When I complained to Dr. Ginsburg that the trouble with discipline is that it’s impossible to know what the right thing to do is when things start going wrong, I expected enthusiastic sympathy, because Dr. Ginsburg is a dad, because he really gets the challenges of parenting, and because he is never not enthusiastic.
Instead, I got another swift correction. No, he said. We do know what to do—or at least, we know how parents should be and that can guide us to the best response. “There’s a ton of research out there that shows that there is a right way to do this,” he said, and he quickly offered up a primer on the four parenting styles—three bad, one good—that researchers have developed over the years. There’s the high rules/low warmth “authoritarian” style many of us experienced; the high warmth/low rules “permissive” style, in which a parent is more of a friend; the low rules/low warmth disengaged parent, who believes “kids will be kids” and “they’ll figure it out”; and, finally, the ideal rules-and-warmth pairing found in the balanced, or “authoritative” parent, who provides firm boundaries around issues of safety and morality and warm, supportive guidance around everything else.
So while there may not be one right thing to do, there is a right approach. “We do know what to do, or at least how to do it,” says Dr. Ginsburg. “Striking the right balance that includes attention to monitoring, while not smothering, is scientifically proven to matter.” Happier parents of young children are more hands-on when it comes to discipline, stepping into an argument between friends to model listening and problem-solving, demonstrating how to complete a chore, or keeping a close eye on adherence to screen-time rules, but as children grow older, those parents are stepping back to allow kids a chance to show their self-discipline—and, if that doesn’t go well, stepping forward to help, only to step back again a few weeks or months later. Dr. Ginsburg is quick to list just a few benefits of that dance: kids whose parents offer authority when needed and support the rest of the time have lower levels of depression and anxiety and lower rates of drug use; they’re half as likely to be in a car crash; they start sexual experimentation later.
Of course, knowing how you want to be doesn’t always tell you what to actually do, no matter what Dr. Ginsburg says. That’s the balanced parent catch-22: we must be flexible but firm. We need to take circumstances and who our child is into account, but not to the point of compromising safety, morality, or our child’s belief in us as a guiding light in a cloudy world. So, the bakery tantrum on the night before a scary surgery might merit a soothing compromise, the hitting child might get a pass this time, the child on her way to the debate tournament might not have to let down her team, but she might have just gained an unexpected chaperone.
When you’re able to take the time to move into responsive mode, you’re also more able to see your way toward that balanced style. You won’t make as many mistakes around deciding what is really an issue of safety or morality that requires your close attendance (staying close in the parking lot, cheating on a test) and what’s not (sibling nastiness, forgotten homework). You’ll be able to be loving even when you’re also angry and disappointed. You’ll think through what should come next, and you’ll be able to be happier with your own actions (although your child might not be).
Connect, Teach, Enforce, Repeat
Parents tend to be happier around discipline, even during the most difficult moments, when we have a sense that it’s working. We feel more effective as parents if we can reassure ourselves, for example, that breaking the rules of our house has consequences. Ask a bunch of us for discipline advice, and one of the most common answers is some version of this: never threaten a consequence you won’t carry out. We put a lot of weight on that word and concept—“consequences”—but what exactly do we mean by it?
The American Academy of Pediatrics says that effective discipline includes three things: (1) a generally positive and supportive relationship between parent and child; (2) a way to teach the child the right thing to do in any given situation; and (3) a plan for ending the behaviors you don’t want. It’s that third piece—the 10 percent of the iceberg, to go back to my earlier analogy—that gives us the most trouble, both because we don’t like it and, often, because we feel that we don’t know how to do it.
In some cases, we can let “natural consequences” run their course—the child who throws her cookie now has none—but with many of the expectations we set for our children, the natural consequences of their behavior are either distant or more painful for the adults than for the kids. Especially when our children are young, many of the behaviors we want to end are fun from their perspective—chasing the cat, spitting water out of a straw at a restaurant. We tell them to stop, and they don’t. What then?
That point is, says author Joanna Faber, when many of us turn to “the threats, the warnings, the commands,” it sounds to small children “like a Charlie Brown parent talking: wah wah wah womp wah.” If we follow it up with a punishment—“That’s it, then. You won’t stop, so no television for you tonight!”—we put ourselves and our child on opposite sides, with her attention now on herself and what you’re doing to her rather than on the behavior you were hoping to teach. For many of us, that’s not a happy place to be, especially if it leads, as it often does, to a meltdown.
Faber’s suggestion? Try to engage and connect the moment things start to go south. It’s fun to chase the kitty or squirt the water, but here’s why it’s not fun for the kitty or the other diners. “Scolding, smacking, or putting a child in a time-out might stop him in the moment,” she said, “but you’re not here just to stop him in the moment.” You’re here, she says, to teach your child to make the right choices for himself, so offer that option first, even if it seems as if he should know better by now. Some things take a lot of saying.
If he still can’t make that choice, make it for him: “It’s too tempting for you to chase the cat right now, so I’m going to shut her in my room.” “It’s too hard for you to resist that straw, so we’re going to give it back to the waitress.” “I know I said we were going out to lunch after the game, but I don’t want to do that anymore, so we’re leaving.”
The consequences, she says, “can look much the same” as any punishment you might have imposed, but using words that show that you understand your child’s feelings, and that express yours, can make it easier to keep yourself calm and to allow the child a chance to apologize and make amends (even as you still remove the cat or the straw, or leave the restaurant). You may not achieve calm. You may not get a “sorry.” You may, instead, meet with grumbling and complaining or shrieking and wailing, and all may not end happily. That’s okay. They’re hearing you. They’re gradually connecting their behavior to your response. It’s all part of the process, and you’re all but guaranteed to get another chance.
That whole sequence of connecting, teaching, and then, if necessary, ending a behavior is one you will repeat again and again, especially with a younger child, so make your words positive ones, even if the behavior is anything but. “If I’m going to say it a hundred times,” says Faber, “I figure it might as well be something I want my child to learn.” Thus “Pat the kitty gently,” not “Bad boy! Don’t chase the kitty!” We want to teach our children, not give them labels to live down to, which means that repeating “Please put your bowl in the dishwasher” in various ways thousands of times over the course of a childhood is better than “You are such a slob,” no matter how tempting the latter may be.
That kind of repetition is where a lot of us fall down. Consistency is hard, and it’s especially difficult when we’ve become so accustomed to an on-demand world. When I run out of my preferred brand of coffee, I open an app on my phone, and in two clicks six more cans of French Market Coffee & Chicory, Restaurant Blend, are on their way. Why, then, do I have to tell you to put your cereal bowl in the dishwasher six times and then tell you I’m taking a dollar off of your allowance if you don’t do it before you will c
omply? And why did you not take the spoon? And why—why—will we have this exact same conversation tomorrow?
Because that is the way this works, and the sooner we embrace that, the sooner we can get back to being generally happy in spite of it.
Most parents, says Bryson, “expect too much. Just because a kid can do something well, like control anger and handle disappointment, doesn’t mean he can do it all the time.” Those seeming setbacks can really set us off. When we feel that our kids have let us down, says Bryson, it triggers our parental fear that this is about our child’s character, “when in fact, it’s typically about a skill or an ability they don’t fully have wired yet because their brain is still building.”
When we accept discipline as a long-term teaching process, it gets easier. Instead of thinking, I’ve asked him hundreds of times to do this and he still doesn’t do it, parents who are happier in their disciplinary role think something more along the lines of I’ve asked him a hundred times and I’ll ask him a hundred more and that’s how we get there.
“My oldest is eighteen,” says Ylonda Gault Caviness, “and seriously, it wasn’t until days before she turned eighteen that I was beginning to see that, oh, she heard me.” Suddenly, her daughter was getting ready on time or putting in a load of laundry. “There were so many things that I thought, okay, I gotta just write this off, I’ve said it a million times, it’s not going to happen.” And then it did.
As Catherine Pearlman, a parenting coach and the author of Ignore It!: How Selectively Looking the Other Way Can Decrease Behavioral Problems and Increase Parenting Satisfaction, says, try not to let the crying and the complaining and the shouts of hatred bother you. “That’s how you know it’s working.”
Maybe You Don’t Have to Do Anything
As kids get older, the natural consequences of their actions are more likely to really bite them where it hurts. Even when it’s not as serious as an arrest or expulsion, the results of something like being late for a team practice, rude to a teacher, or not turning in homework assignments can be enough to allow a parent to do nothing but sympathetically make sure the connection hits home. You are, of course, sorry that your child lost her place on the starting lineup, wasn’t chosen among her classmates as a school ambassador, or lost the chance to move up to the honors English class. But no, you’re not going to try to make it right, although you are willing to help her think of ideas to help herself.
With younger children, a different kind of “not doing anything” can be a genuine discipline strategy, and even a very effective one, if you can swing it. Most of us are familiar with the idea that rewarding a behavior you don’t want with attention only reinforces it. (I hit my sister and now look! Daddy is sitting in my room talking to only me!) For many minor things, like tantrums over the end of screen time or whining about chores, the best thing to do is to do something else. If you get good at it, this is a strategy that can really up your happiness. If you see something, don’t always say something. Sometimes, your kids are just being annoying, and it’s possible to choose not to be annoyed.
Pearlman lays out a clear map for how this works. When we talked, she used a child’s mild temper tantrum as an example. “Start by ignoring it,” she told me. “Flip through a catalog on the counter. Put all your attention on that catalog, even if it’s really hard. At the same time, you’re listening, because you’re going to reengage as soon as it stops—about something else. You’re just going to go on as though there was no tantrum or whining or whatever.” Later, she says, you “repair” if necessary—talk about other things to do when a child is upset, apologize if you wish you’d done something differently in the moments leading up to the tantrum, or invite an apology if your child’s behavior was particularly egregious—but often, you just move on (particularly from something like whining about chores).
There are also times when a child is doing something you feel as if you should stop, like making a repeated noise to annoy a sibling, hopping on one foot in a circle around the kitchen, opening and closing a cabinet door again and again and again, or indulging a harmless habit like leg jiggling or hair twirling. You really can let a lot of this go. “Just because a kid is doing something doesn’t mean you have to address it,” said Pearlman.
This might be difficult at first, but as you get used to it, it will increase your own happiness enormously. I don’t need to do anything about that, I say to myself as the child assigned to feed the dogs slams the bowls angrily on the counter. I can just let that go. The chore needs to be done, the screen time needs to be over, it’s time for bed, etc. That I’ve got. The rest is just static.
Little Kids, Little Problems. Big Kids . . .
The core of discipline isn’t the enforcement of rules, but teaching a child to absorb, embrace, and follow those rules on her own—to discipline herself. Discipline isn’t just meant to create a happier, more harmonious family life, or to engage a child’s help with the work of the household. It’s intended to teach the child how to be an adult in the world, where we will not be able to retrieve our stapler from a colleague by hitting her over the head with even the lightest of plastic desk toys, and where our partners will expect us to do our part in loading the dishwasher. We discipline to raise our successful thirty-five-year-olds, who can get places on time, hold down a job, and raise families of their own.
That requires that we back off from constant monitoring and enforcement of most things as our children get older (although you are allowed to repeat the request that they put their dishes in the dishwasher for as long as it takes). It starts small, with things like leaving them to pack their own bag for sports and school, and to handle the consequences of the lost or forgotten item. It expands as older children are left at home alone, trusted with Internet passwords, or asked to obey household rules when no one is watching. And when our children make mistakes with those minor challenges (as they will), experiencing your disappointment and losing their privilege or access gives them a taste of what screwing up feels like, and what it’s like to have to re-earn your trust and a chance to try again. Those things lay the foundation for the bigger challenges that come later, when you have a teenager at the wheel of a car, armed with a cell phone, her own hard-earned money, and the ability to do just about anything any adult could do in that moment, including a whole lot of things that are against your family rules and even against the law.
You’re counting on the accumulation of all those years of teaching, both generalized (in our family, we are honest with one another, we respect the property of others) and specific (we do not send naked pictures of ourselves or others over mobile networks, we do not drink until we are old enough to do so legally) to help her stay safe and stay on the right path.
Sometimes she won’t, no matter how hard you’ve tried to get this “right.” And you won’t even always know about it—in one relatively small study, 82 percent of high school and young college students said they had lied to their parents at some point during the past year about friends, money, parties, alcohol/drug use, dates/dating, or sexual behavior—exactly the areas where we worry about our children getting in over their heads. That’s a scary statistic, especially when you think about the mountain of risky behavior their lies covered up.
One big irony here, again, is that as our children get older, “natural consequences” really set in, and that’s exactly what we are afraid of. The potential natural consequences of drinking and driving or unprotected sex can be life-changing. The natural consequences of smaller failures in the school and activities arena also have real-world implications. Often, we’re threatening our own “big” consequences in the hopes of helping to scare our children away from the even bigger consequences we can’t control.
At the same time, the stakes feel higher for us as parents. These are our teenagers, not our forgiving toddlers. They can carry a grudge, hurt our feelings, and physically walk out of our doors. It can be hard to discipline them. Canise
Herald, an Indiana mother of a fourteen-year-old, treasures her good relationship with her daughter, and says she’s often easier on her than she thinks her own parents might have been. “You don’t like making your kid mad at you.” When her daughter was caught using her mobile phone in a way the family had forbidden, she lost the phone for a period, but otherwise “got off easy,” in part because Herald and her husband just can’t stay mad at their daughter for very long. Lightening up can feel like the most loving choice.
But when your daughter is arrested for underage drinking, or your son is caught cheating on a test, in the last months or years before you expect to send them off to college to handle so much of life entirely on their own, you will be angry, and shocked, and worried. How will you get them through the consequences the world is about to impose? What can you do to convey your own disappointment and your lack of tolerance for what’s happened? And how can you trust them when, in such a short time, you watch them head out on their own?
What you do next, says Dr. Ginsburg, is exactly what you’d do with a younger child who’d seriously broken your house rules. The only difference is that you have less time in which to see if it’s worked.
“One of the consequences of blowing it in a big way is that your child loses your trust,” he says, and that loss of trust has its own consequences. Your child may lose your permission to use the car or the family wireless network. She may need to return to telling you, in detail, exactly where she is, and when she’s moving, and accept that you will be checking up on her in ways you were not in the past.
How to Be a Happier Parent: Raising a Family, Having a Life, and Loving (Almost) Every Minute Page 21