Set-Up Success
Setting your child up to act knowledgably and competently is truly a win-win strategy. Both you and your child will feel less stressed and will have a greater sense of confidence and skill.
When you let your child know in advance what kind of behavior is appropriate in a particular situation, your child is much more likely to behave well, within the limits of his or her current abilities. It is so much easier to gently remind your child before hand what is expected, than to intervene or “discipline” in the midst of something that is already difficult. You and your child will each feel much happier and less distressed.
When you help your child learn “scripts” for the many recurrent events of daily life, your child will feel more confident and prepared to engage in them. A lot of how we move through our days relies on using familiar scripts, or frameworks, that make it relatively easy and comfortable to accomplish things, whether small errands or major projects. We “know” how to participate in business meetings, engage with others at social events, ask for advice in a store. We know how to coordinate children’s schedules with ours, plan a party, go to concerts. One of the main reasons we are effective in most of what we do, is that we know what is expected, because the streams of daily activity follow familiar patterns into which we slot the particulars of our current ventures. Your child’s life is filled with scripts as well, culturally prescribed patterns for events like birthday parties, going to school, playing in playgrounds, going to restaurants and zillions of other things. Helping your child learn and remember recurrent routines gently bolsters self-assurance and success.
When you help your child think about what might happen in upcoming events, or envision goals and recognize what is necessary to bring them about, or anticipate the possible outcomes of decisions, your child will be better prepared and able to respond to circumstances, strengthening his confidence and sense of control. As your child gets older and gains the cognitive capacity to imagine and plan, you can help your child weigh choices and be prepared for various possibilities. This kind of thinking ability begins during middle childhood, roughly the elementary school years, and expands greatly during adolescence.
As a parent, if you recognize and appreciate the value of these strategies, you can support your child very effectively by stating expectations and helping your child anticipate what is needed to flourish in various situations and accomplish goals.
This Guiding Principle encourages you to set your child up for success by stating expectations, capitalizing on scripts, and coaching ways to anticipate and plan.
State Expectations
“Please Don’t Eat the Daisies” was a best selling collection a humorous short stories written in 1957 by Jean Kerr about raising four boys in mid-Century America. In the opening story, writer and mother Kerr describes how she always gave clear lists of directives to her children along the lines of, “don’t go outside in your pajamas,” “don’t leave your bicycle on the front porch” and “don’t eat cookies before breakfast.” Admonishments that were nicely heeded. However, omissions lead to amusing frustration, as when Kerr never thinks to say, “please don’t eat the daisies,” and discovers her dinner table centerpiece, carefully arranged for guests, suddenly consists of a display of green stems. Delightfully funny, it’s a nice way to remember that we cannot possibly anticipate everything our children may think to do. Nor should we. Ultimately our children need to think for themselves. Along the way, we need to tolerate some errors of judgment. But I like this story too, because it’s a good reminder that stating expectations in advance increases the likelihood children will act well.
We’ve all seen children racing through aisles of stores, bumping people and food displays, begging for unhealthy treats and angrily protesting when denied, and we’ve watched in dismay or sympathy as their frenzied parent yells, punishes or gives up. We’ve seen countless other such scenarios. And we’ve probably been the parent on some of these occasions. These are different from the meltdowns children have when they are overwhelmed and tired, something best handled by removing them and attending to their needs. These behaviors occur when children are not clear about what is expected. The same is true of children who aren’t ready for school on time, don’t complete assignments, forget to feed a pet, fail to let parents know about upcoming matches or rehearsals and countless other frustrating scenarios. A lot of these can be prevented if we remind our child in advance what we expect of him or her. Before an activity begins, simply saying things like this is very powerful: “remember in grocery stores you stay near the cart and don’t run or bump into people.” It not only states your expectation, it also re-affirms confidence, both yours and your child’s, and encourages your child to act in a trustworthy way. When your child acts responsibly, cooperatively or meets expectations, notice it, take it in, and enjoy the feeling. You may want to comment sometimes that you were impressed or happy with how helpfully or responsibly or big they acted. For many reasons, it is more effective to offer those kinds of compliments erratically. Sometimes notice and comment, other times notice and don’t comment.
It is hugely more meaningful and pleasant to foster success by stating expectations in advance, than to have your child (and you) deal with the disappointment of failure. Rather than punishing or being dissatisfied after an event, you can set your child up to succeed. The wisdom of anticipating possible problems and preparing your child to rise above them is captured perfectly in this simple line:
“Take care of it before it happens..”
~ From the Tao Te Ching ~
When you let your child know in advance what is expected, you set her up to behave well.
I have one cautionary thought about this. If you constantly remind your child about what you expect, you become a nag. A nuisance. And your child will stop listening. This caution isn’t as contradictory as it first sounds. If your child is likely to behave well in a situation, don’t say anything. This draws on the fifth Guiding Principle, “Scaffold Skillfully,” which suggests you withdraw a scaffold that is no longer needed. Or you may let the natural consequences provide a lesson. For example, if your child doesn’t tell you about a practice, he or she may miss it; if your child doesn’t check to make sure homework is done or a particular clothing item is ready to wear, there is a natural learning opportunity from the result. You may also want to think about what is important to you at a particular time in your child’s life, and state expectations mainly about those events. This works well for several reasons. For one, it reduces the “nagging” effect. You only comment on a limited subset of things that are especially important. In addition, there is something of a spreading phenomenon to good behavior. When a child acts well in one situation, perhaps because he or she knows what was expected, the sense of success and self-control spreads and generalizes to other situations. Also, not saying something when you think your child will manage on his or her own communicates a sense of trust, which your child subliminally picks up on, and this too inclines your child to behave well. You might offer a warm silent smile.
Capitalize on Scripts
Learning scripts is one of the main ways children learn the activities that are important in their families and their culture. Children learn scripts, or routines, for going to bed, arriving at school, visiting friends, eating in restaurants, going to birthday parties and every other recurring activity they engage in. The familiar event patterns provide security and the confidence of knowing what to do. Have you ever thought about how you typically sit in the same place when you go to a meeting or a class or some other recurring gathering? You once solved the problem of where to sit. Sticking with the routine reduces anxiety and frees you to attend to other matters. Scripts work in a similar way. The familiarity and competence of scripts makes it easier for children to notice and understand elements that are new in an otherwise well known routine. This is one of the key ways children learn new things and build knowledge and skill. They notice and work with new information, opportunities and challenges that occur within familiar paradigms.
The sequence of events that make up a script are roughly the same each time they are enacted. Who participates and what roles they play are also part of script knowledge. In fact, children grow up experiencing much of the world within the parameters of culturally constructed scripts: how we eat, explore the woods, or get together with others are orchestrated by cultural routines.
While these may sound constraining, they are very supportive. If everything you did was new or unpredictable, you would always feel unsure and hyper aware. The confidence born of familiarity and skill actually supports development, personal growth and well-being. Well-being is enhanced because stress is reduced; growth and development are enabled because we are free to attend to new things we encounter. For example, you can attend to the content of a presentation within the familiar context of a business meeting. Scripts are somewhat analogous to habits. Habits preserve successful ways of doing things. When habits, such as tying shoes or driving a car, are first learned they require a great deal of conscious attention and practice. Once mastered, they become unconscious, freeing our minds to learn new things. (There is a distinction in psychology between healthy habits, which we rely on hugely, and unhealthy habits, including addictions.)
A substantial amount of research indicates that children remember recurring events well and they organize information temporally in a script-like way. This is the same organization adults use. With maturity, memory for novel information grows, in part because routine information is well established. In addition, as children becomes more familiar with a script, they become more competent and take a larger role in it. A simple example is how children take on more and more responsibility for brushing teeth and getting ready for bed as they gain skill and knowledge of their bedtime routine.
You can support your child’s success by capitalizing on the power of scripts. You can prepare your child for new events by telling her what to expect and role playing together. Before your young child takes a long plane ride, you may want to walk a “long” distance, pulling a carry-on; set up some chairs in a row and find your seats, pretending to fasten your seatbelts; watch as the plane takes off; talk about and pretend to eat airplane food or do activities that will be available; and so on. Role playing answers unasked questions your child has and prepares for an easier less fraught journey for both of you. Similarly, you can role play activities of “going to school”, or going to a new school, for the first time, or any other new events. Teens benefit from this too. You can talk about, or even role-play, unfamiliar and anxiety provoking new occurrences like job interviews, college interviews, driving tests, and even making a business phone call.
Coach Your Child to Plan and Anticipate
Another powerful way to bolster your child’s sense of competence and set up success is by helping your child anticipate what is likely to happen in upcoming situations; envision possible outcomes or alternatives when a choice needs to be made; and recognize what needs to be accomplished, and what obstacles need to be overcome, in order to achieve goals.
As you know, our new millennium culture is giving a huge embrace to positive thinking. There seems little question that experiences are happier, people healthier, and families closer when we notice and appreciate what is good and when outlooks are positive. Some of this thinking underlies the third Guiding Principle suggesting that you “Live Gratefully.” Yet dreamily moving through life with unbridled visions of perfection may not, in itself, help you or your child reach goals. Accomplishments don’t come magically into existence by our being naïvely positive. There is the difference between imagining a positive outcome and combining positive thinking with realistic awareness.
You can help your child learn how to both envision and achieve goals
It is well known that negative thinking thwarts achievement. On the other hand, simply fantasizing or envisioning desired outcomes may create lethargy or apathy rather than success. It is as if our peaceful brains believe we have already reached our goal or achieved our dream. Actually bringing fantasies or goals into reality requires us to be aware of any challenges that stand in the way of a goal and to recognize the steps that will bring the goal into the real world. That doesn’t mean dropping the dream and “getting real,” an approach that usually discourages achievements. It means holding the dream, but also being aware of hurdles. One clear description about how this works is what psychologist Gabriele Oettingen calls “mental contrasting.” In mental contrasting we imagine achieving something (getting an “A” on a test, making the varsity team, being promoted to manager) and stay with that vision for a few minutes. We then reflect on things in the present reality that stand in the way of the vision (wanting to play instead of studying; needing to improve how we coordinate with others on the team; competition from a colleague) and on steps that can help overcome these obstacles (learning some facts; practicing with teammates; building a network of collaborators). Combining the positive vision with a real sense of challenges energizes the mind. The double focus has two desirable effects. It allows us to explore how feasible a goal is. We commit to goals that are feasible. We then engage with reachable goals, infused with energy that can bring them into being.
There is a growing body of research showing that this kind of positive thinking combined with mental contrasting is stimulating and helps bring realistic visions into real life. Studies demonstrate the strategy works in many areas including boosting grades, improving relationships, loosing weight, building athletic or musical skills and so on. When your child wishes for better outcomes in school, or wants to become friends with someone, or fantasizes excelling at a sport or a musical instrument, or has any other goal, you can guide him to really envision the dream and then coach him to identify the challenges and ways to overcome them.
This hybrid envisioning and planning is a kind of middle way. Positive visions, fantasies even, which let your child see the future as appealing are important and healthy. You may want to encourage your child to express these visions. They are necessary for accomplishing things. Contrasting dreams with a real assessment of obstacles will energize your child’s mind and engages her thinking in processes of planning and taking action.
Similarly, you can help your child envision the possible outcomes of a course of action. Doing this will help him learn to make decisions and to work more confidently with the outcomes of decisions, since the consequences have already been considered. In these ways you can become a coach, helping your child to both plan and act.
As I mentioned in the opening paragraphs, the ability to imagine obstacles and consequences or to conceptualize possible outcomes of decisions requires cognitive development that enables us to mentally manipulate information or ideas. During middle childhood, the elementary school years, children develop the ability to think about concrete matters and mentally manipulate them. They can, for instance, imagine undoing an action or undoing the solution to an arithmetic problem or they can imagine what might happen if they make a particular move in checkers. This cognitive capacity expands during the teen years to include mentally manipulating intangible and abstract ideas. As a result, your child’s ability to envision future outcomes and plan for contingencies expands considerably between middle childhood and the mid-teen years. This is why I began discussing this Guiding Principle by focusing on concrete expectations about behavior and simple scripts, things young children can begin to grasp. Your child’s ability to plan and anticipate future events or the consequences of decisions, or to achieve goals through mental contrasting, will emerge a little later and will become a very important way you can support your teenager.
The different aspects of this sixth Guiding Principle, “Set-Up Success,” combine to support your child in learning how to behave in different situations, to participate effectively in culturally prescribed scripts, and to make thoughtful decisions and accomplish goals. If you set your child up for success, you reaffirm your confidence in your child, you encourage your child to trust him- or herself and you guide your child to use his or her own knowledge and wisdom.
References
Kerr, Jean (1957). Please Don’t Eat the Daisies. New York: Doubleday.
Oettingen, Gabriele (2014). Rethinking positive thinking: Inside the new science of motivation. New York: Penguin Group. ISBN-10 151846870
