‘So you think you can dance’ and parenting for ADHD

Hi,
Agreed the most important tool in parenting is the good relationship , the real influence we have over kids , especially in the teenage years , where our ‘ power’ over them is limited, and punishments and rewards give way to reaching understandings.
However my conclusion and yours differs completely

‘ Not only will it improve your relationship and provide some enjoyment together, but it will make it easier to communicate with one another. This will lead to improvements in behavior

‘and it may even make it easier to enforce rules and rewards when you are working on more complicated parenting approaches.’

Why go backwards , why change the dynamic to a win-lose one , why rely on a ‘ doing to ‘ , manipulative approach to parenting , rewards and punishments , when the one on one time has promoted good communication skills , other cognitive skills, problem solving skills, the ability to reach mutually satisfying solutions. Why not make that one to one communication style part of the interaction and not for the couple of hours a week. The greatest gift a parent can give to a kid , is the relationship , and a relationship means dialog , being understood , having a voice. So many cognitive skills , executive functions, language processing skills , conitive flexibilty, social skills, emotional regulation skills are taught on the jo by parents if they have a working wioth relationship. Then there is the question of the long term effectiveness of rewards and punishments, they don’t generalize, and rewards have a negative effect on intrinsic motivation. See Alfie Kohn’s Punished by rewards – Unconditional Parenting and of Ross Greene’s The explosive Child. Russel Barkley tries very hard to justify the token economy system , ADHD kids lack intrinsic motivation. By upping the extrinsic motivation , the kid will be deprived of enjoying their intrinsic reward and developing intrinsic motivation.
The success of a program depends on this first step, then why not go forward ?

Hi,
Thank you for your quick reply.
‘ Here’s my question: what is the difference between getting two gold stickers for clearing the dishes vs. an adult making $30 for two hours of office work?

That’s the point Alfie Kohn makes – you are defining the parent -child
relationship as an economic one , a ‘ doing to’ one.
If the kid is clever he learns quickly – if you want me to do something , you will have to pay me , the kid asks himself the question – what’s in it for me , what will I get , what will they do to me. We don’t just want to get the kid to do kind things , we are not interested in ‘ behavior ‘ ,we want him to become a kind person who values the community, family , class etc
Kohn says ‘ consequences ‘ are important , not the ‘ what’s in it for me type , but showing a kid how his actions effect others , how he contributed to the upkeep of the home , even better , ask questions , how he feels about it , that is the true reward , that is the intrinsic reward , develop empathy. A kid had received severe consequences
for beating up a kid . He was asked was it worth it. He replied that he did not care ,the main thing is that he showed the kid who was boss. The point being is that kids don’t hurt others because they are afraid of consequences but because they have empathy.
As far as adults – the environment is an economic one unlike that family structure I am trying to create , and even in an economic environment Kohn shows that using financial incentives does not do the trick
See his site
http://alfiekohn.org he has plenty of articles , family , education and business – the same approach for all

from an article
Challenging Behaviorist Dogma:

Myths About Money and Motivation

By Alfie Kohn

The idea that dangling money and other goodies in front of people will “motivate” them to work harder is the conventional wisdom in our society, and particularly among compensation specialists. Those of us who have challenged the Skinnerian orthodoxy that grounds this conviction have apparently caused its professional apologists to reassert in ever more emphatic and defensive language what most of their audience already takes on faith. (Hence the amusing spectacle of being admonished that it is “time that management specialists … understood the importance of money” — as though the field were guilty of attributing too little importance to it!)

In an interview a parent of a BP child described the behavior approach she was taught in the hospital. Kohn replied that he was not surprised that hospitals would base their treatments on Skinner and meds.

I agree that there is not ‘ one size fits all ‘ and that each parent has their own parenting philosophy and educational goals. For sure it is easier and not complicated to manipulate a kid with rewards and punishment s , much more difficult to change the relationship to a win -win , problem solving one , the parent has also got to be a good problem solver. It is not easy. Most therapists and authors , don’t understand problem solving , they think it is the same as negotiation,
they don’t know the difference between concerns / solutions. Educationalists today realize the importance of thinking skills, metacognition, problem solving , perspective taking. So if you have improved the relationship why not give your child the opportunity of acquiring these important life skills. ?

Allan

Hi Allan,
Thank you for the excellent comments.
I don’t see anything to argue with here or challenge here.

I still feel that if we categorize the parenting approaches into 2 (external structure vs. problem solving – which may in fact be an over simplification), then both can be helpful for different families at different times.

When I think about severe behavioral difficulties that can occur, in a family, I have seen the ‘external structure’ parenting approach work very well many times. I haven’t seen the ‘collaborative problem solving’ model work as well. That may be because it is a newer concept, or perhaps there are far fewer therapists with the skills to teach it and implement it.

This certainly merits more thought, and hopefully more comments.

Thanks again for excellent input.

While I do not believe Alfie Kohn has written specifically about/for the AD/HD group (and I agreed with him long before I had heard of him!), it’s clear to me that his conclusions apply perhaps even more to this group, and here is why:

People with AD/HD are notorious for not learning from experience. People with AD/HD are frequently losing their keys, coming late to dinner, not finishing what they start, leaving things to the last minute, going to the next thing without cleaning up, doing laundry when they’re completely out of underwear, saying things they regret, interrupting others, wiggling their limbs, flying off the handle, crying “too much,” snapping at someone who interrupts them, etcetera.

Guess what? These people can be children, and they can be adults, still behaving in so many of the ways they should have “learned” not to, by now.

I know a girl who at age 7 whacked her mother every time mom walked past. Not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to be annoying. Mom — who understood how her daughter could know her mom didn’t like it, do it anyway, and be sorry instantly after she did it, — still found herself avoiding such close encounters with her 7 year old daughter.

Now, what was this pair to do? It’s “bad” behavior, And The Child Knew It. The fact of her immediate remorse is a clue to the non-volitional nature of her behavior. Mom could maybe manage her daughter into not doing this, by pairing the punishment (or, in the case of “appropriate” behavior, rewards) with the behavior without any delay. Barkley recognizes the short term memory problems of the AD/HD person when he says the consequence has no meaning to the child – or adult – if not connected in time and place.

Well, it might work. It might not. I do not think there is any learning going on, though, that is useful in any other time or place, and certainly not over a lifetime. Ask any adult with AD/HD whether s/he still behaves impulsively. Ask if s/he procrastinates. Or makes messes without cleaning up, says what s/he regrets.

I think that about covers it. Yes, setting up routines and structures are external ways to help a person manage to be more effective. But to do so is not “behavior management” in the reward-and-punishment style. It is Environment Management, and as such is not treating the child (or adult, remember) as a object that has things done TO him/her. It is — as much as enhancing the probability of prosocial and successful behavior — modeling what the child is going to have to learn, eventually, to do for him/herself: find the best conditions for maximizing effectiveness, and then set up the environment that way whenever possible.

That’s what school accommodations are about, of course. Why one would expect “Regular” behavior at home or anywhere to occur without some accommodations (not permissiveness, but aids in the way of managing the environment, both material and emotional – even verbal/auditory), is a mystery to me.

Barkley is famous for saying kids with AD/HD don’t learn from experience. In many ways he’s correct on that point, yet goes on to tout behavioral strategies which depend on learning from experience.

Here’s a conundrum. People with AD/HD learn lots of things from experience: most of them do more things “right” than not-right, and most of those behaviors have not been punished or rewarded. Somebody has some ’splainin’ to do. These things have been learned by watching, practicing, wanting to be self reliant, by being human and therefore programmed to want to become independent, to contribute and do their part, and more.

There is no external reward coming for almost all behaviors we could name. Most things people learn, they learn automatically. People with AD/HD often have to learn some of those things deliberately. All people learn best when they are free of distressing emotions, when they feel comfortable and accepted, and when it’s interesting enough.

If we want kids to grow up and take responsibility for themselves AND their behavior, we had better not ever start into the business of coercing behavior. As rewarders and punishers, parents are taking over the reins of who is in charge of the child’s behavior. If Jimmy behaves “properly” as a result of mom and dad’s Doing To him with external consequences, his focus is going to be on them and not himself.

And, the kid with trouble keeping more than one thing in mind, trouble shifting attention, etc. is going to have way more trouble thinking about what dad or mom is going to do AND his own behavior than any “Regular” kid, so this is an even worse strategy for the AD/HD group than for others.

And I still haven’t got to the relationship part, well-covered already. But to add one more idea: if babies learn to talk when they are in relationship with the person talking to them (true: babies don’t learn to talk from radio, TV, etc. and in fact, babies in homes with media playing often, talk later than those who live in homes with infrequent media and frequent verbal interaction); and if people with AD/HD are much more likely to be moved by things that are stimulating, what better stimulation (not what “Intense” stimulation) is there than the emotional connection between child and parent?

In a million years I would not forfeit the closeness made possible by not objectifying my child but instead treating her as she is: the Subject of her own life. And, while there are enormous problems of many sorts which I expect will dog her the rest of her life, one of them is NOT responsibility, nor lack of empathy, nor lack of self discipline; and she has at 14 taken the reins of her own treatment, with her parents alongside to add their sturdy hands to the task if she veers too far to left, or right.

Is this not what everybody says they want from their AD/HD kids?

(Side note: the one time we ever tried so much as a “Time Out,” we were met with screams of rage, confusion and abandonment.)

And, finally: how many adults with AD/HD can say their parents really “got” them and “got” who they were? That is a crucial thing to provide, and from that flows empathy (for the child) and therefore creativity in problem-solving; and what is engendered in the child is the same.

Thank you for reading.