Welcome to Your Child's Brain: How the Mind Grows From Conception to College (45 page)

For young kids, there is no way to go too far with this strategy. Raise the roof with your praise—you should sound as pleased and excited as if he’d just bought you a new car.

“A little bit good” can also apply to complex actions such as tooth-brushing: for example, you can start by rewarding your child for simply holding the toothbrush. Over the next week or two, gradually set the bar higher, waiting until he’s done a bit more before telling him how well he’s doing, until he’s brushing his teeth all by himself. Don’t forget to continue to appreciate the good behavior after it’s established.

The second option is to reward him for good behavior in a practice run. This approach is especially helpful for recurring situations that are difficult because either you or your child is too emotional for calm interaction. For example, if your morning routine is too stressful to allow time for behavior training, pick a moment when both of you are in a good mood and suggest that you play a game. If he successfully pretends to get his clothes on and come downstairs for breakfast, you’ll give him a small treat. A few trial runs should pave the way for offering a similar reward for the real thing. For more details on using this approach correctly, see
The Kazdin Method for Parenting the Defiant Child
.
In spite of the title, this book provides lots of helpful information for all parents on how to handle ordinary disciplinary challenges.

When an adult praises for small accomplishments, children over the age of six perceive it as a slight; they see the praise as reflecting the adult’s low expectations.

Focusing your discipline on preventing negative behavior is ultimately a losing battle. To make changes stick, you also need to promote positive behavior, which is often simply the opposite of the behavior you want to remove. For instance, if your child is whining too much, it’s not enough simply to ignore the whining. You have to also encourage positive behavior: when your child asks nicely, once, for what he wants, reward him. If he does that, even one time, jump on the opportunity to praise the behavior—and if possible, grant the request. Teaching your child a positive replacement behavior reduces the odds that the extinguished negative behavior will come back.

Consistent, small rewards for small achievements work much better than large rewards for big goals, especially for younger children. After all, you wouldn’t expect your child to learn to read if you paid him no attention until he’d finished his first book. Why set such a high expectation for behavioral self-control? Food and toys are often the first rewards that come to mind, but they are not the most effective. Your approval, expressed enthusiastically and accompanied by a pat on the shoulder or a high-five, should produce more behavior change than a cookie. Children also enjoy earning more control over their lives: the right to decide what’s for dinner, stay up ten minutes later, or pick the destination for a family outing. These all make good rewards for positive behavior.

MYTH: PRAISE BUILDS SELF-ESTEEM

In the 1970s and 1980s, low self-esteem was held responsible for almost everything that could go wrong in a person’s life, from fear of intimacy to child molestation to violence. As a result, government programs and private foundations worked hard to make children feel good about themselves. The idea was that because people with high self-esteem are happier, healthier, and more successful, encouraging the development of self-esteem would improve society.

Unfortunately, the research behind this belief suffered from many flaws. The most obvious was the problem of reverse causation: success makes people feel good about themselves, so of course successful people are confident. Another problem is that people with high self-esteem say a lot of positive things about themselves (that’s pretty much the definition of high self-esteem), but many of those assertions are objectively incorrect. For example, people with high self-esteem rate their own intelligence as high but do not score better than average on IQ tests. In the end, interventions to improve self-esteem failed to improve academic achievement, job performance, or other objective measures of success.

The self-esteem movement had strong effects on parenting practice in the U.S.—but not necessarily good ones. Children do not benefit from routine empty praise, like the cries of “Good job!” that ring out over modern playgrounds. East Asian and South Asian parents (Sam’s included) are known for strictness and are sparing in their praise, yet children from those cultures do not have particular self-esteem problems. Indeed, when an adult praises for small accomplishments, children over the age of six perceive it as a slight; they see the praise as reflecting the adult’s low expectations.

Praise is most effective when it is specific and refers to something that your child can control. “You’re so smart!” doesn’t give your child any hint of what to do next time and may reduce perseverance (see
chapter 22
), while “Wow, you really worked hard on that math homework!” carries a clear message about the desired behavior. Parents who communicate high but achievable expectations, along with detailed guidance about how to get there, give their kids the tools to achieve real success in the world—which turns out to be the best route to self-esteem.

Explaining exactly what you’d like your child to do is the first step in behavior change—not the last, as many lecture-happy parents seem to believe. Prepare children for situations and let them know what is expected of them in advance. In the beginning, you should do whatever it takes to help your child succeed at earning the reward for good behavior, offering a cheerful reminder or two (but no more), standing in the room until the job is done, or even stepping in to help (without taking over the whole job). Such interventions provide scaffolding to support the behavior until it can stand on its own, but they should be temporary. If your child’s behavior is improving, even slowly, then your efforts are working and you just need to stick with the program.

Parental inconsistency is a common cause of failure or slow progress. So is attempting to change too many behaviors at once. The best way forward is a systematic approach to working on one behavior at a time, while rewarding that behavior every time your child produces it. You won’t make your best decisions in the heat of the moment; it’s better to make a plan when you’re calm, rather than trying to bribe your child on the fly with one-off promises and threats, which are notably ineffective.

Parents are human too, of course. Sometimes you’re going to be tired or stressed yourself and fail to practice flawless disciplinary techniques—and that’s okay. The occasional bout of yelling isn’t going to do your kids any lasting damage. If reacting in the moment becomes your habit, though, you may be shortchanging your children and yourself. The next time you feel your temper getting the better of you, try stepping into another room and taking a deep breath. You might call it a time-out for grown-ups.

Chapter 30
A TOUGH ROAD TO TRAVEL: GROWING UP IN POVERTY

AGES: CONCEPTION TO EIGHTEEN YEARS

Growing up under conditions of deprivation can damage children’s brains. This is an exception to the general principle we have expressed throughout this book that most children are resilient, and that variations in normal (“good enough”) parenting do not appear to have a strong influence on how they turn out as adults. This chapter is about the other side of the coin: what happens to children whose developing brains match themselves to an environment that does not encourage them to express their full potential. After all, even dandelions can’t grow without water.

Where your children grow up is one of the most critical factors in their development. When you move to a new house or apartment—or another country—you’re determining not only your children’s schools but also their neighborhood and the characteristics of the group from whom your children will select their friends. Children learn a lot from other kids and from the culture by which they are surrounded (see
chapters 17
and
20
). It’s hard to raise children to reject the attitudes and assumptions of their peers, as parents have discovered everywhere from religious communities to inner-city neighborhoods. This is one of the many reasons that children start life at a disadvantage when they grow up in places with high unemployment, unsafe streets, and poor education.

Poverty itself isn’t exactly the problem, unless children are actually starving, which is rare in developed countries. The risks instead come from conditions that are made more likely by poverty, in particular growing up in a chronic state of fear and/or stress. Poverty is stressful due to a combination of economic insecurity (inadequate living conditions, frequent moves), disorganized households and harsh parenting (common side effects of parental stress or addiction), and social subordination (being treated as inferior because of social class and/or race). Heightened fear and anxiety can result from living in a high-crime neighborhood, food insecurity, and parental mistreatment (again more common when parents are stressed).

Inadequate parenting can and does occur in any segment of society, of course. Indeed, the middle class, because it is the biggest economic group in many countries, typically contains the largest number of chronically stressed or threatened children, as well as the largest number of children with behavioral problems. In addition, some especially resilient people who grow up in very difficult conditions become highly successful and happy adults. Even so, poor children grow up in environments that statistically increase their risk of a variety of disorders. Indeed,
some of these “problems,” such as chronic anxiety or early reproduction, may actually constitute adaptive responses to insecure living conditions (see
chapter 26
).

People who are satisfied with their standard of living and feel financially secure are healthier, regardless of their actual income, occupation, and education, than people who are unsatisfied and anxious about the future.

Socially and economically disadvantaged people are much more likely than middle-class people to suffer from medical, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral problems.
Socioeconomic status
(
SES
) is an umbrella term for the resources that people have available to them relative to others in their society. At minimum, it includes income, occupation (with associated prestige), and education, each of which can be broken down into more detailed measures. Across a variety of countries with different social systems, lower SES predicts substantially increased risk of a broad range of medical problems, including heart disease, respiratory disease, diabetes, and psychiatric conditions. As family SES decreases, children have increased risk of low birth weight, premature birth, infant mortality, injury, asthma, and various chronic conditions, including behavioral disorders. Community SES also influences child outcomes in studies that control for family SES.

Health and SES vary together across the full range of SES; the relationship is not merely a consequence of very poor health at the bottom of the scale. Overall, the lower people’s SES, the earlier they are likely to die, with a difference of decades in some countries between the highest- and lowest-SES groups. The gradient is steepest at the bottom, though, with the biggest step between poor and working-class groups. These differences are large. In the U.S., adults with the lowest SES are about five times more likely to report having “poor” or “fair” health than the highest-SES adults.

SES is closely connected with health even in countries with equal access to health care and for diseases that medical care cannot prevent, such as juvenile diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis. So it is not primarily due to differences in
medical care—though such differences can make the problem worse. Only part of this discrepancy (about one third, in one study of British government workers) can be explained by lifestyle differences, such as high rates of smoking and drinking, poor diet, and infrequent exercise among low-SES groups. Lung cancer is still more prevalent in low-SES than high-SES groups even when comparing people who smoke the same number of cigarettes, so there must be some problem beyond lifestyle choices.