The Good News About Bad Behavior

by Katherine Reynolds Lewis

  Looking at how quickly ADHD diagnoses have climbed, Brosco finds it much more likely that these significant environmental changes are playing a role than that the entire difference is due to changes in human brains. Moreover, with overall child health having improved dramatically, physicians and parents alike can now worry more about mental and behavioral health.

  “Fifty years ago, children were dying from a whole set of infectious diseases,” Brosco said. Today, “children are remarkably healthy, and this gives us the luxury of saying, ‘He’s not paying as much attention in school,’ as opposed to an epidemic of polio.”

  So what’s to be done now? Brosco’s study and others like it support arguments for more physical movement and less structured academics for children in the early years of school. This research also provides a useful reality check in warning us to expect to see ADHD diagnoses rising when kids get less activity and face more traditional academics earlier in their lives than in the past.

  “If you are sitting still in a desk for hours doing tasks that are inherently boring, children with ADHD traits are going to show up a lot more than if their job is to run around and play,” he said. “As we increase the academic demands on young children, we have to recognize that one of the consequences of that is that many more children will be labeled as having a disorder.”

  Homework has been debunked as useful for children younger than middle school. Notably, the Duke University psychology professor Harris Cooper analyzed 180 research studies on the impact of homework and found minimal association between assigned homework and students’ achievement in elementary school. Even in middle and high school, Cooper discovered, there is only a small correlation between homework and academic achievement. So instead of battling their children over worksheets, parents should focus on physical activity, unstructured time, and connecting with their offspring in the nonschool hours. It’s great if you can read together or include math facts as part of cooking dinner, but keep it light and fun.

  “There’s thirty years of research to show that homework doesn’t improve academic performance. What I’ve found is parents take on the homework as their own, which eliminates any chance of independence,” Brosco said.

  Has anything changed for the better in the last thirty years? Certainly the eradication of childhood infectious diseases is wonderful for kids and the country. Another beneficial development has been the increasingly hands-on role taken by fathers with their kids, which improves kids’ academic achievement and emotional health. Dads’ unique approach to parenting can buffer children against anxiety—although fathers are also more prone to authoritarian parenting. Nevertheless, they provide an important counterpoint to the mom-dominated parenting that has been the hallmark of our modern era.

  IT WAS THE FIFTH SESSION of my PEP 1 class, an eight-week class representing the first half of the center’s core curriculum. The clock read 7:29 p.m.—almost time to start. The parents in the group entered the room casually. They collected name tags, grabbed a coffee, took a seat. They knew the routine.

  I welcomed everyone and asked how the week went. In the previous session, they’d learned about the four types of misbehavior that children can exhibit, in the Adlerian framework that PEP follows. The first is seeking undue attention, as contrasted with useful and appropriate attention. The second is a power struggle. The third is revenge, and the fourth type of misbehavior is assumed inadequacy, when children simply give up.

  Adler’s theory maintains that all human behavior stems from a desire to belong. If people can’t find a useful way to belong, such as leading or contributing to a group, they’ll search for an unproductive avenue to belonging, like being the drama queen. The same holds for children.

  I asked the class whether anyone was viewing their kids’ misbehavior in a different way since our last session.

  “I stopped engaging in power struggles,” announced Tyrone Roberts. I looked over in surprise. He was beaming, his six-foot-plus frame folded into the plastic and metal chair.

  “You stopped engaging in power struggles,” I said flatly. I’d never heard of a parent giving up power struggles in a week. It took me months to stop needing to win—and I still slipped up sometimes.

  “It was hard because my natural instinct is: you just do what I say,” he said.

  “Yes. So can you give an example of what you would’ve done and what you’re doing now?” I responded.

  “Get dressed. Get dressed. Get up. Get dressed. Get dressed. Get up. Get dressed. Why aren’t you up? Get up,” he said, mimicking himself nagging his nine-year-old, Evan, in the mornings.

  Instead, he explained, he and his wife, Erika, told Evan they would set an alarm for departure time. When it rang, they would simply leave the house to take five-year-old Emma to school. Evan could join them if he was ready. Despite being older, Evan seemed less capable of pulling himself together in the mornings. The whole family usually ended up waiting for him, which often made Tyrone late for his job in software support for an architecture firm and Erika for hers as a university professor.

  Instead, Tyrone told him, “We’re going to be downstairs. When the alarm goes off, we’re going to leave. Just make sure you lock the door and take everything you need because if you don’t, you won’t have lunch at school. Okay, bye.”

  Tyrone told the class, “Every time we did that, he was downstairs before we were.”

  “Interesting. Wow. That sounds like magic,” I said, a bit jealous.

  “Yes,” Tyrone said.

  “We realized we seriously were just threatening. We were doing those fake threats. ‘We’re really going to leave,’” Erika said. “This time we were serious. We were nervous about it. We said, ‘Go through the mudroom door. Lock it and then cross the street.’ We gave him instructions like we were seriously going to leave him and you’re going to have to get yourself to school. We would’ve done it.”

  “The only thing we didn’t do was keep saying it over and over again. ‘We’re gonna leave. This time we’re really going to leave.’ We said it one time, and then we went on our way,” Tyrone said.

  “You acted instead of talking,” Brian said.

  That’s a key piece of advice that PEP gives: act more, talk less. So if you’re trying to train a child to stop dropping a backpack on the floor of the front hall, don’t give a long lecture about the danger of tripping or how irresponsible the child is. Simply stand with an outstretched hand pointed toward the obstacle and say, “Backpack.” With a smile.

  Tyrone impressed me with his commitment to changing his parenting style wholesale. Overnight. I kept coming back to that, because I was curious about how he had accomplished the transformation. So a year after the class, I followed up with him and Erika to see how things were going.

  Tyrone shared that, during the class, Erika had realized his approach to Evan was backfiring. He’d tease Evan to try to nudge him along in the daily routine or to motivate him to work harder. That behavior felt comfortable to Tyrone because he’d steered his own younger brother that way during their youth in Baltimore. As the two children of a single mom, they relied on each other for support—and his hard-headed younger brother needed his direction.

  “I acted towards Evan more as a big brother than a father. I’d needle him, I’d antagonize him. I hadn’t realized I was doing that,” he said. “In me stopping that, I find myself falling back on some of the lessons from the class. I ask: ‘How would Brian handle this?’ and then I dial it back.”

  Tyrone’s father lived with their family for a short while, but on the whole he grew up without a dad. Sometimes his younger brother would return home with a problem and they’d work it out together.

  “Evan’s not in the same environment we were, so he’s not going to need it like we did. There was no one to look out for us, a protector of sorts. The world is scary,” Tyrone said. “We had to learn the ropes ourselves through mistake after mistake. I thought I was helping him to teach him some of this, but I was taking the
wrong approach.”

  Once Tyrone stopped being so aggressive and offered support instead, Evan blossomed. Their roughhousing became fun and joyous because Evan wasn’t worried that his much-larger dad would take it too far. On the basketball court, Evan could take risks within his own comfort zone, without fearing that his dad would interrogate him for not being aggressive enough.

  “Evan, in terms of who he is, those things push him away. Tyrone didn’t want that,” Erika said. “If Evan gets upset, I can see Tyrone catching himself. It won’t even start. Evan will say, ‘Daddy, why did you have to do that?’ Tyrone will quickly notice it and apologize.”

  As a clinical psychologist, Erika easily discusses feelings with both kids, encouraging them to be emotionally open with their parents. Her parents immigrated from the Dominican Republic a few years before she and her younger brother and sister were born. Growing up in a small town in the Catskill Mountains, she experienced a safer, more tender upbringing than Tyrone’s.

  Tyrone now realizes that his children don’t need the same toughening up that he and his brother required to survive in Baltimore, where they had to learn to carry themselves to ward off any attacks. “By the mask on your face, they could tell whether you were predator or prey,” he said. “You guys have absolutely no idea how little boys were prepped for being men: being pushed to fight each other because you didn’t want to be seen as weak or a punk.”

  Now he recognizes that Evan can be vulnerable or sensitive without being a target. But not in every setting. As a black young man, Evan will experience hard situations.

  “There are things he’s going to experience that I want to prepare him for. I still feel that’s my responsibility, to make sure he understands that not everything is going to be rosy, you can’t curl up in a ball in the corner. Face it and keep moving,” Tyrone says. “He used to get really upset and couldn’t control himself. I would say, ‘You need to be able to control that because one of these days you’re going to behave like that in a situation where you can’t back up that explosion.’”

  With coaching from both parents, Evan has learned to manage his emotions better. Neither parent can remember a recent temper tantrum. They’ve found a compromise between Tyrone’s instinct to prepare Evan for a rough world and Erika’s impulse to nurture.

  DURING MY CHILDHOOD, MY PARENTS saw me and my brother as the enemy in a struggle for control. If we misbehaved, the purpose was “to get attention,” so they shouldn’t reward the acting out with that desired parental attention. If we fought with each other, it was “sibling rivalry,” behavior that—again—they dismissed as attention-seeking. When we chafed at a household rule or ignored their dictates, we were testing their limits.

  When I first started raising my children, I easily fell into this frame of mind. Many parents I’ve interviewed also reflexively explain their children’s behavior as limit-testing, manipulative, attention-seeking, or simply spoiled and bratty. Although there may be a grain of truth in this perspective—many sibling fights truly are a bid for parental attention—embracing this worldview merely sets parents up for a power struggle. If you view your children as trying to pull a fast one, or out to win a battle of wits, you’ve established an oppositional zero-sum game. For you to win means that they must lose, and vice versa.

  When I discovered the teachings of PEP and the psychologists and educators you’ll meet later in this book, my perspective began to shift. I realized that my single-minded focus on getting my kids to do what I wanted was keeping all of us from winning. Instead, I learned, I could view their inappropriate behavior as a sign that they were missing a skill or there was a problem in the environment, and together we could find a win-win solution.

  I am not alone. As modern parents reach for a way of parenting that fits our era, we don’t want to either punish or bribe our children into compliance. But today’s parents can’t quite figure out an effective model to replace the tactics of our parents and grandparents, what I think of as “the Obedience Model.” Many devotees of positive parenting struggle with the notion of consequences, which can easily slide into punishment. This is where the lessons of neuroscience and positive psychology come in, pointing the way toward the Apprenticeship Model—an alternative model that gives our kids responsibility within ever-increasing limits that are agreed upon by parent and child.

  Of course, putting this model into practice can get messy. Adults making all the decisions is simple. It’s more complicated to teach our kids to use social media responsibly or to let them miss deadlines and lose items as they learn to organize themselves. We have to steel ourselves against their discomfort in those moments of failure, an inextricable part of learning.

  Part 2

  The Solution

  5

  The Way Forward

  NIAMH GRANT PUSHED DOWN THE lever on the electric tea kettle. Her eleven-year-old daughter, Lara, sat nearby, hunched over a bowl of Cheerios at the dark marble kitchen counter in their home in Waterbury, Vermont. The faint early morning light filtered through the window.

  “Can you help with lunch?” Lara asked her mom.

  “You’ll have to use a coupon,” responded Niamh, a forty-three-year-old with curly brown hair just brushing her shoulders.

  Silence. The Grant girls are responsible for cleaning out their lunch boxes and making lunch for school. For Christmas, they each received five coupons for a parent’s help. Lara had hoarded those coupons. She wasn’t ready to spend one yet.

  Twelve-year-old Isabella slouched into the room, wearing mismatched striped pajamas, her dark blond hair pulled into a messy bun. She called their Golden Doodle dog Denali up to the couch for a cuddle.

  Lara pointed to her lunch box, looking at her mom with raised eyebrows.

  “Hey, Nali, wanna go for a walk?” Niamh said. She ignored the silent question from Lara. The dog leapt down from the couch and bounded over to the mudroom, where Niamh was pulling on a coat.

  “What time is it?” called Isabella from the couch, abandoned by her fuzzy pillow.

  “Time to get a watch,” Lara said, taking her cereal bowl to the sink.

  Isabella gave her an expressionless look.

  “That’s what you always say to me!” Lara responded with a smile.

  Niamh disappeared out the kitchen door with Denali on a leash, cream hat pulled down over her forehead, avoiding a lunch box argument.

  Lara brought her lunch box over to the sink. Isabella headed upstairs to change. Lara shoved some leftover food from the box into the countertop compost bin, a bit awkwardly. Some apple slices fell to the counter. She ran a sponge over her lunch box.

  The girls’ father, Rick, forty-five, came into the room, plopped down at the counter, and put his socks on. Lara grabbed a towel to dry her lunch box. Rick called upstairs: “Izzy, it’s five of, hon.”

  Predictable routines, agreed on in advance, help the whole family avoid conflict. The Grant family, at a relaxed time, had talked through every single step and the time needed to get out of the house. When the kids were younger and balked at some point during the day, the parents had gently reminded them of the routine. They just pointed to the agreements posted on the walls or asked a neutral question like, “What comes next on our schedule?” By now, it was second nature.

  Lara poured Smart Puffs into the lunch box. She took a red pepper from the kitchen island and started to slice it with a giant chopping knife.

  “Careful,” Rick said, hands in his jeans pockets as he watched Lara work.

  She playfully stuck her tongue out at her dad. She wrapped the pepper carefully with plastic wrap, then brought the cutting board and knife back to the sink. While her back was turned, Rick put a single piece of candy into her lunch. Lara pulled turkey and cheese from the fridge and put them on the counter. Rick started to slice the cheese. Lara squirted yellow mustard all over two slices of bread.

  Niamh came back from walking Denali. She pulled a block of yellow cheese from the fridge.

  �
�Do you want this? You complain a lot about provolone,” she said.

  Isabella wandered into the room. “Do you know where my long-sleeved shirt is?”

  “We need to leave in three minutes,” Niamh said, the only reminder she gave all morning.

  It felt like she injected caffeine into her children. Everybody sped up. Lara wrapped her cheese and finished packing her lunch. Isabella opened an English muffin with a fork and popped it into the toaster. Lara gave her dad a homework planner to sign. She sorted papers as he looked over the planner.

  “I’ll be in the car,” Niamh said. She vanished out the door again. Later, she told me that she occupies herself when the kids are getting ready so that she’s not tempted to nag.

  Isabella tied her shoes. Lara zipped her backpack. She paused by the front door. “I feel like I’m missing something.” After thinking for a moment, she left the house.

  “Where’d the jelly go?” Isabella asked.

  “I just put it away. I’m on food put-away,” Rick responded. He walked away. A honk sounded from the driveway.

  Isabella put her hair in a ponytail, buttered the muffin, then loaded jelly onto it.

  Another honk.

  “I’m coming,” Isabella said to the empty room. She grabbed her bags and nearly collided with her mom coming back in the door.

  “I left my phone,” Niamh explained. “Did you hear Lara honking?”

  And they were gone. It was 7:05 a.m.—just right to get to school on time. The morning had unfolded as you might expect in a household of kids finding their way to independence, with just enough support from parents resisting the urge to direct and correct.

  IMAGINE A FUTURE IN WHICH the Grant family is the norm, not the exception. Across the globe, children are productive, helpful, cooperative members of their families and communities. They take responsibility for household chores and their homework, and they play independently with each other in safe neighborhoods. They have harmonious relationships with their parents, working out disagreements through negotiations that address all family members’ concerns. The climbing rates of mental, behavioral, and emotional disorders begin to fall. Adults abandon the persistent myths about why children misbehave—to manipulate or get attention—and instead look for the true needs underlying the misbehavior.