Effective Parenting Principles

The habits of highly effective parents

Why do some parents seem to be more successful than others? Some parents have an approach, a style, or attitudes that help their children grow in a healthy, robust manner, even when they have considerable challenges. Other approaches, styles, and attitudes are, more often than not, associated with children who continue to have difficulties and acquire even greater challenges as they move through childhood. I want to summarize some of the approaches and attitudes that parents can bring to family life that will enable their children not only to overcome challenges but also to become warmer, more nurturing, positive, flexible, assertive, and creative as they grow older.

Principle 1: Be Realistic About Parenthood
Sometimes the best you can do is less than your "best." One of the first challenges that parents face, especially parents with more than one child, is how to find enough time to keep their children and spouse emotionally nourished, meet their own needs, contribute financially to the family - and still get some sleep! For most busy families, time is the enemy.

Parents who have achieved a measure of career and material success often are confronted with a shocking realization. For the first time in their lives, they face a situation where it is suddenly impossible to get an A or A+ in every subject at home and on the job. Just a few years earlier, in college or at their first job, the harder they worked and the more they strived, the better they did. Praise from their families, their bosses, and even their spouses, reinforced their own sense of accomplishment. Getting an A on a Shakespeare exam, after pulling an all-nighter, was a cause for celebration and pride. A brilliant marketing report that took time that otherwise would have been spent on a weekend at the beach but drew the admiration of their colleagues was also a source of enormous satisfaction.

But now let's shift the scene: that marketing report is due, but you have three children, all under age ten, who are clamoring for your attention. Your husband or wife is complaining that there has been little time for talk or real intimacy. As you look ahead at the next forty-eight hours, you realize that there is no way you can have special time with each child, take some relaxed time for intimacy with your spouse, and win an A+ on the marketing report. You face what seems to be a harsh choice: you can elect to get an A+ on that report, but get an F from your spouse and children. Or you can get an A+ from your children and your spouse, but rate an F on your marketing report and perhaps even run the risk of getting fired. Let me suggest a third alternative: you can try to fit everyone into some kind of reasonable balance and get Bs from your children, spouse, and boss.

What? Deliberately strive for only a B?

Most people, as they enter the excitement of marriage and the fulfillment of parenthood, rarely confront this reality. Yet if a parent is to be fair to everyone, and not end up neglecting either children, spouse, or employer, she may have to consciously strive to do only a good-enough job - perhaps for the first time in her life. In real life, being a healthy, nurturing parent to our children sometimes means that, depending on family and work circumstances, you may have to deliberately stop short of your best in order to ensure that your spouse and children get their fair share.

In many families, this is not the issue. Instead, parents may need to put family life and work life in some reasonable priority in relation to hobbies and relaxation. Or the pressing issue may have to do with reducing wasted time or becoming more efficient in work or household chores. Sometimes the issue is simply finding ways to spend time alone with each child and one's spouse. Do you drill your second-grader on his spelling so he'll get into Harvard? Or do you enjoy the castle he's building and leave the spelling until the weekend? You know what I recommend! Similarly, after a busy week, do you and your spouse go to the big party given by an investor in your firm? Or do you steal a few hours to be alone together?

Whether these kinds of decisions about the use of time are simple or complex, the key challenge here is to anticipate, to look at the true opportunities of parenthood, which include opportunities for real closeness. That requires time and consistency. You need to take an honest look at that, alongside your other responsibilities and pleasures. Anticipate and plan, and don't shortchange the very reason for much of your hard work: providing your family with what they need.

Principle 2: Give Your Child the Most Precious Gift of All - Your Time (Floor Time)
Real nurturing, which has nothing to do with money, presents, books, or expensive schools, involves a much more distinctly human commodity - your ongoing supportive and empathetic availability. Not only is being there the essence of parenting, but it is also the foundation on which you can build all the rest - the skills you teach, the expectations you build, the limits you must set. By "ongoing," I mean daily - not weekends only, or two nights a week - but every day (with an exception here and there).

The best way to spend this time together is what I have described earlier as floor time. This is the special unstructured time that you set aside for yourself and each child. During this time, about thirty minutes a day at a minimum, you get down on the floor with your child, trying to "march to your child's drummer." Obviously, with an older child, you might not literally be on the floor. But the goal, no matter where you are or what you are doing, is to follow your child's lead and tune in to whatever interests your child. The idea behind floor time is to build up warm, trusting relations in which shared attention, interaction, and communication are occurring on your child's terms.

Sometimes when I explain this concept to parents, they insist that they are already providing a great deal of nurturing. Twice a year, or sometimes even as many as four or five times a year, the family goes on a wonderful vacation where they spend a lot of time together and have great fun. Countless families, when I have asked them about the daily "chicken soup" nurturing part of life, respond with descriptions of idyllic vacations and the closeness they achieve. When I inquire further, I find that sometimes the mother and father's relationship can indeed be sustained by these interludes. But when I talk to the children in such families, I usually hear a different tale.

"We had a great vacation," they say, "and Mommy and Daddy were both relaxed and we all had fun. But I never see them when I need them - when I'm frustrated with my school-work, when my friends are mean to me, when I get scared and worried, when I feel lonely. That's when I need them."

One child said, with a sigh of resignation, "I guess I can learn to live without them." Interestingly, this child's mother was insistent about the extraordinary amount of nurturing in the family. She described the fact that they had dinner together as a family at least one night a week and did a weekend activity on Saturday and Sunday. But she also described a very busy week, during which she got home at about 7 o'clock at night and her husband got home at 8:00 or 8:30. There was time only for some brief help with homework, a quick bite to eat, showers, and bed. The mother proudly pointed out that this was far better than all her neighbors, who didn't have even a single family dinner together during the week and didn't do things together on weekends. Further, she noted that many of the other fathers traveled during the week. She and her husband were home - albeit late - almost every evening. This mother also remarked that perhaps the standards had changed since when I was growing up; in those days, people expected there to be some family time each and every evening. But now that just wasn't the norm anymore. Yet her son still felt lonely and depressed, resigned to "living without them."

Some children, perhaps, can cope with this apparently changing standard, which seems to occur most in fast-paced, expensive cities, where many families have two working parents who arrive home past dinnertime. Our challenging children, however (and even many children who don't have these challenges, I should add), can't get along in this new schedule. We need to make sure we listen to them as we as parents redefine our expectations for ourselves.

In recent years, there has been a tendency to downgrade that part of parenting that children need most: a parent's nourishing availability. Depending on their personality and particular challenges, some children need this to an exceptional degree.

A touching experience I had with one family speaks to this point. Both parents were busy professionals, and their daughter fit the description of a self-absorbed child. Her motor tone was low and there were slight receptive language problems. Thin and frail, she was a sweet, almost angelic little girl who could easily become withdrawn - repetitively playing with some toys and hardly uttering a sound. She rarely made any demands. I saw her initially because of her language delay and tendency to withdraw from other children. With a rigorous and energetic program, she quickly became more outgoing, happy, and verbal, and showed that, behind her apathy and tendency to become self-absorbed, she was a bright and creative child.

She made steady progress until her parents decided to move. With her parents absorbed in the packing and unpacking, she began to regress. They brought her in to see me, alarmed that she had retreated so severely. When I saw her, I was also very concerned. All of our progress had been undone. She was turned inward, muttering to herself - now it was hard even to get her to look in my direction, let alone talk to me. Her parents reported that, at home, she was moping, hardly speaking, and seemed only to babble incoherently at her dolls.

I asked the parents to participate in a "family vacation" in their new home. The father was about to go on a three-week business trip. I asked him to cancel the trip, even though it would be very difficult for him to rearrange his plans. He needed to provide a consistent and a high degree of floor time to woo and re-engage his daughter, intensifying a pattern that we had used originally to pull the little girl back into the world. I asked her mother to ignore the unpacking and her professional work for a few weeks to participate in this "family vacation."

The family followed the suggestions and, three weeks later, returned to my office. I was amazed to see their daughter not only back to her sparkling, enthusiastic new self, but also being even more verbal and assertive and sophisticated in her language than she had been even before she had regressed. Her parents beamed with pride, relieved that their daughter's regression had only been temporary. But now they faced a real dilemma. They saw the power that they had in their hands and within their own nurturing capacities. The father was confronted now with taking the trip that he had put off. The mother was planning on getting back into her own professional activities, as well as fixing up the new house. But they both said that they had never thought that their daughter could go this far so fast. "She's learning at a faster rate than she was even before the move," said her father. "We don't know what to do now that we see how she responds to more time with us."

This father's job still called for frequent travel, and the family was going to have a difficult time deciding whether to resume their old ways and risk slowing down their daughter's progress. They wondered whether they should somehow try to maintain this rather exceptional growth spurt they had created with their own warmth and availability.

What would you do in their situation?

The point of this story is that when children have special challenges, choices are not going to be easy. While a family vacation can't go on forever, parents must become aware of the potential power they have and the choices that are possible. In that way, they can weigh all the factors and make an intelligent choice.

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