Raising a Successful and Happy Child
by Jim Taylor, Ph.D What
do kids really need to be successful and happy people? Parents,
educators, and society as a whole couldn't ask a more important
question. How you answer this question will determine how you will
raise your child, what lessons your child will learn, what values he
will adopt, and, ultimately, what kind of adult he will become.
The question of what kids really need to become successful and happy
people has been asked since the Enlightenment. The answers have been
many and diverse, ranging from "spare the rod, spoil the child" to "let
them find their own way." As with such issues, the answer to this
question likely lies somewhere between those two extremes. People have
a tendency to oversimplify these matters because it makes a complex
issue easier to deal with. But it also probably makes the answer
inadequate.
My answer to this question reflects back on what parents did well
and where they may have erred during the past fifty years of child
rearing. It also looks at the present to understand what is unique
about our society during this period in our history that makes child
rearing such a challenge. And my answer attempts to gaze into the
future to better understand our society and where child rearing may be
going.
My response to the question "What do kids really need?" is a
two-part answer. The first part of my answer focuses on the "what" of
the question, namely, the essential qualities that every child needs to
become a successful and happy adult. The second part of my answer
addresses the "how" of the question, specifically, how you can help
your child to develop those qualities. Ultimately, my answer is
intended to empower you to act on your values and beliefs, and to
become a positive, active, and purposeful force in your child's life.
THREE PILLARS OF SUCCESSFUL ACHIEVERS
Parents
who want their children to achieve something called "success" may find
that this goal conflicts with their desire for their children to also
become happy. Achieving success, as frequently defined by our society,
emphasizes wealth and social status and is often at odds with
experiencing satisfaction, contentment, and happiness. A perusal of the
psychology section of any bookstore shows that the goal of achieving
success by itself is inadequate. As Dr. Jack Wetter, a Los Angeles
clinical psychologist, observes, "On the one side, you've got books on
how to raise achieving, successful children. And across from that,
you've got books for adults on how to overcome your depression and
increase your self-esteem."
The purpose — and the theme — of Positive Pushing is to guide you in raising your child to be a successful achiever.
Successful achievers are distinguished from those who simply achieve
success in that, for successful achievers, success and happiness are
synonymous. Not only do they not view success and happiness as mutually
exclusive, parents of successful achievers see them as necessarily
mutually inclusive. Success without happiness is not success at all.
Implicit in the notion of successful achievers is that a
necessary part of success and happiness is the internalization by
children of universally held values such as respect, consideration,
kindness, generosity, fairness, altruism, integrity, honesty,
interdependence, and compassion. Children cannot become successful
achievers unless they adopt and live by these essential life-enriching
values.
The development of successful achievers comes from fostering the
Three Pillars of Successful Achievers: self-esteem, ownership, and
emotional mastery. These three areas provide the foundation for raising
children who are successful, happy, and possess life-affirming values.
The goal of Positive Pushing is to show you how to raise your
child with these three pillars so that his or her childhood development
will lead to a life of success and happiness.
FIRST PILLAR: SELF-ESTEEM
Self-esteem
has been perhaps the most misunderstood and poorly used developmental
area in recent generations. In the last few decades, parents were led
to believe that self-esteem developed if a child felt loved and valued.
This belief caused parents to shower their children with love,
encouragement, and support regardless of what their children actually
did.
Yet this "unconditional love" is only one half of the self-esteem
equation. The second part is that children need to develop a sense of
competence and mastery over their world. Most basically, children must
learn that their actions matter, that their actions have consequences.
Since the 1970s, parents have often neglected to provide their children
with this essential component of self-esteem.
Your child will develop high self-esteem from receiving appropriate
love, encouragement, and support, but also from the sense of competence
he develops from opportunities you give him to learn and use skills in
the pursuit of achievement. High self-esteem also acts as the
foundation for the other two pillars that form the essence of
successful achievers.
SECOND PILLAR: OWNERSHIP
Another mistake that parents can make in trying to develop high self-esteem in their children is to provide them with too much
love, encouragement, and support. By investing so much of their own
self-esteem in their child's efforts, parents, in effect, assume
ownership of their child's achievements. Though these efforts are often
well-intentioned, the result is that children feel no sense of
connectedness and responsibility for their efforts. The children end up
being unable to say, "I'm doing this because I want to."
Children need to gain a sense of ownership of their life's
interests, efforts, and achievements. This ownership means that they
engage in an activity out of an enduring love for it and an internally
derived determination to do their very best. This ownership also
provides them with an immense source of gratification and joy from
their efforts that further motivates them to strive higher in their
achievement activities.
THIRD PILLAR: EMOTIONAL MASTERY
The
third pillar of successful achievers, emotional mastery, is perhaps the
most neglected aspect of a child's development. Parents have been led
to believe that letting their children experience negative emotions
such as frustration, anger, and sadness will harm them. Based on this
belief, parents have felt the need to protect their children from
feeling bad. They rationalize failure, distract children from
experiencing emotions deeply, try to placate negative emotions, and
create artificial positive emotions.
Yet, parents who protect their children from their emotions are
actually interfering with their children's emotional growth. These
children end up never learning how to deal effectively with their
emotions and enter adulthood ill-equipped for its emotional demands.
Only by being allowed to experience emotions are children able to
figure out what emotions they are feeling, what the emotions mean to
them, and how they can manage them effectively.
This third pillar explains that you will want to give your child opportunities to experience emotions fully — both positive and
negative — and provide her with guidance to understand and gain mastery
over her emotional life. Children who do not develop emotionally can
still achieve success, but the price they pay is often discontentment
and unhappiness in their successes. Emotional mastery enables children
to not only become successful, but also to find satisfaction and joy in
their efforts.
WHY CHILDREN NEED TO BE PUSHED
Many
children are creatures of inertia (as are many adults). They will
remain in their current state — for example, lying on the couch all day
watching TV — unless you exert a force on them. If you do not push your
child, she will be greatly hindered in her learning to walk and talk.
She will not want to work very hard or strive to do very much. At best,
without pushing, she will do things more slowly or less well than she
is capable.
Children do not like discomfort. When they first try something new,
they will often put forth effort until it gets difficult or
uncomfortable. Then they will look to others — most often to you— to see
whether they have gone far enough. If you say, "Great job. You can stop
if you want," they often will. By stopping, your child will never find
out what he is capable of and will miss out on the satisfaction of
moving out of his comfort zone and pushing his limits.
If you push him
to try harder and persist longer, "Good job so far, but we bet you can
do even better," he is more likely to face his discomfort and attain a
higher level of achievement and satisfaction. As Boston Globe
writer John Powers observes, "A funny thing happens when you raise the
bar. People find a way to get over it, once they realize it's expected.
Human beings can do amazing things — if they're asked to."
A powerful metaphor is that of the mother bird and the baby bird in
the nest. The time has arrived for the baby bird to learn to fly. But
the baby doesn't know it. If left to its own devices, it might remain
in the warmth, comfort, and safety of the nest forever. The mother
knows the time has come for the baby bird to leave the nest. The mother
knows that any earlier the baby would have been unprepared to fly and
might have fallen to the ground. And the mother knows that any later
and the baby would resist leaving the nest. So, with a firm nudge, the
mother bird pushes the baby bird out of the nest, having complete faith
her baby is ready. And the baby bird does fly!
The best way to illustrate why pushing your child is so essential is
to describe the qualities that make successful achievers both
successful and happy. Successful achievers have ingrained essential
values that enable them to be productive, caring, and thoughtful
people. These values, in turn, allow them to take risks and to explore,
test, and realize their fullest abilities. These experiences teach
successful achievers about the connection between their efforts and
their results, and strengthen their sense of control over their lives.
In the course of their efforts, successful achievers experience both
success and failure, and learn the valuable lessons of each. These
experiences provide them with great satisfaction and fulfillment in
giving their best effort, regardless of whether they succeed or fail.
The culmination of this process results in successful achievers
understanding what makes them happiest, helps them to find their life's
passion, and impels them to pursue their dreams to their fullest extent.
If you don't push your child, she will have a much more difficult
time developing these essential elements of becoming a successful
achiever. Some people have described pushing children as a form of
child abuse (and it can be), but not pushing your child may be a form
of neglect that can be equally destructive. Like the mother bird with
her baby bird, you need to be willing to push your child so that she
will learn to fly and to soar to her greatest heights.
WHY PUSHING HAS GOTTEN A BAD RAP
The
popular view of pushing holds that parents need to force their children
to do things that they do not want to do, like cleaning their rooms,
doing their homework, or practicing on the piano. Today's parents have
been told that pushing will make their children angry and resentful,
reduce their desire to achieve, and leave permanent emotional scars
that will handicap them for life. There appears to be some truth to
that notion of pushing. The University of Massachusetts researchers Ena
and Ronald Nuttall found that parents who pushed too hard, in the form
of rigid and angry control, actually reduced their children's
motivation to achieve. Unfortunately, misunderstanding of research of
this type and some parents' own experiences have led many to back away
from pushing their children altogether rather than to learn how to push
in a healthy and appropriate way.
Many baby boomers apparently have unhappy memories of their
upbringings. I often hear parents say something like: "I don't want to
raise my child the way my parents raised me." When I ask these parents
about their childhoods, they describe their own upbringings as
"oppressive, cold, restrictive, or controlling." Drs. Don Dinkmeyer and
Gary D. McKay, the authors of Raising a Responsible Child,
observe that "our autocratic tradition, emphasizing punishment and
reward, has trained us to prod and nag rather than encourage. Often our
language merely echoes the comments our own parents made to us."
What the above research and this quote tell us is that pushing is
destructive when it is negative, angry, controlling, and demeaning.
This type of pushing causes children to feel threatened. Children are
inherently motivated to avoid threats and will, if threatened, avoid
trying to achieve anything. Because many parents seem to have been
raised with this negative kind of pushing, they fear pushing in general
to be something that will hurt their children. Because of this negative
view of pushing, many parents aren't able to see that the problem is how
they push, not whether they push. This is a great loss to their
children. As Ena and Ronald Nuttall have found, parents who are more
accepting and encouraging, and less hostile, raise children who are
hardworking, competent, and ambitious. Positive pushing works.
This current generation of parents seems to be reflecting on how
they were raised and then choosing to raise their own children in a
very different manner. Unfortunately, to correct the perceived mistakes
of their parents' child-rearing methods, many new parents are going to
the opposite end of the child-rearing spectrum, using a laissez-faire
approach that offers children little direction in all aspects of their
lives. The University of Georgia researchers Rex Forehand and Britton
Mc-Kinney traced the disciplinary practices of parents over the past
forty years and found four primary trends that have fostered this
overreaction and resistance to pushing: (1) a shift from strict to lax
discipline that gives children mixed messages, (2) guidance on
discipline moving from Puritan religious beliefs to "experts" in fields
such as psychology, (3) legislative changes aimed at strengthening
children's rights, and (4) a diminished role of fathers in child
rearing and discipline.
It seems clear that many parents of the last generation pushed too
hard, too unrelentingly and inappropriately, and many children suffered
because of it. You might be one of them. The current dominant
child-rearing philosophy appears to be a well-intentioned reaction to
correct these mistakes. Unfortunately, this overreaction has taken away
from parents an essential parenting tool.
PUSHING IS A MORAL IMPERATIVE
I
believe that you should push your child. Not only is it okay, it is
your right, responsibility, and your absolute moral imperative as a
parent. I am going to attempt to show you why you need to push your
child. I will describe what I consider to be the dangers of not pushing
your child. And I am going to try to show you how to push your child so
that, instead of the very real possibility of your contributing to the
raising of an unhappy and unproductive person, your child will have a
much greater opportunity to become a successful achiever.
I hope to change the way you think about pushing your child by
broadening the definition of what pushing means and describing the
right and wrong ways to push. I am going to give you permission to do
what you have wanted to do for a very long time, but were too afraid to
do — push your child to become the most successful and happiest person
she can be.
THE POWER OF POSITIVE PUSHING
Positive
pushing is aimed at motivating your child to action. It encourages
growth in your child. Positive pushing impels your child to move out of
her comfort zone, to explore, and to take risks. It fosters achievement
and success. So far, positive pushing may not seem much different from
pushing as you know it. What separates positive pushing from old-style
pushing is that, as the term would suggest, it is positive and
encouraging. Positive pushing always demonstrates the love, respect,
and value you hold for your child. Positive pushing allows your child
to feel in control of her achievement efforts. It is also flexible and
responsive to your child's needs. By the very nature of positive
pushing, your child sees that your pushing is intended to be in her
best interests.
Positive pushing involves exerting a powerful influence over the
values, beliefs, and attitudes you want your child to internalize.
There are three ways you can "push" your child.
First, you influence
your child through modeling, in which your child observes your
emotional expressions, problem-solving strategies, and coping
behaviors. Positive pushing involves "walking the walk" on your
beliefs, attitudes, and values. "Do as I say, not as I do" just doesn't
cut it with positive pushing. You need to live and act on what you
believe.
Second, you teach or coach your child, providing direct
information, instruction, and guidance on values, beliefs, and
behavior. It includes talking to your child about what you value in
life and sharing your perspectives on life, family, career, and other
areas.
Third, you manage your child's environment and activities — peer
interactions, achievement activities, cultural experiences, leisure
pursuits — in ways that reflect the values, attitudes, and behaviors that
you want your child to adopt. Positive pushing means actively creating
an environment at home, in school, and in your community that will
foster success and happiness.
Positive pushing emphasizes creating options for children from which
they can choose a direction, and stressing that doing nothing is not an
option. It requires that children try different things before they make
judgments about them. Positive pushing demands that you push your
children to go beyond what they believe are their limits. Encouraging
your children, providing emotional, practical, financial, and other
types of support, offering guidance and feedback, and giving them love
and attention are also forms of positive pushing.
Yes, positive pushing also means occasionally strongly directing
your child to do things he doesn't want to do. You will be able to push
your child in this way because you believe it is in his best interest.
You should hold your child to certain expectations that reflect your
values and beliefs, for example, sustained effort, responsibility,
consideration, and cooperation. These values will be reflected in
schoolwork, household chores, and helping others. Only by requiring
your child to adhere to these values will he be exposed to them, learn
them, and, eventually, internalize them. Moreover, if your child is
actually engaged in activities that employ the values that you deem
important, he is more likely to adopt them as his own.
This kind of positive pushing is especially important in helping
your child to learn to make informed decisions. Too often, a child
makes a decision about something that might be of benefit to her
without having tried it. Perhaps she has some preconceived notions about
it, has heard about it from friends, or it just doesn't seem
particularly appealing at face value. In these situations, you should
strongly encourage — push — your child to actually experience it, whatever
the "it" is, so that she can make an informed decision about its value
and interest, and whether to continue the activity.
This is
particularly important because most things of value in life cause some
discomfort when they are first experienced. For example, the monotony
of homework, the repetition of practicing a musical instrument, or the
physical demands of learning a sport can all be initially discouraging.
If your child is allowed to stop before she has reached a point where
she can experience some of the rewards of an activity, she will miss
out on two essentials of life. Your child will not learn the value of
commitment to achieving success and happiness, and she will not
experience the satisfaction and pure joy of achievement.
THE PURPOSE OF POSITIVE PUSHING
What
do you value in raising your child? What is important to you in his
development and his progress toward adulthood? What qualities do you
want to instill in him? Do you want him to be achieving or happy,
driven or content, successful or satisfied, or all of these? These are
fundamental questions that you need to ask yourself when your child is
young. The answers to these questions will have a profound impact on
which path your child chooses and what kind of person your child
becomes.
The answers you find to these questions reflect your view of the
meaning of life and the values that you derive from this perspective.
How you value family, faith, education, social justice, health,
achievement, happiness, and lifestyle will influence how you raise your
child. Whether you do so consciously or not, you communicate your
values to your child through the life you lead and the choices you
make. As Calvin Trillin, the author of Messages from My Father,
observes, "It seems to me that upbringings have themes. The parents set
the theme, either explicitly or implicitly, and the children pick it
up, sometimes accurately and sometimes not so accurately." Positive
pushing is how you can forward your theme. It is the way you
deliberately choose, communicate, and instill those values and
perspectives in your child.
THE ART OF POSITIVE PUSHING
Positive
pushing is not an exact science in which clear rules can be given to
you about how and when to push your child. Rather, positive pushing is
an art that takes thought, sensitivity, and experimentation to find out
the type and intensity of pushing that will be most effective with your
particular child. Some parents push their child relentlessly without
considering the impact that this oppressive force has on him. Other
parents give their child complete free rein to do whatever he wants
with no accounting for how this unrestricted freedom affects him. The
art of positive pushing involves finding a healthy balance between
these two extremes.
The art of positive pushing requires that you temper your
expectations of success with love of your child. Everything you do with
your child is an expression of the degree of control (pushing) and
acceptance (love) you express. Parents who are low in control and low
in acceptance produce children who are the most troubled because they
receive little from their parents in terms of love or boundaries. These
children tend to be unhappy, undisciplined, unfocused, and emotionally
immature. Parents who are low in control and high in acceptance raise
children who are spoiled, impulsive, irresponsible, and dependent.
Parents who are high in control and low in acceptance have children
with low self-esteem who are socially unskilled, feel unloved, and are
angry at and resentful of their parents.
The ideal combination of these
attributes is parents who are high in both control and acceptance. The
children who have had the benefit of this kind of parenting tend to
have high self-esteem, are emotionally mature, and are high achievers.
As Dr. Mary Pipher, the author of Reviving Ophelia, suggests, these
latter parents find "a balance between security and freedom, conformity
to family values and autonomy . . . protection and challenges . . .
affection and structure. [Children] hear the message `I love you, but I
have expectations.' In these homes, parents set firm guidelines and
communicate high hopes."
The art of positive pushing involves learning when you are pushing
too hard. Pushing too hard can produce short-term results seen as
improved effort and greater achievement. Children who are less mature
or less able to express their feelings toward their parents will, for a
time, respond to their parents' unrelenting pushing out of fear of loss
of their parents' love with strong effort and high achievement. These
initial benefits can mislead parents into believing that their forceful
pushing works. But excessive pushing will always come back to haunt
both parents and their children. Though these children may be high
achievers for some time, they will also be very unhappy because of the
tremendous pressure they feel from their parents. At some point, these
children will reach a level of maturity or the burden from their
parents will become so great that they will push back in some
destructive way to relieve the pressure. What results are children who
are both unsuccessful and unhappy.
Children often have difficulty telling their parents directly that
they are pushing too hard for fear that their parents will be
disappointed in them. Instead, children communicate to their parents
that they are feeling too much pressure initially in subtle — and often
unclear — ways, such as not trying as hard, breaking or losing equipment
or materials, or sabotaging their achievement efforts. Unfortunately,
parents misinterpret this behavior as a lack of motivation and
appreciation. Rather than considering what message their children are
trying to convey, parents often have a knee-jerk reaction of anger and
assume a "How ungrateful after all I have done for you" attitude that
further increases the pressure on their children. These conflicting
reactions produce a vicious cycle of anger and resistance, and a
destructive tug-of-war for control over the child's life. If this
battle of wills continues, children may communicate their messages more
"loudly" by using more destructive "language," such as overt rebellion,
disruptive behavior, or substance abuse.
Children have a great ability to communicate to their parents that
they are being pushed too hard. Unfortunately, they often speak to
their parents in a language in which their parents are not fluent. The
art of positive pushing means being sensitive to how your child is
responding to your pushing. An essential part of sensitivity is
learning to speak your child's language. This understanding also
involves deliberately considering the message your child is trying to
communicate — which often your child doesn't even know consciously — and
responding in a way that conveys to your child that you hear what she
is saying. By learning your child's language, you can accurately
interpret her messages and act in her best interests.
Two forces are required to engage in a pushing match. If you push
too hard, your child will push back harder to resist the force. If you
ease your pressure, your child will also let up. What parents often
don't realize is that sometimes less is more — if you back off from
pushing, it allows your child to continue in the direction he (and you)
want to go. By backing off, you increase the likelihood that your child
will regain his motivation, return to his high level of achievement,
and actually have fun again in the achievement activity.
As John Gray, Ph.D., the author of Children Are from Heaven,
observes, "When children resist a parent, it is often because they are
wanting something else and they assume that if you just understood, you
would want to support their want, wish, or need. . . . The power
of understanding your children's resistance is that it immediately
minimizes resistance. When children get the message that you understand
what they want and how important it is to them, then their resistance
level changes."
POSITIVE PUSHING MEANS PUSHING YOURSELF
Positive
pushing doesn't just refer to your doing or not doing things to your
child. In order to push your child appropriately, you must first push
yourself. In my years of work with young achievers, I have come across
no truly mean or ill-intentioned parents. I meet parents who are often
misguided, sometimes confused, and occasionally disturbed. Mostly,
though, I find parents who love their children and want the best for
them, but either they don't know what is best for them or they carry so
much emotional "baggage" from their own upbringings that they aren't
able to act on what is best for their children. I have found that when
most parents are guided to understand what is in their children's best
interests, parents will try to do whatever they can to provide what is
best for them.
Whether a child becomes successful and happy does not necessarily
depend on how "good" or "bad" you are as a parent or what kinds of
mistakes you make in raising your child. Rather, how your child
ultimately turns out depends on your openness to doing things or making
changes that are in the best interests of your child. If you are
willing to do what is best for your child — which may include making
changes yourself and supporting change in your child — the possibilities
for your child's future are good. If you are not willing or able to do
what is best for your child or you can't change yourself or foster
change in your child, your child will have a lesser likelihood of a
richly developed adulthood.
I have come across two types of problem parents in my work with
young achievers. The most difficult parent is one who is unwilling or
incapable of acting in his child's best interests or making changes
that will help his child. This parent is so rigid in his belief that he
is doing the right thing or he carries so much emotional baggage that
he simply lacks the capacity to respond to his child's needs or to make
necessary changes in himself. This parent is unable to consider that he
has made mistakes in raising his child and is threatened by the
suggestion that he must change in order to help his child. If this
child is left to deal with her unsupportive parent on her own, her
chances of becoming a successful achiever are slim. If this child is
fortunate enough to receive support from, for example, her other
parent, a psychotherapist, teacher, coach, or instructor, she has a
chance, but it will be an uphill battle because she must resist the
powerful and ever-present influence of her unsupportive parent in an
unhealthy family environment.
The second type of parent is one who may also carry emotional
baggage and may also have made mistakes, but somehow finds the courage
to recognize the harm she is doing to her child, face her problems, and
support changes in her child. This parent will often seek professional
treatment and will provide her child with similar opportunities. With
this parent's willingness to change, her child has a new environment
that can encourage rather than inhibit his achievement and happiness,
and the odds are in favor of his becoming productive and well-adjusted.
I have immense respect for this parent who puts her child's needs ahead
of her own, faces her own personal demons, and often experiences great
pain in order to help her child. This kind of parent's selflessness,
courage, and strength is remarkable.
For example, Michelle was a promising violinist whose father,
Howard, had devoted the past ten years to her musical career. As
Michelle improved and showed great promise, Howard increasingly exerted
more pressure on her to practice and perform, and his anger, which had
been present for most of his life, became a part of her daily regimen.
When Michelle was thirteen, problems arose. She would have panic
attacks before her recitals, causing her to perform poorly. Howard
couldn't see that he was causing his daughter's problems and hired a
psychologist to work with her. In a short time, it became clear to the
psychologist that Howard was the problem. The psychologist quickly
learned that Howard had been clinically depressed most of his life and
was expressing his depression through anger. At the recommendation of
the psychologist, Howard began seeing a psychiatrist and was put on
antidepressant medication. The rapid change in Howard was remarkable.
His anger subsided and he was able to step back from Michelle's music.
Michelle's behavior changed dramatically too. As if a huge weight had
been lifted off her shoulders, Michelle found joy in her violin again.
Positive pushing means pushing yourself to understand what is best
for your child. It also involves "looking in the mirror" and seeing
what in yourself might interfere with making the right choices and
doing the right thing for your child. Finally, positive pushing means
having the courage to make the changes that will allow your child to
become a successful achiever.
This article was excerpted from:
 POSITIVE pushing: How to Raise a Successful and Happy Child
by Jim Taylor, Ph.D.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Hyperion. ©2002. www.Hyperionbooks.com
Info/Order this book (hardcover) or in paperback.
About the Author
JIM TAYLOR, PH.D., has consulted with young achievers and
their parents in sports, education, and the performing arts for over 17
years. He is the author of several books on achievement and conducts
seminars on the subject throughout North America and Europe. Visti his website at www.drjimtaylor.com.
Another article by this author.
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