Long-Range Parenting Is Best for the Long Run

The other morning I saw a mother studying a book on “positive discipline” while riding the bus to work in downtown Los Angeles. The night before, she explained, her toddler refused to go to bed, her negotiating skills had failed, she resorted to yelling and forced him to bed.

Another passenger, a silver-haired mother of grown children, offered a rueful observation that, in her experience, heavy-handed parenting doesn’t work. She admitted that she controlled her children without ever listening to them. “My children won’t even talk to me now,” she said sadly.

While it is often easier to coerce children into behaving, experts warn parents to beware of what works in the short run and encourage them to consider the long-range results.

Short-range parenting--yelling, spanking, judging, criticizing--can lead to distance and hostility, said Jane Nelsen, a Sacramento-based therapist and author of several age-related books on “positive discipline.”

“These kids either become approval junkies, obeying out of fear, or rebels who get sneaky or defiant. Or they go crazy when they go to college. They never learn any self-reliance or thinking skills,” Nelsen said.

It’s harder, but long-range parenting--compromising, negotiating, talking problems over with a friendly, curious attitude--leads to more independent and responsible children and creates close and trusting relationships.

Perry Good, a Chapel Hill, N.C., parenting author, suggests that parents start early to teach their children to evaluate their own behavior. “I encourage parents to ask children, what kind of family do we want to have?” Then when they misbehave, parents can say, “We all agreed we want to get along in our family. Is hitting your brother helping us to be the happy family we want to be here?”

She also suggests letting children make decisions early and taking time to talk to them about things that aren’t particularly significant--just to let them know they are important.

Experts said parents can avoid knee-jerk reactions by taking a walk or admitting they are too angry to talk calmly. Nelsen said she and a daughter worked out a signal so that when either one of them started to lose it, the other would tap her heart as a reminder that they loved each other.

Kay Curry, a mother of four in Curry, N.C., said controlling techniques she used on her first child stopped working with her second, who began misbehaving and bringing home Ds in the 6th grade. One day, she went in his room, and founding him leaning out the window smoking. Because of several cigarette-related deaths in the family, smoking was expressly forbidden.

“I knew if I talked to him, I would pull out all the stops, berate him, rake him over the coals,” she said. Instead, she said she locked herself in the bathroom, sat on the tub and cried.

When she was calm, she talked to him in ways she had learned from Good, assuring him he would not be punished, seeking to understand his needs and negotiating ways they could be met. Eventually, he said he understood the family rules and would stop smoking and start running.

Her son, now 20 and studying physics in college, hasn’t always made the best decisions, she said. But, she said, they have a “good, solid relationship.”

She learned to let her two younger children work out their own conflicts, she said.

“Children don’t put people who yell and scream in their quality world,” she said. “If you yell and scream, you don’t have a chance.”

* Lynn Smith’s column appears on Sundays. Readers may write to her at the Los Angeles Times, Life & Style, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053 or via e-mail at lynn.smith@latimes.com. Please include a telephone number.