Change what you say and you may be heard

By KATHERINE SNOW SMITH

© St. Petersburg Times, published August 13, 2000

On a recent beach trip with my parents in North Carolina, my father handed me a parenting book titled What Did I Just Say!?!

I joked that I couldn't believe he might be suggesting my parenting skills or my daughter's listening skills needed even an ounce of improvement.

I don't read pop psychology books on child rearing, preferring instead to get guidance from friends, pediatricians, grandparents and shorter magazine articles. But considering I had ranted this book's title to my 3-year-old several times that day, I decided to see what this book had to offer.

I soon realized that What Did I Just Say!?! How New Insights Into Childhood Thinking Can Help You Communicate More Effectively with Your Child (Henry Holt, $23) is co-written by Denis Donovan, a St. Petersburg child and adolescent psychiatrist whom I've previously quoted in this column. He wrote the book with his wife, Deborah McIntyre, a nurse and family therapist.

What Did I Just Say teaches parents to speak a clearer language their children can better understand, relate to and respond to.

Our dialogue is full of empty statements such as "It's not nice to hit Daddy" and "That's not polite." Donovan surmises what goes through the child's mind after hearing this: "So what" or "It's not nice for Daddy to yell at me, either."

But what's worse, he points out, is that the statement is not an order to stop hitting Daddy, just an observation. It makes more sense to say: "Stop hitting me now."

"Are you going to stop it?" is another empty question. "But it is also a statement of adult impotence and powerlessness," he writes. "Why would an adult who can actually control her child's behavior ask that same child if she was going to "stop it'?"

If you offer an explanation for every direction you give your child, you open the door for too much discussion and debate, the book advises.

"No more cookies or you'll get a tummy ache," you say. "But I'll be really careful. Just one more won't give me a tummy ache," the preschooler reasons. If the parent says, "No more cookies," there's no room for discussion. If the child still asks "Why?" Donovan says it's fine to respond with: "Because I said so."

While he endorses no-nonsense parenting, he opposes yelling and spanking.

"When you discipline with anger or, worse yet, rage, your emotion becomes the central focus of the child's behavior. . . . You become the focus of the child's experience, not whatever behavior you're trying to change." So your discipline often results in your defending yourself when your child protests: "You're being mean to me."

Even simple changes in your language can make a difference. Instead of saying "Give those scissors to Mommy right now," your request is more immediate and direct if you say: "Give those scissors to me right now."

If you feel like an ogre always issuing commands, end with a "please" and say them in a nice, matter-of-fact voice.

"You have to have consistency," Donovan said in an interview. "You need to say what you mean and mean what you say."

He points to the "timeout" scenarios many of us know too well. You threaten your child with timeout four times before finally sending him wailing to his room. Once in timeout, he sticks out his tongue, kicks the wall, and complains that his sentence is dumb, not fair, mean, or all of the above.

Donovan tells parents to give "timeout" instantly and often with no warning, promise, discussion or apologies. It should last five seconds, then the child is back in action.

"When you threaten, you train your child not to believe you," he told me. "The purpose (of timeout) is simply to stop the behavior, then reintegrate the child into the activity they should be involved in. Instead, parents get into the massive power struggles."

Children, some sooner and some later, will learn through these many timeouts that there is a consequence for every poor choice they make.

"It's not that they get sick of it," Donovan told me. "It's because only consistency and continuity over time conveys to the child that there is going to be a predictable response to their behavior."

By the way, don't sentence timeouts in the child's bedroom if you want them to enjoy playing or sleeping there.

Parents need to read the whole book to learn a comprehensive strategy and not just pick and choose expressions or tactics, Donovan said. It's not only about parents getting children to listen to them but also how they can listen to and understand their children better.

Donovan wrote of a 4-year-old boy with anger problems and a morbid fear of "bad ducks." His fear of the ducks over his bed resulted in nightly bedtime struggles filled with tears and fruitless reassurances from his parents.

After almost a year, they figured out the boy's fear stemmed from the reconstruction work the family had done on their house after Hurricane Elena.

The air conditioning repairman told the boy there were bad ducts in the house, mostly over his bed.

Good parenting with consistent discipline and effective two-way communication is "good hard work," Donovan said. "But it's no harder than being miserable. People put an immense amount of energy into living in chaos and misery. It takes no more energy to be organized and consistent. It just takes a change of attitudes."

- You can reach me by e-mail at Oliviachar@aol.com; or write Rookie Mom, St. Petersburg Times, PO Box 1121, St. Petersburg, FL 33731; or call (727) 822-7225.

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