Everyday Parenting gives you access to a toolkit of behavior-change techniques that will make your typical day in the home easier as you develop the behaviors you would like to see in your child. The lessons provide step-by-step instructions and demonstrations to improve your course of action with both children and adolescents. Among many techniques, you will learn how even simple modifications to tone of voice and phrasing can lead to more compliance. The course will also shed light on many parenting misconceptions and ineffective strategies that are routinely used. The key to the course is practice. It is not enough to know the strategies; you have to do them to reap the rewards. Using the techniques on a temporary basis will lead to permanent change. Chances are your parenting is perfectly fine and working the way you would like. But if you have any frustrations with your child or would like improve your effectiveness in changing your child’s behavior, these videos will be a very useful guide. Subtitles available in Chinese and Spanish.
Adolescents: Part 2
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來自 Yale University 的課程
Everyday Parenting: The ABCs of Child Rearing
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從本節課中
Advanced ABCs - Troubleshooting and Adolescents
Module 3 takes all the ABC techniques into consideration and outlines ways to improve and expand upon the parenting tools. Learn how to modify techniques for your maturing adolescent along with new techniques to foster communication with your child.
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Alan E. Kazdin, PhD, ABPPSterling Professor of Psychology and Child Psychiatry
Department of Psychology
This is the second installment on adolescents.
The first installment adapted some of the tools we have already discussed,
so they are more applicable with adolescents.
We cover changes in delivering that special praise,
attending and planned ignoring and punishment.
In addition to these tools,
I wanted to outline other tools that are of special use during adolescents.
As your pre-teen and teen develops,
there's great value in making changes in how you communicate with them.
The techniques for the day,
focus on how to navigate and minimize problems and
potential disputes through different strategies of communication. Let me begin.
First, it is important to make a special effort to compromise.
From early childhood on,
parents make decisions for their child and these include what children eat,
what clothes to wear,
where to go when you leave at home and so on.
Of course, all these decisions are essential for
development and the child safety and just managing the home.
Over time, children develop
more autonomy and have taste what to wear and what friends to play with.
In the teenage years,
there is more of a qualitative leap as the need for independence and autonomy increases.
Here, peers can exert enormous influence.
By adolescents, your child has formed views on things such as – how to dress,
what to eat, where to go,
which friends to be with,
as well as what beliefs to have on major life topics and what values there are.
And many of these views seem to be purposely opposite of those you have.
All of these views might well change later,
but there may be clashes at this time.
Among the issues likely to emerge are differences in rules in the home,
and what is and is not allowable in the behavior of your adolescent.
You can help your adolescent and yourself by making much more of an effort to
develop compromise in relation to the rules that guide your adolescent.
Of course, many things cannot be compromised to run family life,
but try to compromise when you can and let
some things go that you are inclined to forbid or weigh in on.
Decide what you might be willing to let go.
Here are some things to consider about being flexible on and grounds for compromise.
Maybe bedtime can be flexible especially when it is on a school night.
Could curfew be extended once in a while,
or can you let a messy room go?
How about strange outfits and personal appearance?
Would these be options to compromise or let go for you?
One creative compromise was brought to
my attention in relation to a teenager's messy room.
The teen wanted her room completely to be
her domain and never wanted a parent to ever come in.
The mother wanted the clothes picked up and placed in drawers,
closets or a laundry hamper and there was literally a one to two-foot pile of clothing,
books, magazines, bags from stores and more that covered the entire floor.
The mother complained that one cannot even see the floor in any part of the bedroom.
The compromise ended up being,
that the teen could keep her room exactly the way she
wanted and the mother would stay out of the room with three exceptions.
First, there could be no burning of incense or candles that would risk safety and
even the slightest whiff of something
burning would allow the mom to come in and take these items away.
Second, there could be no leftover food because that would foster insects,
rodents, and horrible smells.
The daughter often brought snacks and sometimes dinner up to
her room and would leave the plates with leftover food somewhere on the pile of clothes.
Third, the mom could come into the room if the family ran out of silverware or
plates because the teen just kept them in a room after eating snacks.
And about once a week,
the family ran out of something – dinner plates,
forks, juice glasses just because they accumulate in the daughter's room.
If this happened the mom could come in and retrieve them.
The compromise, the mother did not insist on
a neat room but compromise with some conditions that seemed reasonable.
The teen had control over her domain
and the teen could keep them out of the room completely,
by handling some of the problems like returning food and
silverware and dishes to the kitchen once in awhile.
In your family, what can you compromise that stays within your comfort zone?
How about green hair, torn jeans?
How about a backpack featuring some very strange stickers and marking,
could you let that go?
How about goth or vampire like clothing and makeup.
Can you compromise a bit?
Also for skirts, pants and tops.
Is there something too provocative for your taste?
Or is there any room for compromise?
I am not advocating any specific change or recommendation.
Only you can identify what can you can be flexible
about your values and tastes will guide you.
But compromising on practical issues will require you to bend a bit.
My recommendation to parents is to consider allowing adolescents to engage in
actions that are likely to be temporary and will not jeopardize safety or health.
This consideration will allow colored hair, strange clothing combinations,
and bizarre jewelry, even maybe a dog collar
around one's neck instead of the more common necklaces.
I consider this temporary and developmentally based
because in 10 years from now and probably a lot sooner,
the adolescent would not be caught dead in any of these and even
deny that he or she wore odd clothing and jewelry.
Of course, be sure to take some photos if you want a proof later.
There may be many gray areas,
and as a parent, you will need to decide what is allowable.
Many parents feel that using birth control,
driving at night and spending all night out at
a party or prom are not a place to compromise.
Other parents feel that tattoos are completely out of the question but
some parents may allow tattoos if they are appropriate and relatively hidden.
The tool for this lesson is to urge you to compromise
and expand the areas that you're willing to compromise.
Teens want more independence,
you being able to reach compromises and give in on some things will
contribute to that independence but also make you much more effective as a parent.
Compromising for some parents raise the myth of the slippery slope.
Many parents feel that if they give in or compromise in
one place this will be a slippery slope and pretty soon more demands will be made.
So maybe it is better to stop all that early.
Set the rules and not compromise.
Actually, it looks like the slippery slope concern is not a real problem at all,
the opposite is more likely.
By opposite, I mean like compromising has a host of benefits.
When you compromise you serve as
an influential model for your child in a few important ways.
You are modeling and providing a great example of what it is to compromise
and to be reasonable and how two people can disagree but come to terms without a fight.
In addition, you're compromising on some issues is likely to
strengthen your word and the rules in place where you cannot compromise.
So if you can yield on a few things to
allow your adolescents some more independence and freedom,
do not worry about a slippery slope.
Instead, you have made yourself an ally in one more way and are there to provide support.
You have also further cemented the positive facets of
your relationship during this difficult period when the relationship might be strained.
All of that will make you more effective when you
have to intervene when no compromise is possible.
The second tool is to negotiate with your adolescent.
Negotiating is related to compromising.
A compromise refers to the outcome or actual solution that you reach,
while negotiation refers to the process of how to get there.
Negotiation has several features that will
greatly facilitate parenting and child-rearing,
even when you are not facing an issue or an impasse.
Let me start by clarifying what the opposite of negotiation is.
That would be doling out of advice and making
decisions without any real input from your teenager.
When your teen was a young child you had to do
this to get the child to this new stage of life.
There's not much in the way of negotiating about what preschool to go to,
or what brand of diapers to wear,
or when to begin wearing shoes.
You are in the normal habit of taking charge and
your child would not have made it to adolescents without you doing that.
Fast forward to adolescents.
Now, any effort to control or even influence facets of
the adolescence life could be met with resistance and oppositional behavior.
Of course, there are some decisions you still have to make without your child.
Even so, there are opportunities to involve
your adolescent in decisions and negotiation is the key.
Negotiation is a process and here are several guidelines and steps to help you.
First, listen to what your adolescent says without jumping in.
Really listen, pay attention and hear
the entire story your adolescent wishes to say or his side of the story.
Remember the expression that sometimes the opposite of
talking is not listening but just waiting your turn to talk.
You do not want to do that here.
You are actively listening and genuinely
hearing something that may sound irrational or naive or maybe not.
It doesn't matter you are there at the moment and really paying attention.
Second, be respectful of the teen.
On the one hand, you may sometimes feel like your teens statements were dumb,
they reflect poor judgment and they
indicate that your child-rearing did not register at all.
On the other hand, you're hearing how your adolescent
thinks about things and that is very important
and as you listen you will probably be surprised by
how reasonable and understandable the request is.
Withhold judgments and refrain from rolling your eyes or looking in the air in disbelief.
Body language counts as judgments.
Listening is paying close attention,
add respectfulness, which conveys that
the content is being taken seriously for the moment.
Third, focus on the present and not what the teen did in the past.
Parents often call up similar situation
where a teen made an error or something did not work.
This is the kind of indirect,
"Here we go again or I told you that would happen the last time you did this."
You may be right, but at this point being
right is jeopardizing the process of negotiation.
At this stage, we are in the middle of a process,
so stay exactly in the present.
Fourth, stay on the subject at hand.
Try not to go off,
raising the past as a sample of that,
but in general, try to jump off to other lessons or situations.
Do not drag up some situation that the adolescent will view as completely irrelevant.
That would be a signal to the lesson that you were not really
listening and you do not have the slightest understanding of what they are thinking.
Finally, when it is your turn to talk,
provide alternatives and suggestions for how to proceed with the situation.
There are two parts of conveying your suggestions.
First, provide a number of options of how to proceed,
that might include two or three possible solutions.
Second, present them in a way that is not authoritative.
So try not to say anything like,
"Here's what you should do or this is what needs to happen."
Rather, leave with a sentence like,
"Here are some alternatives we might talk about or have you considered this or that."
Each of those gives the adolescent
a voice and allows for further negotiation and compromise.
Also, the adolescent is much more likely to agree to one of your options or generate
a compromise based on how you present the possible options and whether choices involved.
The five steps I have outlined for negotiation are not so easy to do,
especially if the focus is on something that you or your adolescent feel strongly about.
At the Yale Parenting Center,
we have actually brought parents in and teens in sessions into
a room and have them practice negotiation on an issue that's not very critical.
So just planning a hypothetical vacation just to develop the negotiation skills,
and then we give them something challenging that they select from their own lives.
We can jump in and coach and keep the process of negotiation.
But you can do this at home,
maybe start your negotiation on some event that is not so
volatile or provocative and when the stakes are low.
The negotiation process will help you reach an acceptable compromise on a given issue.
But as importantly, this process will help your overall communication,
your relationship with your adolescent and
your adolescent ability to come to
you knowing that you will listen without making judgments.
A final tool for this lesson is to engage in problem-solving with your adolescent.
Problem-solving is a way of handling
difficult situations especially difficult social relationship issues.
These could be interaction with peers, teachers,
coaches or girlfriend or boyfriend and of course a parent.
Problem-solving consists of several steps.
Let me say what they are and then apply them to an example.
First step, identify and state what the problem is.
Second step, prompt and encourage
the identification of potential strategies or solutions to resolve that problem.
Third, identify two or three possible ways
of handling the situation or general approaches to the problem.
Fourth, for each possible way to handle
the problem identify what its consequences might be.
Talk about each way and what is likely to happen if you did that solution.
Fifth, select the solution that is the best in view of the consequences.
Finally, through role play,
practice and act out the situation and the best solution you selected.
For example, let's work through an instance in which your child,
your teenager is being bullied by someone at school.
The first step, is to state the problem, that's easy.
You might say, "So Jack,
is picking on you at recess."
The second step, is to prompt and encourage
the identification of potential strategies or solutions.
So you say, "What are some of the things you might do to handle that?"
The third step, is to identify
two or three possible ways of
handling the situation or general approaches to the problem.
So now you both identify some possible ways of handling that situation.
You do this together and if you're
adolescent can take the lead on one of these that is better.
But jump in if needed.
So for example, you might say, "Well,
one thing we could do would be to talk to the teacher."
Now, ask your teen,
"Is this something else we could do?"
If not, jump in again and suggest another possibility.
You might say, "Well,
how about staying away from Jack at
lunchtime because that is when this seems to happen. "
And now try to get one more solution.
We want the adolescent to suggest a solution just to engage in
the problem-solving process even if the solution is
not that great or feasible do not judge it at this point.
We are shaping problem-solving behavior and the
next time you apply this approach you will both be better at it.
The fourth step, now go through each possible solution
one at a time to identify what the consequences would be.
Here, your teen can play a role and you can jump in less.
You say, "Okay, one strategy is to go to the teacher."
If you went to the teacher what would happen?
And now you give the same verbal prompt for each solution.
You say, "And what would happen if you stayed away from him at lunch?"
Trying to get your adolescent to talk about the consequences.
The problem-solving approach includes you
not taking over all or even most of the talking.
Briefly, discuss the likely consequences for each of the proposed solution.
Fifth, now choose one of the solutions that is
the best of the solutions based on the different consequences.
You say, "Okay, which seems to be the best solution?"
Now, you and your child discuss the need to choose just one.
Finally, the six step is to practice.
You and your teen actually practice the best solution,
you both role play,
you as a parent pay the bully and your child pretends to be
himself in the situation and he acts out the best solution.
Then you switch roles where you play your adolescent and he plays the bully.
All of this is done, stand in place but you're both pretending.
Try to make this fun.
So something should be redone in the middle of this.
Just laugh and say, "Oh,
let's start all over again."
The tone of this is constructive when everyone is calm.
Introducing anything to light and the task is fine.
Going through all the steps is the problem-solving approach.
As you can see this is very different from dispensing the solution to your adolescent.
Problem-solving teaches a different way of coping
with and handling interpersonal problems and research
shows that this approach helps across a variety of
interpersonal situations with peers as well as with adults.
Also, the process greatly increases
the quality of the communication between you and your adolescent.
Let me summarize what I've covered so far in this lesson.
We've added three tools to the toolkit that are especially
valuable in relation to parenting your adolescent.
These were compromise, negotiation, and problem-solving.
As with other tools,
we have discussed in this course,
the terms compromising, negotiation,
and problem-solving are familiar and are used in
everyday life but how they are done is very important.
For example, negotiation and problem-solving
involve very specific steps to achieve their benefit.
Informal problem-solving by just chatting about problems with your adolescent
may be a very good way for improving your relationship and overall communication.
But the steps I noted have been tested and showed to provide the adolescent with
important skills in handling difficult situations and
the benefits extend across many areas in everyday life.
The notable feature of the techniques I discussed is that they help resolve
particular situations that need to be addressed but they also have broad benefits,
such as – strengthening your relationship with your teen,
making you much more approachable,
and teaching by modeling how to address difficult situations.
In any case, you have some more tools now to ease the path.
Keep in mind that you made it through your teen years and are probably doing very well,
your child becoming an adolescent and an adult will probably do well too.
And if you need a little extra help,
if you feel frustrated or if
your usual procedures are not working the way you would like,
you have a variety of tools and some of these are really well suited to adolescents.
