Discipline with Love and Limits

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

—William Shakespeare

Let’s assume that you’ve just told your child to hurry because you’re running late to take her to school. But “hurry” is not part of her vocabulary, so she just takes her time getting shoes on, stopping to sing a song to herself, and then just staring off into space. Her usual pace.

By now you are looking at this situation as potentially catastrophic. You are probably saying to yourself, “We’ll never get there on time. Everybody there will think I’m not a good parent. My daughter is always dawdling and making us late. I can’t stand this.” So, given this self-talk, how are you feeling right now? Stressed? Anxious? Depressed? Oh, and let’s not forget angry?

Note the key words that exaggerate the situation: “never,” “everybody,” “always,” and “can’t stand this.” When we use logic, we can see that the word “never,” which means “no time in the past or future,” is not accurate. In the same way, the word “always” means for “all the past and future or forever.” That’s not true, is it? See how this kind of exaggeration works?

Let’s now change your negative self-talk words to something milder by using positive self-talk. “My daughter dawdles, but we can manage. If we’re late, so be it. It doesn’t mean that I’m a bad parent. I’m doing the best I can. And I can stand it. It doesn’t mean that I’m a bad parent. I should ask her doctor if her behavior is normal and if there’s something I can do about it.”

Now how do you feel? Maybe a little stressed, but not overwhelmed, and you are far less likely to yell, threaten, or hit your daughter out of frustration, the unhealthy discipline we discuss in Chapter 2.

In the over fifty years that we have been working with children and families and from the scientific research that has been conducted during those years on stress, it has become obvious that the mind is the key player. In the Introduction, we described why it is stressful for us to care for and nurture a young child. In this chapter, we will look at what happens when a child is consistently under harmful stress and how to prevent that stress from becoming toxic to a child.

To understand this fundamental biological process of a toxic stress response, imagine that you’ve just climbed up on a stool to get something from a top shelf and you start to lose your balance. Your brain screams, “Danger!,” and your body mobilizes to protect you from that danger. The physical changes that are associated with your brain’s response to danger are well understood. When your brain senses danger, adrenaline and cortisol, two hormones that increase alertness, flood the body. These hormones increase your heart rate, dump acid into your stomach, and constrict blood vessels, restricting blood flow to your hands and feet. These physical changes are needed to prepare your body for fighting or fleeing from the danger—in your case, falling off the stool.

If your adrenaline and cortisol levels get high enough or flood your brain and body frequently enough (you keep being exposed to danger), thinking becomes difficult. Problem-solving becomes narrowed to a very few options.

The same process happens in children’s brains. Extensive research on the biology of stress now shows that children’s healthy development can be derailed by toxic stress—excessive or prolonged activation of the stress response systems in their body and brain. Such toxic stress can have permanently damaging effects, causing a lifetime of learning, behavior, and health problems.

The part of our brain most affected by stress is the prefrontal cortex, which is the decision-making part of the brain. As a result, children who grow up in consistently adverse, stressful environments—including environments in which they are consistently spanked, threatened, or ignored—experience toxic stress. This toxic stress generally makes it harder to concentrate, sit still, rebound from disappointment, and follow directions. And above all, children who experience toxic stress find it harder to self-regulate—that is, exercise self-control. Their brain is always on high alert, not knowing if someone will be there to provide consistent, caring adult support.

Research has demonstrated that supportive, responsive relationships with caring adults to buffer a child’s stress as early in life as possible can prevent or reverse the damaging effects of toxic stress. This is one critical reason why it is so important for parents to focus on being caring, supportive, and protective, to consistently and positively teach children what they want them to learn. That way parents can prevent their children from experiencing toxic stress. (We give you the tools to do so, in real time, in Behavior Problems and Solutions, beginning here.) Parents can lay a good foundation for this approach by taking the three steps to a healthy Mind S.E.T.: Self-Talk, Empathy, and Teaching.

Self-Talk, Empathy, and Teaching: Mind S.E.T.

S Is for Self-Talk

It has long been known by cognitive behavior researchers that our words create our emotions. Therefore, to change our feelings, we must first discover the words that drive our feelings and change those words. This sounds simple enough, but it is more difficult than one would think. We lapse into habits that end up making us feel in ways we don’t like.

We can divide the words we use into two basic groups: positive self-talk or negative self-talk. Positive self-talk keeps our stress down, keeps depression away, and helps us make clear decisions. Negative self-talk, on the other hand, increases our stress and drives our anxiety and depression.

Here’s an example of how we can turn negative self-talk into positive: If our child spills his milk and our self-talk automatically goes to “This is awful! What a mess!,” we can shift to positive self-talk and say aloud, “No big deal. Let’s get the sponge and clean it up.”

Keeping our self-talk calm and constructive will provide a model to help our child avoid the bad habit of exaggerating events as awful disasters instead of treating them realistically as tolerable and fixable. It’s bad enough having to deal with problems without making them worse through self-talk that raises our stress, drives our anxiety and depression, and can lead us to make parenting decisions that are unhealthy to our child.

E Is for Empathy

Empathy is the ability to put ourselves in somebody else’s position so we can see the world as that other person sees it. Feeling what our child feels, taking on our child’s perspective, can help us understand why he is behaving as he is.

When your child hits another child, for example, first put yourself in your child’s shoes. How would you feel in your child’s position? Would you act in the same way? This is the time for some empathy, so say, “I’m sorry you chose to hit Eric. I know it’s frustrating when you want something somebody else has.” In this way, we convey understanding and sympathy for the child’s position and provide a model for him to use in the future. Then continue the lesson by focusing on the victim, asking, “How do you think Eric felt when you hit him? How would you feel if Eric hit you?” These questions can help the aggressive child understand what it must be like to be on the receiving end of an aggressive act.

Unfortunately, we can also provide a poor role model of empathy when we say such things as, “How could you do that? You know better. That was a mean thing to do.” This is not very empathetic language, and it doesn’t teach your child how to have empathy for others. By putting yourself in your child’s shoes, you can understand how he might feel if you were to respond in such nonempathetic ways.

T Is for Teaching

You want to teach a new behavior that replaces the behavior that isn’t good for your child. The teaching strategies in this book are based on applied behavior analysis, the science that is used to identify what is responsible for behavior change. The teaching steps are very simple. First, you show the behavior you want, then you show your child how to do the behavior, and finally you make doing the behavior worthwhile.

The teaching model is the opposite of the punishment model, which is the fallback position most of us think of when we want behavior to change. We have come to believe that if we punish a behavior, it will go away and never return. There are some basic fallacies in this belief. First of all, punishment is only focused on getting rid of a behavior but not on new, replacement behavior. We’ve all experienced the admonition, “Don’t do that!,” and we’ve asked the question, “If I can’t do that, what am I supposed to do?” Teaching says, “Instead of doing that, do this.”

Behavioral research in punishment has consistently demonstrated that when punishment is used, the behavior often goes underground. In other words, it doesn’t go away; it just goes out of sight. Behavior changes only to avoid the punisher seeing the behavior. The thriving business of manufacturing and selling radar detectors is testament to this fact.

Finally, punishment strategies often involve bullying methods and rely on the threat of pain to discourage the unwanted behavior. What happens, however, is an increased stress level that may become toxic to the child, as we discuss at the beginning of this chapter.

Everyone Can Use Mind S.E.T.

Here are some special questions we are often asked concerning whether Mind S.E.T® can be used by single parents, grandparents, and early childhood and preschool programs. We say yes! The more caring, supportive, protective adults, the better.

SINGLE PARENTING AND CO-PARENTING

Q. What if my spouse or ex-spouse or co-parent doesn’t use teaching discipline?

Parenting a young child alone—as sole caregiver for a certain number of days a week or all the time—is a difficult job for even the most skilled parent. Not only is parenting a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week job that demands attention and requires patience, but it’s also designed to be a team effort. So if parents are separated, divorced, or otherwise living apart, even for a few days at a time because of work or travel, it is best if they work together to plan strategies, share duties, and decide on rules that will let them build independent, self-sufficient, loving, empathetic children. And instead of focusing on trying to control what the other parent does or doesn’t do, each parent is best advised to use the strategies that we have outlined in this book.

Keep in mind that children are capable of understanding and following different rules in different settings because the rules are attached to the settings. It is important to note, however, that going to war with the other parent over child-rearing practices will result in the child becoming collateral damage. No one escapes war without damage, so when parents cannot agree on rules, each needs to help the child understand that house rules may be different depending on which parent’s house the child is living in at the time—and that is okay.

THE PARENTING GRANDPARENTS

Q. How can grandparents use Mind S.E.T. when emotions run high between grandparents and the parents of their grandchildren?

The strength of the emotional relationships among grandparents, parents, and grandchildren can lead to conflicts around power and control over who’s in charge when it comes to making decisions about discipline and parenting.

Grandparents may think that they should be “the boss” because they were always in that role with their children. They also may believe that their adult children should follow their lead when making parenting decisions because they are “older and wiser.”

Conflicts can arise between generations over cultural changes, as well, including what constitutes “healthy eating,” for example. Parents may be tuned into the health issues associated with diet by demanding that their children eat only organic foods, non-GMO foods, local farm-raised meat and produce, or gluten-free or dairy-free foods. They may require anything from paleo to vegan diets for their children.

Conversely, grandparents may be following different nutritional guidelines (low-fat, low-sugar, and so forth). Either way, for the grandparents to meet their grandchildren’s needs without alienating the parents requires a spirit of respectful compromise, conversation, and empathy to bridge the knowledge gap and keep mealtimes from becoming meltdown time.

Jealousy and competition can also cause friction between grandparents and their adult children, as well as between sets of grandparents. Although grandparents may not even realize that they have self-centered expectations about how their adult children should treat them, many keep score regarding how much time and what kinds of presents their grandchildren give to them and to their other grandparents.

They may tell themselves things like, “My son should ask me to come over more. His wife asks her mom to babysit, but not me.” “It’s awful that my daughter never calls me anymore since she had her baby.” “Why do my son and his wife leave and expect me to babysit every time I come over to be with their kids?”

So if you are a grandparent who is upsetting yourself about your relationship with your adult children and your grandchildren, consider what this jealousy and scorekeeping are doing to your relationship with them—not to mention your own stress levels.

Ask yourself these questions:

It’s the messages that grandparents say to themselves that upset them. But when they change their self-talk to say that grandparenting and parenting adult children are not competitive games, they shift their mindset from a negative one to a positive one. They go from “I want to be the favorite!” to “I am happy that my grandchildren have lots of relationships with caring adults.”