A (0:00)

Hello and welcome to the questions and answers edition of the Thriving Kids Podcast from the Child Mind Institute. I'm your host, Dr. Dave Anderson. Last week I had a powerful conversation with award winning journalist and author Jennifer Wallace about achievement culture as well as how we help our kids feel like they matter and that they have a sense of belonging within our communities. This week I'll be answering your follow up questions about managing achievement culture failure, handling emotional meltdowns and navigating intense expectations in a way that helps kids to feel like they matter and also that they're not leaning in to the kinds of pressures that might otherwise hurt their emotional health. Let's get into it. Our first question for this Thriving Kids Q and A episode is the following and it's got a little bit of a kind of framing here. Growing up, my parents let me suffer natural consequences. Forget my lunch, go hungry. Recently, my son left his final project on the counter and I drove it to school for him because I couldn't bear him getting a failing grade for something he worked so hard on. My parents would say that I robbed him of a natural lesson. What approach is actually right? So first of all, what I like is that whenever parents ask us the question what is actually right? My immediate response is that so much is about finding a middle path based off of context in these questions. We don't really want parents to get so focused on the idea that there's only one right response to certain things. The reality is we want a kind of balance. So, you know, when we think about natural consequences, if I hear parents saying, well, look, when we see an opportunity for a natural consequence, we let the kid feel it without any sort of situation or extenuating circumstances that would cause us to swoop in and perhaps, you know, help. I'm kind of like, eh, that seems a little bit extreme. When I hear a parent say, I can't let my child fail at all. You don't understand the pressure they're under. If they forget a project, I'll drive it to school. If they can't do their homework, I'll sit with them until the wee hours of the morning just to finish it. If, you know they're not necessarily feeling like someone's their friend, I'll text the parent and ask if we can have a conference to figure out how we can make our kids be better friends. And again, in those situations, I'll think to myself, ich, that's it's a little bit too close to what we'd call kind of bulldozer or snowplow parenting. But what I'm looking for in general is something that is in line with the research on attachment styles, where we say we want parents to lead with nurture for their kids, put in structure kind of when it is needed. And to the point in this question, there are going to be those moments where for one reason or another, we're going to see kids make mistakes and, and it's a way that they, you know, learn resilience and kind of learn, stick to itiveness and, you know, learn to be able to kind of navigate tough situations, to actually let them navigate that situation. Kind of say, huh? Like that is a situation. I wonder, like, what you want to do, like, you know, how you want to handle that. What are some of our options? Like, let's kind of brainstorm on this. And the more that we frame some of these situations as learning experiences for kids, the more we are likely, at least as the research indicates, to see kids, you know, see these kind of like little downs or kind of little failures as like, okay, this is an opportunity for me to like, figure out some solutions, maybe lean on some adults in my village for those solutions. And what I'll usually say to parents related to this kind of natural consequences piece, it's more about the stakes. So, for example, I know that if my own children who are nine and six, forget the bag lunch they have at home, they will probably be given an opportunity to purchase a lunch at school. It may not be their favorite lunch, but you know, they're still going to be able to eat or they have snacks within the classroom, somebody's going to give them a granola bar, you know, it'll work out. And I wouldn't consider that to be terribly high stakes. When we look at something like what's in this question, like a final project, maybe there are kind of high stakes in that. Maybe this is a particularly strict teacher who docks the grade for a certain reason. And you know, maybe there are other moments in school we can show that, like, fantasy failure is okay, or, you know, you don't necessarily have to turn in everything on time, or from time to time you might get a bad grade. But we have the right idea here that we need kids to not be focused only on perfectionism. We need kids not to be focused on the idea that they're going to solve every situation so incredibly easily. Natural consequences do have a value as a learning experience for a kid. But what I'm always looking toward whenever I consult with a parent or two parents who are co parenting together is saying how can we have a balance in these things? Because kids need all of it. Sometimes they need your scaffolding and support. Sometimes they need natural consequence, and sometimes it's not always clear what the situation entails. But if you're going too far toward either end of the pendulum swing, where you're just bulldozing all the challenges for them, they're not going to learn resilience. It's going to be really difficult for them to stay regular in the face of challenges when you're not there. And if you, on the other hand, are just going natural consequence after natural consequence, hey, look, you put yourself in this position, you. You don't need my help. That oftentimes feels kind of punitive to kids and a little bit less nurturing than might be most optimal, we'll say, for relationship growth. So that's kind of where we are. Our second question for this Q and A. My son cheats at board games because he hates losing. Do I call him out on it or let it slide? The one piece of context that's missing in this question is how old the sun we're asking about is. So when we kind of take a look at what's developmentally appropriate as kids move through board games, lots of kids younger than age, say 7 or 8, are going to just be starting to learn games. And they very much consider the rules to be flexible and games to be more about, like, who can imagine certain things and maybe be, like, kind of creative about stuff. They will often like, kind of slyly or even try to clandestinely cheat at the game so that they win. And in a lot of those situations, as you're in those, like, younger ages, we'll kind of encourage parents that like so much of that. That kind of. That developmental stage is about imaginary and fun play and building relationships through just kind of like having fun and following a kid's lead. So maybe those are moments where, if you can, you might mention the fact that you would have more fun if you played by the rules or that there are rules and you'd love to see the game be played by the rules. But also there's this balance of just kind of going with the fact that if they decide they want to turn over five cards themselves during Candyland, and you're only getting to turn over one card, and that's a new rule they've made, or they're trying to play Monopoly with you, but they're saying, I get $200 at the beginning of every turn. But you only get it when you pass go or they're trying to switch your pieces. Any number of things that kids do. Maybe what you look at it with younger ages is we just kind of look at it in a bemused way and we just kind of say, like, hey, you know what, Like, I get it, like these games are kind of tough. Like we've been playing for a little while. I see what you're doing, like, you know, that kind of stuff, and you razz them. As kids get to say, age 9 or 10, that tends to be a developmental stage where games start to become much more rule bound. And you'll often see that if we're going to talk about the skills they need to interface with their peers, they need to know the rules. Because a lot of what's going on at age 9 and 10 at recess and is people arguing about the rules. The rules of football, the rules of Foursquare, the rules of Gaga, the rules of basketball, the rules of tag, the rules of this game they just created. And there's this sense that like, following the rules is what's most important. And that's going to be something that, you know, you go tell on a kid or, you know, you get mad about if that's kind of not happening. So if your kid is getting to that point, say age 9 or 10, where they're cheating in order to not lose, that's going to actually have an effect on their friendships if that's, you know, maybe expanding into the peer zone. So that's where we would really target it and say, look, I really want to play board games with you. I really want to play games just in general, but we've got to follow the rules. And I'm not doing this just for us or just for me to play with you. I'm doing this because I really enjoy this time with you. And I want to also make sure that when you go on a play date at your friend's house or you're playing at recess, you know the rules so that all the other kids still want to include you in the game. And then, you know, beyond that, if a kid says, well, I never, you know, or I always play by the rules at recess, that's not really an issue. It's just more that I like kind of having the rules be a little bit flexible when I play with you, then you might just kind of make your own judgment, you know, when you're playing at home as to whether or not you're going to say, okay, let's be creative about the rules. This time we're playing. And then next time we're going to play Battleship, you know, according to the rules, and we'll see which one is better. The best thing is just making sure that you're thinking about these core principles as answering the question, how does this thing contribute to building your relationship with your child? If it contributes to building your relationship, maybe the rules can be on the back burner. How does this thing play into their peer skills? If it does play into their peer skills, maybe that's a reason to focus on the rules a bit more. And in the meantime, with something like games, they're supposed to be games, how can you make it into a tinkering, kind of, like, fun play situation instead of being like, I won't play with you. You always cheat. You. You know, this is why we can't do these things together. That feels really rejecting. And for a lot of kids, it may be difficult for them to figure out how to play according to the rules, you know, in the way that you would like them to play. And the only way they can learn that is through practice. So we've got to stay regulated enough to engage them in that situation. Our third question for this Q and A, Is it okay to pay my kid for good grades or does that increase the pressure? So what I would say is the first part of this question, or, sorry, the second part of this question is the one that I would tackle first. And that is, it's really good that this particular parent is thinking about the level of pressure their kids feel. This is something we talked about in the podcast episode with Jennifer Wallace last week. This is something we've talked about in a lot of our podcast episodes. Pressure is abounding for lots of kids, from their grades to their performance in extracurriculars, to the notion that they're supposed to kind of, like, find a way to, like, solve for extracurriculars. Having friends, engaging with the online world in a developmentally appropriate way, getting grades, going to schools, getting enough sleep, and having, you know, some family time at least, and also doing all kinds of things that make for very busy schedules in society. The first thing we often look at with parents is kind of, given the level of scheduling that a kid is experiencing and given what's in their schedule and kind of all the things they have to juggle, how much pressure do they feel? What's their level of well being? Some kids can have every activity, you know, an activity or two every single school day, some activities on the weekends, and can tell you that they're feeling awesome about that. And they really love it and they don't want to quit anything and they're getting enough sleep and life is just, you know, peachy. Some other kids can say, oh, my God, I've been forced to do two activities. It's torture. Can I please do one? What I always go back to is if we're talking about the kind of minimum level of pressure, we want to make sure that kids are making an effort in school, trying hard. We want to make sure they're engaged with school and are given the amount of time they need to finish their homework at home or to complete school assignments. We want to make sure each kid has at least one activity that they're trying outside of school. This is to explore passions and hobbies. It can, you know, cycle from activity to activity. But in a lot of ways, structure and a schedule helps a kid. Not to mention that if you have an activity, it can make it so that you're at least exploring things that you wouldn't get exposed to in school. It helps to build self esteem. You know, even if a kid is saying, I don't want to do any activity, we often tell parents, you know, look, just have the conversation, the kid's got to do one, and then you'll try to get off their back. And that one again, can, you know, switch from activity to activity. But we're really trying to think like, what does a kid need in order to be engaging with the developmentally appropriate tasks of kiddom, which might be one extracurricular. It might be having that time to work on schoolwork and to give an effort, getting enough sleep, making sure that they do have friends that they engage with in real life, face to face, outside school. And then once we've kind of gone through that wellness checklist, we might not need to increase the pressure further. We can actually say, I want to balance as a parent, not the notion that parenting is getting my kid to check every single box they could in terms of achievement, but balancing their wellness, the things they need to do for these kind of particularly important developmental tasks, the notion they can have downtime and that they should have time when they're actually bored or don't know what to do. Those are the things we think about as we balance the question of pressure. When we pivot to this idea of paying a kid for good grades, we get these questions a lot about when you can kind of externally reinforce things as a parent and also what's appropriate to pay a kid for. So one thing we start with is that it's really common for kids, as they get to, say, late elementary school years or even before that, to begin contributing in terms of household tasks, to maybe do something that's a simple cleaning task in the house, to be responsible for cleaning up after themselves, to be responsible for certain chores perhaps. And one of the ways we construct allowance discussions with parents is if you're willing to give your kid an allowance beyond just saying, look, this is the way that any one of our family members contributes to the household. This is the key point. You don't always have to give an allowance because your kid washes the dishes once a week or picks up after themselves, or, you know, cleans up their dishes and puts them in the sink or helps to cook dinner. That could just be your messaging of, like, how, you know, any one of your family members contributes to the family. Doesn't have to involve payment. But oftentimes as kids get older and if we have the means to do so, the they'll say to us, there are things you don't want to buy me that I would really love to buy, whether they're associated with games I like or things I collect or things I want to do with my friends or food that I'd like to buy or something like that. And we'll say, okay, if your kid is saying to you, can you give me a reasonable amount of money for these things? That's the allowance. What do you want to hinge that allowance on? Some parents will say it's at home behaviors. They'll say it's respect, or it's doing particular chores or it's finishing your homework on time. Some parents will say it is grades. What's really important is that we kind of resist. There's a lot of parenting in social media and in articles where people shame parents for externally reinforcing their kids. They act like internal reinforcement is the only reason why someone should do something, when in reality, we as humans are a mix of external reinforcers and internal reinforcers. I make the joke all the time that I love the work that I do at the Child Mind Institute, but if I won the lottery and no longer needed to collect a salary, there would be a number of tasks that I would stop doing because honestly, the only reason I do them is because unless I do them, I don't get paid. That's external reinforcement. There are a number of tasks for any human where if it's not externally reinforced in some way, it's giving you access to a privilege or particular thing that you want, you just generally don't do it. Another Thing that's really important about behavioral kind of coaching is that frequently when someone has been unsuccessful at something, we need to think about a particular pathway that's extremely important. If you've been unsuccessful, sometimes it can take a little bit of external reinforcement, something else other than just being motivated toward that task to get you to try that task and put in a good effort a few times before success becomes internally reinforcing. For some kids, that's a sport. They say, look, I'm terrible at this sport. I was terrible at it last season. I don't really believe that, you know, I should keep trying to play it. And some parents will say, look, I will reinforce you. You know, we can go to ice cream or like, you know, maybe you'll have the opportunity to choose what we have for dinner tomorrow night. Or I'll give you an extra hour to watch that television program you like, whatever it might be, where we'll say, look, I'm going to put this external reinforcer, and I'm going to bundle it with this task that I know you're not terribly motivated to do. And what so often goes unsaid in these discussions of intrinsic motivation, external reinforcement, is that for a lot of us, that little external reinforcement can get us over the hump to try something, to experience a new level of success. And then what we as behavioral coaches do is coach parents to fade back on that behavioral reinforcement and to say, now, okay, you don't need this as much. So now we're pretty good. And that's where I would say that with this parent. If you decide that you'd like to reinforce your kid for good grades, whether it's with money or whether it's with choosing the dinner place, whether it's with giving them, you know, a little bit of extra time with their friends or a little bit of extra money to go out and eat with their friends that say, you know, Taco Bell or, you know, something like that. These are things that are perfectly fine to externally reinforce a kid, to give, like, some increased effort on their grades, where you're saying, all I want to see is that you're putting forth the effort that I know you're capable of. And then from there, what we can see is if they start to experience success, oftentimes we can pivot either the payment or external reinforcer to something else that we think they might work on. They might not need to be paid for their grades over time. Or we can also elongate the interval at which they're paid. Maybe we start off paying them for a great grade on each test. And we'll fade back and say, okay, now the grades are for a B or above on each class at the end of the semester. Either way, you know, I probably should have given a TLDR at the beginning of this question because I'm really passionate about this particular one. But I'll just say it is not a problem to externally reinforce your kid for good grades. But there's just lots of principles to think about, about how you kind of apply it and, and how you discuss it with your kid. Our fourth question for this episode, when my kid says I suck at this, what should I reply with? So we get into these conversations a lot with parents when we talk about the concept, and this is Googleable of depressogenic thinking. And what this is is something where psychologists, mental health professionals, we define this as when something negative happens, a kid will often make it kind of about the self permanent and about like kind of a global label. So like, you get a bad grade of the math on the math test and the kid says, that's it. I, I'm bad at math. Like there's no hope for me. I'm always going to be bad at math. I just suck at it. And we'll kind of sit there and say, okay, how do we combat that kind of thinking? Easiest way you combat that kind of thinking is with one of two things. First, you ask for contradictory evidence, or you look toward ways that you can break down a more environmentally focused, you know, solution to the problem in the future. And what I mean by that is we'll say to a kid, all right, you're telling me you suck at math. First let me look at contradictory evidence. What grades have you gotten in math in the past? What grades have you gotten in other math classes? You know, let's talk about your performance. And for some kids, they'll say, oh, well, you know, actually I've been getting pretty good grades this whole term. Maybe it was just this one quiz and you know, that kind of thing. And we're like, okay, good, now we're starting to like, you know, really get flexible with your self talk. So you can not think so much. I suck at this. But you can think like that particular, you know, test or quiz sucked and that kind of thing. Then we're going to, is we're trying to say, instead of centering it within yourself, how can we take a look at the environment and what you might be able to do in the future or things you've already done in the past for success? That could lead to success in the next one. And the kid might say, well, I didn't actually get really good sleep before the math test and I also forgot to study like the third part of the unit, so maybe that's kind of why I got this bad grade. And we'll say so we, it sounds like, is not so much that I'm hearing that you necessarily suck at math, but that what you're thinking is maybe if you make sure you get a bit more rest or you study the next unit next time, or make sure that you're studying all the units, you're going to do a little bit better on this math assessment. And that's really the self talk that we're trying to engender in kids is when they globally label something, they globally label themselves. How do we kind of chip away at that by just saying, look, I just want to be, I want to be your ally in this. Like, let me, let me dive into this with you and just take a look at this situation and maybe we can come to a different conclusion than you suck and more that this situation sucked. And we've got hope for how to improve that situation in the future. That's the essence of what every mental health professional is doing with somebody who starts with that in session. Our fifth question. The car ride home after a lost soccer game is torture. My 13 year old son is silent or lashes out if I try to talk. I try saying things like, I loved watching you play, but it makes him angrier. I feel like I'm walking on eggshells. What is the actual script for the car ride home? Do I say nothing or is there a way to help him process the loss without making it worse? This is a great question about emotion regulation. It harkens back to our recent podcast episode with Mark Brackett. All kinds of things. Because the thing is, what we know in this situation is a few things for sure. There has been a soccer game, it has been lost. This person's experiencing feelings and the parent wants to support them. That's the situation. So what I often want to do with a 13 year old is I want to bring this away from the car ride home. I don't want to necessarily try to intervene in the car ride. And I just want to say like those facts to a 13 year old. So let's call him Bobby. We'll say Bobby, you know, when it's after a soccer game that you've lost, you know, I notice in the car ride home, like all I want to do is support you and what I notice is that when I try to let you know how much I enjoyed being at the game or I try to find some aspect, I get it. It feels like kind of toxic positivity they talk about online where it's like, I'm trying to, like, you know, make this into flowers and roses and act like this was okay. And it was really great to see this when I know you are probably in a different space. Like, what is it you need? Do you just want to be able to sit with the loss? Do you just want me to take you to eat? Do you just want us to, like, listen to music, not talk? Like, what works? And there's two reasons to do this. One is that everybody deals with emotions in a different way. There's not. There's not necessarily. I mean, there are some wrong ways to do it. And if this, if your son was grabbing a rock and breaking all the car windows, I would say that that is not a helpful way of coping with emotions. But for the most part, all the things I just listed are helpful ways of coping with emotion. Where the biggest issue in this situation might be a mismatch in the way that you cope. Maybe after you lost soccer games as a kid, you would really, you know, value the fact that a parent was there to watch you play or you really want to talk about it. Maybe your son is different. And so for Bobby, what we want to lay out is here are all the different ways to cope. And then that's the thing that we lean into with them. We want to be just kind of sitting with them in what feelings they're feeling and not necessarily trying to change them or trying to make it all rosy colored or trying to change the situation, but sitting with them in the way they want to be sat with. And beyond that, as long as they're not doing anything that's overtly disrespectful or unsafe or completely unhelpful, we can sit with them in that. The first reason to do that is because it shows that you're trying to find that way of support and it can allow you guys to align better on what's happening in the situation. Which your son might report to a friend as like, oh, my God, my mom's always trying to be all like, happy, and I'm just like, sad about the loss. And there's that kind of misalignment where we can now become aligned and we can actually strengthen the relationship by thinking about what needs people have in those situations. The second reason to do this is that you are helping to coach any child or teen for future relationships. One of the best things that we can offer a future partner or a future roommate or a future child that we have is the notion that all emotions are welcome and at the same time, the ways that we cope with them can be widely varied. And we want to make space for the idea that the people around us might cope in ways that we would cope, we wouldn't, or would cope differently. And the more you can make space for that, the more likely we're to see that skill map onto success in future relationships. Our final question for this week's thriving kids podcast Q and a Episode Question 6 We keep hearing let them fail, but the school system feels rigged against that advice. If my daughter fails a middle school quiz, she gets put in remedial groups and misses her fun electives. The stakes feel incredibly high. How can I tell her it's okay to make mistakes when the school environment makes it feel like getting a bad grade actually does set her back for the whole year? This is a terrific question to end on, related to achievement culture and everything that Jennifer Wallace wrote about in her first book. Because at the end of the day we don't want kids to feel like, especially in the kind of pressure filled culture that we have today related to college admissions and achievement, things like that, that a single bad grade or not necessarily doing our best on something is anything but a learning experience, an opportunity to see how you can take the lessons learned from that and maybe apply it to future assignments. We want our teachers to give kids feedback on the work that they do, to be mentoring them, to be helping them to figure out how to do better and better work on the subject that is being taught. The notion that a kid should just be able to perform perfectly, particularly in middle and high school grades on material they've never seen before, only encountered this week. You know, that's too much pressure to put on any adolescent. So what I keep going back to is there are interventions at the level of the individual and there are interventions at the level of the group. So at the level individual, I'm often going back to kids and saying, like, look, I'm so sorry the school is constructed this way. How can I help you? Especially if they're like an older kid, how can I help you advocate for the idea that, you know, sometimes you're going to get lower grades on quizzes and maybe, you know, we can say, can I decide not to be in the middle group until I have two straight, you know, low grades just so I can be part of the fun electives that I really enj being a part of during the school day or there things that we can talk to our homeroom teacher about or anybody else who has kind of control over our schedule. It can be really hard because in a lot of public elementary, middle and high schools, part of the reason for this pressure is also tied to school achievement tests and funding associated with students performance as well as reputation of the school associated with students performance on standardized tests. So there is this kind of like feeling of like we need to give support whenever it looks like a kid is struggling to to make sure that we as a school kind of stay at this level. And that's where I'd get into kind of the community intervention of saying to teachers, saying to any administrators whose ear you have, look, I understand that we want my daughter to do well. I do too. I also want to reduce the pressure that comes from feeling like she has to do so well that she can't have any particular low grade or even assignment in which she does poorly. Can we find a middle ground here where it feels like the school is still honoring its objectives and to serve the students? And at the same time my daughter is not feeling like she's on edge for any even mild failure because it's going to involve being pulled out of the activities that she likes. So again, all of that is a conversation. In the end, if you really can't get your daughter out of this particular pressure filled spiral, you are the best counter programming for that. To just say to her, look, we may not be able to escape this right now. The only way out is through. And I really believe you and I can be resilient enough to kind of like push through this, even though this is just the way the school is going to function right now. But we're both going to know, you and me, we can wink at each other that this isn't that bad. That at the end of the day I'm proud of you. I see the effort you're putting forth and even if it seems like the school is kind of overreactive in this way, you know you and I are aligned and I'm just very proud for what you're trying to do in school. And with that, I am proud of all of you who might have listened this far because hey, I got a lot of words and I'm really loving throwing them back toward these amazing questions submitted by our listeners. So thanks again for listening to this episode of the Thriving Kids podcast and see you next week.