January Columns: All New

Information

Jan 31

Parenting Information NOT New

The media recently reported “new” research findings to the effect that rewards often backfire and self-esteem is not the wonderful, uplifting personal attribute once thought. As a result, schools are rethinking their teaching and classroom management philosophies.

Wrong again! Research showing that rewards often backfire and revealing the dark side of self-esteem has been available for quite some time. Furthermore, the Internet permits anyone who is interested to access this information. This supposedly “new” stuff simply illustrates the  disconnect between research and practice in American education. More directly put, educational methodology is more driven by fad than fact. In effect, the classroom is in many ways a laboratory within which experiments are conducted using children as guinea pigs.

Was objective research done to verify the efficacy of the so-called “Open Classroom” before that particular philosophy captured America’s schools in the early 1970s? No. Somebody sold an idea to a bunch of education bureaucrats and millions of dollars of the taxpayers’ money was wasted as a consequence. How about Outcome-Based Education? Again, the research done to validate that particular flop was of the sort my experimental methods professor would have used to illustrate sloppy research methods. And again, millions of dollars, etcetera. That’s been pretty much the story of American education “reform” for forty years.

For almost two decades, research done by people like Roy Baumeister of Florida State University has shown, as conclusively as social science research is capable of showing, that high self-esteem is associated with anti-social behavior. Think, for example, bullying. It appears that the higher one’s self-regard, the lower his regard for others. People with high self-regard believe themselves to be entitled. What they want, they believe they deserve to have. Because they deserve what they want, the ends justify the means. Think, for example, Bernie Madoff.           The functional attribute is one that went “out” with the rest of the bathwater in the 1960s: humility and modesty. People who are humble pay attention to you. They try to figure out, in any situation, what they can do to help you and make you feel comfortable. It’s about you, not the Almighty Them. On the other side of the equation, people who possess high self-esteem want people to pay attention to and do things for them. In fact, they tend to get upset if people don’t pay them attention and cater to them. Furthermore, the folks in question are often malcontents who are never satisfied with any degree of catering.

Concerning rewards, it has been known for quite some time that rewards often depress achievement levels. Likewise, people with high self-esteem tend to perform below their level of ability. Why? Because they believe that anything they do is worthy of merit; therefore, they do the minimum, if that.

A recent conversation with a Navy commander illustrates the point. He told me that he deals “all the time” with young recruits who believe that they should be rewarded for whatever they do, whenever they do it, even if they do nothing more than what is minimally expected of them. They have acquired this very entitled, uncooperative attitude from their parents and the schools they attended. Their parents can be forgiven. They were simply doing what Parents’ Magazine and other publications and talking heads told them to do. Educators, on the other hand, should have had the wherewithal to ask the fundamental question: Is there compelling evidence that giving rewards for adequate or even improved performance actually improves academic achievement over the long haul?

Concerning classroom behavior, rewards often backfire. Give a child who is aggressive during free play a reward for not being aggressive for ten minutes and he is very likely to turn right around and be aggressive. He realizes, intuitively, that the only reason he is being singled out for a reward is precisely BECAUSE he is aggressive; therefore, to keep the rewards coming he must continue to aggress.

If school reform fads had paid off, then today’s achievement levels would be higher and classroom behavior would be better than they were in the 1960s. The opposite is the case. The taxpayer is slowly catching on, evidenced by a growing revolt against public education’s never-ending cry for more money. Accountability can be a painful thing.

Jan 24

Parenting by Feelings

Margaret Thatcher, former prime minister of England, once said, “One of the great problems of our age is that we’re governed by people who care more about feelings than they do about thoughts and ideas.”

Quite so, and it is equally accurate to say that “one of the great problems of our age is that children are being raised and educated by people who care more about their feelings than they do their thoughts and ideas.”

The child’s feelings have been the paramount consideration in both spheres since the late 1960s, when parents became persuaded that they should no longer take their cues from their own upbringing, but from psychologists and other mental health professionals. As a consequence, the focus of American parenting veered sharply away from training the child’s character and mind toward that of protecting his feelings from insult (i.e. disappointment, failure, embarrassment, and other basic facts of life) and elevating his opinion of himself.

Proper parenting, the new experts said, was a matter of being sensitive to and acting in accord with the feelings that issued from one’s child. Psychologist Thomas Gordon, author of Parent Effectiveness Training, the best-selling parenting book of the 1970s, said that because children do not like being told what to do, adults should not tell them what to do. Children who submit to their parents’ authority, Gordon said, grow to be adults who “fill the offices of psychologists and psychiatrists.”

We now know, of course, that this isn’t true. Gordon and other progressive parenting pundits were pulling this baloney out of thin air. Research psychologist Diana Baumrind’s decades-long study of parenting outcomes finds that the most well-adjusted children come from households presided over by parents who loving but unequivocally authoritative—parents who, in other words, adhere to a traditional (pre-1970s, non-psychological) parenting model. It turns out that the very parenting model promoted by the mental health community compromises child mental health! (It is significant to note that Gordon was eventually given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Psychological Association.)

Indeed, the mental health of America’s children has been in free fall since the 1960s. Compared with the child of then, today’s child is much more likely to become seriously depressed, commit suicide, or become a bully. And by the way, researchers have found that high self-esteem predisposes people to depression (therefore, suicide) and is characteristic of bullies. How ‘bout them apples?

Feelings have the potential of greatly enriching one’s life. But unless they are governed by reason, feelings are unruly and destructive beasts. People who are ruled by their feelings say stupid things, make stupid decisions, and fail to learn from experience. The current epidemic of “cutting” among teenagers is a prime example of feelings run amok.

For more than a generation, children have been encouraged to express their feelings rather than taught to control them. They’ve been told that all feelings are valid, which isn’t true. The end result of this mis-education in feelings is young people who believe their feelings trump the feelings of others.

When all is said and done, the child mental health crisis in America is the result of raising children who have lots of emotions but no emotional resilience. They’re full of self-esteem but have little respect for others. This cannot lead to a satisfying life.

It’s not complicated: The emotionally sturdy person is characterized by a high level of respect for other people, not a high level of self-regard. Instead of wanting attention from people, he pays attention, looking for opportunities to serve. That’s what good manners are all about, and learning good manners is where the Good Life starts, not by learning to recite all fifty state capitals at age 3 to applause from a roomful of adult admirers.

Jan 17

Kindergartener hates PE

Q:        According to his PE teacher (Kindergarten), our son has recently started refusing to participate in class. He sits off to the side and pouts. She said he won’t tell her what the problem is. This is a very active child who comes home and plays outside with other kids most of the afternoon. We tried to talk to him about it but like the teacher, got nowhere. What should we do?

A:        If your son has no difficulty making friends and enjoys being active, then the first thing to do is play Sherlock Holmes to see if you can discover any clues that might explain this mystery. Start your sleuthing by talking to the PE teacher. Maybe something happened in class recently that might have caused your son embarrassment. If that conversation doesn’t help clear up the mystery, then call other mothers and ask if they’ve heard any comments about PE from their kids. Have their children said anything about your son and his refusal to participate? If there’s a way you can observe the class without your son knowing, I’d consider doing that as well. Hopefully, you’ll discover the problem and be able to do something to help solve it. He may have misinterpreted something that happened in class one day, for example, and doesn’t have the language skills to put it into words.

If you come up empty-handed, however, then the explanation may be that there is no explanation. As also happens with adults, children sometimes get into funky moods for no “good” reason. Like dark clouds passing in front of the sun, these moods hang around for a while then leave as quickly as they showed up. Most people have experienced spontaneous lows like this at times and not been able to make sense of and explain the feeling. You wake up one morning and just don’t feel like going to work, for example, but can’t identify any specific incident that might have caused you to feel that way. Regardless, you get up and go, but you feel “under the weather” for several days.

Occasional, short-lived moods of that sort are normal. After all, life has its ups and downs, and our internal lives have rhythms too. “Blue funks” of that sort become problematic only when they increase in frequency and or duration and begin to interfere with a person’s ability to carry out day-to-day responsibilities. Something along these lines may be what’s going on with your son. If so, that would explain why he is having difficulty putting his feelings into words.

If you reach the conclusion that there’s nothing problematic about PE, then it’s important that your son participate. I think the application of some gentle but irresistible pressure will be enough to persuade him to do so. Tell him that not wanting to participate in PE means he must not be getting enough sleep. In that event, he can’t play outside after school and has to go to bed early every evening until the next PE class. The teacher, meanwhile, should not make a big deal of his pouting. She should simply assign him to a chair off to the side of the activity and not pay any attention to him.

I have a feeling that this is just one of those stumbling blocks that occasionally crop up in the course of raising a child (or, for the child, are just part of growing up) and that everyone is going to move past it fairly quickly.

Jan 10

Son says he has no friends       

Q:        Our oldest son, age eight, has recently started saying that he has no friends, no one likes him, he’s no good at anything, and so on. None of this is true, mind you. He’s a good kid who does well in school. We are at a loss as to where this is coming from. His younger brothers are bothered by hearing it as well, and we worry about the effect on them. This has been going on for a couple of months now. We’ve tried talking to him, and we’ve tried ignoring him. Nothing works. What should we do?

A:        This problem is more common than most people might think. It’s an example of the fact that human beings have a proclivity for manufacturing dramas concerning their lives. In these personal soap operas, the person in question is a victim of social forces, circumstances, or personal limitations that are beyond his or her control (supposedly) and are preventing him from living a fully satisfying life. Everyone reading this column knows someone who fits this description, a chronic complainer who refuses to grow up and claim full responsibility for his or her life. They seem to believe they are entitled to happiness when—as all truly responsible people know—happiness is something one claims.

Children are especially prone to this sort of self-destructive thinking. They are drama factories. In the child soap opera—your son’s, for example—the most common themes are “nobody likes me” and “I can’t do anything right.” In most cases, there is no basis in fact for these complaints. At most, they are gross exaggerations of normal problems of living that everyone experiences to one degree or another.

The more attention people pay to the child’s complaints, the worse they will become, and dangerously so. Researchers have established that if a person repeats a certain negative self-characterization often enough, he will eventually begin to believe it’s true. So whereas your son’s statements are not factual, his mental health is in danger.

You must stop talking to him about these statements. Paradoxically, attempts to prove to him that none of his self-deprecations are true will only make matters worse. On the other hand, and as you’ve discovered, ignoring them is impossible. When the child in question is not yet 11 years old, the recommendation I usually make is for the parents tell the child that they talked to a doctor who has a lot of experience with children who keep making negative statements about themselves that aren’t true. The doctor said it means the child isn’t getting enough sleep and is watching too much television. Until the statements have completely stopped for a continuous period of two weeks, the doctor says your son has to go to bed, lights out, at 6:30, even if that means cancelling an activity, and can’t watch television or play a video game.

The word “continuous” is important. If, for example, your son does not make any statement of self-complaint for twelve days, but says he hates himself on day thirteen, the two weeks starts over. The idea is to get him to stop making these self-dramatic statements and therefore stop thinking self-destructive thoughts.

If this approach does not result in significant improvement within a month, that may indicate a more serious problem. In that case, I would recommend that you make an appointment with a professional who specializes in child mental health issues.

Jan 3

Micromanagement

Q:        Our 17-year-old daughter is an honor student who has been accepted to three colleges. She has not been a risk taker, except with boys. Her most recent boyfriend is a wonderful kid and very smart. Apparently, they both resent our rule that a parent must be home when either of them is visiting at the other one’s home, but they’ve gone along with it, however reluctantly. We just found out that they’ve been texting about sneaking out in cars to be alone. What should we do?

A:        Your question, however brief, absolutely drips with evidence that the two of you are guilty of world-class micromanagement. Your daughter is a senior in high school, an honor student, and a generally sensible person whose only “crime” is that of wanting to be alone with her boyfriend, who is equally guilty where she is concerned. Sounds normal to me. In fact, it sounds downright reasonable.

For purposes of the present discussion, micromanagement is the attempt to control someone who (1) cannot be controlled or (2) has demonstrated the ability to exercise reasonably good self-control. For micromanagement to work, both of those conditions must be false. If either condition is true, however, then micromanagement will not work and the anxiety-driven attempt to make it work will create a wagonload of problems.

There will be times in a child’s life when micromanagement is both feasible and necessary—during infancy and toddlerhood, for example. As a child matures, the need for micromanagement decreases.

It can certainly be argued that some teens, because they have demonstrated a serious inability to make good decisions, may need to be micromanaged. Regardless, the very teen who needs it is not going to submit to it. A teen who does not need it is not going to submit to it either. Therefore, micromanagement does not work with teens. Period.

Your daughter has obviously demonstrated the ability to exercise reasonably good self-control. The attempt, therefore, to control her is going to cause lots of problems and solve none. In fact, your attempt to micromanage your daughter is likely to result in the very problems you are trying to prevent. With the best of intentions, you have become your own, and her, worst enemies.

Invariably, micromanagement results in four problems: deceit, disloyalty, conflict, and communication problems. You have discovered that your daughter is right on the edge of trying to deceive you. One down, three to go. You and she are having conflict concerning your rules. Two down, two to go. Deceit and conflict go hand-in-hand with communication problems. Three down, one to go. From here, it’s a short step to disloyalty—the increasingly likely possibility that your daughter will decide to reject your values, values you’ve worked for more than 17 years to instill in her. That’s all four down. Is the price worth it?

You can still retrieve this situation, but you’d better be ready to eat some crow. I strongly encourage you to sit down with her and say words to the following effect: “We hope you know we have only your best interests in mind, but we have to admit we’ve made a mistake. We’ve been acting like you can’t be trusted when in fact you’ve given us no reason to believe that’s the case. We’ve made our values and expectations perfectly clear to you. You’re a smart person. You know what the consequences might be of violating them. So, we trust you to do the right thing where this boy is concerned. From now on, we’re going to stop trying to control your relationship with him. We are convinced you are capable of controlling it yourself. We love you!”

Does this approach guarantee that no problems will develop? No. No one can make that guarantee. But believe me; these two young people are far more likely to do what you don’t want them to do if you keep doing what you are currently doing. So, the solution is quite simple: Stop!