Mariana seemed mad all the time. “I was in a really bad place. I had gotten to where I didn’t like her. She didn’t like us,” Camila recalled.
When the “screws came off,” as Colin put it, they quickly realized they had fallen away from their new PEP parenting skills and routines. Under the time pressure of a two-career household with no relatives nearby for support, they’d stopped holding family meetings. Those weekly opportunities for each family member to appreciate the actions of the others—and to discuss any problem issues—had been an important way to keep everyone on track.
At bedtime, their tactics verged on coercive. They delivered ultimatums and threats to get the kids into bed. Then they overcompensated and became too permissive, agreeing to lie down with the children, only to fall asleep themselves. Camila became so exhausted that she’d easily sleep all night on the floor of the kids’ bedroom.
Mariana and Alejandro were so angry and uncooperative all the time that Camila felt her relationship with them was broken. Even though she knew rationally that things had to improve, at the time it seemed impossible.
Slowly, Colin and Camila had righted the ship. First, they removed all the rules and requirements. They stopped worrying about the schedule and instead focused on special time, connecting with their children, and encouraging them in the household.
PEP teaches each parent to schedule appointments for regular special time with each child, during which there are no screens or distractions. The child picks the activity, whether Candyland or playing house or art. For perhaps twenty minutes for young children to as much as two hours for a teenager, the parent is completely focused on connecting with the child. The Cullens also instituted weekly family fun, an activity decided by consensus, such as board games, ice skating, charades, playing soccer in the yard, or painting pottery. (If you spend family time playing video games or watching movies with your children, enjoy yourselves, but don’t let these activities crowd out the screen-free moments that decades of research show build self-regulation and learning.)
Without a controlling parent to push against, Mariana and Alejandro stopped being so resistant and defiant. Once the family had reconnected emotionally, Colin and Camila gradually brought back the routines, including the collaboration that’s crucial to the Apprenticeship Model, rather than dictating rules. They became more adept at diagnosing the children’s misbehavior and calmly choosing the most effective parental response.
For forty-five minutes earlier on this December day, I had watched Alejandro help Camila wash blueberries and raspberries; chop patty pan squash, zucchini, and peppers; cook pasta; and warm Peruvian chicken in the oven. They worked closely together, with Camila giving her son a constant stream of information (“the top of the squash is edible”) and offering choices: “Melon or raspberries?” Camila, a slim brunette with chin-length curly hair, spoke in a low voice that often dropped to a whisper or rose in playful singsong. Instead of directing Alejandro, she invited him to participate—a key difference. When he tired at the half-hour point and announced he was done, she accepted it calmly. He came back a moment later, eager to help find a top to cover the chicken.
Camila reminded me that when Brian told the PEP 1 class that our kids were cooking eggs for themselves at age eight, she couldn’t imagine letting young children manage a flame and pan. But here was four-year-old Alejandro wielding a knife—a sharp one, as PEP recommends, to give him real-life practice being safe—and helping her move the pasta water onto the stove. “We’re doing more and more at the stove, and they like to be there,” she said, noting that they’ve taught the children how to be safe with knives and the stove. “He’s very careful.”
We have eighteen short years to build a mutually respectful relationship with our children that will last for a lifetime. We must strike the balance between being involved and taking over what is truly the kids’ domain. Don’t let a battle over homework or clothing choices corrode the parent-child connection. Remember how that bond helps children learn to self-regulate.
I’d learned from PEP, the neuroscience research, and my child development interviews the importance of systematically building connection with my kids. It’s the first, necessary step in the Apprenticeship Model.
The phrase “connect before you correct” reminds me that learning cannot happen at the moment a child is upset. It took me years to train myself to stop reacting with high-volume criticism when I walked into a room and saw my children doing something unproductive. Now I look for a way to connect with them—even something as small as a hug or a compliment—before asking about the screen agreement or guiding them back on track.
“Wait a minute,” you might say. “I already spend a lot of time connecting with my children!” You probably do. You care enough to read a parenting book; you spend time with them. Indeed, parents in our generation spend far more time with our kids than parents in previous decades, as we know from Chapter 4. I had this same response when I first learned about positive parenting techniques like special time. I already spend so much time with my kids—why should I make this extra appointment?
But ask yourself how that time is spent. Are you bossing your kids around? Hovering over every precious step? Distracted by the ding of your work email every five minutes?
Once you start asking yourself these questions, you can nudge your parenting toward a balance between connecting closely with your kids while giving them enough independence to make their own mistakes. You’ll begin to recognize the moments when your inattention is interrupting an opportunity to build your relationship. Your kids’ behavior will let you know if they need more quality time.
Parents should notice children’s interests and creations with specific attention to what the kids bring to it, rather than indiscriminately praising their work. This ties back to research by Stanford’s Carol Dweck, who found that blanket praise undermines intrinsic motivation, whereas noticing effort and kids’ interests builds their enthusiasm.
Show appreciation for their contributions, even when they’re small. A child has to start somewhere when it comes to household chores, so merely fetching items from the fridge or helping crack eggs is a boon to the family. Schedule special time with each child. Hold weekly family meetings that focus on appreciating each other and planning fun family activities. Even small children can sit for a few minutes with parents to be thanked for their actions that week and to vote on an outing.
The hours we put in now—empathizing with our kid in a tantrum, teaching how to match freshly laundered socks, digging in the backyard mud, patiently reinforcing rules—will pay off as our children increasingly take charge of their lives and learn respect for everyone in the family. And eventually our adult children will actually want to call and visit us, after they’ve launched successfully into the world. Sure, there will be moments of conflict and disagreement along the way. But as long as we focus on empowering our children to become more independent and to figure out their own path—instead of imposing our will on them—we will create authentic relationships with them that endure for life.
BACK ON THE NEW YORK City sidewalk, I was feeling helpless. I wouldn’t be able to experience an MRI scan. I had left Tottenham’s research team on the hook for the cost of a scan—about $600—but with no usable data to show for it. Although I know that participants occasionally have to be excluded from any given study, I still felt guilty.
But more pressing: my twelve-year-old and I were at odds. After we walked out of the lab and said good-bye to the photographer who accompanied us, I’d turned on Maddie. I’d yelled at her for chattering about our personal business, which led us to be excluded from the study.
Now, looking at her stiff back, I knew we had to reconnect.
“Maddie, it’s okay,” I said. I put an arm around her shoulder. She let it rest.
“It’s not okay,” she shouted. “I ruined your book! I’m always messing up.”
“You didn’t ruin the book. I’ll find a way to write around it. Or
I’ll find another lab that will let me observe. The important part is describing the research,” I said. “I was wrong to blame you. Once they read through all my answers on the questionnaires, they would’ve called to tell us not to come tomorrow. We wouldn’t have been able to participate. This actually helped us plan to have a fun day tomorrow.”
She turned to face me. Lip thrust out. Eyes wet.
“Why don’t you have something to eat?” I said.
“This food is disgusting,” she said. But she picked up a fork. She chose a noodle from the corner of the white Styrofoam container, without any meat sauce on it. Slurped it into her mouth.
“I really appreciated your help,” I said. “You took pictures for me in case the photographer’s don’t come out. You were so patient during the boring sections when Ava and I were both occupied.”
She wasn’t smiling. But at least she swallowed another noodle. And then another.
“What should we do now? Do you want to go back to Uncle Chris’s apartment and build some Legos?”
Both kids agreed. I wrapped up the remains of the Chinese food and grasped Maddie’s hand.
We walked to the subway entrance. Together.
7
Communication
IT WAS A FRIDAY IN November like any other Friday. Bryony Daly was hurrying through the dishes and household chores, making the most of having three kid-free hours before picking up her five-year-old from school at 11:00 a.m.
Then she got a call from Maine’s child and family services.
“A report has been filed about concerns regarding abuse in your home,” the caller said. “I need to come out to talk to you.”
Daly’s breath caught in her throat. Her kids were both safe at school. Had a stranger reported that she’d briefly left them in a car during an errand run earlier in the week? Or maybe one of her neighbors in the apartment building had complained about the boys’ caterwauling during a sibling tussle.
“Can you tell me what this is about?” she asked.
No, he said. He offered to visit her home that day, but she declined. The apartment was a mess. Laundry draped around the kitchen, her bucket of fiber piled up next to the sofa, waiting to be spun into yarn.
“I cannot wait a whole weekend without knowing what’s going on,” she said. “Do I have to sit here worrying about what’s going on for the whole weekend and not knowing anything?”
“I legally can’t tell you anything,” he responded.
“I don’t understand why you can’t legally tell me anything when it’s about me,” she said, voice breaking. They made an appointment for him to visit her home on Monday, and she hung up.
She burst into tears.
Could it be something to do with school?
Her older son, Quinn, seven, had struggled since starting Central School in South Berwick, Maine. After just a few weeks in kindergarten, his teachers recommended moving him to pre-K. Understanding academics wasn’t the issue; the routine of the full school day challenged his self-control. He’d yell, or run out of the room. The shorter pre-K day and abundant playtime fit his needs better. The next year, in first grade, the school adapted his schedule and routines as best they could. Regular time with the school’s learning specialist seemed to help. Now, in second grade, it seemed two steps forward, one step back.
Quinn’s behavior had previously led to a child services report, when he pulled his penis out of his pants in front of a teacher. It was a joke, but it hadn’t gone over well. But in that case, Quinn’s counselor called Daly first to warn her about the report.
She emailed Nina D’Aran, Central School’s principal, asking if she knew what was going on.
Quinn was “that kid.” Every school has a few of them: That kid who’s always getting into trouble, if not causing it. That kid who can’t stay in his seat and who disrupts class and has angry outbursts. That kid whom other kids are quick to blame for a recess tussle, and who can make a teacher’s life hell.
Quinn knew he was that kid too. He was smart enough to realize he was causing problems, even though he couldn’t seem to stop himself from getting into trouble. He’d run out of the classroom when upset, occasionally pushing over a staff member in his haste to find a comfortable place. Impulsive, he’d sometimes lash out physically at a child who’d bothered him in the past. Daly was already meeting weekly with his teacher to review and troubleshoot his most recent actions. The school gave him a lot of latitude to calm down in the learning center or a buddy classroom, where any students in the class could work temporarily. He could use fidgets—little stress balls and gadgets—when he was feeling overwhelmed.
A few years earlier, educators at Central might have responded very differently to an outburst or tussle, perhaps sending him home for the day or taking away future recess time. Quinn towers over his classmates, taking after his tall mom and dad. In a typical school, a kid who seems to be threatening others would probably be physically restrained, segregated into a special ed room, or even sent home.
Quinn has a special education plan, which puts him in a category of students more likely to face punishment. Children with disabilities are suspended at twice the rate of their peers and incarcerated at three times the rate of the overall youth population, government data show. Like 95 percent of Central’s student body, Quinn is white, so he is at less risk of punishment than his peers of color. For black kids with disabilities, the national suspension rate is 25 percent.
America’s schools treat chronically misbehaving children as though they don’t want to behave, when it’s increasingly obvious that they simply cannot. Central has gone a different way, however, by adopting a pioneering new approach created by Ross Greene, a Harvard-pedigreed psychologist with a near-cult following among parents and educators who deal with challenging children. Just as Dr. Spock taught a generation of mothers to trust their instincts, Greene’s disciplinary method has become a go-to resource. Parents of kids with ADHD or oppositional defiant disorder often pass around his books, The Explosive Child and Lost at School, as though they were holy writ.
Kids will behave well if they can, Greene teaches.
His model was honed in children’s psychiatric wards and battle-tested in state juvenile facilities; in the mid-2000s, he brought it into dozens of public and private schools, including Central School. The results thus far have been dramatic, with schools reporting drops as great as 80 percent in disciplinary referrals, suspensions, and peer aggression. For Greene, disruptive children lack the skills, not the motivation, to meet behavior expectations. Under his philosophy, you’d no more punish a child for lashing out in class or jumping out of his seat repeatedly than you would if he bombed a spelling test. You’d teach self-control skills in the former cases, just as you might review word patterns in the latter. The goal is to get to the root of the problem, not to discipline a kid for the way his brain is wired.
Quinn was still a work in progress.
After a few anxious hours of waiting on that November morning, Daly heard back from his social worker that, indeed, the child services report had come from school. Quinn had been using his active imagination to describe a scenario at home where Daddy and Mommy beat each other, and his little brother too. Nothing about it was true, the social worker told her, but she was required to report it. After four months of home visits, child services cleared the Daly family—and Quinn learned a lesson about the power of his words.
When I discovered Greene’s track record in 2012, I experienced the first epiphany that led to this book. I realized that the educators who continue to argue over the appropriate balance of what we now call “incentives” and “consequences” are debating the wrong thing entirely. After all, if a child simply hasn’t acquired the brain functions required to control his behavior, what good is a suspension—or for that matter, a gold star? And as we know from Chapter 5, even those who have developed the ability become less motivated in a reward-punishment environment.
I visited Central School on a
crisp fall day in 2013. The school day began with 450 children from pre-K through third grade pouring through the front doors. They greeted principal Nina D’Aran, a slender brunette and mother of four, with hugs and high-fives. As they streamed into their classrooms, D’Aran rejoined her staff in the open-floor-plan main office, which hummed with the restrained tension of a fire station between calls.
D’Aran had no sooner taken a seat than the intercom buzzed with a teacher in crisis. D’Aran hurried down the hall to find a boy sobbing under a desk in the third-grade classroom. His teacher hustled the rest of the class out of the room.
A quiet conversation revealed that another boy had slapped him on the bus and said “the big bad words.” The bad feelings made him think of his dog that died. When D’Aran asked what might help, he suggested wearing his ghoulish Halloween hoodie zipped up over his face for the ride home. D’Aran counter-offered that he wear the hoodie over his head, but leave his face uncovered to keep from scaring the little kids. Solution in hand, the boy rejoined his classmates.
“Teachers have so much to do, it’s amazing,” the principal acknowledged when I asked how she and her staff balance the needs of the entire student body with the demands of the more challenging kids. D’Aran combines the perkiness of a Disney princess with the calm wisdom of her previous job as a guidance counselor.
In spite of the challenges, the decision to adopt Greene’s model was paying off. D’Aran now could spend more of her time planning, and classroom teachers could spend more time on instruction and a lot less time dealing with these sorts of mini-crises. Problems that once took days to resolve could often be handled much more quickly, sometimes in minutes, and often proactively.
The Good News About Bad Behavior Page 14