Had the ghosts of those long-ago boys moved on at last, or was it simply that she was set free from her own ghosts … leaving her alive and free.
Margaret Mahy, Dangerous Spaces, 1991.30
Any change in behaviour means a change in the brain itself. This applies just as much to growing a new way of relating to other people as it does to learning to interpret what you see. And, just as there are ‘critical periods’ in our development for such things as learning to see or learning to talk, there are critical periods in our development for learning to relate.
The first is in the earliest years of our lives, from birth to three years of age. The second great surge occurs, along with so much else, in puberty. And then again (and this is a new discovery) it occurs in mothers, from the third trimester of pregnancy and onwards until the child is three years old. (In fact, anyone closely involved with the baby — dads, grandparents — will also be affected to some degree.)31
How motherhood remakes a woman’s brain
There is still some controversy over whether or not pregnancy makes you dumber but there is very little doubt that, after delivery, motherhood makes you smarter. When a woman is pregnant her hormones, particularly the ‘love hormone’ oxytocin, rewire her brain.
Scientists have recorded improvements to memory, spatial skills, stress management skills and people-reading skills in pregnant women. And these changes stay with us for life. And the more babies we have, the stronger the effect grows.31–35 Better stress management has inevitable repercussions for overall health. [36] So strong is the invigorating effect of pregnancy that women who give birth in their forties are four times more likely to survive to become a centenarian than women who gave birth earlier.37
One leading researcher on the subject is Dr Craig Kinsley, his attention initially caught by the way his wife, previously ambivalent about mothering, was transformed by both pregnancy and the early months of caring for their children.31 The difference between a mother’s brain and a non-mother’s brain, he says, is ‘like comparing a tree in the winter to one in full bloom in the spring, when it is much fuller and richer’.38
And it is not just the mother’s brain that changes. An involved, and not necessarily biological, father’s brain does also: a cocktail of hormones, but most particularly vasopressin (the monogamy hormone) turns men into better ‘hunters’ and protectors, making them both stable and vigilant, sharpening environmental and people-reading skills and making them as keen on cuddling as on sex.37, 39
The studies are just beginning into how being around a baby affects other carers. When I worked in nursing homes I would always take my babies with me, and so rejuvenating was the impact of a smiling, sociable baby that I have little doubt what researchers will find. For most people, interacting with a baby will lead to a surge of oxytocin — promoting brain activity with all the kick-on benefits from that you see at any age — and also improve physical health, showing up in such things as a drop in blood pressure and an improved mood.
Of course we can change at any time, but at those times particularly we are helped along by a bath of oxytocin, the love and learning hormone. One friend who read this part of an early draft of the book rang me to say how exactly this had been her own experience. She had been eighteen and there was a baby on the way.
I knew I was too screwed up to do a good job. Dad was alcoholic and abusive. Mum didn’t have any power to stop him. So, with my husband’s support, I found a counsellor. It was a heavy two years, but I had my head straight by the time my daughter was eighteen months old.
Her nurturing and sociable teenage daughters are a testament to just how very straight she got her head.
It is one hemisphere of the brain that is particularly involved in our ability to transform ourselves to parent better — the right brain. In the 1980s there was a surge of interest in left and right brainedness, and then popular culture moved on, leaving us with an impression that there was nothing scientific in talking about the two hemispheres.
But while popular culture moved on, science didn’t. We now know that the two hemispheres are very different and the right brain is the early developing side, remaining dominant until a child turns three. The left side, from which comes our verbal ability and our logical ability, is the prose. It is the left brain we test on our way to an IQ score. The right side is the place from which passion both flows, and is turned to good account in our lives.
The mother who glances at her child and knows something is wrong and calmly overrides the doctors until she is proven right is following the ‘gut instinct’ that comes from her right brain. The child who knows his parents aren’t telling him something, by reading their micro-expressions — a skill he honed in infancy — is using his right brain. The mathematician who ‘knows’ his equation is not right because it doesn’t yet appear beautiful or satisfying is using his right brain within a left brain task. The man who is transformed by a mentoring relationship, emerging with better coping and people skills, learning ability, memory and a happier mood, has just grown his right brain. The grieving woman who finds that weeks of making shirts has returned her to an engagement with life has begun healing her right brain, and thus her pain, through touch and texture and colour and movement.
In fact, the right brain cannot be reached through words and logic. Sensations and movement are what get through — the rueful expression on a father’s face, the whimper of a tired baby, the crackly warmth of a fire, water flowing over a palm, the alerting bump of the median strip, the dying fall of a pop song, the tingle of wine, the smell of grass. From all of these sensations the right brain builds meaningful patterns that are stored as memory.
The right side of the brain is where autobiographical memory, spatial skills, regulation of emotions and body systems in the face of stress, and the ability to read other people and to empathise with them dwell. It is the part of our mind that we often think about as the ‘unconcious’ or ‘subconsious’. And it is the right brain that your baby spends the first three years of her life growing.
This brain growth doesn’t just ‘happen’, nor does it grow in response to ‘intellectual stimulation’, because this part of the brain is not about logic or words or facts. Your baby’s right brain grows because of the passionate, intimate connection forged with you.40
And for you to grow this part of your baby’s brain to its ‘best possible’, you need to have a well-developed right brain yourself. You need to have had a secure attachment relationship, whether in childhood or later on in your life, for this part of your brain to be strong enough to grow a strong right brain in your child.
So what can you do to grow or keep healthy your own right brain? The central message is that you cannot do it on your own. It requires a relationship. You might be like my friend and find a counsellor, but the relationship must be a reciprocal one to work as an attachment. Just as a baby cannot grow a right brain without a parent’s strong right brain, an adult cannot ‘imagine’ a relationship and be transformed.
With that person’s support you then need to learn to tell the story of your own childhood attachments coherently and meaningfully, and let go to a great degree the losses of your childhood. Once you are able to do that, you will find that you can both allow a child to explore and also be ready to comfort her when she needs it. These are the two halves of parenting.
If you are doing this work and you have children, or perhaps a baby, remember that mother–child attachment is reciprocal. In fact, for some people the best thing to grow their right brain is their baby. All those things that support your baby’s attachment to you also support your right brain growth. Smelling and looking and touching and cradling and rocking your newborn is good for you as well as your baby.
What else? You also need to be getting enough good, healthy food, because a rapidly growing brain, as yours will be as you do this work, is a great consumer of energy. Food is also part of our biological connection to the natural world — or, at least, it should be. And as well as food, we need to be out in that world as much as we can. Leaves, flickering and green, the sharp solids of rocks, the dash and dip of a small bird, and your own movement as you walk among it, will feed your growing right brain. Music (the heart loves a steady drumbeat), happy loving faces, rich stories (the right brain loves narrative), colour, play, laughter, dance, cooking, pets, making something, a feeling of being lovingly supported and appreciated for yourself — all of the things that make you feel good and give you that warm fuzzy feeling will help you to remake your pattern of attachment.
If that is what you need, then what don’t you need? There are no surprises here. You need to not be fearful or traumatised or just plain ‘stressed-out’. If you wish to deliberately regrow your brain, to learn a new story for yourself with an ending that leaves you and subsequent generations free of the past, you can do it any time. Feed your growing right brain, find your support crew and set out. You will find that your children will ride in your back pocket, learning the story along with you. (See Appendix II for more on the different attachment patterns and suggestions for changing a negative attachment pattern.)
Those of us who have been lucky enough to have inherited a secure attachment cannot become complacent. Patterns are broken in both directions: securely attached children can become parents of insecure children; insecurely attached children can become parents of securely attached children. A great deal depends on the people, the environment and the events surrounding mother and child.
The Bidi Bidi Project, Mt Magnet, Western Australia
How to grow the right brain is a huge interest for Mum and me, because we believe that this is the way forward for Aboriginal families where we work, in the remote communities of the Murchison in Western Australia. These are mostly Indigenous communities, with fly-in fly-out mine sites sprinkled throughout. Indigenous disadvantage is not just being passed on, but speeding up and widening as it travels down the generations. It is snowballing as poverty and rapid social change, trauma and passive welfare are interfering with the attachments people have to each other. For Aboriginal people in the Murchison the name of the game has been survival, which is a function of the right brain. Meeting the imperative of survival has meant that all other right brain functions have been co-opted to support that need alone.
The name ‘Bidi Bidi’ — ‘butterfly’ in local language — was coined by Mt Magnet elder Phyllis Thompson in reference to the metamorphosis she wants to see in people’s lives. How does she see this change happening? She wants to see the young mothers better supported. And this isn’t just ‘helping by caring for their kids’ but an intervention to directly grow their right brains. The Bidi Bidi Project has four ‘wings’: four interlinking sets of relationship-based programs. One of them is a right brain growth program for young mothers.
Sometimes, when you are alone with your baby — perhaps you are the only two awake in the middle of the night, or perhaps you are deeply connecting with a smile — it can feel like you are the only two people in the world. And it may feel exhilarating or it may feel terrifying, but it is an illusion either way.
There are always ghosts walking the path with you — the memories of your own childhood. However, this approach — seeing the ghosts — doesn’t ask us to deal with our past. It simply requires that we look right now at what we are doing with our children, and, in doing so, see the ghosts that are standing between us and our child.
There are a number of ways to go about this, but my attention was particularly caught by the revolutionary Circle of Security parenting approach. In this approach a group of parents are shown a beautiful ocean scene on a DVD. The sea is gentle and blue. There are birds flying above. The accompanying sound track is a piece of tranquil classical music.
And then the facilitators change the sound track. Instead of classical music the parents hear the accelerating ‘da dump, da dump’ of the Jaws theme music and they are asked to reflect on how quickly their internal switch was flicked from tranquillity to alarm. The scene had not changed, but their emotions had. Their emotions changed because of a historic association between a sound and their experience of an emotion — a vicarious emotion, because none of them were actually there in the water when the monster shark attacked.
The parents are asked how that change felt — to name it, to locate it in their bodies, to see how it changes how they want to treat others. Because it is that same feeling that we sometimes have as parents.
Have you ever seen a parent react to a child’s actions or words in a way that looks ‘over the top’ to you? They might become furious with a child for crying or smack them for asking for food — to you, the child’s behaviour looked normal, but to the child’s parent it is obviously only a few steps away from the end of the world. The parent is hearing something that you cannot: shark music. Something about the child’s behaviour set off a depth charge of emotion because of something that happened in the parent’s past.
Sometimes, when our children do something, a switch is flicked in our brain that has more to do with our own past than anything that is happening in the present. Even though we feel great love for our children, in that moment we do not express it ‘lovingly’. From our own childhood the message is sent — the child has done something dangerous and must be stopped from doing it again. So we might yell at him or turn away coldly from him or say by our behaviour, ‘you are not allowed to have that emotion’. We are automatically responding to our child as our parents did to us, no matter how much we may have wanted to do things differently.
The Circle of Security trainers focus on teaching parents to hear the shark music, which is like a herald announcing, ‘Here is a ghost.’ Such ghosts tell lies: ‘She only needs a good smack’, ‘She’s just attention seeking’, ‘He’s trying to manipulate you’, ‘She needs to learn that you won’t pick her up every time she cries’, ‘Don’t let her make you feel guilty’, ‘He’s just trying to get out of doing it’ or ‘He shouldn’t be running to you for every little cut and bruise’.
What do you do when you hear the music and spot the ghost? They are not hard to see once you have heard the ‘da-dump da-dump’ because they are standing directly between you and your child. At this point you need to identify what need or emotion in your child brought out the ghost. Did your baby want to be cuddled after a fright? Did your child want you to pay attention to him doing something? Was the emotion he was expressing allowed in your own childhood? Most likely it was not.
At this point you might be wondering how you should react?
That was certainly my thought, after I realised that the shark music started when my sons found something ‘too hard’ and would cry despairingly. And the thought that emerged in my mind was ‘It isn’t safe to advertise the fact that we are vulnerable, it puts us at risk.’ Where had that come from? It may be because I am from ‘pioneer stock’ on both sides, Africa and Australia. A loudly crying child may attract the wrong sort of attention in both contexts. It may have been because I went to boarding school. To cry was to advertise vulnerability. I spent hours learning how to suppress tears. In fact, it was probably a combination of both and perhaps a bit more I still haven’t seen. So my dismissive behaviour originated in a desire to protect my children, and I think this is pretty common.
It is so very loud, the shark music, that it drowns out thought. I found it very hard to think of a different way to react. And this is when I found Haim Ginott.
Dr Haim Ginott was originally a teacher and famously observed of his classroom, ‘It is my daily mood that makes the weather.’41 His books for parents and teachers were bestsellers, and his advice became a permanent influence on the way parents in the western world try to go about the business of parenting. If you recall, I was looking for advice on how to stop forbidding my children from showing despair. And that’s exactly what Ginott’s strategy offers.
First of all, and exactly in parallel with what is required to create a secure attachment, he says ‘allow all feelings’. He says that if you find yourself saying to your child, ‘Don’t cry now’ or ‘Stop making that horrible noise’ or ‘You can’t really mean that’ or ‘Toughen up’ or ‘Calm down’ or ‘You aren’t stupid [or ugly or whatever it is he says of himself]’ you are denying your child’s right to feel a particular emotion. He writes, ‘Strong feelings do not vanish by being banished: they do diminish in intensity and lose their sharp edges when the listener accepts them with sympathy and understanding.’42
So before offering anything else, offer understanding, says Ginott. This is the kind of story he tells in his books:
‘I hate James,’ says your seven year old. Instead of saying something like ‘it’s wrong to hate’ or ‘never mind James’, you need to focus on the feeling your child is expressing, and empathise with it.
‘He must have done something awful for you to say that.’
‘He said that I couldn’t be in his group because I wasn’t eight and I didn’t have an orange rubber like he and everyone else does.’
‘That must have made you feel very upset.’
‘I pushed him.’ Instead of saying ‘Oh no, you shouldn’t push!’ focus back on how your child was feeling.
‘You were obviously very angry too,’ you say.
‘I wish I’d pushed him again, but the teacher came over.’ Picking up on the fact that your child still has angry feelings towards James that weren’t alleviated by pushing him, you say:
‘You still feel angry with him.’
‘I do feel angry still and I’m sad I wasn’t in that group.’
‘You had other friends in that group and you couldn’t be with them.’
And at around this point, Ginott promises, there will be the dividends you are looking for. Your son’s mood is softened by your understanding and he will begin thinking about his behaviour all by himself.
‘I guess I shouldn’t have pushed James though. The teacher won’t put me in that group now until she’s forgotten about it. I should just have ignored him.’
And at this point you could perhaps say, but gently, because you do know how he felt, ‘So you could, and people are not for pushing.’
Making the rule (in this case not pushing) attached to a ‘thing’ (people) is a key feature of Ginott’s way of enforcing limits. It takes the focus from the child and puts it on the behaviour. So you don’t say ‘You must not throw sand’ but ‘Sand is not for throwing’. In our house we have found ourselves saying things like, ‘Soap is for washing, not for carving up with a knife’ and ‘Eggshells are for the vegetable garden, not for crushing up into tiny pieces and scattering throughout the kitchen.’
Prior to reading Ginott, a discussion with my son Sam might have gone something like this:
‘I just can’t,’ Sam would cry, weeping bitterly. ‘I’m stupid.’ This was something Martin and I had been hearing from him for about a year and we couldn’t understand why.
‘You aren’t stupid! Now stop, just stop.’ The shark music was playing, and, rather than focusing on feelings I would focus on facts.
‘I am, I know I am.’
‘I can’t understand why you would say that about yourself. You really aren’t stupid at all. Look how well you are doing at school.’ Another appeal to facts.
‘I can’t remember how to tell the time. And remember when I stabbed the milk cartons to get them out of the box and the milk went everywhere. That was a stupid thing to do.’ The difficulty with facts is that they are rarely controvertible.
‘That doesn’t make you stupid. Now just stop crying. You need to stop. You can’t just keep crying.’ I was back to attempting to control his emotions.
‘I can’t stop. I can’t stop because I can’t stop thinking about being so stupid.’
And so it would go on, until eventually Martin or I would say that he was stupid if he thought he was stupid.
After reading Ginott we had just one discussion about being stupid, and Sam hasn’t mentioned it since. It went something like this:
‘I just can’t,’ Sam cried. ‘I’m just stupid.’
His crying was setting off my shark music, but I had resolved to tolerate it and concentrate instead on Sam’s emotions rather than mine.
‘That doesn’t sound like a nice feeling to have — that sounds like you are feeling awful.’
Instantly I saw him lift his head slightly. The tears gushed out with a bit more intensity at this sympathy.
‘I am. I do feel awful.’
‘You are feeling really unhappy having that thought about yourself,’ I said in my best Ginott style, but feeling that I sounded artificial, despite sincerely wanting to understand him better.
‘It makes me feel sick,’ said Sam in response, but he had stopped crying. And then, to my astonishment, he said, ‘I do some stupid things, but that doesn’t make me stupid.’
And he proceeded to tell me about an incident a year earlier when he had been larking about with some other children and a fork had dropped on the floor. The only adult present had said to him aggressively, ‘You are bloody stupid, Sam.’ So we talked about that. But, in the end, he’d said it himself. Doing stupid things from time to time doesn’t make us stupid.
His expression of his feelings had drawn us closer and we both felt the difference. Ghosts stand between us and our children. It was not the adult who’d spoken harshly to Sam that had caused the problem, it was my attempt to stop him from expressing that feeling of despair.
It had all happened just as Ginott promised. My empathy let Sam connect properly to his feelings and then use his reasoning skills to draw the poison out from the wound himself. Of course, after this I was a Ginott convert. So what else does he say?
It is of little use, says Ginott, to lecture a child about how he should have behaved after the event. And he’s quite specific about the different forms this kind of commentary from parents can sometimes take. He advises against:
Moralising — ‘You only got what you deserved, you shouldn’t have pushed.’
Minimising — ‘You can’t hate someone just because they didn’t want you in their group.’
Attacking the child’s personality — ‘You are so stupid! How many times have I told you not to be rough with other kids? You never listen, and then you get into trouble.’
Prophesising — ‘Well, you won’t get any friends that way, you’ll end up being Mr No Mates for sure.’
If you have set firm limits, as he advises, your child will know your definitions of what is right and wrong already. It is better to use opportunities like ‘pushing James’ to hold up a mirror to our child so he can see how he feels. If it’s just a matter of ‘letting off steam safely’ and acknowledging his emotions, then the job is done. If it is a matter of sorting out other ways he could have behaved, then, with his emotions softened, he can begin doing that too. And, instead of alienating your child with your opinion, you have communicated to him your love and your respect for his emotions and opinion. You have strengthened the relationship between the two of you.
Ginott writes directly about handling our own anger as parents, about recognising it, accepting it and expressing it safely. He advises against smacking because you are teaching the child that physically expressing anger is acceptable. He says not to tell a child off in front of his friends as it always makes him play up more: leading to parents becoming even angrier and the situation sliding out of control.
Instead, he says, express your angry feelings as long as personality and character assassinations aren’t part of what you say. In fact, what he says next is now taught at every ‘better communication’ course around the world. It’s the ‘I—you’ messages: I feel (emotion added here) when you (action added here)’. Begin with ‘I feel angry’, but if, after saying that, you still feel angry, you can amplify the message. ‘I feel extremely angry.’ And if you are still experiencing anger, Ginott suggests a third stage: saying what you’d like to do to release that anger. ‘I feel so angry when you hit your little brother that I feel I’d like to hit something myself. And I feel terribly sad too. I just want to sit and cry.’
His warnings against harsh parenting have proved prescient: of all the ‘everyday’ parenting styles, excluding abuse and neglect, this is the one associated with the worst outcomes.43, 44 If someone ever tells you that you are being ‘too hard on your kids’, it is always worth seriously evaluating what they mean. If they are talking about the limits you set, then this may not be a problem. However, if they mean that you mostly punish, praise rarely and make unpleasant remarks about a child’s character, his abilities and his future, then change is required.
Whereas popular opinion holds that ‘being hard’ is a direction you can safely err in (‘I’d rather be too tough than too soft on my kids’), research shows conclusively that it is not, if what you mean by hard is being punitive and a denigrator. The attachment research, of course, has shown the same thing in its research into ‘frightening’ parents and the link through to disorganised children — this research comes from people who study ‘parenting style’ — and it is worth looking at this slightly different take on what happens when you frighten children.
In addition, recent neuroscience shows that children under eleven don’t have the neural circuits in place to learn anything at all from criticism. They literally cannot adjust their behaviour based on negative comments: in one study, eight-to nine-year-old children performed disproportionally more inaccurately after receiving negative feedback relative to positive feedback. If you want to change your child’s behaviour, you must tell him what you like about what he is doing and exactly what it is that you want him to do.45
Am I too hard on my kids?
Your eldest son has taken his smaller sister in a stranglehold: his fingers are round her throat. She is obviously in some distress. Do you:
Accept the aggressive feelings, but not the behaviour and yell at the top of your lungs: ‘Stop! Let go of her! Other people are not for hurting! I can’t bear to see you hurting your little sister! I feel terribly sad and anguished and upset when you do anything like that! Come and see me when you are angry with her.’ Or do you experience an upswelling of negative feeling towards your son, coupled with anxiety over his behaviour? Propelled by these violent emotions, you fly into action, pulling your son off your daughter, and place your own hands around his neck and squeeze hard, yelling, ‘See what this is like? See how scary this feels? You are such a horrible brother!’
Of the two of these, it is the second response that is the harshest. Powered by parental fears for the child’s social and emotional future, it is every bit as aggressive as the behaviour originally shown by the child. Research shows that rather than changing the child’s behaviour, such an intervention only cements-in aggression. The child’s idea of himself is shaped by the idea of himself that has taken root in his parent’s mind: negative, aggressive, defiant. By the time a child has reached middle-primary school, customary ways of behaving may well have become ‘traits’.46
So the concern that lies behind harsh parenting — that the child is aggressive, unpleasant and selfish, and that the parent has lost the power to influence this child — is eventually realised: the cumulative effect of negative words and harsh actions, including physical coercion and force, leads to the prophecy of a poor outcome being fulfilled.
If the harsh parent is Dad, the children with the worst outcomes are his sons. If the harsh parent is Mum, children of both sexes suffer equally.43
Are you at risk of becoming a harsh parent? In addition to having been harshly parented yourself, being a young mother and living in a dysfunctional family setting44 are the factors that most often contribute to harshness in parenting.
You hold a negative, opinion, of your child
The biggest marker for harsh parenting is that parents feel their child is poorly behaved. If your child appears to you to be aggressive, disobedient, negative and defiant, then you need to consider that your parenting style might be responsible. A difficult temperament can contribute in the first place to a parent feeling they need to be harder, but sometimes what is perceived is difficult is simply a toddler working through the normal 18-month-old behaviours. You also need to consider whether you are seeing ‘another person’ in your child: a disliked or despised relative is the most frequent candidate.46
Your finances or marriage or both are in trouble
Families at risk for harsh parenting are those where Mum and Dad are stressed: where there is marital conflict, money troubles and so on. Flow-on effects include harsher, more negative parenting and can explain why at such times children so often seem to ‘play up’. It is when parents are tired, stressed or unhappy that they find it hardest to manage their own emotions; when they are most likely to punish a child in an emotional and impulsive manner.
You have difficulty with impulse control in general
The ability to stop yourself impulsively acting upon an emotion is a key part of parenting. Our children have an unequalled ability to ‘get to us’. Their ability to disturb our equilibrium comes in part from the fact that we know we are judged on their behaviour; and also because children quite naturally move through different stages of behaviour, some of them difficult. When a child’s difficult behaviour is coupled with a parent whose emotions escape from their control, a pattern of punishing children in a highly charged atmosphere begins.
In the absence of good modelling of impulse control, children are more likely to be defeated by their own impulses. Children with poor impulse control are more likely to be aggressive, and struggle with peer and sibling relationships, and these are the children far more likely to then ‘trigger’ further aggression from you. It’s a hard cycle to stop once it has started.47
Sadly, it is often fears that your child will take to drugs or become a delinquent that drives parents to such harsh extremes. They are trying to frighten their child into behaving properly. The same kind of approach is taken in the ‘scare them straight’ education programs, where children tour jails and meet inmates. Does it work? In fact, it does the very reverse. A recent review of 16 such programs concluded that they ‘increase delinquency relative to doing nothing at all to the same youths’48 In other words, children exposed to such experiences are far more likely to go on to offend themselves: the underlying message is ‘we think you are likely to do this, so we are showing you how bad it will be’. And they proceed to live down to our evident expectations of them.
Ginott was equally prescient when it came to praise. In recent years there have been many studies showing just how destructive the wrong kind of praise can be to children’s motivation and esteem.49, 50 Ginott was there well before them. He distinguishes between evaluative praise and appreciative praise. Evaluative praise carries a judgment: ‘you are being good!’ or ‘what a helpful boy you are’. Such praise is loaded not just with our expectations but with the risk of the child becoming addicted to such praise, at the risk of losing his ability to evaluate himself and to take the risks that are necessary to learning.
He adds that no-one enjoys direct praise of their character. If you are told by another adult that ‘you are such a wonderful, generous, good person’ you are likely to wonder ‘just what is it they want me to do?’ Such praise can seem a bit creepy and insincere. When children are praised in such a manner, they may ‘misbehave to set the adult straight’ says Ginott.
Instead he recommends appreciative praise, where you comment on the task or the achievement. So say to your child, ‘That was difficult’ rather than ‘You’re so clever’, and let the child infer his cleverness himself. This is far harder than it sounds to do.
I want to praise you like I should
When praise is delivered in the right way it has been shown to:
make children better at doing things for themselves
enhance their feelings of mastery and independence
make them happier
motivate them to stay on task
motivate them to try new ways of doing things
help them keep their emotions from interfering with their ability to do something.
But when praise is given for completing an easy task children infer that their ability must be low. And when a great deal of praise is given for accomplishment of something very difficult, children infer that this same standard is expected of them all the time. Both are difficult experiences for children to endure.
When evaluative praise such as ‘good’ is given — ‘What a good kid! You got that right’ — children are likely to infer that getting something wrong must mean that they are ‘bad’.
Once children are over seven they tend to evaluate praise critically. Insincere praise is detected in a flash, often rightly perceived as an attempt to manipulate and promptly discounted. Children then search for other reasons for the praise and may feel that it has been given to cover up for the fact that they are pitied or disliked. Insincere praise can be very damaging for this reason.
Along the same lines, one American study indicated that older children may actually consider praise for hard work as conveying the message, ‘You are low in ability, and so I want you to work harder.’ As older children over-price the value of ‘natural ability’, this can be very destructive.
However, telling a child that he has a ‘natural ability’ seems to be equally destructive: when the next, harder level of task inevitably arrives and he must struggle to master it, he is likely to conclude that the praiser was mistaken, and he does not have the natural ability after all. Consequently he is far less likely to keep trying.
Boys and girls seem to respond differently to praise; children and teenagers likewise. Girls are more likely to examine praise for insincerity; teenagers will experience praise in front of a group as negative, whereas younger children experience it as positive.
Another great risk of praise is that children will become ‘hooked’ on it, and not develop an internal set of motivators. Their ‘feel goods’ are not generated from within, but by the approval of others. This denies them the experience of ‘flow’, that wonderful sensation that occurs from being entirely caught up in a task. It denies them the ability to be the ‘captain of their soul’, to determine for themselves their self-worth.49
How then should we praise our children? Ginott puts it best. ‘Our words should state what we like and appreciate about his efforts, help, work and accomplishments.’41 So rather than saying, ‘You are Mummy’s good helper!’ try, ‘I am so thrilled when I look at the tidy kitchen. It hasn’t looked like this for days! The scrubbing you did on the benches has made all the difference.’
Not ‘You must be the best big brother in the world’ but ‘Thank you for putting down your book to read to your little brother when I asked, I know how difficult that is sometimes.’
Not ‘What a brilliant writer you are’ but ‘I like this sentence in your story particularly It puts me in the hero’s shoes.’
The latest researcher to focus on praise is Dr Carol Dweck. She says that getting praise right encourages our children to have a ‘growth mind-set’ rather than a ‘fixed mind-set’. She means simply that one child will keep trying, while the other one won’t want to risk the shame of trying and failing. For the ‘growth mind-set’ child, failing is just a diagnosis of where more effort needs to be applied, an indication that something needs to be corrected. For the ‘fixed mind-set’ child it is a sign that he should give up.51
Ginott ends his book Between Parent and Child with yet more uncanny percipience, suggesting that a secure attachment allows children to not only learn to deal well with the challenges of their particular temperament, but to ‘switch on’ the more refined individual traits and abilities that too often lie hidden for a lifetime. (You will see how right he is in Chapter 11: Humans — the tallest trees.)
This is the same message that Dr Shonkoff has drawn from the last two decades of research. The active ingredient in our child’s life is the relationship he has with us. Following Ginott’s strategies does take you to a closer, happier relationship with your child, and it takes your child closer to the person he wants to be.