Adults become better
parents when they abandon the power struggle and start supervising their
children, Dr. John Walkup said at a meeting on pediatric trends sponsored by
Johns Hopkins University.
Parents of children with
behavior problems describe their children as if they were opaque. That lack
of knowledge of their children comes from not monitoring them, according to
Dr. Walkup.
“I think that supervision
is the basis of conscience. To this day, when I am in a store and pick up a
glass, I hear my mother’s voice say, ‘Put that glass down,’” said Dr.
Walkup, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the university.
Lack of supervision of
young children increases the risk for everything from accidents to fire
setting. A lack of supervision in adolescence increases the risk for
substance abuse, premature sexual activity, and delinquent behavior. “The
guy who robs the 7-Eleven store without a mask in front of cameras that he
can see and then is surprised he gets caught, was not supervised [as a
child],” he continued.
Parents who supervise and
thus get to know their children do not engage in power struggles with them
because such struggles are unnecessary. Power struggles are based on
negative reinforcement, with the methods of coercion escalating over time:
Each behavior by the child elicits a response from the parent and each
behavior by the parent elicits a response by the child.
In an example given by
Dr. Walkup, this is the course of a power struggle over whether the child
will make his bed:
On day 1, when the parent
asks the child to make the bed, they argue back and forth until the parent
makes a threat and the child gives in.
On day 2, the child ends
the argument by locking himself in the bathroom and remaining silent; then
the parent will tell the child that he does not have to make the bed today,
just come out of the bathroom.
On day 3, the parent
stands in front of the bathroom door during the argument.
On day 4, the child runs
out of the house.
“Public humiliation of a
parent is always a good strategy,” Dr. Walkup quipped.
The effective parent
makes sure that the life of a young child has structure. That includes both
a predictable daily schedule and expectations of behavior. It also includes
specific rewards for meeting the behavior expectations and punishments for
not meeting them. Once that structure is in place, the parent’s job is one
of relapse prevention.
When adults become
effective parents, children feel competent because they are responsible for
details of their daily routines, such as making the beds. There is less
nagging, and children can extend the basic organizational principles they
see in place at home to other areas of their lives.
For their part, parents
learn what it feels like to be successful and in charge. “They learn what it
feels like to ‘ignore behavior,’ ‘set firm limits,’ and ‘be consistent,’”
Dr. Walkup said.
Effective parenting of
teenagers is really a matter of monitoring them.
As part of supervising their teenage children, parents should know where the
teen is, what the teen is doing, and whom the teen is with. It comes down to
attending to the details of the adolescent’s life.
Behavioral therapy is an
effective way to teach parents how to change their behavior toward their
children. Dr. Walkup gave the audience the web sites of two groups of
behavior management therapists: www.aabt.org
(Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy) and
www.academyofct.org (Academy of
Cognitive Therapy).
