Yesterday, I was awoken by a 7-year-old hauling himself up the foot of my bed one fistful of duvet at a time. Our house is on the market and we were expecting a showing later in the morning. Dawn Boy wanted me to get up and start putting hospital corners on things. Specifically, he wanted me to get out of my bed so he could make it.
The sun was barely up, the potential buyers doubtless starting another REM cycle. I lay there taking a mental inventory of the situation. Should I provide positive reinforcement by springing up or should I get a lock for my bedroom door?
Making beds has been Son #2’s special job since the day he came home to find a stager had been here and had given the ordinary pillows on my bed dramatic, sculptural flair. He gasped at the sight, and a 45-pound design star was born. I follow behind him and pull things taut, but mostly he’s got it down.
If you’ve ever tried to keep a house in that unreal, no-one-lives-here-but-the-stager condition, you know how hard it can be on kids. They aren’t naturally inclined to put one toy away before taking out another, no more than they are prepared to sit on the front stoop, hands folded, while you make sure there’s nothing in the bathroom waste bin that would shatter the fantasy that life in this house is effortless and stain-free.
The week the house went on the market I had what hindsight has shown to be a stroke of genius. I sent my boys down to their sterile — and spacious! — rec room with an assignment: Figure out how we were going to keep the house immaculate without barking and crabbing at each other. After about 20 minutes they had a proposal that essentially exchanged their cheerful compliance for much greater quantities of computer time, time with friends on the block, and dessert. Extra points, they proposed, should be awarded whenever a child, say, cleared his place at the table without prompting. I had my doubts, but laid in three different kinds of ice cream sandwiches anyhow.
Two months later I’m still tiptoeing around the stager’s collection of overwrought tchotchkes, but I’m doing it in the company of Stepford Kids. They cheerfully take out trash, sort recycling, “fold” laundry (visualize again the inspiration provided by those sculptural bed pillows), tuck toys into storage bins, and tidy their desks. Occasionally someone has to go back and make a second, more deliberate pass at a chore, but for the most part we’re living in a nag-free zone. And contrary to our current collective hysteria over childhood obesity, eating ice cream in front of the computer hasn’t made them tubby and dull. Rather, it has made the entire family so cheerful I am feeling a mite evangelical about the magic of catching your kids being good.
As new parents, most of us, if we’re telling the truth, are scared witless. Our panic over whether our newborn is peeing, pooping, and breathing grows up and becomes panic that we’re disciplining too little and creating wild apes or too much, thereby setting our babes up for a lifetime of self-loathing. We really want to be good parents, so we sweat these details. In the process, often we unwittingly cloud the air with nervous energy. We mete out the ice cream — metaphorically, anyhow.
I read the other day that social scientists have found a test that determines with astonishing reliability whether a marriage will fail. The crucial element is not how much fighting goes on, or the gusto with which the partners go at each other. In successful marriages, there are at least five positive interactions for every negative one. We’re not talking about praise, we’re talking about ongoing displays of respect that make fights easier to resolve.
I daresay a similar equation applies in good parenting. If your kids are walking and talking, chances are you’ve been on the wrong side of it. After you’ve snapped (usually wholly understandably) for the umpteenth time, you try to smooth things over with praise, and then you wonder why it doesn’t work. Volumes have been written on this dynamic. It accounts for entire canons of parenting literature, for systems that, followed religiously, purport to guarantee domestic harmony. You can spend every spare moment boning up on paper and still end up worn to a nub in practice.
Over the years I have ended up with three books that made a dramatic difference for my family. Each is worthy of a stand-alone review; one of them, Great Kids, got just that in these pages in December 2007. If you missed that column, here’s a quick recap: Psychiatrist Stanley Greenspan identifies 10 characteristics of happy, healthy kids — traits like empathy, creativity, and self-discipline, and explains, in clear, accessible language, what kind of human interactions foster their development. It’s not a how-to book so much as a reassuring overview of the process.
In terms of cutting down on the wheedling, whining, bargaining, and tantrum-throwing that threatens every household’s serenity, I point you toward Dr. Thomas Phelan’s 1, 2, 3 Magic. Ostensibly Phelan talks about taming your kids, but really his idea is to get parents to talk less and to make what we do say more effective.
“Magic” isn’t hyperbole: Phelan’s simple idea brought nearly instant peace to my family several years ago when one child, then 3, was running roughshod over everyone else. Don’t believe it? There are 300 reviews on Amazon backing me up.
Lastly, your child may not have the kinds of behavioral issues brought to mind by the title Transforming the Difficult Child. Few do, but Howard Glasser’s and Jennifer Easley’s Nurtured Heart Approach is a terrific primer on how to provide real positive feedback, versus hollow praise. If at the moment it’s hard to catch your child being good, this book can help you move away from noticing mostly misbehavior.
One morning last week I came downstairs to find Son #1, who is 9, making breakfast for himself and his brother. Cooking wasn’t one of the kids’ tasks, so I asked him what prompted him to do this. His reply: They were waiting and I was still drying my hair, so he thought he’d get things started.
I made a big deal about it, offering thanks and afterschool indulgences. But you know who was the proudest? He was. He caught himself being good, and that, I know you will appreciate, is something we were both mighty pleased about.
Beth Hawkins is a Minneapolis writer.
