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NPR Ed
Why Children
Aren't Behaving, And What You Can Do About It
Cory Turner
June 2, 2018
Childhood — and parenting — have radically changed in the past few
decades, to the point where far more children today struggle to manage
their behavior.
That's the argument Katherine Reynolds Lewis makes in her new parenting
book, The Good News About Bad Behavior.
"We face a crisis of self-regulation," Lewis writes. And by "we," she
means parents and teachers who struggle daily with difficult behavior
from the children in their lives.
Lewis, a journalist, certified parent educator and mother of three,
asks why so many kids today are having trouble managing their behavior
and emotions.
Three factors, she says, have contributed mightily to this crisis.
First: Where, how and how much kids are allowed to play has changed.
Second, their access to technology and social media has exploded.
Finally, Lewis suggests, children today are too "unemployed." She
doesn't simply mean the occasional summer job for a high school teen.
The term is a big tent, and she uses it to include household jobs that
can help even toddlers build confidence and a sense of community.
"They're not asked to do anything to contribute to a neighborhood or
family or community," Lewis tells NPR in a recent interview. "And that
really erodes their sense of self-worth — just as it would with an
adult being unemployed."
Below is more of that interview, edited for length and clarity.
What sorts of tasks are children and parents prioritizing instead of
household responsibilities?
To be straight-A students and athletic superstars, gifted musicians and
artists — which are all wonderful goals, but they are long-term and
pretty narcissistic. They don't have that sense of contribution and
belonging in a family the way that a simple household chore does, like
helping a parent prepare a meal. Anyone who loves to cook knows it's so
satisfying to feed someone you love and to see that gratitude and
enjoyment on their faces. And kids today are robbed of that.
It's part of the work of the family. We all do it, and when it's more
of a social compact than an adult in charge of doling out a reward,
that's much more powerful. They can see that everyone around them is
doing jobs. So it seems only fair that they should also.
Kids are so driven by what's fair and what's unfair. And that's why the
more power you give kids, the more control you give them, the more they
will step up.
You also argue that play has changed dramatically. How so?
Two or three decades ago, children were roaming neighborhoods in
mixed-age groups, playing pretty unsupervised or lightly supervised.
They were able to resolve disputes, which they had a strong motivation
to because they wanted to keep playing. They also planned their time
and managed their games. They had a lot of autonomy, which also feeds
self-esteem and mental health.
Nowadays, kids, including my own, are in child care pretty much from
morning until they fall into bed — or they're under the supervision of
their parents. So they aren't taking small risks. They aren't managing
their time. They aren't making decisions and resolving disputes with
their playmates the way that kids were 20 or 30 years ago. And those
are really important social and emotional skills for kids to learn, and
play is how all young mammals learn them.
While we're on the subject of play and the importance of letting kids
take risks, even physical risks, you mention a remarkable study out of
New Zealand — about phobias. Can you tell us about it?
This study dates back to when psychologists believed that if you had a
phobia as an adult, you must have had some traumatic experience as a
child. So they started looking at people who had phobias and what their
childhood experiences were like. In fact, they found the opposite
relationship.
People who had a fall from heights were less likely to have an adult
phobia of heights. People who had an early experience with
near-drowning had zero correlation with a phobia of water, and children
who were separated from their parents briefly at an early age actually
had less separation anxiety later in life.
We need to help kids to develop tolerance against anxiety, and the best
way to do that, this research suggests, is to take small risks — to
have falls and scrapes and tumbles and discover that they're capable
and that they can survive being hurt. Let them play with sticks or fall
off a tree. And yeah, maybe they break their arm, but that's how they
learn how high they can climb.
You say in the book that "we face a crisis of self-regulation." What
does that look like at home and in the classroom?
It's the behavior in our homes that keeps us from getting out the door
in the morning and keeps us from getting our kids to sleep at night.
In schools, it's kids jumping out of seats because they can't control
their behavior or their impulses, getting into shoving matches on the
playground, being frozen during tests because they have such high rates
of anxiety.
Really, I lump under this umbrella of self-regulation the increase in
anxiety, depression, ADHD, substance addiction and all of these really
big challenges that are ways kids are trying to manage their thoughts,
behavior and emotions because they don't have the other skills to do it
in healthy ways.
You write a lot about the importance of giving kids a sense of control.
My 6-year-old resists our morning schedule, from waking up to putting
on his shoes. Where is the middle ground between giving him control
over his choices and making sure he's ready when it's time to go?
It's a really tough balance. We start off, when our kids are babies,
being in charge of everything. And our goal by the time they're 18 is
to be in charge of nothing — to work ourselves out of the job of being
that controlling parent. So we have to constantly be widening the
circle of things that they're in charge of, and shrinking our own
responsibility.
It's a bit of a dance for a 6-year-old, really. They love power. So
give him as much power as you can stand and really try to save your
direction for the things that you don't think he can do.
He knows how to put on his shoes. So if you walk out the door, he will
put on his shoes and follow you. It may not feel like it, but
eventually he will. And if you spend five or 10 minutes outside that
door waiting for him — not threatening or nagging — he'll be more
likely to do it quickly. It's one of these things that takes a leap of
faith, but it really works.
Kids also love to be part of that discussion of, what does the morning
look like. Does he want to draw a visual calendar of the things that he
wants to get done in the morning? Does he want to set times, or, if
he's done by a certain time, does he get to do something fun before you
leave the house? All those things that are his ideas will pull him into
the routine and make him more willing to cooperate.
Whether you're trying to get your child to dress, do homework or
practice piano, it's tempting to use rewards that we know our kids
love, especially sweets and screen time. You argue in the book: Be
careful. Why?
Yes. The research on rewards is pretty powerful, and it suggests that
the more we reward behavior, the less desirable that behavior becomes
to children and adults alike. If the child is coming up with, "Oh, I'd
really like to do this," and it stems from his intrinsic interests and
he's more in charge of it, then it becomes less of a bribe and more of
a way that he's structuring his own morning.
The adult doling out rewards is really counterproductive in the long
term — even though they may seem to work in the short term. The way
parents or teachers discover this is that they stop working. At some
point, the kid says, "I don't really care about your reward. I'm going
to do what I want." And then we have no tools. Instead, we use
strategies that are built on mutual respect and a mutual desire to get
through the day smoothly.
You offer pretty simple guidance for parents when they're confronted
with misbehavior and feel they need to dole out consequences. You call
them the four R's. Can you walk me through them?
The four R's will keep a consequence from becoming a punishment. So
it's important to avoid power struggles and to win the kid's
cooperation. They are: Any consequence should be revealed in advance,
respectful, related to the decision the child made, and reasonable in
scope.
Generally, by the time they're 6 or 7 years old, kids know the rules of
society and politeness, and we don't need to give them a lecture in
that moment of misbehavior to drill it into their heads. In fact,
acting in that moment can sometimes be counterproductive if they are
amped up, their amygdala's activated, they're in a tantrum or excited
state, and they can't really learn very well because they can't access
the problem-solving part of their brain, the prefrontal cortex, where
they're really making decisions and thinking rationally. So every
misbehavior doesn't need an immediate consequence.
You even tell parents, in the heat of the moment, it's OK to just
mumble and walk away. What do you mean?
That's when you are looking at your child, they are not doing what you
want, and you cannot think of what to do. Instead of jumping in with a
bribe or a punishment or yelling, you give yourself some space. Pretend
you had something on the stove you need to grab or that you hear
something ringing in the other room and walk away. That gives you just
a little space to gather your thoughts and maybe calm down a little bit
so you can respond to their behavior from the best place in you — from
your best intentions as a parent.
I can imagine skeptics out there, who say, "But kids need to figure out
how to live in a world that really doesn't care what they want. You're
pampering them!" In fact, you admit your own mother sometimes feels
this way. What do you say to that?
I would never tell someone who's using a discipline strategy that they
feel really works that they're wrong. What I say to my mom is, "The
tools and strategies that you used and our grandparents used weren't
wrong, they just don't work with modern kids." Ultimately, we want to
instill self-discipline in our children, which will never happen if
we're always controlling them.
If we respond to our kids' misbehavior instead of reacting, we'll get
the results we want. I want to take a little of the pressure off of
parenting; each instance is not life or death. We can let our kids
struggle a little bit. We can let them fail. In fact, that is the
process of childhood when children misbehave. It's not a sign of our
failure as parents. It's normal.
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