Parents: What Do You Think You’re Doing?

To effectively write this column and do my real job (going around the country teaching adults strategies and procedures for working with kids), I keep my powers of professional perception sharp by often visiting a Variable Stressor Family Interaction Lab (VSFIL), where I can see parents interacting with their children under varying levels of duress. This place is also known as Chicago O’Hare International Airport.

The way parents interact with kids very much confuses me when their kids are throwing a fit or acting like jerks. I always want to ask parents, “What do you think you are doing?”

I want to ask this, not rhetorically, but as an authentic, information-seeking question. I know that they are trying to do something, I’m just not sure what it is.

Here’s where I should say that, before I had my kid later in life, I had already worked very effectively with thousands of kids as a teacher and principal. I had created the strategies and procedures for what became the world’s first behavior management manual for PK-12 teachers. I did all of this after my first two years of teaching, which was spent screaming and yelling at 1st and 5th graders.

I say all of this so that you, dear reader, know that I am not just a judgy parent who wants to signal to the world that I’m better or smarter than anyone. We all know these people, and we don’t like them. It’s just that I’ve been working with kids for the last quarter century, and you probably haven’t.

So, what is a parent trying to do when their kid, whether they are four or fourteen, is acting like a jerk, and they are speaking soothingly to them about feelings and emotions and going to a happy place and blah, blah, blah? In order to try to answer this question, I took to the Internet to do some research.

Through this research, I came across this idea of “validating the feelings of a child.” I think this might be what these parents in the VSFIL are trying to do. It seems like parents think that what they are doing is a good idea. The problem is that it isn’t.

My research tells me that it is true that validating kids’ feelings (telling them it’s okay to have a feeling), is a good thing. It is true that there are a few small studies that show that when kids are solving a problem, they show more resilience and feel better when they are told that their feelings of frustration are okay.

This, of course, is great, and I’ve been doing it for most of my career. Here’s how I’ve been doing it for the last 23 years:

Kid: This math problem is really frustrating.

Kid Whisperer: It’s totally okay to feel frustrated. Keep going.

Doing this teaches kids that all feelings are always okay, and it teaches them that you think they are capable and resilient. While I may add some extra support through teaching how to solve the problem in a slightly different way, validating the feeling and gently encouraging resilience are the key components.

This is not what is happening at gate G11 at the VSFIL.

I suspect that parents think that this is what’s happening, I’m just telling you that it isn’t.

What I teach kids is that their feelings are never wrong, because feelings are never wrong. What parents at the VSFIL are teaching their kids is that their actions are never wrong, because when we give attention to negative behaviors, it reinforces them, making it more likely that those behaviors will be repeated, explored, and heightened.

What I’m doing makes kids more emotionally healthy, and what these parents are doing is turning their kids into monsters.

Teachers today will tell you that we are in the middle of a Behavioral Apocalypse. Schools are crumbling because legions of kids are showing up to their first day of school having been accidentally trained by their parents that the best way to get attention and a feeling of control is by causing problems for other people. If parents don’t stop doing this, our schools will eventually stop working entirely (some already have), and eventually, so will our country.