five parenting tools for pre-schoolers
The following are my notes from a brown bag I attended at the university's Union today, organized by the Human Resources staff. The speaker was Dr Suzanne Duncan, a learning and behavioral consultant with a background in Educational Psychology and 25 years of experience; at one point she was Assistant Research Professor in Pediatrics. She currently runs a private practice in town. The intention of the post is to get down what the she said; I haven't had time to digest it all or apply it to my life.
Dr Duncan felt that there were five tools that every parent of a two to six year old should have at their disposal, and she structured the talk around these five tools. However, she embedded these five tools into a larger context of her specialization. Dr Duncan said that the semantic field of children's behavior is often summarized with the letters "ABC", namely "A"ntecedents (i.e. triggers), such as people and places and times of the day; the "B"ehavior as such; and the "C"onsequences that follow from these in terms of the parents' reaction. Dr Duncan pointed out that small children will have difficulties with behaviors in three key trigger situations: when they are hungry; when they feel tired; and when they feel rushed. The consequences that parents can exhibit fall into positive and negative consequences, where positive mean those that cause the behavior to persist and even increase, and negative those that cause the behavior to subside or stop. She reminded the audience that parents of unintentionally provide positive consequences from the child's point of view, e.g. when they let themselves be constantly interrupted while talking on the phone and react to the interruption via dissuading the child continuously. This reinforces in the child the behavior as an attention getter--and attention being the number one coin of the realm in the world of the young child, this is key.
Dr Duncan then discussed the first tool, which she referred to as preparing the soil for the remainder of the tools. This is special time. Dr Duncan stated that children in the age bracket under discussion required about 15-20 min minimum uninterrupted quality time, by themselves, with one of their parents. During this time, the parent should either limit all multi-tasking, or (if it were impossible to get the other children occupied), include them in the play but leave the child whose special time it is in control. During that time, the child should dictate what is to be done, and the parent should assist in the same way a sous-chef would, either requesting tasks from the child to perform or being a sort of "radio announcer" of the child's action. Both reading books and watching TV made for bad special time activities, since that takes control away from the child again; in the case where the children suggested that, Dr Duncan recommended going along with it for a couple of times but then obtaining toys that tied into the book or the TV and using these as a bridge to move into active play.
Not only in this case, but in general, Dr Duncan placed great emphasis on labeling. She felt that it was too difficult for small children to realize what was going on, and that labeling the playing time as "special time" was a sure way to help the children understand how this time was supposed to be different.
Upon the backdrop of an age-appropriate supply of special time, Dr Duncan introduced informative praise as the second tools. Dr Duncan and her colleagues distinguish between evaluative and informative praise. "You are awesome" and "Good job" are evaluative, because they contain insufficient information for the child to figure out which of the many aspects of the behaviors it just exhibited are being praised. Dr Duncan recommended making the feedback that is intended to be informative as precise as possible; "Gee, using the knife to put peanut butter on the sandwich without tearing the bread is really hard, but you managed putting on the peanut butter so well!" The advantage of going to that level of precision is also that it sounds more believable and truthful to the child, plus it pinpoints the behavior that elicits the parental reaction for the child to understand.
The third tool that Dr Duncan introduced was the exact inverse, namely planned ignoring. She established from the beginning that some behaviors, such as violence, tantrums and argueing, cannot ever really be ignored and need to be dealt with differently. But most other annoying behaviors are more properly understood as attempts of the children to get the attention that they feel they are currently not having. The planned ignoring targets the attention getters but finds other ways to direct attention back to the children. Thus, the children learn that they do not have to resort to these behaviors and can use more appropriate (and less annoying) mechanisms to request to be involved.
Dr Duncan then cited the book, The Explosive Child, as a good guide that used the strategy of the three baskets to deal with behavioral issues. Behaviors that were absolutely not acceptable would be labeled as belonging to basket A; behaviors that the children were simply not capable of delivering yet would be labeled as basket C. All the behaviors that the children were at least in principle ready to exhibit but were not showing yet would go into the basked B, a sort of "under construction" category. The main advantage of this conceptualization approach is that the parents can pick their battles without losing track of anything.
The fourth tool Dr Duncan introduced was intended for dealing with argueing, i.e. the attempt of the children to verbally sway the parental "no" into a "yes" (or at least into acceptance of the child's position). This tool is called the four-step timeout and is applicable to all rules that have been established but that the children do not want to adhere to. (Dr Duncan was very clear that it is unreasonable to ask the children to follow behavior patterns that do not have pre-explained rules.)
According to the four-step timeout, the first step for the parent if the child is unhappy with the "no" to a request is to give the rule explanation in an age appropriate form. The rule explanation should be delivered in a non-emotional, non-angry voice as that assists the children in "keeping it together", as Dr Duncan put it. Such rules have structural properties in order to be successful: They should be enforcable, and the parent should be ready to enforce them. If the child insisted beyond step one, then step two would be an age appropriate summary of the rule. Dr Duncan emphasized that, other than with adults, for small children explanations have to be shorter rather than more verbose; especially in this situation. Keeping emotions and anger under control (e.g. when the rule has been explained for the umpteenth time on that day) remain helpful. The third step, if required, is labeling the child's current behavior as "argueing". Dr Duncan prefers arguing over whining as a less derogatory term. The labeling of the behavior helps the child understand that they are at a choice point, since often children do not realize that they are in fact arguing.
The final and fourth step is the timeout. Dr Duncan expressed unhappiness with the majority of timeouts given. First, timeouts should never be a punishment; their function is to temporarily suspend the reinforcement. For that reason, corners and similarly humiliating locations were unsuited; she recommended top or bottom stairs. Dr Duncan said that a ticking timer was a key ingredient to a successful timeout, because it provided audio feedback of the progress of time and the end of the timeout, and an apparently external impartial party. Such a ticking timer was to be the property of the parent only, never to be played with. Timeouts should be limited to one minute per year of age, and never be longer. (However, there could be multiple timeouts in sequence, if the arguing continued--at which point it was not necessary to go back to anything before step three.) Once the timeout was concluded, the interactions should return to business as usual, without explanations or lectures on what had just happened, make-up hugs and kisses or enforced apologies--unless such were initiated by the child; the matter was simply done and over with. During the duration of the timeout itself, the parent was to exercise "planned ignoring" (e.g. read a magazine, etc), and potentially even overlook the child sneaking a little out of the timeout location.
As one of the persent parents correctly observed, timeout was an unhelpful tool for noncompliance with requests, because it supported the neglect of the requested action. Dr Duncan agreed and introduced the notion of "Granny's Law" or the "Premack Principle" as the fifth tool. Briefly, that law or principle states that the things the parents need to get accomplished should be done before the things that the children enjoy doing. The technical terminology for that distinguishes between low frequency behaviors (picking and cleaning up, putting things away) and high-frequency behaviors (snacks, screen time*, going outside to play, toys, fun stuff). Dr Duncan felt it was very important to phrase "Granny's Law" in a positive form, specifically, "As soo as you do X, then you can do Y." (instead of: "If you dont do X, you dont get to do Y").
In the closing discussion, Dr Duncan was asked about appropriate screen time. She was especially concerned about screen time for small children without the presence of the parent; such screen time should be limited to 20-30min per day. On the other hand, watching even a whole movie with children with the parent present was in her mind OK.
* Screen time is the common generalization of TV time, gameboy time and computer time.