Cruel to be kind: Parents should not be their children's friends

BEDTIME is 8pm, you tell your child. 

He argues that he wants to stay up until 8.30pm. You reiterate that bedtime’s at 8pm. “I want to stay up later,” he objects. “Now, bedtime is at 7.45pm,” you say. “Ok, fine, I’ll take 8pm,” he says. You reply: “Now, it’s at 7.30pm.”

It’s called reverse negotiation: When your child lobbies for something you’re not happy to give him, he ends up with less than he had when he started. It works a charm, says Dr Robin Berman, psychiatrist, associate professor at University of California, Los Angeles, and author of Hate Me Now, Thank Me Later, How to Raise Your Child with Love and Limits.

Berman is not a fan of old-school parenting, “when children were seen and not heard, punishment was swift and corporal, hitting was the norm, and fear and shame were ways of controlling kids’ behaviour”.

But she says the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. “We’ve become scared of saying no to our children. We befriend them rather than parent. We negotiate everything from going to bed to what they’re going to eat. We’ve taken the power out of parenting and we’ve created a whole new set of problems. Kids today boss parents and exhaust them with their demands.”

Berman says the current parenting style grew out of good intentions.

“Today’s parents grew up feeling neglected. They said ‘we’re going to do it differently. We won’t shame our kids, use physical punishment, ignore them or see them as accessories to us.’ We wanted our kids’ needs to be more central than our needs were to our parents. It was a lovely idea, but when we went about it we went overboard.”

Berman wrote her book in a bid to find a “graceful new middle” place, where we can “honour children’s feelings and make them feel very central, known, heard and seen, but also hold the line and still be in charge as parents”.

Berman calls the book a collection of pooled wisdom — in compiling it, she spoke with teachers, coaches, parents, paediatricians, therapists, and children. She advocates mutual respect between parents and children and vice versa, parents setting loving limits and being squarely at the helm, and children never being shamed but given accurate, specific praise when it’s due.

In such a scenario, certain parental behaviours are out. First up is over-negotiation. “Children tell me: ‘when my mom says no, she doesn’t mean no. If I keep lobbying, she’ll say yes’. This means the child has to work — for the extra 20 minutes of TV time, for a later bedtime, for different food. Giving kids too much power creates anxiety in them. With everything negotiated, routines go — there’s no smooth rhythm.”

Other no-nos include over-explaining decisions/rules to children (“weakens our position as someone in charge”) and ‘good-jobbing’ or praising children constantly. “We create praise junkies, performance monkeys,” says Berman, citing research by psychologist, Carol Dweck, which shows that over-praised children are less resilient and more risk averse. When parents give in to children’s tantrums and demands, when they can’t tolerate seeing their child upset, but rush to fix their unhappiness, when they don’t allow their child to fail, the result isn’t self-esteem, but psychological fragility, says Berman.

She urges parents not to fear disappointing their children and not to be afraid of being unpopular with them. The job description is “parent them” not “please them”.

“Be a loving leader, not a critical boss. Look how kind history is to world leaders who take a firm stand on doing what is right, even though it might mean being unpopular at the time.”

She recommends setting consistent limits and watching your tone of voice when you speak to your children.

“How we talk to our children is how they will one day talk to themselves. We are the voice in our children’s heads. If we take a moment and pause, we can have a delivery we’re proud of. It’s a muscle we can develop.”

Berman says we should discipline from “our highest place” — which never involves shouting, hitting or shaming. But she says that parenting is difficult. “Every parent on the planet has had many of those days and moments where they wish they could have done it differently. But where there’s rupture, we follow it with repair.”

So, if you lose your temper or say the wrong thing, you say to your child ‘I’d like to do this over’. “You model for your child that you’re learning too —this strengthens your position as a leader.”

The beauty of parenting, she says, is that it’s never too late to right things.

* Hate Me Now, Thank Me Later, Dr Robin Berman, costs €18.75.