Scene: A pediatrician’s office. A 2-year-old lifts the wood base of the standard pediatricians’ office bead maze toy and lets it fall onto the table with a BLAM! Again — BLAM! And again — BLAM.
Mother: Please don’t do that, honey.
BLAM!
Mother: Will you please stop doing that?
Daughter: No.
BLAM!
Pause. Mother (perplexed): Why not?
And so it has come to this: Toddler discipline through begging and attempted reasoning. It didn’t work in this instance, except to serve as an illustration of the mass confusion of a generation of parents over how to teach their children to behave.
No parenting issue evokes so much angst. Bookstore shelves groan under the weight of books on the subject. When Fred Gosman, author of the back-to-basics “Spoiled Rotten: American Children & How to Change Them,” spoke recently at a Winnetka middle school, 340 parents battled a slashing nighttime downpour to attend.
“For 12 years, I’ve been organizing lectures for parents of young children; the biggest draw is always discipline,” said Gail Reichlin, founder and executive director of Parents Resource Network, which sponsored Gosman’s talk.
“I don’t think there is any topic today that parents are more concerned about,” said Dr. Mark Walker, a psychiatrist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital who encounters overflow audiences when he lectures on the subject.
At the back of the crowds’ minds is fear of disciplinary failure, and the resulting discomfiting question: Are they raising a generation of brats?
“We’re pushovers,” confessed one mother in Gosman’s audience.
“We’re just tired,” contended another mother at the talk, Caroline Kennedy of Wilmette. Letting bad behavior pass “is easy. It’s the path of least resistance,” she said. “You develop a tolerance.”
Those who have not developed a tolerance say they find themselves in the minority. When Jody Gerbie, an Oak Park mother of three, scolded some children on a school field trip for hitting, other mothers on the trip seemed stunned.
“They looked at me as if I were foreign material — `Why would you stop kids from doing that?’ ” she said.
Diane Kaercher, a Western Springs mother of two, recalls watching her son wait patiently for the playground slide while one child after another cut in front of him, in full parental view.
“One mother actually said to me, `You’d better teach him to be more assertive, or he’ll never get a turn.’ I thought, No, you need to teach your children to be more polite,” she said.
She considers the problem epitomized by the time she saw a 2-year-old boy repeatedly hitting another. The perpetrator’s mother’s only reprimand: “I don’t think he wants to be touched right now.”
“It’s politically correct discipline,” Kaercher said. “Parents are afraid to say, `Don’t do that; it’s mean.’ They say, `Now isn’t the time for this,’ or `He doesn’t want you to do this.’ They don’t let the child take responsibility for his actions.
“I think people feel they are literally damaging their child’s ego if they say, `That’s wrong.’ “
Some parents are so flummoxed by the thought of disciplining their children that they don’t go out to dinner for fear of a tantrum, said Reichlin, who recently taught a class titled, Help! My Toddler is Running the Household!
Children don’t actually enjoy such control. Their nature — in fact, their developmental job — is to push to see how far their parents will let them go, said Dr. Miriam Gutmann, a psychiatrist with the Chicago Center for Family Health.
Parents’ job, she said, is not to be their children’s friend but to establish rules and limits. When they do, children are comforted; when they don’t, children feel beset by chaos.
The result, Walker warned, can be devastating.
“Parents end up with children who have no sense of any power greater than themselves,” he said. “They react with rage when anybody attempts to tell them they can’t have what they want or when anyone attempts to exert any control over them, such as bosses, teachers or legal authorities.”
“Discipline is the second most important thing you give to a child,” said child development expert Dr. T. Berry Brazelton.
“The first is love,’ he said. “But very quickly on the heels is discipline — and not punishment. It’s teaching.”
But discipline is hard for parents who feel guilty over how little time they have to spend with their children.
“Working mothers cannot come home and be disciplinarians,” Brazelton said. “They just cannot do it psychologically. And single parents have a really hard time of it.”
Are children more ill-behaved than their predecessors?
Yes, said Walker. “Parents have seen, in their own children and others, increasing ill-manneredness, rudeness, self-centeredness and impulsiveness,” he said.
They are now battening down the disciplinary hatches, he said: “It’s definitely a shift from, `Well, if you’re nice to them, they’ll grow up to be nice people.’ “
Not really, said Thomas Phelan, a Glen Ellyn psychologist who has given 800 seminars across the country on his no-nonsense discipline methods since his book, “1-2-3 Magic,” was published in 1984.
“Each generation thinks that,” he said. “When you’re up against it, it always seems like it’s the worst it’s ever been.”
Undoubtedly, said Gosman, a Milwaukee father of two who self-published “Spoiled Rotten” (it has since been picked up by Villard Books), because he saw today’s children as overindulged yet unhappy.
“I don’t think there’s anything endemic with children today,” he said. “It’s that parents today don’t take the time to insist on what’s appropriate.
“We delude ourselves; we say, `I don’t have the time to discipline.’ Discipline is not work. What is time-consuming is all the arguing and yelling.”
Yes, said Diana Grossi, principal of Flossmoor Hill School and an educator for 28 years.
Parents themselves no longer acknowledge that rules must be obeyed, she said, pointing to the incident at Bremen Community High School where several students were punished for bringing alcohol to a homecoming dance — only to have their parents fight their expulsions in court.
“Parents are fighting the school systems instead of supporting them,” she said. The lesson for their children, she said, is that anything goes.
The venerable Dr. Benjamin Spock, who at 93 is still peeved about being pegged in the 1960s as the voice of permissive parenting, characterized discipline problems as constituting “a significant minority.”
“They aren’t delinquent children, aren’t seriously misbehaved, but they’ve got the bit in their teeth,” he said. “They’ve learned that by being fierce and being determined, they can make their parents back down.”
His stance: “Parents should know what they want to expect of their child and then make it absolutely clear to the child. It isn’t necessary to be disagreeable. . . . There are plenty of children whose parents make it absolutely clear, but in a friendly and loving kind of way, and children respond to that.”
Children may seem ill-behaved, said Jeanne McInerney, a Flossmoor mother of three, when they clamor for parental attention.
But while earlier generations were accustomed to letting children spend hours playing outside by themselves, parents today are fearful of allowing that kind of freedom. “Having continual parental attention . . . becomes their norm,” McInerney said.
And in defense of some public wildness, Toni O’Leary, a mother of two young children from Gurnee, said it is an acceptable tradeoff for more independent children.
“Our parents took the view that children should be seen and not heard,” she said. “The view of this generation is that children are people. We’re giving them choices; we may not like the choices they choose.
“It doesn’t work out so well in the short term, but in the long run, it’s worth it.”
It is not philosophical permissiveness that causes misbehavior, said Spock, but uncertainty.
“A significant minority (of parents) are very unsure of what they can ask of their children in the way of behavior, and so they in many cases don’t ask anything,” he said.
Indeed, Gutmann finds herself reassuring parents that it’s OK to trust their instincts about what behavior is unaccepable.
Some parents envy their own parents’ swift and sure judgments, if not the methods they used to enforce them.
Tony Kick, a house painter from Algonquin and the youngest of 19 children, recalled that his father ruled the house through corporal punishment, yelling and fear.
Kick, the father of five, doesn’t want to do the same, but finds himself wishing for a little more authority.
“My wife tells me all the time, `The kids think you’re a joke,’ ” he said. “I’ll say, `You stop that or you go to your room,’ and they’re like, `I’m a little busy right now.’ “
There is no shortage of how-to books on the subject. But even authors of such books say that a major source of confusion is the books themselves.
“You get books coming out at a mile a minute,” Phelan said. “There’s a lot of competing advice out there about discipline, unfortunately. There’s always a debate between the authoritarian and the permissive (views), and a lot of parents don’t know what to do.”
Developments in child psychology have added immeasurably to parents’ knowledge, Spock said, but at the price of making parents feel that the experts, not parents, know best.
“You read the books by Dr. Burton White, who says if you screw up in the first three years, you’re doomed,” said Reichlin. “That’s pretty stressful to hear.”
With discipline, age 3 is not too late; there are plenty of good learning years left before you have an adolescent who has never obeyed rules.
But even parents who want to assert their authority often don’t know how — and don’t have anyone to ask.
“Our parents had the over-the-fence chitchat camaraderie of other moms,” Reichlin said. “Aunt Martha lived down the street. Mom might not have lived too far away.”
Isolation also makes some parents excessively worried about their children liking them — and reluctant to discipline their children for fear of alienating their only source of love and assistance in their old age, Walker said.
Other facts of modern life, such as overscheduled and overtired kids, and parental exhaustion, make asserting discipline even harder. Divorce and the parental conflicts that can come with it further complicate the task.
And some oft-used methods are largely ineffective. Among them:
– Reasoning with children as one would with grownups. “Kids are not little adults,” said Phelan, who in fact sometimes compares them to small animals needing training.
“It’s not like one day you’re going to give them this explanation about why they shouldn’t tease their little sister, and a 7-year-old boy is going to say, `Wow, I never looked at it that way.’ “
– Excessive talk in lieu of action. Some kinds of talk — namely, telling children that you are upset and disappointed in their behavior — can scare children far more than saying no, said Gutmann.
“Having an angry parent who might withdraw affection is the most frightening thing imaginable,” she said. “If the child is sensing that Mom or Dad is displeased and they’re having a discussion with him that is kind of confusing, he’s going to get anxious.”
There is plenty of anxiety to go around. Gosman hopes it will be translated into disciplinary action; it is today’s overloaded parents, he said, who need it most.
“Time with children is too precious to be ruined by misbehavior,” he said. “You discipline because you want to have fun with your children.”
SOME THINGS THAT WORK:
– Pick your battles.
– Come up with a reasonable consequence, and follow through.
– Ask squabbling children to come up with their own peace plan.
– Count slowly and calmly to three, then give a brief time out.
– Talk about misbehavior quietly at bedtime, not in the heat of the moment.
