Course Reminds Parents Who’s the Boss at Home

A toddler in a high chair throws a handful of food across the kitchen. Mom slaps the child’s hand, then cleans up the mess. But as soon as she finishes, the next course hits the floor.

The battle is on: slap, toss; slap, toss.

Finally, mom stops slapping and decides to ignore the next toss.

The toddler is disappointed. “Hit me harder, Mommy!” she demands.

Who’s in charge here?

A 16-year-old sleeps through his morning alarm and misses the school bus.

“Why didn’t you wake me?” he asks his parents, who are busy getting ready for work.

Feeling full of guilt, Mom stops to make her son’s breakfast and Dad offers him a ride to school. The boy gets to his first class on time, but both parents are late for work.

Who’s in charge here?

You guessed it. The toddler seeking attention and the teen resisting responsibility are getting just what they want, because they’ve learned which buttons to push to manipulate their parents.

Lee Hachey, a Costa Mesa marriage and family therapist, has heard many frustrated parents talk about situations such as these in his workshops on assertive parenting.

During a six-week course that he repeats regularly, he teaches parents how to win back control--and keep it. In a deep voice that gently commands attention, Hachey offers reassurance along with instruction: “Don’t look at your children as a super-intelligent beings who are out to get you. . . . They’re not monsters. They’re only trying to get their own way. You just have to keep one step ahead of them.”

But that’s not easy to do if you’re not sure where you’re going.

“Many parents come on strong and then back off and let the kids run all over them. Then they get tired of that and become strong again. Then they get afraid the children aren’t going to love them any more and they back off. And they go back and forth,” Hachey said during a recent lecture.

“Children get very confused because they really don’t know what their parents want. It changes from day to day.”

Hachey made it clear at the start of his talk that he was speaking from personal as well as professional experience.

“I had six children of my own and made all kinds of mistakes,” he told a group of 14 parents gathered in his spacious office. “I wish I’d taken a class like this when my kids were small.”

Now that he has the 20-20 vision that comes with hindsight, he believes that effective parenting is more likely to occur in a “democratic family” than in an authoritarian one.

“I told my children too much what to do instead of letting them learn for themselves. They would have done better if I had stepped back more and let them do things their way even when I didn’t agree with it,” he said.

However, Hachey stressed, before it’s safe to loosen the reins, parents must establish enough control to teach their kids how to be responsible.

Generally, he said, children age 10 and under need to be taught, and those older than 10 need to be given opportunities to learn from their own experience.

During the teaching years, he said, it’s best to be forceful without using force. But, he added, for parents raised in authoritarian families themselves, it’s often easier to slap than to talk.

Hachey tries to put parents in a frame of mind to discipline their children with love and compassion rather than with anger and impatience, to reflect on what the world looks like through a child’s eyes.

“Children come into the world feeling like aliens. They look through the bars of the crib and see grown-ups doing all kinds of things they can’t do,” Hachey said. The furniture is too big for them; the language, foreign. “They feel very different, and it’s up to the parents to help them feel like they’re part of the family.”

Attention is what gives children a sense of belonging, Hachey noted. “The problem is that in most families, it’s easier to get negative attention than it is to get positive attention.”

He teaches parents to recognize positive behavior instead of just cracking down on kids when they misbehave. “Catch your kids being good,” he advises.

Hachey also urges parents to set “house rules” and to use reasonable, predictable consequences to enforce them instead of inflicting punishment haphazardly in the heat of anger.

As Hachey put it, “Act--don’t react.”

Punishment--which usually happens “at the scene, off the top of your head”--may get immediate results, but it often backfires later, he cautioned.

“Punishments come back to haunt you in the form of resistant behavior in the early teens,” he said.

The resentment that punishments such as spanking and grounding generate over the years may eventually cause children to seek revenge against their parents, Hachey said.

“They save it up. They wait until they’re big enough and smart enough to challenge their parents, and then all that resentment comes out. And nobody wins because they often get into self-destructive behavior. They fail at school and get into all kinds of deviant behavior to embarrass their parents and get back at them.”

Consequences don’t foster resentment because they can be determined in a calm atmosphere--with the children’s help--before problems arise, Hachey said.

“They should be logical and consistent--and used without put-downs or bias,” he added. “As the child gets older, the best consequence is the one he agrees to--or comes up with himself.”

This kind of participation helps children feel capable. Punishment, however, causes low self-esteem, especially when kids try to get relief through what Hachey called “a display of inadequacy.”

He explained: “A child fakes that he’s stupid, sick, weak or incapable. Often, they convince us that they’re inadequate, and we think, ‘Poor little kid, he can’t do that. I’d better do it for him.’ ”

If a child plays that role long enough, he may grow up believing he really is inadequate, Hachey said.

Parents tend to underestimate their children’s abilities, he said.

“I try to jolt parents by asking, ‘Is your child brain-damaged?’ If not, he will learn if you let him.

“Kids love to be responsible. You’ve heard them say, ‘I’d rather do it myself!’ The more they do for themselves, the more they feel they belong like everybody else. It’s our job as parents to know when to let go. You probably can let go a lot sooner than you think.”

For example, he said, with guidance, 6-year-olds are capable of getting themselves ready for school and making their own breakfasts, and 10-year-olds are capable of buying their own clothing.

Children over 10 can also do their own laundry, and they shouldn’t have to be reminded to do their homework. And by age 12, they should no longer need a bedtime, Hachey says.

Given this kind of freedom and responsibility, Hachey said, most children will learn to get ready for school on time, manage their money, get enough sleep and get the grades they want. And their self-esteem will grow with each accomplishment.

“One of the goals of parenting is to teach self-responsibility, and that will never occur if you keep doing for the child what he’s capable of doing himself,” Hachey said.

Among the parents who listened with some surprise to Hachey’s suggestion that young children be given more responsibility were Patty and Steve Baugh of Costa Mesa, who have attended a number of Hachey’s lectures.

Steve said he was “blown away” by the idea of a 6-year-old making breakfast and a 10-year-old buying clothes when he first heard Hachey speak some time ago, but now he’s convinced that he was indeed underestimating what his own children could do.

His 4-year-old son, Warren, seems to enjoy the new responsibilities he has been given since his mom and dad started taking parenting classes. Now he helps load the dishwasher, gets his own cereal out of the cupboard in the morning and puts his dirty clothes in the laundry.

“That’s pretty good for a 4-year-old,” Steve says proudly, “and I’m sure he could do much more.”

Steve said he and Patty keep signing up for Hachey’s classes because “you can’t be too educated about parenting,” and that they hope to take steps now that will keep their kids out of trouble as they get older.

Besides, he added, “it’s so easy to let your kids work you. I feel more in control now.”

So does Patty. She says she used to do a lot more yelling when her son and 2-year-old daughter, Rachel, misbehaved. “I’m more consistent now--and calmer. I’m teaching the kids consequences so it’s not always me deciding what to do and being the bad person.”

For example, she said, Warren knows that if he gets rough with his sister, he has to sit on the stairs for a brief “time out.” Patty no longer has to yell and pull the two children apart; Warren just looks up at his mom when he knows he’s been caught and heads for the stairs.

Patty said she’s grateful to be able to approach parenting with more confidence--and preparation. “Kids get control because parents are too busy to see what’s coming and aren’t prepared to react,” she said. “Now I’m able to stay a couple of steps ahead of the kids instead of waiting for things to get out of control.”