Raising independent children
Raising Confident, Independent Children - Child Mind Institute
This is an excerpt from The Scaffold Effect, a new book by Harold S. Koplewicz, MD, the president of the Child Mind Institute.
When our kids are young, our job is to be fixers, protectors, and social secretaries. We childproof the house so they can’t get under the sink and block the stairs so they don’t fall down. We set up playdates and throw their parties. We call their teachers when there’s a problem. But at some point along the way, the parents’ job changes, without warning or indication, and we become consultants. Our job then is to help them find solutions for themselves.
Shifting from “fixer” to consultant is a major change, and you might have a hard time with that. As parents, we’re socialized for the fixer/protector role, to step in and take care of the problem. If your kid falls down and scrapes his knee, your instinct is to put a Band-Aid on it, and say, “It’s okay, sweetie. I’ll make it better.” Then they go back to playing and you feel good about having done your job as a fixer well.
However, you can’t put a Band-Aid on a social rejection or a failure experience. There is no instant fix when a twelve-year-old girl is suddenly cast out of her friend group, or when an eight-year-old boy struggles to memorize math tables and starts to believe he’s stupid. You can’t protect a child from the trials of life. But you can give your kid armor by teaching him to advocate for himself, and thereby develop the grit he needs to survive and succeed.
If your child gets a poor grade on a test, for example, a fix-it parent would say, “You should call the teacher to talk about what happened. You should meet with your friend who’s great at math and get some tutoring. You should study harder.” You should, you should, you should. Listen to how you talk to your child. When you hear that phrase, be aware that you are in fix-it mode, essentially choosing and handing him tools.
To scaffold, parents support and encourage the child to learn how to select the right tool for the particular task all by himself. He might choose wrong, and then you can guide him to evaluate why that particular tool wasn’t the best choice. Next time, he’ll try something new.
It’s not that you are letting him hang out there on his own. You are standing by and collaborating with him to come up with his own solutions. Instead of his depending on you for answers, you will guide him to come up with ideas about how he can do it for himself.
The Growth Zone
A psychological state is often called “a zone.” In the active construction site that is your child’s development, it helps to be aware of her various zones, as well as which are the safe and unsafe areas.
The Comfort Zone. This is a no-anxiety, no-stress figurative place where a person feels safe and secure, believes he’s in control, and can do any social, emotional, behavioral, or academic task easily, without help from parents or teachers.
In the Comfort Zone, a child can build confidence and self-esteem. He is secure doing the activity; he enjoys it because he’s proficient. It might feel good to hang out here; it might be a bit boring, too. Since growth comes from learning new things, and learning requires you to be vulnerable in your ignorance and inexperience, the child will have to leave the Comfort Zone in order to grow.
The Growth Zone. Maximal learning and growth happen in the area just outside the Comfort Zone, when the child is reaching and stretching to acquire new skills. Russian educational psychologist Lev Vygotsky believed that educating children in the “zone of proximal development”—just beyond their current capacity, not too far from where they already are—inspires kids to become independent problem solvers and self-motivated learners. The theory holds up in the context of scaffolding a child’s emotional, social, and behavior learning as well. Learning, aka growth, an ongoing process of reaching for more, is always empowered by parent-child collaboration.
You’re in it together, but once your child learns what he needs to learn, he can move on, and up, to the next level, while you cheer him on from the near distance of the scaffold.
Failure Is an Option
For your kids, you scaffold their current and future growth by teaching them to take risks, despite the very real possibility of going splat.
Labeled praise plays a major part here. If you want your kids to be more proactive and prosocial, you have to praise them when they try. Be careful about what you praise, though. If you praise success, your kids learn to think that failure is bad. But failure isn’t good or bad. It’s just one possible outcome.
Emily, a fourteen-year-old girl with severe anxiety disorder, always became extremely worried in the days leading up to her midterm and final exams. Her mother Diana’s reaction to her daughter’s stress was to tell Emily to study harder, but that wasn’t helpful. Obsessive studying was a symptom of Emily’s anxiety, not a coping, calming strategy.
It was like giving a drug addict permission to smoke more crack.
We coached Diana to scaffold Emily with nonjudgmental validation and by presenting failure as just a thing that sometimes happens, to say to her daughter, “I hear you. You’re worried that you’re going to fail. Maybe you will, and that’s okay.”
With the “death threat” of failure off the table, Emily could turn her deficit (anxiety) into an asset (productivity). She still prepared twice as much as her peers and always met with teachers for reassurance. But by telling herself failure was fine, by releasing that valve, the destructive “I can’t do this!” anxiety was gone. Diana had to send the same message many times. But eventually, the message sunk in, and Emily, now a young woman, flings herself into intimidating job opportunities. “Failure isn’t fatal,” she said. “I’ll just try again.”
A parent’s fear of failure and rejection on the child’s behalf leads to the parent riding to the rescue to save the day, by doing his homework, calling teachers and coaches, taking care of every tiny thing for their kids.
The irony of swooping in is that parents believe they’re helping their kids by preventing pain. But what they’re actually preventing is growth.
Excerpt from The Scaffold Effect: Raising Resilient, Self-Reliant, and Secure Kids in an Age of Anxiety. Copyright © 2021 by Child Mind Institute, Inc. Published by Harmony Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
Learn more about The Scaffold Effect here.
Parenting: Raise Independent Children | Psychology Today
One of your most important goals as a parent is to raise children who become independent and self-reliant people. Certainly, in early development, your children count on you. As infants, they rely on you for nourishment, cleaning, and mobility. As your children grow, they become more independent in these basic areas of living but still depend on you for love, protection, guidance, and support.
As your children reach adolescence and move toward adulthood, they become less reliant on you and gain greater independence in all aspects of their lives.
This process of separation prepares your children for the demands of adulthood. But this progression toward adulthood is not inevitable and is often stymied by well-intentioned, but misguided, parents.
Contingent Children
Contingent children are dependent on others for how they feel about themselves. Some parents want to foster this dependence. These parents act on their own needs for power and use control and coercion to ensure that they remain the dominant forces in their children's lives. Contingent children can be recognized in the following ways:
- Depend on others to provide them with the incentive to achieve.
- Depend on others for their happiness because they have no ownership of their lives and little responsibility for their own thoughts, emotions, and actions.
- Reinforced with inappropriate rewards and no limits, and regardless of their behavior.
- Poor decision-makers because their parents hold the belief that they always know what is best and make decisions without soliciting their children's wishes.
Independent Children
Independent children differ from contingent children in several essential ways. If your children are independent, you have provided them with the belief that they are competent and capable of taking care of themselves. You offered them the guidance to find activities that are meaningful and satisfying. You gave your children the freedom to experience life fully and learn its many important lessons. Independent children can be recognized in the following ways:
- Intrinsically motivated because they are allowed to find their own reasons to achieve.
- Were given the opportunity and guidance to explore achievement activities of their own choosing.
- Parents use extrinsic rewards appropriately and sparingly.
- Collaborative rather than a controlled relationship with their parents in which the children's ideas and wishes are solicited and considered.
- Good decision-makers because they were allowed to consider various options and, with the support and guidance of their parents, make their own decisions.
Parent and Children Responsibilities
At the heart of whether you will be raising a contingent or independent children is that you understand the essential responsibilities that you and they need to accept. Taylor's Law of Family Responsibilities states that if family members fulfill their own responsibilities and do not assume others', then children develop into independent people and everyone is happy.
Your Responsibilities
Your responsibilities revolve primarily around providing your children with the opportunity, means, and support to pursue their goals. The psychological means include providing love, guidance, and encouragement in their efforts. The practical means include ensuring that your children have the materials needed, proper instruction, and transportation, among other logistical concerns.
Your Children's Responsibilities
Your child's responsibilities involve doing what is necessary to maximize the opportunities that you give them.
These responsibilities include giving their best effort, being responsible and disciplined, staying committed, and giving an achievement opportunity a realistic try, as well as, completing all tasks and exercises, getting the most out of instruction, being cooperative, and expressing appreciation and gratitude for others' efforts.
Types of Contingent Children
I have identified five types of contingent children. All of them are created in similar ways. Children develop a particular contingent style depending on their temperament and that of their parents.
Pleasers
Pleasers will do everything they can to get the love and attention they crave. Pleasers may often be perceived as model children who are successful and exceptionally giving to others. Yet, in pleasing others, they often neglect their own needs and, as a result, are unfulfilled, resentful, and unhappy.
Disappointers
Disappointers are nonachievers who never live up to expectations.
They are usually bright and demonstrate promise in a number of areas, for example, they often score high on IQ and achievement tests, yet they rarely accomplish anything. Disappointers relieve the pressure they feel from their parents by simply not trying. Disappointers avoid their parents' expectations by sabotaging themselves, for example, with lack of effort or avoidance of the achievement activity, or significant problem behavior such as drug use or criminal misconduct.
Reactors
Reactors do the exact opposite of whatever their parents want them to do. Parents often interpret this behavior as independence, but they are highly dependent on their parents, in a paradoxical way. Reactors feel controlled by their parents and feel powerless to directly assert themselves against their constraints. Reactors wait to see what their parents want them to do and then they choose the course that is in direct opposition to it. This reactive behavior usually emerges in the form of nonconformist dress, poor grades, "unacceptable" peer relations, and, possibly, alcohol and drug use.
Frustrators
Frustrators, not surprisingly, cause tremendous frustration in their parents. Frustrators are not "bad kids" and they rarely get into trouble. They do fairly well in school and in other achievement settings, yet are often viewed as underachievers who don't perform up to their ability. For example, a Frustrator might get a B+ rather than apply extra effort in schoolwork to get an A, or be named as an alternate to perform in a musical recital, or lose a tightly contested sports competition.
Rejecters
Rejecters refuse their parents' expectations, choosing a course of his own in spite of their parents' objections. Rejecters do not simply react by choosing the opposite, but rather thoroughly discard whatever their parents have to offer. Rejecters may be viewed as the most healthy and adaptive of the five kinds of contingent children because they have separated from their parents and become autonomous and self-directed people.
But Rejecters pay a price for their extreme disengagement by damaging their relationships with their parents and discarding even the positive contributions their parents made.
Raise Independent Children
Independence is not something that your children can gain on their own. They have neither the perspective, the experience, nor the skills to develop independence separately from you. Rather, it is a gift you give your children that they will cherish and benefit from their entire lives. You can provide your child with several essential ingredients for gaining independence:
- Give your children love and respect.
- Show confidence in your children's capabilities.
- Teach them that they have control over their lives.
- Provide guidance and then give them the freedom to make their own decisions.
Teach Responsibility
One of your tasks as the parent is to teach your children about responsibility. The best way to ensure that you and your children assume the appropriate responsibilities is for each of you to know what your responsibilities are.
If you and your children have a clear understanding of what is expected of each of you, then it will be easier to stay within the confines of those responsibilities.
Make a list of what you as a parent will be doing to help your children succeed.
Then, make a list with your children of what their responsibilities should be. Next, identify other individuals who will have responsibilities (and what they are) in your children's achievement activities, such as teachers, instructors, or coaches.
There should also be consequences for not fulfilling responsibilities. The best consequences are those that remove something of importance to your children and give them the control to get it back by acting appropriately. This process provides absolute clarity to both you and your children about what your "jobs" are. It also allows for no confusion at a later point when either of you steps over the line and assume the other's responsibilities or neglects their own.
Demand Accountability
Many parts of our culture send a message to children that nothing is their fault.
Whether rationalizing bad behavior, looking for scapegoats on which to blame misfortune or faulting others for their failures, children are constantly told that they do not need to be responsible for their actions. Yet, the ability of children to hold themselves accountable for their actions is a critical part of becoming independent.
The reluctance of children to take responsibility for their actions is based on their desire to protect themselves from failure. By blaming outside factors, such as other people, bad luck, or unfairness, children can safeguard their egos from harm. Yet, responsibility is two sides of the same coin. Your children can't take responsibility for their achievements and successes unless they are willing to take responsibility for their mistakes and failures.
Encourage Exploration
Early in your children's lives, you need to keep them on a fairly short "leash" to ensure their safety. This care builds your child's sense of security by teaching them that they have a safe place to return to if they venture too far and that you are there to protect them when needed.
There is, however, a fine line between security and dependence. When your children have established their sense of security, you must then encourage them to explore the world beyond the safety net that you provide. This push allows your children to test their own capabilities in the "real world" and to find a sense of competence, security, and independence within themselves.
How to raise an independent child: the lazy mom method
August 30, 2021 Relations Books
Principles to help parents teach their children important life skills and avoid scandals and whims.
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0 How many funny and sad stories have we heard about how adult uncles and aunts are brought to a mom's interview? How do graduates go to the admissions office hand in hand with their grandmother? All these problems grow from childhood, in which parents are shaking over their children, do not sleep at night, get tired of a huge number of things.
It's good to be a lazy mother who can sleep until noon on weekends, because the children will wake up and wash themselves, and make breakfast for themselves, and find something to do. It's good to be a lazy dad, whose children themselves will clean the room without a command, and then they will also help fix the tap. We will tell you how to become so lazy-happy so that even the children are happy.
Anna Bykova
Author of the book “Independent child, or how to become a “lazy mother””, child and family psychologist, educator.
Anna Bykova is sure: you can do without sleepless nights, and without scandals and whims. To do this, you need to raise independent children, those who will not need the help of their parents.
Actually, laziness with such an approach is cunning. True laziness does not smell here. Raising children who do not need constant supervision requires enormous labor costs from parents.
Mother's "laziness" at the base should have concern for children, and not indifference.
Anna Bykova
A child can become independent only because he has to. For example, if he is left to himself all the time and there is no time to take care of him. But such independence loses in terms of the level of development of consciously brought up, when parents do everything so that the child stops needing them as soon as possible.
Let's analyze the basic principles of a lazy mother.
Never do for a child what he can do for himself
Not to do for a child what he already can is, in fact, not to interfere. For example, at a year and a half a child can cope with a spoon, and at three - get dressed, put toys away, at five - heat up breakfast in the microwave, at seven - return from school and do homework on their own. Why doesn't the child do this?
Yes, because his parents do not allow him to do this, for whom it is easier and faster to feed, dress, collect, bring by the hand.
Children are actually smarter than they seem.
And a hungry child will not refuse porridge, and a tired child will not fall asleep with a scandal. The parents' job is only to help: give porridge, read a fairy tale, suggest what the weather is like outside and what is better to wear.
How to find out what a child can do
Since all children are different, the timing of development is individual. Nowhere have tables been published that indicate at what age a child can be given a knife, and at what age they can be sent to the store for bread.
When hands reach out to do something for a child, ask yourself: why can't the child do it for himself? It’s one thing - he can’t physically, because motor skills are not developed, because he is tired, because he is sick. This is where parenting comes into play.
It's another matter - he can't, because he doesn't want to, demands attention, is capricious. In this case, you need to talk, reassure, suggest, but do nothing extra.
And, finally, if a child simply does not know how yet, he must be taught.
Teach your child, don’t do it for him
You need to teach your child according to the scheme “show → do together → let do with a hint → let do it yourself”. Moreover, the points “do together” or “do with a hint” will have to be repeated far more than once.
Before my eight-month-old son began to properly slide off the high sofa, I turned him in the right direction, probably five hundred times. At the age of three, it was enough to show ten times how the mop works, and once to check that the child was enthusiastically mopping the floors. At the age of five, watching how dad works with side cutters, the child skips the “do it together” stage and uses the tool correctly.
A lazy parent is willing to spend hours and days making the house safe and teaching a child to play on his own.
But then he will enjoy the opportunity to sleep on the weekend, because the child will not rush to mom and dad immediately after getting up.
Help solve a problem, don't solve it for a child
When a small person is given big tasks, it is logical to hear in response that he "can't". How can you cut a bowl of lettuce when there's a whole mountain of vegetables? Ordinary parents will cut themselves, lazy ones will go the other way.
They help break down the task into smaller ones. For example, first cut only cucumbers, then only tomatoes, and then only greens remain.
Allow a child to make mistakes
A child, mastering a new business, will make a lot of mistakes, even if the lesson seems nonsense to an adult. You have to find a button inside yourself that will turn off criticism. Of course, a three-year-old kid with a mop will not wash the floor, but only wet it.
Lazy parents will not take away a bucket of water. They will praise the child, thank for the help. In the meantime, the child is watching a cartoon, they will quietly wipe the puddles. Lazy people will not scold a child for the wrong type of tea in the store or for a jacket that is too light for the weather.
Because any mistake is an experience, and only experience can make a person independent.
Give your child a choice
For a child to be independent, he needs to choose. And choose for real, without cheating. Ask your child to choose their own clothes in which he will go for a walk. Buy cereal for breakfast. Decide how to spend the day off and which section to go to after class.
You will have to look closely at the child and trust him, to be near and lend a shoulder.
This is more difficult than doing everything on your own. But with this approach, every day it will be easier to be parents.
Think about every “no”
Some of the prohibitions are necessary because we care about the safety of the child. But sometimes behind the word “no” is a concern for your own convenience. It is easier to forbid a child to pick up a watering can than to teach him to water.
A child can overturn a flower, scatter earth, can flood a flower, and water will flow over the edge of the pot.
But this is how, through actions, the child learns to coordinate movements, understand the consequences and correct mistakes.
Anna Bykova
Therefore, only that which is unsafe can be “impossible”. For example, eating with dirty hands or crossing the road in the wrong place.
When once again a hard “no” is ready to come off your tongue, stop, think, answer your question: “Why not?”
Anna Bykova
If it is impossible because it is more convenient for you, then you will not see the happiness of a lazy parent for a long time.
Get the child interested
For a child, any process is a game. As soon as he stops playing, you can force him to do something only with threats, punishments, intimidation and other evil spirits that are better not to be dragged into family relationships.
It is desirable that the child experience independence on the wave of “Wow, how interesting to try!”
Anna Bykova
When a child can do something but doesn't want to, get him interested.
Spilled water? We take a mop to scrub the deck of your ship like a real sailor. The same game gets boring quickly, so you have to stretch your imagination and offer different options.
We cannot be perfect parents, but our task is to make the child stop needing us. This is probably enough.
Specific advice and examples from teaching experience are in the book. Read and enjoy lazily.
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Psychologist's advice: Children should be taught to be independent from an early age
It is important to start teaching a child independence on time.
Every parent who loves his child sooner or later faces the same problem - how to raise children so that from childhood they have a head on their shoulders and learn to make independent decisions?
Not property, but personality
This upbringing begins with parents working on themselves.
The main thing that you should understand at this moment for yourself is that children are not your property, which you raise only so that they take care of you in old age. A child is a personality that you, like no one else, knowing all its features, should help to take place. By itself, he will not grow up - especially if you treat a growing person like some mothers, in animal fear for children, trying to protect them from possible troubles, following their children on their heels, tracking and evaluating their every action, preventing all desires , cutting off contacts that seem wrong to them ... They simply take the life of their children upon themselves. All this stops the development of the child's independence in the bud, turning him into a neurotic who, without his mother, will not be able to study and has big problems in communicating with his peers.
No less harm than overprotection can be caused by the attitude that the child will grow up on his own. Such parents are ready as soon as possible to believe in the "adulthood" of their child and give him much more independence than the child can handle.
Not justifying, of course, parental expectations, receiving a scolding for this, from an early age he begins to get used to the position of a helpless person, and when he encounters such an attitude regularly, he gradually becomes disillusioned with his ability to take independent actions in principle.
The law is harsh, but it is the law
The desire to do everything yourself is an organic sign of growing up, a sign of the awakening human psyche.
The basic skills of independence are laid in him at about three years. And the first skill, the formation of which you should pay attention to, is independence in eating.
Around the beginning of the second year of life, many children no longer want to just sit at the table and open their mouths. And what is it in mom's hands? - and small hands reach for the spoon. Let nothing get into your mouth this time - rejoice at the impulse! And as soon as you - calmly, unobtrusively, without getting annoyed by the porridge falling on the table - show how to hold the spoon correctly, and over time he will begin to succeed in bringing it to his mouth full - so the person himself will become interested, and appetite will appear.
If you miss a moment here, you make it easier for yourself - and the child will very quickly get used to the fact that adults constantly feed him.
In principle, the upbringing of independence is teaching the child to the idea that for him - as for everyone in the house - there are certain rules and he must comply with these rules. The parent, who at first provided one hundred percent of the baby's life, should gradually, step by step, begin to dose his help to the child.
It is clear that at the age of two and a half, your daughter cannot yet remove her turtleneck over her head or pull on tight tights. But to fasten Velcro on sneakers (dressed at the same time on the "correct" legs!) Is quite capable - as well as wrapping a neck with a scarf. So don’t do it for her, pretend that you are already dressed and go out, and is she still in one shoe? I assure you, it will work, and soon everyone will always be ready on time. Then let her put on her own jeans, learn to zip up her jacket, and so on.
An important point in raising a child's independence is his responsibility for the most valuable thing for him - toys. Let the three-year-old understand that the order in the toys is his contribution to the general order in the house, and let, say, before the guests arrive, he once again checks whether everything is in place.
A small child is an active being, at this age he is constantly focused on action, creation, helping adults, from him every now and then you hear: "I myself!" Such an impulse for independence is a property of age, then it will go away. Excessive parental caution, fears that the baby will spoil something, and most often just your impatience, eternal haste prevent the child from expressing himself. Of course, it’s faster to wipe up the tea he accidentally spilled on the table than to wait until he himself reaches the rag and independently eliminates the mess he has made. But pull yourself together and do not do for the child what he can already do for himself!
On an equal footing
Education of independence is a very subtle and delicate work.
You should in every moment of communication with the child think only about how not to harm him, not to interfere with his development. Be patient if you want to raise a person for whom you will not be afraid in your life. Attention:
1 Never help a child in any of his business until he asks you to do it himself. If he asks for help too often - come up with an excuse to postpone your help and give him another chance.
2 Have your child do things for himself often. And never redo what he did not succeed - especially with reproaches to him and in front of him, otherwise he will not take up the next assignment soon.
3 Always reward progress. If the baby appears before you proud that he washed and dressed himself, this cannot be ignored. She "put on" herself - she has every right to put on for a walk not an ordinary gray hat, but a pink one with a bow and ride down the hill not for ten minutes, but fifteen.
4 Make it easier for the little person to live independently in the house.
Stools in the kitchen should be light and stable, there should be a small chair by the sink, drawers with children's things should be located at an accessible level for him.
5 Try to communicate with your child on an equal footing and do not talk more often, but ask. Emphasize your interest in what is happening with him and the importance of his opinion: “What else do you think we need to buy?”, “Maybe we should rearrange the table in the kitchen here - what do you think about it?”.
And don't forget: the most independent child always needs parental attention, care, advice and just presence. No wonder a wise teacher once said: "A child is like a kite - he longs for free flight and at the same time needs a strong rope."
To the attention of parents
Children can also be taught responsibility and independence in a playful way. Here are some simple games that can help you.
Good Hands
You can play this game.
