How Children REALLY React To Control

by Dr. Thomas Gordon

When one person tries to control another, you can always expect some kind of reaction from the controlee. The use of power involves two people in a special kind of relationship - one wielding power, and the other reacting to it.

This seemingly obvious fact is not usually dealt with in the writings of the dare-to-discipline advocates. Invariably, they leave the child out of the formula, omitting any reference to how the youngster reacts to the control of his or her parents or teachers.

They insist, "Parents must set limits," but seldom say anything about how children respond to having their needs denied in this way. "Parents should not be afraid to exercise their authority," they counsel, but rarely mention how youngsters react to authority-based coercion. By omitting the child from the interaction, the discipline advocates leave the impression that the child submits willingly and consistently to adults' power and does precisely what is demanded.

These are actual quotes from the many power-to-the-parent books I've collected along the way:

• "Be firm but fair."
• "Insist that your children obey."
• "Don't be afraid to express disapproval by spanking."
• "There are times when you have to say 'no'."
• "Discipline with love."
• "Demonstrate your parental right to lead."
• "The toddler should be taught to obey and yield to parental leadership."

What these books have in common is advocacy of the use of power-based discipline with no mention of how children react to it. In other words, the dare-to-discipline advocates never present power-based discipline in full, as a cause-and-effect phenomenon, an action-and-reaction event.

This omission is important, for it implies that all children passively submit to adult demands, perfectly content and secure in an obedient role, first in relationships with their parents and teachers and, eventually, with all adult power-wielders they might encounter.

However, I have found not a shred of evidence to support this view. In fact, as most of us remember only too well from our childhood, we did almost anything we could to defend against power-based control. We tried to avoid it, postpone it, weaken it, avert it, escape from it. We lied, we put the blame on someone else, we tattled, hid, pleaded, begged for mercy, or promised we would never do it again.

We also experienced punitive discipline as embarrassing, demeaning, humiliating, frightening, and painful. To be coerced into doing something against our will was a personal insult and an affront to our dignity, an act that devalued the importance of our needs.

Punitive discipline is by definition need-depriving as opposed to need-satisfying. Recall that punishment will be effective only if it is felt by the child as aversive, painful, unpleasant. When controllers employ punishment, they always intend for it to cause pain or deprivation. It seems so obvious, then, that children don't ever want punitive discipline, contrary to what its advocates would have us believe. No child "asks for it," "feels a need for it," or is "grateful for it." And it is probably true, too, that no child ever forgets or forgives a punitive parent or teacher. This is why I find it incredible that the authors of power-to-the-parent books try to justify power-based discipline with such statements as:

• "Kids not only need punishment, they want it."
• "Children basically want what is coming to them, good or bad, because justice is security."
• "Punishment will prove to kids that their parents love them."
• "The youngster who knows he deserves a spanking appears almost relieved when it finally comes."
• "Rather than be insulted by the discipline, [the child] understands its purpose and appreciates the control it gives him over his own impulses."
• "Corporal punishment in the hands of a loving parent is entirely different in purpose and practice [from child abuse]....One is an act of love; the other is an act of hostility."
• "Some strong-willed children absolutely demand to be spanked, and their wishes should be granted."
• "Punishment will make children feel more secure in their relationship."
• "Discipline makes for happy families; healthy relationships."

Could these be rationalizations intended to relieve the guilt that controllers feel after coercing or committing acts of physical violence against their children? It seems possible in view of the repeated insistence that the punishing adult is really a loving adult, doing it only "for the child's own good," or as a dutiful act of "benevolent leadership." It appears that being firm with children has to be justified by saying, "Be firm but fair"; being tough is acceptable as long as it's "Tough Love"; being an autocrat is justifiable as long as you're a "benevolent autocrat"; coercing children is okay as long as you're not a "dictator"; and physically abusing children is not abuse as long as you "do it lovingly."

Disciplinarians' insistence that punishment is benign and constructive might be explained by their desire that children eventually become subservient to a Supreme Being or higher authority. This can only be achieved, they believe, if children first learn to obey their parents and other adults. James Dobson (1978) stresses this point time and time again:

• "While yielding to the loving leadership of their parents, children are also learning to yield to the benevolent leadership of God Himself."
• "With regard to the specific discipline of the strong-willed toddler, mild spankings can begin between 15 and 18 months of age....To repeat, the toddler should be taught to obey and yield to parental leadership, but that end will not be accomplished overnight."

It's the familiar story of believing that the ends justify the means. Obedience to parental authority first, and then later to some higher authority, is so strongly valued by some advocates of punitive discipline that the means they utilize to achieve that end are distorted to appear beneficial to children rather than harmful.

The hope that children eventually will submit to all authority is, I think, wishful thinking. Not all children submit when adults try to control them. In fact, children respond with a wide variety of reactions, an assortment of behaviors. Psychologists call these reactions "coping behaviors" or "coping mechanisms".

The Coping Mechanisms Children Use

Over the years I have compiled a long list of the various coping mechanisms youngsters use when adults try to control them. This list comes primarily out of our Parent Effectiveness Training (P.E.T.) and Teacher Effectiveness Training (T.E.T.) classes, where we employ a simple but revealing classroom exercise. Participants are asked to recall the specific ways they themselves coped with power-based discipline when they were youngsters. The question yields nearly identical lists in every class, which confirms how universal children's coping mechanisms are. The complete list is reproduced below, in no particular order. Note how varied these recurring themes are. (Can you pick out the particular coping methods you employed as a youngster?)

• Resisting, defying, being negative
• Rebelling, disobeying, being insubordinate, sassing
• Retaliating, striking back, counterattacking, vandalizing
• Hitting, being belligerent, combative
• Breaking rules and laws
• Throwing temper tantrums, getting angry
• Lying, deceiving, hiding the truth
• Blaming others, tattling, telling on others
• Bossing or bullying others
• Banding together, forming alliances, organizing against the adult
• Apple-polishing, buttering up, soft-soaping, bootlicking, currying favor with adults
• Withdrawing, fantasizing, daydreaming
• Competing, needing to win, hating to lose, needing to look good, making others look bad
• Giving up, feeling defeated, loafing, goofing off
• Leaving, escaping, staying away from home, running away, quitting school, cutting classes
• Not talking, ignoring, using the silent treatment, writing the adult off, keeping one's distance
• Crying, weeping; feeling depressed or hopeless
• Becoming fearful, shy, timid, afraid to speak up, hesitant to try anything new
• Needing reassurance, seeking constant approval, feeling insecure
• Getting sick, developing psychosomatic ailments
• Overeating, excessive dieting
• Being submissive, conforming, complying; being dutiful, docile, apple-polishing, being a goody-goody, teacher's pet
• Drinking heavily, using drugs
• Cheating in school, plagiarizing

As you might expect, after parents and teachers in the class generate their list, and realize that it was created out of their own experience, they invariably make such comments as:

• "Why would anyone want to use power, if these are the behaviors it produces?"
• "All of these coping mechanisms are behaviors that I wouldn't want to see in my children [or my students]."
• "I don't see in the list any good effects or positive behaviors."
• "If we reacted to power in those ways when we were kids, our own children certainly will, too."

After this exercise, some parents and teachers undergo a 180-degree shift in their thinking. They see much more clearly that power creates the very behavior patterns they most dislike in children! They begin to understand that as parents and teachers they are paying a terrible price for using power: they are causing their children or students to develop habits, traits, and characteristics considered both unacceptable by most adults and unhealthy by mental health professionals.

Excerpted from "Teaching Children Self Discipline", by Dr. Thomas Gordon

How P.E.T. Helped Our Family Handle An Incident Of Cyberbullying

Cyberbullying is a phenomenon that is unique to this generation and it personally touched my family when my daughter was 10 years old and in the 5th grade.  It is a form of bullying that has evolved due to the rapid onset of our use of electronic technology and the arrival of social media sites in the late 1990's.  According to Internetsaftey.org (http://www.internetsafety.org), "Cyberbullying is willful and repeated harm (i.e., harassing, humiliating, or threatening text or images) inflicted through the Internet, interactive technologies, or mobile phones."  In short, anyone who uses a computer, email, instant messaging, social media sites, mobile phone, or interactive online video games, is using the tools that enable cyberbullying to take place.  As a result there is a high risk of experiencing cyberbullying either as a victim, a bystander, or as the perpetrator.  

This week there has been a Cyberbullying Prevention Act put forward in the state of Maryland in response to a few high profile suicides by young teens who were the victims of cyberbullying.  Cyberbullying has real and serious consequences.  There is some evidence to show that the rates of depression are higher among children who experience cyberbullying versus "traditional" bullying.  In the words of Noah Brocklebank (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/12/noah-brocklebank-letters_n_2861140.html) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sR4D4HLzciU&feature=youtu.be), who was a young victim of cyberbullying, "Words have power."  In my opinion there is no better book or course than Dr. Thomas Gordon's Parent Effectiveness Training in order to equip parents, and everyone who interacts with children, with the communication tools ensure that their words have positive and not negative power.

Cyberbullying is a fact of modern life that we all need to take seriously, but especially anyone who interacts with children.  In my daughter's instance, cyberbullying occurred in the first year that she was actively using the internet to socialize with her friends after school via Skype conference calls and Skype instant messaging.  It started as a form of social acceptance and camaraderie.  It quickly and very easily turned into cyberbullying.  Internetsafety.org defines cyberbullying tactics as the following:

• Gossip: Posting or sending cruel gossip to damage a person’s reputation and relationships with friends, family, and acquaintances  
• Exclusion: Deliberately excluding someone from an online group
• Impersonation: Breaking into someone’s e-mail or other online account and sending messages that will cause embarrassment or damage to the person’s reputation and affect his or her relationship with others 
• Harassment: Repeatedly posting or sending offensive, rude, and insulting messages 
• Cyberstalking: Posting or sending unwanted or intimidating messages, which may include threats 
• Flaming: Online fights where scornful and offensive messages are posted on websites, forums, or blogs
• Outing and Trickery: Tricking someone into revealing secrets or embarrassing information, which is then shared online
• Cyberthreats: Remarks on the Internet threatening or implying violent behavior, displaying suicidal tendencies

According to The American Academy of Pediatrics, cyberbullying is the “most common online risk for all teens” and girls are more likely to engage in cyberbullying than boys are.  Our children are using these interactive technologies more and more, at younger and younger ages, and they can have access to them in every area of their life.  Although cyberbullying may be a fact of modern life I believe that the skills taught in the P.E.T. course provide a model of communication and parenting that can help turn the tide on cyberbullying in two key ways.

Modeling How to Resolve Conflicts Without the Use of Power

Firstly, the P.E.T. model of communication and parenting is unique because of the fact that it dissects how power is used in relationships and puts forward a model of resolving conflicts without the use of power, called Method III.  Cyberbullying is a form of power that the perpetrator inflicts on the victim and bystanders.  By raising our children using the P.E.T. model, and specifically the Method III approach to resolving conflicts without the use of power, we are modelling behavior that they can then follow themselves in their interactions with others.

Helping Children Meet Their Needs

Secondly, the P.E.T. model of communication and parenting does not use the term misbehavior but rather states that "all behavior is to get a need met".  Think about this in terms of the behavior that the victim of cyberbullying will exhibit, the behavior of a bystander, and then the behavior of the perpetrator.  All three are exhibiting behavior to have a need met and the better we all are at identifying when a child needs our help, whether they are a victim, bystander or perpetrator, the sooner we can begin to put an end to an incidence of cyberbullying.  The P.E.T. parent uses the Helping Characteristics of Empathy, Acceptance and Genuineness, combined with the powerful Helping Skill of Active Listening in order to help their children meet their unique needs.  In turn, by modeling this type of communication, the P.E.T. parent helps their child learn how to communicate more effectively in order to meet their own needs or to ask for help when it is needed.

In our personal experience of handling my daughter's instance of cyberbullying I can identify the following things that I learned through the P.E.T. course that helped us to resolve the situation.

Sharing Values Respectfully - It is a strong value of mine to treat others the way that you want to be treated and I share this with my children in different ways.  About 6 months before my daughter experienced cyberbullying I had asked the kids to watch a series of talks with me on CNN called Stop Bullying: Speak Up (http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2011/bullying/).  This initiative is also the first place that I heard about a recently released documentary about bullying called Bully (http://www.thebullyproject.com/).  The timing could not have been better. When my daughter began experiencing cyberbullying, she knew that this behavior was not okay, she also knew that I was aware that it can happen and that she could talk to me about it.  I know that the discussions we had following our viewing of the CNN programs had a positive impact on the situation she experienced.

Modeling behavior - Shortly after reality shows became a popular form of television viewing, I recognized that some of them condone the use of bullying behavior in the name of entertainment.  I made the decision not to watch those shows and since we don't have cable television my children have not watched those shows either.  Funnily enough, the discussion has never come up but if it did I would explain to my children why I don't watch shows of that nature, because they normalize bullying tactics and desensitize society to their impact.  I would be sharing a value with them while at the same time ensuring my behavior was consistent with that value.

Active Listening - As a parent who has taken the P.E.T. course, and as a P.E.T. Instructor, I know the power that Active Listening can have on your day to day interactions with your children.  When your child is going through something like cyberbullying, the power of Active Listening really comes into its own.  Throughout the period that my daughter was experiencing cyberbullying, we were using Active Listening and this allowed her to share with us the story of what was happening to her.  We helped her to problem solve and she took examples of the cyberbullying she was experiencing through the use of instant messages to her school counselor.  The fact that she had cut and pasted the examples onto a piece of paper and scheduled a meeting with the school counselor were totally her initiatives.  She knew she had our support and I was so proud of her for feeling empowered to take this course of action.  I know that Active Listening helped her begin to solve the problem.

More Active Listening

The element of Active Listening that completely caught me off guard involved me Active Listening in an email communication from one of the perpetrators.  In this email he was threatening my daughter and encouraging others in the email chain to exclude her.  He stated that her actions in bringing the situation to the school's attention had resulted in his friend, the primary perpetrator, getting into big trouble at home.  Now believe me, his email was very serious and threatening in nature and I got on the phone and called his mother straight away to inform her that I needed to bring this to the school's attention.  What was different about how I did this was a result of what I had learned in the P.E.T. course.  I explained to her that I could tell that her son was being a loyal friend, and that his need in that moment was to protect a friend that he was worried about.  His email provided me with the information I needed about both of the perpetrators unmet needs that had led to their behavior.

Resolving Conflicts Without the Use of Power

The fact that I knew what the perpetrators needs were and had empathy for them and their families as well as for my daughter, the victim, had a huge impact on how we dealt with the situation as a combined team with the school principal and counselor, the parents and the children.   We had a very constructive discussion, the children were able to become friends again and are still in touch today.  I feel certain that it is because my daughter also began to use some of the P.E.T. skills that she saw us modelling and that empowered her.  The parents of the perpetrators were able to better understand what had led to their children's behavior and help them to meet their unique needs at the time.

I will forever be grateful that P.E.T. had come into my life before I had to handle the situation of cyberbullying that my daughter experienced.  If you have already taken the course and you have an evening to watch the Bully movie you will see many instances of parents, teachers and school administrators who do not handle the situations they encounter with the P.E.T. skills and you so wish they would.

All of the resources mentioned above are a great source of further information about cyberbullying, and what to look out for if you or someone you know is experiencing cyberbullying.  In addition Robert Pereira, head of the Effectiveness Training Institute of Australia, has written a powerful book called "Why We Bully" which I highly recommend:  http://www.bullying-prevention.com.  

___________________________________________________________________________
Heidi Mulligan Walker is a mother to three children and is the Founder of The Difference.  As a certified Parent Effectiveness Training Instructor she assists families achieve more peaceful and rewarding family dynamics by sharing the communication techniques pioneered by Dr. Thomas Gordon.  Heidi and her family relocated to Cary, North Carolina in 2012 after living abroad in the UK and China for the past 18 years.  She is loving sharing the American experience with her husband and young family.  You can register to join a course, take part in a free monthly parenting call, find family reflections and read her blog on her website http://www.thedifference.uk.com and follow her on Facebook www.facebook.com/thedifferenceparenting.

No Punishment?

Recently, we had an interested question sent to us on our Facebook page:


"Does this program promote no punishment for bad behavior? I don't get this program?"




We responded, and would like to elaborate to our readers here.

First off, to simply say "no," that P.E.T. is not an advocate of punishment would only be giving half of the answer. The use of the term "bad behavior" is a major underlying issue here. P.E.T. encourages parents not to view behaviors as "bad" or "good" because such labeling does not encourage children to change their behavior, among other things (at least, not in the long run!). Given the idea that all behaviors are simply attempts to get a certain need met, we can view things from a different frame of mind. 

For example, in a traditional sense, a screaming child would likely be seen as "behaving badly". But consider that this child is screaming for a reason. Active Listening is the way to find that reason behind the commonly misunderstood behaviors of a child, or of anyone for that matter. This child is experiencing a problem or obstacle to getting his or her need met. She might be hungry, tired, in need of attention/affection, feeling unsafe or insecure, etc. It would be absurd to think that a child could communicate these feelings in an effective manner; especially considering that many adults still struggle from doing this. The question at hand then becomes: Why punish a child for expressing an unmet need?

Our response to the question on Facebook sums it up:

P.E.T. does not promote punishment of any kind, but the most important part of this is the reasoning behind it. Being commonly mistaken as "passive parenting", P.E.T. does not reject the use of punishment simply because "it's bad." When parents begin to look at their child's behaviors as attempts to get a certain need met, they can begin to realize that their children aren't deliberately "misbehaving" in order to upset their parents. On the contrary, children are desperately seeking approval from their moms and dads. When we look at a screaming child and think: "they're behaving bad," this is when the parent-child relationship gets into real trouble. In actuality, children are commonly seeking fulfillment of some need that they don't know how to express in any other way. 

As for the punishment factor, years of psychological and neurological research has proven that using control to manipulate the behavior of your children (or anyone) has serious consequences on the relationship between parent and child. In the short term, punishment can be a quick fix and often does work. But in the long term, it's effects turn out to be quite the opposite of what punishment aims to achieve. Case in point: teenage-hood! 
What are your thoughts on this? We'd love to hear from you. Please feel free to comment below or send us an email to: family@gordontraining.com

by: Selena George, P.E.T. Program Manager