Tag Archives: discipline

More Thoughts about Parenting in COVID

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I wanted to offer you some more thoughts about parenting during COVID. In Wordsworth’s famous autobiographical poem, The Prelude, he talks about “losing the props of my affection” when he was 8-years old. In saying this, he refers to the death of his mother. I have always thought that this way of describing parental function as “propping” was such an apt way of describing the way parents support their children in a quiet, typically unacknowledged, way. It reminds me of a preschool child sitting in a parent’s lap during a remote learning session, an elementary school child’s parent helping them with a school project, and a high school student’s parent stocking the fridge with her favorite snacks during exam time. 
 
 
Parents deserve a little “propping” these days also! They are under a great deal of stress. They are worried about how to do good work at their job– either remotely or safely outside the home. They are worried about how to manage household chores with children under foot. They are worried about how to help their children learn remotely or whether it is safe to send them back to school. In the background of all those concerns is the fear of illness and death. These are very difficult times. 
 
In addition to “propping”, there are other ways parents can turn the hardship of the pandemic into opportunity. I hesitate to add anything to the burden of parents, but I am taking a risk to suggest that they try very hard to look beyond the stress and austerity and recognize a new chance to help their chidlren grow. I often talk to parents about how boundaries and limits are good for children, how “good discipline” grows children’s brains. In fact, I have recorded a series of podcast episodes and shorter Youtube videos about “good discipline”. I have done this because discipline is the most popular topic that parents ask me about as a child psychiatrist. 
 
American culture does not make it easy for parents in this domain. In fact, our culture seems to capture parents between a rock and a hard place—expectations that you keep your children’s behaviors within societal bounds while at the same time encouraging their autonomy! During the pandemic, and to the degree that there is still social distancing with its associated losses—the constraints of freedom and treats like visiting friends and family, play dates, going out for to eat – parents may struggle even more to set limits on their children’s behavior. They sympathize with their children’s distress, and they put up with more whining and even tantrums. 
 
Now, I have stated in podcast episodes and videos that it is important to lower expectations for everyone—children and parents. I think lowering expectations is crucial in order to adapt to these new challenges without excessive frustration and self-criticism. However, it is also a chance to help children grow, by helping them learn how to respect boundaries.  You can teach your children that– in this hard time– different rules apply. 
I would first tell your children that you are all in this together. Explain that this is a special time, a time when everyone has to work together. This stance embraces children as important members of the family. 
 
Then I would apply the Ury and Fisher’s book, “Getting to Yes”, that I have discussed at greater length in the podcasts. The main idea is that parents have negotiating power, just as children do, and that in these negotiations both parents and children define “firm positions” and “flexible positions” at the outset (Ury & Fisher, 1981). The firm positions are nonnegotiable and the flexible ones can be negotiated.
 
The pandemic offers parents an opportunity to learn to establish “firm positions”.Contemporary parents often have difficulty with this. One of the reasons parents taking firm positions is helpful to both them and to their children is that it takes problematic doubtout of the equation. Parents can get anxious when their children challenge them, and they can begin to waffle, doubt themselves. This waffling undermines the children’s belief that there are some things they cannot change to their (short-term) advantage. The truth is that their long-term advantage is being able to deal with inevitable frustrations and disappointments without falling apart.
 
 
Remember that once the firm positions are established, they should not be negotiated. The support the pandemic gives parents is the pressure of necessity. Parents have to get their work done. They must hold to their firm positions, while being willingly negotiating their flexible ones. 
 
Children are also allowed “firm positions”, although parents must scaffold their choices. For example, depending on their age, children might stay firm on having screen time (the amount of screen time and the timing of screen time may be something parents insist is “negotiable”.) The main idea is that parents are supporting their children in learning how to tolerate “no”. This, as I said, is extremely helpful to children. Once they learn to accept that there are limits in life, they can turn their attention to their more “flexible”–read “possible”– ambitions and put their heart into them.
  

Ury W, Fisher R (1981). Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement without Giving In, Penguin.
 

Co-parenting

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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?”

Discipline

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 This is just a brief posting on a big subject that always seems disjointed to me when it is discussed out of context, but also a subject that parents and other caregivers have such headaches about that it deserves attention now and then.

There are two main points I want to make about discipline in this piece. The first is, discipline serves to maintain safety and to communicate values. The second is that discipline frequently gets mixed up with deep – both unconscious and nonconscious – reactions in the caregiver that influence the way the discipline is delivered. We all know both of these points. I am going to simply comment on examples of good discipline I have observed both at Deenabandhu and at Love and Hope and try to identify some of the features that make them effective. As for the deep reactions of the caregivers and how they influence the caregiver’s behavior, I will leave that for a later entry. Some insights for parents about this issue can be found in Parenting from the Inside Out (Siegel and Hartzell, 2003).

One observation I have made is that it is often easier in children’s homes than in single families to establish a consistent set of rules and consistent consequences for noncompliance with those rules. At Love and Hope these rules for behavior are listed in colorful posters on the walls of the dining hall. These rules also communicate the Christian values – such as generosity and compassion – that play such an important role in the life of the Home. Consistency takes some of the stress out of discipline from the point of view of the caregiver. That is very important, because those deep unwelcome reactions that cause caregivers to “blow up” at their children are in part stress reactions. In other words, the loss of perspective and even loss of control on the caregiver’s part is probably mostly generated by stress. If the caregiver can stay calm and reflect on the situation, he or she is more likely to respond to the child’s behavior appropriately (that is, in a way that fits his or her best values). 

There are many ways to address the stress reactions that interfere with good discipline practices, and consistency in rules and consequences is only one of them. When caregivers can gain insight into the deep reactions, it is also useful. However, insight is a “top down” phenomenon, and often the stress reactions of the lower parts of the brain trump attempts to keep perspective with the thinking brain. When the caregiver can also use a “bottom up” response to stress, insight is even more effective. Bottom up strategies include ways of calming, or regulating, oneself. 

One way of doing that is to disengage, that is, try to distance oneself from the intensity of the situation. That can be very helpful and is commonly called “time outs” either for the child or for the caregiver. Physical distance is often a critical part of this strategy. Another partial solution to this caregiver dilemma is the support of another caregiver, either in a partnership or in a group. When individuals develop supportive relationships with each other, they offer not only ideas, but also implicit patterns of mutual regulation that can be engaged when one caregiver is stressed, and that is calming. It is a cliché to speak of two parents working as a team in setting limits for their children. Yet, the stress generated by a noncompliant child can polarize caregiving teams, also. So, it is best to try to use all of these strategies when disciplining children. 

Finally, there is the function of communicating values. This relates to Peter Fonagy’s “epistemic cues”. Values in a culture are transmitted by the way the caregiver communicates, not just what he or she communicates. If the caregiver, in the context of a trusting relationship, lets the child know that the child’s behavior is simply not acceptable – through calm but firm voice, facial expression, and gestures, indicating significance by emotional tone – the child will learn that behavior is unacceptable. This is key because cultural values fit the cultures they belong in, and they cannot be transposed from one culture to the next.

Let me give you an example of what seemed to me to be effective but also culturally specific discipline from Deenabandhu. At Deenabandhu, just as at Love and Hope, the expectations for behavior are clear, as are the consequences and usually involve taking away something small such as no television on one of the rare occasions when it is allowed. The little boys were throwing food in the courtyard. Prajna gave them a consequence. She explained to them and to me that food is given to them to eat by the benefactors of the ashram and produced by the efforts of the farmers, and that therefore wasting food is not acceptable. You can see that this reasoning would not work particularly well in most families in the U.S., but it works here. The values that are being communicated reflect the meaning of giving and serving that I mentioned in an earlier posting. Another time, Prajna gave the boys a similar consequence for running through the courtyard without restricting themselves to the lighted areas. It initially seemed to me a pity to stop them, because they were having so much fun and interacting so well as a group. However, Prajna explained that there might be snakes in the dark (sometimes cobras! One boy had recently been bitten by a non-poisonous snake.) And also trampling the plants was not acceptable. Then I understood.

Siegel, D. & Hartzell, M. (2003). Parenting from the Inside Out: How a Deeper Self-Understanding Can Help You Raise Children Who Thrive, New York, Penguin Group.

photograph by Ginger Gregory

 

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