OUT AND ABOUT

Psychology is broadly defined as the scientific study of behavior. This can be both fascination and curse for the clinical psychologist. The fascination with behavior is obvious and studying or analyzing behavior appeals strongly to both professional psychologists and lay persons. Who among us has not puzzled about why others, both children and adults, behave as they do?

The curse for the clinical psychologist is that people are behaving (or misbehaving) no matter where the psychologist might be; shopping, at parties, or at children’s sporting events. Any time and any where the psychologist is “out and about”. Plumbers might notice dripping faucets. Physicians might notice drippy noses. Mechanics probably notice cars without mufflers or in need of a tune-up. However, most faucets don’t drip and most people out and about seem to be reasonably healthy. Most automobiles I see seem to run reasonably well. The curse (and fascination) for the psychologist is that everyone is behaving (or misbehaving) wherever the psychologist turns.

I observe others when I am out and about. I eavesdrop (most often unintentionally) on conversations and constantly think about what others say and do and evaluate what I see and hear. These observations and my commentary about what I see and hear are the basis for this page. What I see and hear is sometimes comforting and very appropriate; at other times it is not. I will try to comment on both if there are lessons to be learned that will benefit parents, children, and families.

Pacifiers. Supermarkets provide a rich array of observations when I am out and about, shopping. Not infrequently, I see small children sucking on pacifiers. In most cases, the children are not given a pacifier because they are distressed or fussy; instead, they seem to suck on pacifiers habitually and the pacifiers are provided by parents motivated to keep little mouths shut! My impulse invariably is to snatch pacifiers and threw them away; thus far I have been able to resist this temptation.

Let me share just two of many observations involving pacifiers and young children. On one occasion, I saw a rather frantic looking mother pushing a shopping cart at what I considered a high rate of speed. She was pushing her cart with one hand and forcibly holding a pacifier in her young daughter’s mouth with the other. Clearly, the only reason her daughter was fussing was because the pacifier was being forced into her mouth and she was trying to expel it. Her mother would have none of it and continued to hold the pacifier in her daughter’s mouth. I saw her again 10 or 15 minutes after our initial encounter; she was still moving rapidly, holding the pacifier, and her daughter continued to fuss in an attempt to spit it out.

On another occasion, I was comparing prices and contents of an item when I heard an odd gurgling coming from behind me. I turned and saw a very cute 18 month old boy in a shopping cart; he was looking at me, smiling, and clearly wanted to interact while his mother looked for a particular variety of cheese. He interacted as best he could despite the pacifier in his mouth. He could not talk or attempt to communicate meaningfully because of this unneeded plug in his mouth (he was happy and not fussy). Once again, the pacifier seemed to be an unnecessary bad habit and his mother apparently gave it to him in some automatic manner to prevent fussing. That is, both mother and son had a bad habit; his was sucking on a pacifier and hers was allowing him to have it.

Big deal! You may think professional psychologists should mind their own business and find bigger issues to deal with than children with pacifiers. However, using pacifiers is not as benign as you might think. Thumbsucking is a problem for many children later in life, and considerable evidence exists to suggest that many children who become chronic thumb suckers were chronic pacifier users earlier in life.

Another consideration is language development. Children frequently use pacifiers at ages when they should be cooing and clucking and practicing expressing themselves verbally. This is something they cannot do with a pacifier in their mouths, and using pacifiers is suspected of interfering significantly with language development in young children. In the case of the young boy mentioned above, language would have been facilitated had he been able to “talk” and interact with me appropriately, as he was attempting to do.

So, if you have a pacifier for your child, throw it away. Your child will not be traumatized. If you have young children and have not yet resorted to “pacification”, don’t start. If your child is fussy, comfort him; pick him up and spend the time required to be a better parent. Shopping might take a bit longer and dinner might be served a little later, but the time spent interacting with your child and preventing future problems will be time well spent.

Shopping carts. I spent two years as Postdoctoral Fellow in Pediatric and Family Psychology at the University of North Carolina Memorial Medical Center in Chapel Hill. A few of the more memorable and distressing experiences I had during my training involved working with very young children suffering the consequences of closed head injuries resulting from a fall. Frequently, children experiencing significant brain damage fell from a shopping cart in a supermarket onto a very hard floor.

I don’t usually comment or share my thoughts about various issues with parents when I am out and about unless they ask my opinion. However, this is one time I intrude and give an opinion without being asked.

On almost every shopping trip, I see one or two or three-year-old children standing and struggling to keep their balance while tripping over canned goods and other items cluttering shopping carts and creating a very precarious perch for young children who, at best, have difficulty maintaining balance even while standing on the floor. Young children are inherently unstable. Almost invariably, I am told to mind my own business or reassured by parents that their child “will be all right”.

Try an experiment the next time you go shopping if you have a small child you do not seat securely and appropriately in your shopping cart. Go to the produce department, find a watermelon, and drop it to the floor from a height of about 5 feet. If you do not like what happens to the watermelon, never allow your child to stand in your shopping cart. Strap him in securely or let him walk. I am certain you get the point without conducting the experiment. If you do actually drop a watermelon to see what happens, send me your receipt and I will reimburse the cost.

I recently encountered another problem with shopping carts. My local supermarket now has a kiosk where parents can rent a cage on wheels resembling an automobile in which they can confine their children; shopping while the children watch yet another video alone. It apparently is not enough that we dumb our children down at home with insipid and vacuous cartoons and videos. Now, we can even do so in the supermarket.

I strongly discourage the use of such contraptions to contain children and encourage parents instead to use shopping trips and their supermarket as an interactive learning laboratory for their children. Take a moment and think of the many lessons to be learned there. You can teach your children about colors, fruits, vegetables, weights, measurement, etc.; all you need to do is add little time to your shopping trips. When the grocery shopping is done, spend a few minutes in hardware, the pet department, automotive, or in housewares. There is always something for children to learn and parents can be much better teachers without significantly deviating from their regular schedules and routines.

Sleepovers. Bad things happen to nice kids in the most unlikely of places. Over a span of 30 years in private practice, I have seen children injured on sleepovers, sexually molested by other children or adults, and a local college student was murdered a few years ago because two teenagers purportedly “were having a sleepover”. As noted elsewhere on www.parentsastherapists.com I think parents, through their child rearing practices and parenting, should strive to teach their children to be good adults. I think good adults sleep in their own beds rather than sleeping around with friends. I have three children who have never participated in a sleepover away from home, and I have never invited other children into my home to spend the night with my children.

As a parent, professional psychologist, and effective disciplinarian, I believe parents should make decisions that facilitate or enhance their children’s development. That is, children should participate in activities that contribute to their development and welfare; they should opt out of activities that are not beneficial or that may cause some injury. What benefit is there to sleepovers? In the best of circumstances, children stay up too late, are cranky and irritable the next day, take naps, can’t sleep the following evening, etc. In the worst of circumstances, children are molested and people die.

In the latter instance, two local 15-year-old boys told their mother they were “sleeping over”. Child A said he was spending the night with Child B. Child B told his mother he was spending the night with Child A. Both were from respectable families and neither parent questioned her son.

The boys did not stay at either home. Instead, they were confronted by a college student in a local university parking lot while breaking into cars and rifling their contents. When confronted, one teenager lashed out with the screwdriver he was using to break into cars; stabbing the college student in the temple and killing him. Because two boys “were having a sleepover” a college student is dead and one of the boys was tried as an adult and sent to prison.

I am not suggesting that bad things happen to every child having a sleepover. I am suggesting you may want to reconsider your position on sleepovers. Although you might rationalize sleepovers for young children as being somehow beneficial socially, your five or six-year-old sleeping over now may use a sleepover as a smokescreen as a teenager to do something else that you disapprove of and that may to be inadvisable or dangerous.

When I challenge parents’ ideas about sleepovers they often respond that they never permit a sleepover without talking to the other child’s parents. This too is an indefensible rationale; parents sleep during sleepovers while children often do not. I have had reports, too numerous to mention, of very inappropriate things that happened during sleepovers while parents were sleeping in the very next room.

Reading. It is said that reading is fundamental. It certainly is a very important skill and ability and proficiency in reading has been steadily declining in our youth for a number of years. I recently heard a report suggesting that reading proficiency in New York City high school students was defined by a 44% score on a reading test. This, to me, seems to be far from proficient.

Just as reading proficiency in our school population is decreasing collectively, on average, decreases in reading ability and reading comprehension are also seen in individual children as they progress through the grades. Children who were very proficient readers an elementary school are less proficient in middle school and often have significant problems with reading comprehension and reading ability in high school.

What happens? Why does reading ability decrease rather than increase with age and experience in school? I think I can provide at least part of the answer. Several years ago, I stopped to shop at a local yard sale. Among the items for sale was a large box of paperback books. The mother hosting the sale commented proudly that her middle school daughter had read each and every book in the box (there were literally dozens and dozens) over the course of several years. The mother was very proud and happy. I was saddened because her daughter wasted so much time reading materials that taught her absolutely nothing and did nothing to enhance her reading ability. Every book in the box was a work of fiction written for children. Her daughter probably tested as a proficient reader because all of the books in the box were written at a fifth or sixth grade reading level. While she read book after book, her reading skills did not improve because she was not challenged with new words. She very likely became a high school student with substandard reading ability and very poor reading comprehension.
Children should spend more time reading. And, when they read, they should read a significant amount of nonfiction so they gain important knowledge and information and so their reading skills will be challenged and improved by reading new words rather than the same words over and over again.

As noted elsewhere, I think children should be treated as adults so they grow to be good adults. It certainly is acceptable for good adults to spend idle time reading novels. However, good adults read novels when their work is done. The essential task of childhood is learning and gaining information. Children also should read works of fiction after their job of learning is done and they have spent at least some of their reading time with nonfiction.

Sleep. There is considerable evidence that most of our children are sleep deprived. As they grow older, the extent of their sleep deprivation becomes greater and greater. Children in elementary school should have 10 to 12 hours of sleep nightly. Middle school and high school students function best when they have about nine hours of sleep nightly. Many, if not most, children do not get the sleep they need. They stay up too late watching television, on computers, communicating with friends on their cell phones, or playing video games. Even though they might retire to their bedrooms at a reasonable hour, there is much in their rooms to distract them from sleep. Sleep deprivation in children has been linked to social problems, behavior problems, and underachievement in the classroom. Contact me for a free consultation if you are concerned about your child’s sleep patterns and I will make some suggestions that should help.

School problems, low severity learning differences, and High Output Failure. I find it difficult to go anywhere, particularly in the spring of the year, where I do not hear parents talking about school problems and underachievement in their children. School performance always occupies one of the three top positions when parents are asked to itemize concerns about their children. The top three typically includes behavior problems, social problems, and academic underachievement. Often, parents concerned about their children’s performance in school report the children were successful in earlier grades and then started to struggle at some point beyond fourth grade.

I spent many years trying to help a population of students I refer to as “bright underachievers”. Parents seeking my services because of concerns about their bright underachievers are not concerned about their children’s intelligence. In fact, they invariably comment on and take pride in the children’s substantial intelligence. They are concerned about lack of performance in the classroom and underachievement. Almost invariably, the children in question are not completing their assignments. Or, if assignments are completed, they are not handed in or are not of the quality that would be expected given the children’s intelligence. Because the children were successful in earlier grades, parents and teachers conclude their current difficulty reflects laziness, lack of interest or motivation for learning, some sort of emotional impairment, or Attention Deficit-Hyperactivity Disorder.

What bright underachievers typically have in common is that they possess low severity learning differences (Estimates suggest 20% of intelligent school children possess some combination of low severity learning differences). Because bright underachievers are intelligent and their learning differences are not severe, problems do not surface until later grades when demands for output increase. That is, even though these children possess learning differences in earlier grades, they do not struggle because they are not challenged in areas of weakness.

A good example of a low severity learning difference that may eventually result in underachievement and High Output Failure is handwriting. In second and third grade, the emphasis in handwriting is on neatness. Children are successful if they can write neatly; irrespective of the amount of time taken to complete their assignments. Children writing their alphabet neatly in second or third grade can concentrate intently on letter formation and neatness; time required to do so is not an issue. Beyond fourth grade, the emphasis in handwriting shifts from neatness to output and children with a hidden writing problem can no longer be successful.

Rather than thinking about how to form letters, the bright underachiever now has to think about what he or she is writing about. As they are bright, they can think quickly and coherently about the topic at hand. To put their thoughts on paper, handwriting speed must keep pace with their thinking. However, if it does, the bright underachiever is sloppy. In order to be neat, he or she must write more slowly. If handwriting is slower, thinking also slows down and what is produced is substandard and unacceptable. Such children are thus put in a no-win situation. They are sloppy if they hurry; if they slow down they don’t get their work done. A reasonable solution to this problem by a bright underachiever is to avoid school assignments altogether.

Contact me for a free consultation if you think your child is experiencing High Output Failure and is a bright underachiever. I can suggest remedies and also offer a School Success Program that will help you ensure that assignments are done in a timely manner and that your child stays current in school.

Playing the homework game. Parents coming to my office ask the wrong questions in relation to discipline and their children. Almost invariably, they ask “How can I get him to do this?” or “How can I get her to stop doing that?” As noted elsewhere, my recommendations to parents about discipline and other matters related to children are based on the very simple and straightforward idea that all of us want children to grow up to be good adults some day. You want your children to grow up to be good productive citizens. It follows then that a better question to ask in relation to children is “What am I teaching my baby?” That is, what is your child learning as a result of your actions? This is why I argue against using rewards and punishments, whether for school success or any other behavior. Rewards really don’t teach anything of value and punishment generally upsets children and makes things worse. Let’s take a look at what is being taught when we place emphasis on homework; this discussion will continue below when I address grades.

Years ago, psychologists recommended smokers put a large rubber band around their wrists; giving themselves a good snap whenever they thought of having a cigarette. Even though this is not effective with smokers, I suggest parents put a rubber band on their wrists and give themselves a good snap whenever they mention the term “homework”. All parents talk about homework but this is one of the most destructive concepts in school. It severely undermines children’s success, achievement, and motivation for learning.

Based on my Theory of Noncombative Child Management and Discipline, the critical question to be asked in discipline is “What am I teaching my baby?” What are you teaching your baby when you ask about “homework”? Parents invariably ask questions like “Do you have any homework?” “Have you finished your homework?” When we mention homework, we teach our children

• The only time they must learn is when homework is assigned.

• The only thing worth learning is what is assigned.

• In fact, you don’t have to learn at all. All you have to do is get it done.

• If you don’t feel like doing it, go home and tell your parents you have no homework.

• If no homework is assigned, you don’t have to learn at all.

Academic underachievement is rampant in our schools and is getting worse. I once gave a keynote address to a group of educators at a professional meeting. The title of my talk was “Children’s learning is too important to be left in the hands of educators”. Needless to say, I have not been invited back. In the talk, however, I was not attempting to insult professional educators. Rather, I was emphasizing what parents often hear from teachers; that children’s learning and success should be the result of a collaboration between home and school; between teachers and parents. I meant to suggest that completing homework is not enough and that parents and teachers should see to it that students take advantage of any and all opportunities for learning and success. Children should learn whether or not they have homework.

Contact me for a free consultation if you have concerns about your child’s learning and achievement. I will make some suggestions guaranteed to help!

Grades. Emphasis on grades is another problem contributing to underachievement and lack of success in school. It is well known that typical practices in education are geared to less capable students. When I think about what is offered in our schools I think about opportunities lost or wasted. Bright students languish and are not stimulated to achieve while less competent students may resist teachers’ attempts to help them.

Parents invariably look at grades in evaluating their children’s progress in school. Just as homework is an insidious and destructive concept, so is the practice of grading as it is currently used. Parents don’t ask their children what they are learning or if they are experiencing a sense of accomplishment. Instead, they ask “How are your grades?” I have never seen a bumper sticker proclaiming “My child is a dedicated and motivated learner”. I have seen plenty of bumper stickers proclaiming that the driver’s child “is an honor student” at this school or at that school.

The problem here is that reasonably bright children in most classrooms could be in a semi coma and still earn good grades if they are efficient test takers. Over the years, many parents have stated to me proudly that their children are “Straight A” students. Not infrequently, parents add that their children earn Straight A’s without cracking a book; ironically they don’t realize this is a problem and it is not something in which they should take pride.

Children who get good grades without cracking a book are generally personable and good technicians; teachers like them and they do well on tests. However, they frequently learn and retain very little and it is not unusual for such successful high school students to fall flat on their academic faces when they enter college and encounter significant academic demands for the first time.

At any rate, do not be deceived by good grades. The true yardsticks to apply in evaluating your child’s success in school and in learning are to pay attention to what is actually being learned or what is happening in the classroom, and to focus on the amount of time your child spends learning. Good grades without obvious effort are a cause for distress rather than pride.