare, A.L., Szwedo, D.E., Schad, M.M., & Allen, J.P. (2014). Undermining adolescent autonomy with parents and peers: The enduring implications of psychologically controlling parenting. Journal of Research on Adolesence 24(4), 739-752. DOI: 10.1111/jora.12167 Lamborn, S.D., Mounts, N.S., Steinberg, L., & Dornbusch, S.M. (1991). Patterns of competence and adjustment among adolescents from authoritative, authoritarian, indulgent, and neglectful families. Child Development 62, 1049-1065. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.1991.tb01588.x Lansbury, J. (2014). Setting limits with respect: What it sounds like. Retrieved from: http://www.janetlansbury.com/2014/04/setting-limits-with-respect-what-it-sounds-like-podcast/ Kochanska, G. (1997). Mutually responsive orientation between mothers and their young children: Implications for early socialization. Child Development 68(1), 94-112. 10.1111/j.1467-8624.1997.tb01928.x Kochanska, G. (2013). Promoting toddlers’ positive social-emotional outcomes in low-income families: A play-based experimental study. Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology 42(5), 700-712. DOI: 10.1080/15374416.2013.782815 Kochanska, G., Kim, S., & Boldt, L.J. (2015). (Positive) power to the child: The role of children’s willing stance toward parents in developmental cascades from toddler age to early preadolescence. Developmental Psychopathology 27(4pt.1), 987-1005. DOI: 10.1017/S0954579415000644 Kohn, A. (2005). Unconditional parenting: Moving from rewards and punishments to love and reason. New York: Atria. Parpal, M., & Maccoby, E.E. (1985). Maternal responsiveness and subsequent child compliance. Child Development 56, 1326-1334. DOI: 10.2307/1130247 Spera, C. (2005). A review of the relationship among parenting practices, parenting styles, and adolescent school achievement. Educational Psychology 17(2), 125-146. DOI: 10.1007/s10648-005-3950-1   Read Full Transcript Transcript This episode actually grew out of an assignment for my master’s program. I’m in the middle of a class on child psychology, which is really at the heart of the curriculum for the masters in psychology with a focus on child development. We were presented with a case study for a child called Jeremiah whose mother was at the end of her rope in dealing with him because he basically refused to cooperate with her. He was having problems in school as well and I was tasked with writing a guide for his mother that that would help her to address some of his challenges. I’ve been reading two books that helped me with this assignment – the first is Unconditional Parenting by Alfie Kohn, who also wrote the book Punished by Rewards that was the basis of the episode on not saying “Good Job.” The blurb on the back of Unconditional Parenting starts out “Most parenting guides begin with the question “How can we get kids to do what they’re told?” and then proceed to offer various techniques for controlling them. In this truly groundbreaking book, nationally respected educator Alfie Kohn begins instead by asking “What do kids need – and how can we meet those needs?” What follows from that question are ideas for working with children rather than doing things to them.” I read Unconditional Parenting a while ago and have been looking for an excuse to delve into the research behind it so this seemed to be about as good of an offer as I was going to get. But I have on my nightstand at the moment the provocatively-titled book “Do Parents Matter?” which is sort of like David Lancy’s book The Anthropology of Childhood that I’ve quoted many times on this show except that the authors actually lived in the communities and did a lot of the research themselves that the book cites, whereas Lancy’s book mostly cites other anthropologists’ work. At various points in Do Parents Matter? very young children in some African and Central American cultures are described as being highly cooperative and even obedient. They can and will sit still and quiet through long church services or car rides; they entertain their siblings rather than squabbling with them and they make valuable contributions to the running of a household. And I started to think about how to marry these two lines of inquiry together – what is it that parents in other cultures are doing to get their kids to cooperate in learning and in life? And are some of those things the kinds of activities that we should consider doing to get our own kids to cooperate more – or is the key really focusing on the child’s needs like Alfie Kohn suggests? So let’s start with the research on children in other cultures. Sarah and Robert LeVine spent two years studying how the GuSII people in Kenya take care of their infants, and compared these relationships with middle-class American mothers in Boston. The Gusii mothers would spend a lot of time soothing their babies. Mother and baby were in close bodily contact for much of the day, or if the mothers weren’t available then siblings were holding the baby. The mothers responded very quickly to a distressed cry, often by offering a breast – the LeVines showed some Gusii mothers a video of an American baby crying while having his diaper changed and the mothers were shocked that anyone would let a baby cry for even a few seconds. The Gusii infants rarely cry long enough to become aroused, and being in constant touch with another person and feeding as soon as they fuss helps to keep the baby calm. The Gusii mothers didn’t use toys or other objects to play with their baby, and would turn the baby away from them so the baby couldn’t make eye contact if they thought the baby was getting too excited so the baby would calm down again. The Gusii mothers want a calm infant and a compliant child because another child is probably on the way within a couple of years, since the average Gusii mother has ten children – so this continual “soothing” of the baby helps to set the stage for a toddler who prioritizes his mother’s wishes and doesn’t give her much trouble. Shifting gears a bit to slightly older children among the Mayans of the YucaTAN, we find that children older than two are asked to do chores quickly and efficiently. Beginning around age 6 the run errands, help older siblings with chores outside their compound, and take care of younger siblings. Girls learn to make tortillas by watching, and by the mother’s very judicious use of direction. I have personally watched children younger than ten in the highlands of Guatemala make tortillas – they left a bucket of corn to soak overnight and in the morning they took it up the hill to someone who had a generator and returned with the corn ground up. They would pat the tortilla into shape, passing it from hand to hand. I tried it myself, and they laughed at me because I couldn’t stop the dough from sticking to my hands and my tortillas were so thick they were virtually inedible. Children in many cultures WANT to learn and they are EXPECTED to learn; they stand stock-still watching someone do a task that they’re interested in, and they learn how to do it by watching the task over and over again. Their parents don’t have to train them or teach them to do a task; the child learns how to do it because he wants to, because what is being learned has some value – often a real contribution to the running of the household. If an adult offers instruction it’s during the course of doing work, not as a lesson specifically set up to teach the child something. And one set of researchers note that in learning outside of school there are virtually no failures. Some children might take longer than others to learn certain skills but almost all children become able to collaborate and contribute fully to family and community. Flunking isn’t really an option. Of course, you can also take the opposite approach like Chinese parents, as these mothers combine parental authority with love – if you love your child then you want to train him for the seven Confucian learning values, which are sincerity, diligence, endurance of hardship, perseverance, concentration, respect for teachers, and humility. Chinese parents consider the child’s school performance as part of their development as a moral person. They criticize their children without worrying about the child’s self-esteem because...