Between stimulus and response is our greatest power — the freedom to choose.
Stephen R. Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, 1989.15
If your child can put a moment between an impulse — to hit back, to cry, to blame, to laugh — and putting the impulse into action, they have time to choose from among a range of actions and select the best one. It will be an advantage to them for the rest of their life. Impulse control is simply the ability to ‘stop’ or to ‘wait a moment’, but it is not so simple when you pull it apart. To stop doing something a child needs:
the ability to put a ‘thinking space’ between an impulse and an action
to know that she needs to stop, and this requires that she is able to both listen to an inner voice (conscience) and accurately interpret cues from her environment (perceptual sensitivity) and from other people (empathy and theory of mind)
to be motivated to stop, which requires the ability to reason ahead and know that she won’t enjoy the consequences of ‘not stopping’. And it will be a history of consistent responses from you that has taught her that
to have the ability to switch her attention to the cues that are telling her to stop and to concentrate long enough on those cues to pick up the message.
So how can you help your child with all of that?
The circuits for impulse control are located in the right hemisphere of the brain, which is growing and dominant until your baby is three years old. So you start with a focus on building the best quality relationship possible with your child.16 A child’s impulse control is positively correlated with a secure, organised attachment with her parents.17 In terms of impulse control there is one feature of that secure, organised attachment which counts in particular: consistency. And it does this in two different ways.
Firstly, it is the consistency of ‘always responding’ to your baby. Your baby knows you will come, and so she learns to wait. This is what creates the ‘thinking space’ between impulse and action. One day that thinking space will fit a thought like, ‘I’d better stop doing that because I might hurt my brother.’
Secondly, it is applying a consistent response to her behaviour later. If sometimes she is in trouble for hitting her sibling but not other times, then she isn’t going to develop particularly strong motivation to stop. Responding consistently, however, does not mean responding harshly or in a way that removes the responsibility for her own impulse control from your child.
With the child who is very impulsive it is very easy to revert to using the commands, ‘Stop! Don’t! Right now! Do as I tell you.’ These sorts of tactics are part of the repertoire of the harsh parent. While tempting to use, they actually minimise your child’s opportunities to develop her own skills in impulse control. You are suppressing her inappropriate behaviours for her, and so she can’t learn to do it herself. Every time we do this as parents we are preventing our child from learning.
Parenting and temperament are working together here towards a poor outcome. The less controlled the child, the more controlling the parent becomes — and the more controlling the parent, the less opportunities the child has to learn control. So the responsibility for impulse control must be given to the child. How do you do this? Ginott’s approach to parenting, discussed in Chapter 4, is an excellent road to take.
This same very controlling behaviour in a parent can create a different problem in the less impulsive child. There is the risk that a child’s impulse control will not be a flexible, adaptable skill but simply a blanket inhibition of all impulses. This is impulse control taken too far, leading to a child who expresses and does little but thinks a great deal. This leads to depression and anxiety in the long term.
How good is your child’s impulse control?
A child with good impulse control is able to:
sit still (but not before four)
wait her turn (at around two and a half)
stop when asked to (from two and a half)
resist temptation (but not before three).
If a child struggles with waiting, staying still, resisting temptation, planning ahead and following instructions then she has low impulse control. Obviously, this is a call you make over weeks rather than days. And you must consider just what impulses she might have to suppress, because some children have a more impulsive temperament. That type of temperament coupled with a birthday party, for example, will mean that a child ‘blows the lid’ of her impulse control. Common sense also tells us that such basic factors as good health, good nutrition and adequate sleep are important here too.
Being consistent is a big part of good parenting but it is very hard to be consistent consistently. It is hard work even without an external opposing force, and children are a significant opposing force from about 18 months old. They prowl the boundaries you’ve set, methodically testing for a weakness in the current of your will. The velociraptors that tested the fences in Jurassic Park have nothing on a child. Why do children do this? I think they do it to reassure themselves that the boundaries that keep them safe are strong ones. When the current of our will appears to have weakened — when we are tired or busy or distracted, particularly by the telephone — our children will then renew their efforts to test the fences. What I’ve discovered during 12 and a half years of parenting is that the more frequently your fences ‘give’, the more your children will test them. Testing behaviour tends to disappear the more consistent you are. It took me some years to work this out, however. So even though the effort to be consistent is very tiring, inconsistency is ultimately more tiring still.
I think it is this bit of parenting that puts it over the line for ‘the hardest job in the world’. To have the energy and endurance that being consistent demands, parents need to have ‘fuel in their own tank’. This is a drum I’ve banged in the early chapters. Good quality childcare and income splitting and supportive workplaces — all of these would help parents meet this bit of the parenting job description.
Apart from consistency, what else helps in the development of impulse control? Parents improve impulse control by improving the other self-regulation tools — empathy and theory of mind (already discussed), perceptual sensitivity (a big subject covered in the following chapter) and the ability to switch attention between cues and to concentrate long enough on those cues to pick up the message.
Attention is the ability to focus on one thing to the exclusion of others. It has a huge role in learning as it lets us dismiss irrelevant information and focus on what really counts. A child with good attention skills is able to wield his senses like a high-powered spotlight, keeping them trained on the relevant detail and excavating for deeper insights all the time. Concentration is all about the length of time the spotlight can be flicked from detail to detail. Attention is the intensity or the level of focus, while concentration is the endurance or length of a play episode.
Most parents want their children to be able to play by themselves for a while. A child who demands to be constantly entertained and played with is exhausting to parent. For our sanity we need them to have the capacity to amuse themselves. Fortunately, this is something that we can teach.
The most important thing to remember is to play with your baby for some of the time. Don’t leave the job of entertaining him up to a toddler or to the TV. The longest play sessions babies have are with their parents and it is these play sessions that stretch their ability to sustain and focus attention.18 By ‘stretching’ them with these sessions, you are lengthening the time they can play by themselves.
The kind of games you play also contributes strongly to your child’s attention skills. You need to create a balance of play by including some very exciting games where your child’s attention is compelled, but also some of the very simple games which require your child to pay attention: the low intensity pleasures (see page 80, Part Two). Check whether you are seeing your child doing such things as completing puzzles, playing with dolls and having time in the sandpit with water and toys.
I cannot recommend these low intensity pleasures too highly. Although it wasn’t a connection I made until recently, over and over again I’ve seen low intensity activities lead to a child with better self-regulation. For example, a highly emotional child who just months after developing a passion for Lego or Mobilo was far better at keeping a lid on his emotions; a highly active toddler (and being highly active at this age is a risk factor for attention problems in preschool) who had many stories read to him a day and went on to perform very well in kindergarten; a little girl who was lagging behind her age peers with fine motor skills and who completed a low intensity therapy program with not just her fine motor skills but her attention skills greatly improved.
And it fits with the research into the way environment impacts upon temperament. Dr Theodore Wachs conducts research in just this area. He is clearly a man with a sense of humour, although not the kind particularly appreciated by mothers of young children. One of his measurement tools is called the Chaos Questionnaire, which further breaks down into the Confusion, Hubbub and Order Scale.19 He also measures the rooms-to-person ratio. His findings? One was that more tractable toddlers come from more ordered homes with a higher room-to-person ratio. He relates this to the fact that less caregiving occurs in busy, disordered settings, which is a very reasonable conclusion. However, it also seems likely that it is much harder for children to engage independently in low intensity activities in such a setting, and that this has long term consequences in terms of self-regulation.20 Fascinatingly, he also found that boys suffer more negative consequences from living in such busy homes than do little girls.
So how do parents build the capacity to enjoy low intensity activities in their children? It is partly done by managing the environment. A quieter home with less stuff, more order and less emotional confusion means that children can have their attention caught and kept by the low intensity occupations.
Avoid heavily structuring your child’s day. Such things as time spent sitting in a sandpit letting the sand drip through fingers or lost in a picture book might look like time wasted, but in fact it is extremely valuable. Your child will be building attention, concentration and perceptual skills in this time. Equally, time spent playing computer games and watching television should be minimal. Even though they are not intense physically, neither entertainment television nor computer games ask the child to focus. Instead, they compel focus through highly intense pictures and sounds, as parents need to do to engage a very young baby (or a child with an intellectual disability), but normally less and less as a child grows up. Children cannot develop good attention and concentration while watching a screen, and time which could be spent developing these skills is lost.
So get rid of the television or keep it turned off most of the time (or perhaps, as my cousin Penny has done, hide it in a cupboard and only bring it out for special occasions). A 2008 study of very young children showed that their occasional glances at the TV, which seem so harmless, actually reduced not just the length of a play episode but the amount of focus they brought to their play.21
Like behaviour, movement and everything else, attention and concentration have developmental stages. In this case, they correlate quite closely with a child’s age. By recognising the different stages you can better know how to intervene to help your child onto the next stage.
Your baby will get bored quite quickly, and a bored baby is not a baby who is trying to focus his attention. Limit the number of toys available at any one time as this will help your baby pick out one thing from his environment and focus upon it. Also, give him the chance to explore something new regularly, or, at the very least, rotate the toys you have. (Lots of practice focusing will also make your baby tired and he’ll sleep better after an interesting day.)
Your one year old should be able to concentrate for at least three minutes in a moderately distracting setting. But from time to time his attention will be ‘caught and dragged’ when he’d really rather have kept on with what he was doing. Apart from when he is doing something he really shouldn’t, don’t interrupt him when he is absorbed in play by himself. Independent play is the beginnings of the ability to work independently.
At two years old children are less distractible and can keep playing for longer, but their attention still has a brittle quality. His attention is held rigidly by what he is doing, but once his focused state is broken he is unlikely to return to what he was doing. Two year olds have difficulty coping with any interference in their play. The older sibling who attempts to join in may be greeted with tears or a turned back or (worst of all) biting due to frustration over the loss of a happy play session. If a two year old is playing happily alongside you, talk about what you’re doing without interfering with his play: for example, ‘I’m just pushing my truck down the road.’
If your two year old is happy to have you discuss what you are doing, expand the discussion out and talk about what he’s doing too. Gradually modify his play by making your play a little ahead of his play instead of alongside: for example, drag your train in front of his, or bounce your doll up the pathway to the house ahead of her doll. From this he will gradually learn to accept new ideas into his games without losing his attention on his own game. The ability to widen focus without losing attention is a critical one in learning throughout life: we all need to know how to accept new ideas.
At three years old children are able to switch between looking and listening and are able to listen to you and then return to their play. Expect them to come more slowly out of their games and to need a clear cue to stop play and start listening. In kindergartens you will hear teachers say, ‘Have you got your listening ears on?’ or, ‘Whole body listening please, class’ before delivering the information. So at three you should definitely anticipate that your child will need extra help to switch between looking and listening.
The next stage, at four years old, is when the child is controlling the switch between looking and listening for himself. To help your three year old achieve this you need to prompt him to listen, and then, afterwards, prompt him to return to his game. When you are playing with him, build on his ideas to make the game more elaborate. Not in an intrusive way, but it is during this three-to four-year-old time period that children begin to really love collaborative play. ‘And then we put a whole lot of bushes into the garden.’
‘Yes! Then they have flowers.’
‘And they need to be watered with flower water to really blossom.’
‘And we make special flower water by mashing up old flowers.’
From four years to five years games grow in length and complexity. They can have episodes, with children returning to further elaborate or add more details to a storyline. This is enabled by the ability to sustain attention despite distractions. While your child might still need a little help to know that it’s time to listen, it is now destructive to his attention skills to demand that your five year old show he is listening by looking at you. Why? Because at school he will need to be able to deal with the teacher saying something like, ‘It’s five minutes to recess. You need to finish colouring in the picture before then and pack up.’ Stopping work to listen is going to disadvantage him in the classroom.
If your five year old looks up (as he will do if it’s a long message) that’s fine, but it’s not something that he needs to do to prove he’s listening. At five you are hoping to see a child who is beginning to be able to look at one thing and listen to another.
At six to seven this ability needs to be well enough developed so that he can listen to a long message while looking at something else. When a child can follow a complex set of directions without looking up, his attention and concentration skills have developed sufficiently for him to be able to cope with formal schooling. One other way of recognising school readiness is to listen to ‘pretend’ play themes. If children are collaborating to make up societies or worlds, sustaining themes and storylines over long periods of time and are able to stay focused on their game despite distractions, then their attention skills are ready for the demands of school.
Being in a classroom is a big strain on children’s attention skills. The average classroom features lots of visual stimulation, a bombardment of sound and the unpredictable behaviour of classmates. The need to block out other competing information becomes far more pronounced. At this point impulse control skills, the ability to stop ourselves doing something, need to be added to attention for children to cope. They need to be able to stop themselves listening to a friend and not the teacher. They need to look at a book and not out the window. And that impulse plus attention combination is also vital for formal learning.
For a child trying to learn to read it is strong attention that lets him dismiss the irrelevant information and focus on what really counts. He might see a ‘c’ at the beginning of a word and the urge to say ‘cat’ might occur, but strong impulse control lets him continue attending to the whole word, which turns out to be ‘cow’. The two self-regulation skills work together. Learning is really ‘creating useful memories’: where attention and impulse control work together to create a memory. As children get older and their attention and impulse control improves, they become better at creating these useful memories.22
So what can you do to practise this in the short years before school? You are probably doing most of it already. With a one year old, games like ‘Where’s Mummy?’ are excellent. He must choose to not point at any of the distracting objects but at the right person or thing. For older children, these games do the same thing:
Pointing to pictures in books. The Usborne puzzle books, Where’s Wally? and Australia’s own Graeme Base picture books are great for this. This helps your child practise the skill of ‘not looking’ at those things designed to distract him from the real target.
Sleeping lions. This remarkably silly game works better with a group: all the children have to lie down on their backs with their eyes closed and not cover their faces with their hands. Then you say something funny and they mustn’t laugh. They mustn’t quiver or squirm! Some choice phrases are, ‘pig’s bottom’ and ‘little baggy elephant bums’ and ‘exploding bu — I mean bombs’.
Playing card and board games. Learning to wait for your turn is excellent practice in impulse control.
And there is one more thing: impulse control is something that you teach by having good impulse control yourself. And this can be so hard. Again, parents need support so they are not too tired or too busy or too stressed to be able to be in command of themselves.