I’ve put the section on behaviour last because it’s so much easier to behave better when the other things I’ve been talking about are taken care of. That includes, for a child, having their feelings considered as part of their supportive, loving relationships. We all behave better when we’re not desperate for more contact and connection, when we feel we belong.
The hand that rocks the cradle does rule the world. We owe it to the world to love more than we judge and to consider our children’s feelings rather than automatically dismissing them as silly or wrong. Treating infants and children with consideration and respect doesn’t mean you don’t set boundaries.
In this part, we will look at the winning and losing game, the qualities we need to develop to behave well, how strict a parent should be, clinging and whingeing and when to set boundaries and how to set them.
Your child will ape your behaviour, if not now, eventually. I once had a client who explained to me how very different he was from his father, who ran large corporations for profit in the top-down manner of an autocrat. But although my client worked in the charity sector, his way of running his department was – you’ve guessed it – autocratic. Our own behaviour is probably the biggest influence on our child’s behaviour. We think we are individuals, but we all affect each other. We are but parts of a system, and the roles we carve out for ourselves will be in reaction to the parts other people play around us. So, however your child behaves or how you behave, it is not in isolation, it is co-created by the people and culture around you too.
How would you describe your behaviour? Are you respectful to other human beings all the time? Do you consider their feelings? Does your ‘good behaviour’ go deep or is it merely manners? Are you pleasant on the surface, but do you then condemn people behind their backs? Do you get stuck in relentless games of one-upmanship? However you behave, you’ll be teaching your children to behave like that too, including any behaviour you don’t approve of.
If you consistently behave with kind consideration towards your children and towards other people, then your children will probably follow suit … eventually. In the meantime, your children might not behave ‘well’ all the time, because before language, behaviour is the only way they can communicate what is going on for them. And this remains true even for quite a few years after they develop language too. That’s because it takes some practice and skill to know what it is we’re feeling, to put it into words and then to work out from that what we need. Even adults – nay, even poets – can find this hard.
I don’t believe there is anyone who is all good or all bad. I’ll go even further: I would say that the concepts of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are not useful. It is true, although quite rare, that some people are born without the capacity to feel empathy, no matter how much is shown to them. But having a differently wired brain does not mean you are in any way ‘bad’. I will only relent on this good-and-evil argument so far as to say that some people’s behaviour is inconvenient or harmful to others. No one is born bad. So rather than label behaviour as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, I describe it as ‘convenient’ or ‘inconvenient’.
Behaviour, as I’ve said, is purely communication. People – and especially children – act out in inappropriate, inconvenient ways because they haven’t found alternative, more effective, more convenient ways of expressing their feelings and needs. Some children’s behaviour is inconvenient to others, but it is not ‘bad’.
Your job is to decipher your child’s behaviour. Rather than dividing our children up into ‘good’ bits and ‘bad’ bits, there are questions you need to ask. What is their behaviour trying to say? Can you help them to communicate in a more convenient way? What are they telling you with their bodies, with their noises and with whatever words they may choose? And, a really hard question to ask yourself: how is their behaviour co-created with yours?
Once, when my daughter, Flo, was three years old she wanted to walk the short way to the shops and not go in her pushchair so I left the pushchair at home. On the way back she just stopped and sat down on someone’s front step. My instinct was to think, ‘Oh no!’ because, in my mind, I was more in the future than in the present; I was already putting away the shopping so I could relax and rest. It wasn’t in my plan to rest halfway home. But Flo was resting now.
Then I realized that it didn’t matter when we got home. I put down the bags and crouched beside her. Flo was looking at an ant following a crack in the pavement. Sometimes it disappeared into the crack and then it got out again. I watched with her.
An elderly man came up to us and said to me, ‘Is she winning?’ I knew what he meant straightaway. He meant, in the battle of the wills between parent and child, was she getting her way at my expense? I knew this battle of old. My parents believed in it to the extent that they thought if any child got too much of what they wanted, whatever it was, it would be bad for them.
But you and your child are on the same side: you both want to feel content rather than frustrated. You both want to get along and behave well. The old man smiled knowingly down on us. He was only trying to be friendly, so I didn’t argue. I didn’t say something like, ‘We are in a relationship, not in a battle.’ I just said, ‘We are watching an ant,’ and smiled back at him. He went on his way, and so did the ant. Flo and I stood up and went on our way too.
As I said above, all behaviour is communication, so behind behaviour you’ll find the feelings. Once you discover the feeling behind any particular behaviour and empathize with it, then you can put the feeling into words, you will help a child use words to express themselves and they will have less need to act out on that feeling.
In the example above I realized that Flo, unused to walking for so long, was tired and wanted to rest. I thought about how she might have been overwhelmed by all the sights and sounds around her – she might not have learned how to block out the ones not relevant to her, as an adult automatically does, and that may have been behind her need to focus on just one thing. It is more useful to think of a situation from the child’s point of view rather than yours. Mine here would have been: I want to get home; she is stopping me; it is my will against hers.
Traditionally, it was thought that you must not let children ‘get their own way’. I think this is what the old man was trying to say with his ‘Is she winning?’ remark. He was going down the ‘You are making a rod for your own back’ approach. I hear about this all the time when people talk about tantrums. Parents seem to fear tantrums so much that even to notice one, they think, will mean that a child will never grow out of having them. In this don’t-let-them-win game that parents play, there are no winners. There is only manipulation rather than relating to each other. The game is not real. It is something parents make up.
Such an approach is based on a fantasy of what will happen in the future rather than what is working in the present. What was working in that present was Flo resting before continuing with our walk.
The game of winning and losing can get entrenched as a dynamic and this damages relationships. By dominating a child, you teach them to dominate. What if your child gets into the pattern of thinking it’s normal and desirable to impose their will on to other people? How popular will that make them with their classmates?
If you act as though a large part of childcare is imposing your will over your children, the patterns of relating that your child will learn from that have the potential to be harmful. If a child learns such a limited choice of roles – ‘the doer’ and the ‘done to’, or to put it another way, the dominant and the submissive – it considerably limits their potential as a person. For example, if the roles they have had the most experience of are victim and bully, they may either become a bully or start to automatically find themselves in the victim role.
The game of winning and losing also has consequences for the emotional repertoire of your child. To lose a battle of wills can often mean humiliation. And the consequence of being humiliated is not, as the word might imply, that a person becomes humble but that they become angry. That anger may be turned inwards towards the self, leading to depression, or outwards towards the world, which results in antisocial behaviour.
So, if it’s not about winning and losing, what is the best way to think about helping a child behave appropriately and conveniently at any one time? Generally, going with what works in the present, which is grounded in reality rather than what you fear may happen in the future, based on fantasy, is a useful maxim to live by with children.
A client of mine, Gina, was weaning her daughter. The only way she could get her to eat was by singing to her while the child ate her vegetables and spaghetti sitting on her special rug in the middle of the room. Doing this, the kid was happy and, because the food was going in, my client was happy too.
Sometimes we tell ourselves stories about the future: what if the only way she can ever eat is when she is sung to at the same time? What if he never learns to sleep in his own bed? What if she never wants to give up her pacifier? What if Mr Squidgy has to accompany him to the office on his first day at work? But these stories are just that: stories. In the example above, if Gina had thought, ‘What if this is the only way my daughter will ever eat? What if she’ll always refuse to eat at a table?’ she could have worried about, say, school lunchtimes, restaurants, even her daughter’s first date. But, believe me, almost everything with children is a phase. So it’s fine to go with what works in the present, however odd it seems.
I think going with what works for everyone right now is especially useful when it comes to sleep. If the only way everyone gets some sleep is if you push two double beds together and pile the whole family in, then don’t worry about tomorrow: get some sleep tonight. Eventually, your children will want their own beds. They’ll get fed up with your snoring.
If what is working stops working, then implement a change, but make it one where everyone wins, as far as possible, or at least one where there are no winners or losers. Modelling flexibility will make this easier.
As I said above, your job is to model good behaviour, to behave towards your child and towards other people with the same empathetic attitude and hope your child will adopt this behaviour too. As well as that, there are four skills we all need to develop in order to become socialized, to behave conveniently.
These are:
To put these into context, I managed to (1) tolerate my frustration when Flo wanted to sit down on a step on the way back from the shops when I wanted to get home. I was (2) flexible because I changed my expectation about the speed of the progress we would make on our walk back. I solved the problem (3) of Flo needing a rest by allowing her to have one and (4) I used my ability to see how wanting to stop might feel from Flo’s perspective. And, indeed, I managed to see the situation from the old man’s point of view as well, thus I managed to behave conveniently for both Flo and the old man.
Some children naturally pick up the four skills of socialized behaviour because they automatically mimic those around them. But children vary enormously at what age they reach any milestones, including these. Some children can read before they are three; I couldn’t read with any fluency until I was nine. Some can run about before they are one and others still prefer to crawl at eighteen months. And just as physical skills are learned at differing ages, children develop each of their behavioural skills at different times to their peers too.
I often hear parents say that their child is ‘driving them mad!’, which translates as ‘I cannot stop my child from screaming/crying/whining/demanding’ or whatever behaviour is pushing their buttons. I believe when children behave in a way you find inconvenient, it cannot be considered a choice in the way an adult makes a choice. Children want to be loved by you, they want to connect, they want to be friends. Sometimes they want your attention so much that getting negative attention from you is better than getting no attention.
It helps, when it comes to managing your own emotions around your child, if you can understand the emotion and the circumstances that caused your child to behave in the way you’re finding hard to deal with.
Some children appear to be difficult to understand and to soothe from the beginning. It could be colic or some other discomfort such as not liking lights or noise, or having a full nappy, or being scared or tired, or being very sensitive, or lots of other things. Often we may have no idea of the cause of their distress, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to soothe them. Alternatively, your child might have been easy to soothe as a baby but may have difficulties dealing with self-control later on. Soothing them and accepting them at whatever stage they are at is more likely to help to nudge them along to the next stage than losing patience with them.
Often, frustration in a child comes when the challenge to do something is too great and the child can’t handle it. A child is most frustrated just before they master a new stage or skill. Before they can walk, talk, think, write, be sexual, be independent, they’re at their most brittle. You can think of the child’s inconvenient outburst or tantrum or sulk as a developmental milestone that has not yet been reached rather than a planned, intentional intervention on their part. If you watch a child have a tantrum, they are not enjoying it. No one would choose to feel like that if they felt they had a choice about it.
Another thing that’s often said is that children behave in a way that’s inconvenient to others because their parents are lax. This isn’t true: many lax parents manage to have children whose behaviour is not a problem to themselves or to others, and stricter parents may have children who, despite the consistency and fairness of their mothers and fathers, behave inconveniently. Sometimes, whether a kid behaves conveniently or not is not so much to do with whether their parents are strict or lax, it’s more about the speed they pick up those four skills: tolerance of frustration, flexibility, problem-solving skills and ability to consider others.
How to learn to behave conveniently rather than in an antisocial manner is not an exact science. What causes one child to behave appropriately might not bring forth the same results in another. Children are people, not machines. We want them to be able to connect and relate rather than become robots. I am not a fan of sticker charts or bribes because they are more about judging behaviour than relating. From them, children learn neither tolerance for frustration, nor flexibility, nor problem-solving skills, nor how to think and feel for other people. Behaviour charts are manipulative. They are a trick. If we manipulate children, we cannot complain if they learn how to manipulate us and others. I believe in relating to children rather than conditioning them to want star stickers.
When we behave well, it’s rarely because we want a reward or because we fear punishment, it’s because behaving with consideration towards other people comes naturally to us. It’s because we have learned that collaboration leads to a more harmonious life than opposition does. We don’t do favours for other people or consider their feelings because we fear punishment if we don’t; we help people because we want to make life easier for them. We want our children to act with consideration and empathy towards others rather than being motivated only by the narrower ideas of punishment and material reward. Having said that, I do not know a single parent, including myself, who has not resorted to a bribe at one point or another, but bribes should be the exception, not the norm.
The best way of getting your kids interested in chores, for example filling and emptying the dishwasher, is to let them play with whatever it is when they are toddlers (remember: play is work). They will keep imitating you when you cooperate with their play and they will cooperate with you and, after what can seem, I admit, a long time, you have a person in your house who empties the dishwasher because they want to contribute, not because you are bribing them to empty it. Some people believe in paying their children to do chores to teach them, they say, the value of money. However, I believe to teach a child the value of money we need to teach them the value of people.
Children learn their behaviour from how they are treated. They really learn how to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ when gratitude and respect have been shown to them. They can then embody it. If you only drill your child into saying these things, they may never learn to feel them. We can feel embarrassed as parents when someone gives our child a present and they don’t say ‘thank you’ because we want everyone to love our children as much as we do and we do not want them to reflect badly on us, but we need to put our narcissism to one side and, rather than humiliate our child by getting them to say something they might not feel, we can give thanks for the present ourselves so the giver doesn’t feel unappreciated. Children learn real gratitude when they are shown it. It starts by you welcoming those pretend cups of tea they want to hand you for hours at a time. They are not wasted hours. They are invested hours.
So how can you understand what your child’s current inconvenient behaviour might mean? Start with thinking about when you’re at your worst. I know I’m at my worst when people around me don’t understand me and do not even seem to be trying to understand me; I find it a strain to behave well if I need someone’s attention and they are ignoring me; I feel stressed when an expectation, a hope or a plan I have is dashed due to things outside my control, when I’m expected to achieve something I find impossible, or when I’m in a situation I can no longer tolerate. When your child acts out in frustration, it is probably due to similar circumstances. They may cry or sulk or scream, kick, hit, throw things or even throw themselves about so much they hurt themselves.
Make a note as to when they act out in this way. What are their triggers? What frustrations do they have the most difficulty with? Is your mood another factor in the mix? You need to be the one who observes because, if you ask them, they may not know why they reacted like they did. They’ll probably say something like ‘It’s not fair’ or even ‘I don’t know.’
The problem is, when we are upset, that feeling of being upset is so predominant it’s difficult to articulate it. And when very young it’s even more difficult for a child to articulate why they find some situations difficult or impossible to cope with. Sometimes, this can apply to us as parents as well as our children. Let’s have a look at the following example. It’s an email I received from Gina, who has a nursery-aged daughter called Aoife.
Tonight, I got stuck on a train for an hour coming from London so I didn’t get to nursery to pick up Aoife until 5.40, over half an hour late. When I got there she was fine, playing nicely with a little boy. But as soon as we left she began to be … I am just going to say it because this is what I’m thinking … so naughty. She ran up and down the corridor screaming, ‘No, no, no!’ when I asked her to put on her coat. I felt completely out of control, like she was running rings around me. I was so embarrassed in front of the other parents. For the sake of trying to sound effective, I told her she wouldn’t get a pudding that night if she carried on … but of course it made no difference.
Nobody else’s child at nursery acts like this. Aoife always looks like the naughty one. Outside, she was just as bad. She wouldn’t get in the buggy, she wouldn’t put on her hat, or her gloves. I had to go to the chemist’s, where she wouldn’t hold my hand then kept pulling things off the shelves. At the counter she started screaming and shouting. Trying to get her in the buggy, we ended up almost wrestling while she was screaming. Again, I felt out of control and completely useless because my child was being naughty and I couldn’t control her.
When I got to the corner of our road I realized, having tried to put Aoife’s coat on her for so long, I’d left my shopping bag with the supper in it in the nursery porch. I ran back but it was all locked up. I felt despairing. I was so angry with Aoife, the angriest I have ever been with her because I was going to look even more stupid and like a crap parent at nursery.
When we got home and I saw my partner I burst into tears. I was literally standing with my back to Aoife, sobbing. That also made me feel terrible because who cries in front of their child? Why am I such a bad parent?
This is what I wrote back:
How awful to be delayed by a stuck train for a whole hour. If it was me, I would have been so stressed and frustrated and miserable, imagining how horrible it was that I was going to be late for pick-up. I’d be so worried that the nursery would think I was uncaring because I was so late. I’d be worried that my daughter might be worried too. Knowing how I can work myself up about stuff like that, I’d be on edge and would need for everything else to go smoothly, for routine to be re-established. So, I’d be in such a rush to get back on track that I wouldn’t have anything left to think about how Aoife would be feeling. I’d try to make her behave too because I wouldn’t have one jot of emotional energy left to slow down to try and find out what Aoife’s feelings were and to work out how to soothe her. I would feel mortified if other people, instead of witnessing love and cooperation between us, saw my child having a tantrum and me apparently not being able to do anything about it. (I can also say, now I have some distance from the toddler years, that we have all been there.) I’d feel terrible that I’d issued a threat. Then forgetting the shopping – it would have been too much for me to hold it all together. I too would have burst into tears as soon as I’d found the safe arms of someone who knows and loves me.
Now, I’m going to imagine what it’s like for Aoife:
Hi, Mum. I can’t write yet and even my talking is on the limited side, but if I could explain myself, this is what I’d say:
It would really help if, instead of judging me as being ‘naughty’ and explaining me away that way, you tried instead to work out what is going on between us.
At nursery, I had an underlying feeling of uneasiness because it felt like you should have been there already and I should have been with you. Then, when you did come, I was playing a complicated game. You told me we were leaving right this minute and to put on my coat. I said, ‘No.’ Then you insisted and then I screamed and then you weren’t happy. It did not go well.
Let’s look at why I said ‘No.’ I have got into the habit of saying it when things go too fast for me and I want them to slow down. I’m not trying to be difficult or manipulative, it’s just an automatic reaction because I hate sudden changes that I’m not expecting. You were so distracted and rushed that I couldn’t get a connection with you and that scared me, and when I get scared I get angry too. You are always thinking about what needs to happen in the future, but I live in the present and I need you to be in the present with me, otherwise I feel alone and get upset.
When you were late, I needed you to slow down and explain what had happened to make you late. Then I needed you to explain what was going to happen next so I could get my head round it. I haven’t yet learned how to be flexible so I need more time than you do when it comes to shifting gears. Putting on my coat AND stopping what I was in the middle of was just too much for me at once. I bet if you were in the middle of a complicated piece of work, which is what playing is for me, you would be frustrated if you were interrupted.
What I need when you want me to stop doing something, whatever it is, whether it’s playing or running about, is a warning. I need a specific warning for each thing: to stop playing, to put on my coat, to get in the pushchair. I need a space to take each thing in too. Tell me what the plan is when you know it and give me a chance to take it in and understand. I might need a five-minute warning before I need to stop playing, and to be told I might find it hard. Then a three-minute warning. Then a one-minute warning. If I still cannot bear the thought of putting on my coat when we are inside, carry my coat outside and ask me to put it on there. One gear change I really hate is when I have to go from running about to getting in the pushchair. There is nowhere for my energy to go so it just bursts out of me in frustration.
When you tell me not to say ‘No’ or to stop running around or shouting and tell me what the consequence will be, it doesn’t help. That’s because I haven’t yet picked up the skill of looking ahead to the possible outcomes of how I behave. Those neural pathways will fire up in due course. At the moment, when you’re telling me off it makes me think you don’t understand, then I get more scared and more angry and have to say ‘No’ all the more. When I feel overwhelmed, I can’t be still and quiet.
What would help is if you could try to identify my difficulty and say it in a way that makes sense for me. For example, ‘You are feeling frustrated because you don’t want to stop this fun game.’ By you putting my frustrations and fears into words, I will start to learn to use words too. Then I will be able to communicate better and be less likely to lose control.
If you get cross, or tell me I’m being silly, I will just close down or scream. I know it’s hard for you when you’re stressed and in a hurry to think about relating with me rather than just getting me to do stuff or to behave in a certain way. But when we have a to-and-fro exchange where I feel met and seen and loved and understood, then I feel calm and my feelings don’t burst from me in the form of inconvenient behaviour.
At the chemist’s, if you had told me what you were thinking and doing, I could have helped you. But because you just told me to be good, I copied you and got things from the shelves. Please include me in tasks, even though you think you have not got time. It takes a long time anyway because at the moment you spend that time admonishing me.
Even though you were crying, Daddy loved you and gave you a cuddle. How nice it was that he understood about forgetting the shopping. That’s what I need too. If we’d had a cuddle at nursery when I was upset because I had to stop playing I think we both could have managed better. Mum, because you know you and me are together for ever, superficially you care more about what other people might be thinking. I understand this, but it isn’t helpful when you judge yourself through their eyes.
One day soon, Mum, I will be able to tolerate frustration, be flexible about plans, I will be able to put my feelings into words rather than behave inconveniently and I will also learn to take your feelings on board too, because I’ll learn that from you thinking about mine.
And don’t worry about being good or bad at parenting. You are the best mummy in the world and the only one I ever, ever want.
Being a parent is always going to be time consuming. It is better to put in that time positively by pre-empting trouble rather than negatively, after the trouble has arisen. If you go too fast for the pace of your child, if you don’t verbalize their feelings for them, if you don’t give them warnings about your plans, if you don’t include them in any tasks, you will instead find you spend the time you thought you had saved telling them off instead. There’s no getting around having to invest time in your child, so why not invest it positively? I’m happy to report that as Gina learned to slow down, to stay in contact with Aoife by staying in the present and began to see situations from her point of view and put them simply into words for her, Aoife’s behaviour became more convenient.
Exercise: how to predict difficulties
If you want to change a situation your child often finds difficult, or you know there’s a potentially tricky new situation coming up, it can really help to stop and imagine what it is like to be your child and to imagine what they would say if they could identify their feelings, articulate them – and knew what would help. Try writing it down in the form of a letter to yourself from your child or baby’s point of view, like I did above. Writing it down can really help you get into your child’s mindset – and that can make it clearer how both of you can have a calmer time.
It’s helpful when we want a child (or anyone!) to stop one behaviour if we suggest an alternative way of being, as happens in the following example:
John’s four-year-old, Junior, used to wake up every single morning, start screaming, run to his parents’ bedroom and carry on screaming at them until he was given a cuddle.
One morning, John suggested to his son he might like to try a new tactic, of coming into their bedroom without screaming. He told Junior, ‘You can just say, “Good morning, Mum and Dad, I would like a cuddle, please.”’ Junior tried to do this, but there were still tears.
Junior’s mum asked him, ‘Do you feel lonely when you wake up?’ and he nodded. They suggested he could say this instead: ‘Good morning, Mum and Dad. I’m lonely and I’d like a cuddle, please.’ This turned things around. Junior began to bounce into the bedroom every morning, say his new sentence and get a cuddle.
After a few days, the parents said, ‘You don’t seem lonely. You can be happy and still get a cuddle too!’ In the end, Junior had a new morning sentence: ‘I’m okay, and I want a cuddle.’
John and Junior’s story illustrates how putting feelings into words can really shift them along. This is true for adults, too.
It can feel hard, as a parent, to acknowledge your child’s feeling beneath tears and screams because you don’t want to think that your child is suffering. To name the suffering feels like it will make it worse, but it doesn’t, it usually makes it better. It takes time to put things into words but when a child is upset they’ll find it even harder to find the words, so it is up to you.
When Flo was a toddler I used to take her swimming at the local pool. One day I couldn’t go, so my husband took her instead.
Their swimming session went well until it was time to leave and my husband turned to go up the stairs. The way we usually went into the pool was via the stairs and the way we usually left the pool was via the lift. So Flo, then aged twenty-two months, said, ‘No,’ and sat on the floor.
This was inconvenient behaviour. It fits the normal definition of ‘bad’ behaviour, but Flo wasn’t behaving badly, she just wanted the routine to be as it always was. She hadn’t yet learned flexibility, or how to articulate clearly what she wanted. Instead of taking the time to find out what the ‘no’ was about, my hurried, harassed husband picked her up to take her up the stairs, which is not what she wanted at all, so she started to scream. By the time they got home they were both very cross. After I heard this tale I looked into her big blue eyes, still brimming with tears, and said, ‘You were looking forward to pressing the lift button, weren’t you?’ A little nod. ‘And Dad didn’t know that’s why you wanted to go in the lift and not use the stairs, did he?’ A shake of the head.
What we learned from this experience is that if you are going to deviate from a normal, much-loved routine, it’s probably necessary to give lots of warning, some imagining and possibly even some rehearsing.
I was lucky in that I was able to guess what went wrong. But often situations arise and you can’t guess. Maybe you’ve taken your child to something you wanted to be lovely, like going swimming, but it has all ended in tears and it seems impossible to work out why.
It’s natural for you to look for some sort of certainty about why a child is crying or shouting or refusing to do something – otherwise, you feel out of control – but it is really okay not to know and to stay curious. The reason parents fall back on most is ‘Oh, it’s because they’re tired,’ which may or may not be a factor in the mix. But I can remember, as a child, hearing this explanation, and it added to my fury because it wasn’t an accurate mirror of what I was feeling so it left me feeling misunderstood. The ‘tired’ explanation is much loved by parents, but I think we know who is truly tired, and I don’t mean the kid!
There are some other interpretations for children’s inconvenient behaviour that might even be harmful for a child to hear. If you are up for recognizing them in yourself, you have already made a start on the repair:
Everyone needs attention, whatever age they are. If a child automatically has enough attention and feels secure that attention is there when they need it, they don’t have to develop maladaptive ways to get it. If it’s true that your child is doing something inconvenient to get attention, ask them instead to ask for some attention.
My daughter used to ask me for an apple that she didn’t really want. What she wanted was me looking pleased and beaming at her. When I noticed the apples I gave her mostly went uneaten I twigged and asked her to ask for attention instead. This became a fun game between us and wasted far fewer apples. And she wasn’t shamed for wanting what we all want at times – attention.
Toddlers don’t have the skills to practise malice aforethought; they are just being themselves rather than planning to annoy you. Babies and children are their feelings; they haven’t yet learned to observe their feelings, to work out what they want then ask for it. They need help with that.
When your child has a screaming fit, with kicking and perhaps head-banging, they are not carrying out a pre-planned strategy, they are being their feelings and need help to articulate them more conveniently. It will come in time.
If you feel an older child is trying to play you and their tantrum seems more like amateur dramatics than an actual tantrum, you can say how you experience their behaviour and put into words what they may be trying to tell you. For example: ‘I feel like you are trying to trick me into letting you off your homework. I guess it can feel lonely doing it by yourself. I’ll sit next to you while you do it instead.’
Just because you find your child’s reaction to frustration unpleasant it doesn’t mean they have any idea of the impact it’s having or how to calculate how to achieve that impact. My daughter was not trying to wind me up when she sat on a step on the way back from the shops, even though I felt momentarily frustrated by it. Nor was she trying to wind up her father when she plonked herself on the floor at the swimming pool; she simply did not yet have the words to say what she wanted. Children learn the skill of using vocabulary to describe how they feel and what they want when we model this for them. And think about it: learning this skill is way more complicated than, say, learning to ask for a biscuit, especially when strong emotions are involved.
Some children learn social skills more slowly than others, some have more difficulties dealing with frustration, some take longer to learn how to be flexible and problem-solve. This gives rise to some problems for them and for you. Most people probably think that plonking yourself down and screaming if you have to use the stairs instead of the lift is age appropriate for a toddler, but by the age of six or seven? The expectation is usually that your child should have grown out of it. But some children need more help in working out what it is they are feeling and finding appropriate ways to express or hold the feelings. What really helps is if they are expressed accurately, by someone on their side: you.
You will not always be able to fathom out what is going on, but being kind rather than punitive towards them in their distress will encourage future cooperation and nurture your relationship with them rather than hinder it.
If you need help or reassurance about your child’s behaviour because it seems stuck at a stage for much longer than all their peers, see a family therapist or a social worker. Your doctor or the school should be able to guide you towards the help you need. It may lead to a diagnosis, which may feel like a relief to you and lead you to get more help and support.
The downside of a diagnosis is that it’s like a judgement, a full stop. This means it can close a door on looking at and learning to understand the feelings behind a behaviour. A diagnosis can become an excuse for the behaviour. And there is a danger with a label that you can think things will never get any better and you lose your optimism around it.
Or worse, a situation that does not need to be might become medicalized. Let’s look at ADHD. Think about this: more children born in August are diagnosed with ADHD than those born in September. I believe this shows that authorities tend to decide that those born in August have a disorder rather than merely being less mature than their peers who were born nearly a year earlier. This isn’t to say all medicine designed to inhibit behaviour is bad, only that it should be a very last resort.
If you feel you cannot cope with your child’s behaviour, seek professional help sooner rather than later, as the longer we have habits that are not helping our relationship with our child, the longer it can take to untangle them.
The three main approaches to trying to steer a child’s behaviour tend to be: 1. being strict, 2. being lax and 3. collaborating.
1. Being strict is probably the most common way we may think about child discipline. It’s about imposing your adult will upon the child. For example, you insist that your child tidies their room and you punish them if they don’t.
Nobody is especially keen on having someone else’s will imposed upon them and children are no exception. Some children may be compliant, but by no means all. This way of going about things leads to stand-offs, to winning and losing, to humiliation and anger.
The danger here is that what you’re modelling is ‘being right’, ‘being inflexible’ and having a low tolerance for frustration yourself. By imposing your insistence on your child, you could be inadvertently teaching them they must be always right, inflexible and intolerant.
Then, you can get into a cycle of reciprocal inflexibility or, to put it another way, stand-offs and screaming matches or a withdrawal from communicating with you. This isn’t a good long-term strategy for a relaxed relationship with your child. That’s not to say you don’t occasionally say, ‘Toys away, right now!’ but this needs to be an exceptional style of communication, not the usual one.
If being authoritarian is your go-to way of being with your children, you are also risking their future relationship with authority. It may block them from being able to cooperate with authority or being able to be a leader themselves or you may breed a dictator. To sum up: consistently imposing your will on your child is neither the best way to nurture morality or cooperation, nor is it a good way to have a good relationship with them.
2. Being lax is when you never communicate any standards or expectations to your child. Quite often when parents do not have any boundaries for their children it is a backlash against anxiety-driven, risk-averse child-rearing or a reaction to their own authoritarian upbringing. Some children may be able to establish their own standards and expectations for themselves, but not all can. A child who does not know what is expected of them may feel lost and unsafe. Sometimes, when we parents are so determined not to do what our own authoritarian parents did, we can swing too far in another direction and not give our children any boundaries at all. If you think about it, in those situations we are still behaving more in reaction to our own parents than to the situation we are faced with in the present.
However, being lax is not all bad; it may sometimes be the best solution for a situation in the present. Because sometimes it is sensible to drop an expectation you had for your child because they are not ready for it. For example, your eldest might have found tidying up easy but your next child feels overwhelmed by it, so rather than have a battle, and one in which there will be no winners and there will be an erosion of goodwill, if a child is not ready for what you want them to be able to do eventually, drop the expectation for now. This means not insisting that the toys are tidied at all. This is not necessarily giving in but intentionally deciding to put off putting down a boundary for your child until they are ready for it. Being lax can be a positive short-term solution, until your child is ready for the collaborative method.
3. The collaborative method is when you and your child put your heads together to solve a problem so you’re more of a counsellor than a dictator. This is my favourite approach as it’s about trying to find a solution to the problem together.
So, what is the collaborative method, and how does it work?
And don’t judge your child.
Stage 2 can be tricky, as it can feel hard saying something you don’t feel you want to endorse, but by not acknowledging a feeling you may think is inconvenient, your child is more rather than less likely to dig in their heels. Because your child may not be able to articulate everything they feel, you may have to use a multiple-choice approach to find out the feelings behind the problem, as in the above example.
When you have nailed down their feelings, then you can redefine the problem, which is not ‘Your room’s a mess and you’d better tidy it up or I’ll throw away all your toys.’ That would only shame and threaten and build up resentment. Instead, empathize. This takes practice and can feel counter-intuitive, but how children learn to consider other people’s feelings is by having their own considered.
When you brainstorm solutions together, it’s important to give your child the lead and not to dismiss out of hand anything they suggest. So, they might come up with, ‘We could leave my room as it is.’ Consider this: ‘Yes, we could do that. You might be happy with that solution, but I have difficulty with it. Not only does it make me feel uncomfortable, but I’d find it hard to clean the room or put away your clean clothes. What else could we do?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘It’s okay. We’re not in a rush, take your time.’ It’s important not to be the clever one with all the answers because, if you are, you disempower your child. ‘I could put away the toys now, then have a break and then you could help me with the clothes because I find folding difficult.’ ‘Okay, that sounds good to me. Come and get me when it’s time to start folding and we can work out ways of doing it.’
If you have been brought up with the authoritarian method, you may think it’s the ideal. In that case, the collaborative method may seem very long-winded. However, the important thing here is that, as well as the room getting tidied, you are both being open about how you feel and therefore looking after your relationship and learning how to compromise and problem-solve. The real work of parenting is not the tidying, it is being with your children and helping them to develop. The collaborative method helps to develop the essential skills for socialized behaviour, which are: tolerance for frustration, flexibility, problem-solving skills and empathy.
If you observe any child having a tantrum, they are not enjoying it. They are not doing it because they want to do it. It is unlikely to be a premeditated tactic on their part; they are being their feelings, their frustration, their anger and their sadness.
The same is true for tantrums as for any behaviour you don’t like: ask yourself, what feelings is this communicating? What are the feelings behind the behaviour? Once you have guessed or worked it out, meet and validate those feelings. For example, ‘You are very angry I cannot allow you ice cream before lunch.’ And finally, once calm is restored, talk to the child to help them find a more acceptable way of expressing their feelings. ‘You can tell me you are angry when I won’t let you have what you want. It is easier for me to hear than when you are screaming.’
For example, a toddler’s tantrum might be down to frustration. The toddler won’t have chosen to have a tantrum, they’ll just be having one. Once they are in the middle of it, they may even forget what it was that was frustrating them. The forbidden ice cream will be forgotten; they’ll just be being their feeling. What I prefer is when they are not left to scream it out alone but if the caregiver stays in dialogue with them. Even if it is just, when they stop for breath, a sympathetic ‘Oh dear, poor old you,’ this means that on some level the child knows they are not alone with it. No one likes being left to dance alone, even if it is a dance of war. The exception may be when you, from your child’s point of view, are deliberately misunderstanding them and this is therefore the cause of their anger, or you cannot contain your own feelings. However, I am uncomfortable at the thought of a child going through any extreme distress alone.
It does help to name the feeling behind the tantrum: ‘You are really angry, aren’t you?’ If they are upset, they need comfort: ‘I’m sorry you feel so sad.’ This is not necessarily the same as giving them what they want, because that might not be possible or desirable. They might be crying because they cannot fly to the moon or swim with sharks.
What you can do is try to see the situation from the child’s point of view, to comfort them because they cannot have what they want rather than punishing them or telling them off for wanting something you aren’t going to or can’t provide. A child will learn to contain their feelings by having them contained for them by someone else, someone who understands, who can stay calm, who doesn’t shame them for feeling and acting like this, and for whom their feelings can never be too much or too big. Of course, that someone is you.
I think sometimes parents fear the tantrum too much and do not put down a boundary because they fear it may cause one. I am thinking of those parents I see carrying a child in one arm and heavy bags and a scooter in the other. Personally, I would rather comfort a child through a tantrum than carry a scooter around all day, but we all have different limits, so maybe I should mind my own business.
No one was ever healed by being made to feel ashamed or silly. You can contain your child when they are having a meltdown by holding them, and sometimes by staying close, getting down to their level and showing your concern for how they feel without becoming overwhelmed yourself. You can use words to help to validate how they are feeling, or maybe just loving gestures or looks.
Sometimes it may be necessary to remove the child from a situation, for example if they are a danger to themselves or others, or if they are disturbing other people. Then you say, ‘I’m going to have to pick you up and take you out because I can’t let you hurt the dog/disturb other people.’ And then follow through.
What makes a tantrum worse is if you retaliate by shouting back or handling your child roughly. This is, effectively, punishing your child for having feelings. Ignoring a child having a tantrum is also a form of retaliation. Stop pushing the pushchair with the sobbing child in it, make sympathetic noises face to face with the little person in it and maybe pick them up for a cuddle.
It’s not that you do what the child wants when they have a tantrum but that you are sympathetic to their frustration. What I used to do is verbalize what was happening. ‘Oh, you are angry that I won’t carry your scooter for you’ (or whatever the trouble seems to be). Sooner or later your child’s tolerance for frustration will begin to develop. I can remember the joy I felt when, after what seemed a very long time of me verbalizing what I thought my child was feeling every time she was in meltdown or close to it, she began to process her feelings into words for herself. ‘I’m getting angry,’ she’d say, and I’d inwardly marvel at how far we had come.
If you find yourself pushed to your limit because of your child’s tantrum, remember to reflect rather than react. And remember not to take a tantrum personally. Breathe, and stay in contact with yourself and with your child.
As you keep observing your child and noticing their moods, and experimenting and verbalizing to find out what your child is communicating, you will begin to learn their triggers for losing control of their feelings and behaviour and you’ll be able to ward off a tantrum before it happens. A lot of parents know when it is time for their child to withdraw from a group, for example, to have some quiet time with a parent. Or when constraint in a pushchair is getting too much for them and they need the freedom to run about. Or when it is time for a meal before hunger takes a hold.
If your child frequently has tantrums yet is past the toddler stage, or if you find yourself getting into arguments, stand-offs and meltdowns with your child, it is a good time to think about what might be going wrong and what you could do differently.
No child is in permanent meltdown, so your first task is to make a note as to the where, when, with whom, what and why of the altercation to notice what the triggers are.
If the triggers are things like overstimulation or too much noise, you can take steps to avoid or limit those situations. It might be transitions – for example, when you ask the child to stop playing and come to the table. Or you may notice the problem can be when you are more impatient. Quite often, the problem is that we have put too high an expectation on the child. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have high expectations of our children, but if we impose them before they are ready for them we are only going to frustrate them and ourselves. We all develop at different speeds.
The next job, after you’ve identified triggers, is to look at your role in the meltdown, or the other adult’s role if it happens away from you, for example at school. Are you being inflexible? Often when a child communicates with us using behaviour – because they haven’t learned to articulate their feelings yet – instead of considering the meaning of that behaviour, we make the mistake of thinking we must be stricter. Now this may ‘work’ with some children. And it is good to put down boundaries before you reach your limit and to be reasonably consistent with those boundaries, but sometimes you can go too far and become inflexible. This in turn sets an example of being stubborn to our children, or it simply frustrates them further and causes the situation to escalate. For example, if a child isn’t getting the results expected of them at school, it might seem natural for the teachers and adults to think they need to spend longer on their allotted tasks and forego their break time. But if you observe that child, you might see that they are fidgeting, they are finding it hard to keep still, they cannot concentrate. Forcing them to sit still longer makes them worse, not better. It is a rare six-year-old who knows themselves so well that they can tell you, ‘I have an excess of physical energy. I really need to run around outside before it is easy for me to sit still.’ You will need to observe them to work this out.
At Eagle Mountain Elementary School in Fort Worth, Texas, teachers experimented with extending the children’s break time to one hour – more than twice as long as they had previously. The teachers claim the children are now learning more. They have noticed the students now follow directions better, attempt to learn more independently and show more initiative in solving problems on their own. There has even been a drop in disciplinary issues. Parents have stated that their children are more creative at home and more social. This is just one example to show that clamping down on children is rarely the answer but opening up to them, seeing their needs and wants from their perspective, often is.
Reasoning – playing fact tennis – is very rarely a way to get a child to cooperate or to stop crying. Very young children cannot take in reasons. Feeling with them, on the other hand, frequently is. Parents rarely look to themselves when they feel irritated with their children. In their minds, the child is just being annoying and ‘behaving badly’. But any situation between you and your child happens in relationship with them. It is co-created. And when we think of it like that, we do have a bearing on how they behave. It is easier to see the part we are playing when we let go of having to be right, winning and losing, and think more instead about how we can model cooperation and collaboration.
The behaviours that seem to particularly irk parents are: whining, whingeing, clinging and sobbing. That isn’t the crying when kids fall over but the plaintive grizzling they do when parents can’t think of a reason why their offspring might be sad or is still sad after the parent has made heroic efforts to distract them or cheer them up.
You may just want to get your child to stop when they do this; you may see it as ‘bad’ behaviour. But I wonder whether the irritation you feel at the whingeing is something to do with being shut off from what it felt like when you were an infant or a child and you felt sad and defenceless? The annoyance with your child could be coming from you not wanting to be taken back to the pain of re-experiencing old feelings of fragile vulnerability. So instead you try to shut down your child.
In addition, or alternatively, you may experience your child’s whining or crying as a criticism of your parenting skills. Maybe you have an unspoken expectation that children should be happy all the time. Therefore, what to the child is just sadness or loneliness is felt by you as a reminder of your impotence over what your child is going through at that moment.
Bella is a forty-five-year-old senior manager in a large corporation. She is married to Steve, a chef and restaurateur, and they have three boys aged eight, twelve and fourteen. They are a lively family with plenty of weekend activities and socializing. The atmosphere at home is one of cheerful busyness. Bella and Steve both have demanding jobs and Juanita lives with them during the week as a childminder/housekeeper. She has been with the family since their oldest boy was five.
Bella thinks her youngest son, Felix, has a problem. ‘Felix is really clingy,’ she told me. ‘Even though he’s eight, he needs more attention, day and night, than my two other boys put together did when they were his age. I have wondered if I didn’t bond properly with him as a baby, but I think I did. I really don’t know why Felix seems so insecure.’
I was interested in why Bella had a low tolerance of Felix’s clinging behaviour and what was perhaps stuck in their relationship. I told Bella to ask Felix about his dreams. I didn’t expect to get any answers from his dreams, but I thought of it as a way of Felix talking and Bella listening.
Bella told me: ‘Felix said he had a terrible dream where he was all alone and couldn’t find anyone. I asked him if he’d ever experienced that in real life, confident he hadn’t. I was surprised when he said he had. “I remember when we were visiting your brother in Wales, you left me alone in the car.”
‘As he said this, I remembered it too. My brother lives in the middle of nowhere and, once, when Felix was nearly two, he was asleep when we arrived so I got the other boys inside and unpacked the car and put the shopping away, then went back out to check on him. He’d woken up and was crying.
‘I was devastated he’d remembered this. I said sorry, and “You couldn’t have been alone in the car for more than five minutes, darling,” and we had a hug. I began to wonder how one tiny incident from six years ago could still be around for him now.’
The incident may have been tiny for Bella, but it probably wasn’t for Felix. I asked Bella if Felix had ever been left alone in a strange place, before or since. She said, ‘No, but when he was little, twenty months, he had such a severe septic throat that he had to be hospitalized. The antibiotics didn’t work and, for a week, he was put in a coma and on a machine to help him breathe. While in the coma, he was sometimes alone, but after he was taken out of it Steve or I were always with him.’
‘Bella,’ I said, ‘how awful for you that your son was so sick he had to be put into a coma.’ She replied, ‘Oh, it was fine – I mean, not very nice, but you get through these things.’
When Bella said this I felt pushed away, that my concern was unwanted. And in that moment it felt to me as though she had been – and was still – pushing away her own feelings about Felix’s illness. I felt shocked and moved myself, imagining what it must have been like for the little boy to be so ill and what it must have been like to be his parents. Bella said, ‘Steve said we might have lost him, but I couldn’t go there.’ I felt another wave of sadness and told her so. As I looked at her I noticed that she too had tears in her eyes.
I said, ‘This could be why Felix is clingy – because he had to cling on to life. Although he couldn’t have known consciously you weren’t there when he was in a coma, it’s possible he knew it on another level, which perhaps explains his dream of being alone.’
Whether this was true or not, it resonated with Bella, helped make sense of Felix’s behaviour for her. And this in turn made it easier for her to empathize with Felix.
Another thing that may have happened is that Bella finally allowed herself to feel the fear and sadness about losing Felix that she’d repressed for so long. It’s completely normal to want to lock away our difficult feelings, but when we do we risk becoming insensitive to the difficult feelings of others, including our children. All the time Bella was repressing her feelings about Felix’s illness, Felix’s feelings irritated her.
When Bella did finally allow herself to experience what nearly losing Felix had felt like, it didn’t completely consume her, as she’d feared. ‘Before, I always thought it was Felix’s fault he was clingy. I’d think, your brothers are fine, so why aren’t you? I realize now that you can’t blame anyone for their feelings.’
After we talked it was Bella who had a dream – in fact, a nightmare. She dreamed two of her nieces and Felix went swimming in the sea and got into difficulties. The girls were saved but Felix drowned. Bella woke up with a start, tearful and upset, and went to check on Felix, who was asleep, safe and sound. The irony of this action struck her – it was usually Felix coming into his parents’ bedroom.
These days, if Bella does feel irritated with Felix, she takes responsibility for this. She’s not sure this is down to Felix being less clingy, whether she has softened towards his clinginess, whether she’s reaching out more towards him, or all three.
There are as many reasons for clinginess and whingeing as there are children and relationships with each of their caregivers. The reason why I put in the above case study was not because a child having nearly died is a common reason for clinginess. It’s because not wanting to be sensitive to the feelings our children trigger in us causes us to get stuck in our relationships with our children, prevents us being as close as we might want to be and so reduces our children’s capacity for happiness.
Acknowledging and validating feelings – our own and our children’s – is important, not only for our own and their mental health but as a way of understanding our triggers, our children’s triggers and for gaining a deeper knowledge of why we all behave how we do.
All feelings – clinginess, ghosts in the wardrobe, monsters under the bed, just feeling sad or overwhelming frustration – make sense once we find their context. If the context isn’t obvious, it doesn’t mean there isn’t one. The first step is to accept the child’s feeling, which will help you understand their behaviour. Once this happens, you will be able to tolerate it and so be in a better position to collaborate with your child to come up with solutions to make helpful changes.
Sometimes, families have secrets which are in fact lies. You may not even think of it like that; you may think it’s just withholding information the child doesn’t need or which may even harm them.
But when a family withholds information or there are lies within the family, even if family members are not consciously aware of the truth of the situation, it will have an impact. That’s because, in our bodies, we can feel if something is not straightforward and in the open.
If you’re telling lies – or omitting information – to protect children from the reality of a situation what you are doing is dulling their instincts. You are telling them something different from what they will be sensing and feeling. It won’t feel comfortable for them and, if they can’t articulate that discomfort, it’s likely to surface in inconvenient behaviour.
This case study was used in my training as a psychotherapist to teach us about this phenomenon.
Mr and Mrs X went to see a psychotherapist, Dr F, about their teenage son A. A’s behaviour, said his parents, was out of control. He was playing truant from school, using drugs and alcohol, was sullen and uncommunicative and had been stealing from his mother’s bag. What they wanted from the therapist was advice on how to get him to toe the line.
Dr F explained to them that when a child reaches adolescence they feel a need to separate from their parents, to form or come together with their own new tribe. When they feel they have established a separate identity from their parents, they don’t need to push away so much and things settle down. The Xs insisted that their son’s behaviour went beyond this.
Dr F asked for a history of A’s early life. The way the Xs described what a happy, normal little boy A had been sounded stilted, bland and without details. The Xs glanced at each other, as if they were communicating something secret. Dr F noticed this. He said, ‘What are you not telling me?’ The Xs fell silent and looked at each other again.
‘Have you two always got on well?’ Dr F prompted. ‘We weren’t together then,’ said Mr X at last. His wife shot him a stern look. ‘You split up when he was little?’ Then it came out. Mr X wasn’t A’s father but, as far as A was concerned, he was. A’s real father, said Mrs X, had been ‘no good’. He had womanized, was an alcoholic and, when A was eighteen months old, he’d died in a car accident caused by him drink driving.
‘A wouldn’t remember him. He was hardly ever there anyway,’ said Mrs X.
‘He might not remember him knowingly, but in his body, he might have felt his presence and then the lack of his presence,’ Dr F suggested.
‘What we’re worried about is that this type of behaviour is in his genes,’ said Mr X. Behaviour, Dr F told them, is a communication; it has a meaning. ‘So what is A’s behaviour telling you?’
‘It’s like he’s telling us to fuck off,’ said Mr X.
‘You have told A a lie, a huge lie. He doesn’t know what it is, but he may feel that something doesn’t add up and it disturbs him,’ said Dr F.
‘We haven’t lied, we just haven’t told him,’ said the Xs.
‘Lying by omission,’ said Dr F.
‘So, what should we do?’ asked the Xs.
‘I’m not going to tell you what to do. I’m thinking, though, that this could be part of the problem.’
The Xs decided to tell their son. He was furious. He found out his real father had a brother. He went to stay with the brother, started working hard, did well at school and got into university.
His parents had their wish that their son began to behave himself. All they had to do now was repair the rupture. This would mean understanding their son’s anger, owning up to preferring a perfect picture of a perfect family rather than telling the truth, acknowledging the impact this had had on their son and apologizing and accepting whatever feelings their son had about it. I never learned whether this happened, as the story stopped there.
Quite often, when we’d prefer that something wasn’t happening or hadn’t happened, we lie by omission to our children. It is natural to want to protect our children from difficult feelings, but it is not their feelings that are a problem, it is our being terrified of their feelings that’s the problem. So I believe it would be better if they were informed, for example, that you or your partner were having difficulties and that you were working to solve them and hoped that you would, rather than keeping matters that do affect your child’s world a secret. If they are worried, you can soothe them. If we do not tell such bad news in a form a child can handle, they will sense the atmosphere anyway and may come up with even worse explanations for it.
I don’t believe it’s good for children to be lied to, or lied to by omission, so I don’t advocate holding back on bad news, such as the death of someone important to the family. But it needs to be given with the reassurance that, although we feel desperately sad now, and although we will not forget the person, we will get used to their loss and life will carry on and be enjoyed again. In the same way, if one parent who had hitherto lived in the family home is moving out of it, this needs to be talked about before it happens and the children need to know the plans and proposed routine of how they are going to keep their world together – in other words, still see enough of both parents in a regular and predictable way.
There is probably an age-appropriate way of communicating anything. For example, you can tell a child: ‘I am unwell, I’m going to the doctor and, with a bit of luck, I will get better. I’m sorry if I seem distracted. I’m worried about my illness.’ This is better than keeping your cancer a secret. If your child is adopted, it is best to tell them in an age-appropriate way from the start so they always know and never have the shock of finding out.
We cannot protect children from the inevitable bereavements and calamities that life will throw at us and at them, but we can be alongside them and feel with them and help to contain their feelings when, inevitably, calamities happen.
All children need the reassurance that they matter, that they are wanted and loved, not just in occasional words but by being shown the love, in how your face lights up when you see them, in the give and take of your interactions, by being included in your life, and by parents allowing themselves the leisure to enjoy their children and enjoy being with them. It is difficult to do this fully if you are holding some information back that affects them. They have a right to know it.
I was at a welcome talk for new parents at my daughter’s secondary school and the headteacher, Margaret Connell, looked at all of us parents and gave it to us straight. She said, ‘Your child will lie to you.’ I thought, ‘Oh, not my daughter, we have a great relationship.’ She went on, ‘Even if you think your daughter tells you everything, she will lie to you as she enters adolescence, and your job,’ she told us, ‘is not to make a stonking big deal of it.’
When I asked Margaret about this years later she told me this: ‘Everybody lies. Of all the bad things we do, lying is the most common and the one we think least about. But, for some reason, parents seem to put this sin above all sins. If the child has done something they shouldn’t have, maybe something relatively trivial, and she says she didn’t do it, the parents then say, “I know my daughter, she has her faults, but she wouldn’t lie.” And the problem is, this puts the child into a corner and it means, whatever the matter is, you never reach an end of it.’
All children lie; all adults lie too. It’s great when we don’t, because it gives us a better chance to have proper dialogue and real intimacy. But we all do it and we shouldn’t treat our children like the greatest sinners when they do too.
After all, we give our children very mixed messages about lying and when it’s acceptable in our culture. We tell them not to lie, but then we also tell them to pretend to be grateful for an ugly scarf Granny has knitted them for Christmas for the third year running. If you think about it, children have to learn a complicated lesson about when it is appropriate to lie.
Children witness their parents telling lies all the time. They’ll have overheard you ask your partner, for example, to tell his colleagues you can’t come to the work reception when the correct version is that you don’t want to go. There is no reason for your children to believe you will never lie to them if they have witnessed you behaving like this, with perfect power to persuade other people that the truth is other than it is.
If you think about lying, it is an accomplished thing for a child to do. Firstly, they have to conceive of an alternative reality and say, ‘This happened.’ Then they must keep that in their mind along with what really happened. And they must distinguish between both in order to properly lie and then – and this is the really clever bit – they also have to bear in mind what you are thinking and what you know.
A toddler may indulge in deceitful behaviour, like feeding the dog behind your back with something they don’t fancy eating, but they don’t really begin to lie in the way I described above until they reach the age of about four. Then they feel that they’ve got a new superpower. ‘Wow, I can make stuff up and people will believe me! This is amazing!’
Quite often, children lie because the adults in their life would not be calm and unjudgemental about the truth. Some children tell lies to get out of trouble, others are fantasy lies or lies to please grown-ups or to do others a good turn.
Sometimes children tell a lie to tell an emotional truth. When they are asked what’s wrong and they do not know how to explain, they invent a narrative to fit their feelings.
One day at nursery school when Flo was aged three, she did not seem her usual bouncy self. The teacher asked her if anything was wrong. She replied, ‘My goldfish has died.’ At pick-up, the teacher told me about that conversation and I said, ‘Er, but we have never had a goldfish.’
Thinking about it, I realized she was telling a kind of truth. My beloved aunt had died, and I had naturally been upset about this. Flo would have seen me cry; maybe I was not as interested in what she was absorbed by; maybe I didn’t hear when she talked to me; and generally, although I was there physically, I was not as available and present with her. Maybe she was missing what I was normally like to the value of one goldfish? Or, more likely, she could handle and conceive of the death of a goldfish, but this massive, terrible thing of my bereavement needed to be reduced to the value of one goldfish for her to be able to handle it. I told the teacher what I thought had really happened.
It can be easier for a child to hold on to a fantasy than to handle the truth, and we need to respect that. The more we continue to put our feelings, and our children’s feelings, into words, the less they will have to lie to get their emotional truth across to us. This takes years to learn.
Sometimes their fantasy lie is a form of self-soothing and we must, as with all aberrant behaviour, look to understand the feelings behind the behaviour rather than condemn the child for committing it. If they cannot take in the enormity of it, like my daughter could not take in my aunt’s death, they will break it down into a goldfish or whatever their equivalent is.
And there are yet more reasons your older child will lie. As you may have predicted, Miss Connell’s wise words came true and Flo did lie to me, when she was fifteen. When I found out, I remembered Miss Connell’s words and did not treat this as the greatest tragedy ever to descend upon me.
Instead, I listened to my daughter’s explanation. She and a friend each told their parents that they were revising at the other’s house but instead they went to the local university’s student union bar.
I really listened when she said that she had to lie because I would never have let her go there! That much was true, I told her, I wouldn’t have – because it was illegal: she was not only under age to drink, it was a private bar which they weren’t entitled to use.
But, I said, the real reason I wouldn’t have allowed her to go there was because I was scared. I was scared because, when I was fifteen, I had similar adventures and didn’t tell my parents about them. And, looking back on my own escapades, I did put myself in danger and was just lucky I got away with it.
I told her I wasn’t yet ready to let her put herself in the sort of danger I’d put myself in at her age, drinking too much and trying to impress people who were older and who I saw as more sophisticated than I was, of losing my head in the moment. I told her she’d have to wait until I felt confident to allow her to do things like that, and I said I could understand if she felt frustrated by that. Indeed, the following year I did feel confident enough to give her more freedom. When Flo was sixteen I let her camp at a pop festival with a group of her peers, and no harm came to any of them. We did have conversations before she went where I shared my fears: What are you going to do when your phone has died and you’ve lost your friends? How can you tell if an offered drug poses a risk? (A very cunning trick question on my part.) Her answers were sensible enough.
Now Flo is an adult she can enjoy scaring me with some of the things she omitted to mention at the time. Apparently, by 3 a.m., theirs was the only tent not on fire, so she and her friend left the site, walked miles to the train station and slept there. A marvellous adventure for a pair of sixteen-year-olds. Flo felt she couldn’t tell me at the time because she enjoyed having that secret for a while.
It’s better if you don’t overreact to what your child does and tells you, as not overreacting makes it more likely that you will keep the lines of communication open. I had perhaps erred by overreacting with my fears, veering too far from the ideal of containment, which is why she deemed me unready to hear this story until years later.
When parenting a teenager, remember what it was like to be a teenager yourself, straining at the restrictions your parents put in place to try to stop their fears coming true. Adolescents do need to keep some things, like that relatively harmless tale of my daughter’s, private. They need this privacy in order to forge their separate identity. Teenagers may also lie, or lie by omission, to create space for themselves. It isn’t that they are necessarily up to something tremendously bad; they’re up to something that they may want to keep for themselves or in their friendship group because they are separating from the tribe of family and parents and forming their own new tribe.
What you’re aiming for is to keep those lines of communication open from babyhood to adulthood. It’s important that children feel they can tell you the truth, that all their feelings will be accepted, even – or rather, especially – those feelings and attitudes you find inconvenient. If you are not a safe person to talk to, who can they turn to when, for example, they are being bullied at school, or feel spooked by the sexual overtones of their judo instructor? You need to contain a child’s feelings and not overreact to what they show or tell you by not being judgemental and by getting them to brainstorm possible solutions to problems rather than immediately telling them what they should be doing. We have been around longer than them, and sometimes when they tell us something it is tempting to tell them what they should do, but, if possible, hold back, so that you instil confidence in your child rather than disempowering them. If you are a sounding board rather than always an oracle, your child is more likely to keep telling you the truth.
If a child lies – or engages in any other behaviour you’d rather change – instead of reacting, look to the reasons and feelings behind the lie or the behaviour. If you understand and validate those feelings, you give them a chance to find more acceptable ways of expressing themselves and their needs.
Margaret Connell told me about a pupil of hers. ‘I had a pupil once who, whenever there was a disaster in the world, she had a relation in it. Whether it was an earthquake or a train crash, she had a second cousin or a brother-in-law or a family friend in it. After a while it dawned on me that this was not entirely likely, and that she was driven to lie to get attention and get sympathy, probably because she couldn’t or hadn’t been allowed to ask for attention and sympathy in a straightforward way. So she invented these unlikely scenarios based on whatever that day’s news was.’
To get to the root of the problem, it is important to go beyond the lies and find out what is lacking in that child’s life, or what is happening, or has happened, to them that they need such sympathy and attention. And also what is happening that they have to take such a roundabout route to secure it.
You may think, yes, but lying is still wrong. But having a stern, moralistic approach towards lying does not make children more truthful. In fact, research shows that it makes children more accomplished at lying.
Researcher Victoria Talwar visited two schools in West Africa with similar pupil intakes but very different disciplinary regimes. One was roughly equivalent to a typical Western school: if you did something wrong, maybe lied or didn’t do your work very well, you would get guidance about how to act next time in a chat with a teacher and perhaps a detention. The other school was punitive: the children were taken out and beaten for misdemeanours.
Talwar was interested to see which regime would be better at raising a truthful child so she did an experiment with the children called the peeping game. She invited a child into the room and said, ‘You sit here, facing the wall. I’m going to bring out three objects behind you. You have to guess from the noise it makes what each object is.’ With the third object, she played a trick and gave it a completely different noise, for example the noise of a greetings-card birthday tune when the object was a football.
Before she asked for the child’s answer, she said, ‘I’ve just got to pop out of the room for a moment. Don’t peek!’ When she came back, she said, ‘You didn’t peek, did you?’ The child invariably replied, ‘No.’ Then she asked, ‘What was the third object? Could you guess from the noise?’ The child almost always said, ‘It’s a football.’ Because they had peeked. They almost all peeked.
Talwar then asked, ‘How did you know that? Did you peek?’ And at that point she could measure how much and how effectively the children lied. In the school with the not-so-strict regime, some children lied, some didn’t; it was around the same ratio she’d found when she did the test in other countries. But the children in the school with the punitive regime were all incredibly quick to lie, and they all lied very convincingly. So, unwittingly, by cracking down hard on lying, the school had become a machine for turning out highly effective liars – something my daughter’s headteacher, Margaret Connell, had known all along.
When your child lies – and I say ‘when’ and not ‘if’ – remember all the reasons for lying. It’s a developmental stage, they are copying you, they are creating their own private space, they’re lying to communicate a feeling, to avoid punishment or to avoid upset. If the lying is a problem, it’s better to problem-solve and find out what’s behind the lie rather than being punitive. That will only make your child into a better liar.
The more judgemental you are, the more punitive you are, the more you will stop your child confiding in you. They will still want to please you, to get your approval, but they will do it by putting aside honesty, by putting aside their real self, perhaps at the expense of their mental health. A draconian regime does not turn out good, moral citizens. Nor is it likely to help them have a mutually rewarding relationship with you, which in turn may jeopardize their ability to form sustaining, satisfying relationships in life.
Remember Margaret Connell’s words: ‘Your child will lie and your job is not to make a stonking big deal of it.’
What children – and all of us – need is love plus boundaries, not one or the other.
Boundaries are important for any relationship. A boundary is the metaphorical line you draw in the sand that you won’t allow the other to cross. Just beyond that line is your limit and, if your limit is crossed, that’s when you lose your cool and cannot handle your frustration any longer.
That’s why it’s a good idea to put a boundary down before you reach your limit. One example of a boundary is saying something like, ‘I cannot allow you to play with my keys,’ and taking the keys away. A boundary is stated calmly but firmly. When you reach your limit, you have no such control and maybe you’ll react in a way that frightens your child, maybe by grabbing back your keys and yelling at them.
Sometimes parents find it hard to set boundaries. For example, when a much-longed-for child arrives after many miscarriages, IVF, or even, in some tragic circumstances, after a death of another child. Parents can be so blinded by love by such a happy miracle that they do not know where their own limits are and revere their progeny like a god. Without boundaries, your child will not learn where your and other people’s limits are, and if you grow up believing you are omnificent, you might go beyond good self-esteem into self-delusion. We all need boundaries so that we have some sort of structure to our lives that supports us and so we can learn to live together, and children are no exception. Get into the habit of putting down a boundary by describing yourself and not them, so it’s ‘I cannot allow you to have my keys’ rather than ‘I’ve told you before, you are not to be trusted with keys.’ Even if your baby cannot understand words yet, defining yourself in this way is a good habit to get into. When you are later setting a boundary with a teenager, they’ll be able to hear ‘I need you back at ten for my sake’ more easily than ‘You are too young to be out after ten.’
This is from an email from a friend who I had just shared my define-yourself-not-the-child theory with.
The other night, instead of saying my usual ‘Go and brush your teeth. Go and brush! I’ve told you four times, I’m not going to tell you again, I’m going to take away some of your screen time if you don’t do it now, and so on. I said ‘I’m really tired tonight and I’m getting really, really tired of listening to my voice nagging on about your teeth. Can you please go and do them?’ And he did. Love him.
You want your boundaries to be effective, so don’t dish out empty threats. Before a child realizes that the threat is empty, it is too scary and therefore liable to shatter a child’s thought processes rather than help them learn consideration. And, once they learn that your threats can be empty, they will not be able to take you seriously. So, mean what you say, do not relent and give them the keys back (or whatever it is). It may mean a tantrum, but you can be sympathetic about their frustration about not having the keys and still hold on to your keys – and your boundary.
With babies and toddlers you put boundaries in place by physically picking the child up and removing them from what you do not want them to do or disturb. This must be done respectfully. Respecting a child is not ‘spoiling’ them.
For example, you might say, ‘I cannot let you tease the dog, so I’m going to pick you up and carry you away from the dog.’ Even if your child has not learned to speak yet, your kind and firm tone and you physically removing them from what they are doing will gradually teach them that you disapprove of the activity they were engaged in.
Or it might be: ‘I carried you out of the room because you cannot make a noise when someone is making a speech.’ They might not understand what you say, but they will begin to learn on an embodied level what is and what isn’t appropriate. If a child is using a toy keyboard as a weapon, you might show them and tell them that keyboards are for playing on, not for hitting with or throwing. Then you might say, ‘Unless you play on the keyboard instead of hitting with it, I will have to take it away.’ And then, if the inappropriate behaviour continues, you take it away.
Speak calmly, kindly and firmly, do what you said you would do and be consistent. The advantage of not issuing empty threats, of following through with a physical removal, is that your child really does learn to take you seriously. You are a person who means what they say. What surprised me about using this approach was that, by the time the child grows too big for you to be able to physically remove them from the situation, they have learned that you mean what you say, and so they do as instructed, as if you could still pick them up. If you are past the being-able-to-pick-them-up stage, it is important to put down boundaries by defining yourself, not defining them and not getting into reason wars (see below, pp. 216–18). Remember: you are both on the same side. You both want them and you to be content. The way to achieve this is to listen and empathize with their feelings, to contain their frustration and to learn when to be firm (when your own limit is being approached, or when their safety is at stake, or, more usually, when your fears about their safety are more than you can tolerate) and when to be flexible. You can be flexible when, for example, a change in plans or expectations won’t jeopardize anything in the long run, when you are being firm for the sake of keeping up appearances, when you are veering towards manipulating rather than relating with your child. As I was typing this, I was listening with one ear to some children playing in a neighbour’s garden. They were getting more and more boisterous and began to sound as though they were on the edge of hysteria. Then I heard an adult address them: ‘I am finding your noise too much for me. You can either play quietly out here or you will have to come in.’ I loved her firm yet calm voice and I felt safer, as though I had been one of those children who was losing control and needed a boundary. After a while they got noisier again and she came out and said in a firmer voice, ‘Right, inside now,’ and in they all trooped. They knew she meant it.
Framing your boundaries with as little negativity as possible also helps. So instead of ‘Don’t paint on the walls,’ say, ‘Walls are not for painting on, paper is for painting on. Here is some paper.’ In the following example of a repair after a rupture, Aoife’s mum, Gina, learned to do just this with her toddler.
We just had a lovely moment. Aoife was washing her hands after painting and she filled a bowl with water and put it really carefully on the side. I said, ‘You were so careful then, Aoife’ and she said, ‘Yes, I was’ – then she hugged me. I realized instead of being positive, I’m usually saying, ‘Don’t spill the water,’ ‘Don’t make the floor wet.’ Her hug was my reward for my good parenting behaviour.
At first, boundaries are about keeping your child safe. We might say, ‘Play in the garden, not the road, as the road is not safe.’ Then they are about considering the environment and other people. Often, when parents put down a boundary, we pretend it is not about defining ourselves. We say things like, ‘You’ve got to turn off the television at the end of this programme because you’ve watched too much.’ By doing that, you are defining the child. No one likes to be defined or told what they need when they don’t think they need it. In this case, what you really mean is ‘I don’t want the television on any more so I will be turning it off after this.’ It is not only okay to self-define rather than pretend to them (and to yourself) that you are being objective, it is good modelling for them. You are showing them that you are listening to your feelings, working out what you want from what you feel, then you are going for it. This is key to staying sane.
You may have read that it’s not good for children to have more than one hour’s screen time a day so you might feel you are stating an objective fact when you tell them they’ve watched too much and so they must turn it off. But it might not feel like too much to them, so you may be inviting an unwelcome game of fact tennis. So, define yourself, give your boundary with an I-statement, say how you feel: ‘I am not comfortable with you watching any more television, so I am switching it off after the end of this programme. Would you like to play something else, or help me cook the supper?’
Losing your temper with your child can traumatize them and close them down. So it’s much better to know your limits and to be firm about a boundary before you get to that limit. The boundary is when you stop the behaviour, and the limit is when you blow a fuse if the boundary has not been put down.
So, if you lose your cool after overhearing two hours of YouTube memes or cartoons, two hours is your limit, so you need to set the boundary before two hours. Boundaries benefit the person we give them to but they are also for the benefit of the person laying down the boundary, and we should not pretend otherwise.
If you pretend that you have worthy reasons for a boundary, you are teaching your children to hide their real feelings behind worthy reasons. This will make communication with them more difficult, as they will get good at the game of inventing worthy reasons rather than sharing how they feel. Having the more difficult parenting conversations – about sex and porn, about social media, about stress and pressures and feelings – will be much harder unless your habit from the start has been clear communication and you’re in the habit of talking about your own feelings and listening to their feelings and taking them seriously.
If you make up reasons for boundaries, even when they sound reasonable you will get into all sorts of difficulties. ‘But Daddy lets me stay up until eight o’clock and you’re saying I have to go to bed at seven thirty?’ ‘Who is right?’ the child will wonder. The truth in such a situation might be: ‘Daddy doesn’t mind if you stay up until eight, and I do. And tonight I want you in bed by seven thirty because there is a programme I want to watch at eight, undisturbed.’
We owe our children honesty, so that means sharing our feelings with them rather than pretending we don’t have any. Our feelings and personal preferences inevitably come into a decision like what time they should go to bed, and we must not pretend they don’t.
Likewise, children may resent it if rules seem petty. In one family, their eldest child was autistic. He needed to know what was going to happen and when, and it had to happen then and it had to be the same every day. The parents brought up their subsequent two sons with the same routine and rules because they felt it would be ‘unfair’ if they allowed the younger children flexibility they hadn’t allowed their first. ‘John had to go to bed at eight when he was twelve, so you do too,’ they’d say. If you are that inflexible and refuse to see each child as an individual, they may gradually store up resentment against you or against their sibling. And storing up resentment is storing up trouble.
The rule of thumb for setting a boundary is to define yourself and not the child. For example, suppose your child is playing music really loudly and it’s disturbing you. They are absorbed and enjoying themselves. You, on the other hand, are beginning to feel resentful. In other words, you are approaching your limit. Define yourself, describing how you feel rather than defining your child. Say: ‘I’m finding this music too loud. I would like you to turn it down, please,’ rather than, ‘Your music is too loud, turn it down, please.’
My parents never defined themselves when they gave me commands or put down boundaries, and I remember that it felt frustrating. I might not have been able to put my finger on why at the time, but something felt not quite real about it and it made me feel angry and lonely.
I decided that, when I had a child, I would do things differently. I would be honest. I would tell the truth. That’s not to say it didn’t feel like a risk to own my selfishness when I told my daughter I was cold and bored and that was why I wanted to leave the playground, but it turned out well. By modelling and saying how I felt and then saying what I wanted, my daughter learned to do the same thing. And we did not get into reason wars.
What is a reason war? A reason war is when you play fact tennis and pretend that feelings don’t come into a decision at all, then it escalates to a war or stand-off. For example:
ADULT We have to go because we have to make lunch.
CHILD No, we don’t. We can eat the leftovers.
ADULT It’s time to go home for lunch now, anyway.
CHILD I’m not hungry, and there are apples in the bag, if you are.
ADULT You need a proper lunch and we’re going home and that’s that.
CHILD Whaaaaaaaaaaah!
If you often find yourself locked into battles like this, it’s because you’ve taught your child the rules of fact tennis. You might think it’s better or less selfish-sounding to give a reason that involves them (‘It’s time for your lunch!’), but if it’s not the real reason you want to leave the playground – say, the real reason is that you want your own lunch – you are giving them too much space to argue with you. There’s no arguing with you wanting your own lunch.
The way to get out of reason wars is to describe how you feel and say what you want. It is easier to negotiate when everyone shares their feelings instead of pretending everything is about a reason.
So, instead, try this approach:
ADULT We have to go now because I want my lunch.
CHILD I don’t want to go.
ADULT I’m sorry you don’t want to go, but I’ll get grumpy if I don’t have lunch. I’ll give you two more minutes to finish your game and then we’re going.
And then you follow through.
I remember being very pleasantly surprised one day when I told my daughter I was getting cold and bored in the playground so we’d be leaving in five minutes and she negotiated down on my behalf, saying, ‘We can go in two if you like!’
A child who is respected by being listened to and having their feelings taken seriously has less inclination to act out their frustrations and is more likely to want to get along with you and to learn how to empathize. A child who isn’t listened to enough will be more demanding. With very young children, it takes many years until a small person can articulate themselves clearly so you’ll need to listen by observing. Here is a case study to illustrate what I mean.
My son, Paul, who is six, has speech and language difficulties that are probably related to autism, but we have had no formal diagnosis. When he was a baby and a toddler, the house sometimes felt like a war zone.
Once my partner and I started trying to understand life from his perspective, all our lives got better. We had to put a lot of time and effort into watching and listening to learn from him. He taught us patience. What we learned is when we can nudge him a little further and when to back off. We also have a daughter, who is two years older than him. Because she is more like we are in the way she works, we didn’t have to puzzle her out as much. But while we were learning about our son, we started to observe and listen better to our daughter too. Although she was always lovely to be around, we’ve noticed that, as we have become more considerate of her, she has become more considerate of us.
‘When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have him around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.’
– Mark Twain
It can feel much more difficult than it did when they were younger to set boundaries with teenagers. It is easier, though, if you are already in the habit of defining yourself rather than them. But if you are not, it is never too late to start.
When my son Ethan was a teenager, things got serious. He’d had a few moments of getting into trouble at school – nothing out of the ordinary. But when he was nearly sixteen, things got bad. One day, I got a call to pick him up from the police station because he’d been involved in a ‘supermarket sweep’. A group he’s friendly with had filled a trolley in a supermarket with beer and sweets and tried to make a dash for it to steal the lot. He said he had no idea why he did it, he just got swept along with it all. This was totally out of character for him. But then again, I worried that it might be becoming his character …
Beer and sweets. This is a snapshot of where a teenager is at – halfway between childhood and adulthood. How are they supposed to cope with that? Can you remember how confusing it was for you? And how are we, as parents, supposed to cope with it? You can say how the behaviour makes you feel. ‘Disappointed’ is a word often used by their parents when children reach this stage. It stings more for the child when a parent defines themselves like this than when they try to define their teen by saying, for example, ‘You’re behaving like an idiot.’ The other tool is to go through this problem-solving list, breaking it down so the teen can understand their thought process. By doing this, the teen will eventually start to be able to use it themselves.
In this instance: ‘I don’t find shoplifting acceptable. We are going to have to understand why this happened and work out how it can never happen again. I felt mortified when I had to pick you up from the police station.’
The conversation may go a bit like this: ‘What happens when you five boys get together because, individually, you do not appear to be natural criminals?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Okay, take your time. How did you feel before you did it?’
‘We were joking and laughing.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘We started to dare each other.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘We just did it.’
‘I’m wondering whether the problem seems to be that when you five boys get together you egg each other on, get carried away and develop a peer pressure between you that is hard to resist. Is that it?’
‘Yeah.’
‘So, next time this happens – when you’re about to do something you know isn’t a good idea – how are you going to put the brakes on so the situation doesn’t get out of hand?’
‘I suppose we could just imagine it, rather than actually do it. Say how funny it’d be if we did it.’
‘That might still be a laugh, and without the terrible consequences.’
‘Yeah.’
Steps 2 and 3 may have to be repeated because there might be something else going on for the teen which they need to talk about, such as feeling they can’t cope with what is expected of them at school, or any other problem. Perhaps you might say something like ‘I’m wondering if you were already feeling angry and rebellious because you got a detention at school?’ But remember: let them take the lead in the brainstorming.
You’ll probably want to set a boundary for future behaviour. Set the boundary by defining yourself and not them.
So, rather than ‘You cannot be trusted, you are grounded,’ it’s ‘I am keeping you at home for a couple of weeks because, after picking you up from the police station, I am giving myself a break from worry. I want you close for a while.’ Keep naming and sharing your own feelings.
Don’t judge your child. Labelling them as incapable, impulsive, untrustworthy or immature will not help them improve. Boundaries are good, such as ‘I’m not letting you out until I feel more confident to do so,’ but a punitive stance increases stubbornness and goes no further in enhancing a deeper understanding between you. And keep the dialogue going. Follow through and check in to see how the solutions are working out.
Remember: when you want to put down a boundary, define yourself and not the teen. Give your own feelings as your reason – because it is your feelings that are the reason. For example, your thirteen-year-old wants to catch the night bus back across town on their own. You could say: ‘You are right, you probably can catch that bus and know how to behave responsibly and safely on it. The trouble is, I am not yet ready to let you do it. I must get used to the idea that you are getting more adult and that you can look out for yourself. You are going to have to bear with me for a bit before I can let it happen.’ By saying it like this, you are modelling honesty as well as putting down the boundary. Your teenage child will be able to hear that it’s not because of anything to do with them that they are not allowed on public transport in the middle of the night but because of you. They would know this anyway, but by not pretending it is otherwise they may be able to be more tolerant of your decision and so it will help your relationship with them.
Although it’s a cliché to say it, your teenage child is going through a stage. Human beings don’t reach maturity until we’re (roughly) in our mid-twenties. Until then we are more likely to make errors in risk-taking and decision-making. It’s thought to be because our frontal lobes, where a lot of our thinking takes place, have not yet achieved fast connections to other parts of our brains. But, at the same time, our ability to feel excited is reaching a once-in-a-lifetime peak. Teenagers appear to feel things more deeply and completely than either younger children or adults. While impulsivity exercises their emotions, their capacity to say, ‘That’s a bad idea,’ or ‘Don’t do that’ has not yet caught up. Some people develop impulse control later than others, but this doesn’t mean they’ll never learn to look ahead at likely outcomes before they act. Most people get there in the end.
Just like the stage your child went through when they were a toddler discovering their autonomy, teens need love plus boundaries and a heavy dose of parental optimism that they will master their emotions and their impulsivity. Remember: behaviour is at its most challenging just before a new behavioural milestone is reached. Think of it in terms of them experiencing emotion in colour whereas, in comparison, we are experiencing it only in black and white. It’s great if they can channel all this emotional energy into creativity, like music, or into sports, but it is not unusual for some to come out inappropriately. And your job as parents is to provide a boundary, a space for brainstorming solutions and, importantly, not to make too big a deal of it.
The three-point plan about finding out what the inconvenient behaviour is communicating, then problem-solving, then brainstorming, is not the only way to deal with it. Families find their own ways through these milestones, and their own ways to repair a rupture. Here is Sophia’s story.
When I came home from work, I smelled smoke. I went into the living room and Camila, my daughter, aged sixteen, was there with her friend. I had never been particularly keen on this friend of hers because there always seemed to be some drama going on to do with her.
So, I turned to the friend and said, ‘Have you been smoking?’ My daughter said quietly, ‘No, Mum, we both have,’ but I didn’t want to hear that, and I carried on addressing my lecture to her friend, telling her that I didn’t appreciate her smoking in my house. My usually nicely behaved daughter went ballistic. She started shouting at me, ‘No, Mum, it was me! Stop picking on her! Why don’t you ever listen?’
When her friend left, she ran out of steam. I felt shocked because this outburst was unusual for her. I said, ‘I’m disappointed that you talked to me like that. I don’t want you around right now. Go upstairs.’ When my husband, Adam, came in I told him what had happened. He reminded me that we both used to smoke, and that I’d started at her age. And that our daughter was just pointing out that she was fed up of being seen like an angel and her friend being seen like the devil. He also said I’d made up my mind too quickly about her friend.
Adam got me to see it from Camila’s point of view. And when I also remembered what the teenage brain is like, I began to calm down.
As Adam and I were talking, I was rolling out ready-made pastry to put on the top of a leftovers pie. So I cut out the letters for ‘SMOKING KILLS’ and put them on the top of the pie. It was a peace offering to my daughter. When she came down for dinner, she was sheepish. But when she saw the pie she laughed, then we all laughed, and the tension dissipated.
Camila took a picture and put it on Facebook and told the story of being caught smoking, having a screaming match with me – and our newly named ‘pie of peace’. One of her friends commented that I should have made a pie of cigarette ends and made her eat it – but not even I would go that far!
Remember this when you’re going through a rough time with your teenager: if you usually manage to listen and see the situation from their point of view as well as your own, in the not-too-distant future you’ll be able to look back on scenarios like this and laugh together. In other words, you will repair the rupture, especially if you make the first move. Which might be making a pie of peace or, more likely, using words.
It is also important to remember not to deny what their experience of you is. As adults, we do not tend to evolve and develop as quickly as our children, and the picture we may have of our teen may have been accurate six months ago but is not up to date today. So six months ago they may have welcomed your help with their homework, but these days they experience it as annoying interference. Remember not to get defensive when you are told by them that you are annoying or just plain wrong. Although, if your limit is being approached, it may be appropriate to help them find a way of expressing their complaint about you in a fashion in which it would be easier for you to hear. All this becomes easier the more you and your family express your experiences, feelings and boundary settings with self-defining I-statements and not defining-the-other you-statements.
A teenager may temporarily lose some of their charm while they are forging their own identity apart from the family, developing new identity markers to help them form and fit into new tribes. You have not lost your beloved child. Once they feel secure in their new groups of friends in secondary school and then university, their need to feel separate from you will diminish and their better traits will resurface. The teenage brain can have moments as powerful as that of an untamed wild animal. And although it may feel difficult for you as a parent to be empathetic with this at times, keep trying. And be optimistic: their frontal lobes will catch up.
A teenager – and indeed people in their early twenties – might act out the insecurity they feel because they don’t yet know their place in life. Insecurity is a type of fear and sometimes, when we feel fearful, our instinct is to attack. Opportunities in some areas for young people can be scarce, while finding a role and forging an identity is a challenge in itself. Remember: we are at our worst just before we have conquered the next hurdle in our life. Young adults need understanding and support to find their way and often the only way they know how to articulate this is by acting out their frustration. This is often inconvenient for those around them and for society in general. Never write someone off as ‘bad’. Instead, help them get the help they need. Remember: helping someone is facilitating them to help themselves. When we rescue someone by doing for them what they are capable of themselves, we disempower them and possibly make them feel worse. This means, for example, that we might be alongside them as a wall for them to bounce their ideas off when they are choosing their university, but the choice of what and where they study can usually be left to them. We can remind them that most courses have open days, but the task of looking that up and booking a place is probably best left up to them. We can share what we know, but that might not go as far as telling them what to do.
When a teenager acts antisocially, in a way that we had no idea our angel was capable of, what we tend to do as parents is say, ‘They’ve got in with a bad lot.’ Every parent of each child in that group may be saying the same thing. For the other parents, your child is the bad one of a bad lot. What is usually happening here is very human, and we all do it; rather than admit our child is as responsible for whatever happened as anyone else’s, we blame other people for what happens and see ourselves as innocent victims. It’s not that anyone is a ‘bad lot’ so much as that peer pressure is irresistible. Think about what you got up to because of peer pressure when you were a teenager.
Children and teenagers experiment, and that’s normal, but of course it doesn’t follow that you should find their experiments acceptable. You can share how you feel with them: ‘I felt furious when …’, ‘I feel scared when you …’, ‘I am upset that you …’ But don’t waste an opportunity to share more positive feelings as well. ‘I felt proud when you …’, ‘I was impressed by you when …’, ‘I’m bursting with love for you when you …’, and so on.
If you don’t dismiss your child’s feelings as silly, if you can listen without judging, if you validate their experience of themselves, you are more likely to keep the lines of communication open and they are more likely to continue to confide in you as you both get older. This makes boundary setting – of their boundaries and yours – easier and more natural to maintain.
If there has been a rupture between you, I recommend honesty with yourself about your part in that rupture. If you do not know what it is, I recommend asking them (and not defensively) what needs to be done to mend the rift. Or ask what you could do to make it easier for you and your child to talk more easily. It helps if you remember that older adults do not have the monopoly on being right.
It also helps to remember the simple rule of thumb: define yourself and your feelings, not your child. So, it is ‘I’m not ready for you to be going to pubs yet’ rather than ‘You’re too young to go to pubs.’
A client, Liv, was telling me about her relationship with her adolescent son, Matt, sixteen.
The more time we spend together – doing things together, hanging out together – the easier it is to ask him to do things, like take the sheets off the beds, or empty the dishwasher. When I say, ‘Can you do this?’ he says, ‘Yeah, sure.’ But when I’m busy with my own stuff or busier at work so I’m more in my own separate world, when I ask the same thing – ‘Can you do this?’ – he is much more likely to say, ‘No,’ or even, ‘No, why should I?’ In the past, we’ve got locked into cycles of arguing. But then I’d get less busy at work, more available to just watch telly together or grab a pizza, and our lives would again become more about cooperation.
I only made this discovery after about ten years of parenting. I said to my husband, ‘You can’t just live your separate life and then barge into Matt’s life and say, “I want you to do this.”’ It would be a bit like a stranger walking into your house and telling you what to do. The more there is a connection between all of us, the easier it is to work through any problem and negotiate so we each get what we need.
Liv’s experience reminds me that it’s important to spend time with our children whatever their age, and to listen to them, not only to be with them when we are all staring at separate screens, or living mostly separate lives and merely sharing a space. We need to make sure we connect with them as well as live with them.
When the lines of communication are open, the more complicated, nuanced conversations you need to have about sex, drugs, bullying, friendships, pornography and the online world are easier to have. You can learn how these things are seen by your child and the younger generation and you can each share your feelings and knowledge about them and each change in the process. If you are not willing at all to be impacted upon by the opinions and feelings of your child, they will be less likely to allow your influence and your wise counsel.
If you try to remember what you were like as a teenager, it may help you to find more common ground with your child, although examining your teenage years may give you an unpleasant awakening, as in the quote below.
‘In the hope of understanding Bron better, I read the diaries I kept at his age. I was appalled at the vulgarity and the priggishness.’
– Evelyn Waugh, Diary, 1956
Exercise: Maxims for behaviour
- Define yourself rather than defining your child.
- Don’t pretend your decisions are grounded in facts when, in fact, they are grounded in your own feelings and preferences.
- Remember you are both on the same side.
- Collaborate and brainstorm rather than dictate.
- A lack of authenticity causes a rupture and you will be able to repair it by becoming authentic.
- And remember: children behave as they are done to.
Exercise: Older teenager as lodger
If you are having difficulties in knowing what boundaries are reasonable for you to ask for with your older teen, imagine they are a lodger who has come to share your home. You would still have house rules, but you would put them in place by defining yourself and not them. For example:
–‘I would like it if you kept your bags in your own room and not the hallway.’
–‘I want you in by twelve because I do not sleep well if I am half expecting to be woken up by you coming in late.’
–‘I am not comfortable with old food plates being kept in the room and cannot allow it.’
–‘You can use the washing machine at any time.’
If you are imagining your nearly-adult child as your lodger, it helps to give them some of the respectful distance they may be craving.
Something for parents to remember: in order to help our children pick up the four cornerstones of appropriate behaviour, we need to keep putting them into practice ourselves. We need to tolerate frustration, be flexible, have problem-solving skills and be able to see things from another’s point of view.
Having a child to me feels a bit like this: one minute you are making very slow progress down the road because your toddler’s little legs can only take tiny steps. Then for a short while you will be going along at the same pace, and then they will overtake you and you’ll have to run to catch up. That last bit – that’s the longest bit. That’s the bit that all this investment of time, care, consideration, respect and love has been about. That’s when they reap the benefits of having a secure attachment style, curiosity about the world and an ability to know what they feel, so that they can work out what they want and need in life and you have the benefits of watching them go for it.
You will have provided them with a secure base, emotionally as well as practically, so if they do get lost along the way – and who doesn’t from time to time? – they will have a safe dock to return to that will provide succour and comfort. Even if you are no longer there to come back to, because we are but mortal, they will find that secure base within themselves that was built up in relationship with you and that will help them get back on course.
It means a lot to adult children when their parents take an interest, non-intrusively, in their lives. You always were a mirror for your child. How they see and feel about themselves will always, to some extent, be influenced by how you respond to them, how you delight in them, how you greet them and relate to them. This doesn’t suddenly stop when they get to be of voting age, or when they have their own children, or when they retire – it continues. When a hundred-year-old mother beams in delight and shares her pride in her child with them, even though that child may be seventy-five themselves, it is not meaningless; it has affect, it matters. Our pride in our adult children means a lot to them, quite often more than the admiration and praise of others. Don’t take part of the credit for their triumphs (unless they give it to you) because it does not help them, but don’t side-step from your part in any of their setbacks either.
It is never too late to attempt to repair a rupture, although it helps if you are both still alive. The way to do it, as it ever was, is to look for the feelings behind your behaviour and their behaviour and to try to understand those feelings. If, for example, you feel affronted because your adult offspring warns you off your new lover as not being good for you, don’t assume they are trying to keep you all to themselves or are being rude but rather that they are concerned for you and that they love you, and talk back to their concerned part and not the part you want to punish for telling you what might be an inconvenient truth. The roles of parent and child may swap over, and you can find yourself parented by your child.
It can help our adult children to know how we may have made mistakes that led to them making poor decisions. And I’m sorry if this seems unfair. ‘It’s not fair’ was my first idea for a title for this book, because the grown-ups have to invest a lot of their time in their children and, however considerate we are with it, parenting comes with no guarantees.
One way parents can slip up once they imagine their duties are largely over is that they can feel competitive towards their child, or one of their children, and when that child tells them of an achievement they feel they have to top it or come back with a triumph of their own. For example, here’s Julie’s experience.
I told my mum how well her grandson was doing at school and, instead of being happy for us, she just came back with how clever my sister had been at school, which felt hurtful, and it wasn’t even true. It was as though she was trying to trump me. I asked her why she was being competitive and she just got flustered and changed the subject.
The grandmother here may have just been reminded of her pride in her children by hearing her daughter’s pride about her son, but it certainly came out all wrong. When our children are adults, it is just as important as it always was not to fear being in the wrong, not to get flustered when we make a mistake but instead to repair the rupture. It can help to stay aware of our past habits of rivalry such as fact tennis, or winning and losing, because we might slip up and forget about our self-awareness when we think our job is done and then these unhelpful ways of relating can rear their heads again. Even though everyone is now all grown up, because of their past dependence and the child–parent bond, parents may still have a major influence on how their adult children feel about themselves and their lives. We need to keep this in mind so that we do not unknowingly knock them back, as in the above example, or feel so merged with them that we unthinkingly let our inner critic loose on them.
Our bonds with our children can be some of the most important and formative relationships of our lives, and we need to continue to look after these relationships by continuing to respect them when they are adults, as well as loving them.
And just as I recommended looking back to our own childhoods to notice how they are influencing our children’s childhoods, it’s good to see how our own parents are to us now that we are adults, and what we will do the same as them and what we will want to do differently when our own children are grown up.
Further down the line, if we are lucky enough to live long, we may have to let our children make decisions for us in the final stages of this lifelong relationship. If we have learned to trust them, this will be easier on us, and on them. Having a child means that you will have to be the parent when they are a child, then you will be adults together and, finally, you may become the child to their adult. If we can be flexible and fluid about these roles, it can make it easier on everyone.