A reader writes in about living with her adolescent
daughter: "It's like eggshells are everywhere."
This is a complaint I frequently hear from the
parents of temperamental teens. So many parents tiptoe around their
teenager, fearing the smallest confrontation.
Consider this scenario:
"Rene."
"What? Why are you always getting on me about
stuff? Can't you leave me alone for one minute? It's always something. I
can't stand it. I don't know what is your problem. What?"
Rene's mother was about to ask her to clear out the
collection of half-eaten sandwiches gathering mould in the refrigerator. But
she changes her mind. Instead she says, "I was just wondering if you
had seen this morning's newspaper."
"How would I be supposed to know? I don't ever
read it."
Many teenagers today bully their parents in such a
way that their parents are afraid to say anything lest they provoke an
outburst. So parents constantly back off, not making demands and not saying
"No" when they should.
The problem is that teenagers can often bring far
more sustained energy and volume than their parents can, or want to, counter
with. Or parents do blow up and there's a big screaming match that
accomplishes nothing and leaves the parent upset about yet another parenting
moment that has devolved into a mess.
Fortunately there is a technique that can put
parents back in the driver's seat: If you have something to say to them, say
it. And if they start into one of their unpleasant outbursts, repeat what
you had to say and then immediately disengage.
"Rene, would you please get rid of your old
sandwiches in the fridge."
"Why are you always ... blah blah blah etc.
etc."
If it is part of an outburst, it doesn't matter what
she is saying. Do not respond to the content of her words. To you, the words
have no meaning - they are unpleasant noise. Instead, repeat your message:
"Rene, would you please get rid of your old
sandwiches in the fridge."
"I can't. I won't. You're mean, etc."
At that point you should already be making your
exit.
The key is that as soon as they start in with an
obnoxious tone, switch gears. (You will know when to do this because their
tone will immediately spike your blood pressure.) Tune out and exit. And if
they do not do what you ask, after a reasonable interval - with the
sandwiches in the refrigerator example, 10 minutes is probably good - repeat
the process.
This technique does not produce perfect compliance.
But it works far better than anything else you might do, and with far less
effort and considerably less stress. Generally teens will comply because
they can't get rid of your request and they know, deep down, that it is
reasonable. At the same time, they don't get to rave at you because you
don't stay around to listen.
When they comply, thank them. Whenever they talk to
you in a reasonably civil manner, respond in a friendly way. They are not
punished for their surly tone. Today's generation of parents will attest
that such punishments only seem to increase a spiral of negativity within
the parent-child relationship.
With this method, what teens experience is that
whenever they talk to you in an unpleasant manner the immediate result is
your withdrawal. What they are saying gets no response at all, as if
suddenly they have lost their voice. They are speaking to you, but their
words are not reaching you. This does have an impact on teenagers: They hate
it.
"Don't walk out on me when I'm speaking to you.
That's so rude."
You'll see when you use the technique that it does
not seem weak or ineffective. Just the opposite - whenever you do it
correctly, it feels firm and strong.
What you are doing is applying one of the most basic
techniques of behavioural psychology. You are extinguishing a behaviour by
giving it a non-response. And by responding positively to any instance in
which they are more civil, you increase the likelihood of that behaviour.
You are now controlling the flow of the interaction.
You get to say what you want with a minimum of unpleasant reaction from them
- because if it is unpleasant you are already on your way out. The bottom
line: You're no longer walking on eggshells. - GLOBE
& MAIL 2007 September 18
Anthony E.
Wolf is a clinical psychologist and the author of six parenting books,
including Get out of my life, but first could you drive me and Cheryl to the
mall?: A Parent's Guide to the New Teenager.
I've lost track of the number of times fellow
parents have remarked wryly, "Wow, four children under seven? I guess
that means you haven't slept in a while. Like seven years."
It used to be that when people said that sort of
thing, I told them the truth. But it had an awful dampening effect. The
truth made their sympathy dry up, and spoiled the
hail-haggard-parent-well-met camaraderie that is so pleasant and friendly.
So now I just smile and say, "Something like that."
The fact is, during most nights over the last
seven years I've slept like a baby. Not the sleep of Borscht Belt humour --
"I sleep like a baby. Every two hours, I wake up screaming!" --
but the sleep of any adult who has only her intemperance to blame if she
feels lousy in the morning. I certainly can't blame the children. Once we
put them to bed they almost never pester us in the evenings, and unless
they're sick or terrified by nightmares they never wake us up. They don't
come down repeatedly for glasses of water, they don't wander out of bed at 4
a.m. to climb into ours, and we never find them crouched on the landing,
waiting for us to come upstairs.
They don't do these things because they themselves
are too busy sleeping. Every night at 7:30, we tuck each baby and child into
its own bed, give it a kiss, turn out the light, and go downstairs.
And that's it.
Believe me, before we had children, I wasn't sure
this was even possible. I remember going to dinner parties and witnessing
some variation of the following scenario: There would be wheedling and
mewling from a distant room, as a new mother or father beseeched a child to
get back into bed. Eventually, Ben or Max or Emily would come toddling out,
holding the index finger of a smilingly apologetic parent. "Well,
everyone, I guess we'll be nine for dinner!" Back then I had a
childless person's natural fastidiousness, and found it amazing and
distasteful that people would let their children intrude on adult pleasures
like that. One time, four of us sat grimly at the table, our conversation
dying, as, from upstairs, came a three-year-old's persistent, "Mummmmmy
... Mummmmmy ... Mummmmmy ..."
So forgive me if I sound smug. I shouldn't,
because our attempt to impose domestic tranquility succeeded beyond our
wildest expectations. Without any idea of how to run a proper nursery, and
no experience of babies, my husband and I stumbled on a superior method of
training children to sleep through the night with our very first. Our
method, simply put, is to break the poppet's spirit before the child is old
enough to remember things any other way.
This is how it happened: Five weeks after our
first child was born, I remember feeling rather jaunty. I'd got the hang of
nighttime feedings, and getting up a couple of times a night didn't seem
such a disaster. Seven interminable nights later, I gazed blearily into the
mirror and declared that I was tired as hell and I just couldn't take it any
more.
Somewhere we'd heard that babies can sleep through
the night once they weigh 10 pounds. Armed with this probably bogus factoid,
and having noticed that our infant daughter was waking more frequently at
night, and getting more fractious by day, we decided to act,
blitzkrieg-like. My husband, who had spent six peaceful weeks in the guest
bed, moved Molly's Moses basket into the sitting room (we were living in
Japan at the time, so, in case of earthquakes, he put it in the centre of
the room to protect her from falling pictures). Around nine o'clock that
night, we kissed her, drew closed the two massive fire doors that separated
our room from hers, got into bed, screwed our eyes shut, and held hands,
waiting.
Far in the distance, she began to wail. We gripped
each other's hand like drowning men. Poor Molly cried and cried. And cried.
All through the night. We were in agony. The next night, she sobbed for
three hours straight. The third night she wept for 45 minutes.
And that was it!
Six weeks and three days after Molly was born, the
whole household was sleeping through the night. When Paris came along, a
couple of years later, we had only a gloomy unfinished basement for him to
gnash in at the age of six weeks. In due course, the same happened with
Violet and Phoebe, who both learned to sleep in a pantry.
Brutal as this method may seem, I can't recommend
it highly enough. What we hadn't realized until we actually did the deed is
that babies love to sleep as much as adults do. It's no fun, those first few
nights of wailing, but once babies are weaned of the two-to-three-hour
late-night napping of early infancy, they become visibly happier, more
settled, and more predictable in their daytime routines. Far from growing up
fighting to keep themselves awake, and arguing with us about bedtimes, at
7:30 our children fall into their beds with the kind of soft-focus happy
gratitude you usually see in mattress ads.
Usually. With the oldest child now seven, I'm
getting uneasy intimations of a time when they may rage against the dying of
the electric light -- or may, with teenage hormones, be physically unable to
sleep until after midnight. Then we will presumably have them slouching
about the household at all hours. There won't be such a satisfying
demarcation between "family" time and "adult" time.
Perhaps, when that day comes, my husband and I will be the ones sleeping in
the basement, having our spirits broken. - by
Meghan Cox Gurden National
Post
3 May 2002
