anger vs. encouragement
in parenting troubling, angering, frustrating kids
a few thoughts for the maximally frustrated parent
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A friend called me to ask that I join with him in condemning his daughter's acting out behavior that had been increasing over the past few years. His frustration level was about through the roof. He was asking that I join him in convincing her that she is acting like a loser. He wanted me to display a great deal of anger at her, thinking the more anger, the better. |
the basic proposal  about parenting anger
Anger comes easily, especially when frustrated, and especially when frustrated again and again. And when frustrated again and again by a loved one -- a child who you care for and try to help develop -- anger begins to come easily and can seem the right thing. But anger is a much more natural response than it is a wise one. Anger diminishes complex thinking -- and when frustration reaches maximum levels, anger can lead a well-meaning parent to harm his or her child's self-esteem, self image and sense of hope for the future by fostering the idea that hostility, humiliation and negativity might help.
I have had this discussion several times with several parents. They assert that humiliation and dark threats about failure worthlessness as a person are defended as needed, strategic interventions intended to help a child "wake up" and be good. When their child was born they would have guessed never in a million years would such behaviors be right when dealing with a child. But anger can twist one's thinking into strangely illogical shapes.
To avoid being angry with an intensely frustrating child and situation, it often helps to recognize that children are supervised and monitored closely until young adulthood because we do not believe they are capable of making quality, responsible decisions -- and that whatever decisions they make are based on their biology (which came from their parents) and their experience (which has been supervised by his parents). This doesn't mean that parents should be angry with each other or at themselves. It is simply an observation to ease anger at the child.
how choices are made how behavior happens
Choice is an interesting taken-for-granted-type thing. Few people ever even wonder how they happen. They feel something mentally happening when they do what they call making choices but they never really analyze that feeling.
Choices aren't random expressions of creativity. Choices are conclusions based on complex mental processes that systematically add up all sorts of data inside the mind and then convey an answer or a set of answers. This is basically what computers do -- though even the most complicated computers are vastly, VASTLY more simple than the average human brain.
Whenever a human engages in the process of making a choice, it is engaging in adding up all sorts of factors and concluding what answer the data seems to add up to. In any given situation, we ask ourselves a question and then in a matter of milliseconds usually (though sometimes a person might think about a choice over and over again for hours or days) our mind collects and rank orders all sorts of information about a) past experiences, b) learned information, c) current conditions, d) current options and e) what you believe near future holds with respect to possibilities that may occur. Unless we accept the possibility of concepts that have had less than stellar support from the scientific community -- e.g., spiritual input, alternative universes bleeding into this one, influence from past and future lives, unseen fairy godmothers, etc. -- what we call "choices" are basically made by adding up these factors and coming to a conclusion.
For example, what you "chose" to be wearing right now was "chosen" by sort of adding up a) what you can remember of your past experiences with your clothes and clothing choices, b) what you have learned about clothes, the protection they give and the possible reactions from others, c) the current conditions of temperature, weather, other people around, and such, d) the clothing you had available to choose from, and e) what you think might happen to and around you and what you think you might be doing during the period of time from when you finish dressing and when you have another chance to dress into something else.
It isn't exactly that simple, though, since at each of those questions, the data you might choose to toss into the equation to be added up is decided by "unconscious processes" -- decision-making mental processes that in much the same way go through complicated processes to decide what to "choose" to be "remembered" and, of the data that is "chosen" another set of "choices" choose whether that piece of data should first be distorted, edited, expanded, revised, enhanced or flat out garbled.
Why, you might ask, would your brain want to distort or edit information? That's what it does. All day, all night. Your brain is made up of billions of cells that interact with each other to form complex data analysis and storage mechanisms to store the massive amount of stimulation and information that comes in from the environment from minute to minute. It has to take in overwhelmingly massive amounts of data and it has to edit, clip, enhance, revise and then store on the basis of meaningfulness as much of each of your days experience as possible. You don't want it all remembered. You want it edited, cut down, digested and compacted. You want the most meaningful information separated out from the non-meaningful and you want it sorted, copied and stored in any way it might have connection to meaning. Your brain is constantly making decisions about what is important and what is not important, and of the important stuff, it has to decide why and how is it important and how it is connected to other important stuff. It is a massive task, too complicated to do justice to it. But suffice it to say, your brain is always editing and making sense of things by enhancing or diluting or distorting them.
The bottom line here -- the punchline to this -- is that children are doing their best at all times. What you see in behavior is the best they can do at the moment, under the circumstances and given what they have in their heads in the way of learning. If you want to see changes, you must add the right things to their brains. If they are behaving in ways that you are pretty certain they should know or do know are wrong, then there is something at work that isn't obvious right off. Possibilities include but are not limited to:
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* Is there something in the consequences is what the child wants but is not able to ask for it directly. Ask yourself if a) the child is seeking closer attention from parents or other loved ones, and/or b) the child is hoping to be restricted from some activity that they want to be restricted from but can't seem to say no to (which could be anything in a range from using drugs with peers to going to college when frightened), and/or c) the child trying to revert to a much younger age, to not need to face challenges of growing older, and/or d) is the child trying to get parents or other loved ones to gather closer together and work more closely together by giving them something to cooperate and agree on (as in families where parents are at each other's throats)?
* Is there something in the consequences is what the child wants but cannot get in any other way -- specifically, is the child trying to anger, hurt or humiliate parents or trying to make them feel powerless? Is the child essentially devoting his or her own happiness and wellbeing to an effort to punish, hurt or pay back parents for some grievance?
* Though the child can verbally acknowledge what is the right thing to do, when actual opportunities come up a) the child's attentional processes do not recognize the situation in a way that brings up awareness of appropriate behaviors, and/or b) the child knows what he or she should be doing but cannot seem to get him- or herself to do what should be done.
Anger is helpful in some situations, but for the most part, the only time extreme anger is helpful as a response to negative behaviors is a) if anger would be natural for a parent and b) for some reason the child had not realized that the parent would be very angry. This would probably be the case the first one or two times a behavior occurred but would not be the case much thereafter.
Shaming anger and/or angry shaming is unlikely to be ever appropriate. Angry shaming is almost always rationalized by the angry shamer as "getting through" to a child, but what it "gets through" is the feeling that a loved one thinks the child is a loser or worse. The typical response to shaming anger is for the child to feel much less self-esteem, much more worthlessness and a great deal of personal shame.
In most situations when children act in negative ways, they feel poor self esteem and frustration with themselves and their lives -- even if they were doing what they were doing to make parents angry, helpless and hurt.
You can basically assume that if you are angry and fed up with a child because of his or her behavior, the child is too. You can assume that angry shaming will increase an already heavy burden of self-directed anger and shame and will push the child either toward trying harder to be loser on purpose (to remove the sense of being out of control) or suicide (to achieve the control that everyone wants and end the negative behaviors and upsets).
so why might all this
be important to know?
This is really important only to those parents that find themselves thinking that anger and shaming is the right thing to do. It is important because the natural tendency for any parent who is frustrated is to become angry and yell and when very, very frustrated, it is easy to become shaming and negative, too. This is important because, if you find yourself in this kind of situation and experience the urge to be shaming and ugly, then before starting to scream at a daughter or scream at a son you can perhaps remind yourself that choices are not so much choices as responses to what is already in the brain and what seems to be happening outside at the time. When a child makes a "choice" he or she is demonstrating what she or he has lodged in her head in the way of experiences, learning and processing skills. And as much as you yell, the child will yell at him- or herself, too, but this only achieves poor self esteem and less reason for better behavior. Notice again, what makes up a choice -- everything added up is already a done deal at the time -- there is little or no free will involved there at all.
When a child makes a "choice" he or she is demonstrating what she or he has in her head. If yelling will get something different in there so when he or she adds up the factors a different choice is then made, then perhaps yelling will help. But if yelling and condemning add only more ideas about being helpless or hopeless or worthless or worse, then the choices may later look worse than they would have without the yelling.
Consequences are important to help alter future choices and behaviors. But what we know about yelling and screaming and condemning is that often it adds only more negative stuff into the brains of children who are already negative enough.
Life is a struggle to deal with the complex pushes and pulls and it's a very tough struggle to control the feelings inside. To a child -- pretty much at any age on up to about 25, hearing that parents and friends are thinking that you are a loser rarely causes the child to rebel and decide to show them they're wrong. What happens is that this kind of information is taken to heart.
so given all this what's the advice?
First of all, recognize that if there is anyone to yell at, it is probably you. And the place to look for solutions is in parenting -- if there are any solutions at all. But then remind yourself that you don't need yelling or recriminations and condemnations either.
Consequences for negative behaviors work well if not condemnations of the person. And they should not include "you know better" so much as "I know you will get this into your head -- I know you can learn how to do this."
To the father at wits end trying to deal with his child, I say ideas like grounding and taking the car are good ideas. Consequences of negative behaviors should be negative enough that the person is saying again and again, "The next time I want to remember to make a better decision."
After the first time that a negative behavior is discussed, assume that the child knows that the behaviors are negative. Then
Assume that the child is doing the best he or she can do.
Focus on consequences that will not crush the will or self esteem but will keep reminding the child for a reasonable amount of time about the negative consequences of the behaviors
Stay away from berating.
Encourage and commiserate -- tell the child you have faith that he or she will get what they need to get into his or her head and tell him/her you know it is tough to have to learn these lessons.
Have consequences settled in mind and possibly written on paper. Then if the child still engages in the consequences, there is a component of being able to decide the consequences might be worth it.
Avoid monster long consequences or consequences that can add up to unreasonable times or weights. Things won't work if your child ends up grounded till 45 or owing you millions in fines.
Consequences for some things -- like substance abuse -- should include groundings for long enough to assure there is no dependency. Consequences for time not where supposed to be is better in increments for how long gone than in blocks of time for incidents (i.e., grounded an hour per minute for time where not supposed to be is better than one week grounded for being at all late -- because with the latter, once the child realizes he or she is going to be ten minutes late, he or she decides he or she might as well not return home for the rest of the night).
Avoid being angry if at all possible. Avoid making decisions when angry. Avoid assuming anger will help you to think.
Try to figure out why behaviors are happening and work to facilitate better choices. Get a child into counseling if it seems their behaviors are complex and causing adults to go nuts.
If biology is the problem -- hormone excess, minimal brain damage/dysfunction, learning disabilities, take it slow and get help.
Assume that the best you can do is the best you can do. It is not helpful to expect more from the child or yourself than you can do. What you cannot do, you don't have to do. Humans have been surviving for 60,000 years like a virus on the planet -- even though many or most have dysfunctions.
When all you can do is done and it still leaves some fears, then look at things bigger-picture. The bigger picture is that if there is no afterlife and no purpose to life, then nothing bad will last and nothing much matters except for a brief while. If there is an afterlife and a purpose you can ask if you believe in a God who makes a kid with a glitch in her brain cells and then punishes her for it or if maybe the whole thing has purposes for all.
see also
The Raising of a Confident Puppy
A brief bunch of ideas, observations and recommendations on how and why
to raise a self-confident puppy (and/or a confident child).
Contribution made possible through Dr. Glenn Johnson PhD
@ http://www.head-cleaners.com
More articles, Hypnosis CD's, MP3's, and Tapes are available through Dr. J's Website
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