Lisa Greene is a writer, educator and mother of two children with CF. She and child psychiatrist Dr. Foster Cline wrote a book about parenting children with health issues. The book can be found here, and this is her website www.TipsForCFParents.com Below is an article about five crucial concepts that help in parenting.
How Do Kids Really Learn Responsibility? The Five Essential E’s!
by Foster Cline, MD and Lisa C. Greene
How do children really learn responsibility? Love and Logic teaches us to use five easily understood, practical, and effective skill sets. We call them the Five Essential E’s: Example, Experience, Empathy, Expectations, and Encouragement.
Some parents make the mistake of believing that children learn responsibility by lectures, reminders, ranting, raving or rescuing. However, the Five Essential E’s will always work better both in parenting and in leadership situations.
Parenting is really about leadership. And when times are tough, good and bad leadership skills rise to the surface. Leaders cannot force those who follow to accept their values and beliefs. The same holds true for parents of an adolescent. Forcing an issue does not work because both followers and children must choose to accept the belief of those who lead. So the Five E’s are offered, not demanded.
Let’s take a brief look at each of the Essential E’s by using a metaphor of learning how to play a musical instrument.
The First Essential E: Example
The first step in learning how to play it is to have someone teach you by example. In order to learn how to play the piano, you’ll need someone to model how it’s done and, hopefully, to teach you the right way to do it. Everyone plays an instrument after at least watching, if not being inspired by another.
What happens if one is taught a bad technique in the beginning of a musical career? Once formed, it is difficult to break a bad habit. If we expect our children to be basically respectful, responsible and cope well with problems, then that’s the example we must show. We must occasionally ask ourselves, “Am I being the way I want my children to be?”
In setting the example, it is essential that we take good care of ourselves. We can even use this as a teaching opportunity by occasionally muttering about ourselves in front of the kids: “Gees, I think I’m watching too much TV so I’d better turn it off,” or “You know, I really want that chocolate cake, but it’s just not good for me, so I guess I’m going to pass on it.” Now we are modeling taking good care of ourselves.
Along with taking good care of ourselves, we insist our children treat us with respect when they are around us. Our message is: “Sweetheart, I love you but I won’t allow you to treat me badly.” Then, our children, modeling after us, won’t treat themselves badly, will have a high self-image, and will learn self-respect and how to set boundaries because they learned it from us.
Here’s an example of a loving parent taking good care of herself: A teen is fussing, whining and complaining about checking her blood glucose levels. The parent explores the situation, keeping in mind that all children have a right to protest with compliance until it slides into downright obnoxiousness.
Often a little empathy will be enough to stop the whining or using an enforceable statement like: “I’m happy to listen when you can talk nicely with me about it.” But let’s say it escalates. Now a fed-up parent might say, “Just stop it!” – like that’s going to do it with a strong-willed kid.
It’s so much more effective to set the example and take good care of yourself by lovingly saying something like: “Honey, I’m not feeling very good about the way you are behaving right now. And I can understand your frustration. But your whining about checking your glucose level is draining my energy and hassling my ear drums. Where would you like to go, sweetheart, so I won’t hear it?”
The child learns a few things: Mom cares but won’t put up with obnoxious behavior. Mom is very loving and firm. And, Mom is setting a great example!
The Second Essential E: Experience
Back to the piano metaphor: what is the second step to learning how to play a piano? Trial and error. Practice and experience!! The road to wisdom is paved with lots of mistakes. When a mistake is made on the piano, we get discord and it generally sounds pretty bad. Life’s mistakes are also like that. And, Love and Logic teaches us that the mistakes made early in life are far more affordable than mistakes made later in life.
Unfortunately, wisdom only comes with trial and error if the error is accompanied by negative consequences. Although it may be unpopular to say in today’s world, the truth of the matter is that: “People have to suffer the consequences of their errors and poor choices in order to learn from them.” This means that when our children make a mistake, we respond by loving them, talking it over with them, and providing ideas about how they might get themselves out of a bad situation but we don’t rescue them unless it is absolutely essential for life and health.
Parents who raise children without wisdom usually do it by making two common mistakes. First, they try to make sure their child doesn’t make mistakes. Secondly, when their children do make mistakes, the parents try to fix it. They do something outside the child’s skin to make it better.
Wise parents who raise wisdom- filled children respond to the situation by putting their energy into what’s going on inside their child’s skin rather than outside.
For many of us, , this is a difficult concept because we parents of special needs kids are normally over-protective. We must be overly protective with a sick child in the early years. But as the child grows older, it is essential for the us to back off, put less energy into making sure the environment responds correctly to our child, and spend more energy on helping our child cope with all environments.
In other words, we must spend less energy into fixing things outside the skin and more energy into growing a child with the wisdom to handle what the environment throws at him or her.
So, the next time you are tempted to rescue your child from their (non-life or limb threatening) bad decision, think twice. Instead of answers, give them empathy and remember that wisdom only grows through experience.
The Third Essential E: Empathy
What would happen if our little concert pianist was struggling with learning to play the piano, making lots of mistakes and we became angry and frustrated with him or lectured or nagged? Wouldn’t our child want to quit or be upset with us and feel unsupported? Or feel like a failure?
What would happen if we reacted to mistakes with empathy instead? Would our child be encouraged, more likely to continue and try harder? Would he or she learn from the mistakes, feel supported and like us more?
Responding with empathy is the key to building and maintaining a good relationship with our children. And our spouses, too, by the way. But it’s not easy. People have the hardest time with this one because it may not be natural!
It’s easy to show our kids empathy when someone other than us has caused our children unhappiness. But when they are unhappy about the consequences that we’ve imposed or that occur naturally because of their misbehavior, many parents often have trouble expressing empathy.
Instead, we might show a combination of frustration and anger when we give the consequences:
. “You didn’t do your breathing treatment this morning, so you are not going out until it’s done!”
. “You broke curfew last Saturday, so you’re staying home for the next two weekends!”
It generally brings more harmony to show our children empathy over the consequences that we impose. An example might be: “Gosh, Nancy. I bet you’re going to be really upset when you can’t go out next weekend. I would be too! I hope you have as good a time as possible here at home, honey.”
It is wise for us to show empathy before delivering consequences. Real empathy. When we show empathy, rather then anger and frustration following our children’s mistakes, they feel encouraged, supported, and learn from their errors. Our child’s poor choice becomes the “bad guy,” not us parents! Empathy provides love and respect even as it locks in the learning experience.
(The following text comes from www.parentingchildrenwithhealthissues.com)
The Fourth Essential E: EXPECTATIONS
Booker T. Washington said, “Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him.” This is the power of Expectations which is the Fourth E in our five-part blog series on The Five Essential E’s of Raising Responsible Kids.
The problem is that, as parents, we can set our expectations too low or too high! And, when we have kids with special medical needs, we can really have a hard time with this. Expectations that are set too high for a child’s abilities can result in your child feeling like a failure. Expectations set too low conveys the attitude that you don’t think your child can do it. Setting high but reasonable expectations is really an art form and is different for each child. Here are some tips:
· Know your child’s personality, strengths and weaknesses. Build on your child’s strengths.
· Periodically review child developmental charts so you are aware of what’s typical for your child’s age and stage of development.
· If you aren’t sure if your child is keeping up with peers, ask teachers, coaches and other parents about how other children are performing in a particular area.
· Have a good understanding of “I can’t” versus “I won’t!” (From the book “Parenting Children with Health Issues” by Cline and Greene)
· Recognize that not every child is a star athlete or gifted academic. Help your child discover who he or she is, not what you want them to be. Help them find their joy and special gifts.
It’s easy for us parents to show negative expectations and not even be aware of it. Children who have special healthcare needs must have parents who vibrate out high expectations if they are going to grow to take good care of their bodies and respond in a healthy way to their medical conditions. Some negative expectations that are natural for parents to unknowingly express are: giving warnings, showing worry, being pessimistic, and showing disappointment without hope of improvement.
Positive expectations are shown in positive words, actions and attitudes, smiles, dreams, encouragement, faith and hope.
The Fifth Essential E: ENCOURAGEMENT
This blog is the last in our five-part series about how to teach children to be responsible. The Five Essential E’s form the foundation of effective parenting and include Example, Experience, Empathy, Expectations, and Encouragement. This week, we’ll discuss Encouragement.
When times are tough or when our children face tough times, it’s natural for everyone to feel discouraged. However, encouragement and discouragement are both contagious! When we effectively show our children encouragement, we will help them to cope better with their challenges including medical situations and other special needs.
Encouragement includes an overall “You can do it!” attitude. It’s how we treat and act towards our children. Are we full of smiles and high-fives or frowns and put-downs? Are we more focused on what our kids do right? Or what they do wrong?
Encouragement is also how we talk to our kids when they do something we like. It’s a specific way of using positive words. Normally, we think encouragement means saying things like, “I am so proud of you!” or “Good job!” but in reality, this is praise.
Parents can easily get caught in the praise trap because it makes us feel good when our kids feel good. And praise does make our kids feel good in the moment, especially when kids are little. But we have to be careful with praise. Excessive praise causes problems including raising a praise junkie! We want children to do good things and feel good about themselves because it pleases them rather than always looking for outside approval from others.
Parents also like to use praise as a way to motivate our kids to do what we want them to do. It’s kind of like giving them a reward. Again, that’s fine when kids are little and not over-used. But praise can easily turn into a bribe just like rewards can. When children only do the right thing for the praise or the treat or the “reward”, then it becomes a bribe and this can become dangerous especially where medical care is concerned. Again, we want to raise children who make good choices because it’s the best thing for them, not for a reward, bribe or praise.
So, instead of using praise, we can ask questions to help our children self-evaluate. For example, instead of saying “I am proud of you for remembering to take your medication,” we can say, “Wow! How do you manage to always remember to take your medicine on time?” This causes children to think, encourages them to be proud of themselves, and naturally motivates them to continue to take good care of themselves. Our book, “Parenting Children with Health Issues” by Cline and Greene discusses this in depth and gives many more examples.
So there you have it: The Five Essential E’s! The keys to raising confident, respectful, responsible children who make good decisions and feel good about themselves from the inside out rather than the outside in.
Watch a video of Dr. Cline and Lisa Greene discussing the E’s
