A healthy transition to adolescence requires the pursuit of essential developmental goals during childhood. These parent-child vignettes promote Attunement (A), a process of thinking about parenting – one that incorporates knowledge of a child’s interests, capabilities and developmental progress. The result is one where parents analyze before they act. When this fails, they are better able to reflect upon their own issues that interfere with this approach. These good-humored vignettes are one family’s approach to Childproofing for Adolescence.
Raise Your Parenting AQ – Introduction
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You think?
Raise Your Parenting AQ is a book about thinking. Before responding to our children, we need to think about the developmental issues that create urgency for our children to act or avoid. The book also asks parents to think about their own emotional urgency to respond. The essence of the book is learning to analyze before you act.
This is not a book about pathology. It will not help you deal with your oppositional-defiant child. Raise Your Parenting AQ is a book about thinking more deeply about child development and behavior as well as your own issues that potentially obscure that focus.
Raise Your Parenting AQ has a number of themes. First, childhood and parenting are complex and should not be oversimplified. There are developmental themes that run across childhood that apply to all children, but are managed on personal schedules depending upon the characteristics of the child. Another assumption is that all behavior, regardless of how irrational it appears, has a purpose. That purpose is usually to manage some emotion. Emotion arises from some important issue. Responding to behavior without a deeper understanding of the emotions and issues involved is shortsighted and potentially damaging.
Teaching emotional competence, listening and communicating with respect and empathy, and taking an authoritative approach are necessary and healthy approaches to parenthood. However, they are insufficient without simultaneous integration of an understanding of child development and the unique characteristics of the child. Children must wrestle with and master developmental challenges, such as developing a unique and separate self while developing satisfying relationships. Although both of these goals are essential they are often at odds with each other within the family as well as with peers. As parents, we must be attuned to these developmental binds, helping our children stay engaged with them and master them.
Within the family, we demonstrate healthy management of that bind by maintaining closeness to our children via our understanding and support for their need to develop independent selves, by virtue of our awareness of the child’s developmental goals, capabilities, interests and temperament. Without our understanding and involvement, our children will misinterpret events in their lives, often blaming themselves unnecessarily. Our children learn empathy and respect from the way we treat them. They feel respected and empowered from knowing that their feelings and opinions will be listened to and changes can result from their demonstrations of competence and responsibility. Competence and self-reliance are the bases of self-esteem. To gain competence they must stay engaged with difficult struggles, tolerating frustration and recognizing failure as a source of learning. As parents we understand that all behavior has a functional purpose and that we must understand the underlying emotions and issues involved before responding. Equally important is the knowledge that unless we understand our own issues first, we will likely impede our children’s development and cause more harm than good.
I cannot presume to tell you how to parent your child. You know your child better than I do. Therefore following some script will inevitably lead to a failure, because it will not be the right response for your particular child. Empathy is important, but it is not sufficient without a clear understanding of the child and the developmental tasks at hand. Empathy without understanding can ultimately be not empathic if the parent leaves the child stuck, focused on feelings but not on the hard work that needs to be done. This book cannot make someone empathic and attuned. But it can start the process of thinking in terms of children’s developmental goals and whether those goals are being considered, honored and supported.
Let’s make it fun
When a student is struggling with a subject, it is often helpful to tell him up front what to look for in the reading assignment. Taking this approach with a good student often interferes with their ability and willingness to analyze what they are reading and make sense of it for themselves. I assume that the readers of this book are part of this latter group, well educated and highly motivated parents. Therefore I have written a book to stimulate thinking about parenting. If you think more deeply about what you do and why you do it, you will be better parents in the process.
To encourage this thinking process, I have developed a series of parent-child vignettes that are fun to read, to which many of you will relate, and around which most of you will immediately begin to say, “Why did he say that, do that, or miss that … ?”
I have created a fictional family, with three children, each quite different in temperament. As these three children grow up, they have a series of interactions with their parents that are designed to highlight important developmental issues. Each vignette is followed by observations of what was going on with the child developmentally as well as how the parent tuned into developmental goals facing the child and helped promote that development.
Many of these vignettes are accompanied by “what if’s”. These are alternative vignettes that could just have easily occurred given the same circumstances. The parents in these vignettes are also caring and well intentioned. But often there are developmental issues that are overlooked or there are issues of the parents’ themselves that are profoundly affecting the responses they choose. In short, these “what if” vignettes call upon us to ask ourselves, “Whose issue is it?”
Ideally, the vignettes and discussions will lead you to think of your own examples and how you chose to handle them. Even better may be recognition that something that should be occurring is being avoided or overlooked. By the end of the vignette section, I hope you are doing your own recalling and analyzing. Important themes or issues that arise within the vignettes are noted and compiled in summary form in a final chapter. I consider them important principles to understand and consider, but to offer them at the beginning of the book would interfere with you compiling a mental list of your own. If the vignettes and discussion process has worked, you will approach this final chapter with your own ideas of what is important and you will wrestle with the appropriateness of the developmental approach described. If you are thinking of better vignettes, better responses, or better ways to summarize the important goals of development, then the goal of “thinking about parenting” will have been achieved. Typical of a psychologist: “If you disagree with me, we are getting somewhere!”
None of the examples or dialogues are real, except for a few references to my own family. For full disclosure sake, my son did fall off a backstop and break his elbow, my daughter did take flight without checking with ground control and I did climb over the glass and yell at the hockey coach. Except for this family theme of falling, everything else is fiction.
Look out below!
A climbing* metaphor runs throughout this book. In a sense, a child’s development is like climbing mountains. Some mountains call out to be climbed while others are on the path to what needs to be reached on the other side. Climbing mountains requires skill, yet climbing is the only way to learn and become competent. Therefore, to climb successfully one must learn to tolerate falling. The rope and harness allow one to try and fall safely, only to try again until successful. How fast mountains are climbed matters little as long as they are climbed. The more mountains climbed the more competent the climber and the more challenging the climbs, the more the climber learns. But climbing needs to be safe and not overwhelming. The beginning rock climber relies upon others to keep him safe as he learns to increasingly do that for himself. The climber who can trust in the belaying* does not have to delay his climb to insure his safety. He doesn’t have to rationalize an intermediate climb as good enough. He does not have to obsessively build in safeguards that delay his climb.
Having experienced the trust and safety of his parent’s belaying, a child can come to trust others to belay him as well. He also learns to provide that support for others in their ascent. With his history of trusting others and his knowledge of what it takes to provide that belaying to others, he is able to make sound judgments concerning the people to whom he is willing to rope himself.
As with climbing, the parent learns what interests the child, what the child’s capabilities are, what is tolerable and what is overwhelming. With this level of attunement, the parent holds the rope, but not too tight, nor too loose, thus allowing the child to do the work of finding genuine interests and gaining competencies. When the climbing ceases or remains limited, the parent is also there to help the child reengage and if necessary, tolerate the challenge of the climb (or the fall).
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* I apologize to the serious rock climbers in the audience who know that when I use the word mountain, I should probably be saying rock. The climbing vignettes at the gym involve the sport of rock climbing. However, the metaphor for child development, is better captured by using mountains instead of rocks.
** belaying involves a spotter holding a rope (run around a secure object) attached to the climber that insures a safe descent