2. Parenting with the End in Mind

You are in a new city for the first time. You walk a few blocks and venture down a flight of concrete steps into a metro station. You find a map and look it over. The colored rail lines intersect and intersect and intersect again; all the stops are unfamiliar. For a moment, the whole city blurs in front of you. You’ve got to get your bearings.

What do you do?

Well, if you’re like most of us, you first locate that little sticker (or ubiquitous red X) that identifies where you are. Then you look for a landmark that indicates your destination. Your route reveals itself only when you know your starting and ending points.

Parenting, too, is a trip greatly aided by knowing where you are and where you want to be. That’s what this chapter is about. Next, we’ll talk about how to get there.

What Are Your Goals?

Take a step back for a moment and think about the person you are trying to raise. What words describe this “ideal” child of yours? Check all that apply.

I want my child to be:

Assertive

Brave

Calm

Capable

Caring

Close with siblings

Compassionate

Confident

Creative

A critical thinker

Disciplined

Eager to learn

Empathetic

Ethical

Fair

Flexible

Friendly

Fun

Generous

Gentle

Giving

Grateful

Happy

Hard-working

Healthy

Helpful

High in self-esteem

Honest

Humble

Independent

Kind

Loving

Moral

Nonjudgmental

Open

Passionate

Patient

Positive

Relaxed

Resilient

Resistant to peer pressure

Respected

Respectful

Responsible

Safe

Self-assured

Self-aware

Self-regulating

Self-sufficient

Sound decision-maker

Stable (emotionally)

Stable (financially)

Strong

Supportive

Trustworthy

Warm

Well-rounded

Willing to apologize

Wise

All of the above

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it certainly does include a good number of the characteristics we tend to value in our fellow human beings. And every one of these outcomes is associated with heart-centered parenting.

Look closely, though, and you may see some obvious holes in the list.

Missing are traits like successful, popular, rich, and famous. Missing are adjectives that pertain to achievement, gender norms, and looks. That’s because these traits are either naturally occurring or personal decisions best set by children, for themselves.

Here are some others not listed:

• Athletic

• Beautiful

• Gender-conforming

• Heterosexual

• High-achieving

• Interested in pursuing a particular profession

• Loyal to family traditions

• Loyal to parents’ religion/spiritual practice

• Manly (boys)

• Obedient

• Pretty (girls)

• Quiet

• Respectful of hierarchy

• Smart/gifted

• Thin (girls)

• Tough (boys)

• Unemotional

• Well-dressed

• Well-paid

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying your child’s quiet disposition or fashion sense or in hoping your child stays loyal to your family’s spiritual traditions. And if these things are important to your child, great! But tread softly. Prioritizing these traits is often associated with a more controlling parenting style, which can lead to loss of self-confidence and higher stress levels in children. Plus, it can set children up for failure if their tastes and interests aren’t suited to your expectations.

Luckily, you probably do not need to be convinced to value kindness over popularity or gratitude over beauty or critical thinking over obedience. These are no-brainers, at least in theory. Still, it’s important to know up front that the bullet-pointed traits were not accidentally left off our list of heart-centered parenting goals; their absence is both intentional and important.

The Many Myths about Self-Esteem

While we’re on the topic of what we want for our children, let us divert your attention for just a moment to an issue of critical importance: self-esteem.

Despite what you may have heard, high self-esteem—that is, a positive image of oneself—is associated with health, happiness, and loving relationships. As Alfie Kohn reports in his highly researched book Unconditional Parenting, people with high-self-esteem are “more apt to be satisfied with life, less depressed, and more optimistic.” They also are more likely to persist at tasks, even when they are difficult, to discontinue when they know their efforts are futile, and to be resilient so that failure isn’t as discouraging.

Low self-esteem, on the other hand, is linked to legions of unhealthy behaviors. Depression, anxiety, and neurosis all are bedfellows of low self-esteem, as is addiction, lack of empathy, poor boundary-setting, cheating, lying, and blaming others for one’s mistakes and weaknesses.

In short, all people thrive on high self-esteem, and all of us suffer without it.

Yet this simple fact has been beaten beyond recognition over the last couple of decades. In fact, a shocking number of people—including many doctors and psychologists—still buy in to the myth that self-esteem can be “too high” and that “giving every child a trophy” and thus preventing them from experiencing failure has corrupted the character of an entire generation of children.

Some point to the Millennial generation—born between the 1980s and early 2000s—as an example of self-esteem run amok. Regardless of fairness or accuracy, many Millennials have been labeled as entitled, ungrateful, and lazy. This, we are told, is a direct result of feeling “too good” about themselves.

“If a child feels great about himself even when he does nothing, why do anything?” psychologist Jean M. Twenge famously asks in her oft-quoted book, Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before. “Self-esteem without basis encourages laziness rather than hard work.”

This is misleading at best.

Decades of research show that kids with high self-esteem, regardless of what they have accomplished, are more likely to persist at difficult tasks but also to recognize when their persistence would gain them nothing. In other words, they don’t need to feel that they are great at everything, and they know they aren’t. They are more, not less, in touch with their personal limitations—and are accepting of them.

This is important. Renowned psychologist Carl Rogers, one of the founding fathers of psychotherapy, once said, “How we think about ourselves, our feelings of self-worth, are of fundamental importance both to psychological health and to the likelihood that we can achieve goals and ambitions in life.”

Narcissism, conceit, and entitlement may well be on the rise in this country, but they are not the result of unearned high self-esteem. In fact, they are not associated with high self-esteem at all. Unlikely though it may seem, conceit is simply a disguise for low self-esteem.

“Self-esteem is not a noisy concept,” wrote teacher, psychologist, and author Dorothy Corkille Briggs in her seminal work, Your Child’s Self-Esteem. “Conceit is but a whitewash to cover low self-esteem. With high self-esteem, you don’t waste time and energy impressing others; you already know you have value.”

We’ll discuss this much more in the next chapter. In the meantime, if your preconceived notions led you to skip the “high in self-esteem” checkbox earlier in Chapter 2, you might want to go back and check it now.

What Kinds of Problems Do You Want to Solve?

Now that we’ve considered your long-term goals, let’s get some clarity on your short-term goals. What brought you to this book? What’s on your mind?

I am experiencing power struggles with my child.

I don’t understand why my child behaves poorly at times.

I sometimes have conflicts with my child that I’m not sure how to resolve.

I sometimes feel myself lose control (e.g., become angry or emotional, say things I don’t want to say) when in the midst of conflict with my child.

My children sometimes have conflicts with each other that I’m not sure how to help resolve.

My partner/spouse and I disagree about how to respond to our child’s challenging behavior.

I rely on bribery, rewards, threats, and punishments—such as timeouts, taking things away, and raising my voice—because I don’t know what else to do.

I am unsatisfied with the parenting techniques I’m using.

I’m pretty sure I’ve got baggage from my childhood, but I’m not positive how that baggage is showing up in my parenting or how to ensure my child doesn’t inherit it from me.

I actually think I’m a pretty great parent already, but I’m always looking for new strategies and tips to make my home life more smooth, happy, and peaceful.

If you agree with even one of these statements, congratulations! You’ve come to the right place. We’ve got you covered.

“Knots of Tension”

Behavioral challenges come in all shapes and sizes. Lawrence Cohen, a psychotherapist, consultant, and author of Playful Parenting , among other books, calls them “knots of tension” and said they tend to crop up around certain highly charged emotional experiences, such as:

• Bedtime

• Chores

• Disappointment

• Doctors

• Friends

• Giving up a pacifier

• Losing at games

• Meals

• Medicine

• Musical practice

• Rules

• School

• Separations

• Siblings

• Transitions

After circulating an informal survey in 2017 to about 500 parents of children between the ages of two and eighteen, we discovered a few more “knots of tension” to add to Cohen’s list, including:

• Electronics

• Homework

• Messiness

• Morning routines

Cohen also studied what kinds of parental responses “tightened” these knots of tension. He reported the following:

• Attempts to control

• Avoiding the issue

• Forced compliance

• Giving in and then resenting it

• Labeling the child as “bad”

• Punishment

• Scolding, yelling, and threats

• Timeouts

• Trying to “teach children a lesson”

• Withdrawing love

What loosened the knots, Cohen said, were all things we’ll be visiting in future chapters:

• Avoiding power struggles

• Critically evaluating our own behavior

• Doing the unexpected

• Laughter

• One-on-one time

• Play

• Reconnection

• Releasing feelings

• Unconditional love

ParentShift Assignment: Let’s Talk Specifics

Thinking about the conflicts that have emerged over the past, say, week or month with your child, put down in words what you hope to change, if anything.

WHERE DO YOU FALL ON THE PARENTING SPECTRUM?

Now that we’ve discussed what you’re trying to accomplish and the kind of person you’re trying to raise, let’s talk a little bit about where you are now. For the purposes of this book, your “starting point” is where you currently fall on our “parenting spectrum.”

Read through our descriptions of the three parenting styles that follow and try to pinpoint the following: 1) where you see yourself, 2) where you see your spouse/co-parent (if you have one), and 3) where you saw your own parents when you were growing up.

Keep in mind, most of us are not rigidly controlling, permissive, or heart-centered. We all tend to bounce around a bit, depending on our mood and the particular situation. Some of us pendulum-swing from one end to the other. But most of us, because of the way we were raised, tend to lean toward one end or the other, at least to a degree.

1. Controlling Parenting Style

On one end of the spectrum is the controlling paradigm, similar to what many call “authoritarian.” In this style, parents make the rules, and children follow them. Parents have very high expectations of their children—so high, in fact, that they often expect too much, making children feel perpetually “not good enough.” At the same time, these parents possess a low tolerance for emotional outbursts, especially outbursts that are deemed unwarranted, illogical, or exaggerated.

Controlling parents are firm limit-setters, which is helpful and even necessary when behavior is life-threatening or unhealthy (insisting a child wear a seat belt in the car, for instance). But they also tend to set impulsive and arbitrary limits, showing little regard for a child’s opinions or feelings during periods of conflict. They tend to blame the child when problems arise and have an attitude of “Do what I say.”

Controlling parents feel comfortable giving orders (e.g., “Brush your teeth” and “Pick up your mess.”) rather than giving kids information and allowing them to move forward on their own (e.g., “Fifteen minutes until bedtime” and “You left some things on the table.”). They use punishments, guilt, shame, and threats to motivate children to do “right.”

They also use bribery and rewards. It may surprise some parents to learn that the use of rewards generally falls at the controlling end of things. Bribery and rewards seems so benign relative to punishments and threats. But Alfie Kohn, trailblazing author of more than a dozen books, including The Myth of the Spoiled Child, Unconditional Parenting, and the aptly named Punished by Rewards, says controlling and manipulating children by making them feel “good” isn’t all that different from controlling and manipulating them by making them feel “bad.” It’s all extrinsic motivation.

Extrinsic Motivation: A drive to action springing from external rewards, such as money, fame, grades, or praise. This type of motivation arises from outside the person.

Children who are regularly rewarded, he said, develop an attitude of “What’s in it for me?” They get in a habit of “performing” just to receive a reward, which sets them up to look to others for their sense of accomplishment. Children raised in families who rely heavily on reward systems or star charts often end up losing some self-discipline along the way. As Kohn says in Unconditional Parenting, “Rewards and punishments are two sides of the same coin, and that coin doesn’t buy very much.”

Bottom line: Parents win; children lose.

Extreme Parenting Leads to Extreme Problems and Often Interrupts Marital Bliss

Although many of us find ourselves on the controlling or permissive ends of the spectrum from time to time, few of us are true extremists. Even if we tend to be a bit controlling, for instance, we’ve never used a whistle to call our children to dinner like Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music. More commonly, as clinical psychologist Thomas Gordon wrote in PET: Parenting Effectiveness Training, one parent will lean permissive, and the other parent will lean controlling. Or both will be more permissive when the children are young then gradually shift to controlling as the kids age.

Other times—to the chagrin of older siblings—parents will start out as controlling and then, with subsequent children, switch to permissive in hopes that it will work better. Then, of course, there are those of us who swing from one method to the other in a single day.

One parent told Gordon, “I am permissive with my children until I can’t stand them. Then I become strongly authoritarian until I can’t stand myself.”

Positive Discipline program creator Jane Nelsen once observed how parents with opposing philosophies will often go a little more extreme in their own direction to “counteract” the other parents’ natural leanings. “One has a tendency to be just a little too lenient,” Nelsen said in an article that ran on Positive Discipline’s website. “The other has a tendency to be just a little too strict. Then the lenient parent thinks he or she needs to be just a little more lenient to make up for the mean old strict parent. The strict parent thinks he or she needs to be just a little stricter to make up for the wishy-washy lenient parent—so they get further and further apart and fight about who is right and who is wrong. In truth they are both being ineffective.”

2. Permissive Parenting Style

On the other end of the spectrum are permissive parents. In this style, parents treat limits loosely, often setting them only to see them broken time and again.

Permissive parents have lower expectations of their children’s behavior or capabilities, so ask less of them. Plus, they rescue, overdo, pamper, feel sorry for, and pity their kids—rather than encouraging them to problem-solve and having confidence in them to overcome age-appropriate adversity. Permissive types often do not want to be the subject of their children’s wrath and tiptoe around their children, saying yes when they really want to say no.

Permissive parents have a tendency to excuse their children’s inappropriate behavior or laugh it off, and they allow their children to treat people and property disrespectfully. They tend to give in when in conflict with their children, they provide freedom without structure, and they often are poor boundary-setters. Worse, health and safety limits—such as those around bedtime, electronics, or bike helmets—are not upheld. Kids are given lots of freedom and are allowed to call most of the shots, even as the parents’ personal boundaries are being crossed.

Bottom line: Children win; parents lose.

3. Heart-Centered Parenting Style

Balancing between controlling and permissive parenting—in the coveted Goldilocks position—are (you guessed it!) heart-centered parents. This is not, however, a combination of the other two styles, but a completely separate style. These parents have high but reasonable expectations for their children, and the emotional support they provide is generous and healthy. Limits are age-appropriate, consistent, and mostly set around health and safety.

Heart-centered parents refuse to be rescuers or referees. Children are encouraged to make age-­appropriate decisions for themselves and given age-appropriate responsibilities as they age. They are allowed to make and repair their own mistakes, and they are generally treated as capable, dependable, and reliable people. In this way, children are far more likely to become intrinsically motivated.

Intrinsic Motivation: A drive to action springing from one’s enjoyment of the action. This type of motivation arises within the person.

It is intrinsic motivation—that is, being motivated “from the inside”—that leads children to adopt healthy boundaries, listen to their moral compasses, accept responsibility for their actions, and try to do good for the world.

Mutual agreements between parent and child are hallmarks of heart-centered parenting; lectures give way to two-way discussions where children are allowed and encouraged to give input.

Heart-centered parents set personal boundaries for themselves and teach their children to set boundaries for themselves. They hold their children accountable for their actions. The needs of both parent and child carry equal weight.

Is “Positive Reinforcement” a Heart-Centered Tactic?

As a parent, you are probably familiar with the term positive reinforcement—which refers to a favorable stimulus or condition that enhances certain behavior. If not, here’s the gist: We want our puppy to sit on command, we give the puppy a treat every time he sits on command, and the puppy learns to sit on command.

But is positive reinforcement really “positive” for children? That depends on the treat.

Let’s say we want our child to read more books. We give the child a sticker every time she reads a book. The sticker is the treat. The child reads more books.

In this context, our positive reinforcement is synonymous with extrinsic motivation—it’s fine for most animals, but as we discussed, it can sabotage our efforts to raise responsible, self-trusting humans with high self-esteem. Not very positive, right?

But there is another type of “treat” that kids can receive for participating in certain activities, and that is the kind that occurs naturally, with no interference from us.

We want our child to read more books. The child chooses which books to read and enjoys them. Her enjoyment is the treat. The child reads more books.

The child is, indeed, experiencing positive reinforcement because a favorable condition (joy) has enhanced her behavior (reading). But the “treat,” as it were, is intrinsic rather than extrinsic and therefore brings about positive behavior without lowering the child’s self-esteem.

The Great Misalignment

Starting with the next chapter, we will begin to lay out a comprehensive guide to heart-centered parenting, which we believe is the single most direct route to all those wonderful goals you have for your children. But before we do that, we’d like to offer a common, real-world scenario highlighting how a fundamental misalignment between goals and tactics can poison a parent’s greatest efforts.

A little boy is born to two loving parents who hope and expect to share a close relationship with him. They know how important the parent-child relationship is in keeping their boy out of harm’s way, and one of their goals is to make him feel comfortable turning to them for advice.

Two years later, they welcome a second son.

Everything is fine until the elder son turns four. He takes to whining, melting down in public, and mistreating his younger brother. His parents are frustrated and a bit heartbroken. Mom and Dad lecture their son about his sudden “regression” and the importance of being a “good big brother.” They raise their voices, impose timeouts, and, when he gets older, take away his beloved electronics whenever he acts out. Over time, the tactics seem to have an effect. By the time he’s thirteen, just a disapproving look from one of his parents usually is enough to bring him in line.

Unfortunately, there has been collateral damage. Shaming and punishing the boy for his behavior, rather than addressing the needs and feelings beneath the behavior, have led him to believe his parents can’t be trusted with his strongest emotions. Day by day, he learns to hide his feelings. He blames his brother for always getting him in trouble, which fractures the sibling relationship. Then, in high school, his peers become his favored audience and he finally finds an outlet for all those pent-up emotions in the form of risky behavior. Ironically, despite their best intentions, these loving, caring parents are now the last people their son would think to turn to for advice.

Have this boy’s parents abused him or mistreated him? No. Do any of their tactics seem extreme? Not at all. Yet they failed to hit their own mark. Why? Because their tactics were focused exclusively on their short-term problems to the detriment of their long-term goals. By manipulating their son into doing “the right things” as a young child, they pushed him to do “the wrong things” as an older child.

This self-sabotage isn’t just common. It’s an epidemic.

Consider:

• We want our kids to be honest, but we shame them, punish them, and tell them we’re “disappointed in them” when they confess to wrongdoing.

• We want them to think positively about themselves, but we regularly nag, criticize, and scold them.

• We want them to trust their instincts, but we override their instincts by saying things like, “You can’t be full yet,” or “Big kids aren’t scared of the dark.”

• We want them to set healthy boundaries for themselves, but we force them to always share their possessions with their friends and siblings, or we ask them to show physical affection to people even when they don’t want to, saying, “Come on now, give Grandma a hug.”

• We want them to be courageous and assertive, but we discourage them from talking back to us or standing up to our limits.

• We want them to be good problem-solvers, but we make most of their decisions for them.

• We want them to feel a sense of security and belonging, but we adopt attitudes of “my house, my rules.”

• We want them to enjoy learning, but we choose their electives for them.

• We want them to be responsible, but we bring their forgotten lunches and homework to them at school.

• We want them to resolve conflicts with maturity, but we solve our problems with them by threatening them with punishment.

• We want them to share their feelings with us, but we tell them their tantrums are “inappropriate” and send them to their rooms to cry.

• We want them to be self-reliant, but we constantly do for them what they are capable of doing for themselves.

• We want them to value teamwork over competitiveness, but we set up competition between them and their friends and siblings.

• We want them to stand up to people who are unkind to them, but we discourage them from standing up to us when we are the ones being mean.

• We want them to be creative, autonomous, and independent, but we set most of the rules with little buy-in from them and insist that they follow them.

• We want them to have a moral compass, but we use bribery and rewards to motivate them—instead of allowing them the positive feelings that naturally come from being kind or the negative feelings that come from being unkind.

• We want them to learn to self-regulate, but we don’t model the skills to do so.

• We want them to question authority, but we don’t let them question us.

What we do in our day-to-day lives moves us closer to or farther from the future we envision for our children. Our goal cannot be to settle for “what works” or to “go with our guts” or to “have faith that everything will work out.” We must consciously and purposefully aim higher.

If we are truly interested in our children’s futures, and we are, we’ve got to start parenting with the end in mind—focusing not on the behavior we want to stop but on the people we want to raise.

Aim for Awareness, Not Perfection

Parenting won’t always be easy. Some kids just seem to make our lives hard. Even “easy” kids challenge us at times. They say things that cut us to the core. They do things that make us wonder, if only for a moment, “My God, who raised this child?”

And we do make mistakes. Plenty of them. We’re all imperfect parents. How could it be otherwise? We all show up in the role of “parent” only after developing our own neurosis and fears and personality quirks. There is no way we won’t falter along the way. We all get into ruts with our kids from time to time. We all regret our words. Sometimes, we do things we know are wrong but we are just too exhausted to switch gears. “There’s always tomorrow,” we tell ourselves.

And you know what? We’re right: There is always tomorrow.

The best learning opportunities in parenting occur when we make mistakes. Mistakes make us better and stronger parents, they drive us forward, they make us more empathetic, and, best of all, they allow our children the freedom to be imperfect, too.

The point of parenting is not to do everything right all the time. We needn’t get from Point A to Point B without detours, deviations, or the occasional derailments. Parenting is rarely a straight shot.

But it sure helps to know where Point B is—and how the heck to get there.