Post No.: 0974
Furrywisepuppy says:
Post No.: 0952 expressed the importance of instilling discipline. Notwithstanding, rewarding desirable behaviours remains the primary goal when trying to get children to do what you want.
However, merely bribing naughty children through rewards if they decide to later cooperate can further encourage children to be naughty because they’ll be given a chance of a reward that they wouldn’t have gotten if they weren’t naughty from the very start. Any well-behaved children from the start will see this as unfair and might learn to misbehave too in order to receive such bribes too. Hence it’s about focusing on the well-behaved children and rewarding them from the very start.
Yet too often, parents and teachers neglect the well-behaving children because they’re considered ‘non-events’ whilst they give all their attention to the naughty ones – thus reinforcing their naughty behaviours. There are plenty of contexts where it’s like one sibling is being naughty then the parent spends more time with that naughty sibling (wherein that child might regard this attention as rewarding) whilst the parent neglects (or essentially punishes) the sibling who wasn’t being naughty. So don’t ignore the children who aren’t naughty. The idea of rewarding desirable behaviours must be there from the beginning but parents tend to only think about the idea of rewards and punishments after a child misbehaves.
Reward charts and a ‘token economy’ with something like gold stars that are awarded for desired behaviours can work for young children, particularly for toilet training. But some children are quite cunning at gaming such systems when they’re used as basically bribes for good behaviour. We ultimately want children to behave without the need for extrinsic motivators like gold stars thus the aim is to gradually wean them off them. (However in some contexts we don’t always have to have strategies that foster intrinsic behaviour changes once the extrinsic incentives are removed e.g. would a lot of adults still work if their wages were gradually removed?!)
Participation awards for all are, or should be, for recognising the taking part in activities, giving something a go, the effort, and trying one’s best – not prizes to effectively reward losing(!) Gold medals (even plastic replicas) are associated with winning, and they’re extrinsic material rewards, though, so maybe they’re not the best way to even recognise a child’s participation and efforts.
As a related point regarding rewards – governments get reliably punished with criticism for every mistake they make but seldom get rewarded with praise whenever they make sound decisions. Perhaps they’d perform better if they were praised more for making sound decisions? We must also bear in mind that not every sound decision results in desirable outcomes, and not every terrible decision results in undesirable outcomes, because of luck – yet all we usually judge are the outcomes. (Another problem is if, say, the education department carries out a program that also improves health, the former won’t normally receive any credit for it because of the way that government departments and department ministers are typically quite siloed. We therefore need to look at the broader pictures.) This leads to politicians overspending public money on external consultants in order to protect themselves if something goes wrong. Not rewarding the good (long-term) decisions but only punishing the bad (short-term) outcomes doesn’t produce the most optimal incentives, plus it attracts the wrong types of politicians who prefer to pass the buck and blame others. The public therefore arguably needs to start praising the good and not just criticising the bad – just like in any other context, from raising children to motivating employees.
Focus your energy on finding and praising the things you like about your children. And instead of constantly telling a child ‘don’t do this or that’ – focus your efforts on paying attention to, complimenting and encouraging what you want them to do. Who feels like eating when it feels like a battleground at the dinner table? Who feels like playing when it’s just quarrelling? Hovering around constantly and nagging are annoying and ineffective motivators when done against you, so why deploy these methods on others? This is another case of something that should be obvious (but obviously isn’t) because we all personally know we feel more encouraged when praised and rewarded than scolded, chastised, chided or penalised – so it just requires more empathy and putting yourself in the shoes of a child to understand this, or simply remembering how it was like being a (naughty) child yourself. It’s amazing how easily adults forget what it was like being a child!
Constant fuzzy nagging will make your very voice sound annoying to them. They’ll then zone out to the sound of your voice (‘sigh, there he/she goes again’), which may mean you’ll feel like you’ll need to escalate the volume (or worse) whenever you really need to get their attention; not because of an increasingly naughty child but because your voice has been overused until its effectiveness has diminished. And if you shout too often, that’ll eventually be zoned out too, which will mean they might not instantly listen to you during a true emergency (e.g. to stop them running onto traffic). When everything is emphasised, nothing is ultimately emphasised (like if all of the text in this post were in bold type) – so when you constantly bark, barking loses its power. Woof.
If something doesn’t work for your particular child then try something else that isn’t unsustainably escalatory i.e. don’t just think ‘this hasn’t worked thus even more of it will work’, like grrreater threats or bigger bribes. Some methods work better for some children than others so keep trying other approaches instead of resorting to raised aggression. Do make sure you’ve read and applied any techniques correctly too, like being positive and consistently praising their efforts on a day-to-day basis more than going on about what they did wrong yesterday. Continually saying, “You shouldn’t have done that” is pointless because the past cannot be changed. Remember to administer constructive criticism too.
Just saying, “No” to a child is frustrating for them. Just take a look from their perspective again. It’s better to say, “Yes you can have a cracker but dinner is in 10 minutes and you can have one at the end of your dinner as part of it” and then calmly walk away with the crackers to remove further temptation or conflict. The child may still feel frustrated for a short moment but they’ll soon realise that their goal (a cracker) is still within reach as long as they earn it (through being patient and eating their dinner). So explain why ‘no’ (avoid any unconvincing ‘just because’ responses) and perhaps give them a chance to earn what they want. (Note too that children won’t starve themselves if they’re truly hungry and there’s nothing but their dinner to eat, so don’t cave in to giving them sweets if they won’t eat their proper balanced meals at all.)
This’ll set them up better for the outside world when they’re older because rejection shouldn’t be seen as a dead-end to negotiations but as opportunities to practise patience or to earn things instead of merely pleading for them or expecting them for free. Forbidding things outright can also make things appear more desirable so they might attempt to obtain or do these things when you’re not looking. Children should also learn to be more proactive in finding out how they can improve their grades or otherwise get what they want out of school rather than merely accept their rejections or fails.
It’s like it’s far easier to criticise a movie than knowing how to make a better one yourself. So be positively encouraging and support them practically with whatever you want them to do. Whenever parents think their children are a disappointment, it can actually be that the children think their parents are a disappointment for not believing in them or not being supportive of their ambitions to be whoever they want to be. (This can happen at the societal level too, where people are told that they can be whoever they want to be and do whatever they want with their life… as long as they follow how the rest are like and do what the rest do!)
Telling two other people who are clashing to stop can be effective if the dispute is petty or everyone is just reiterating the points they’ve already made. But you cannot just say, “Enough” and expect a disagreement between two people, like two siblings, to lastingly ceasefire until everyone has expressed their piece. We ourselves detest it whenever someone leaves before we’ve gotten what we want to say off our chests (unless we’ve emotionally divorced from them i.e. we don’t care about them anymore and thus what they think), so once more it requires empathy. Even if they shut their mouths, they’ll be holding resentful feelings within that’ll eventually require an outlet i.e. things may flare up again later. So people must be allowed to express what they need to say before a dispute can cease. The key is that it doesn’t have to be through raised voices – it can be done more civilly and via taking turns to speak. So if you really want some sustainable peace and quiet between two bickering kids – don’t order them to simply ‘zip it’ but teach them to resolve issues through composed and reasoned dialogue.
Although they might still need to face the consequences of their misjudged words or actions, we can also sometimes lack enough cognitive empathy to understand when someone said or did something angrily in the heat of the moment. Our affective empathy might then make us mirror their testiness, and thus escalate animosities. They might regret what they said or did as long as we don’t rub it in or make them feel more irate.
Parents who can control their own tempers and stay calmly commanding are the best. It’s for our own sakes because it’ll reduce our own frustrations since we won’t be wasting our breath on trying to lecture someone when they’re not in any suitable frame of mind to listen or learn anything we say. People aren’t in a receptive mental state to be reasoned with when they’re in a ‘fight or flight’ mode so you’re just wasting your time trying to ‘drill a lesson into their heads’ with force, even though you may be thinking you’ve been teaching them a lesson. Under our own frustration, we might say or do something we’ll regret ourselves too.
Never humiliate them verbally or physically. Well if you think your child is ‘stupid’ then why are you shouting at him/her? Won’t this make you the stupid one for not accommodating for their ‘stupidity’?! Would you be clever for complaining that a city car cannot go off-road? If they’re a ‘stupid child’ then remember they’ll have come from stupid parents/caregivers(!)
It may be easier said than done without practice since we’re reacting on instinct but we can remove a child from a heated situation and stay calm until they’ve calmed down too; and then explain what they did, why it was wrong and what they should do instead next time.
It’s irrational to yell at the television because someone on screen did something you wouldn’t have done, or to bellow at a non-playable character in a videogame who keeps repeating an instruction just in case you didn’t hear them the tenth time, as if they can hear you(!) It can feel cathartic to vent that exasperation out hence it’s for our sake rather than theirs. But in the context of raising children – what we say and do should be for the children’s sake.
Woof. Not doing something is something in itself – thus claiming you ‘didn’t raise them that way’ because you just let them be or let school raise them that way is to do something to contribute to raising them that way.
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