The Good News About Bad Behavior

1

Introduction

CAMILA CULLEN’S EVENINGS WERE BEGINNING to feel like torture. Like an endless game of whack-a-mole.

She tried to ignore the muffled thumps as she read a book in bed. Then a door burst open. She looked up. Through the open door of her bedroom, she saw a slight figure dash out of the room across the hall and run upstairs.

Mariana. Probably headed to the attic playroom to grab some toys.

Camila checked her watch. 10:00 p.m. She sighed.

I wonder what time she will fall asleep. How many nights can she keep this up?

Mariana, age seven, and her younger brother, four-year-old Alejandro, had been “partying at bedtime,” as they called it, for days. The pair seemed to be in open revolt, and Camila, forty-one, finally got tired of fighting it. She and her husband, Colin, forty-two, had tried everything they could think of to bring peace to the family’s evenings. They played soft music. They lay down beside their offspring. They threatened and pleaded. Nothing worked consistently to get the children to sleep.

Testy from sleep deprivation, Camila and Colin had squabbled with each other over how to handle bedtime. Defeated, the parents decided to stop nagging, threatening, or wheedling—just for a week—to see what would happen.

Bedtime became chaos. Mariana and Alejandro would rile each other up, laughing and running around like crazy. After each late night, the mornings dragged out later and later. The family twice pulled into their Washington, DC, public charter school noticeably tardy. The tired-out kids simply couldn’t get out the door on time.

Camila felt hopeless. She wondered if they should put the children in separate bedrooms. Alejandro went to sleep more willingly. He was always the first to say he was tired of the party and climb into bed. But Mariana could play with toys, build structures, or just dance around the room until 11:00 p.m. some nights. It was the fall of 2015, and the school year stretched ahead of the family ominously.

With them in the same room, no sooner had Camila kissed and tucked in one child than the other popped out of bed to get water or a stuffed animal or with some other excuse.

“I’m exhausted,” she told me in a phone interview. “I cannot do anything because I’m spending all my time putting them to bed.”

THE CULLENS ARE TWO OF the parents you’ll meet in this book, but they are far from alone. In fact, stories like theirs are so common that they have effectively redefined normal. Parents increasingly struggle with kids who can’t seem to control their behavior or emotional response. Government data confirm this. A sweeping study by the National Institute of Mental Health revealed that one in two children will develop a mood or behavioral disorder or a substance addiction before age eighteen. Extensive research I present in Chapter 2 shows that this represents an actual change in children, not just a rise in diagnosis.

So if you look around and see misbehaving, undisciplined children everywhere, it’s not your imagination. Children today are fundamentally different from past generations. They truly have less self-control.

Simply put, we face a crisis of self-regulation.

I hope the cutting-edge research and stories of real families in this book will transform your view of discipline—and give you examples of both what to do and what not to do. By the conclusion, you’ll see how the Cullens pushed through their bedtime frustration with persistence that paid off. After they absorbed and implemented the key principles in this book, they turned bedtime into a peaceful family ritual.

This book makes the case that when adults crack down on bad behavior, they undermine the development of the very traits that children need to become self-disciplined and productive members of society. Tactics such as time-outs and rewards for behavior you want may seem to help in the short run. But I’ll show how they actually hold children back by undermining their self-regulation, one of the bedrock skills for success in school, in college, in the workplace, and beyond.

It’s entirely understandable that when children misbehave, adults feel an urge to squash the unwanted behavior. We should resist that impulse. It’s exactly the opposite of what’s needed.

Instead, pay attention. View the child’s actions as a clue to a puzzle that can only be solved with the child’s engaged cooperation and as an opportunity to help that child develop an important skill. It’s easy to forget that just as children need practice to learn how to ride a bike, tie their shoes, and do math, they must try and fail and try again when it comes to managing their own behavior.

Can you imagine sending your child to time-out because they couldn’t ride their bike all the way to the stop sign and back? Of course not. First, it simply doesn’t work. It’s not as though a time-out is going to improve their balance or coordination. Second, you’d be throwing away a prime opportunity to engage your child in a constructive moment, a teaching moment. So when you factor in what you might call the opportunity cost of punishment, it’s not just that traditional discipline really doesn’t work—it moves you away from the goal.

There’s another way. A growing number of parents, educators, and psychologists are finding success with research-backed models of discipline that share three common threads: connection, communication, and capability. They are restoring order to turbulent families, giving disruptive children control over themselves, and even eliminating symptoms of attention and anxiety disorders in some kids.

This book tells the stories of this nascent movement, the champions of which aren’t even fully aware of the shared building blocks in their methods or of the growing body of science that supports their results. The first part, chapters 1 to 4, explains why we face a crisis of self-regulation and lays out the scientific discoveries that underpin this assertion. The second part, chapters 5 to 9, describes the three key steps shared by all the successful discipline models I’ve studied and takes readers inside four of these models as adults teach children to self-regulate. The conclusion, chapters 10 and 11, gives practical advice for adopting these techniques and changing old habits.

You will learn facts that may surprise you. You’ll discover how social media and family schedules have contributed to children failing to launch. You’ll learn that there is zero association between the time moms and dads spend with their school-age children and the kids’ behavior or academic performance. You’ll meet parents who achieved domestic harmony by treating their home as a learning lab, not a shrine to perfection.

By the end of the book, I hope you will respond to unwanted behavior in a child not with alarm but with eagerness. Rather than seeing misbehavior as a problem, my goal is for you to see it as an expected and totally normal part of how modern kids develop—and a chance to practice the tools I’ll explain in the pages ahead.

I FIRST STARTED PUZZLING OVER the question of how contemporary kids respond to discipline when my middle child entered kindergarten in 2009.

One warm, early fall day, I volunteered for recess duty at the school. From my post near the blacktop, I saw some older boys playing wildly, sending kickballs flying around the playground and narrowly missing a group of little kindergartners at play. I warned them to take the rough play away from the younger children. They paused and looked over at me. I walked closer to repeat my instructions while making direct eye contact.

They simply ignored me. They resumed their dangerous rough play.

I live in a solidly middle-class community in a quiet, leafy Maryland suburb of Washington, DC—similar to the upstate New York area where I was raised. Back then, kids in the schoolyard would never have ignored a parent’s instructions. As I compared notes with other parents, I heard similar stories in all walks of life. Children ignoring lifeguards at the neighborhood pool. New kindergarteners unable to sit still or keep their hands to themselves. Something seemed to have changed dramatically without our even realizing it. As fascinating as it is to ask why children have changed, the first thing I needed to know was: What now? How can I get these boys to play safely? I needed discipline strategies different from the ones my parents and teachers used.

The experience my husband and I had with our children confirmed this insight. As a child, I was a typical good girl, eager to excel in school and please adults, often found reading quietly in my bedroom. Our oldest daughter, Samantha, now twenty-five, shares a similar temperament. Our two younger kids are entirely different creatures. Natural extroverts, they burst into a room with the barely contained energy of a pair of puppy dogs. I could understand them being wiggly at mealtimes when they were two or three. But even at age eight or nine, they’d sit still at dinner for just a few minutes before jumping out of their seats to play with our dog or come to me for a hug.

My journal notes from when my youngest daughter was three and a half are full of frustration at her refusal to dress after a bath, brush her teeth, go to bed on time, or even put on her shoes to walk out the door for school. My middle child, now fourteen, has often flatly refused to attend religious school or another scheduled activity. When my similarly high-energy and headstrong husband was young, a raised hand or stern look from his mother got him back in line. Some critics argue that parents today have gone soft; the solution, they say, is to be strict and in charge. But the command-and-control method of discipline never resonated with me, and I’ll show in this book why it isn’t best for today’s children.

When my kids’ defiance first cropped up, I used time-outs, counting to three, sticker charts, and whatever methods I could find in the parenting books in a vain attempt to get them to do what I wanted. One new technique might extinguish bad behavior for a few weeks, but before long a fresh problem would crop up. At one point, I endured a stretch when every single day ended with me or a child in tears over bedtime.

As a mother, I needed a better way—something that would honor my desire to respect my kids as individuals but keep the family from descending into total chaos. As a journalist with two decades’ experience gathering facts and analyzing problems, I burned to understand why so many parents were having the same difficulties. None of the responses to misbehavior I saw around me—whether squelching, “tiger” parenting, or bubble-wrapping children—seemed to reliably produce capable, confident adults. I wondered why parenting seems so much harder nowadays, even though parents of my generation devote more time and energy to our children than at any point in modern history, according to time use researchers.

I called on my early training as a physics undergraduate at Harvard to examine, with a critical eye, hundreds of research studies on what the latest science could tell us about this broad societal problem. I started interviewing parents and educators about what seemed to work. Then, in July 2015, Mother Jones magazine published my first round of reporting about new discipline techniques. Within days of appearing on MotherJones.com, the article became the site’s most-read story ever, with more than 4 million views, 790,000 Facebook shares, 6,000 tweets, and 980 comments.

To my shock, I seemed to have struck a raw cultural nerve. I realized that millions of people were facing the same fears, confronting the same problems, and also looking for solutions. Parents and teachers around the world told me that the piece changed their approach with children. It made its way into conference sessions and university curricula and attracted interest in Sweden and Germany.

Galvanized by this response, I embarked on a cross-country quest, shadowing families and classroom teachers in ten different states. I visited homes in Vermont where children were cheerfully taking responsibility for household chores. In Maine, I observed a revolutionary new model for rehabilitating the most troubled kids in homes, schools, psychiatric wards, and even youth prisons that reduced discipline problems by 70 percent or more. I learned about brain function from leading neuroscientists and agreed to let them test my connection to my daughter with a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine. I watched Santa Fe meditation teachers offer mindfulness tools to anxious children. I traveled to inner-city classrooms in Baltimore and Columbus where the rowdiest children quieted the instant they heard a harmonica.

I sought out the real-life stories behind the rising rates of youth anxiety, depression, behavioral disorders, and substance abuse. I looked for experts to challenge my growing conviction that kids today are simply unable to manage their behavior, thoughts, or emotions the way they could in generations past. Traveling everywhere from Texas and Wisconsin to Massachusetts, I spoke with dozens of parents, educators, psychologists, and other professionals who care about kids to learn what helps children thrive. I took parenting education classes and tested their recommendations on my own children, eventually becoming a certified parent educator.

As I interviewed parent after parent who only wanted the very best for their children, the most common question I heard was, “How do we get the kids to do what we want?” It took five years of research for me to understand that, somewhat tragically, we all are asking the wrong question. The right question is, “Why can’t the kids do what we want?”

The following chapter explains why.