Tag Archives: routine

Co-parenting

Important Note: The image in this post and in all the previous ones are not images of the children discussed in the posting. They are simply children whose photos I have collected throughout my travels. 

Co-parenting

Recently, a couple of parents came to consult me to ask me about “co-parenting”. This is a term that parents typically use to refer to working together as parents when they are divorced. In this case, the parents were married, but they still had trouble coordinating their parenting behavior. They attributed this difficulty to difference in parenting style. I have heard of this kind of difficulty many times before, and I particularly appreciated these parents seeking consultation about it.

Let me first say a few things about “different parenting styles”. Conflicts between parents may arise for a number of reasons. Three common reasons include: different experiences of being parented as children; chronic stress in the family; underlying conflict in the marriage. Often more than one of these factors is present at the same time. Let’s take them one at a time.

Suppose that the father was raised in an authoritarian family in which his parents were strict and what they said was law. The children would not dream of speaking disrespectfully to them, and discipline for transgressions was swift and sometimes harsh. The mother, on the other hand, was raised in a household with progressive values and style of discipline. In practice, that meant that the father was the “bad guy” disciplinarian and the mother the reluctant protector the child ran to when he fled the father’s discipline. This meant that the father felt unsupported in setting limits on the child’s behavior and the mother felt burdened with having to respond both to her partner’s and her child’s distress.

There is an answer to how to think about how to change this situation. Note that I do not say, “resolve the problem”. The answer about how to think about the situation is to put aside the conflict between the two parents and focus on the needs of the particular child. I will follow this line of reasoning in responding to the questions the parents in my practice brought to me.

The first question the mother asked me was how to manage the morning transition. She explained that her 8-yo son was always forgetting what he had to bring to school, and he not infrequently called her from school because he forgot some sports equipment or a piece of homework. The father expressed his frustration about his son’s disorganization and insisted that the mother ignore his calls and let him “learn from experience”, but the mother felt that to do that set her son up for failure.

Further exploration suggested that their son had a more general problem with organization that impeded his ability to make transitions. (Remember that to make a transition you have to take apart your current state of organization, such as eating breakfast at your kitchen table, and reorganize it in a new place and with new expectations, such as school.) With this in mind, the parents and I set up a routine (remember that routine and ritual are parents’ best friends!) for how to manage the morning transition. Children need routines and predictability, especially children with organizational problems (sometimes referred to as “executive function disorder”, though I do not like to use the term “disorder” in children if I can avoid it). Once we established their child’s need for external predictability and order, we could move on to discuss how each of them – with their different parenting styles – could work together to provide that for him. The father took in my explanation about how the child could build organizational capacities that were not yet in his repertoire by practicing routines created by both parents, and he volunteered to keep an eye on how the family maintained the routines. The mother said that she could validate the child’s feelings about being confused, overwhelmed, and criticized, while also holding to the routine. Both parents agreed to try to learn from each other in the process of helping their child grow stronger.

In my next blog posting I will consider the parents’ next question: “How do we translate the difference between our two parenting styles for our son so that he understands where we are coming from?”

“Come here right now!”: The Iceberg Effect and More About Transitions

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I find myself talking about transitions to the parents I see perhaps more than anything else. A parent will say, for example, “When I call her to come to dinner and finally say, ‘Kate, I need you to come here right now!’ I will either get a nasty response or none at all. If she does respond it will take 10 minutes and more nagging before she comes! Why does it have to be that way?!” the beleaguered mother will ask. These parents are good parents of good children. Most of the children whose parents consult me have major or minor neurodevelopmental problems, ranging from autism to ADHD or the kind of organizational problem commonly called “executive function disorder”. All of these problems involve difficulty making transitions. The good mother who is explaining that her daughter does not come when she calls is looking at the top of an iceberg. She sees a little mound of snow or ice. It is a simple, reasonable request. Why can’t her daughter make a “normal” response? However, beneath the water is a huge iceberg of patterned behavior and the meanings associated with it that has been built up over the child’s life.

Let’s analyze the mother’s “simple request” to “come now”. First of all, she is requiring that the child take in the auditory command. This is harder for some children who have ADHD or who have what is called “auditory processing problems” than for others. The mother might not know that Kate has auditory processing problems or if she did hear that from a tester, she may not have entirely understood what it meant. Or even if she did understand what it meant when the tester was explaining it to her, it is hard to keep in mind during the course of family life.

Second, the mother’s command requires Kate to shift her attention from whatever she was doing at the moment to what her mother is telling her. That shift in attention can be much more difficult that you would think. It involves taking apart the current organizational state of the child – her attention, narrative (the story of what she is doing), and her motor activity. It requires Kate to change her postural position and her physiological state of excitement or of comfort, and prepare for something else. Usually, these shifts in our state of being take place out of awareness. We have an intention to change, and it all happens – we stop reading, get up, and walk to the kitchen to start cooking dinner. We don’t realize that all these small changes of everyday life take energy. Other transitions – sleep to wake, home to school, bedroom to bathroom, bedroom to kitchen table, pajamas to school clothes or even worse, snow pants, also take energy. For some children it requires more energy than for others.

In addition to all those shifts, there is the relational and symbolic meaning associated with the transition. For Kate’s mother it may mean, “Oh, dear. I shouldn’t have taken so long reading that paper. I need to get dinner started!” That may be slightly annoying, but no big deal. For Kate, her mother’s calling her may have a very different meaning. That may be something like, “She is bothering me again, just when I got comfortable watching t.v. I had a really hard day at school and Susie was mean to me, and Mom just can’t give me a break. Why is she always making me do things and not Freddie (little brother)!” I am not suggesting that these coherent sentences appeared in Kate’s mind, but that her mother’s reasonable request may feel entirely unreasonable to her, and this meaning comes together with all the other transitional demands – that she shift her attention, her body, get stirred up inside instead of comfortable, etc.

There are two general antidotes for the stress of transitions. One is routine and the other is what I call “herd mentality”. Herd mentality is more available to teachers than to parents of children in small nuclear families. I first noticed it at the orphanage in El Salvador when the little children – most of whom had suffered early neglect and abuse and therefor could be expected from a neurodevelopmental point of view to have difficulty with transitions – all seemed to manage transitions relatively well. I came to think that it was because they all did the transitions together. When it is time to come to dinner and all the other kids start heading in the direction of the dining hall, the stragglers seemed to notice the general movement and catch up, as if noticing that they didn’t want to be left alone. There is another factor – those children didn’t have the hypnotizing effect of video games or other screens to interfere with the process of the transition.

In addition to the herd mentality, there is the importance of routine. What I tell parents is that routine is their best friend. That is because a routine has momentum. The teacher of the children in the preK classroom in the photo above is using routine, herd mentality, and the rhythm of dance, to facilitate a transition. Once you have established a routine the child does not have to move into that state of limbo, an extended disorganized state, with all the stress that entails. (Remember that stress can be expressed as irritability or aggression!) Instead, although the child may not want to interrupt what she is doing to come to the table, it is easier for her to do it. Kate’s mother’s command does not “come out of the blue”. Dinner is at the same time every night, more or less. Kate’s mother has given her a warning five minutes ago, just as she always does. She may even have gone into the family room to join Kate temporarily in her present state (“That looks like a good program! How about if we record it so that you can finish it later!”) and then used her own body to generate a rhythm in the direction of the kitchen. She may also have initiated a conversation about something that interests Kate – “Remember that girl, Karen, who moved out of the school? I just heard that she was moving back!” All these things help establish a routine. Once the routine is established, it makes everything easier.