by contributor Matt Winkler

Bad Cop:         “[Child], I thought we agreed that you would [perform an action].”

Child:               “Stop micromanaging me! I’m not perfect, OK?”

Good Cop:       “That’s OK this time. But you need to improve, understand?”

Child:               “Fine.” (Child exits, stage left)

Good Cop:       “[Bad Cop], you need to pick your battles. You’re pushing him/her away.”

Bad Cop:         “All three of us agreed that he/she would [perform an action]. Why am I the only one who expects accountability? How else is he/she going to learn responsibility?”

Good Cop:       “You have to be more flexible. It’s not easy being [a number] years old.”

Bad Cop:         “Easy isn’t the point. The child who is always carried never learns to walk. It’s not unreasonable to expect him/her to [perform an action] at this age.”

Good Cop:       “Just let it go.”

Reading the comments on earlier posts sparked a connection between Brian Hoover’s A-B-C chart and the Good Cop, Bad Cop paradigm. The scene above has played out many times during my marriage, invariably ending with me (Bad Cop) in the dog house. My wife and I agree on the laws of our household, but she tends toward selective enforcement, so I try to make my arrests when the good cop is not on duty. This treats the symptoms, but not the disease. How to remedy the performance gap between my wife’s noble legislation and her wimpy adjudication?

Let’s examine the dynamics at play in the scene above, according to the A-B-C formula, which “essentially allows a behavior analyst to identify the causes and outcomes of a given behavior.”

Child:

Antecedent – A three-way agreement that Child would [perform an action]

Behavior – Failed to clean her room, take out the garbage, do his homework, etc.

Consequence – Busted by Bad Cop, absolved by Good Cop

Bad Cop:

Antecedent – Child failed to [perform an action]

Behavior – Verbal confrontation with Child, to hold him/her accountable.

Consequence – Undermined by Good Cop.  Accountability compromised.

Good Cop:

Antecedent – Bad Cop confronting Child

Behavior – Intercede on behalf of Child

Consequence – long term Bad Cop / Child relationship rescued. Accountability incidentally compromised in the process.

Now, what is the function of these behaviors? Brian informs us “that the vast majority…of the behaviors we encounter fall into one of two categories: escape or attention-seeking.” Let’s assume a healthy family dynamic, and the child is simply trying to escape the obligation to [perform an action]. The best explanation for the Bad Cop behavior is child rearing (a combination of duty and altruism?). The Good Cop seeks immediate escape from conflict.

In our household of hair trigger, teenage dramatics, simply broaching a topic qualifies as conflict. My wife’s maternal instinct is to protect her child and restore harmony, so she rushes in to oppose me. In the past, I’ve either folded or held my ground, but I’ve discovered a new tactic that is far more productive. Instead of engaging my wife in a struggle over the issue at hand, I ask, “What would Supernanny say?” This converts the external conflict with me into an internal struggle with her parenting conscience, personified by Jo Frost.

I recommend this approach to other dads who find themselves accused of extremism when taking a centrist position. Rather than arguing your case, just summon an expert witness – one whom your spouse respects. Conjure this wise and imaginary arbiter, and allow your wife to play out the struggle mentally, potentially changing her own mind, and certainly sparing you another trip to the dog house.

by contributor Brian Hoover.

Editor’s Note: Please take a moment to read this longer form piece on child behavior. As a parent, when you think critically about how you respond to your children’s less-than-ideal behavior, you can help reinforce the good kind and reduce the bad kind. Take a few minutes for this, you’ll be glad you did.

Like approximately 900,000 other people over the past two-plus months, I have run across a video on YouTube called “Ellie’s amazing vocabulary pt. 2” or something to that effect. In it, a toddler (Ellie, we’ll assume) is sitting at her high chair with a sippy cup and a bib, rocking a hoodie; a poppy Modest Mouse tune jangles faintly in the background. The clip only runs twenty-seven seconds, but Ellie doesn’t waste a one, uttering a certain two-word phrase that means “the heck with it” (but just a tad saltier) a total of nine times. On screen, she’s a natural. Her diction is fantastic. She glows as she delivers her line directly to the camera, blue eyes bright and wide and searching.

Ellie’s father can be heard from immediately behind the camera: “Don’t say that anymore, okay?” She waves him off with a frustrated whinny and then glares right back at him. She hits him with her line again. And again. And again. Dad warns, “We don’t say that anymore.” And Ellie drops it again. “Ellie—no.” But he ought to concede. He’s lost this one already. She gets one more in before the video cuts off.

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We have a useful tool in my field[1] that helps us determine the function of behavior: the A-B-C Chart. “A-B-C” in this instance stands for Antecedent-Behavior-Consequence; the chart essentially allows a behavior analyst to identify the causes and outcomes of a given (undesirable, usually) behavior so that a plan can be formed to modify (or eliminate) it.

A couple of strictly hypothetical scenarios to help illustrate the point:

Scenario 1: For homework, Roger has a color-by-numbers worksheet. When I ask him to come sit at the table to begin his task, Roger backhands the box of crayons off the table and across the room, scattering them to all corners of the room. I tell Roger he needs to pick up the crayons and put them back in the box.

Scenario 2: As I record data in Roger’s logbook, Roger is trying hard to open a large container that has several of his favorite toys in it. He can’t do it by himself, but knows that if he needs help, all he needs to do is ask me. Roger growls and kicks at and shakes the container as I continue to fill out my paperwork; ultimately he engages in some sustained shouting and turns over a chair. I put down my pen and intervene; Roger stops shouting.

In Scenario 1, the antecedent is my placing a demand on Roger: “Come to the table, Roger, thereby leaving whatever fun thing you’re doing, and do your homework instead, which, I’m going to guess, is near the bottom of your list of things you’d like to do, if it makes the list at all, which, I’m going to guess, it does not.”  The behavior is smacking the crayons across the room, and the immediate consequence is that Roger then has to clean up his mess. In Scenario 2, the antecedent is that Roger wants a toy that he cannot gain access to by himself. The behavior is an honest-to-goodness tantrum, and the consequence is that I come to see just what the deuce is going on here.

So what is the function of the behavior in each scenario?  It might help to know that the vast majority, by which I mean quite nearly all, of the behaviors we encounter fall into one of two categories: escape or attention-seeking. In the first scenario, Roger’s swiping the crayons off the table is an unmistakable attempt to escape the demand. In the second, his tantrum, is designed to get my attention, as evidenced by the fact that it stops once he has it.

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The reaction that Ellie is looking for in her father’s viral fame vehicle is, pretty obviously, I think, laughter. It isn’t difficult to imagine her antics having resulted in laughter once before—she says, “F—k it,” Dad reinforces it with attention (and the best kind of attention at that—laughter and the video camera!) and so she says, “F—k it” again.

But, now, Poor Ellie!  She must be thinking, Wait a minute—where’s my laugh?  What’s with the stern reproach?  This isn’t right. I know—I’ll say it again, and this time, it’ll work like it did before!

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Back to Roger. The “C” portion of the A-B-C Chart is perhaps the most important—what happens in response to a behavior. The consequence is what reinforces the behavior for better or for worse (and ultimately determines whether you’ll see that behavior again). This is worth spending a minute on.

In Scenario 1, the consequence for Roger’s swiping the crayons off the table is that he has to pick up the crayons. But if the behavior was aimed at avoiding his homework, then Roger can fly a big “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED” banner above any aircraft carrier in his fleet, ’cause, clearly, he ain’t doing any color-by-numbers worksheet while he’s picking two hundred crayons up off the floor. And in Scenario 2, going all Hulk on the furniture does exactly what it was supposed to do: divert me from what I was doing so I could pay attention to him.

If Roger is picking crayons up off the floor, isn’t he just stalling? Isn’t he winning the battle here because he’s not, in fact, doing his color-by-numbers worksheet? And the tantrum—it was designed to get my attention, and sure enough, I’ve set down my pen and am now dealing with Cyclonic Action Roger.

It’s like my dad used to tell me all those years ago when he taught me how to pitch: you’ve got to make sure you’re following through. The consequence of Roger’s throwing the crayons all over the floor must be two-fold: 1) Throwing your crayons on the floor is an unacceptable response to my asking you to come and do your homework, and so you’re going to need to clean them up; and 2) But, guess what! You still have to do your color-by-numbers sheet first! The consequence of Roger’s tantrum is that I attend to him, but it’s all about the details here. Attending to Roger’s tantrum by opening the container and giving him access to his toys? Bad. Attending to Roger’s tantrum by letting him know that I won’t tolerate his violence, that he needs to restore the furniture to order, and, when he is calm enough to do so, ask me for my help? Better. You’ve got to make sure there’s a meaningful consequence, and you have to make sure you follow through with it.

Here is the part of behaviorism that every parent, guardian, and caregiver, bar none, needs to understand: If the consequence of Roger’s tantrum is that I get his toys out of the box for him (without first taking steps to redirect the behavior as I mention above), then I have just taught Roger that pitching a fit is an effective way for him to get his toys. If the consequence of Roger’s chucking a box full of crayons across the room is that he gets out of doing his homework, then I have just taught Roger that he won’t have to do his work if he makes a huge mess. If your daughter caterwauls in the checkout line because she wants a Kit Kat bar, and you cave and buy her one because it’s embarrassing and you just don’t want to have to hear it anymore, you better believe she’ll remember that if crying worked once, it’d probably work again.

And if Ellie got a great laugh out of Dad by saying “F—k it” that one time, well, why wouldn’t she just see if she couldn’t get a repeat result?

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Lest you think I’m some kind of killjoy, or that I am convinced that I’m this great father myself, let me add this: I think the Ellie video is absolutely hilarious. I’ve watched it a dozen times at least, and it gets me every time. I completely understand her dad’s impulse to get the episode on camera for posterity.

I’ll take my mea culpa one step further: my wife and I have been anxious for our daughter to reach the stage of her language development where she repeats everything we say; we figured there would be a very entertaining month or so where we could make her say all sorts of distasteful things without lasting consequences.

I realize now, in light of the Ellie video and what has very suddenly started happening our own home, that this is folly. At seventeen months, Leslie has what we have been told is a remarkable vocabulary. Among the ways she augments it is by listening to her mother and I as we talk, isolating specific words of interest, and then repeating them. The rapidity of this process has increased by a factor of ten, it seems; she learns new words, plural, on a daily basis, and often with only a few exposures. The word of the day? “Disaster.” As in, “They’re saying North Carolina had several hundred tornadoes over the weekend—what a disaster,” or, “Can you load the dishwasher? The kitchen is a disaster,” or, “If you don’t take a nap this afternoon, you’re going to be a disaster.” I guess it’s a word we’ve thrown around a bit, and Leslie has caught on. She stands in the middle of the living room, surrounded by what looks like every toy on earth, shrugging and saying, “Disaster!” (It actually sounds like “disasshole,” but we’ll leave that one alone for now.)

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There is also something to be said for picking your battles. Sometimes it is just easier to buy your kid the Kit Kat and call it even. I totally get that. I’ve had my cave-ins, for sure, and I’ve reinforced behaviors I almost instantly wished I hadn’t. It happens.

Ellie’s dad wrote a lengthy introduction to the clip on YouTube, defending his parenting from the internet trolls and shedding some light on the circumstances that led to his eighteen-month-old’s rant. In it he states, “If I were a perfect parent (and who is?) I should have ignored it.”  (Correct. That, we call putting the behavior “on extinction”—but that’s a lesson for another day.)  He concludes by saying that there are many ways to raise a successful family, but that “Love is the only requirement.”

And I’m inclined to agree with that.

But knowing my A-B-Cs has been a big help so far, too.

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* Since 2003, I have worked as a behavior therapist for children on the autistic spectrum. I want to stress, however, that the behavioral concepts I discuss herein can be applied to just about anything on earth that exhibits behavior.

by regular contributor Chris Belden

My wife is in a tizzy because we’re not sending our daughter, Francesca, to private kindergarten next fall. For the past three years, from ages two to four, Frankie has attended a local private pre-school, which has been expensive but worthwhile. She learned how to use the potty at two, memorized the alphabet at three, knows numbers one through one hundred, and is now, at four and a half, reading simple books. She’s made good friends and has thrived in a tightly structured environment. When I was four, I went to a nursery school where we ate graham crackers, took naps, and listened to Bozo the Clown records.

So why are we making the switch?

Her tuition for this past year was $13K, a head-spinning amount that we felt was justified by Frankie’s progress—and by the $13K gift her grandmother gave us as an estate tax strategy. Next year’s tuition at the same school will be $24K. Twenty-four thousand dollars—for kindergarten! No matter how I look at it, I cannot justify that obscene amount. Maybe—maybe—if our local public schools were below average, I would consider it; but our public schools are in fact above average.

My wife agrees that the private school tuition is ridiculous. She recognizes that the public school kindergarten has worked well for the neighborhood kids, all of whom we like and admire. And yet she has this nagging feeling that we’re hurting our child’s chances of thriving in the world by pulling her from private school. She worries—understandably—that Frankie will be bored, that she’ll be academically ahead of her classmates, that the class size will be larger. I worry about those things, too. But I also believe in the public school system, which is under attack from all sides—from self-serving politicians; from parents hoodwinked into thinking all public schools are less effective than all private schools; even from artists like Davis Guggenheim, whose pro-charter school film Waiting for Superman neglects to mention that charter schools more often than not underperform compared to public schools*—and I believe it’s important to take a stand. It’s a proven fact that, when “affluent” children (and I use that term loosely in our case—we’re affluent only in the sense that, if we scrimped and saved, we could actually afford to send Frankie to private school) attend public schools, it has a positive affect on all the students—upper and upper-middle class kids provide a positive example for kids who have fewer advantages at home. Just think if every middle and upper class parent sent their kids to public schools, how much better those schools would be!

Then there is the practical side of the argument: we’re paying property taxes for this public school, so why not send our kid there? It’s also good to be a financially responsible parent. The money we save on school may pay for a new car, or a nice vacation, or repairs to the house.

I like the private school Frankie has attended for three years. I like the teachers and I like the parents, whose Range Rovers and Lexi (plural of Lexus) I’ve weaved past in the parking lot in my old Toyota Matrix. But I won’t miss this culture of “My kid is better because she attends this tony school” or “This is the only way to make sure my kid gets into [Ivy League school of your choice].” I don’t think that I’m shortchanging my daughter be moving her to public school. I’m not in a tizzy. Frankie is going to do just fine.

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* A 2009 Stanford study showed that while 17% of charter school students performed better at math than their public school counterparts, 37% performed worse.

A funny-for-a-moment site to check out today is “Too Big For Stroller.”

We’ve all seen those kids who are 7 or 8 and still riding in a stroller. I’m sure sometimes they’re for the little siblings and are co-opted by a tired older brother or sister–it happens. But then I wonder, are some of these strollers actually for them?

by regular contributor Brian Hoover

“So who’s going to be the disciplinarian?”my sister wanted to know. As if this was a faraway decision my wife and I wouldn’t have to make until our daughter was a surly adolescent. The greasy plastic carcasses of our take-out dinner glistened in the dim mood lighting, and a few empty bottles—a Pinot Grigio and a couple of IPAs—stood at odd intervals around the table. Baby monitor static whirred from somewhere amid the mess. A rare grown-ups night in with my sister and her husband, who’d driven north five states to spend the weekend satisfying a serious niece-jones.

My wife testified with a raised hand that she would fill this role, obviously, end of story.

Now, hang on, I said, let’s be reasonable here.

Wasn’t our parenting plan one of consistency? Of communication? Wasn’t our kid a pretty good kid so far because her parents were on the same page? Did she get away with certain things when only one of us had the watch? Did her parents ever overrule each other?

And for God’s sake, wasn’t I the one with eight years of professional experience as a behavior therapist?

My wife conceded, but hypothesized that she’d probably end up playing bad cop to my good. She seemed resigned to this point. Leslie, she believes, is daddy’s girl, through and through.

But I bristled at this as well. Why couldn’t we try to be good cop, good cop? There was no reason to believe, as I saw it, that either of us was deficient in the ability to support or to enforce, to establish limits and stand by them. Neither of us held an edge in our capacity to guide, rebuke, or love.

My daughter is a good kid. Of course, she has her moments (as any sixteen-month-old will)—like when she looks right at you and lets the milk dribble out of her mouth, or the increasing selectivity of her hearing, or her ongoing affinity for the word “no”—but my wife and I feel we lucked out. We really got ourselves a good one.

And she’s a good one not because of me, God knows, and not because of my wife.

She’s a good one because of me and my wife.

Potty training is hard to do. And it’s even harder to keep those kids on the learning curve during a road trip (who isn’t scared of rest stop toilets)?

So I love what these enterprising parents did to keep their kid’s eyes on the prize. (Even though some readers might get bent out of shape because of the downhill slope and the efficacy of parking brakes.)

Note how her arm is raised is Victory!