088: Setting loving – and effective! – limits

I know it can be difficult when it feels like our child is constantly testing boundaries and doing things we ask them not to do, but having a positive relationship with your child is really important to get out of any cycle of persistent disobedience you might have slipped into without realizing it. So if you find yourself in a persistent negative cycle with your child, try to take a step back from control that you might have been exerting and do some fun activities with your child that don't require a lot of limit setting to build up that bank of positive feeling between you. Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives, but it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released and get a free guide to seven parenting myths that we can safely leave behind, seven fewer things to worry about, subscribe to the show at yourparentingmojo.com. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us. Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today we're going to discuss a topic that virtually all parents find difficult at one point or another, and that's setting and holding limits. What's the purpose of setting limits? How do we know we're setting one when we should be setting one? And how do we set them without getting into a big fight over something that ultimately turns out not to be all that important? And can there really be cultural issues at play here? Why yes, of course it's parenting after all. So we'll look at all these things in this episode today. As we work through this episode, I'm going to mention a few times a problem solving method that we use at our house that the vast majority of the time avoids the need for us to set any kind of consequence for our child's non-compliance, because most of the time we can use this technique to meet both our needs and our child's needs in a way that invites rather than coerces them to cooperate. If you're in the paid Finding Your Parenting Mojo group, which has been running since November of two thousand eighteen, then using this method has probably become second nature to you by now. I've actually developed a guide that you can use to try this method for yourself if you want to move away from punishing your child and even using logical consequences as a regular disciplinary tool, as these really are much more effective when they use sparingly. If you're already subscribed to the show via my website, and you'll know if you're subscribed by my website because you'll get emails from me when new episodes come out, as well as newsletters on the weeks when I don't release a podcast episode, then you received a link to this guide in the email that told you about this episode. If you're subscribed through iTunes or another platform, then I don't have a way to get the guide to you, so head on over to yourparentingmojo.com/punishment to download it, and I'll remind you of that address again at the end of the show. First, let's examine our weirdness, or how people in countries that aren't Western-educated, industrial, rich, and democratic do things. The anthropological literature is replete with examples of how children's behavior is controlled in other cultures, as well as historically in our own. Shame is one of the most common tactics used, as illustrated by this anecdote from a study of the Nagonia ethnic group in Southern Africa that I think we mentioned in our episode on storytelling. It goes like this, a proverb might suddenly be dropped like a stone into a pond. The conversation rippled away into silence, and the boy or girl who had refused to share some peanuts or had been boasting began to wonder to himself, can that be for me? No? Yes? It is me. I am ashamed. No one said anything, but the shamed one took the first chance of slipping away to avoid further public notice. The use of proverbs was effective at making a child learn for himself and apply the lesson.

Tzenech and Tekin elders in Mexico critically discuss the child's behavior while the child is present, but otherwise don't interact with the child. The child is expected to overhear and modify their behavior. Shame is also used in a variety of Asian cultures, from Bali to China to Japan to Taiwan. Parents in these cultures will tell others of the child's misdeeds in front of the child, will ridicule, mock, and laugh at the child. Samoan children are reined in with threats that animals will come and eat them, and the Keke elders on Guadalcanal warn that giants will take naughty boys and girls and carry them off to a cave where the bodies are cooked and eaten. Frightening bible stories as well as folk tales have been used to control European children. In the eighteen hundredths, children in England were taken to the gibbet to view rotting bodies hanging there while being told moral stories, and then they were whipped when they got home to make sure the lessons stuck. And where stories, proverbs, and shame fail, corporal punishment picks up. The Mfansi in Ghana will even lightly cuff an infant for crying for no good reason, while parents in Samoa, quote, believe in the unique efficacy of pain as a means of instruction, end quote. And the royal of Badu in Syria will spank small children with a stick and slash older children with a saber or a dagger. Corporal punishment is most common among societies where tribal warfare and intervillage conflict are frequent, as well as where living space is at a premium, and children must learn to control their emotions so as not to encroach on other people's space. There's actually some evidence from neuroscientific research that the release of adrenaline during emotional arousal enhances memory. I plan to do an in-depth episode on spanking at some point, but this research suggests why people in so many cultures around the world use physical punishment, because it helps the child to remember the event and their transgression. Perhaps the child might also learn some unintended lessons as well though, including, I can't really trust my parent, and it's okay for bigger people to hit smaller ones. In addition, this could cause the excessive power assertion in the relationship to become more apparent to the child than the parents' love and caring, which may result in the child's acting out of their hostile impulses, particularly to other people who don't have power, so siblings for example, and possibly towards people who do have power if those people are permissive, like permissive parents.

In societies where children are actively encouraged to fight each other, then acting out on violent impulses is perhaps not a bad thing, but in our society where we want our child to get on with their siblings and friends without hitting them, we can start to see how our own interactions with our child serve as role models for how our child treats others. And as a side note, I've yet to find an anthropological study that discusses the children's experience of being shamed or beaten, or how this impacts them as adults. These studies always focus on parental practices without ever looking at what are the effects of these practices on the child. And then there's Dr Amy Chua's book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which argued for the Asian parents' much more controlling approach to child rearing than we see in Western cultures. The book was written for a Western audience, of course, but it turns out that Asian children might actually genuinely appreciate this style of parenting. Two American researchers surveyed both European-American and Korean adolescents and found that the more controlling European-American parents were, the less warm the children perceived the parents to be. But in Korean children, the pattern was reversed. The more controlling the children rated their parents, the warmer they rated them as well. So some of the same behaviors engaged in by European mothers would be perceived by Korean children as acts of love and caring, rather than efforts to dominate and control. But that study was done in the ninteen eighties. In the nineteen nineties, some Chinese researchers studied second-grade children living in Beijing and found that parents who use more power-assertive parenting behaviors had children who were more aggressive and disruptive in the classroom, weren't liked as well by their peers, and had lower school achievement. Parents who used a more authoritative style, so provided limits in structure but also warmth and connectedness, had children who were less disruptive in the classroom, were well-liked by their peers, and had better school achievement.

A much more recent study from two thousand fourteen found that both Chinese and Canadian children preferred parental discipline that was based on warmth rather than love withdrawal, which implies that Chinese parenting approaches are rapidly becoming more Westernized. Anthropologist Dr. David Lancey notes that, quote, the rarest strategy for engendering compliance favored in weird societies is to reason with children. This may not be as effective at controlling behavior, but as a side benefit, it does give some early preparation for being an effective negotiator. Reasoning with children accomplishes two goals. It is a way to manage children's behavior, especially when shaping more complex skills, and it also facilitates the development of the teacher-pupil relationship, end quote. And so my aim in telling you this is not to demonstrate the superiority of weird methods over those of other cultures, but to point out that parents in different cultures are preparing their children to participate in different kinds of interactions as older children and adults, and so different kinds of preparation is useful for this than for interacting in our society. Even within weird cultures, there's a variety of practices. All of the five sets of parents who were interviewed for one study reported using corporal punishment, with most of them stating it must be accompanied by an explanation for its use. And this, of course, is a really small sample and is pretty typical for interview-style studies. One parent believed that you should, quote, spank with love and instruction, end quote. Other methods used including scare tactics and intimidation, and spanking in an early effort to avoid the need for it in the future. One parent said, quote, I'm real conscious of making sure my cute little black son here doesn't become one of the people they, meaning European-Americans, are afraid of walking down the street in five years. Another said, I'm trying to teach her survival techniques and how to survive when the odds are against you. These African-American parents are thus using the tools that they have to prepare their children for the kinds of societal pressures the parents have been dealing with their whole lives. By contrast, European-Americans are socializing our children to take a dominant place in the world. The way we permit them to negotiate boundaries teaches them that they can not only generate their own ideas, but they can also challenge an adult's initially proposed boundary. If our child misbehaves in public, we might feel as though both we and our child are being judged, but we know that others are not looking at us thinking we are bad parents just because of our race. And we also know that in an ambiguous situation, our child is likely to be given the benefit of the doubt and will be allowed to explain themselves before a decision about their guilt is made. So as we learn these methods, please do keep in mind that this set of practices has a goal that's unstated but no less powerful for being so. We should also teach our children that there are instances where it may technically not be harmful for them to break a rule, but not all children may experience the same luxury, and there are times when we should not allow a rule negotiation because of this unfairness. Also, please be kind to parents you see out in the world even when their discipline styles don't match your own. They are probably doing the best they can with the tools they have to meet their particular parenting goals, even if these don't align with ones that you have and use. So the research on respectful boundary setting originated in the work of Haim Jinot, an Israeli elementary school teacher who then studied psychology at Columbia University. Jinot worked with troubled children at a guidance clinic in Jacksonville, Florida where he developed his approach based on both compassion and boundary setting.

Jinot proposed that denying feelings makes the feelings more powerful, while acknowledgement of feelings allows people to heal so they can become better problem solvers. At the same time as showing respect for their children's emotions, Jinot advised parents to be strict with unacceptable behavior. At the time this approach was untested, but Dr. John Gottman said in the foreword for his book, Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child, that he could, quote, provide the first quantifiable evidence to suggest that Jinot's ideas were essentially correct, end quote. These ideas formed the basis of emotion coaching, which we learned about recently in the episode on emotion regulation. So Gottman saw accepting emotions but being strict with behavior as two sides of an equation, with emotion coaching being the one we already learned about and setting limits being the other which we're going to discuss today. Also connected with Jinot's work is self-determination theory, which proposes that all humans desire autonomy, competence, and relatedness, which is associated with better life outcomes for all people, not just children. So I'll just briefly define each of these ideas. Autonomy is the desire to feel like we control our own lives, which can be difficult for children who typically go through their day with every move scripted by an adult. Competence is the desire to feel a sensation of mastery over tasks and activities, which is often what children are trying to do when we're hustling them along to the next activity or telling them to stop doing something. And relatedness is a sense of connection with others, which can suffer when much of our time is spent saying, hurry up and do this thing, or stop doing that thing that you really want to do. What we want to do here is tease out how we can set limits in a way that supports autonomy, competence, and connectedness, so we can achieve the benefits of self-determination while still enabling the parent to set needed limits. We can also look to Dr. Diana Boehmrein's idea of an authoritative parent, which is a parent who's an authority and who isn't permissive, who makes age-appropriate demands, sets limits, and monitors children's behavior. Then the research shows that children do better when parents are, quote, in control. But there's a difference between being in control and being controlling. If you're in control, then you provide rules, guidance, and limits. Controlling parents find compliance to be the most important skill their child develops, and they pressure their children towards specific outcomes, discourage discussions and negotiations on limits, don't provide reasons for limits, and don't respect children's viewpoints. They may coerce the child into achieving a certain outcome or punish them if they don't achieve it. But once again, this view of what are appropriate limits for children seems to be very highly focused on what are appropriate limits for white children, which is to say that black children might use a more controlling style of parenting, not necessarily because they believe it's the best approach for their child's development, but because it's the best approach to keep their child safe.

So when we think about refreshing our approach to setting limits, the first thing to understand is when we can set limits. As Magda Gerber, the founder of RAI, has said, discipline is not a set of rigidly enforced mandates, but a process in which the child learns to become a social being, end quote. So we shouldn't expect things of our children that are against the nature of their developmental stage. We can't expect a toddler not to say no, or not to take all the available toys out, or not to grab a toy they want from a friend. Gerber says, quote, knowing when to give children freedom and when to introduce limits is the backbone of the RAI approach, end quote. So by introducing limits, we're introducing structure, which means providing guidelines and information that children need so they can meet the parent's request. When you provide structure, you communicate your expectations by doing things like making sure your request is age appropriate, providing a rationale for your request, providing acceptable choices, and following through as needed. So perhaps the best way to avoid having your child throw balls in the house is to store balls outside, so you don't even have to set a limit. But if your child finds a ball and makes out like they're going to throw it, you could say, I don't want you to throw the ball in the house because I'm worried something might get broken. You can roll it on the ground if you want to, or take it outside. If your child proceeds to throw the ball, you could say, I can see you really want to play with the ball. I don't want anything inside to get broken. I'm going to put it outside and you can play with it out there, or find something else to play with indoors. A more controlling approach would be to see your child about to throw the ball and say, don't you throw that ball! If you throw it, I'm going to spank you, which doesn't help the child to understand why the limit has been set, or have any autonomy in determining how to meet it. It makes the child feel like they're our enemy rather than our partner, so relatedness is undermined as well. Because at the end of the day, we don't want to be reminding our child forever not to throw balls in the house, or to brush their teeth, or to tidy their rooms. We want them to take on these ideas as their own, ideally because they want to do these kinds of things for themselves, not because we're pressuring them to do the activity. This reminds me of the types of self-regulation that we discussed when we talked about rewards with Alfie Kohn. When we have to reward the child for cleaning her room or punish her for not doing it, she's externally regulated. We're essentially doing the regulation for her by controlling or coercing her. She may have internalized the rule slightly when she engages in introjected regulation, which means the pressure and coercion are still there, but they come from inside her, so she might be thinking, I don't want to tidy my room, but my parent really wants me to do it. She may feel guilty, anxious, or uncomfortable if the room stays messy. A child who's using identified regulation has identified with or personally taken on the value of the behavior and sees it as important to their goals. She might clean her room because she recognizes she'll be able to find things more easily when it's tidy. She doesn't enjoy cleaning it, but she does it willingly. And the final stage is integrated regulation, which is when the person has examined the issue and decided that it fits within their other beliefs and values. She doesn't feel guilty if she doesn't clean up, but she cleans up because she values having a tidy room. One of the things that prompted me to reach out to Alfie Kohn in the first place was to understand whether you can reward someone at the beginning of the process and expect them to integrate the idea later on. In other words, if I reward my daughter to get her to clean her room now, will she ultimately decide that cleaning her room fits with her own values so it becomes integrated into her ideas? Mr. Kohn was adamant that this is not going to happen, that extrinsic motivation in the form of parental control undermines the development of integrated regulation, and by extension the same happens with limits. After all, punishments and rewards are only quantitatively different. They're both tools that we use to coerce people into doing things we want them to do. When we punish children for doing things we don't want them to do, we're undermining their autonomy because they don't get to decide if they want to take on this value, as well as their competence to examine an idea and take it on as their own, as well as our relatedness when we exert our dominance. It's in providing the rationale for a limit that the child is able to decide whether the value aligns with their own values and internalize this, if the rationale makes sense and is within the child's ability to understand.

And when we have a relationship with a high degree of relatedness that's generally positive, our child is likely to want to emulate our behavior, which includes taking on our values. Dr Mark Lepper has argued that the key to supporting internalization is to exert the minimum amount of control that elicits the behavior, so the child can't attribute their compliance to external constraints. So you want to exert just enough pressure to get the child to engage in the new behavior, but not so much that the child pays most attention to the pressure rather than to the behavior. Dr Lepper tested this idea by using either mild or severe threats to prohibit children from touching a toy in his lab. He found that children who received the mild threat were most likely to resist temptation in a completely different situation two weeks later. He concluded that compliance in the presence of strong constraints undermines internalization, while compliance in the presence of weak constraints supports internalization. If we're not using rewards to gain compliance, then another option is to use power, although this ends up helping us to achieve immediate compliance, but doesn't support the child in taking on our values. A couple of studies shed some light on this. A really old one from nineteen sixty that did use a small sample size of 22 families found that the more mothers used unqualified power assertion with children, the more those children became resistant to attempts by peers and teachers to ask the child to do something. The power assertion helped the mother to achieve compliance at home, but it didn't actually support the child in developing self-control that they could bring to school. And then a slightly more recent study from nineteen eighty found that mothers who were more controlling and scolded their children frequently had children who didn't internalize values as much as the children of mothers who scolded less and helped their children do things independently. Some researchers have found that securely attached children seem to be more internally regulated than children who didn't have a secure attachment with their primary caregiver, which again demonstrates the importance of relatedness to compliance. It's possible that relatedness leads to compliance in that children with a secure relationship with their caregiver are more likely to comply, but also that compliance leads relatedness in that taking on the caregiver's values leads to greater relatedness. Dr. Grazia Konchanska has done a lot of work on how children experience parents' requests for compliance. In one study she showed what she called committed compliance, which is where the child takes on the parent's values, occurred most often where the parent and child had a mutually positive relationship during the activity, reduced the need for the parent to exert more forceful control, and was seen both when the parent asked the child to do something as well as when the child was told don't do something. By contrast, children who didn't have as positive relationship with their caregiver had to be reminded repeatedly not to touch some fun toys, didn't seem to have internalized the value, and was most effective when the parent said don't do something. I was particularly interested in this finding about saying don't, since it goes against what practitioners of the RAI parenting philosophy tend to use. Advice from the proponents of RAI says that parents should say make sure to keep the pen on the paper rather than don't draw on the table, because apparently the child only hears draw on the table and misses the don't. Personally, I sort of naturally gravitate to a hybrid model. If I'm requesting compliance then I'm more likely to use do. So if I'd appreciate it if my daughter did something, but it's not the end of the world if she decides not to do it, then I'll ask her to do something. And I reserve don't for more serious rule violations. And when I use a don't, I usually then follow up with a couple of you can do x instead options. You might want to experiment with this yourself to see which appears to work best for your child.

Dr. Kachanska also found that contrary to popular wisdom about the terrible twos, children's frequency of compliance actually stays pretty stable from toddlerhood to age five, but the way that children express their non-compliance shifts over this period. They start off with a lot of passive non-compliance, although I have to say it's really not clear to me how researchers can distinguish between passive non-compliance and the child not understanding what they were asked to do, and direct defiance. And over time these were replaced with more skillful forms of expressing resistance like simple refusals and negotiation. Simple refusals are when the child just says no, and are actually viewed as a milestone in children's development of autonomy. They express competence and more autonomy than defiance because the child's goal is self-assertion rather than resisting the adult. Simple refusal is more skilled than defiance, which parents find aversive, but not quite as skilled as negotiation which is indirect and persuasive. We're going to talk in a bit about how we can set effective boundaries and limits with our children, but first I just want to mention a couple of ideas to put this in context. The first of these is a quote from a paper by Dr Alan Shroof whose work on emotion regulation I relied on heavily in the episode on that topic, and he says, automatic compliance is not the hallmark of a competent two-year-old. While we do want our child to do what we ask when we're setting limits related to safety for example, if they respond yes mother every time you ask them to do something, then your child is going to have a host of problems later in life. Although compliance is associated with mothers feeling as though their child has fewer behavior problems, by age five compliant boys in one study were perceived as having more internalizing problems, so things like anxiety, sadness and fearfulness. As we learned a long time ago when I first looked at Alfie Kohn's book Unconditional Parenting, it doesn't seem to be possible to raise an adult who thinks critically but who only switches on this ability after they leave your house. So complete compliance is not our goal. And secondly I want to refer back to what Alfie Kohn said in our interview on rewards, which is that often when a child doesn't comply with a limit we assume the child's behavior is the problem, when actually the limit may be the problem. Now this isn't to say we should never set limits on our child's behavior, but rather we should see if there are other ways of meeting everyone's needs in the situation without using the particular limit the child is protesting. We talked a lot in that interview about trying to get a child to put their clothes in the hamper when actually what we should be doing is examining our underlying needs and seeing if there are other ways to meet those needs. So perhaps as a parent we have a need to feel the house is tidy and also that we're not the only one doing all the work. And maybe there's another way that our child can help us to meet our need, like helping with the laundry on the weekend, without needing to comply with the immediate limit that we set because we had set it without deeply considering the underlying needs. I do think that having an understanding of your needs can help you to form a framework for the limits that you set. So for example, I have limits around safety issues as well as respect for people and property, but this can play out in different ways in the moment. For example, I'm very sensitive to loud noises, so if my daughter starts playing an instrument really loudly, I ask her to either take it to another room or to play it more quietly near me. If playing loudly is her primary need, then she moves to another room. If she wants to be close to me in that moment, then she plays more softly. Either way, both of our needs can be met without me needing to ask her to stop playing. And we'll talk more in a few minutes about what to do when the child doesn't comply with our limits. So Dr. Junot proposes three zones of discipline that we can use to form this framework. The first element of this framework is behavior that is wanted and sanctioned, where our yes is given freely and graciously. So these are things that we want our children to do.

The second is behavior that is not sanctioned but is tolerated for specific reasons, including providing leeway for learners with the expectation of future improvements. So for example, tolerating a 12-month-old spilling food on the floor while they're eating, and also providing leeway for hard times. So when experiencing accidents, illness, moving to a new house, separation from friends, death or divorce in the family. I actually also add fatigue to this list as well, although Junot's hard times list is sort of more hardcore than mine. And then the third element of this framework is behavior that cannot be tolerated at all and must be stopped. So for number one, behavior that's wanted and sanctioned, you aren't setting a limit. You're encouraging this behavior, or at least saying why not. This is the place where you want to be as much of the time as you can. And the key to this is to reassess whether you need a limit in the first place. So when my daughter wants to head outside without shoes on, my husband will say, you can't go outside without shoes on, which often results in raised voices and tears. But I'll say, hey you don't have shoes on. Last time you went out without shoes on, you stepped on a rock and you hurt your foot. Do you want to put shoes on? And then she gets to make the decision about whether she wants shoes, and not only do I not have to set a limit, but she gets to practice deciding how much risk she wants to take. The key here is that as much as possible, I have my default answer to a question be yes. If I'm not sure if I can say yes, I say, I need a minute to think about it. Can you tell me why you want to do whatever the thing is she's asking to do? And after I've thought about it, if possible, I say yes, which means I don't need to set a boundary. So let's skip number two for a minute. For number three, behavior that cannot be tolerated, you need to decide what are your hard limits. As I mentioned, my non-negotiable limits are around safety and respect for people and property. I do try to be as permissive as possible related to safety. I allow high climbing and jumping off things and just ask what's your plan to make sure my daughter has one. But I'm clear in my own mind about obvious safety risks like running into the street and riding without a helmet and using sharp knives unsupervised and I don't allow these activities. Respect for people or property could be a bit more nebulous, but for me it covers things like not making loud noise right near me, not drawing or painting on anything but paper or designated art materials and things like that. In either case, my limit is swift and firm and non-negotiable and my daughter hears this in my tone and the vast majority of times she complies immediately.

But we get ourselves into trouble with number two where a behavior is not sanctioned but is tolerated and I was really interested to see that Jeanette's reasons for permissiveness focus on the child, but in real life we may introduce our own reasons as well. If we've already set 300 limits that day and we just don't have the energy for another one. If we hope that a little permissiveness now will be repaid with compliance later or if we just want them to do what we say without negotiating for once. But pretty often when we set these limits we aren't a hundred percent sure why we're setting them or we're sort of setting them and hope that our child will comply but then when they refuse we find ourselves committed to a course of action and popular parenting advice tells us to never back down because if we do our children won't respect our authority and if we hold the limit we find ourselves in this battle of wills over an issue we realize isn't that important to us after all. So what should we do? Well firstly I try and push as many issues as possible out of number two type limits and into number one sanctioned activities and number three hard limits. So I try to create more permitted activities for which I don't need to set boundaries and I offer choices that allow her to set her own boundaries like instead of saying don't go out without shoes I remind her of the risk of going outside without shoes and let her make the choice. Where I can't make a number two limit into a number one limit I make it into a number three limit if I feel strongly about it. So I keep permitted art supplies within my child's reach but the ones that could make a mess that I find unacceptable are stored out of reach. I put small amounts of food on her plate so I don't have to nag her to eat vegetables. If she wants more food I just remind her she needs to finish what's on her plate before having seconds and I say something like because it's important to eat lots of different kinds of food and because it's not fair that daddy and I have to eat all the stuff you don't like not so that she can have a reward like dessert later. For each of these boundaries I have at least one reason that I can quickly and succinctly explain if my daughter wants to understand it and because I have these reasons that I've thought about in advance I can hold the limit more firmly. Some of my limits are somewhat arbitrary so for example we'll do a snuggle tuck in at or before nine o'clock but not after that we just do a quick hug and good night which could just as easily be 9 15 pm but I won't ever budge on those limits in the moment. Instead I'll hold the nine o'clock limit and then the next day we'd have a problem-solving conversation later where we discuss what's not working about the current limit and how we can potentially shift it to meet everyone's needs. To help with these limits around tolerated behavior I develop policies for what I will do in times of distress and stick to these plans. When my daughter's very tired she often wants to skip brushing teeth but I know that if I allow this the next time she doesn't want to brush teeth she'll say but we don't always brush we missed a night last week so when she's tired I offer to let her brush with fluoride-free toothpaste which doesn't require any spitting so she can do it in bed but not brushing is not an option and I will offer to wait for her as long as she needs until she's ready but if this takes too long then we won't have time for stories. Now I've read in the research literature about a couple of other ideas that you could try although I'm not sure I'm on board with them myself. So Dr Mark Lepper again has done some work on getting children to comply using fantasy. So he and a colleague told children to imagine they were pretending to be a robot picking up moon rocks or just set a goal for themselves like how fast they could pick up blocks. Children in both of these groups were more likely to comply with a request to pick up tennis balls two weeks later than children in a third control group who were just asked to pick up the blocks and Dr Lepper theorized that this was because the children in the moon rock and fast pickup groups were more focused on the activity and less on the fact that they've been asked to do it. This meant the children thought they had chosen to participate in the activity rather than being coerced into it. I guess there's not so much trouble with making inherently boring tasks more interesting using fantasy but I know that Dr Lepper has also suggested that teachers use fantasy to get students interested in schoolwork by doing things like asking children to calculate the angle of the transponder beam that Captain Kirk needs to use to beam Dr Scotty back to the Enterprise given the known distances between the Enterprise and two points on the alien planet.

And I do think there is something wrong with using fantasy to try to motivate children to do something that is inherently interesting like learning. The problem with this scenario is not that the child isn't interested in learning, it's the lesson has no relevance to the child's life. So they're actually interested in learning something that is relevant to their life rather than what the teacher in the curriculum wants them to learn. And Dr Joan Grusek, who we interviewed on the show a few months ago on the topic of goal setting, has suggested that parents who want children to comply even when the parents aren't around should make what she calls purposeful attribution errors by attributing the compliance to the child rather than to the inducements. So the parent might say you did that because you're such a helpful person when the child does the dishes even though in reality the parent did apply some subtle persuasion. I would actually strongly advise against this. Firstly because the judgment of the child is essentially praising them which is essentially a reward. And we can tell it's a reward because we're saying it to try to get the child to engage in the behavior again. And rewards are highly coercive. Secondly children know whether they were being helpful or not. When their parent tells them they were helpful when the child knows they weren't, the child is thinking parent you're either not too smart or you're lying to me. And in fact you are lying to your child which I don't recommend doing deliberately and regularly. So what do we do when a child protests the limit? The first thing to do is always to empathize but to do so in a calm and confident way. Janet Lansbury had a great recent podcast episode on this topic that I'll link to in the references where the mother accepted emotions so readily that her children actually put on a performance for her. If this limit comes up often then I would think about it in advance and decide how much you're willing to give on that limit. I'm perfectly willing to allow my daughter to brush teeth in bed. I'm not willing to go further than that. Not brushing teeth is not an option. Deciding this in advance will allow you to set and hold that limit more easily. If something comes up in the moment feel free to say to your child, I need a minute to think about it. Can you please help me to understand why you want to do this thing? If a child has repeatedly failed to comply with their own suggested modifications you can refuse to accept modifications for a while. You can explain this the first time if you like. Something like, I think your suggestion is reasonable but you've shown me so many times in the past that if I let you do what you ask you then just refuse to do the thing altogether. So if you'd like one last chance you can have it but if you don't follow through the next time when you ask I'm going to say sorry it has to be done my way.

What would you like to do? And then if they don't cooperate you can calmly and confidently hold your limit the next time. But what do you do when a child still refuses to cooperate? One of the most powerful tools to guide your child's cooperation is to set up the environment in a way that invites their cooperation. So for example instead of saying okay let's go to your room now at bedtime I shut off the light in the bathroom and turn on the one in the hallway which naturally leads her towards her bedroom. I ask her to be responsible for choosing her coat and bringing it with her in the morning and putting it away at the end of the day and so I try to keep a clear pathway to the coat hook in her room so that she can do this. But sometimes you need a bit more help and in these cases Dr. Janot proposes using logical consequences to encourage a child's compliance. Now I do want to clear up a terminology point because I think sometimes parents struggle in understanding the difference between natural consequences and logical consequences. Natural consequences are ones that happen without the parent doing anything so if the child chooses to go outside without shoes on they might step on a rock. If they choose to go out without a coat when it's below freezing outside they get cold and I will usually bring the coat with me so the limit doesn't become spiteful and my daughter has to suffer for the rest of the day at least while she's young. You wouldn't need to do this with an older child. But a logical consequence is one that a parent devises. The key to effective logical consequences is they have to be tied to the transgression and they have to be used as sparingly as possible. The difference between logical consequences and punishment is that punishment is unrelated to the transgression and is only used to make the child remember not to transgress in the future. So punishments are related to the child's interests things like taking away a favorite toy or the parent's mood and how much the parent feels the child must pay or the severity of the repeated offense and so they don't provide any additional information about the values and principles behind the parent's rules. This means the child perceives the punishment as coercive and representing a withdrawal of the parent's love. As we've discussed the punishment induces strong emotions in the child which is likely to cause the child to remember something although the child may internalize a message related to the parent's use of punishment rather than the parent's values or principles. Logical consequences may be unpleasant but they don't have to be. Logical consequences may be pleasant if they address the problem and the child takes responsibility for example by cleaning the living room with fun music on. A survey of 259 mostly French Canadian mothers and children aged between nine to twelve found that mothers rated logical consequences as both more acceptable and more effective than mild punishment especially when those mothers usually use parenting practices designed to support autonomy like reasoning and acknowledging feelings. Children rated logical consequences and mild punishments as equally effective but logical consequences were perceived as more acceptable than mild punishments and researchers believe this acceptability is important in promoting the internalization of the parent's values in the child. In studies where parents use power with and without explanation unexplained power assertion was correlated with child aggressiveness and transgressions when the child was among peers and away from parental power. We've actually recently started to use logical consequences with some success at our house.

I really haven't needed to use them up to this point because usually when we have a problem we have a conversation about the issue to identify our needs and we come up with a plan to move forward that works for both of us but my daughter's been really interested in cutting snowflakes out of paper lately and there have been both snowflakes and all those tiny little bits of paper that come out of a snowflake all over her room and because we added this room where the kitchen used to be it's actually the first thing guests see when they walk into our house. Now I don't require that this room be kept perfectly tidy, my husband's probably actually getting a good laugh out of this example because I'm a lot messier than he is but it was getting really really messy and she didn't seem to care so the natural consequence here would be to let it get messy until she decides she wants it to be tidier but because the mess was in a pretty public area I wasn't willing to let it go forever. I tried problem-solving conversations. We agreed to do 10-minute tidy-ups before bed where we would tidy up together as much as we could in 10 minutes and that worked for a day and then she refused to participate and after another problem-solving conversation she said she's too tired at the end of the night and wanted to do it right after she got home from preschool. I was skeptical but I agreed and I don't think that that one even happened once. I tried parent educator Robin Einzig's approach of modeling graciousness so I tidied her room for her quite a few times. As I was doing it I realized that modeling graciousness really seems more suitable to one-off things like accidental spills rather than ongoing issues where it seems like I'm essentially cleaning her room for her every day. So I said to her, Caris this room's always a mess I'd like to work with you to figure out some ideas for how we can help it cleaner. I have some ideas and I'd like to hear yours if you have any. And she said what are your ideas and I said well I could take all the paper out of your room and if you want more paper we'll work together to make sure your room is tidy before you get it and she said let's do that. So that's what we've been doing and it's working great. I really didn't think it would work for her because she often uses several pieces of paper in one session but now she'll come to me and say can I have some paper please and I'll say of course let's go and make sure your room is tidy and then we'll spend just a couple of minutes tidying up because it really doesn't take that long when you only have a couple sheets worth of snowflake bits and then she gets more paper. So the key to the effectiveness of this consequence are that it directly supports my daughter's internalization of the value of the keeping our house tidy. I didn't say you haven't tidied your room so I'm taking away your favorite toy or you haven't tidied your room so we can't go to your friend's birthday party which would be examples of punishments. The consequence is directly tied to the thing I want to achieve. The second key is that I'm really applying a very minimal amount of control. I'm not saying that she can't have more paper or that she can't cut those annoying tiny pieces out or guilt trip her into tidying up. It's just that before she gets more paper we need to work together to tidy her room. After some period of time she might decide that she doesn't want to have to come to me for more paper and she'll be willing to keep her room acceptably tidy and at that point I'll be ready to shift the control back to her. I was honestly hoping that I wouldn't need to use logical consequences but I think that when other tools just aren't working they are something we can use to help us achieve our parenting goals. So let's summarize what we've learned today. Parents in other cultures around the world use a variety of punishment strategies that are designed to help children remember their infraction. Although it's possible they also internalize messages about who holds the power in the relationship through this as well. If you come from a culture where power over children is a desirable thing then this is probably an attractive fringe benefit but for those of us who are aiming for a more respect-based relationship with our children we use the distinctly weird practice of empathizing with our children's feelings and attempting to reason with them.

We're doing this dance of knowing when a limit can even be set because toddlers will say no to things and they will throw things sometimes and we're setting these limits in a way that ideally provides autonomy, competence and relatedness in an attempt to encourage the child to take on their limit as their own. Now I know it can be difficult when it feels like our child is constantly testing boundaries and doing things we ask them not to do but having a positive relationship with your child is really important to get out of any cycle of persistent disobedience you might have slipped into without realizing it. So if you find yourself in a persistent negative cycle with your child try to take a step back from control that you might have been exerting and do some fun activities with your child that don't require a lot of limit setting to build up that bank of positive feeling between you. Our discipline is most effective when we have a framework of acceptable behaviors that we operate within. The behaviors that are never acceptable like things that really aren't safe or show disrespect for people or property are never allowed and as much as possible we allow the child to do pretty much anything else that's reasonable. Whenever you can try and stay out of that gray area in the middle where you find yourself setting boundaries that you realize you can't or don't want to hold. You may occasionally choose to allow behavior that you normally wouldn't in times of extreme stress either stress in the child or stress in you but be aware that when you do this you're setting a precedent for this to be repeated in the future. Rather than apparently randomly just allowing usually prohibited behavior which is how it may seem from your child's perspective you could say I'm going to let you do this one time tomorrow when we're both calm and we've had some time to think about this I'd like to have a chat about how we can do this differently next time. While you've had several of these conversations and nothing seems to be sticking and there's no real natural consequence or the natural consequence like my daughter's room getting filled with bits of paper that isn't acceptable to me doesn't work for you might consider the lightest possible application of logical consequences you can think of to meet both your and your child's needs. If you want some more guidance on how to have these problem-solving conversations with your child that really do solve 90% of our limit-setting problems without the need for logical consequences or punishments then do check out the free download that I have available at yourparentingmojo.com forward slash punishment it'll guide you step by step through having one of these conversations with your child that promotes their autonomy competence and relatedness at the same time as you get both your and your child need met. We've been using this with my daughter for a couple of years now and it was really pretty gratifying to hear at her latest parent-teacher conference that she's become the go-to problem solver in her classroom. When children are having a problem she's the one who can figure out solutions to meet both of their needs. So once again you can find that at yourparentingmojo.com forward slash punishment. I hope this has helped you understand a bit more about what the research says about setting limits and how they can be useful and how you can set them in a way that encourages your child's developing self-determination rather than undermining it. I'd love to hear how it goes if you implement some of these strategies. You can find all the references for today's episode at yourparentingmojo.com forward slash limits. Thanks for joining us for this episode of Your Parenting Mojo. Don't forget to subscribe to the show at yourparentingmojo.com to receive new episode notifications and the free guide to seven parenting myths that we can leave behind. And join the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group for more respectful research-based ideas to help kids thrive and make parenting easier for you. I'll see you next time on Your Parenting Mojo.