Who among us did not hear that as a kid?  And who finds themselves saying it to their own kids now?  Children can really wear you down, and some of them are more persistent than others — even after a reasonable “no”, they still keep harping and nagging until they break through your calm attitude and leave you barking these four words. 

The problem with “because I said so” is that it sends the message to the child that you don’t really care about his point of view, that when it really comes down to it, what he thinks and feels is not really important compared to what you want.  It makes it tough for him to take you seriously when you tell him that you want him to come to you with his problems or his desires, because he doesn’t really believe that you’ll listen to him anyway.

You may end up with compliance, at least for a little while, by using the “because I said so” strategy.  But in the long run you risk damaging your credibility when you tell your kids that what they think matters, you may set them up to be taken advantage of by authority figures, or they may get angry, secretly rebel, and stop concerning themselves about you and what you say.

This doesn’t mean that children should be allowed to do whatever they want.  As a parent, you have a legal and moral obligation to keep your kids safe and to look out for their best interests.  When it comes to issues of safety, legality, and morality, you need to reserve the right to limit your children’s activities.  But instead of just resorting to “because I said so”, let your kids know (in age appropriate terms, of course) what your concerns are and that if they can find a way to really address all of those concerns in a way you both feel good about, that you’ll reconsider.  (Barbara Coloroso describes this idea by using the phrase, “Convince me” with kids.)  This isn’t a blanket acceptance of what they’re doing or a suggestion that under any circumstances you should be forced into doing something or letting your kids do something you don’t feel comfortable with — it’s a way to teach critical thinking and problem solving skills that they’ll be able to use over and over again in their lives.  We need to practice these kinds of behaviours for them to become natural and second nature, and kids can’t go wrong with the ability to identify a problem, consider the options for overcoming the problem, and presenting these options to the involved parties.  And it keeps you out of the dog house in having to fight with your children over “because I said so” over and over again.

Here’s a thought from Jean-Yves Frappier, the head of the adolescent division at Sainte-Justine Hospital in Montreal and president of the Canadian Association for Adolescent Health, as quoted in Today’s Parent magazine a number of years ago: just when you thought that it was ok/necessary/unavoidable to be considered redundant by your teenagers, he has this to say:

I always compare parents to the while line one the highway.  You don’t always look at the line when it’s sunny, but if it’s dark and rainy, you look at that line to make sure you are on the right path.  That line is always there, always, always.

Fantastic!  What a great way to remind us that while the teen years may be challenging, giving up or assuming our kids don’t want us around is never the answer.  So what can you do instead?  I encourage parents to keep offering to do things with your teens, whether that’s go our for dinner or shopping or to a concert or special event or playing a game…or whatever.  Will they take you up on it?  Perhaps not.  But keep putting yourself out there, and letting your kids know you’re there for them.

Include all of your kids in decisions like family vacations, how to spend free time like school holidays, and the running of the house.  Cheer them on at their sporting events or recitals.  Keep t.v.’s and computers in central areas of your house (never let your child have a web cam in their rooms), and watch and discuss shows together.  Let them know that you love them and love having them in your family.

I just found out about a great movement called Take Back Your Time; here’s what their mission is (taken straight from their web site):

TAKE BACK YOUR TIME is a major U.S./Canadian initiative to challenge the epidemic of overwork, over-scheduling and time famine that now threatens our health, our families and relationships, our communities and our environment.

What a great idea!  I’m running a workshop for Eastview Public School next month, called “The Crazy Pace of Life: The Effect on Kids and Strategies to Stay Sane”, and Take Back Your Time Day fits right into that theme.  Unfortunately, I have already scheduled myself to work on October 24th.  Nuts.  I will, however, be taking back my time on the 23rd instead. 

I’d love to hear some thoughts on how you and your family might celebrate TBYTD.  I think it’s critical that we start making our families more of a time priority and finding ways to really connect with our kids.  Not only is it in our best interest as parents, because our focused and healthy involvement in their lives allows us to be more of a role model than peers, say, or the media (among a zillion other reasons), but also because, it’s what our kids want!!  The greatest gift you can give a child is your time.

So, what do you think about Take Back Your Time Day?  Feeling inspired to do something bold with your own time on the 24th?

I’m excited to be adding two new topics to my list of workshops:

7 Things Your School-Agers Wished You Knew About Them (based on my free report, which you can get by going to the top of this page and entering in your name and email address)

and

The Crazy Pace of Life: The Effect on Kids and Strategies to Stay Sane

If your school, or church, or workplace, or any other group you’re a part of, is looking for a speaker to hold a workshop, anywhere from an hour to a half day, call me!  I’d love to chat about our options, and I’d be happy to provide some testimonials and feedback from previous workshop participants.  There are more details on my Workshops page. for .

One of the most useful tools I use with parents is the concept of the Goals of Misbehaviour.  It’s a fantastic way of making sense of children’s behaviour, and for knowing how to best give them what they need so that behaviour stops!  A lot of the information I’ve put together here is from Jane Nelsen’s fantastic book Positive Discipline , so if you’re looking for more details, it’s an excellent place to start (the chart below is straight from her book).  Another good choice is Alyson Schafer’s book Honey, I Wrecked the Kids, which is an entire book devoted to discipline, using the goals of misbehaviour as a basis.  I recommend them both!

“Why do they do that?!”                         “A misbehaving child is a discouraged child” – Rudolph Dreikurs

The primary goal of all human beings is to feel a sense of belonging and significance. When we are lacking this feeling of belonging and significance, children display one of

The Four Mistaken Beliefs and Mistaken Goals of Behaviour:

• Undue attention – the mistaken belief: I belong only when I have your attention
• Misguided Power – the mistaken belief: I belong only when I’m the boss, or at least when I don’t let you boss me
• Revenge – the mistaken belief: I don’t belong, but at least I can hurt back
• Assumed inadequacy – the mistaken belief: It is impossible to belong. I give up.

Children are not aware of their mistaken belief or their goal. Children (and many adults) adopt one or more of the four mistaken goals because they believe that:

• Undue attention or misguided power will help them achieve belonging and significance
• Revenge will give some satisfaction for the hurt experienced in not feeling a sense of belonging and significance
• Giving up is their only option because they really believe they are inadequate

Knowing the goal allows you to identify the most effective action you can take to help children achieve their true goal of a sense of belonging and significance. Children may use the same behaviour for any of the four goals – for example, she may refuse to do her homework

• To gain attention (“Look at me, look at me”)
• To show power (“You can’t make me”)
• To seek revenge (“It hurts that my grades are more important to you than I am, so I will hurt you back”)
• Or to express her sense of inadequacy (“I really can’t)

It does not matter whether the beliefs are based on facts or children’s perception of the situation; behaviour is based on what children think is true, not what is true.

Two clues to identifying the mistaken goal:

• Adult’s feeling reaction to the behaviour
• Child’s response when you tell him to stop the behaviour

Anger and frustration are two of the more common feelings parents identify, but they are both secondary responses to a primary feeling. Feeling threatened, hurt, or inadequate are such helpless feelings that we quickly cover them with the secondary response of anger. Frustration and anger are both secondary responses to being unable to control the situation that causes our more primary feelings. If you cover the primary feelings with anger, instead of validating the child’s feelings, you are likely to become involved in a revenge cycle.

Final Thoughts

Wanting and needing power and attention are not bad things – we all need both of them in our lives – the problem arises when a child needs undue attention or power, or when his way of gaining them are disrespectful to others. Children who are into power are sometimes inspired by an adult who is into power. It is the adult’s responsibility to change this atmosphere. When you truly want mutual respect and cooperation based on mutual understanding and shared decision making, children will know the difference. Avoid using logical consequences with revenge; it just feels like punishment and is likely to encourage a further revenge response from the child.

Remember… “No habit is maintained if it loses its purpose.” – Rudolph Dreikurs

I always like to share good resources when I come across them, and this book, by Alyson Schafer, falls into the category of good resources.  It’s a book about discipline, or, really, the four goals of misbehaviour.  She’s broken down each of the goals into their own chapters, making this book one of the most thorough explorations of the topic of goals that I’ve come across.  Like her first book, Breaking the Good Mom Myth, it’s written in a casual, easy to read style, that acknowledges that this is a messy, complicated situation, being a parent, and that lofty, theoretical tomes are not what you need when your kids refuse to stop jumping on the bed. 

Her work is geared toward parents with kids up to age 10, and I think this is a great additional to your toolkit if you’ve got young kids.  With its main focus on helping those discipline-resistant kids function peacefully within the family, as well as a chapter devoted to her favourite discipline tool, the family meeting, it’s a nice rounding-out of some of the tools and approaches that we often wish we had more how-to information on.

Anyone else read it?

I just read a great article about the danger in tying parental love and approval with good behaviour.  A fantastic argument for what kids need and why time outs and other withholding of parental affection and involvement can lead to unhappy, misbehaving kids.  Let me know what you think.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/health/15mind.html?_r=1

Researchers from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently conducted a meta-analysis of the current research literature on parent training programs, in order to identify components associated with better parent and child outcomes. The findings showed that teaching the following parenting skills had the greatest impact on improved outcomes: emotional communication, positive parent-child interaction, consistent responses to child behaviour, and correct use of timeout. The study also found that offering a wide array of services may divert attention from the program’s main objective of skills acquisition. The full report, entitled Parent Training Programs: Insight for Practitioners (2009), is available at http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/pub/parenting_meta-analysis.html

You may or may not have already had "the talk" with your kids, your daughters in particular.  You may be avoiding it like the plague, you may feel that there’s no need because if your daughter needs information she’ll come to you, or you may be confident that you’ve got the kind of relationship with your daughter that’s open and healthy, and not much slips by you. 

Here’s the problem: regardless of how you would describe your experience or expectations in this area, there’s a good chance a lot is going on that you don’t know about.

Here are some facts to consider, from a recent survey:

• "Only 22 percent of mothers think their daughters are uncomfortable talking to them about sex, while 61 percent of girls say that, in fact, they are."
• "…the actual number of 15- to 18-year-olds in our survey having oral sex (30 percent) is double the number mothers know about, or even suspect…"
• "…46 percent of girls that age who’ve had intercourse didn’t tell their moms."
• "Seventy-eight percent of surveyed girls who are no longer virgins say they’ve had sex without using a condom, and 65 percent of them admit they lied about or hid it from their mothers."
• "…a sobering 56 percent of girls who are no longer virgins have had sex without any form of birth control: Sixty-six percent of these girls have kept that a secret from Mom."
• "Even among the few girls who had an abortion, many didn’t tell."
• "…only 4 percent of girls say their moms are the biggest influence on their attitudes toward sex."

Did anything there surprise you?

These statistics are direct quotes from an article by Liz Brody in O Magazine.  Here’s a link to the full article (I definitely recommend reading the whole thing).  The survey referred to is one that was conducted jointly with O Magazine and Seventeen Magazine, in which 1000 girls ages 15-22,  and 1000 moms of girls those ages, were surveyed. 

The words I would use to describe my reaction to this survey are distressed, saddened, and re-energized.  It’s time to take control of this topic within our own families, get educated ourselves, and open up a dialogue so that we can say with 100% confidence, that the results of this survey don’t reflect what’s happening with our kids.  Here are some resources from Oprah to get you started:

First of all, read the whole article.  Make sure you have accurate information in order to answer any questions she may have, learn from what’s worked (and not) from the moms interviewed, and decide what approach you’ll take with your daughter.

There’s also an online quiz you can take to determine how well you’ve been doing in this area with your own daughter.  It’s another great resource.

If you know that your daughter is thinking about having sex with her boyfriend, Dr Laura Berman, a sex therapist who has been a part of this discussion on Oprah’s show, has a list of questions to ask your daughter and her boyfriend before they go ahead with their plan.  You can find the questions here.

Dr Berman has also prepared a handbook for parents to talk to their kids about sex, regardless of their age.  It’s great — get it here.  And on that same page is a set of visual aids that you can use in your own talk, as well as a video of Dr Berman coaching a mom through the talk with her daughter. 

Take a deep breath.  You can do it!

As a culture, we assume that the teen years are going to be tough on parents. Between Girls Gone Wild and a sudden lack of communication, we expect problems. We don’t like the thought of having problems, but we feel realistic enough to expect them.

This can sometimes blind us to the opportunities, though. Yes, this is a time of change and experimentation for kids, when they learn more about themselves as individuals, separate from their parents. Yes, it’s a time of new challenges, like dating, post-secondary school, and part-time jobs – things that as parents of younger kids we didn’t have to handle. But it doesn’t have to be a time of door slamming, rebellion, and defiance. Situations involving drama and trauma to the family exist and they’re very painful, but we’re doing ourselves and our kids a disservice if we expect them to be a rite of passage. It can become a self-fulfilling prophecy: we’re looking for signs of trouble, so we find them.

Study after study has shown that teenagers want their parents in their lives, that they value their relationship with their parents, that teens who have involved parents do better in school, and that they enjoy spending time with their parents. Admittedly, they might not enjoy spending Saturday night with their parents when they could be out with their friends, but in general, they appreciate and enjoy the time spent as a family. The problem is that we have an assumption that they aren’t interested. Attitude can play an important role here. If we assume that our kids don’t want to have anything to do with us, we behave in a way that sends a subtle message that is picked up by our kids as our disinterest in them or our view that we wouldn’t understand that they do want to spend time with us. Kids of any age are extremely sensitive to how they feel they are being perceived, and if they sense a perception that they are inherently troublesome or untrustworthy, they’ll behave accordingly. But if we assume that they are capable and that they want to be included in the family, at least sometimes, there is a subtle shift that takes place, one that kids pick up on and react to. Even if they don’t want to accept every single time, they take comfort in knowing that the invitation is always there.

A lot of people have a lot of theories about human development. In the mid-20^th century, one of these experts put forward the idea that teens need to break away from their parents in order to create their own identities, which would then allow them to reconnect with their parents as adults. This theory has maintained its position in popular thought, despite the fact that it doesn’t appear to be rooted in fact. Studies consistently show that parents matter more to teenagers than this theory would suggest. And if this seems hard to imagine, ask one. Pick a teenager in your life (I would suggest not your own, because it will probably put your kids in a position that they would rather avoid), and ask how important their parents are to them. They will usually say things such as their parents are the most important people to them, that they enjoy spending time with their parents, that they think highly of their parents, or that their opinion matters.

Teenagers need the same things from their parents that they did throughout their childhood: someone to be in their corner – to provide them with a safe place to fall when times are tough and a source of strength for going out into the world as they develop their own confidence. This looks different depending on whether you’re parenting a toddler or a teenager. When your kids are teens, it may mean not taking their behaviour personally, and being a role model for them in how to handle conflict without shutting the other person out. Remember that mantra that was so helpful in disciplining your toddler: love the kid, even if you don’t love the behaviour? That’s the same mantra that will be helpful again (or still) now that your kids are older. It’s possible to be unhappy over a thoughtless comment or broken promise, while at the same time still sending the message that you love and accept your child.

And when the going gets tough, keep in mind that teenagers are particularly concerned with saving face. When you put your foot down about something, you may get a lot of static for it, but your teens may quietly be able to see your point or even agree with you. You might be surprised to learn that despite the ensuing tantrum, they are secretly relieved to not be able to go to that party or get involved in an activity that they’re not comfortable with. You just may be giving them the excuse that allows them to get out of the situation without having to live through the embarrassment of telling their friends they’re uncomfortable. Don’t expect gratitude when you deny a request to go a co-ed sleep over, but just take comfort in knowing that there’s a possibility your kids get it.

I saw a fridge magnet that said, “If raising kids was meant to be easy, it wouldn’t start with something called Labour.” Even in the best of relationships a little rain must fall, so it won’t always be easy being a parent. But don’t set yourself up for even more trouble by assuming that the teen years are a black hole of yelling, tantrums, defiance, and thoughtlessness. We want to approach the teen years with positive expectation, anticipation, and the belief that whatever happens, we have the ability to work together as a family to overcome it.