Interplay Blog

February 26, 2015

What to Do If Your Child Swears

Bad words are everywhere and it should come as no surprise that these are the favorite words of our children. Swear words very easy to learn, since they’re usually said with enough emotional force to stand out in a conversation. Tiny tots are sometimes encouraged to swear, by grownups who think it’s cute. Older kids are sometimes encouraged to swear by older kids and media stars who make swearing seem cool.

Cuss words are just part of the vocabulary these days but having a reputation as a potty-mouth doesn’t endear a child to many adults. Your child’s teachers or grandparents might object, and the parents of other children might avoid your child because she is just too vulgar. If your child swears and curses, you’ve probably been in a situation where what came out of your kid’s mouth embarrassed you greatly.

But what can you do? If swear words are everywhere, how can you clean up your darling child’s vocabulary?

If your child is very little, now is the time to mend your own speech and the speech of those around him. Your friends and relatives – and even you – might be more free with the curse words than any of you were as kids. Give your own child the more protected environment you grew up with. Set some rules about what can be said in front of your child.
Don’t encourage naughty language in your kids. What’s cute at age two or three will be a problem when she goes to preschool. Don’t set your child up for punishment by teaching words now that will get her into trouble later. When your older child says words you don’t approve, say something, don’t just let it slide.
Set standards for language during play dates at your home. You don’t need to be the Language Police but children are quite good at adjusting to the rules in a new situation. If you firmly discourage bad words among your child’s friends when they’re in your home, kids will go along with your requirements.
Assume that the kid who swears doesn’t know any better. Instead of punishing a child for saying bad words, teach her what is offensive and even acceptable words to say instead.
Teach older children to adapt to time and place. Kids ages 9 and older can learn to differentiate between what they say and do around their friends and what they say and do in school, when older adults are around, or in Sunday School. Instead of requiring that they never ever say a particular word, tell them that you never want to hear it coming from their mouth or never want to hear it in front of Grandma or never want to hear about it in a teacher conference. Knowing how to manage different social situations is a valuable skill and your older kid can learn this.
If swearing is habitual in your home but you’d like it to stop, then call a family meeting and work out a solution. You might consider instituting a penalty jar (a quarter deposited for every bad word someone says) or in some other, reasonable way that’s appropriate for everyone. Notice that everyone is included here, grownups as well as children. Where do you think they learned such language, after all?
Monitor media. This is not to say that your kids can only watch G-rated movies but it does mean that the media your children consume has an effect. Know what messages are being communicated in the media your children, especially your older children, are experiencing. Talk about this with your kids. Your silence is a signal of your approval, including approval of the words people say to each other.

Speaking is an essential social skill but a complicated one. It includes not just the speaker but the listener too, and also the context, the situation, in which speech is shared. Helping your child know how to choose appropriate words and adapt a message to fit present company is part of this social learning.

Teach your child how to do this and you’ll help your child be welcome wherever she goes.

© 2015, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Look for free downloads on Dr. Anderson’s website at www.patricianananderson.com.

February 10, 2015

How Bribery Backfires

How do you get your children to do what you want? Do you offer rewards?

“If you eat your vegetables, you can have dessert.”

“If you clean your room, you can watch TV.”

“I’ll get you a toy if you stay in the shopping cart.”

If you do, then you’ve probably noticed that rewards don’t often work, or if they work once you have to keep doling them out to make them work again and again. Bribery has no power to teach good behavior, it can only engage a child’s attention for a little while.

Pretty soon the tables will turn. Your child will learn that he can extract a goodie from you by misbehaving until you give in and offer a bribe. Now you’re being manipulated by your child; he’s the one in charge of rewarding you.

Rewards turn everything into an economic transaction. When you offer a reward, you’re paying your child to do as you wish. Just as anyone in a purchasing situation can decide if the product is worth the money it costs, so a child will decide if complying with your wishes is worth the bribe you’re offering. Sometimes it is; sometimes choking down that broccoli is worth the promise of ice cream. Sometimes it’s not.

When your child asks you what’s for dessert, she’s asking what the payoff will be for sitting through dinner and trying everything on her plate. You can get a child to clean up her room by promising to take her to the movies. But you won’t develop her sense of responsibility, only her sense of power. The next time you want her to clean up her room, she will ask, “What will you give me if I do?” Kids can be bought, yes, but only so long as they agree to be your pawn.

Bribery is as corrosive to your relationship with your children as punishment is. Both rewards and punishment are intended to control a child against his will. Both make you into the enemy. Both inspire your child to sneak behind your back, lie, subvert your efforts, and challenge your authority. When your authority as a parent is based on your ability to deal out rewards, then you’re on very shaky ground.

So what can you do to get your kids to do what you want?

Say what you expect, clearly and with kindness, but say it. If you expect your child to have a clean room before going out to play, then say that. Say, “In this house, we put stuff away before we do something new. Please put away the Legos.” This statement of fact is different from an offer of a reward. It’s a truth, not a bribe. The child can look to see if the basic truth has been fulfilled and then know he can go out to play.
Be consistent. One of the problems with expectations and statements of truth is that they apply to everyone. They apply to you. So you also must put away your things from one activity before moving on to another activity. You also must eat your broccoli before having dessert. In addition, the expectations and statements of truth are the same every day. They don’t change.
Notice what your current truths are. If you’ve fallen into the expectation that children will misbehave in the grocery store and then that you’ll give them a toy to keep them in line, you’ve created this truth. No wonder your child acts up frequently! If you want new behavior, you must create expectations to match, and you should expect some push-back when the old truths are replaced by new ones.
Celebrate collaboration. There’s no reason why you can’t say, at the end of a marathon cleaning job, “Whew! We did great, didn’t we? Let’s have a great snack!” Celebration is good. It’s manipulation and the setting of conditions that works against you. Celebrate collaboration, not compliance. Celebrate responsibility and helpfulness, not being good. There’s a huge difference and your kids know exactly why that difference matters.

No one likes to be manipulated. Everyone prefers to be treated with respect. When you avoid bribery in favor of clear communication and consistent standards, you develop your children’s best qualities. You permit them to be responsible people who can see ahead and know what to do in any situation.

That’s what you want, isn’t it? More than toys and ice cream, it’s what children want too.

January 29, 2015

Do You Invite Your Kids to Lie?

A parent at the grocery store the other day confronted her child in a very intimidating manner and demanded, “Did you poke a hole in that package?” The boy – maybe eight years old – seemed to physically shrink. Guilt was written all over his face but he whispered, “No.”

Of course. Who would admit to making a mistake under such circumstances? Clearly his mother was upset with him and clearly he knew that admitting he’d damaged the package would lead to more anger, more yelling, maybe even being shaken, hit, or humiliated in front of all the other shoppers. Answering “no” was the safest option, even though it was a lie.

This is how it goes. We paint our children into a corner, confronting them with their errors in the most threatening way possible, and then we’re surprised when they lie to us about whatever it is we think they did. We make lying the only sensible action. We teach our children to lie.

Is this what you had in mind?

Our need to assign blame is endless. We want everything to be someone’s fault so we can be appropriately angry or disgusted with them. We do this when someone pulls in front of us on the highway, we do this when our spouse forgets to bring home the milk we asked for, we do this when a child brings home a bad report card. Someone is a fault and we want to identify the culprit. And then we want to punish him. Since the adults in our lives are unlikely to accept our controlling, blaming ways, we control and blame our children. Especially our children. Then when they lie to get out from under our anger, we blame and control them some more.

It’s time to stop the madness. Here’s how to teach your children that truth-telling, not lying, is the way to go.

Make the truth unpunishable. If a child tells you the truth, you may not punish her. This is so sensible, we wonder why it’s so rare. Obviously, if you want the truth to be told when you ask for it, you cannot then punish the truth-teller, no matter what it is she’s done.
Focus on solutions not on punishment. Punishment is never the solution, so don’t even go there. If something bad happened, affixing blame won’t make the bad thing go away. Since everyone makes mistakes, children need to know that it’s up to them to fix the mistakes they make. You do this by working together to find a solution to what happened.
If you know the truth, don’t ask a question. If it’s obvious to you that your child poked a hole into a package of $20-a-pound steaks, don’t ask if he did it. Acknowledge the problem and move on to the solution. It’s the question “Did you do that?” that forces a child to lie, so if you know the answer, or have a good guess, then don’t ask. Just say, “Uh-oh! You poked a hole in that. Let’s tell the meat man about that and see what he can do.”
Unsupport tattling. One of the many downsides of blaming people is that others feel encouraged to tattle on them. In an atmosphere of blame, bystanders want to deflect any suspicion from themselves onto the guilty party – or to frame someone else even if that person is not to blame. If you’ve been focused on blame, your other children may have become tattlers. To stop tattling, stop blaming but also stop acting on tattling. Don’t encourage your children to participate in the blame game.
Forget trying to be perfect. Like our tattling children, the reason we blame a wrongdoer and try to force a confession is because we don’t want other people to think we are raising our kids to be hooligans or that we tolerate mistakes. We want to be perfect parents of perfect children who never do anything wrong. This is a fantasy. A perfect parent (if there is such a thing) wouldn’t make a scene in the grocery store over a damaged package. A perfect parent would model responsibility and truth-telling and engage the child in finding a solution to the problem that just came up.

A package with a hole in it isn’t the end of the world. It’s not worth ruining your day over or ruining your children’s day or making a scene in the market and gathering the stares of all the other shoppers. The parent I saw could have said, “Uh-oh! That package has a hole in it. It looks like it’s really easy to put your finger through that thin plastic.” I imagine that at this point the child will nod but if he didn’t poke a hole in the package, he might say, “No, it was that way already,” and the parent could believe him.

We can believe our children are telling the truth if we make the truth easier to tell than a lie. You could easily do that. Truly, you could.

January 15, 2015

Is Your Child Afraid of Failure?

When something doesn’t work on the first try, what does your child do? Does she stop and figure out what might work better? Or does she give up or ask for help?

And what do you do, when your child attempts challenging tasks but then struggles? Are you quick to step in to complete the task for him? Do you even avoid letting your child try tasks that might be difficult, because you want to avoid the frustration?

Here’s the thing: everything we know how to do we learned the hard way, through trying and failing and then trying again. That’s really the definition of learning, to figure out something we didn’t know before we started. So when we only let children do things we know they’ll be successful at or when we step in to do things for them once they encounter a setback, we derail the very thing we’re supposed to be all about. We derail learning.

Carol Dweck, the noted expert on children’s motivation and learning, studied fifth grade children’s reactions to tricky math problems. She found that some children acted helplessly and quickly quit trying but that other children seemed to relish the challenge and enjoyed applying their thinking to working out a solution. The two different approaches to hard tasks didn’t seem to depend on what we might call “intelligence.” Kids in both groups were equally smart.

What seemed to matter was children’s expectations for their own learning. Kids who think things should be easy for them and who are praised for getting the right answer to easy questions balk at even trying to work out answers to hard questions. This makes sense: if your belief in your ability depends on always getting the right answer, even trying to answer a hard question has the potential to reveal you’re not so smart as you thought you were. But if your belief in your ability depends on your resourcefulness and persistence and dogged determination to solve problems, then the harder the problem, the smarter you feel.

The question for us, then, is how do fifth graders get this way? What went wrong in their past experience to convince them that trying is dangerous? I may not be able to tell you what happened, precisely, but I can tell you when: in their preschool and early elementary school years. Children form their ideas about themselves and their abilities long before we think they do. And we’re the ones who influence those ideas, for good and for bad.

So take a look at the tasks you let your kids take on. Look at their reaction – and your reaction – to struggle and frustration and failure. Make certain you support effort and persistence. Try not to be too quick to step in to help.

At the same time, avoid praising right answers and easy successes. When children think our opinions of them depend on their always being right, they’ll be less daring in tackling challenging problems. Congratulate your child on a good try. Help him to try again.

Do your children love a challenge? I hope they do.

December 30, 2014

Start Now to Teach Your Child to Drive

If you drive a car, sooner or later your child will expect to drive one too. For most teens, the day they can legally drive is the moment they want to get behind the wheel. How can you make certain your child is ready when that time comes?

First, learning to drive starts now, no matter how old your child is. As you drive through town, with your child in the backseat, talk about the rules of the road as they come up. Notice the signs and talk about what they mean. Talking about driving starts long before your child is tall enough to see over the steering wheel.

As soon as your child is old enough to sit in the passenger seat, that’s where he should sit at least some of the time. Now your driving conversations get more specific, as you point out possible hazards and how you handle them. Get your child thinking about driving, watching the traffic, and helping you notice dodgy situations.

Second, make it clear to your child long before he turns 16, that driving is a privilege that carries with it some heavy responsibilities. Driving is not a right. Let him know that you will be watching for signals that he’s ready to drive a car and that when you see he’s ready you will agree to let him learn.

At the same time, don’t make learning to drive an exercise in extortion. Don’t make your permission dependent on getting straight As in school or setting other impossibly high standards as a prerequisite to learning to drive. Be fair and treat your child fairly.

Remember that driving is a complex skill and it takes lots of practice to get good enough at it to be safe. This means that even if your child takes driver’s ed in school or gets private lessons, you will still have to help her practice driving as much as possible. The more situations, the more weather, the more sorts of roadways your child drives under your watchful eye, the better.

Keep your eye on the law. Be careful to get things off on the right foot by keeping your child out from behind the wheel until he’s legally allowed to get a learner’s permit. Once your child gets his license, pay attention to the limitations your state puts on teen drivers. In most states, new drivers are not allowed to drive after dark or to drive with other teens in the car. Make certain your child follows the law – and make certain he knows the law even if he’s just riding while a friend drives.

Finally, as always, model what you want to see, even if you don’t want to see it for another five years. Now is the time to be mindful of your own driving, so your children see the best possible example. Don’t use your cell phone when you drive and avoid other distractions, like hunting for something on the floor while you go down the road. Always use your seat belt. Don’t speed. Come to a full stop at stop signs. Do not put yourself in the position later of having to insist on rules your child thinks you yourself ignore.

When it comes to preparing a child to learn to drive, “Do as I do and do as I say,” is the safest way. Start modeling good driving now and start talking about good driving. No matter how young your child is now, the time to start driver’s ed is today.

© 2014, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Look for free downloads on Dr. Anderson’s website at www.patricianananderson.com.

December 13, 2014

How to Get Kids to Do What You Want

It is not true that people do things only because they will be rewarded for doing them. Children are not trained pigeons or laboratory rats, who will do whatever will get them a treat. Kids like treats, of course, but there is something they like even better. Independence.

So trying to get children to behave by “catching them being good” and rewarding or praising them for it will only get you so far. You might get a smile. You might even get a repeat of the good behavior. But over the long haul you’ve taught your child something different from what you think you’ve taught. You’ve taught your child that your approval can be bought and that she’s the one in charge.

This isn’t what you expected. This isn’t what happens with lab rats. Rats don’t suddenly ask the researcher, “What will you give me if I do what you want?” They don’t ever say, “No, thanks. That’s not enough for me.” But children do. Once you’ve put a price on good behavior, you’ve put the choice to accept that price or reject it in your children’s hands. Children weigh the value of your approval against the value of their own independence and self-esteem. Sooner or later, your approval is worth less.

No one - not even a child - wants to be manipulated. So when rewards and promises are used to coerce good behavior, children understand perfectly what’s going on. As far as a child is concerned, no reward is better than being an independent, free person. A child might accept your offer of a reward today – as a free, independent person, that’s his prerogative – but he might reject your offer tomorrow. Children are their own selves, not our puppets. They know this and are ready to teach parents a lesson.

So this means that the plan you might have had, to not punish your children but to reward them when they do as you wish, has a huge flaw in it. Rewards just don’t work all that well over the long term. Kids can be bought, yes. You can get a child to clean up her room by promising to take her to the movies if there’s a movie she wants to see. But expect her to demand the same “payment” for cleaning her room next time, or for her to tell you she’s just not that interested in cleaning her room since there’s no good movies around. Rewards don’t develop a child’s sense of responsibility or obedience, only a sense of power.

Now it is your child who is doling out rewards - her cleaned room - and you whose behavior is being manipulated – ponying up for a trip to the cinema. Was this what you had in mind?

What can you do instead?

The problem with rewards lies in the trickery rewards imply. We are tricking our children into doing as we wish by holding out a reward for doing it. Remove the trickery and make things more straightforward. Say, “This room is a mess! It’s time to clean it. How quickly do you think you can get things into better shape?” Let the child decide on a time target. Set a timer. Announce, “Go!” If it’s a small child or if the room is really awful, pitch in to help. Get it done in the time allowed. Then celebrate with a cookie or a high-five or a trip to the movies. Whatever. Just avoid holding out the celebratory reward ahead of time.

Or, forego the reward altogether and simply comment on what you see. Instead of saying, “Thanks for taking care of your baby sister. Here’s three dollars,” just say, “Thanks for taking care of your baby sister. She looks like she had a great time with you.” If you never start down the payment-for-responsible-behavior road, your child will feel more responsible, not less, when you share your sincere appreciation. There’s no need to taint the moment with money or another reward.

It’s not that you can never say, “Wow, that was a terrific thing you did. Let’s celebrate!” You certainly can. But it does mean that you can’t develop the kind of responsibility you’re looking for if you instead say, “If you do a terrific thing, then we’ll celebrate.” The problem is not with the celebration but with the cause-and-effect condition put on it. A celebration is something you do with another person. A reward is something you do to another person.

No one wants to be done-to.

November 28, 2014

Is Your Child Keeping Secrets From You?

If you are the parent of a child aged nine and up, you are already aware of the shift in perspective that happens in the preteen years. Suddenly, peers and friendships take on more importance than before. While your child still values your opinion, you certainly are no longer the center of your child’s social world. Her friends are. And with this shift comes a need to keep from you some of what’s going on.

You won’t be told everything. Your child will keep from you things that he thinks should be secret. He won’t tell you things that are just between him and his friends. And this, obviously, can be a problem, because he is not yet a good judge of what he can handle and what you need to know.

Keeping secrets becomes something of an obsession in the preteen years. This is the age of the locked diary, after all. Mystery, intrigue, and hidden information of all sorts attract older elementary school students. Being able to keep a secret is a mark of self-control and competence and kids this age know it.

So children in the preteen years are likely to keep secrets. In addition, your child’s friends may make her pledge to keep a secret. Your child may be burdened not only with secrets of her own but with the secrets of others and the weight of a promise not to tell.

Couple this interest in secrets and the power of children’s social relationships with a preteen’s growing awareness of adult issues and sexual vulnerability and it’s obvious that a kid can get in over his head pretty quickly. Keeping secrets becomes a trap. Even if he is not personally involved in his friends’ worries, hearing about them and pledging to keep them secret can cause your child problems. Research has shown that adolescents who keep secrets and cannot unburden themselves to a trusted adult are more anxious and troubled than children who are not.

You cannot derail the interest in secrets. But you can keep the lines of communication open. Do this in two ways:

First, have a conversation with your child today – before you even think there’s a secret she’s keeping – about sharing important information. Let her know that some things should be told, even if it seems scary or dangerous or even if she’s made a promise not to tell. Let her know that if a friend shares a secret, your child should decide for herself if keeping the secret is a good idea or if telling an adult is actually the better course of action. Empower your child to be thoughtful about secrets.
Second, make certain you are someone who can be trusted with confidential information. Be someone who isn’t easily shocked, who doesn’t immediately jump to conclusions, and who doesn’t shush or shame a child for revealing disturbing information. If you want your child to tell you what’s bothering him, you have to be the sort of person who makes things better, not someone who makes things worse. You establish your credibility over time. The time to start being open-minded and non-judgmental is now.

Even with this sort of advance planning, you will stumble on secrets your child is keeping from you. What should you do then?

If you suspect your child is keeping secret something you think you and she should talk about, then say so. There’s no need to ask the child if she’s keeping something secret – there’s no point in forcing her to lie to you. Instead, say what you suspect and start the conversation from there: “I’ve noticed that your friends were talking about shoplifting at the mall. Tell me about that…” Remember that your ultimate objective is to keep the lines of communication open between the two of you, not to shame your child or make her feel she has to hide things from you. Make this a friendly conversation.
If you discover a secret your child has been keeping from you, the same process applies. Don’t ask questions that will encourage lying but simply say what you found out and go from there. “I was cleaning your room yesterday and I saw some things that make me think you’re smoking pot. Tell me about that…” Your child may accuse you of snooping. Don’t deny it. Say, “Yes, I was putting your clothes away in the drawers and I found things.”

Which brings up the question, should you snoop? Should you read your child’s diary, go through her desk drawers, search her computer? Maybe. If you really and truly have cause for concern, if you think your child is considering suicide, for example, or is acting erratically, then searching for clues might be the wise thing to do. It might save your child’s life. But keep in mind that your relationship with your child is built on trust. Whatever you do that erodes that trust has potential to erode your relationship.

Keeping secrets can become a trap. It’s the mechanism on which pedophiles, bullies and abusers rely. It’s the place where feelings can spiral out of control and lead to catastrophic consequences.

Help your child and your child’s friends know the difference between secrets that are fun to keep and secrets that must be shared.

November 14, 2014

Is it Wrong to Say "That’s Wrong"?

Most of us like Right Answers. Knowing the right answers got us where we are today – pretty successful grownups who feel competent most of the time. We are good at knowing things and we feel in some ways it’s our mission to make sure our children know things too. We like it when our kids give us the right answers. We don’t like it so much when our kids are wrong.

Is that a problem? If we correct children, and make them repeat the Right Answer, even tell them they’ve given us a Wrong Answer, is that itself the wrong thing to do?

Yes. The answer is yes. It’s wrong to say, “That’s wrong.” Here’s why.

Children have an awful lot to learn before they leave our care and go out into the big wide world, even if we’re only talking about heading off to kindergarten. Learning all that stuff takes quite a bit of effort and a large amount of courage. A person has to be persistent. A person has to feel she’s making progress. All of this is undermined if a grownup is hanging around criticizing.

When an adult tells a child, “That’s wrong,” the message received is, “You’re incompetent. You’re incapable. You’re dumb.” Certainly the grownup doesn’t mean all this. The grownup only means to point out that an answer or a thought was wrong. But the vulnerable child hears an indictment. She hears a message that tells her she’s not good enough.

The child also hears that it’s safer to not think. It’s safer to wait for someone to tell him the Right Answer so he can just memorize it. It’s safer to be passive, to be dumb about learning. This is the child who is always asking if the teacher likes his paper. This is the child who watches others to see what they’re doing before he dares to try something himself. This is the child who doesn’t bother to think but waits until the Right Answer is spoken by someone else.

When we tell children their ideas are wrong, we make learning a guessing game, not an exercise in thinking. Guess what the right answer is, we’re saying. If you’re lucky or if you’re smart, you’ll guess right. If you’re unlucky or if you’re stupid, you’ll guess wrong. It should be obvious that this isn’t fair. This doesn’t contribute to a love of learning. Telling children they’re wrong when they venture an idea stops their brains.

The problem, of course, is that we adults love the Right Answer. Wrong answers give us the willies. We hate how a wrong answer lingers in the air, infecting everyone. What if the child continues to think a wrong thought? What if his brother or sister agrees with a wrong idea?

We could calm down. Our anxiety is all about us and our feelings, not about the children and theirs. Eventually, the truth will become apparent and children will come round to what we think is “right.” Or, maybe, they will stumble on a new truth and we’ll be forced to agree with them. Either way is okay. The big issue isn’t landing on a question’s one right answer.

The big issue is thinking about questions at all.

October 30, 2014

How to Handle Sibling Rivalry

To a certain extent, sibling rivalry is normal. Teasing, arguments, and sabotage are pretty common even among good friends and it’s reasonable to see these behaviors in kids who share the same household.

But sibling rivalry can come to dominate family life and even descend into bullying. What can you do to smooth things over among your children and reduce the level of animosity?

The root cause of sibling rivalry is competition. This is obvious, since the word “rivalry” suggests a pitting of one side against another. Competition is learned. The way to reduce sibling rivalry is to reduce the level of competition in your home. Here’s how.

Share your attention fairly. Parental attention is a zero-sum game: attention given to one child necessarily means less attention to another child. Children actively jostle for your attention, even resorting to bad behavior so you have to focus on them, and actively undermine attention you give to a brother or sister. So notice if you tend to attend more to one child than another, if you let one child “get more” than a sibling, and if children may reasonably believe you have a favorite child (and it’s not them).

Naturally, the baby needs attention and a preschool child (or even older child) may resent all the time the baby takes. The same can be said for a child with special needs and her typically-developing siblings. Sometimes it’s just impossible to be fair in how you share attention. But at least be aware of the impact this difference has on the other children in the family. Be sympathetic and supportive. Give children fewer reasons to think you don’t love them.

Don’t pit one child against another. Making comparisons between your children, so that one feels lower in status than another or one feels higher, is obviously a trigger for sibling rivalry. Competition isn’t a very good motivator, especially when the stakes are high – and there’s nothing higher than earning a parent’s favor. Avoid comparing one child to another or suggesting that one child is faster, stronger, smarter, better looking, more responsible, or anything else than his sibling is. Instead make statements that are not comparisons: “You’re really strong” is better than “You are so much stronger than your brother is.”

Children will be competitive without you injecting competition into everything. Little kids want to be just like their older siblings, and older siblings work hard to stay ahead of the younger kids. Don’t add to the competition by setting things up yourself.

Draw the line about being mean. There is a good bit of evidence that bullying happens at home as often as it happens at school. Your children shouldn’t feel intimidated by a sibling or unsafe in their own home. Remember that bullying isn’t just physical but includes also verbal abuse and sabotage. Set clear standards for courteous behavior and make certain all your children adhere to them.

This is where favoritism creeps back in. Children believe their siblings get away with behavior they themselves are punished for. They say their parents ignore them when they complain about a sibling who is abusive. Open your eyes. If children say they are uncomfortable, they are. Deal with it.

What can you do if sibling rivalry is already a habit among your children? Besides changing your own behavior, as outlined above, what can you do to put a stop to the nastiness?

Identify one problem to focus on. Don’t single out any one child as the instigator: remember that almost always both parties contribute to the trouble in one way or another. Then notice your own default patterns of reaction and how you might be supporting or contributing to the problem. Settle on one frequently-occurring situation to fix.
Decide on a way to change the pattern. Depending on the situation and whether this is fueled by temperamental issues, developmental stuff, or just bad habits, settle on your plan of approach. This might involve changing how things happen or it might include having a talk with the kids and settling on a new way of interacting. It might mean that you arrange things so the situation doesn’t occur. It probably means you will change how you yourself react. Whatever you decide to do will signal to your kids that a change is underway.
Avoid setting yourself up as the referee or judge. If you sit down with your children and tell them that you will punish the next one who does X, you encourage tattling and extortion. Tattling and extortion are not what you want; you want peace and quiet. So stay positive. Work out with your children how they are to act in the problem situation in the future. Say nothing about what will happen if they don’t.
Go on a positive comment campaign. Notice pleasant behavior and comment on it. Notice when children resolve the problem you discussed in a positive way, even if only one child did this and his sibling did not. Mention only the good behavior, not the bad. If you’ve been commenting only on the negative stuff, you’ve been inadvertently supporting it. Ignore bad behavior as much as you can and heap praise on the good stuff. You’ll soon see more good and less bad.

When you replace unpleasant actions with more acceptable behavior, you guide your children in handling difficult situations and handling themselves. These are valuable lessons.

When you reduce the perception of favoritism and competition among your kids, you and they will get along better.

September 25, 2014

Five Little Words Your Child Wants to Hear

A couple of college football coaches have asked their athletes this question over the last 30 years: "What is your worst memory from playing youth and high school sports?"

You might be surprised by the answer: "The ride home from games with my parents."

Stuck in the car with a parent still mulling over the game, a child cannot escape. He gets asked why he missed that play. He gets asked what he can do to play better next time. He gets asked why the coach put so-and-so in or what he thinks about that call by the ref. Most kids are focused on just getting home. Many parents are not.

Those same college coaches asked their athletes a second question: “What did your parents say that made you feel great about being involved in sports?”

The answer here was simple: parents said, "I love to watch you play."

Saying “I love to watch you….” is a statement without any strings attached. It doesn’t suggest how a child can make us happier by being even better. It doesn’t imply we’re not so happy right now as a child could make us if she just worked harder and earned more acclaim.

Saying “I love to watch you…” can’t be said without a warm smile. It’s a sentence that feels good to say and feels good to hear. It’s a gift.

So try it. After the next game look your child in the eye and say, “I love to watch you play.” Just that. See if he doesn’t light up.

After your child practices the piano, helps his little sister, or just sits in a corner reading a book - whenever you see something you want to encourage, something you want your child to do more of - don’t make any comment or give any advice. Just say “I love to watch you…” do whatever you saw. Just that.

Then spread the love around. Tell your partner, “I love to watch you play with the kids.” Tell your mother, “I love to see you and the baby having such a good time.” Stop and appreciate the wonderful people and talents around you. There’s no need to tell people how to do things better. They’re doing just fine on their own right now.

Once we appreciate our children and tell them how much we love to see them in action, we really will appreciate them more. We’ll feel less inclined to judge and correct and we'll feel happier to just let them be. We’ll be able to see how wonderful our children are.

And our kids will be happier to let us watch. Our kids won’t be afraid of the ride home.