078: You have parenting goals; do you know what they are?

We all have goals for our children, even if these are things that we’ve never formally articulated and are ideas we’ve inherited from half-remembered bits of parenting books and blogs (and the occasional podcast) and the way we were parented ourselves. But do you ever find that the way you’re parenting in the moment doesn’t necessarily support your overarching goals?  So, if you have a goal to raise an independent child but every time the child struggles with something you step in and “help,” then your daily interactions with your child may not help your child to achieve that independence. In this episode Dr. Joan Grusec of the University of Toronto helps us to think through some of the ways we can shift our daily interactions with our children to ones that bring our relationship with them (rather than our need for compliance) to the fore in a way that supports our longer-term parenting goals.   Dr. Joan Grusec's Book Parenting and children's internatlization of values: A handbook of contemporary theory - Affiliate link   References Coplan, R.J., Hastings, P.D., Lagace,-Seguin, D.G., & Moulton, C.E. (2002). Authoritative and authoritarian mothers’ parenting goals, attributions, and emotions across different childrearing contexts. Parenting: Science and Practice 2(1), 1-26. Dix, T., Ruble, D.N., & Zambarano, R. (1989). Mothers’ implicit theories of discipline: Child effects, parent effects, and the attribution process. Child Development 60, 1373-1391. Grusec, J.E. (2002). Parental socialization and children’s acquisition of values. In M.H. Bornstein (Ed.). Handbook of Parenting (2nd Ed)., Volume 5: Practical issues in parenting (p.143-168). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Hastings, P.D., & Grusec, J.E. (1998). Parenting goals as organizers of responses to parent-child disagreement. Developmental Psychology 34(3), 465-479. Kelly, G. A. (1995). The psychology of personal constructs (2vols.). New York: Norton. Kuczynski, L. (1984). Socialization goals and mother-child interaction: Strategies for long-term and short-term compliance. Developmental Psychology 20(6), 1061-1073. Lin, H. (2001). Exploring the associations of momentary parenting goals with micro and macro levels of parenting: Emotions, attributions, actions, and styles. Unpublished Master’s thesis. Stillwater, OK: Oklahoma State University. Meng, C. (2012). Parenting goals and parenting styles among Taiwanese parents: The moderating role of child temperament. The New School Psychology Bulletin 9(2), 52-67. Miller, P. J., Wang, S. H., & Cho, G. E. (2002). Self-esteem as folk theory: a comparison of EA and Taiwanese mothers’ beliefs. Parenting: Science and Practice, 2, 209-239.   Read Full Transcript Transcript Jen:  [00:22] Hello and welcome to today’s episode of the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today we’re going to dig into the literature on something I’ve been doing a bit intuitively for a while now, which is on setting goals for our parenting. Something that Dr Rebecca Babcock Fenerci said during our conversation on Intergenerational Trauma really stuck with me. She said, nobody sets out to be a terrible parent. In other words, all parents are doing the best that they can. Now everyone has parenting goals, whether we fully articulated them or whether they’re circulating somewhere in our subconscious that are formed by relationships we had with our parents and half remembered bits of parenting books and punk post, but what if we could bring all this stuff out of our subconscious and articulate it so that we can work towards achieving these goals? I’m not saying we should set goals like ‘by next month my introverted son is going to love going to parties,’ but if we understand what high level qualities we want our children to have as they grow up, will have a much better chance of actually achieving those goals. Jen:  [02:17] So here with us today to think through all this is Dr Joan Grusec, who’s professor Emerita at the University of Toronto and have spent decades thinking about and researching this topic. Dr. Grusec received her Ba from the University of Toronto and her PHD from Stanford University before she returned to Toronto. She notes on her website that effective parenting does not involve simply the application of specific strategies and techniques or the adoption of specific styles of interaction, but the interaction of parenting strategies and children’s features like temperament, age, sex and mood, as well as something called the domain that the child is operating and that we’re going to discuss a lot more today. So don’t expect to come out of this episode with a tidy template for goal setting, but rather a framework to think about the goals that you have for your child and some ideas on how to apply it. Welcome Dr. Grusec; thanks so much for joining us. Dr. Grusec:  [03:05] Thank you. Jen:  [03:08] All right. Let’s go back to, well not the beginning here, but kind of a long time ago now. So you and one of your students did a study that has become something of a classic, I think it was published in ’98 in which you looked at parents’ goals when they imagined interactions with a child that could lead to conflict in a short vignette or in a previous experience with their own child. And I think you found that the parent use different strategies to work with their child depending on whether the parents’ center of control was themselves, the child or their relationship with the child. Can you tell us some more about that study? Dr. Grusec: [03:44] Well, I think what we were trying to do, Paul Hastings and I and in that study was to look at the situation where a child has misbehaved and the parent is responding to that misbehavior, presumably wanting to improve things for the future. But we wanted to emphasize that there isn’t one response that can be made or that all parents make and parents have different things that they want to achieve in this same situation. So some parents or at some time and not at other times. Some parents may just want immediate compliance. They want good behavior, the child is throwing a temper tantrum and they want the child to stop, and those were, what we’d call parent-centered goals. Sometimes parents are interested in teaching a value or in trying to do something that will ensure or make it less likely that the child will misbehave in this way in the future, or sometimes they’re focused on the child’s emotional needs and why is the child so distressed and so upset or what’s bothering my child? Or how does this look for my child’s perspective? How does my child see this situation? Maybe I should take that into account when I’m responding. And the, uh, the last goal that we identified, and this was us asking parents, “what are the goals that you have when you’re interacting with your children in a situation where you want to change their behavior?” So last goal we call relationship-centered. And basically this is just a desire on the part of parents, particularly mothers, I must say mothers reported this more often than fathers did just to make sure that everybody ends up feeling happy and satisfied with the outcome of the interaction. Jen:[05:47] Okay. And so what strategies did parents use in each of these kinds of situations? How did they differ? Dr. Grusec:[05:53] Oh, they differ in the, “I just want you to obey me” focus, a parent centered focus. It was mostly some sort of power assertive approach. Taking advantage of greater physical strength to move the child physically out of the situation or just to speak sharply to the child and say, “don’t do that.” So there were more of what we call these power-assertive interventions. In the case of child-centered goals. It was more some power assertion, some setting of rules. This is not the way we behave, but with an explanation or with reasoning or was some attempt to explain to the child why this was not acceptable behavior. In the case of relationship-centered goals that would be more like a taking the child’s perspective, trying to convey to the child that parent understood what the problem was even though the behavior needs to be changed and to see if...