Acceptance does not mean approving, condoning, or letting yourself be abused. It simply means acknowledging reality as it is rather than internally railing against it or denying it entirely. Accepting reality is the only alternative to counterproductive ideas like “I know how the world/my son/my daughter is supposed to be (and this ain’t it).”
Acceptance is a powerful stance. For one thing, accepting your children the way they are conveys respect. Acceptance is also a choice, and choosing to accept that “it is what it is” increases our sense of control. It’s the opposite of thinking that we have to change something we can’t change. (Why does my son have ADHD? Why is my daughter anorexic? Why did it have to happen to me?) Finally, if we start with acceptance, we will be more effective at limit setting and discipline. Acceptance increases our flexibility and allows us to respond thoughtfully, rather than instinctively and reactively.
Consider that for all we know, our kids may well be exactly who and where they are supposed to be right now. This does not mean that we don’t desire the best possible future for them. It simply means that, at this moment, there is no evidence that they are really off course.
There is a Chinese parable we like to share about a wise farmer. This farmer was very poor. He had only one son, and only one horse to till his land. One day, the horse broke away. The farmer’s neighbor came by and said, “You poor man! You were already so poor and now you have no horse.” The farmer said, “Maybe yes, maybe no. It’s hard to say.” The next week the farmer was out with his son, pulling the plow, and it was ugly—the work was tedious, slowgoing, and exhausting. But then a week or so later, the horse came back and brought two wild horses with him—apparently, he’d found a herd and two of the herd had followed him back. The neighbor said, “What incredible luck! Now you have three horses to work your land!” The farmer said, “Maybe yes, maybe no. Life is very long. It’s hard to say.” The farmer’s son got to work trying to break the wild horses. He was thrown from one and broke his leg terribly. “You poor man!” the neighbor said while the boy was convalescing. “Maybe yes, maybe no,” said the farmer. Not long afterward, while the boy was still bedridden, word came down from the emperor that China was going to invade the Mongols, and every family needed to send a son. But the farmer’s son could not walk, so he could not go, undoubtedly sparing his life. The point of the parable is clear, and one we should take to heart in parenting: life is long, and you just don’t know what will happen next.
What to Do Tonight
Spend private time with your child, ideally without electronics. Take turns with each child if you have more than one, so that the ratio is one-on-one. It is remarkably healing for kids and will help you to enjoy them. It also makes them feel like they are your number one priority.
If you’re highly anxious, do something about it. Treating anxiety is one of the best things you can do for yourself and your family. Consider participating in cognitive behavioral therapy: you can learn very effective strategies for identifying and “talking back to” the distorted and unproductive thoughts that contribute to high anxiety. Learn to meditate. Take a yoga class. Be very regular in your exercise routine. Spend time in nature. Get more sleep. Socialize more with friends if it helps you feel calm.
Avoid making decisions for your child based on fear. If you find yourself thinking, “I’m afraid if I don’t do this now, then—” stop. Do what you feel is right now, not what you feel you have to because of what you’re afraid will happen if you don’t.
If your child is struggling, schedule a short time every day for you to worry about his or her problems. Literally write it into your planner. This will let your brain know that it is safe not to worry all day long.
Remember who’s responsible for what. It cannot be your responsibility to see that everything goes well for your children at all times.
If you are very worried about your teenager and have talked through the issues together many times, write your child a short letter summarizing your concerns and offering any help the child might need. Then promise that you will not bring the issue up again for a month. When you break your promise (because you will) apologize and recommit to it.
Get out a piece of paper and draw a vertical line in the middle. In the left-hand column, write statements such as the following: “It’s okay for Jeremy to have a learning disability,” “It’s okay that Sarah doesn’t have any friends right now,” “It’s okay for Ben to be depressed right now.” In the right-hand column, write down the automatic thoughts that come to your mind in response (likely rebuttal) to these statements. Then question these automatic thoughts. Ask questions such as, “Can I be absolutely sure that this thought is true?” “Who would I be if I didn’t believe this?” This kind of self-questioning exercise, developed by author and speaker Byron Katie and others, can serve as a useful tool for discovering the thoughts that trap you into negative judgments.18
Create a stress-reduction plan for yourself. Can you get more exercise? More sleep? What calms you down and how can you do more of it? Don’t make yourself available to your kids at the expense of your own well-being. Wall off some “me” time.
Model self-acceptance and tell your kids what you’re doing.
CHAPTER FIVE
Inner Drive
How to Help Your Kids Develop Motivation
MOTIVATION IS A TRICKY THING. We want our kids to want to practice their instrument, to do well on their math test, to help us clean up the house, and to set the table once in a while. But what if they don’t? We’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to convince you that you can’t make your child want what he doesn’t want. Which begs the question: what the heck can you do?
As it turns out, a lot.
First, let’s get an important distinction out of the way. There are some things we need our kids to do simply because we need them to get done. While it isn’t crucial for Ned’s daughter, Katie, to practice the violin, Ned and Vanessa do need her to put on her seat belt, brush her teeth, and get dressed and ready in a timely way in the morning. If she doesn’t, she’s late for school, and they’re late for work. There are countless scenarios that fall into this category, where children are not motivated to do something we need them to do for the good of the family, and their unwillingness creates stress for everyone else. Go to any quiet street around 7:30 on a school morning and you can hear the frustration and feel the stress emanating from the houses that line the block. In these “must-do” situations, most parents rely on the external motivational strategies passed down for eons: the carrot and the stick. Rewards can be effective and in some cases can even spark good habits. They can help encourage your kids to accomplish short-term goals, to modify behavior, and to ensure cooperation. They can get a kid started on something, by helping him take those all-important first steps. For some kids, especially kids with ADHD, rewards can get the brain to activate for boring tasks, and can help them buckle down to do tasks that are really hard for them to do, like going to bed on time or doing their homework. But these scenarios are not about developing motivation—they’re about enlisting cooperation.
This short-term external motivation isn’t the type we’ll be talking about in this chapter. Our aim is to focus on the self-motivation necessary for the long game—the inner drive that we want our kids to have so that they commit to something and persevere, develop their potential, and take steps toward living the lives they want to live. Research over the last four decades has repeatedly demonstrated that incentives like sticker charts, consequences, and other forms of parental monitoring that are “laid on” children actually undermine this type of motivation. What we’re trying to do is to help kids to motivate themselves and to realize that they have something important to offer the world. We want to help them learn to run their own lives and seek to make them meaningful.
The damage isn’t done immediately; it happens over time. Studies show that rewards for
things like grades or other achievements can lower performance, crush creativity, and lead to bad behavior, like a willingness to cheat on a test or take performance-enhancing drugs.1 Significantly, these external motivators can reinforce the idea that someone other than the child is responsible for his life. Rewards can erode self-generated interest and lead to interest only in the reward itself. What’s more, our clever brains see through external motivators; we’ve evolved in such a way as to detect them and to resist attempts to be coerced. We’ll devise ways to get the reward without doing the job or assignment. This is why kids can get As in courses they hardly remember after a few months.
Our aim is to largely take away the carrots and sticks and to offer you instead a deeper understanding of the brain . . . which, happily, is all you really need.
What Makes Us Tick?
Grasping the way motivation works in our brains and bodies will go a long way toward helping you understand your kids. Lucky for us, psychology and neuroscience are in agreement as to how to “make” motivation, and have even offered up a recipe. Here are the key ingredients:
The right mindset
Autonomy, competence, and relatedness
The optimal level of dopamine
Flow
It’s all in your mind(set)
The work of the renowned psychologist Carol Dweck on motivation and mindsets may be familiar to you, as it’s gotten a lot of attention across fields over the years. She posits that when students have a “fixed mindset,” they see their mistakes as coming from a lack of ability, something they’re powerless to change. In contrast, when students have a “growth mindset,” they focus instead on their own effort as a means to become more successful. A growth mindset offers students a sense of control, as they believe that it’s in their power to get better and better at something—indeed, at anything. Dweck’s studies have found that students with a growth mindset tend to see learning as a more important goal in school than obtaining good grades. Their motivation, in other words, is internal. They are not relying on someone else’s pronouncement that they are worthy or smart. Promoting a growth mindset is one of the best ways to improve your child’s sense of control, to foster their emotional development, and to support their academic achievement.2
To encourage a growth mindset, Dweck recommends praising effort and the various strategies kids use to solve problems, rather than their built-in ability. Say things like, “Your curiosity is really fun for me to see” over “You’re so smart”; or “I’m really impressed with how hard you worked on that test” instead of “Fantastic grade!” In Dweck’s words, “a focus on inner effort can help resolve helplessness and engender success.”3 A growth mindset is the MVP of the self-motivated child.
Self-determination
Because motivation is such a strong focus of our work, we have studied the best thinking on this topic. Dweck is one of our great teachers in this area, and so are eminent psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. Deci and Ryan have developed one of the best-supported theories in psychology, known as self-determination theory (SDT), which holds that humans have three basic needs:
A sense of autonomy
A sense of competence
A sense of relatedness
Autonomy, they argue, is the most important of the three for developing internal motivation, so let’s start there. According to SDT, the best way to motivate a child (or an adult, for that matter) is to support their sense of control. Hundreds of studies of schools, families, and businesses have found that explaining the reasons why a task is important and then allowing as much personal freedom as possible in carrying out the task will stimulate much more motivation than rewards or punishments. We now know that if teachers foster autonomy in their students, they will catalyze internal motivation and a desire for challenge, and that if parents promote autonomy and mastery, their kids will be more likely to explore their interests and extend themselves. The very best thing you can do to help your children develop self-motivation is to give them as much control over their choices as possible, including asking them what it is they want to be competent at and in charge of.4
Competence is the next piece of the puzzle, and this can be misleading. Many parents put all their focus on a narrow definition of competence, thinking that if their son or daughter becomes incredibly skilled at math, or at playing soccer, then his or her intrinsic motivation will kick in. These parents focus so much on the performative aspects of competence that, through their nagging and plan making, they actually compromise the fulfillment of the other two needs, autonomy and relatedness. Think of self-determination theory as a three-legged stool. One extremely tall leg won’t make you sit higher, it will topple the whole thing over.
But competence is important, too. None of us want to do something we feel like we constantly stink at. Yet as Dweck revealed, competence is more about our feeling that we can handle a situation than it is about being really great at something. It’s about feeling consciously competent, not about having an “I’m the Best!” trophy on a shelf. It’s an internal rather than external barometer of accomplishment. Supporting our kids in developing competence is our job as parents. “You worked really hard on that science test and I’m proud of you even if you didn’t get the grade you wanted. I imagine it’s clear to us both that you are getting better and are getting nearer to reaching your goal.” Remember that you can’t develop competence for them, and any attempt to do so will just undermine their own motivation.
Finally, relatedness refers to the feeling of being connected to others, of being cared about. When your child feels connected to his teacher, he’ll want to work hard for that teacher. When Ned asks the students he coaches what their favorite class was the previous year in school, he always follows up their answer with another question: “Was it the class or the teacher?” At least half the time, the answer is, “It was the teacher. She was really great.” Likewise, when your child feels connected to you, when you communicate unconditional love and he tells himself, “My parents care more about me than about my grades,” then it is more likely that your child will internalize your values. Self-determination theory calls this “integrated regulation.” It is a child’s identification with the values and goals of the people who care for him and love him unconditionally.
If you believe in education and hard work, and want your children to as well, we don’t recommend scolding them each time they come home with a subpar grade. Though you may think it’s the best way to communicate values, it’s actually counterproductive because it signals conditional love. Chances are that they are already irked by the grade, so offer a sympathetic, “I know this is upsetting to you. I know you worked hard on that. I’d be happy to talk through things to help you for next time, if you want.” Note that this response is sympathetic (relatedness). You’re also reminding your child that there are ways to get a better outcome next time (competence). And by ending it with “if you want,” they see they are in control, that you’re a consultant, not a manager (autonomy).
Dopamine: Your “get up and go” aid
Brain science backs up what psychologists have been arguing about motivation since the 1970s. As you may remember from Chapter One, the brain’s reward system is fueled by dopamine, which activates and energizes the brain. When something really cool happens, and especially when you’re anticipating something really cool happening, you have a surge of dopamine. This happens with animals, too—just think of how a dog responds when his owner reaches for the leash. He knows where it’s hanging and that it means he’ll get a walk. He’s up and wiggling around excitedly, ready to go out. In fact, he can’t really be still. We want kids to experience this high-dopamine state. When we find something boring at work, generally the dopamine level in our prefrontal cortex is too low to motivate us to get up and go and to sustain effort. The same is true when kids can’t motivate themselves to do their homework.
For years we’ve listened to storie
s about kids like Savannah, lovingly described by her parents as the most gifted procrastinator in the world. “Savannah is maddening during homework time,” they told Ned. “She puts it off and puts it off no matter how many times we tell her to just get it done so she can do something fun. It’s so frustrating because we know she can do it. It’s just that she chooses not to. There are times like last night, when her brother finished his work at seven thirty and Savannah still hadn’t started hers at seven forty-five. Her brother really wanted to go out for ice cream, and so we told Savannah that the three of us were going to Ben & Jerry’s and she could come too if she finished her work. She was done by 8:00. It took her fifteen minutes to do the work, and yet she’d chosen to avoid it for three hours.”
If you think of the role dopamine plays in motivation—and in anticipation of pleasurable outcomes—stories like this make complete sense. The thought of doing homework didn’t generate enough dopamine in Savannah’s brain to get her going. The thought of a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream made her dopamine level spike (much as Ritalin does for kids with ADHD), allowing her to focus on an otherwise uninteresting task and to finish her homework in record time.
Offering ice cream may help in the short term, but you can’t do it every night. Besides, we’ve said that rewards are counterproductive to intrinsic motivation. So how do you help a child develop a healthy dopamine system? The answer is surprisingly simple: encourage them to work hard at what they love.
Sculpting a motivated brain
Prior to the mid-1980s, people didn’t realize that the brain could be changed. We thought what you’re born with is what you’ve got. It’s relatively new knowledge that we’re capable of forging new neural pathways, and that how and where we focus our attention makes a measurable difference in the way in which our brain develops.5
The Self-Driven Child Page 11