I’ve always been a great reader of parenting books.
I remember reading one book that argued forcefully for ‘positive parenting’. The central message was this: ‘If you only pay attention to positive behaviours in your children, they alone will be reinforced, and the behaviours you don’t like will steadily disappear.’
At the time I was in my early thirties with two little boys. I retold the message to my husband Martin and my mother — how exciting it would be to be able to drop the discipline and just focus on the good things!
‘In my experience, if you ignore children who are behaving badly they will scale up their behaviour until you do notice,’ advised my mother.
But I ignored her. Perhaps I had already internalised the message that I should only pay attention to what I wanted to see and hear?
We started our new parenting approach at breakfast the following day. Tim (four and a half years old) did not like to sit at the table to eat. In fact, he did not even really like to eat. He appeared at the doorway and slowly approached the breakfast table. Martin and I beamed at him approvingly. Tim reached the table only to promptly duck under it and drop to the floor beneath.
Instead of asking him to sit and eat, we steadfastly ignored him and talked of other things. One little hand shot up to the edge of the table, and then another. I thought for a moment that he had capitulated and was going to swing himself out and eat with us. But then the hands began a dialogue, with the right having a deep growly voice and the left squeaking plaintively. It was quite clearly the story of Dad telling Tim to eat, and Tim resisting.
I could see Martin was going to say something about this and so I reminded him in a whisper of the new rule. ‘We only notice good behaviour.’ He did not look particularly happy about it — but he nodded his agreement.
The dialogue presently stopped and I could hear scuffling sounds under the table. Luckily I am constructed so that I can talk ceaselessly and I was able to give an excellent impression of ignoring these intriguing noises. However Martin was not performing well in the supporting role, and my attention was eventually caught by the expression on his face. He is hard to read at the best of times, but at that precise moment his expression was so utterly impassive — so wooden — that he would not have been out of place in a shop window display.
I was to find out later that Tim had been biting his leg at the time.
But we finished our breakfast with me still in ignorance of this. Martin went to work and I continued on with my new parenting method.
One of the boys’ habits I particularly disliked was ‘play-wrestling’. Someone was always hurt. Later we instituted a rule that they could only wrestle with their father — which has stood the test of time — but on this particular day I adhered firmly to the rule of ignoring what I didn’t want to see.
While I hung out washing I could hear the stealthy sounds of Tim and Sam beginning to wrestle. About here is where I would normally have broken it up. Roll, roll, and thump of them together on the floor. And then, over in the other direction — roll, roll, thump. And then a howl.
I picked up my basket and walked swiftly past the combatants, now well separated and attempting to hide tears.
They did not wrestle again.
I seized upon this first bit of evidence that my new parenting approach was working with a delightful feeling of inner certainty. This was the way forward! But shortly after I could hear the steady sound of objects being thrown. Out on the veranda my sons were throwing Lego pieces at each other. I feverishly raced back to consult the book. This, it said, was normal. Wait them out. And, soothed by the writer’s utter certainty, I sat with a cup of tea and kept to my chair as each son simultaneously began crying. Right now, I told myself, they were learning that the consequence of throwing things is that someone gets hurt. I was forgetting that this had been experienced before and was showing no sign of leading to a change in behaviour.
It was time for morning tea — which we shared in perfect amity. There was no mention of the throwing by them and no mention of the toys everywhere by me. I ignored the widely spread Lego; as evidence of negative behaviour it was beneath my notice.
Later that day the boys were left to play together again on the veranda. And this time they played in contented silence. There was no play wrestling, no throwing. They were utterly engaged in whatever it was they were doing. I gratefully read some more of my parenting book. I marvelled that the author — a young male postgraduate student without children — had such a grasp on what worked with children and how extraordinarily easy his system was! Why was it not commonly used?
And with that thought I began to wonder just what it was that my children were doing on the veranda, so I decided to investigate.
They had taken four large bottles of poster paint and squeezed each out onto the vinyl floor. The colourful mass was then diluted with water and distributed widely. They had then invented a game of ‘flicking’. You dipped your paintbrush into the paint and water and then ‘flick’: you saw just how much red, purple, blue and green paint you could throw up onto the white walls and ceiling.
When your mother leaves you to play for more than an hour, that is a great deal of paint.
It is very odd, some seven years later, to be the one who is writing a book on parenting. In my defence, it was not my idea to write this book.
I became friends with the editor on my first book and, being the mother of two young children, she quickly got into the way of ‘picking my brain’ about child development. Not only am I an occupational therapist, but my mother is also, which between us gives me some 50 plus years of clinical experience to ratchet through, looking for answers.
To add to this, I am, tragically, more than a little like a hound. If I am asked a question I ‘take the scent’ and am off on the hunt straightaway.
I remember not having an answer for my sister-in-law Minnie’s question about one of her children who was briefly ill.
‘We have Health Direct in WA, Minnie. You just call 1800 …’ I said, giving her the number in full twice, and rather hopefully.
‘Oh, I have that too. I just call …’ and she rattled off a string of numbers.
‘I wonder why it is different to the one we call?’ I said.
‘Let me just repeat that for you,’ she said.
The number sounded somewhat familiar.
‘It’s yours,’ she said eventually, as it was evident I wasn’t going to make the connection.
And, sure enough, having spoken and read and nutted out the illness I was back to her in short order with a few ideas to deal with it. Once a question has been asked I’m programmed to return with a range of answers. ‘Even,’ my husband Martin has just added, ‘when a person doesn’t actually ask you to do it.
But my editor Jo Mackay did actually ask me. First of all she asked if there was a book with all the occupational therapy knowledge in for parents, and when I said, no, there wasn’t, as Mum and I had often looked for such a book, she asked if I could write one. And then she came up with the name — the one on the cover. I pointed out to her that her original concept had not come close to the scope of this one. This book goes a long way beyond occupational therapy. This would need to draw from a much wider pool of knowledge. But she was not to be roped into a discussion of how difficult the project would be. She changed the subject and said how she had been longing for a book that was not about turning your child into Einstein or getting them to read at two or having them sleep through the night at three minutes old …
So off I went to find out just how to help a child become her ‘best possible’ self. I went back to university and I read thousands of articles and books and I talked and talked with my mother on our morning walks.
Into this book I have put everything I could find about how children learn to learn, think, move, talk, read, make friends, concentrate, empathise and, above all else, recover from setbacks and become transformed by adversity into the person they want to be. It is also the story of my own journey through the research, and how it profoundly changed the way I parent my children.
But this is not just my journey — and when you read ‘I’ it is not just my voice or Mum’s voice you are hearing. We tend to interpret the saying ‘it takes a whole village to raise a child’ to mean that everyone needs to help a parent directly with their child. I think there is another interpretation that is just as valid. I believe it is equally about everyone contributing to a parent’s ‘thinking’ about each individual child.
Martin and I are surrounded by people — parents, grandparents, teachers, family members, colleagues — who will happily talk with us about the issues we face in rearing our sons and the issues they face with their own children. Parenting is a richer experience when this is happening and easier, too. When you have someone who will say, ‘Have you thought about …?’ then your decisions are going to be smarter ones.
The same village that helps me raise my children has shared the journey of writing this book. I hope you can hear their loving voices asking, ‘Have you thought about …?’ as you read.
When a baby is born she could grow into a range of different people. One of these is a person who that child will be happiest being, which is what every parent wants for their child, and that is the ‘best possible child’ of this book.
Even as we get older this is still the case — ahead of us is always a range of different selves. We know that a decision will take us closer to one potential self, and further from another.
But just what capacities does a child need to become the person — happy, resilient and wise — she wants to be? And just what do we need to do to help our child be that person?
Should we focus on ‘skills’?
I’m going to cover skills in detail in this book — talking, movement skills, reading, maths and writing skills and so on — because they are important, and, being an occupational therapist, this stuff is my bread and butter. But are they the deciding factor in life success? I know — and you probably do, too — skilled people who are still not making the success of life they could. So this, it seems to me, is the least likely answer to the question.
Should we focus on ‘good behaviour’?
Again, you will find this covered in the book in great detail, but is good behaviour the ‘make or break’ factor? You can perform well in a role, such as worker or student, but not delight in it — and not, at the end of the day, be happy. So it seemed to me that a main focus on having an obedient child was not going to achieve our desired outcome.
Should parents try to create ‘good motivation’?
This seemed to be far closer to the answer — and yet there are people who are highly motivated but who, in the end, are still not the person they want to be.
For me, none of these answers, alone or even together, were hitting the mark. And they weren’t hitting the mark because I’ve seen that for some children education (to improve skills), discipline (to improve behaviour) and opportunity (to improve motivation) don’t help. There was something that some children had and some children didn’t. What was it and how could I shape my parenting to ensure my children had it?
This question is increasingly a focus in the child development literature.
Like parents, researchers have been disturbed by the fact that today’s children are not performing as well as those in earlier generations. The change has been one that has happened during my lifetime — so in just the last forty years.
When I remember back to my classrooms in primary school and high school there was a very small percentage of children who were struggling. On graduating from university I expected that a classroom would have five to ten per cent of children who could benefit from occupational therapy. Ten years ago I had mentally ‘upped’ that number to between 10 and 15 per cent. And it has risen since.
The Australian Early Development Index, a best practice, whole population measure of child health, is now used to measure how well a community is supporting its children. And what does it show for Australia as a whole? It shows that about a quarter (23.4 per cent)of all children are deemed to be ‘at risk’ — socially, educationally and in terms of physical and mental health.1 This is way, way too high.
So what have the researchers uncovered? What sort of parenting does put a child on track for her best possible self?
There are three main branches of early child development research. Each has come up with a very similar answer. Alas, each uses a different name for this concept and has a slightly different set of ‘what is included’, but the answers are hearteningly supportive of each other. And what they are all saying is this: What a child needs for success is to be able to manage stress, stay focused and navigate both her own and other people’s emotions.
In everyday language, we would use terms like ‘emotionally savvy’ or ‘wise’ or ‘self and people smart’ to describe these abilities. In the literature they talk of ‘effortful control’ and ‘emotional self-regulation’ and ‘executive function’. I’m going to use ‘self-regulation’ as I’m increasingly seeing the term appear in other writing for parents.
Each set of research is important in understanding how self-regulation develops and just why it is so valuable.
Attachment theory connects self-regulation to a particular type of relationship between parent and child, and believes that the main benefit of self-regulation skills further down the track is that they allow a child to create meaningful and enjoyable intimate relationships.
The neuroscience shows these skills grow as a result of the physical and emotional connection (brain to brain, heart to heart) between mother and child. Researchers would point to good health and good brain development as key results.
Another perspective comes in the temperament research literature, and to my astonishment this has been the most useful research of all. Previously I had held a grudge against the temperament theorists. I was astounded when my dear little Tim, my elder son, began behaving badly. His hand would inch ostentatiously towards an object he knew was forbidden — a power-board or toilet brush — while his eyes were defiantly fixed upon mine. I began to look for answers.
The first set of parenting information I encountered was based in the temperament literature. I dutifully filled in the checklist and was horrified to be told that he was ‘anti-authoritarian’ and at high risk of developing a conduct disorder. Sometimes what you read as a parent can be destructive and this certainly, though temporarily, was.
What I’d failed to realise is that behaviour, like everything else, follows a pattern of development. Tim had recently turned two. He had hit that stage of systematically defying me just to see what the consequences would be.
But this new temperament research was quite different from what I’d encountered years earlier. It dives right into questions such as ‘Which sort of kids find it easiest to develop self-regulation skills?’ ‘Fearful or fearless?’ ‘Intense or laid back?’ And the researchers also go on to ask, ‘How should parents respond to different temperaments to create a child with good self-regulation skills?’
The temperament theorists have a different take on why self-regulation is important. Their research shows it leads straight to a child who develops a working set of socially appropriate internal rules. Without this set of rules children are more likely to grow up to abuse drugs, to be aggressive towards others and to generally behave in ways that deny them an easy life.2
And from there the research travels to exactly the destination I was looking for: a breakdown of the factors that lead directly to self-regulation.
So what are the qualities required for self-regulation?
Imagine you are learning to fly a small aircraft. First of all you are trying to learn how to monitor your plane for the slightest hint of something going wrong. This ability to be aware of subtle changes, to detect a new note in the engine, or an unexpected drop or increase in speed requires that your perceptual sensitivity is calibrated accurately to the outside world. The person who is not very sensitive will be at risk here, but so too is the oversensitive person. They will have difficulty screening out some signs to focus on the ones that really count.
Those perceptions help us know what to attend to, but we also need the separate ability to be able to shift attention to the right part of a task. We are not born able to do this, and, as adults, we only remember how difficult this is when we are immersed in new learning — for example, following the instruction ‘look at the blinking light’, you have to shift your attention to the blinking light on display. You must look just at this light and not any of the other fascinating gauges and lights, and then go back to your previous focus of attention.
The ability over time to keep directing your thinking between internal knowledge and the external situation while keeping in mind what you are trying to achieve is called concentration. You need that too.
You also need to be able to prevent habits, urges or emotions from interfering with your goals. This is called impulse control. If you hop back into your imaginary aircraft … you discover that you don’t just ‘learn’ how to fly, but that you also need to ‘turn off’ all the habits you have developed in driving a car. It is your feet that turn the plane to the left or to the right, rather than your hands. So as well as remembering to use your feet, you will have to suppress the habit of using your hands to do the job. Impulse control is the ability to stop yourself doing something.
Impulse control is fed by two other important skills: empathy, which is the ability to know how someone else is feeling, and something called theory of mind, which is the ability to predict what somebody else knows.
Both of these allow us to ‘mind-read’ other people to a sufficient degree to negotiate relationships — or a runway on which a number of small planes are landing.
Together these self-regulation tools — perceptual sensitivity, shifting attention, concentration, impulse control, empathy and theory of mind — create a human control system so flexible and powerful that with them in place your child will be able to become her ‘best possible self’, regardless of temperament.
Fortunately each one of these skills is something that you do shape with your parenting, and you shape them particularly by how you relate to your child. Just how that happens is the story of this book.