THE POWER TO PARENT IS SLIPPING AWAY
KIRSTEN WAS SEVEN years old when her mother and father first consulted me, upset and worried over a sudden change in their daughter. She tended to do the opposite of what was expected and could be very rude to her parents, especially when her friends were around. The parents were perplexed. Before she entered second grade, Kirsten, the eldest of three sisters, had been loving and affectionate and eager to please. “Parenting Kirsten used to be a wonderful experience,” the mother recalled. Now the child was resistant and very difficult to manage. She rolled her eyes to the most innocuous of requests, and everything ended up in a battle. The mother discovered a side of herself she never knew existed, finding herself angry and even enraged. She heard herself yelling and was shocked to hear words coming out of her mouth that frightened her. The father found the atmosphere so tense and the friction so wearing that he increasingly withdrew into his work. Like many parents in their situation, they resorted more and more to scolding, threats, and punishments—all to no avail.
It may be surprising to hear that parenting should be relatively easy. Getting our child to take our cues, follow directions, or respect our values should not require strain and struggle or coercion, nor even the extra leverage of rewards. If pressure tactics are required, something is amiss. Kirsten’s mother and father had come to rely on force because, unawares, they had lost the power to parent.
Parenting was designed to be power-assisted. In this way, it is much like the luxury vehicles of today, with power-assisted steering, brakes, and windows. If the power fails, many of the cars would be too much to handle. To manage children when our parenting power has been cut is likewise next to impossible, yet millions of parents are trying to do just that. But whereas it is relatively easy to find a good technician to help with your car, the experts to whom parents bring their child-rearing difficulties seldom assess the problem correctly. Too often the children are blamed for being difficult or the parents for being inept or their parenting techniques for being inadequate. It is generally unrecognized by parents and professionals that the root of the problem is not parental ineptitude but parental impotence in the strictest meaning of that word: lacking sufficient power.
The absent quality is power, not love or knowledge or commitment or skill. Our predecessors had much more power than parents today. In getting children to heed, our grandparents wielded more power than our parents could exercise over us or we seem to have over our children. If the trend continues, our children will be in great difficulty when their turn comes at parenting. The power to parent is slipping away.
THE SPONTANEOUS AUTHORITY TO PARENT
Parental impotence is difficult to recognize and distressing to admit. Our minds seize on more acceptable explanations: our children don’t need us anymore, or our children are particularly difficult, or our parenting skill is deficient.
These days many people resist the concept of power. As children, some of us knew all too well the power of parents and became painfully aware of its potential for abuse. We are mindful that power leads to temptation and have experienced that those who seek power over others cannot be trusted. In some ways power has become a dirty word, as in power-seeking and power-hungry. It is not surprising that many have come to eschew it, an attitude I encounter frequently among parents and educators.
Many also confuse power with force. That is not the sense in which we employ the word power in this book. In our present discussion of parenting and attachment, power means the spontaneous authority to parent. That spontaneous authority flows not from coercion or force but from an appropriately aligned relationship with the child. The power to parent arises when things are in their natural order, and it arises without effort, without posturing, and without pushing. It is when we lack that power that we are likely to resort to force. The more power a parent commands, the less force is required in day-to-day parenting. On the other hand, the less power we possess, the more impelled we are to raise our voices, harshen our demeanor, utter threats, and seek some leverage to make our children comply with our demands. The loss of power experienced by today’s parents has led to a preoccupation in the parenting literature with techniques that would be perceived as bribes and threats in almost any other setting. We have camouflaged such signs of impotence with euphemisms like rewards and “natural consequences.”
Power is absolutely necessary for the task of parenting. Why do we need power? Because we have responsibilities. Parenting was never meant to exist without the power to fulfill the responsibilities it brings. There is no way of understanding the dynamics of parenting without addressing the question of power.
The power we have lost is the power to command our children’s attention, to solicit their good intentions, to evoke their deference and secure their cooperation. Without these four abilities, all we have left is coercion or bribery. This was the problem faced by Kirsten’s mother and father when they consulted me, anxious about their daughter’s newly developed recalcitrance. I will use Kirsten’s relationship with her parents as an example of the loss of natural parenting authority, along with two other cases I’ll describe that also help demonstrate the meaning of parental power. There are nine people in this cast of characters—six parents and three children. Their stories typify the dilemma faced by many families today.
The parents of nine-year-old Sean were divorced. Neither had remarried, and the working relationship between the two of them was good enough that they could seek help together. Their difficulties in parenting Sean had contributed to their split. The early years with Sean had been relatively easy, but the past two had been horrendous. He was verbally abusive to his parents and physically aggressive toward his younger sister. Although he was very intelligent, no amount of reasoning could induce him to do as he was told. The parents had consulted several experts and had read many books that recommended various approaches and techniques. Nothing seemed to work with Sean. The usual sanctions only made things worse. Sending him to his room had no apparent impact. Although the mother did not believe in spanking, out of desperation she found herself employing physical punishment. The parents had given up trying to gain Sean’s compliance in such simple matters as sitting at the family table during supper. They had no success in getting him to do his homework. Before the marriage broke up, Sean’s sullen resistance blighted the atmosphere in the home. So worn down emotionally had they become that neither parent could any longer conjure up feelings of warmth or affection toward their son.
Melanie was thirteen years old. Her father could barely contain his anger when he talked about his daughter. Life with her changed after Melanie’s grandmother had died when the child was in the sixth grade. Until that time, Melanie had been cooperative at home, a good student at school, and a loving sister to her brother, who was three years older. Now she was missing classes and couldn’t care less about homework. She was sneaking out of the house on a regular basis. She refused to talk to her parents, declaring that she hated them and that she just wanted to be left alone. She, too, refused to eat with her parents, consuming her meals by herself in her room. The mother felt traumatized. She spent much of her time pleading with her daughter to be “nice,” to be home on time, and to stop sneaking out. The father could not abide Melanie’s insolent attitude. He believed that the solution was somehow to lay down the law, to teach the adolescent “a lesson she would never forget.” As far as he was concerned, anything less than a hard-line approach was only indulging Melanie’s unacceptable behavior and made matters worse. He was all the more enraged since, until this abrupt change in her personality, Melanie had been “daddy’s girl,” sweet and compliant.
Three individual scenarios, three separate sets of circumstances, and three very different kids—yet none of them unique. The child-rearing frustrations these parents experienced are shared by many fathers and mothers. The manifestations of difficulty differ from child to child, but the chorus is remarkably the same: parenting is much harder than anticipated. The litany of parental laments is by now a common one: “The children of today don’t seem to have the respect for authority that we had when we were kids; I cannot get my child to do his homework, make his bed, do his chores, clean his room.” Or the often heard mock complaint, “If parenting is so important, kids should come with a manual!”
THE SECRET OF PARENTAL POWER
Many people have concluded that parents cannot be expected to know what to do without formal training. There are all kinds of parenting courses now, and even classes teaching parents how to read nursery rhymes to their toddlers. Yet experts cannot teach what is most fundamental to effective parenting. The power to parent does not arise from techniques, no matter how well meant, but from the attachment relationship. In all three of our examples that power was missing.
The secret of a parent’s power is in the dependence of the child. Children are born completely dependent, unable to make their own way in this world. Their lack of viability as separate beings makes them utterly reliant on others for being taken care of, for guidance and direction, for support and approval, for a sense of home and belonging. It is the child’s state of dependence that makes parenting necessary in the first place. If our children didn’t need us, we would not need the power to parent.
At first glance, the dependence of children seems straightforward enough. But here is the glitch: being dependent does not guarantee dependence on the appropriate caregivers. Every child is born in need of nurturing, but after infancy and toddlerhood not all children necessarily look to the parent to provide it. Our power to parent rests not in how dependent our child is, but in how much our child depends specifically on us. The power to execute our parental responsibilities lies not in the neediness of our children but in their looking to us to be the answer to their needs.
We cannot truly take care of a child who does not count on us to be taken care of, or who depends on us only for food, clothing, shelter, and other material concerns. We cannot emotionally support a child who is not leaning on us for his psychological needs. It is frustrating to direct a child who does not welcome our guidance, irksome and self-defeating to assist one who is not seeking our help.
That was the situation faced by the parents of Kirsten, Sean, and Mela-nie. Kirsten no longer relied on her parents for her attachment needs or for her cues on how to be and what to do. At the tender age of seven, she no longer turned to them for comfort and nurturance. Sean’s stance went beyond that: he had developed a deep-seated resistance to being dependent on his father and mother. Sean’s resistance, and Melanie’s, extended even to being fed—or, more exactly, to the ritual of feeding that takes place at the family table. Melanie, as she entered adolescence, no longer looked to her parents for a sense of home or connection. She had no wish to be understood by them or to be intimately known by them. Not one of these three children felt dependent on their parents, and that was at the root of the frustrations, difficulties, and failures experienced by all these mothers and fathers.
Of course, all children begin life depending on their parents. Something changed along the way for these three kids, as it does for many children today. It is not that they no longer needed to be taken care of. As long as a child is unable to function independently, he will need to depend on someone. No matter what these children may have thought or felt, they were not anywhere close to being ready to stand on their own two feet. They were still dependent—only they no longer experienced themselves as depending on their parents. Their dependency needs had not vanished; what had changed was only on whom they were depending. The power to parent will be transferred to whomever the child depends on, whether or not that person is truly dependable, appropriate, responsible, or compassionate—whether or not, in fact, that person is even an adult.
In the lives of these three children, peers had replaced parents as the objects of emotional dependence. Kirsten had a tight-knit group of three friends who served as her compass point and her home base. For Sean, the peer group in general became his working attachment, the entity to which he became connected in place of his parents. His values, interests, and motivations were invested in his peers and the peer culture. For Melanie, the attachment void created by the death of her grandmother was filled by a girlfriend. In all three cases the peer relationships competed with attachments to the parents, and in each case the peer connection came to dominate.
Such a power shift spells double trouble for us parents. Not only are we left without the power to manage our child, but the innocent and incompetent usurpers acquire the power to lead our children astray. Our children’s peers did not actively seek this power—it goes with the territory of dependence. This sinister cut in parenting power often comes when we least expect it and at a time when we are most in need of natural authority. The seeds of peer dependence have usually taken root by the primary grades, but it is in the intermediate years that the growing incompatibility of peer and parent attachments plays havoc with our power to parent. Precisely during our children’s adolescence, just when there is more to manage than ever before, and just when our physical superiority over them begins to wane, the power to parent slips from our hands.
What to us looks like independence is really just dependence transferred. We are in such a hurry for our children to be able to do things themselves that we do not see just how dependent they really are. Like power, dependence has become a dirty word. We want our children to be self-directing, self-motivated, self-controlled, self-orienting, self-reliant, and self-assured. We have put such a premium on independence that we lose sight of what childhood is about. Parents will complain of their child’s op-positional and off-putting behaviors, but rarely do they note that their children have stopped looking to them for nurturing, comfort, and assistance. They are disturbed by their child’s failure to comply with their reasonable expectations but seem unaware that the child no longer seeks their affection, approval, or appreciation. They do not notice that the child is turning to peers for support, love, connection, and belonging. When attachment is displaced, dependence is displaced. So is, along with it, the power to parent.
The ultimate challenge for the parents of Kirsten, Sean, and Melanie was not to enforce rules, induce compliance, or put an end to this or that behavior. It was to reclaim their children, to realign the forces of attachment on the side of parenting. They had to foster in their children the dependence that is the source of the power to parent. To regain their natural authority, they had to displace and usurp the illegitimate jurisdiction of their unsuspecting and unwitting usurpers—their children’s friends. While reattaching our children may be easier to conceptualize than to do in practice, it is the only way to regain parental authority. Much of my work with families, and much of the advice I will give in this book, is intended to help parents reassume their natural position of authority.
What enables peers to displace parents in the first place, given that such displacement seems contrary to what is needed? As always, there is logic to the natural order of things. A child’s ability to attach to people who are not her biological parents serves an important function, because in life the presence of the birth parents is by no means assured. They could die or disappear. Our attachment programming required the flexibility to find substitutes to attach to and depend on. Humans are not unique in this transferability of attachments. What makes some creatures such great pets is that they can reattach from their parents to humans, enabling us to both care for them and manage them.
Since humans have a lengthy period of dependence, attachments must be transferable from one person to another, from parents to relatives and neighbors and tribal or village elders. All of these, in turn, are meant to play their role in bringing the child to full maturity. This remarkable adaptability, which has served parents and children for thousands of years, has come to haunt us in recent times. Under today’s conditions, that adaptability now enables peers to replace parents.
Most parents are able to sense the loss of power when their child becomes peer-oriented, even if they don’t recognize it for what it is. Such a child’s attention is harder to command, his deference decreases, the parent’s authority is eroded. When specifically asked, the parents of each of the three children in our case examples were able to identify when their power to parent began to wane. That erosion of natural authority is first noted by parents as simply a niggling feeling that something has gone wrong.
WHAT ENABLES US TO PARENT?
It takes three ingredients to make parenting work: a dependent being in need of being taken care of, an adult willing to assume responsibility, and a good working attachment from the child to the adult. The most critical of these is also the one most commonly overlooked and neglected: the child’s attachment to the adult. Many parents and would-be parents still labor under the misconception that one can simply step into the role of parenting, whether as an adoptive parent, a foster parent, a stepparent, or the biological parent. We expect that the child’s need to be taken care of and our willingness to parent will suffice. We are surprised and offended when children seem resistant to our parenting.
Recognizing that parental responsibility is insufficient for successful child-rearing, but still not conscious of the role of attachment, many experts assume the problem must be in the parenting know-how. If parenting is not going well, it is because parents are not doing things right. According to this way of thinking, it is not enough to don the role; a parent needs some skill to be effective. The parental role has to be supplemented with all kinds of parenting techniques—or so many experts seem to believe.
Many parents, too, reason something like this: if others can get their children to do what they want them to do but I can’t, it must be because I lack the requisite skills. Their questions all presume a simple lack of knowledge, to be corrected by “how to” types of advice for every conceivable problem situation: How do I get my child to listen? How can I get my child to do his homework? What do I need to do to get my child to clean his room? What is the secret to getting a child to do her chores? How do I get my child to sit at the table? Our predecessors would probably have been embarrassed to ask such questions or, for that matter, to show their face in a parenting course. It seems much easier for parents today to confess incompetence rather than impotence, especially when our lack of skill can be conveniently blamed on a lack of training or a lack of appropriate models in our own childhood. The result has been a multibillion-dollar industry of parental advice-giving, from experts advocating time-outs or reward points on the fridge to all the how-to books on effective parenting. Child-rearing experts and the publishing industry give parents what they ask for instead of the insight they so desperately need. The sheer volume of the advice offered tends to reinforce the feelings of inadequacy and the sense of being unprepared for the job. The fact that these methodologies fail to work has not slowed the torrent of skill teaching.
Once we perceive parenting as a set of skills to be learned, it is difficult for us to see the process any other way. Whenever trouble is encountered the assumption is that there must be another book to be read, another course to be taken, another skill to be mastered. Meanwhile, our supporting cast continues to assume that we have the power to do the job. Teachers act as if we can still get our children to do homework. Neighbors expect us to keep our children in line. Our own parents chide us to take a firmer stand. The experts assume that compliance is just another skill away. The courts hold us responsible for our child’s behavior. Nobody seems to get the fact that our hold on our children is slipping.
The reasoning behind parenting as a set of skills seemed logical enough, but in hindsight has been a dreadful mistake. It has led to an artificial reliance on experts, robbed parents of their natural confidence, and often leaves them feeling dumb and inadequate. We are quick to assume that our children don’t listen because we don’t know how to make them listen, that our children are not compliant because we have not yet learned the right tricks, that children are not respectful enough of authority because we, the parents, have not taught them to be respectful. We miss the essential point that what matters is not the skill of the parents but the relationship of the child to the adult who is assuming responsibility.
When we focus narrowly on what we should be doing, we become blind to our attachment relationship with our children and its inadequacies. Parenthood is above all a relationship, not a skill to be acquired. Attachment is not a behavior to be learned but a connection to be sought.
Parenting impotence is hard to see because the power that parents used to possess was not conscious of itself. It was automatic, invisible, a built-in component of family life and of tradition-based cultures. By and large, the parents of yesteryear could take their power for granted because it was usually sufficient for the task at hand. For reasons we have begun to explore, this is no longer the case. If one does not understand the source of one’s ease, one cannot appreciate the root of one’s difficulty. Owing to our collective ignorance of attachment, our difficulty recognizing parental impotence, and our aversion to power itself, the most common affliction in parenting is left begging for an explanation.
THE SEARCH FOR LABELS
The obvious alternative to blaming the parent is to conclude that there is something amiss or lacking in the child. If we are not given to doubt our parenting, we assume the source of our trouble must be the child. We take refuge in the child-blaming thought that we have not failed, but our children have failed to live up to the expected standards. Our attitude is expressed in questions or demands such as Why don’t you pay attention? Stop being so difficult! Or, Why can’t you do as you’re told?
Difficulty in parenting often leads to a hunt to find out what is wrong with the child. We may witness today a frantic search for labels to explain our children’s problems. Parents seek the formal diagnoses of a professional or grasp at informal labels—there are, for examples, books on raising the “difficult” or the “spirited” child. The more frustrating parenting becomes, the more likely children will be perceived as difficult and the more labels will be sought for verification. It is no coincidence that the preoccupation with diagnoses has paralleled the rise in peer orientation in our society. Increasingly, children’s behavioral problems are ascribed to various medical syndromes such as oppositional defiant disorder or attention deficit disorder. These diagnoses at least have the benefit of absolving the child and of removing the onus of blame from the parents, but they camouflage the reversible dynamics that cause children to misbehave in the first place. Medical explanations help by removing guilt but they hinder by reducing the issues to oversimplified concepts. They assume that the complex behavior problems of many children can be explained by genetics or by miswired brain circuits. They ignore scientific evidence that the human brain is shaped by the environment from birth throughout the lifetime and that attachment relationships are the most important aspect of the child’s environment. They also dictate narrow solutions, such as medications, without regard to the child’s relationships with peers and with the adult world. In practice, they serve to further disempower parents.
We are not saying that brain physiology is not implicated in some childhood disorders or that medications never have value. My cowriter, for example, sees many children and adults with ADD, a condition in which the brain’s functioning is physiologically different from what is the norm, and he does prescribe medications when they seem justifiably needed. What we do object to is reducing childhood problems to medical diagnoses and treatments to the exclusion of the many psychological, emotional, and social factors that contribute to how these problems arise. Even in ADD and other childhood conditions where medical diagnoses and treatments can have value, the attachment relationship with parents must remain the primary concern and the best path toward healing.*
Sean’s parents had already gone the route of seeking labels, collecting three different diagnoses from three different experts—two psychologists and a psychiatrist. One professional assessed him as obsessive compulsive, another as oppositionally defiant, and still another as suffering from attention deficit disorder. Finding out that something was indeed wrong with Sean was a great relief to his parents. Their difficulty in parenting was not their fault. Furthermore, the doctors’ diagnoses also took Sean off the hook. He couldn’t help it. The labels stopped the blaming, which was a good thing.
I had no quarrel with any of these labels; they actually described his behavior rather well. He was highly compulsive, resistant, and inattentive. Furthermore, what these three syndromes have in common is that the children so labeled are also impulsive and nonadaptive. Impulsive children (or adults) are unable to separate impulses from actions. They act out whatever impulse arises in their minds. To be nonadaptive is to fail to adapt when things go wrong and to fail to benefit from adversity, to learn from negative consequences. These failures give parents more inappropriate behavior to handle while at the same time limiting their tools for managing the child’s conduct. For example, negative techniques such as admonishment, shaming, sanctions, consequences, and punishment are useless with a youngster who cannot learn from them. So, in one sense, one could accurately say that Sean’s parents were having so much difficulty because of what was wrong with Sean. There is some truth in this, but sometimes one truth can mask an even greater truth—in this case, a problem in the relationship.
The medicalized labels made Sean’s parents depend on experts. Instead of trusting in their own intuition, learning from their own mistakes and finding their own way, they started to look to others for cues on how to parent. They were mechanically following the advice of others, employing contrived methods of behavior control that ran roughshod over the attachment relationship. Sometimes, they said, it felt as if they were relating to a syndrome rather than to a person. Instead of finding answers, they found as many opinions as there were experts to propound them.
A yet more worrying problem with labels—even ones as informal as “the difficult child” or as innocuous as “the sensitive child”—is that they create an impression that the root of the problem has been found. They cover up the true source of the difficulty. When an assessment of a problem ignores the underlying relationship factors, it retards the search for genuine solutions.
That Sean was a handful was not in question. His impulsiveness made him harder to manage, to be sure. Most impulses, however, are triggered by attachment, and it was Sean’s attachments that had gone astray. It wasn’t his impulsiveness but the fact that these impulses were working against the parents that made things so impossible. It went against Sean’s natural instincts to depend on his parents, to be close to them or to take his cues from them. This was due to his peer orientation, not some medical disorder. His skewed attachment instincts also explained his oppositional behavior and pointed the way for a cure. The peer-orientation problem did not explain all his attention problems, but restoring healthy attachment with his parents was the way to establish a basis to deal with them. The most salient issue the parents needed to come to terms with was not what was wrong with Sean but what was missing in Sean’s relationship to them.
Although neither Kirsten’s parents nor Melanie’s parents had gone the route of seeking a formal diagnosis, they also wondered whether their children were normal or whether the problem lay in their techniques. On closer examination I did find that Melanie was significantly immature for her age, but this again did not explain the difficulty in parenting. The critical issue was that she was peer dependent, which, given her psychological immaturity, delivered a devastating blow to parenting.
Fortunately, peer orientation is not only preventable but, in most cases, also reversible—Parts 4 and 5 of this book are dedicated to those tasks. We must, however, thoroughly understand what the problem is. Parenting was meant to be natural and intuitive but can be so only when the child is attaching to us. To regain the power to parent we must bring our children back into full dependence on us—not just physical dependence but psychological and emotional, too, as nature has ever intended.