We are working on No One More Times, Yelling "NO!!" Is Sassing, and That Means You Too. With a side of Respect Your Sibling's Special Time. And in the Table Manners department, we are working on Sitting On Your Bum. Of course, that doesn't mean that we're abandoning all our other ordinary manners, or things like lying to your mother are going to slip by, but those are the special projects of the month-ish (or whenever they get absorbed). And if that sounds like it's overwhelming for the kids because we're working on everything at once, I assure you, it is NOT everything!
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| (Notice their flower names at the top of the page...) |
In this post, I am going to write more about managing clear family policies and teaching discipline in a family of high-intensity young children. It's something I think about every day, and sometimes every minute! I am still frustrated with the older children's behavior, but we are making progress, together. I will share some of the specific things that we are doing that work for the children, and I will share some of the ways that I think about discipline.
First of all, a little bit on what I think discipline itself is. I think for all parents, but especially for those of us raising highly challenging children, that it is essential to be clear in our own minds about our own deeper philosophy behind what we are doing. A clear definition of the end goal, and feeling clear about why we are making each choice, is the headlamp that lights our paths through all the swamps and dust-storms that our children constantly create around us. It's not a floodlight that makes everything easy, but by constantly re-charging our mental batteries by thinking carefully about what and why we are doing, we parents can be the ones with the lights on, leading through the path of confusion. Because our children are more confused than we are!
First of all, the word "discipline." This is a word I use a lot, and to me it neither has negative connotations nor is it about the "no-and-punishment" side of parenting. Discipline is discipleship, and discipleship is teaching, and teaching is what we do with our children all the time. Discipline is the type of teaching that we do that is about areas like behavior and self-control, rather than areas like learning to read. And we are teaching discipline to our children every moment, whether we are choosing to think about it or not. What we model to our children is the most powerful message that we send!
I try to strengthen the message that I model by bringing it into the foreground and telling my children about myself. I apologize when I'm wrong. I talk about when I'm frustrated, and talk through looking for a solution. I tell them stories about when I felt angry or upset, and how I dealt with it. I try and focus on emotions that are within their little-kid palette of understanding, especially when there's an issue that they have been struggling with lately. This is difficult for me to to do and I have to be conscious of it, not because I'm ashamed of making a mistake or getting frustrated at someone in line, but because I don't naturally show or talk about my emotions very much, and I'm good at hiding my emotions. I have to step out of my comfort zone so my children can see that I struggle and have to deal with my struggles, just like they do. Right now, I make it very clear about when I need to do something I don't want to do, or obey someone else's rules even though I don't like them, because this is a huge area of difficulty for my children.
Which leads us to the word "obey." This is a word that was rife with negative Bible-belt connotations in the world in which I grew up, and my parents and everyone else avoided it entirely. I don't any more. Simple words are better for kids, and "obey" is a simple word for a lot of complicated ideas, including respect, cooperation, listening, delaying gratification, and accepting responsibility. However, I define "obey" in the adult way, and not the child-only way. Do we expect an obedient child to do whatever an adult says immediately and without question? That is going to get him into a lot of trouble when he gets older, and people put pressure on him to do all kinds of things, including some we parents wouldn't like at all! We can make it clear to children that they are allowed to use their heads and their words while they are obedient. Even in the Bible, many prophets like Isaiah and Moses discussed issues with God, and brought up their concerns. Moses took off his sandals in front of the burning bush, but he did not acquiesce immediately to what God had in mind. If Moses can bring up his concern about his speech, and God can make a compromise of adding a brother-in-law to his team, then my children are being perfectly obedient if I ask them to set the table, and they say "may I please go get my game from outside first?" or "I don't remember where the plates are any more." That's obviously different from screaming at me or running off, and that difference defines what obedience in children means to me.
Like in defining obedience, my husband and I think a lot about instilling values and habits that will serve our children well in the rest of their lives... which is often very different from what makes an easy and pleasant child! I don't want my children to obey without question, because although that would make setting the table go a lot faster, it's not going to help them with peer pressure in high school. We want to teach our children how to think and how to problem-solve, and I acknowledge that sometimes they're going to come up with a different answer than I have. Tonight we discussed why Hibiscus had gotten a Sit, and I pointed out the rule on our chart and what she had done. She agreed that she understood, and I asked if that was fair or if I was being a mean mama. She mumbled that I was being mean. And that was a fair answer. My understanding of the situation was different from hers.
I love the Waldorf idea of "rhythm instead of discipline" (except obviously I think that rhythm itself is discipline, since discipline is positive), and it gets us a long way in this household. And we are a Sousa march or a Strauss waltz -- no Copland allowed! -- as far as rhythm is concerned: everything that can be regularized is pinned into place. But for my highly challenging children, a household rhythm isn't enough to contain the roaring rockets of their internal chaos. So then the question is, consequences or punishment?
When I wrote about our Sits, some people commented that I seemed almost ashamed of giving out punishment and that time-outs are perfectly normal. I am not at all ashamed of having consequences that my children don't like, but I want to be clear in my own mind about whether the Sits are consequences, or turning into punishments. What's the difference?
I would say that a consequence is directly related to the particular event that happened, and that it allows room for the child to grow and move out of it. A punishment is handed down from above, and the purpose is to make the child feel "yucky" (as my children say). Let's go back to thinking about adult life: our lives are chock-full of consequences, but there are very few punishments. If you go to a party and are laugh when someone gets hurt and grab all the hour d'oevers from the snack tray, no one is going to take you into the other room and make you stay there for the rest of the party, but you're not going to have many friends or go to many more parties. That's a consequence. But because no one hauled you into the back bedroom, you have a chance to grow: you could sincerely apologize to the people you laughed at, and go into the kitchen and help make another tray of melon balls. It wouldn't erase the negative, but it would change people's impression of you, and someone might invite you to a party another time. Maybe.
Some parents think about that kind of consequence, and work really hard to make every consequence fit the misdeed exactly. Some kid-problems have obvious kid-consequences if we simply step out of the way and don't fix it for them, but I don't go beyond the obvious. My kids need regularity, and we do Sits for everything else and that is regularized. I don't knock myself out thinking of the perfect matching consequence for every misbehavior. But a Sit IS the natural consequence, because overall, their problem is that they need to calm themselves down and think before they act. Or while they act, or after they act... in fact pretty much any thinking at all would improve most evenings around here!
Are punishments for children wrong? I don't think they are entirely. Again, in our adult life, there are some punishments. A cop can give you a big fine for driving too fast, and I think a lot more people follow the speed limit because of the potential punishment than would without it! But a punishment that is above and beyond the natural consequences of our behavior is rare, which makes it more powerful. So if we parents find ourselves giving punishments a dozen times a day, that indicates to me that something is out of balance. In fact, because young children are so spontaneous and have so little understanding of the world beyond themselves, I think there is almost nothing they can do to merit an actual punishment (being placed in a position to feel bad, instead of a position to grow). My children are too young and too random to be acting maliciously, however frustrated their behavior might make me!
Something like a Sit or a Time-out could be a punishment or it could be a consequence, and it might look the same from the outside. It is my job as a parent to be constantly asking myself, am I enforcing this in order to help them learn and grow, or am I trying to make them feel bad because they made me feel bad? Do I want them to develop internal habits or just avoid something negative? Right now, I do believe that the way we are doing Sits teaches them good internal habits -- like learning to STOP. (I'm not sure the actual thinking part has made it into the equation yet... maybe next year!) Both Emerson and Hibiscus get wound up until their internal accelerator is jammed down to the floor, and they can't learn anything else until they learn to stop that revving-up cycle. Emerson and I worked on that for months this spring and summer, with me essentially stopping things for him over and over and over again, until he figured out how to slow himself down. (We went home, closed books, put food back away, sat on roadsides, etc etc etc... that's mom putting on the emergency brakes.) Actually, this is a little bit of a challenge right now, because it's very important to treat the two of them equally, but Emerson is moving a little bit beyond just plain needing to STOP, whereas Hibiscus definitely isn't.
Here is what I have learned academically about helping highly challenging children move beyond one challenging stage: repetition and consistency. Here is what I have learned from actually parenting them: you have the same fight twelve million and fifty-two hundred times, until you go from thinking you are a particularly patient person to wanting to shake your child until their teeth rattle and then push them off a cliff, or at least out of the house you have to live in. (That is not gratuitously violent imagery, that is a painfully honest description of raising two highly challenging children.) But if you manage to make it through and be consistent and kind of calm for the fifty-two-hundred-and-first time, you suddenly realize that it's been days, or even weeks, and you haven't had that same argument any more, and they are cheerfully and pleasantly completing the challenged task. It takes so long to notice because you are on your six millionth repetition of a different argument.
I am also learning that the more absolutely specific, exact, and clear my expectation is, the shorter the learning/arguing period is. So we have walls covered with labeled drawings of routines and expectations and an entire home-made book of policies, as well as skits between dolls where the children laugh at how obviously one is misbehaving and diagnose the appropriate consequence, and certain phrases that we use over and over again. Tomorrow, I'll write another post and go into detail about how we have used all those props to help the children gain footholds of understanding in the complicated world of Self Control. And how frequently we have used the poster at the top of the page in the first 24 hours, and that apparently I should have put it up weeks ago...
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