A developmental approach to parenting
Wouldn’t it be nice if a mess could turn into something positive? Funny you should ask. Childproofing For Adolescence is organized around an approach to parenting that can be best summarized as making A MESS.
A MESS is an acronym for Attunement, Mastery, Engagement, and Self-Soothing. An attuned parent has knowledge of child development, understands their child’s uniqueness in terms of interests, abilities and temperament, and can assess where their child stands developmentally. This assessment leads to identification of developmental goals that must be mastered. The process of mastering these goals presents the child with challenges to engage, while finding ways to self-soothe in order to sustain this engagement. Ultimately, the parent teaches this process to the child so that the emerging young adult is tuned into his or her own development, can assess progress and set goals, welcomes challenges and develops healthy ways to self-soothe as they tolerate and learn from setbacks and failures. The end result is a young adult who is resilient and resourceful, who can make A MESS of themselves.
In this workshop section, we will apply the concept of A MESS to each of the five kids, in a variety of contexts, so that you can feel comfortable applying it yourself. Attunement will lead to a recognition that Sam needs to pay attention to her own thoughts and feelings and find ways to express them; that D.J. needs to find ways to form satisfying relationships around areas of mutual interest; that Neal needs to measure his worth internally, instead of how he compares with others; that Mitch needs to tolerate loss and frustration if he really wants to become a better athlete; and that Sophie needs to form mutually satisfying relationships based on shared interests, not desperation.
By the end of this book, you will be asking yourself constantly, “Am I really making A MESS of my child?” and “Have I taught my child to make A MESS of themselves?”
Let’s start with a brief overview of the main parts and ideas of making A MESS:
Attunement – A Summary
Attunement involves knowing what is unique about your child in terms of what they like, what they are good at, and what kind of personality they have, along with knowing where they stand in terms of making developmental progress personally and socially. There are clear developmental pathways that begin in childhood and lead to adolescence and eventually adulthood. We will take a closer look at the necessary components of development, because an attuned parent understands these specific components of development and can assess where their child is on each of these pathways. And with that understanding they can then translate that assessment into developmental goals they are able to help their child pursue and master.
Mastery- A Summary
When we are tuned into our kids’ developmental progress, we can define what they need to be working on and mastering. Does he need to learn to take turns at preschool? Does she need to take the perspective of others? Does he need to be more self-reliant in getting ready for school in the morning or getting ready for bed at night?
Healthy development is built upon a set of competencies that the child must master. These competencies, including empathy, logical thinking, and genuine self-esteem, are mastered one small skill at a time. Parents provide the context for this achievement of mastery, beginning with an assessment of where their child needs to grow, recognition of the skills they need to master and the steps involved in gaining mastery, and an understanding to how to support sustained engagement with this process, including the teaching of self-soothing strategies.
An emphasis on mastery needs to begin early. It focuses on internal strength, by virtue of hard-earned competencies. This internal competency focus runs quite contrary to the way much of the world works, where people are judged based on how they compare with others. To move our children in the direction of healthy autonomy, where they can think and act for themselves, we need to promote mastery from early childhood. But mastery is not possible without taking on challenges and staying engaged.
Engagement – A Summary
Achieving mastery requires sustained engagement. Even though our children are naturally inclined to be curious, and to want to try new things, engagement in that process often entails risk. Therefore, engagement requires the ability to tolerate anxiety, fear, frustration, and failure. It is easy to avoid and make excuses for not engaging, and avoidance is often the easiest solution. Remember Neal’s rocky experience with engagement? Working so hard his first year of middle school was very discouraging. He felt overwhelmed. If this was what engagement entailed, Neal wanted nothing to do with it.
Staying engaged requires that our children keep the conflict (anxiety) within themselves, rather than moving away from it or asking to be rescued from it. If an attuned parent in the child’s life notices when the child’s interests and ambitions have been temporarily sidetracked by anxiety, the parent finds a way to encourage the child to stay engaged. It is unfortunate that someone was not tuned into what was going on with Neal when he felt so overwhelmed that he decided his only option was to withdraw from engaging fully in school.
Helping our children to engage and stay engaged when necessary is an important part of parental attunement, or what we’ll see later in charismatic adults. Knowing what is important and should not be avoided, what is something our children can handle, and what may be too overwhelming are important aspects of attunement. Clear boundaries promote engagement. For example, kids engage in a process of working to demonstrate readiness for greater privileges (because they learn to self-regulate). And clear limits also prevent avoidance of necessary engagement in uncomfortable challenges – like expectations to complete math homework before playing video games. Without assuring engagement, kids will understandably seek to avoid anxiety, frustration or potential for failure. We would have wished that Mitch’s parents had said, “Enough with the excuses Mitch. If you really want to be a ball player you need to (engage in the hard work of) practice”.
Self-Soothing – A Summary
Our children cannot sustain the process of engagement without the ability to self-soothe. Approaching a task that creates anxiety, or staying engaged with something that is terribly frustrating, requires an ability to calm these feelings enough to persist. Learning to self-soothe is a demanding process that involves a great deal of mental and physical self-regulation during childhood and adolescence. Self-soothing is the result of increasing levels of emotional competence: from awareness, to tolerance and then control. Understanding what you feel and why you feel that way eventually produces effective action to change things.
Children who do not learn internal means of self-soothing are vulnerable to reliance on external means of soothing, such as drugs and alcohol; and let’s not forget video games. Sophie’s inability to self-soothe led her to self-medicate with drugs and/or desperately seek that soothing from others – often in ways that were harmful to her. D.J.’s inability to self-soothe in social situations left him with no choice but to retreat into the safety of his room and his projects.
The developmental course for emotional growth involves a child’s learning to master each of these steps of awareness, tolerance, and control. Initially, we as parents provide the structure for these steps and facilitate our children’s efforts. Gradually, we turn that process over to our children as they come to internalize that control. However, there is a need to recognize that each new area of development or learning elicits a need to progress through these steps all over again. Emotional competence and the ability to self-soothe are essential to the development of a healthy internally directed individual.
Putting It All Together
Making A MESS is a process. It involves knowing your child, understanding the course of development, and assessing your child’s developmental progress. From that assessment comes the ability to define goals that need to be mastered through engagement and the self-soothing it takes to sustain that engagement.
Neal needed someone to make A MESS of him as a student. An awareness of his early history or his ability testing would have clued us into the fact that Neal was coasting in school. If doing things at the last minute was sufficient, then expectations were not high enough. If papers were turned in after just one draft, he was not being asked to produce his very best work. Real attunement would lead to setting higher expectations for Neal, by someone who knew him well enough to constantly compare new Neal with old Neal, who monitored what he had mastered and what he needed to master next – independent of what his peers were doing.
Neal needed to engage new areas of challenge, like taking a test that identified his areas of weakness. The problems he ‘fails’ to get right are clear markers for what needs to be studied. Neal must be able to engage in a process where he will experience failures, because failures point out what still needs to be mastered. He must engage challenging material he still needs to learn. And he needs to soothe himself sufficiently so he can tolerate the frustrations of doing the challenging work necessary to gain mastery.
As we work through the book or the website, you will become increasingly comfortable with this model for thinking about development and parenting, which I like to refer to as making A MESS of your child. Making A MESS has application for kids in all areas of their lives.