Gratitude & Kindness (12 page)

Do your best to be firm, assertive, and share all that you know about the good that can come from maximizing gratitude and kindness. Hopefully, the care and compassion from the other adults in your child’s life will shine through to inspire change that parallels your own.

It may be frustrating, but even if you slowly inch towards your goal, your children and family will be in better shape than they were before.

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Believe in Gratitude and Your Kids Will Too

“When you believe in a thing, believe in it all the way, implicitly and unquestionable.”

[Walt Disney]

These gratitude and kindness strategies come from years of extensive clinical research, and we have seen their success rates among parents that have approached us for help. We have found that, if you fully believe in gratitude, so will your children. A blast of daily gratitude by speaking it and doing it will combat any child’s tendency to be entitled.

The good news is that entitlement is a learned behavior, which means that it can be unlearned and replaced by positive ways of behaving in a loving family and community.

Notes from the Real Parenting Lab
on Changing Behaviors

One family we worked with really affirmed for us the power of practicing gratitude-boosting actions. They came to us reporting that their preteen children were acting out in disrespectful, self-centered ways. Once we began to understand the family dynamics, it became clear that the entitled behavior the children displayed mirrored the parents’ behavior towards one another.

The parents admitted to screaming matches with verbal attacks, insults, constant belittling of each other. The children described feeling so angry about their parents’ behavior that without realizing it, they would make hostile
demands and talk and act in disrespectful ways themselves. It is no wonder the parents came to us so discouraged and saying their children would never back down.

Once we began to help them connect their thoughts, feelings, and behavior, the parents realized they were modeling the opposite of kindness, care, and empathy. They also became aware that their behavior towards each other was completely devoid of gratitude. At this point, we realized that movement toward change became a possibility.

We did many things with this family, from gratitude letters to intensive coaching on how to implement gratitude dialogue
(see Appendix 3 on page 181)
successfully. The gratitude dialogue was profound as they described their efforts toward mindful appreciation of each other. It took months of diligent daily action on everyone’s part, but eventually the contempt began to melt away.

The children began to understand that the root of their demanding behavior was actually to have more family harmony. When we last met with the family, they reported more respectful interactions and that they were feeling more connected with each other.

Three Things We Know about Changing Behaviors

Before we can summarize and send you off, we need to put our academic hats back on to remind you of some of what we know about change. We psychologists have been in the business of change since the inception of our field, and we want to make sure that you make use of our colleagues’ research, in addition to our own clinical experience, about how best to make sustainable changes.

ONE.

The first level of knowledge about change focuses on our thought process. Let’s talk about the Einstellung Effect,
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which looks at people’s tendency to persist with the same approach to solving a problem whether or not the approach is effective. Yes: we all do this. The old adage of “try, try, try again” only succeeds if we do something different. Each time we say the same thing to our kids—“Stop whining to get me to say “yes”,”—and then we go ahead and give them what they want, we are repeating ourselves ineffectively, and causing no change in our behavior or that of our children.

The factors that help us to change our problem-solving strategy are two-fold
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:

1.
When we perceive that family dynamics are changing from an old way of being to a new way, a family might state:

2. Additio
nally, we see the old problem itself from a new perspective, or see the challenge as a different or new challenge.

• Example:
  Nicole finds her teen daughter is self-centred
  

  Old Perspective	New Perspective
  My child is selfish because she does not express gratitude when I do special favors for her and just demands more favors every day. I need to make her less selfish. I should ask her therapist to work on making her less selfish.	My child needs structure, examples, and cues to show her gratitude appropriately. I need to help my child to understand empathy for others and empathy for me. I need to change my behavior so that I avoid rewarding or punishing demanding statements, and only reward a kind tone of voice and reasonable requests.

In the above example, the problem of the ungrateful, demanding child is the same, but under the Old Perspective it is expressed in a way that focuses on a negative label of the child. It does not appreciate the impact that the parent has on the child’s behavior and seeks solutions which are not proven to work, such as “making a child be different”, or looking to solutions outside the home as the primary agent of change.

In the New Perspective, we can see that the challenge is broken down into specific elements that are causing the demanding behavior and lack of appreciation in the child. We can see that when we look at all the elements of the problem (i.e., the lack of understanding of the child, the
lack of modeling in the home, the behavior of the parent that keeps the problem going), the original problem is no longer so complex and is fixable.

What we know, is that we will tend to continue to parent in the same way that we always have, unless we make a conscious effort to do and see things differently.

Imagine a corporate executive looking at last year’s company accounts and realizing that, in order to improve in the next fiscal year, some outdated operations must be rethought. Or a schoolteacher recognizing that this year’s curriculum or class projects need to be adapted to a changing social environment to keep them relevant to the kids in the class.

Could your approach be reasonably conceptualized as an era that has passed, a parenting style that has become extinct, or a chapter that has ended? We encourage you to look at the current problems in your household environment —the challenges with your child’s attitude, behavior, or emotions, and your own challenges—from a different perspective. Can you switch up what you do and create a new set of solutions that make more positive impact?

TWO.

The second level of knowledge about change focuses on the
emotional
variables that both get change going and maintain change. What we know is: both strong
negative emotion
and
optimism
are key emotional elements in successful change.

Whether you believe the popular sayings that sometimes people need to “hit rock bottom” or that there is “no pain, no gain” in relation to doing something new, we do know that more change happens when we experience strong negative emotion.
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Our behavior changes are more efficient when we experience a spike in upset, anger, distress, or another emotional state. In business, a team’s productivity will increase before a deadline. A serious diagnosis (heart disease or Type II diabetes) can prompt radical, lifestyle changes.

For your family, we would like you to find motivation for change through picturing the happiness and peace you will experience once you have made all the switches and taken all the necessary actions to increase gratitude and kindness in your home. On the other hand, if your motivation is waning or your consistency is wobbly, consider what you may need to do to strengthen your determination to change. We do not want you to think about how angry you were the last time your 15-year-old showed you a sassy attitude, videotape your 8-year-old’s temper tantrum to watch again and again, or to reread the self-centered birthday wish-list your 12-year-old wrote. We want you to take a look at the seeds that you have been planting that will grow into adult entitlement, or the weeds that are blocking out your child’s ability to be kind, empathic adults. If nothing else will kick-start a change in your parent
ing and modeling, then envisage:

• The social problems
  
• The self-esteem problems
  
• The career problems
  
• The parenting problems when your children will face when they themselves become parents
  

that will occur if your child grows up to be selfish and all about “me, me, me, more, more, more”. We don’t want you to worry yourself into a state of panic, but the reality is, everything you do now leads to the success or failure of your children. Kids do not just grow out of entitlement. They need our help, and they need it now.

Okay—enough doom and gloom: what about optimism? How many times during the reading of this book have you thought to yourself, “My kids will never go for that”; “I don’t think I have the strength to do that”, or, “This will never work”? Come on—be honest.

We know the techniques we talk about in this book work. If you need to read and reread it, look into the sources that we quote, make a PLAN, make a new PLAN, and then make another before your begin the change process, that is great: do it. You need to gather up an attitude and an approach that is filled with optimism. We know that change happens better when there is optimism for success
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—and when the optimism is not blind.
Gee, if I just wish really hard for grateful kids, turn in a circle, and do a fancy dance, I bet my wish will come true!
Optimism should be based on good, solid evidence, planning, goal-setting, and a measured and consistent course of action and belief in change.

THREE.

The third level of understanding that we have about change has to do with
process
, or rather,
how
the change takes place. The elements of this section make good common sense, but we want you to know that there is also some solid research behind what we are saying as well.

Multi-level approaches to problems yield better long-term change
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. Change of language, tone, AND parenting techniques—not just long-winded lectures on the topic of gratitude— and consistency of the interventions lead to long-term change
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The following examples are a good place to begin:

• Discussing gratitude every week over a number of years
  
• Living by the needs-over-wants philosophy through the developmental levels of your children
  
• Consistent engagement in community volunteer work
  

A weekend-long extravaganza of action and communication— although a good start—is not going to do it.

A group of our colleagues grabbed our attention with their research on buy-in to change. Dodge
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and colleagues have been working on how motivation, or buy-in to change differs for some—based on how much choice the individual has regarding what to change first. From our perspective, we have found this to be the case with many children. Children seem to have a higher cooperation level with change (whether it is a family recycling program, exercise program, or clean-up schedule) when the parents set the goals and standards but the children have a choice in how or when the goals and standards are put in to play.

So, while working on our gratitude and kindness-boosting program, once you have decided what should be worked on first, be sure to include input from your children into your plan
(Appendix 2)
.

For example, if your plan were to encompass the following,
ask your child(ren) to vote on where they would like the family’s
focus to begin:

• Eye rolling
  
• Poor language
  
• Whining
  
• Begging after Mom/Dad has already said “no”
  
• Differentiating between wants and needs
  

If you and your family are game to try this, depending on the age and enthusiasm of your child, go ahead and make up a contract that has all the bells and whistles: signatures, stamps, family coat of arms, etc., to make it official. Remember, though, parents hold the responsibility to monitor and follow through with consequences if the contract is broken.

A Model of Change

And finally, we need to make comment on our motivation for change for, of course, without motivation, nothing will change in any of our homes. Prochaska and colleagues
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have researched and written extensively on health-encouraging behavior change. They began with positive change for addictive behaviors, before moving onto diet, exercise and other health and life-enhancing actions. We have adapted their model, called the Transtheoretical Model of Change, to create change-enhancing behaviors for the family. We will not spend a lot of time going through the details of our Family Change Model (FCM) here, but will rough in the concepts for you to consider. Then,
if you like working with structure and would like to explore the model more, please do so in
Appendix 1 (page 165)
as you develop your plan.

There are generally five stages to change theories. In our experience, all five stages need to be worked through, with graduation to the next stage, only happening after successful completion of the previous stage.

The five stages are:

1.
The Unwilling
Where we sit when we have no conscious intention of change. Perhaps we are not aware of what it does to our children to say “yes” too often, for example. Or we have tried previously, failed, and are feeling defeated (“Entitlement is too ingrained in our family—I can’t fight it”). We know we are towards the end of this stage when we begin to get a sense that our behavior is standing in the way of our goals—“Maybe the
way I act could have something to do with the way with my children behave.”