Caught Fire:
The truth is that there are no techniques that will motivate people or make them autonomous. Motivation must come from within, not from techniques. It comes from their deciding they are ready to take responsibility for managing themselves.
—EDWARD L. DECI, PH.D., Why We Do What We Do
IN HER EXCELLENT PRIMER for parents, the psychologist Natalie Rathvon describes the unmotivated child as follows:*
• Performs well when given one-to-one attention but is restless and unproductive when required to work independently
• Has trouble beginning and completing tasks
• Withdraws attention when parents or teachers give instructions
• Becomes distractible and distracting when not the centre of attention
• Has difficulty relating to peers (may be revealed in complaints that others are “bothering” the child)
• Has difficulty relating to siblings
• Displays frequent temper outbursts or abrupt mood changes
• Makes incessant demands but is never satisfied with anything for very long
• Requires caretaking on some tasks beyond the age when it is appropriate
• Has difficulty organizing school materials and belongings at home 1
The description is, of course, a textbook list of characteristics associated with attention deficit disorder. Although not all unmotivated children have ADD, all ADD children are unmotivated. Their absence of motivation is evident not only when it comes to activities and tasks expected of children their age but even in their approach to projects and plans that originally aroused their interest and enthusiasm. A lack of inner-directed purpose also typifies a large number of ADD adults.
Not surprisingly, one of the most frequently asked questions by parents of children with attention deficit disorder is, “How can I motivate my child?” The answer, if we understand the dynamic of counterwill discussed in the previous chapter, is that you can’t. More exactly, you may succeed in activating the child temporarily with a threat or with the promise of immediate reward but at the expense of the child’s self-motivation in the long run.
The more helpful long-term goal is to foster the development of motivation that arises intrinsically from the child’s own nature. This truer form of motivation reflects the genuine inclinations of the individual, not the values and expectations of significant figures in her life. Trying to motivate a child by coaxing or pressuring her to accept what the parents want of her is worlds away from promoting the growth of her natural, self-generated motivation. The first is done to the child. The second happens within the child and is a process she actively participates in.
There are, as Edward Deci points out, universal human needs for self-determination, to feel competent and to be genuinely connected with others. These needs and the drive to satisfy them do not have to be instilled in people: they exist, even if in undeveloped form. Allowed to unfold, they will motivate. The problem is not that parents and other important adults, such as teachers, do not know how to motivate children. The problem is that our parenting styles and teaching methods in many cases fail to support the child’s natural drive for discovery and mastery. Encouraging development to unfold is based on the knowledge that nature has its own positive agenda for the child: it has given the child, every child, all the potential and capacities required for full maturation. Attempting to motivate from the outside betrays a lack of faith in the child and in nature. It reflects the anxiety of the parent, not the limitations of the child. It’s unfortunate but true that while we may not be able to transplant genuine motivation into our children, we are altogether too successful when it comes to sowing in them the seeds of our own anxiety.
A child who must meet only parental expectations will likely acquire a chronic sense of incompetence as she fails over and over again to live up to them. Or she may function well enough as viewed from the outside but will have to pay a grievous price internally. She will be unable to experience the joy and satisfaction of acting from her own free choice and may not learn what her own genuine preferences are. Her self-esteem will hinge on what she does, not on who she is. Even if she succeeds in the eyes of others, she will be mercilessly critical of herself.
True motivation is knowing that I do what I do not because someone else wants me to do it, or because I believe someone will respect or like me for doing it, not because some inner voice tells me I “should” do it, and not because I am asserting my independence by defying someone who forbade me to do it. What I do satisfies me, regardless of what others may think. As long as I am not deliberately injuring someone else, knowingly causing them harm, I will honor my preferences and inclinations, even if others will feel disappointed in me.
As with every aspect of the development of the ADD child, the growth of true, internal motivation requires a secure attachment relationship with the parent. Without the safety of the attachment relationship, the small child will be too anxious to focus his attention on a meaningful exploration of the world around him. By school age, he will automatically be guided by what he perceives to be the values and opinions of others. “How can this be true,” parents of the ADD youngster may protest, “when my child is completely defiant and refuses to accept any direction or opinion from me?” The child has transferred his conscious striving for acceptance from his parents to his peers. Recalcitrant at home, he is desperate for the approval of his playmates, a desperation more often than not met with rejection. The weakness of his core self relative to his playmates makes him a natural target for ostracization. Parents are often baffled by the apparent paradox of seeing their rebellious and fiercely contrary child submit to various humiliations in school or on the playground, continuing to seek favor with his tormentors. It is not a paradox. At home his counterwill is being manifested, while with peers he openly displays his lack of self-esteem and need for inclusion at any cost. Both behaviors bespeak an underdeveloped autonomous will. He cannot develop his own true motivation when he is too busy fending off the pressures coming from his parents and, simultaneously, working overtime to gain the acceptance of his peers.
Along with attachment, the other necessary condition for the development of motivation is autonomy. “People need to feel that their behavior is truly chosen by them rather than imposed by some external source,” writes Edward Deci, “that the locus of initiation of their behavior is within themselves rather than in some external control.” Supporting the child’s autonomy, Dr. Deci points out, means “being able to take the other person’s perspective and work from there. It means actively encouraging self-initiation, experimentation and responsibility, and it may very well require setting limits. But autonomy support functions through encouragement, not pressure.”2
It is worth recalling here that the injudicious use of rewards and praise can be pressure tactics no less than verbal or physical coercion. As we have seen, there are three dangers with motivating by means of reward and praise. First, they feed the anxiety that not the person but the desired achievement is what is valued by the parent. They directly reinforce the insecurity of the ADD child. Second, since children can sense the parents’ will pushing them, even if under benign disguises such as gifts or warm words, counterwill will be strengthened. Third, praise and reward will themselves become the goal, at the expense of the child’s interest in the actual process of what he is doing. Children thus motivated will sooner or later learn to get by with the least amount of effort necessary to earn the praise or the reward. Short cuts and cheating often follow.
Accepting the child’s reference point, the parent gives her as much choice as possible. Without some choice, autonomy is not possible. “You don’t feel like doing your homework now. When would be a better time?”
The choices offered have to be realistically on par with the child’s maturity, and within boundaries the child can handle. It is unrealistic to expect, for example, that the ADD child will sit for a long time by herself, immersed in mathematics problems, even if she is free to decide when to begin her homework. Recognizing this, parents need to structure their time so that they can be present when homework is being done. This does not mean hovering over the child and correcting her every mistake, but simply being around so that the child’s attachment anxiety does not interfere with her motivation to do the work. As attachment security and competence in handling the work improve, the child will have a growing ability to function independently. One family I know has approached this problem by having the child do his homework in the kitchen, with one of the parents always around, engaged in kitchen work, available to help when the child asks for it.
True autonomy allows the child to make choices the parent may not like. With the middle-grade child, and especially with teenagers, the option must be left open, for example, not to complete homework. It is for the school to decide what the consequences of homework left undone will be, not for the parents to impose arbitrary outcomes. If the parents put the emphasis on attachment and autonomy, the child will eventually be able to learn from the natural consequences of his actions. Schools on occasion will contact parents, trying to recruit them to pressure the child. As much as parents may share the school’s objective that their children become productive, they should resist adopting the role of enforcer. They can communicate their concern to the child as their own concern, not as an ultimatum.
True autonomy requires that the parents provide a supportive structure. It is futile to expect a child to do self-motivated and organized work if the parents’ lives express a near-desperate frenzy to keep up with their own responsibilities, which is what I often see in the families of ADD children. Without structure that involves the whole family and is not just forced on the child alone, there cannot be autonomy. For the child’s choices to mean anything, he has to know that the atmosphere in the family will be calm and supportive, that meals and other group activities will be at regular times so that schedules can be adhered to, and that the parents will be available and present both in body and spirit.
A supportive structure must include the setting of limits, boundaries demarcating where the autonomy of one person ends and that of another begins. Supporting autonomy, therefore, is not the same as permissiveness, which, by definition, allows children to infringe on the rights of others or leaves in their hands decisions and choices they are not equipped to handle. The latter is very much an issue of age. It is unwise to leave a two-year-old to decide how many hours he can spend in front of the television each day, but—regardless of the parents’ own views on the matter—an older child who is highly aware of control issues and who sees that his peers are not under strict control needs to be allowed greater latitude. The setting of limits works much better if the boundaries are defined as generously as possible, allowing maximum reasonable scope for individual choice. The rationale for the rule needs to be clearly articulated, so that the rule itself rather than the parent’s will is seen as authoritative.
As always, attachment needs to be attended to, especially when we have to impose limits the child will not like and may resist. “Keep in mind that rapport and limit setting go hand in hand,” Stanley Greenspan advises. “As you increase limit setting, you need to increase empathy.”3 Extrasensitive children, which is to say all ADD children, need more empathy and understanding in direct proportion to the need for more structure and limit setting. These must all go hand in hand to be effective in promoting development. Without parental empathy, the child shuts down and hides behind the wall of emotional defenses; without structure, he becomes lost, uncertain and anxious. “The key is to empathize with the child’s feeling even if it is a feeling you don’t like,” writes Dr. Greenspan. “Often parents think that if they empathize with the child’s feeling, they will somehow encourage that feeling in the child’s mind or intensify it. But recognizing what a child is feeling will help her recognize and label that feeling rather than experience it as a vague sensation.”4
Helping the child to label her feelings in words is what was referred to as symbolization when we discussed counterwill. It is also an important step in promoting autonomy. Words are symbols. They stand for feelings and actions. Without the capacity to put things into symbols, children are driven to act out every strong feeling and every urge—it is the only way they can express themselves. They are thus unable to take charge of themselves, impelled as they are to act by emotions they cannot identify. Without learning to symbolize emotions they are also likely to experience everything in terms of simple and opposing categories: people are alternately mean or nice, good or bad. It’s either “I love you, Mommy” or “I hate you.” The child has greater autonomy, a greater choice of possible responses, when she can say, “I didn’t like what Mrs. So-and-so said to me in class today,” than when she is restricted to “Mrs. So-and-so is mean.” Language supports freedom, including freedom from one’s own impulses.
Finally, in supporting autonomy, we address the child, not the deed. A parent can get angry at a four-year-old who spills some milk, or she can say, “You were trying to do it yourself. That’s great, but this bottle is just too heavy and big.” Especially with ADD children, not a few of whom have problems with motor control, parents can avoid painful scenes if they learn to respect the motive instead of fixating on the outcome.
Actions have their own consequences in the world; we don’t need to create them. For instance, if a boy is late for school every day for a week, his teacher may require him to stay after school—the parent docs not need to add some arbitrary sanction, such as, for example, a denial of permission for the child to play with his friend on the weekend. There is no logical connection there. Many so-called “natural consequences” taught in parenting courses are, in fact, arbitrary punishments that undermine the child’s security and autonomy. Punishments are designed to control behavior rather than to encourage learning and development in the child. They are, according to all the relevant research, bound to backfire. They sabotage learning from consequences and hinder the ability to take responsibility. Punishments substitute the parent’s feelings and judgments for the lessons taught by reality.
In a Gary Larson Far Side cartoon, four Old West cowboy types are ranged around a campfire by their wagon, roasting marshmallows. One of them is lying in the classic cowboy death pose, boots stiffly raised toward the heavens. A second man, smoking gun in hand, addresses the other two in a tone evidently dripping with righteous indignation. “You are my witnesses,” he says. “He laughed when my marshmallow caught fire.” There is quite often not much more natural connection than that between the consequences we as parents impose on a miscreant child and whatever it is the child may have done to provoke our ire.
Artificial consequences devised by parents intensify resistance and reinforce the child’s already negative view of herself. This is especially true for the underproductive and underachieving ADD child. “Although punishment is ineffective in making [the child] try harder,” writes Natalie Rathvon, “it is highly effective in solidifying her view of herself as unlovable and her view of others as unhelpful. If treatment by punishment continues, it is likely to motivate her to act out her image of herself as bad and dumb by misbehaving in school or at home or by performing even more poorly academically.”5
Will is like psychological muscle, says Gordon Neufeld. Parents cannot do anything directly to develop the child’s will, any more than they can make the child’s muscles grow. What they can do is to provide the nurturing, the right conditions and the proper direction. Like muscles, will needs exercise to grow. “Parents can provide lots of exercise,” Dr. Neufeld says. “Exercise is basically making choices—that is how we exercise our will.”
Parents may worry that if they support the child’s autonomy, she may grow up to be selfish, unmindful of others. It is a common fear, but unfounded. It is based on the completely erroneous view that children are wild creatures needing to be tamed by any means necessary. The process of becoming connected with other people and learning appropriate human interactions, of developing into a social creature, is called socialization. Children don’t have to be trained into socialization. Because it is a fundamental human drive, we naturally develop connectedness and compassion if our own basic needs have been respected. Socialization is at the apex of a pyramid. The base is formed by secure attachment and autonomy. We often make the mistake with our children of putting socialization—the rules of social conduct, what is called “good behavior”—ahead of attachment and individuation. We try to make our kids act as truly socially responsible people at the expense of their emotional security and their autonomous sense of self. This may result in compliance, but not in the internal, organic growth of true morality and social responsibility. We can no more foster genuine socialization this way than we can balance a pyramid on its apex, upside down.
*The book is The Unmotivated Child, and every parent of an ADD child should have it. My only disagreement with Dr. Rathvon is that she seems to make a distinction between the ADD child and the unmotivated child, a distinction that is unnecessary and unwarranted in most cases of attention deficit disorder.