Instead, you could get curious about what your child means. Maybe your kid is struggling with the current math unit and doesn’t like to admit it. Or perhaps you have a high-energy child who needs an hour of hard play before being able to tolerate sitting still for a conversation with a seventy-two-year-old. If you listen with an open mind and ask probing questions, you may be surprised by what you learn.
Don’t blow off comments like “It’s boring” or “I don’t care.” Our kids know exactly how to push our buttons. They’ve studied us for years. They may be trying to provoke a lecture in order to hide the vulnerability or pain or insecurity lurking behind their reluctance to cooperate.
How do you draw out a reluctant talker? First, pick the right time for the conversation. Make sure you feel unhurried and ready to be patient. Then, be persistent but not aggressive. Ask open-ended questions like “What’s up?” or “Tell me what that’s like for you.” Use silence to your advantage—your child may well fill the empty space with an explanation. If they persist with non-answers like, “I don’t know,” ask them to take a guess at what might be going on. You can even make some educated guesses yourself, and learn much from their response. If the first conversation is a bust, try again later.
With many children, sitting close together and looking into their eyes will convey trust and effectively break down communication barriers. But other kids feel intimidated by that much eye contact and will open up more on a car ride or while doing dishes together—when you’re not staring into their face. Experiment to find what works best with your child.
THE TEACHERS AT CENTRAL SCHOOL discovered the power of listening as they became more comfortable with Greene’s problem-solving conversations. They learned that Quinn often made up stories or ran out of the room when he was embarrassed. Indeed, anxiety seemed to lie at the root of many of his difficulties. His special education plan gave a vague diagnosis, “other health impairment,” because his symptoms fell all over the map: some seemed to indicate autism, some ADHD, and some a sensory processing issue.
Mornings could be a disaster. Quinn grew riled up just being in the gym with crowds of other pre-K and kindergarten students waiting to file to their classrooms. He couldn’t sit through morning meeting.
His teacher and D’Aran began a series of conversations, intent on figuring out the solution. Talking to a seven-year-old requires a special kind of patience. They may fall off the chair during your discussion. You’re guaranteed several monosyllabic answers. You have to be prepared for a long session, without any guarantee of progress, and probably a follow-up or two.
Quinn’s teacher often would begin a conversation with an apology, for whatever her part was in the outburst or misunderstanding. This helped put Quinn at ease. Then she’d broach the issue at hand, using a phrase like, “I notice that sitting at morning meeting is hard for you. What’s up? What’s up with sitting at meeting?”
When she first asked what’s wrong, he’d usually say, “I don’t know.” She and D’Aran used observations like, “From your body, it looks like this is uncomfortable to discuss,” to draw him out and help him name the emotions he was experiencing. They’d reassure him that he wasn’t in trouble. Then they’d ask again, building on any tiny comment he had made, any way in which he had participated. They’d bring up past successes to remind him of his capability. They’d hypothesize about what might be going on, listening for his agreement or dismissal of their ideas. They’d suggest different solutions, to see what might help.
By listening to him patiently, and relying on Greene’s communication training, his teachers figured out that the chaos of the morning simply overloaded his system. They agreed to try a plan where he would skip the noisy gym and go into the classroom first, with his teacher, to begin to acclimate to the school day in quiet. He thought that might work.
It did. Mornings became more tranquil and less agitated. But meeting time still challenged Quinn. Sitting near the other kids just seemed too much for him. After another conversation, they tried having him sit one-on-one with a teacher to share individually. That helped.
Slowly but surely, Quinn learned to trust that he wouldn’t be judged and that his teacher and the school staff would help him work through issues to find solutions. For months they focused only on keeping him safe in the building and not a danger to others.
Trouble often rose out of his misperception of a situation. He might think that his aide was making fun of him, or that a teacher was mistreating another child. By debriefing him, his teacher and counselor learned that many of his outbursts stemmed from a mistaken idea that someone was being victimized.
As Greene’s teaching took hold, the staff stopped delivering personalized praise like “I love that you walked safely” or “It made me happy,” and instead used phrases that emphasized Quinn’s decisions and attributes: “I noticed that you made a choice not to run. Way to go.” Or, knowing that Quinn felt fearful of strangers, “I noticed you were very brave about talking to the visitor today.”
They created affirmation cards to give to Quinn and his peers, a physical representation of this kind of positive feedback. The kids called them “awesome cards.”
One day last fall, Quinn got off the bus in front of their apartment complex. He greeted Daly with a big smile.
“I had a terrible day, Mom. My day was so bad,” he said. This was their running joke, that if he had a great day for behavior, he’d pretend it was awful.
“Oh, really,” she replied with a smile.
“Just kidding.”
He pulled an awesome card out of his pocket. With shock, Daly read that Quinn had been able to listen to an entire concert at school. This boy couldn’t even sit in music class for more than ten minutes. The noise and acoustics overwhelmed his system. He couldn’t stand the different voices clashing, with some people singing off-key. At the previous year’s “Hike Through History”—a huge schoolwide event celebrating the town’s past—he couldn’t even remain at an outdoor sing-along.
And here he was now, sitting at an indoor concert for forty minutes straight.
“Quinn, that’s amazing! Did you enjoy it? What was it about?”
“Yeah, it was okay,” he said.
Another big smile. He ran off to play with the other kids milling about the apartment building.
Daly felt relief. Slowly but surely, her son was learning to manage his issues. More and more, he could say, “I need to express my feelings,” instead of screaming. He could tell his teachers he needed a break instead of bolting from the room or building.
From Greene’s perspective, that’s the big win—not just to fix kids’ behavior problems, but to set them up for success on their own. Too many educators, he believes, fixate on a child’s problems outside of school walls—a turbulent home, a violent neighborhood—rather than focus on the difference the school can make. “Whatever he’s going home to, you can do the kid a heck of a lot of good six hours a day, five days a week, nine months a year,” Greene said. “We tie our hands behind our backs when we focus primarily on things about which we can do nothing.”
This holds true in our homes as well. Instead of bemoaning our children’s faults and shortcomings, if we focus on the distance they’ve come and find hope for their future progress, they will follow our lead. This can only happen if we understand our children’s perspective and communicate with them effectively, the second step in the Apprenticeship Model.
8
Capability
BAY AND JOSIAH JACKSON LIVE in a simple, two-story house in rural Lincoln, Vermont, with their seven-year-old son, Zealand, and four-year-old twin daughters, Scarlet and Magnolia. They milled the posts and beams themselves when building the house, and they left the exterior unpainted except for a bright orange door. The town rests at the foot of Mount Abraham and offers stunning views of the New Haven River through the trees.
On a brisk fall afternoon, Zealand finished an after-school snack of eggs and toast while Bay helped Scarle
t mix yogurt and granola at the kitchen island a few feet away. Magnolia darted up to the kitchen table to show me how she could write her name, then padded back to investigate the food situation. All three children sported fine, red hair, a lighter shade than Bay’s auburn. Magnolia wore a brightly colored striped cloth hat over a chin-length bob. A pink barrette held Scarlet’s longer locks away from her round face.
Seated at the table with me and Zealand, Josiah explained that he and Bay used to see groups of parents coming to the local pub after Vicki Hoefle’s parenting classes. When Zealand, at age three and a half, started throwing tantrums and resisting transitions between activities, it made sense for them to sign up too.
Hoefle compares misbehavior to weeds, which either grow, if watered with attention, or shrivel up when parents instead focus on building the relationship and supporting kids’ small steps toward independence. Instead of telling kids what to do, she advocates taking a coaching and training approach—giving them the information and practice they need to become increasingly more competent.
“The first couple of times we went to her class, it was so clear it was a lifestyle choice, and it was much more about us as individuals than fixing our kids. There’s nothing wrong with them. They’re just mirroring and reflecting what we feed them,” Bay told me. “It resonated with us both in a big way. It felt very natural and right.”
While I chatted with his parents, Zealand seamlessly transitioned from snack to homework at the kitchen island, tucking his plate into the dishwasher without being asked. Scarlet chopped her own nuts for a bowl of yogurt and granola—with a mammoth knife—before beginning to fold laundry with her mom on a futon in the corner of the room. All three children dress themselves, pack their own lunches, and clean up after themselves, as well as helping the family by cleaning the bathroom, cooking, emptying the dishwasher, feeding the animals, bringing in wood, and starting the fire. Hoefle taught the Jacksons to give these chores the positive name of “contributions.”
“There’s a level of pride they all take because the contributions are not catered to them as kids, they’re real-life contributions, like cleaning the toilet and cleaning the shower, things that oftentimes kids are not encouraged to do,” Bay said.
“We need to heat our house and we need wood,” said Josiah. “Zealand was lighting fires when he was two.”
When Zealand began to prepare for his soccer game, the first hint of a cloud hovered over the serene afternoon. Magnolia begged to come along, but her parents wanted her to rest at home since she was getting over a cold. It was November in New England, and the weather was chilly.
She proceeded into a heartfelt and full-on meltdown as her initial wails and whines escalated and she burst into tears. Bay pulled Magnolia onto her lap. She stroked her back and comforted her without judgment, just giving quiet empathy. Seconds after the door closed behind Josiah and Zealand, Bay proposed bike riding in the driveway. Tears still on her face, Magnolia agreed.
And like that, the storm passed. Magnolia brushed tears from her cheeks and ran for her sneakers. She came back to show me how she could tie the beginning of the bow, the bunny ear. Bay finished tying them, and they both pulled on jackets to walk outside. I rose to leave as well.
It wasn’t until I said good-bye and was reflecting on the cozy after-school routine that I realized that not once in the ninety minutes I’d been visiting had any member of the family picked up an electronic device. Josiah had leafed through a Patagonia catalog as the kids puttered around him, but the emphasis had clearly rested on connecting as a family while completing the daily tasks—all within the kitchen that comprised most of the 560-square-foot ground floor. The afternoon had unfolded like a well-choreographed dance, with every family member knowing their part. The parents didn’t nag or yell, but merely offered to help or asked questions to move the action along.
I FIRST HEARD VICKI HOEFLE speak in October 2013, at a gathering of PEP teachers where she delivered a fiery denunciation of parents as the problem underlying misbehavior. By then, I’d taken all the PEP classes and was beginning to teach portions of the curriculum. Brian had joined the PEP board with an eye to making the organization more dad-friendly. We were fully sold on Adlerian parenting and agreed in theory with most everything in Hoefle’s book, Duct Tape Parenting. And yet Hoefle’s conviction that parents are the problem shook me. I was too scared to try even a week of “do-nothing-say-nothing,” much less commit to parenting that way forever.
By late 2015, two days in Burlington immersed in Vicki Hoefle had won me over. I realized that I couldn’t teach my kids to face life with courage if I was parenting from a place of fear. And frankly, I was a bit humiliated that the three Jackson kids—all under age eight—were doing more household chores than my nine- and eleven-year-old children.
I arrived home primed and ready to build my relationship with my kids and to stop being so tyrannical. I started taking notes about the kind or helpful things they did for each other and the family, so I could thank them in order to emphasize their contributions and capability. At our next family meeting, I brought up the issue of family jobs. Brian and I and the children had been rotating through the usual set of kitchen and front hall tidying jobs earlier in the school year, but we had let them slide as homework and activities heated up.
We all agreed to resume the jobs, and Brian and I offered to teach the kids to do laundry, cook a new meal, or help tidy their rooms. To my delight, Maddie took Brian up on the offer to learn how to cook crepes, and Ava jumped at the chance to have Mommy help put her clothes away and organize books. Within a few days, they were back in the routine of sharing the household work: dishes, cooking, cleaning, tidying, and caring for the dog. We started having ham and cheese crepes for dinner once a week, an event spearheaded by the kids.
Over the following months, whenever the family seemed to be in a jobs rut, I would change the method of dividing up responsibilities. Once, I turned a shoebox into the “Secret Box of Jobs,” from which the kids could randomly choose a chore. Another time I wrote the jobs on slips of paper and put them in an elegantly scalloped glass. By not taking it personally when the jobs started to slide—or seeing it as a sign of my children’s future irresponsibility—I avoided a power struggle.
Whenever my good humor threatened to slip away, I reminded myself of the simple rule: before taking any action as a parent, ask yourself whether it will be relationship-building or fracturing. If you’re about to harm the relationship, stop. It’s better to do nothing than to damage your bond. You’ll surely have another opportunity to address whatever issue is at hand—give yourself breathing room to think it out.
I kept telling myself that the kids beginning to act up or the chores slipping by the wayside weren’t signs of our failure as parents. Instead of seeing a tantrum as a disruption to be eliminated, I now viewed it as a signal that something was wrong—and a message for me to switch into detective mode. Perhaps the uproar was prompted by my child not having a skill needed to handle the situation, or maybe she needed support in building frustration tolerance or getting organized. Maybe my child was bored and needed more challenge and responsibility. (It’s counterintuitive but it works: give a misbehaving child a truly difficult job and their behavior may suddenly improve.) I would simply keep coaching and leading them into the next area they were ready to master—saving and spending, planning their time, organizing their belongings, or whatever the next mountain to climb might be.
Researchers such as Heidi Riggio, a psychology professor at California State University–Los Angeles, have found that when children help with the work of the household, they develop a belief in themselves as capable and effective. Riggio interviewed a few hundred young adults about when they started doing chores and how they felt about themselves. She found a significant correlation between regular housework and their sense of competence. If they began chores at an older age, the connection was weaker. On average, people in the study started doing family jobs at age nine.<
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Similarly, Marty Rossman, professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota, analyzed data from a study that followed children from preschool to age ten, to age fifteen, and into their midtwenties. Those adults who started doing chores in preschool were more likely to complete their education, start on a career path, enjoy healthy relationships, avoid drugs, and be self-sufficient, as compared with people in the study who’d had no chores or who started them as teenagers. One caveat: some researchers have found that children who shoulder too many chores because their parents are absent or busy with work may lose out on academics. It’s a balance.
Other researchers have found that household jobs have the most positive impact on kids’ well-being when they have a say in which household jobs they do and autonomy in deciding how and when to perform them. It’s good for parents to stretch their children’s abilities, and time management skills, by teaching them household tasks and expecting them to complete them. Children gain confidence and a sense of meaning when they’re responsible for walking a dog, setting the table, cooking dinner, and other daily jobs. When Brian and I started presenting these jobs in a matter-of-fact way as part of every family member’s responsibility, the kids went along, with only a modicum of complaining. You may need to switch from a chore chart to a wheel to a mystery box from time to time, but stick with it.
SO WHERE DO YOU START? It depends on your children and what seems reasonable to you. If Vicki Hoefle’s do-nothing-say-nothing approach resonates, try that. Be guided by your child’s interests and age, rather than what you’d like them to handle themselves. Some children just love to sort and stack—they’re well suited to organizing plastic containers in the kitchen or storage areas of the garage. Cleaning out the pencil sharpener or changing the printer ink cartridges will appeal to kids who adore doing anything mechanical. Be sure to start with a manageable task, so you can build on success.
The Good News About Bad Behavior Page 17