What's Your Goal?

Imagine—as unbelievably perfect as it sounds—that there existed a tidy, effectively regulated home environment. Unkind words and yelling weren’t allowed; the children were expected to do as they were told, and by all appearances it was a fairly perfect home. The family went on outings together; they didn’t suffer through poverty, divorce, abuse, or chronic illness. But as each child moved out, they struggled under the pressures of adulthood. A few years after the initial departure of the eldest child, the family has come to a conclusion that they didn’t really expect: there wasn’t much sincere expression of feeling at home, and the children didn’t feel listened to while they were growing up.

I’m centering this scenario on a real family I’m familiar with, and it took me a long time to figure out why such a minute detail would have massive consequences. Unmanaged or repressed feelings appear to result in an ineffectively-controlled adulthood. So why was this home so perfect right until the children all left? The parents were pretty amazing people. They studied parenting and actually made a point of listening to the children after school every day. The biggest issue here was the parenting goal.

The parenting goal guides how a parent raises their children; even if a parent’s theoretical ideals deviate from their real desires, their parenting will come out in the end aiming towards their overall parenting goal. The typical, temporary, primary goal of parents—whether or not they are conscious of it—tends to be compliance and ease in raising their children. The goal is to have children that won’t question them and will obey them. It makes life a lot easier to have children that will simply do what adults tell them, and it makes sending them out into the world a lot less terrifying when parents believe that their children are perfectly responsible and capable of acting as adults.

Dr. Haim Ginott explained the most effective goal of parenting in this way: “It’s to help a child grow up to be a decent human being … a person with compassion, commitment, and caring” (Ginott, 2003, p. 192). As counterintuitive as it sounds, children can’t become committed and caring adults if all they do with their time is obey and wait for commands. In order to have the capacity to care for other people, children need to become adults with teeth and strength of their own: along with these traits that Ginott described, children need the independence and responsibility to exercise them.

That’s a lot of weight to put on a parent, ensuring that their children not only live comfortably while at home, but also learn how to perfectly balance obedience and independence, agreeableness and stalwart defense of truth. Ginott gave a number of methods for helping children to attain a balance of attributes, but I want to focus on one in particular.

“Parents want to know if the methods advocated in this book are strict or permissive regarding how they relate to discipline,” Ginott wrote. “They are strict when dealing with children’s misbehavior. But all feelings, wishes, desires, and fantasies are permissible, be they positive, negative, or ambivalent” (Ginott, 2003, p. 196). Accepted misbehavior—after the nature of misbehavior has been thoroughly explained and understood—prevents children from understanding entirely how rules work. Children naturally push and poke at boundaries to test them; that is part of the learning process. If rules and responsibilities collapse to this pushing and poking, children determine that they can have whatever they desire if they push hard enough. This leaves parents being pushed from place to place.

On the opposite end, feelings that are strictly caged and controlled cause internal strife. Part of parenting is teaching children how to deal with their feelings. If children are instructed to ignore or alter what they truly feel—and are punished for not doing so—their hearts become hidden and their relationships struggle. This occurred in the family I was referencing earlier: because of the ostensible perfection of their home environment, there was a lot of pressure for things to be positive or non-hurtful all the time. In fear of offending or troubling their parents, the children hid their feelings and considered perfect behavior to take priority over their real desires—until the children hit adulthood.

It’s terrifying for parents to imagine that children should be allowed to think whatever they like, particularly since parents have broader perspective and more experience behind them. But I have already seen a peculiar phenomenon happening in my life, even though I’m not that old: I’m forgetting what it’s like to not have an independent adult’s perspective on the world. It’s easy to forget that children need to go through similar experiences that adults did when they were young; we hope to let them learn everything the easy way, by simply listening. But that isn’t the goal of parenting—sometimes we just need to let them learn by experience so that they can become wise, responsible adults themselves.

References

Ginott, H. G., Goddard, H. W., & Ginott, A. (2003). Between Parent and Child: Revised and        Updated: The Bestselling Classic That Revolutionized Parent-Child Communication, 192, 196. New York: Harmony. Retrieved from https://search-ebscohost-  com.byui.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=724916&site=eds-live

The True Prize

On occasion when I did something pleasant or good when I was young, my dad would say, “This makes me want to give you a raise,” or “Now I want to give you things that you want, like take you to Wendy’s.” While we didn’t have allowances and he would have taken me to Wendy’s regardless of whether or not I behaved perfectly, hearing him say things like that always made me feel that my decision to be a good person had made him happy.

My mother didn’t have the same approach, but she definitely had ways of showing she cared. She called to me one day when I was young: “Sev, there’s someone on the couch that needs a friend!” I thought she was saying that our dog was lonely and trying to distract her from her work, so I came in to comfort him and found a stuffed unicorn where I had been expecting to see the dog. Other such little prizes appeared for no rhyme or reason.

Perhaps these stories seem a little disconnected, but behind both of them was a principle that contributed to the greatness of my parents: they didn’t use bribery to get good behavior out of their children, but they still used small, spontaneous rewards to show us that we were appreciated.

I couldn’t have explained this principle when I was a child, mostly because I just felt that they were rewarding us for our behavior. But as I’ve been exploring the academic findings on parenting over the last year or so, I’ve realized that their system of rewards and the standard parenting practice of bribery are opposite in nature and effect. At first when I was introduced to the idea of rewards as negative for children, I was skeptical: I love rewards. The charm of them hasn’t died for me, and I haven’t felt the worse for receiving them; I love giving them to show appreciation as my parents did for me.

The problem isn’t so much with rewards as the common nature of them. Most parents use rewards to talk their children into starting or stopping a behavior. Dr. Hain Ginott in his book Between Parent and Child discussed the problem with rewards used incorrectly: “[Bribery] may occasionally spur the child toward an immediate goal. But it seldom, if ever, inspires [him or] her toward continual efforts” (Ginott, Goddard, & Ginott, 2003).

Ginott goes on to explain three more major issues with the idea of bribery. First, the bribery concept of “if-then”—“If you accomplish this task, then you will receive a reward”—implies that a parent expresses a lack of confidence. There’s a big “if” to start out that idea. Second, children will misbehave intentionally to goad their parents into prescribing rewards against bad deeds if that becomes the pattern. Third, children begin to associate their parents and doing good things with gifts and prizes. “[Parents] are greeted by the children not with, ‘Hello,’ but with a ‘What-did-you-bring-me?’” (Ginott, Goddard, & Ginott, 2003)

Essentially parents that use rewards as a fall-back cause their children to believe that everything good they do should be rewarded. This doesn’t create a pattern of responsibility; this creates a different idea. “If I look good to other people, I’ll get rewarded. If I do what I want in secret, I can get rewards from my parents when I do something they like.”

Ginott does not necessarily recommend cutting out the idea of rewards altogether, though. He has some guidelines. “Rewards are most helpful and more enjoyable when they are announced in advance, when they come as a surprise, when they represent recognition and appreciation” (Ginott, Goddard, & Ginott, 2003). I had been reading negativity against rewards until I came across this quote, and now I realize the value in my parents’ method of reward: they didn’t reward me for specific instances of obedience. It was an overall effort—resulting in changes and positivity in my character—that caused them to reward me in the way they did.

Basically what it boils down to is this: using rewards to generate behavior in your children—especially when you have repeatedly promised payment for good behavior—accomplishes the opposite of its purpose. Rewards don’t train children to listen, much less to be responsible and make the right decisions for themselves. We can talk about how to help children learn responsibility later, but for now bribery is not the most effective way to get there. Rewards can be a sweet, simple gesture from parents to show children that they are loved and thought about. In a spontaneous moment, that may be exactly what a child needs to know.

References

Ginott, H. G., Goddard, H. W., & Ginott, A. (2003). Between Parent and Child: Revised and        Updated: The Bestselling Classic That Revolutionized Parent-Child Communication, 60.     New York: Harmony. Retrieved from https://search-ebscohost-com.byui.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=724916&site=eds-live