In retrospect, it seems crazy that I so often let short-term thinking and consequences override my long-term goal to help my children develop into responsible adults. But it’s possible to abandon these bad habits, just as we expect our children to let go of theirs. Let your actions flow from the intention to support and guide your children in learning from the consequences of their actions. Don’t worry about how they’ll be perceived or how your parenting will be judged. Ignore that little voice in your head that catastrophizes based on today’s behavior—have confidence that your kids will learn.
This discipline can feel invisible, because you’re not directing or correcting children in public. They may show up for school with unkempt hair and missing a snack. The teacher and other parents don’t see you at home chatting with the kids about how the day went and strategizing a better way to remember their snack. This private correction keeps the focus on learning without humiliating children in front of adults or their peers.
It simply takes time for experience to teach children the lessons they need to get along in life. From the outside, kids who are growing into their independence may not look as together as the children whose parents do everything for them or prod them into completing every step on a checklist. But over time, as your kids wrestle with the normal challenges of life—not with you and your stupid rules—they will increasingly take responsibility for their belongings, schedules, and actions. And your relationship with them won’t experience the damage that nagging, blaming, or punishing can inflict.
Consequences may not look the way you imagine. You may not believe that your kids could really be learning if they endure consequences without crying or being visibly upset. The positive parenting guru Jane Nelsen—author of the Positive Discipline book and class series—addresses that objection: “Where did we ever get the crazy idea that in order to make children do better, first we have to make them feel worse?”
Kids may learn a different lesson than you imagine they will. They may find a short cut. Their choices may have side benefits you never imagined. When I stopped rescuing my children by delivering their forgotten lunches, they became expert at negotiating with their friends and classmates for portions of their lunches. I noticed that as my kids were packing their own lunches they often included more tuna packs, cookies, or chips than they could possibly eat themselves. It turned out that they were banking goodwill by sharing their treats with their lunchmates—in preparation for that day when they’d forget their lunch.
I had to accept this as a reasonable outcome. And in fact, which is more realistic for long-term success in life: trying to be perfect in anticipating every need you will have, or developing the interpersonal skills and relationships that will help you deal with the unexpected over the long term?
I saw this idea in action at a fair that our synagogue held to raise money for the preschool, when my kids were perhaps six and eight years old. Teenagers ran little carnival games, and there was a huge moon bounce and slide. I purchased $10 worth of tickets and gave half to each child. I watched as they blew through their tickets making little necklaces and jars of multicolored sand. Then they proceeded to the moon bounce, which cost three tickets. I knew that each of them had only one ticket left.
Aha! They would finally learn the lesson that they should’ve carefully planned their activities and used their math skills to figure out how many tickets would be needed for each one. I watched as they approached the volunteer ticket taker. But to my surprise, after a few words, they handed over one ticket each and bounded up the steps to the moon bounce.
When they finally piled out and retrieved their shoes, they walked over to me, their hair sweaty around their foreheads and their cheeks glowing.
“How did you get on the moon bounce?” I asked. “I thought you didn’t have enough tickets.”
“Oh, I asked the person, ‘Would you be willing to take one ticket?’” Maddie told me nonchalantly. She took her coat from my hands and shrugged into it as we headed outside. I followed, stunned.
Your kids are more capable than you may imagine. They’ll discover their own path in life, from small interactions to major choices. All they need is the freedom to experiment.
YOU’VE PROBABLY HEARD THE ADVICE to give choices to children, especially toddlers and preschoolers, when they start pushing back. Having choices gives your children some power in situations where they feel powerless. For example, at bedtime, ask your preschooler, “Would you like to brush teeth or read a book first?” When getting out the door in the morning, ask your toddler whether they’d like to hold Mommy’s hand or carry the keys to the car. If they resist buckling into the car seat, ask if they’d like to be the “safety captain” who ensures that everyone is belted in before the car moves. Putting a child in charge of a task they’ve been resisting may be counterintuitive, but it’s remarkable how often it works.
If giving them choices doesn’t win your kids’ cooperation, you may be only pretending to give them a choice—maybe you’re actually giving them only options that get you what you want, not something they would choose. This hit home for me when I flew to Burlington to visit Hoefle’s parenting class.
It was the second session of her six-week class. The parents seemed on board. They were listening closely to her explanation of how to encourage young children’s independence. Give them information, she told them, not reminders. You want their brains working. Teach them one thing at a time, and let them practice.
“Allow them to be frustrated before you come in with your helpful comment like, ‘How can we solve this?’ Just pause in that frustration, so they learn they’ll recover. Then offer one thing: ‘What if you…,’” she said. She moved around the room like a dancer, stretching and bending to give emphasis to her words.
“Slow the learning process down. We’re always rushing. ‘Come on. Get those shoes on,’” she said. “They should have time to sit down and put the shoe on and pull the tongue out and get the laces so. Just watch how quickly with young kids you go in to make it all neat and tidy. They’ll keep you honest. They’ll start doing things like this.”
She put her hand off to the side, palm facing out, in the universal sign for “back off.”
One mom asked for advice on handling her four-year-old son’s reluctance to take baths or showers.
“So how do you get him in?” Hoefle asked.
“Oftentimes it’s a bribe, for a TV show, or last week it was popcorn,” the mom admitted. “I can’t quite say, ‘It’s okay for you not to be clean for a week.’ He just doesn’t care.”
“I don’t care if he cares if he’s clean. You care. The goal is to get him to take it, not to care,” Hoefle said. “Your job is to mimic what will happen in the outside world so kids can make informed decisions.
“You can say things like, ‘Listen, I can’t force you to take a bath or shower. I have my reasons for why it’s a good idea, but I’m not going to fight with you every night. Here’s the thing: that’s your choice. I have a choice too. To tell you the truth, you’re a little ripe at the end of the day. I’m happy to read with you, if you sit there and I sit here.’”
She mimed sitting across the room from a child.
Most parents looked skeptical. One dad nodded.
“There are no such things as good or bad choices. There are things that move you towards what you want and away from what you want,” Hoefle said. “In that moment the kid has to decide: What do I want more, to be in a power struggle about the bath and the shower, or read on the lap of my mother? Huh. I want to snuggle next to my mom. So I have to give up this game.”
She explained that a boy who takes a bath after being bribed has simply learned that he can get a treat if he stalls. He clearly doesn’t have a fear of water. She warned the parents that they had to be patient and prepared for the child to choose what they didn’t want for three, four, or five days in a row. The child might need to make the choice they didn’t want several times before deciding that it wasn’t w
orking for him.
“This is going to happen a million times. You’re going to have to allow your children to choose, and let them know you also have choice. So they don’t feel pushed into doing what you want. It’s really hard, but it works fast with kids,” she said.
Say the issue is tooth brushing. You teach your child how to brush. You make sure they have the toothpaste they like and a toothbrush they picked out themselves. Now it’s on them. Your only role is to decide whether to snuggle with them or, if they haven’t brushed, read across the room from a distance.
One dad asked for clarification. “What you’re describing, the result of your decision may not play out until later because you read later,” he said.
That’s right, Hoefle said. If you think through a plan and confirm that it’s related to the issue, respectful, reasonable in scope, and revealed to the child in advance, just carry through in a matter-of-fact way. Don’t threaten or lay out the scenario for them when they’re about to make the “wrong” choice. Let it unfold.
“When do you spring that?” Lisa Rowley asked.
“I don’t spring. The world doesn’t spring. She’s already told him nine thousand times. Really, everybody’s supposed to take a bath,” Hoefle said.
“Okay, I understand,” Rowley said. “So she says, ‘You don’t need to,’ but three hours later.…”
This was not what Hoefle wanted the class to do. Bending down to talk to the dad who commented earlier, she adopted a syrupy sweet tone of voice and pretended he was the kid.
“That’s fine if you don’t want to take a bath, but I’m not going to sit next to you later,” she said. “It’s like an invitation to a power struggle. The kid’s like, ‘Really?’” Her eyes grew wide.
“Now when you say, ‘No, I told you I wasn’t going to,’ he says, ‘Really, I’m going to crawl on top of you!’”
She mimed crawling on top of the dad. The class burst into laughter.
“Now she’s going to come back to class and say it doesn’t work!” Hoefle said.
Instead, the mom should be low-key, Hoefle explained, suggesting that she say, “‘Love to. Gotta say, you’re a little ripe.’ Suddenly his brain goes, ‘Oh yeah, it’s bath night. I chose not to take a bath. This is the result of my choice. I’m still being read to, I’m just not being read to in the way I would like.’ Now we have cooperation.”
Again, the key is to alert your child to the consequence ahead of time, not in the heat of the moment. When bedtime rolls around, they may not remember that you’re planning to read across the room from them, but after a couple of times experiencing this outcome, they will learn.
NINE-YEAR-OLD MARIANA CULLEN SWEPT THE dirt from the wide front porch of her family’s home. She spotted me and froze, blue plastic broom pressed against the dustpan. I gazed up at her, across a ten-foot-high flight of steps that climbed steeply from the sidewalk to the front door. Behind me, a Sunday morning soccer game began in the field across the street.
“Well, hello,” I said to her. “Good morning.”
Her mother, Camila, held a doormat she had brought outside to shake out. Mariana resumed sweeping.
“We had people over and the kids went under the porch, so we’re just trying to sweep up a little bit of dirt,” explained Camila. Her hair was pulled back from her face in a cloth hairband. I looked across the wide wooden slats of the front porch, imagining the hideout created underneath. Perfect for a gang of kids.
“So you went under the porch and then brought the dirt back up?” I asked Mariana. She nodded.
“It’s filthy, but they love it,” Camila said. “This whole area here. They take chairs and stuff down there. It’s super, super dirty. It gets tracked in.”
“We made mud balls yesterday,” said Mariana, a beanpole with a lighter shade of her mom’s short, curly locks. “It was so fun!”
“Oh. You made mud balls! I understand even better why it was so dirty,” I said.
In the house, I accepted a coffee from Colin, who invited me to wait in the living room while they finished cleaning. As I walked back from the kitchen to the front hall, I caught a glimpse of six-year-old Alejandro, hanging on the interior staircase. As soon as he saw me, he bolted upstairs. Mariana wandered back into the house with a blue plastic water bottle swinging from her hand.
Camila came back in too, done with the porch. She explained that the unexpected cleaning had frustrated Alejandro because he usually did his chores quickly on weekend mornings and then got to use his iPad. He had declared that as soon as I arrived, he was going to hide.
True to his word, Alejandro couldn’t be found in the bedroom, Camila’s home office, the parents’ bedroom, or even the attic playroom, where two lightweight pop-up castles dominated either corner, one pink and the other decorated with circus stripes. Camila seemed to know his hiding places and shook the thick curtains in every room, in search of his little body.
Finally, she discovered him in the living room, behind the couch, where Mariana sat. He slipped by and ran upstairs. Camila followed him. Soon, he was trailing her downstairs into the bathroom, where they wet a washcloth for him to use to scrub dirt from the doorknobs and handles. Later, she explained that he had offered to do only one, but in the end he cleaned both.
The cleaning done, the family next held a meeting in the living room, with visiting grandmother Rita. They each expressed gratitude for every other family member’s actions and quickly reviewed the week’s schedule. I stayed to chat with Camila and Colin while the kids and their grandmother went into the kitchen. After about twenty minutes, Camila checked on them and returned to report that Mariana had just made breakfast for herself and her brother.
I scurried into the kitchen to see Alejandro plopped onto a kitchen chair, scooping up fried eggs and toast with his fork. Mariana stood on her tippy toes to put a mug into the microwave.
“I heard you made breakfast,” I said. “That looks good. Are those fried eggs?”
“Yes,” she said. She started the microwave. “I like my milk with plain old 100 percent dark chocolate. It’s from Nicaragua. My grandmother brought it.”
She brought the warmed milk back to the kitchen table, where Alejandro already had a mug of chocolate milk. Both children idly stirred their mugs while they ate. Alejandro had a spoon in his mug, and Mariana stirred hers with a tiny metal whisk. We chatted about Girl Scouts and camping. After Alejandro wandered out of the room, Mariana walked to his side of the table.
“I’m going to mix up my little brother’s now,” she said. She stirred his chocolate milk with her whisk, then took a long sip. “This is good. Not bad.”
She stirred a bit more and then announced: “Alejandro, your chocolate milk is ready!”
“Really?” he ran back in the room with a grin across his face.
HOMEWORK. I REALLY WISH IT had never been invented. Reams of evidence suggest that homework is useless for children younger than middle school. From the research on play, we know they’re better off roaming the outdoors with siblings and friends, or exploring books, music, and art independently. So my first piece of advice is: don’t worry too much about homework.
To be sure, most parents must deal with the fact that teachers expect children to complete homework. It helps kids to have a strong parent-school connection, so you don’t want to undermine the teachers’ authority.
Agree with your kids about some limits and routines for homework. When and where will it happen? How long should it take? What must be delayed until after homework is completed? (Hint: screen time.) Be open to trying out different routines to see what works best for your child. Some do better sitting straight down to homework after school. Others need some time to run around, since they’ve been sitting and focusing all day long.
Once you have your agreement, stick to it. Resist any commentary. Perhaps you agree that homework should take thirty minutes. (One good rule of thumb is ten minutes per grade of school.) Set a timer. The child can leave the homework table aft
er it dings. This can help with dawdling. I know from my own experience as an adult that a task expands to fill the time allotted. Your children will soon learn that to finish everything, they need to be efficient and focused.
Advocate for your child at school. My family was lucky to have an elementary school principal who read the homework research and believed in the value of free play and connecting as a family after school. She encouraged her teachers to assign minimal homework.
In fourth grade, Ava ran into a roadblock with spelling words. Each week she received a list of twenty words and had to complete five different assignments as a way to memorize the words for the Friday quiz. She could write the words in different colors or make a crossword puzzle. She hated sitting down to do the writing, especially when the weather was beautiful. Some weeks she did only one of the assignments, despite all our insistence. The thing was: she got perfect scores on the quiz. Consistently.
Clearly, the additional assignments weren’t needed for her to learn the words. She was resisting the burden of busy work with good reason. We sat down with her English teacher and came to an agreement that she’d study the words for ten minutes a day and turn in whatever writing she produced. Problem solved.
If your child seems to have too much homework, raise the issue with the teacher. Share the facts of what you’ve observed. For instance: “My child sits down at 5:00 p.m. to do homework and works straight until 6:00 p.m. Then they simply can’t concentrate any further.”
Ask for the teacher’s help in solving the problem. Most educators will respond well to sincere outreach. Propose a trial of reduced homework for a few weeks. Teachers who see the quality of a child’s schoolwork increase after such a trial period may be open to reduced quantity.
The Good News About Bad Behavior Page 21