Q: For years, people have told me I needed to say “no” to my children more often.
I did not listen. My kids have pretty much ruled the roost for most of their lives. Now it is getting out of hand.
Our 13-year-old son is in trouble just about everywhere he goes. He is struggling in school, spending more time being reprimanded in the principal’s office than he does being taught in the classroom.
His coach is not fussy about having him on the hockey team and the few friends he has had are coming over to spend time with him less and less each year. Our son has no sense of self-discipline. He is impulsive, self-centred and insensitive.
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We need to do something to help him change, not just for him but also for his two younger sisters following in his footsteps.
A: It sounds like your family is embedded in a fair amount of turmoil. My guess is that you need help sorting your way through this thing.
Check in with your local mental health clinic. Someone there will know the principles of cognitive behaviour therapy.
A few sessions could go a long way to helping your family get back on track.
Yours is not the only family in turmoil. When people finally admit that this thing is stressful, they often mistakenly try to change everything at once. They think that if they find the right magical formula, they can expect that their rude and defiant children will suddenly become angels. It does not work that way.
Changing how we deal with our children is an incremental process. It comes with time.
You can break down what is happening to your kids into three concerns. They are early morning routines, mealtimes and curfew times. Your best bet is to focus on one of the three concerns and figure out what you are going to do from that point on.
Don’t forget the parable of the housefly: you catch more flies with honey than you do with a fly swatter. You are probably going to increase your chances for success encouraging changes in your children by rewarding them for the efforts they make than you will for punishing them when life goes a bit sour.
You give each of your children a chip when they show up at the dinner table after being called for supper. Friday night, payday, you give each of them their basic $5 allowance, plus an additional 50 cents for each chip he or she picked up throughout the week. Once you and your children are more comfortable with mealtimes, you change the program. Maybe they are going to get chips for crawling into bed in the evening or being dressed for school before breakfast in the morning.
Remember, this is a positive program, not a negative one. They get a chip for co-operative behaviour.
As tempting as it might be, try not to scream and shout when they are late for breakfast or dawdling at bedtime.
The truth is that you have probably been shouting for years and it has not been working. The odds for success are better with rewards.
I have a couple of caveats to consider when developing a more positive program. The first is that there are no secrets. Your kids need to know what you are doing with your rewards and why you are concerned about them. The more that they understand, the more likely they will co-operate with it. The second caveat is that this is a time-limited program. It is called behaviour modification and if you check out information from reliable sources on the internet, you will find that programs such as this one have fatigue factors. Over time, rewards become less effective.
You are using rewards to establish more acceptable behaviours and you are hoping that these new behaviours become habits, so that in the future they will come to the supper table when called. While at the table, they are going to talk about the nice time they had talking to the principal at school, the same one who is at the moment berating your son for his irresponsibility.
Jacklin Andrews is a family counsellor from Saskatchewan. Contact: jandrews@producer.com.
