Dr. Ginsburg isn’t alone in seeing value and even potential joy in our children’s most challenging moments. “The behaviors that are the most challenging, and that drive us the craziest, are actually telling us something really important,” says Tina Payne Bryson, a psychotherapist and the coauthor (with Dan Siegel) of No-Drama Discipline: The Whole-Brain Way to Calm the Chaos and Nurture Your Child’s Developing Mind. “They are telling us the specific areas in which our kids need teaching, support, and skill-building. Instead of focusing on what we need to take away from our kids for them to learn their lesson, think instead of what we need to provide for them to learn so that they become self-disciplined.”
What Goes Wrong
Before we start trying to think about discipline differently, let’s figure out how we got here. Had you surveyed a thousand parents a hundred years ago, or in any decade over most of the last century, it’s unlikely that “what they liked least” would have coalesced around discipline. Our parents, and most parents before them, were largely in agreement about how children should behave, and how their parents should go about getting them to do just that. “Most people parenting teenagers now,” Dr. Ginsburg said, “would have been raised by authoritarian parents. It’s a high-rules, low-warmth style,” he said, which isn’t to say it isn’t meant lovingly. “It’s ‘my house, my rules.’” Most of our parents would have experienced a similar style themselves. Adults who grew up in the middle class in the ’50s and ’60s often describe being disciplined at home and at school with a paddle, strap, ruler, or switch.
Corporal punishment isn’t a necessary piece of the authoritarian style (spanking has been a matter of debate for hundreds of years), but few questioned the need for some form of punishment, even if it took the form of being sent to bed without dinner or missing an anticipated event rather than a spanking. As a general rule, people believed there was a clear connection between punishing a child and reducing bad behavior.
For most parents today, the clarity of that simple cycle of transgression and punishment is gone. In its place we have a better understanding of how a too-heavy parental hand can push a child away and even lead to an increase in risky behaviors later. But while there’s a consensus among experts like Dr. Ginsburg about the balanced style of parenting that should replace the “my way or the highway” approach (more on that shortly), there’s not a lot of societal agreement on what, exactly, we should be doing to achieve that balance. That can mean that we parents feel a lot of angry glares in public places when we don’t do whatever it is we’re supposed to do to control our kids. Many of us favor a “positive discipline” approach, which rewards the right behavior rather than reacts to problem behavior, but this can leave you at a loss when the only rewardable behavior available at the grocery store is that the child didn’t actually flip over the cart.
But there’s more to what makes discipline tough for us than our personal struggles. In many respects, we face a different disciplinary landscape than our parents. Technology is a part of it, as are changing norms about how people speak to one another, how they behave and dress in public, and how the people and institutions around us treat questions about discipline and authority. A few decades or less ago, a student who rolled her eyes at a teacher could expect a detention while a student who called a classmate “fat” would be met with a shrug; today those responses are reversed. Like it or not (and if you’re asking, I think both merit a disciplinary response), that’s the world most of us send our children out into. At the same time, being called out for misbehavior by a neighbor, another kid’s parent, or a stranger was common for a child not long ago; now it’s rare. One reason discipline feels more painful to us as parents is that more than any generation before us, we’re solo. Add in the incredibly high expectations we have for ourselves, and you have a recipe for feeling inadequate.
Our children are also more supervised than any generation that came before them, which has shifted how we convey our behavioral expectations as well. Because we’re usually with our kids, we rely heavily on the power of our “no” rather than teaching our children how to behave without our guidance, and for their part, our children lean on our presence. Because we’re always available to smooth things over, they’re less likely to have experienced the consequences of rude or inappropriate behavior in a public setting. Meanwhile, we expect our constant attendance itself to be enough to get the job done. We show up relentlessly, as though looking for a good attendance award, when we might teach our children more by being less present.
“We kind of want to professionalize child-rearing,” says Ylonda Gault Caviness, the author of Child, Please: How Mama’s Old-School Lessons Helped Me Check Myself Before I Wrecked Myself. “We feel like, if we have this input, we should get this kind of outcome. We’re very organized and we’ve got Google Calendar and date nights with each child and we’re doing all the things. But it’s not just a formula you can plug in.”
That doesn’t have to mean we’re not doing a decent job, even if it doesn’t look like it every minute. The biggest thing that “goes wrong” when it comes to discipline is the nature of children and teenagers. Children push and test and forget and act on impulse. Teenagers do the same, with the addition of more freedom, more hormones, more knowledge, and on occasion even less self-control. They’re being exactly who they need to be to turn into the adults they’ll someday become, but that isn’t necessarily easy for the adults who are trying to get them there. Looked at in this light, discipline, even the enforcement bit, is just parenting.
The last thing on my checklist of “why discipline is actually really hard” is that we get almost no control over when we need to bring it to the table. In fact, things nearly always come up at the hardest possible moment. A late commute after a long week at work during a month of stress over your father’s health and the possibility that you may need to move the family halfway across the country for your partner’s job? Why yes, thank you, that’s exactly when your children will offer up their very biggest challenges. So often, when we feel empty of any ability to give, our kids force us to reach deep into our well.
We’re muddling through a foggy landscape of societal expectations and changing norms, charged with reining in young people who are designed to resist at every turn. We can’t control when we’ll be called upon to produce some form of “discipline” out of our magic bag of parenting tricks. So what can we do to make this least-favorite aspect of being a parent better? Enough to make a big difference. We can take a cue from Dr. Ginsburg and start thinking about it differently, which might change our behavior not just when we’re on the disciplinary “spot,” but when we’re off as well. We can shift our approach and adjust how much we let others second-guess us or get under our skin when we’re not doing what they would do. And we can feel happier about how we express our approach, to ourselves, to others, and to our children.
Here’s what we can’t control: the result.
And that is why discipline can be so overwhelming, even terrifying. “Discipline” is both a verb and a noun. We use it in order to teach it. If your child reaches the age of eighteen without having ever eaten a fruit or vegetable, unable to do a load of laundry, and still putting soccer ahead of homework, college and adult life may involve some rude awakenings (or possibly scurvy). She’ll cope. But without discipline, it’s hard to successfully enter any part of adult life at all, and the worst part is, we can’t know how much our children have learned until they’ve been tested by something we can’t control. There are no guarantees. Everybody hates that.
But there is some really good advice. And if you can find a happy peace with this arguably most-challenging aspect of parenthood, you’ll find that happiness extending into nearly every other challenge, because discipline troubles are a piece of everything that makes raising a family less fun, from miserable mornings to horrible homework to vicious vacations. Make this better, and a whole lot of other things fall into place.
Discipline may be the overall practice of teaching a child how to behave in the larger world, but for most of us, especially if we’re naming it as our “least liked thing,” what we’re thinking of are the tough spots. Insisting that chores be done is discipline. Maintaining expectations for homework and public behavior is discipline. But what pulls us up short and makes us hold our head in our hands is what we need to do when the chores aren’t done and the expectations aren’t met and one child is kicking you in the shin while another is on the phone trying to explain how her friend ran out of gas on the highway on the way to the concert you said she couldn’t go to. That’s where the rubber hits the road.
Among the biggest challenges for me when it comes to that form of discipline is that I have to be the grown-up. Sometimes my children just plain make me mad. They look up at me and flat-out deny biting a sibling while I’m examining their distinctive tooth marks in a plump baby leg. They scream, “No! I no want p-butter!” And in waving their arms to make their point, they knock the plate and sandwich out of my hand. They saunter off to begin slowly making their lunch when I announce that it’s time to get in the car for school.
I am human. I get angry, I get hurt, I get frustrated, disappointed, and upset. All of that is allowed, but when it comes to teaching my children to master their own worst selves at tough moments, I obviously can’t start from there. Instead, I must first discipline myself. My hair is not on fire. There is nothing wrong. I can take the time to climb down off the ceiling before I do anything else.
This is difficult when you have very young children, particularly when their demands mean we aren’t getting the sleep we require, doing the things we need to do to care for ourselves, or finding time for things we enjoy. It’s also difficult with older children and teenagers, from whom we expect more, and who know how to push our buttons in very special ways. In fact, it’s just plain difficult. Sometimes we’ll find ourselves in situations with our children where it’s easy to enforce our family rules or values warmly, calmly, and firmly. More often, we’ll be doing it while dealing with a cascade of emotions within ourselves. Whether you’ve always struggled with a hot temper, a passive-aggressive streak, or impulse control or whether you’ve generally operated on an even keel, children can bring you to heights of rage you’ve have never before experienced, unless you’re employed in a workplace where your colleagues intentionally drop your mobile phone into the toilet.
When I say as much to Dr. Ginsburg, he maintains his enviable calm. The problem, he tells me, is that we need to expect the tough moments. It’s not if your child will do something that’s over-the-top infuriating, disappointing, or even frightening. It’s when. If you see even the worst-seeming problems as part of a bigger picture that’s inevitably full of ups and downs, you can take a deep breath, pull your shoulders down out of your ears, and quiet the voices in your mind telling you that you have failed as a parent, or that this child is just like you and will screw up just like you did. “Look,” he says. “It’s not a tiger. It’s almost never a tiger. A D on a test is not a tiger, shoplifting is not a tiger, an arrest for underage drinking is not a tiger.” In other words, even the biggest crisis is probably not immediately life-threatening. You don’t need that adrenaline-charged reaction your body is offering. You have time to deal with what’s in front of you calmly, as an adult, helping a child to learn from her experience and go forward. Sounds good, right? Here’s what I learned about how to get there.
RESPOND, DON’T REACT
It’s hard to teach our children to try to do what we as adults are likely struggling with in the very moment of the teaching. Both you and your child need to master your immediate desires, fears, and emotions in a way that allows you to move toward your long-term goals, and you’re supposed to be leading the way. The screaming child in the grocery cart who wants a lollipop doesn’t really want to be screaming. She wants to be a happy, comforted child (preferably not in the cart, or at the grocery store at all, but with a lollipop). And we don’t really want to be the purple-faced grown-up screaming back. We want to be peacefully at home with our groceries and a happy child (lollipop entirely your call). Getting from point A to point B takes discipline inside and out.
The more we struggle with disciplining our own response to our children’s behavior, the more likely we are to be struggling with our children. There’s neuroscience behind this. In his book Hardwiring Happiness, neuropsychologist Rick Hanson describes our brain’s “reactive mode”—the place we go when we “feel apprehensive or exasperated, pulled in different directions.”
A brain in reactive mode is not a brain that’s thinking clearly. “Adrenaline and cortisol course through the blood, and fear, frustration, and heartache color the mind,” he writes. “The reactive mode assumes there are urgent demands, so it’s not concerned about your long-term needs.” Your brain is offering a stress response better suited to fleeing a cheetah than to soothing either a child or yourself, and that doesn’t help.
“If we’re emotionally chaotic and reactive in discipline moments, we’re making it less likely we can effectively teach our kids,” says Tina Bryson. Our stress response activates our children’s stress response in return. “When we are reactive, angry, unpredictable, our children’s primitive brains are getting the ‘threat’ signal, and the brain cares first about safety. No learning can be done when kids don’t feel safe.”
When the parents we surveyed spent more time punishing, yelling, or hashing over the rules of the house, those parents (particularly those with younger children) felt less satisfied with their role as parents. When discipline feels like a problem, it becomes an even bigger problem.
The alternative to that “reactive mode” is a “responsive mode,” in which our brains, not feeling disturbed by a sense that our safety, satisfaction, or connections are at risk, can remain at rest even in response to challenges. To keep our minds from snapping into reactive mode, we need to stop seeing our child’s bad behavior as a threat to ourselves. If you can stay focused on the “teaching” side of discipline—the 90 percent—it’s easier to get through these more difficult moments calmly, because they don’t feel as fraught. You know that your immediate response here isn’t some sort of ultimate parenting test, with a win-or-lose result ahead.
But that’s not always easy to remember. The reactive mode often overwhelms us, especially when the disciplinary crisis is sudden, feels big, and comes at a rough moment. What can we do to pull ourselves out of what Dr. Hanson calls “the red zone” before we pull everyone else in, too? First, he told me, label it. “Just softly in your own mind put some words to what you’re feeling,” he says. “‘I’m so mad, so freaked out, I want to hit that kid, I want to scream.’ Name it as neutrally as you can.” Then, he says, buy yourself some time. “We make mistakes when we’re moving and speaking too quickly. Pause, slow down. Imagine yourself observing from the outside of a glass wall, or think of a video camera in the corner, recording this to play later.”
Do the best you can to calm your body. “Exhale,” he says. “It activates the parasympathetic nervous system. Lift your gaze to the horizon, which engages the circuits in your brain to take a panoramic view.” Above all, he says, remind yourself how safe you are. There is nothing wrong. You’re not denying the situation. You’re just helping yourself calm it down. “We’re very quick to move to alarm about our children and our partners,” he says. “We go straight to ‘everything’s falling apart.’ Take a moment to remind yourself of the actual possible consequences of what’s in front of you. You’re not sick, no one’s dying, you’re not going bankrupt, there’s no terminal illness.” Basically, everything is okay.
Take the time you need for this process. Your child can wait, in time-out, in her room, with a partner or an older child, for you to respond—not react—when you’re ready. Forgive yourself, too, if you react before you can stop yourself. Yo
u don’t have to get it right every time. If the situation merits it, bring your response to the table when you’re able; if not, let things blow over. This is an area where most parents get more opportunity to practice than we ever imagined.
WHAT DO WE ACTUALLY DO?
If only, once you were ready to respond, you were all set with the formula that would lead straight back to the road to happiness for all, with a quick stop at the I’m-so-sorry-I’ll-never-do-it-again service area.
Sadly, it’s the nature of many of the most difficult discipline dilemmas that they’re unpredictable, varied, and specialized. It’s not just that your child is having a tantrum over cookies, but that you promised her cookies before her tonsil surgery tomorrow and now the bakery only has peanut butter cookies, which you can’t get because your visiting nephew is allergic and everything else is closed. One child hit the other, but you know good and well that the other probably asked for it, even though you only saw the hit. The child caught at the party where there was alcohol has a plane ticket to compete with her team in the national debate championships tomorrow. You thought you’d know what to do in those situations—no tantrums, no hitting, no drinking—but it’s never a nice, clear case of this-then-that.
How to Be a Happier Parent: Raising a Family, Having a Life, and Loving (Almost) Every Minute Page 20