Positive Discipline for Preschoolers - Jane Nelson, Cheryl Erwin, & Roslyn Ann Duffy

There is much to admire in this description of parenting through “teaching, guidance, and love”.  The philosophy of positive discipline (based on Alfred Adler’s belief that “human behaviour is motivated by a desire for belonging, significance, connection, and worth” and Rudolf Dreikurs’ emphasis on “the need for dignity and mutual respect in all relationships”) may all sound a bit too warm and fuzzy for some audiences, but there is also a strong emphasis on cultivating “the ability to be both kind and firm at the same time”.  I was particularly taken with the statement that “love is the easy part. The real issue is whether you can show your love in ways that nurture accountability and self-esteem”. The implication is that the main job of a parent is to “encourage your child to reach his full potential as a happy, contributing member of society”, by helping them attain “a sense of belonging and significance, perceptions of capability, personal power and autonomy, and social and life skills”.

Conventionally, discipline tends to be understood as a set of techniques for dealing with bad behaviour.  In this book, bad behaviour is seen as arising from “mistaken goals”, i.e. misbehaving children are trying to meet a real need in an inappropriate way.  The authors advise trying to look for and respond to a message behind misbehaviour, such as “Notice me - involve me usefully”, “Let me help - give me choices”, “I’m hurting - validate my feelings”, or “Don’t give up on me - show me a small step”.  The “building blocks” of positive discipline, such as mutual respect, discipline that teaches, and focusing on solutions instead of punishment, all seem reasonable to me.  These are followed up with suggestions of methods for implementing them, such as getting children involved, saying what you mean, and following through kindly and firmly, which mostly seem like common sense - although of the kind that’s often hard to remember in heated moments!  The one recommendation that seemed less obvious to me is to “act, don’t talk”, which I have found very useful on occasion.

I found the basic principle of “kind and firm” parenting very persuasive.  I have (theoretically at least!) been strongly influenced by the concept of long-term parenting – the idea of thinking about what characteristics you wish your children to have as adults, and trying to parent in a way that encourages those attributes, rather than focusing on solving short-term behaviour problems.  A story about a circle of friends who took it in turns to care for the children while the other mothers had some time off also stuck in my mind, and I significantly altered my views on early academic education after reading here about a research project that confirmed the early advantages of academic preschools, but found that “by age five, the kids from the play-oriented preschools had caught up, while those attending academic preschools felt less positive about school.”  The specific suggestions that I found most compelling on my initial read of this book (but could still benefit from doing more of myself!) were:

• Providing opportunities for children to develop skills, confidence, and a sense of initiative by doing things for themselves as much as possible, trying to be “more interested in helping children develop their full potential than getting chores done quickly” (or tidily!) and encouraging children to take on age-appropriate tasks such as dressing themselves and helping to prepare, serve, and clear away food;
• Positive time-outs - creating a space that children will find appealing and calming, and encouraging them to spend time cooling off there (alone or with a supportive adult) if they are “too upset to get along”, but not enforcing this or using it as a punishment;
• Stating clear expectations - e.g. discussing a forthcoming outing in detail, mentioning (even role-playing) expected behaviour and the consequences of breaking the rules, and following through on those consequences - the example that stuck in my mind was the child who was calmly taken to preschool in his pyjamas;
• Holding children responsible for their actions and giving them the opportunity to make amends, by involving them in cleaning or repairing tasks or finding ways to make someone they have upset feel better;
• Asking “curiosity questions” - allowing children opportunities to think things through by asking questions about what happened and the consequences (at a later, calmer, moment) rather than lecturing;
• Having brief family meetings at which family members can “offer compliments, help solve problems, plan family fun, and express their needs and get help” as well as simply enjoying each other’s company.

On a re-read 18 months later, a few other points also struck me as helpful.  Reading as a mother of two, I was interested in a section on birth order that suggested countering a first child’s tendency to perfectionism by reducing expectations and pressure, modelling acceptance of imperfection (yours and theirs!), and limiting responsibilities, and also in the suggestion of planning “special time” alone with each child, treating it as a special event and giving them focused attention.  Some suggestions on dealing with anger (which had become more relevant to our family in the intervening time!) also seemed useful, such as facilitating talking through feelings by asking yes-or-no questions, discussing physical feelings associated with anger that can act as cues to take a cooling off action, teaching slow breathing, and not trying to talk them out of their feelings.  I also realised a couple of mistakes I’ve been making when reading a warning against “piggybacking” by adding criticism or nagging when following through with consequences or discussing problems, and a reminder of the particular importance of consistent non-verbal communication when dealing with very young children who are still developing their language skills.  Having gone through a period of unpleasant battles with my daughter when I insisted that she drink more water, I also agreed with the advice on health maintenance that “when parents allow children to become involved and responsible (in age-appropriate ways, of course), they not only help ensure their child’s future health and well-being but also build self-confidence and a sense of capability”.

Although most of the advice in this book appears constructive and sensible, I did find myself questioning the level of open-mindedness of some of the parents in their examples - some of these appeared overly permissive (e.g. a mum who allowed her daughter to sleep in her shirt to improve the morning routine), while others seemed to be impractical to implement while fitting into the expectations of mainstream society (such as the example I mentioned earlier of sending a child to preschool in pyjamas).  I was also irritated at times by the frequent references to other books by the same authors on similar themes (even a suggestion to buy this book or another in the series as a gift for a childcare provider!).  On the whole, however, I found this to be a thought-provoking and encouraging resource.

Here are a few more detailed notes to jog my memory...

The “building blocks” of positive discipline are listed as:

• Mutual respect
• Understanding the belief behind behaviour
• Effective communication
• Understanding a child’s world
• Discipline that teaches
• Focusing on solutions instead of punishment
• Encouragement
• Children do better when they feel better

Methods for implementing positive discipline:

• Get children involved (in creating and following routines, through limited choices, with opportunities to help)
• Teach respect by being respectful
• Use your sense of humour
• Get into your child’s world
• Say what you mean, and then follow through with kindness and firmness
• Be patient
• Act, don’t talk - and supervise carefully
• Accept and appreciate your child’s uniqueness

Suggestions on dealing with anger:

• Invite them to draw a picture
• Facilitate talking through feelings by asking yes-or-no questions,
• Discuss physical feelings associated with anger that can act as cues to take a cooling off action,
• Look at a ‘feelings faces chart’,
• Encourage safe expressions (such as running, screaming into a pillow, playing with play-doh etc),
• Teach slow breathing,
• Use positive time-outs,
• Look at relevant books,
• Create an ‘anger wheel’ listing options they can choose from
• ... and don’t try to talk them out of their feelings!

Suggestions on dealing with violent or disrespectful behaviour:

• Decide what you will do (e.g. leave the room)
• Hold the child kindly and firmly (if you feel they may do damage)
• Share your feelings (model sharing your feelings and wishes)
• Use a positive time-out
• Ask curiosity questions
• Offer limited (respectful and acceptable) choices
• Discuss the problem at a family meeting

My True Love Gave To Me - ed. Stephanie Perkins

This book of 'twelve winter romances' was a (slightly surprising) present which turned out to be the perfect collection of quick, easy & comforting reads during a rather exhausting period of looking after poorly children... The stories themselves are mostly teenage wish-fulfilment, with the mandatory supernatural elements thrown in (one of my favourites involved a wished-into-existence imaginary boyfriend with real hooves!) but I was impressed by the lack of passivity of most of the heroines, who tend to get their happy endings through hard work and creativity - in fact that same story ends with the girl resolving to "imagine greater things" and "exert my will on the world".

The Carriage House - Louisa Hall

I found this tale of a family of disappointed narcissists struggling to come to terms with their diminished identities fairly enjoyable but I wasn't captivated by it. It was only after reading it that I realised that I might have got more out of it if I'd ever read Jane Austen's "Persuasion"... I found most of the characters hard to like, but did warm towards the middle daughter as she attempted to rekindle her relationship with her first love.

Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn

I picked this up to blot out stressful thoughts one evening and it was the perfect book for the job - I came out the other end slightly dazed after just over 24hrs of compulsive reading.  As with most thrillers I found it a little distasteful in places - was there an element of misogynist fantasy about the whole setup? - but there were some genuinely shocking twists, some impressively flawed but strangely engaging characters, and I liked the way she played around with narrative voices.

Married Love - Tessa Hadley

This collection of powerful and intriguing short stories is superbly well written - most of the stories had at least one moment that made me linger over it. Many of these were because of the clarity with which an insightful observation was described: "He knew how passionately she succumbed to the roles she dreamed up for herself. She won't be able to get out of this one, he thought. She can't stop now.", "And I thought: I will always be the tame one, watching while she risks everything. I believed then that this meant I would be safe at least.", or "This tension of thwarted longing - even when they were on their own and could do whatever they liked - was somehow the whole character of their relationship. Sheila was always frantic for the next thing she didn't have from Neil; the sensation was as painful as wire spooled taut in her chest. She wondered sometimes what would become of them if the spool gave way and the tension slackened."

This collection displayed the precision and economy of the best short story writing, particularly in resonant moments like the mother unblocking a sink while reminiscing about her absent soldier son and wondering about the things he's seen in Afghanistan, when "hearing the boy flush the toilet in the cubicle behind her, she scooped up the nasty mess with some paper towels and dropped it into the black bag she had with her for rubbish, so that he would not have to see it." Similarly, in several of the stories the most significant events are not directly described - an illicit encounter where "their knees touched" sets the reader wondering about the subsequent baby's "mysterious black baby hair". Even in the most romantic story, the ultimate realisation of love is only hinted at (beautifully - "He knows he ought to marry Ellen Pearson and get a house full of furniture. But he can't. He won't.") and left to unfold 'offstage', but the spite and scorn that the central character has previously tried to arm himself with was described in detail. I admired this collection immensely but did not love it; the short story form seems to lend itself to a particular, slightly bleak, view of human relationships, which I found a little sad.

Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman

This fascinating book is full of insights into human judgement and decision making, with an emphasis on the Nobel-winning collaboration between Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, in which they challenged the idea that human thinking is fundamentally rational, and showed how “systematic errors” of judgement can be explained, not by emotional interference, but by “the design of the machinery of cognition”.  The book includes two of Kahneman & Tversky’s key papers, including 1974’s “Judgment under uncertainty: heuristics and biases”, in which they presented three major heuristics that we use to answer questions about probabilities or estimated values (representativeness, availability, and adjustment from an anchor) and demonstrated a range of biases that each frequently gives rise to.  The “fast and slow” thinking of the title refers to the “two systems” or modes of thought that much of the book discusses: the automatic, quick, involuntary and intuitive “System 1”, and the effortful, slow, complex and logical “System 2”.

One thing I particularly enjoyed about this book was the inclusion of lots of striking case studies and experimental results, such as:

• An office kitchen honesty box where the level of contributions increased sharply when an image of eyes “primed” the idea of being watched;
• Zajonc’s classic experiment demonstrating our liking for the familiar, where made up words were more likely to be judged to mean something good if the participant had previously seen them;
• Kahneman’s own discomfort as an examiner when he realised how strongly his grades for subsequent questions were influenced by the first essay he’d read from that student (a “halo effect”);
• Experiments where the ratings of competence given based on brief viewings of politician’s faces (generally higher for faces having “a strong chin with a slight confident-appearing smile”) correctly predicted (with around 70% success) the winner in an election;
• “Anchoring effects” where even an obviously random number picked on a wheel of fortune influences estimated answers to numeric questions, and even estate agents are influenced by the asking price when valuing a house, despite claiming not to be;
• An analysis showing the absence of any persistent variation in the results obtained by professional investment advisors, suggesting that successful stock picking is a matter of chance rather than skill – hard to believe because “we are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random”;
• A few shocking illustrations of the “planning fallacy” where forecasts are “unrealistically close to best-case scenarios” because others’ experiences and potential setbacks are not considered – such as Kahneman’s own team of textbook writers (who estimated they had two years’ work left, then learned that similar projects had a 40% failure rate and took around eight years if they did complete, but persevered anyway, finishing eight years later when the book was no longer in demand), and the Scottish Parliament building, originally budgeted at £40 million but finally completed for £431 million;
• An illustration of the costly effects of loss-aversion, where self-imposed goals act as reference points for our decisions, such as the New York cab drivers who go home early on (potentially high-earning) rainy days because they’ve met their daily targets, and work long hours on sunny ones when fares are scarce;
• A graph on reported life satisfaction, showing a peak at the time people got married and a sharp dip afterwards, which becomes less disturbing when read as “a graph of the likelihood that people will think of their recent or forthcoming marriage when asked about their life”.

Although I’m sure I’m still susceptible to the many biases described in this book, I have noticed my own thinking to be changed by the ideas described here on several occasions.  I found myself including “the law of small numbers” (that “small samples yield extreme results more often”) in a mental list of possible reasons for the difference in litter distribution in different areas of my road.  I once shouted “regression to the mean” at the TV when a presenter spoke of poor performance following a win as a “curse”.  I resisted the urge to throw in extra items when selling on eBay, because I’d learned that people evaluate sets by forming an impression of the average or typical item, and therefore adding lower-value items can actually devalue the entire set.  More significantly, two sections of this book have led to my strangely calm and agreeable attitude to a potentially life-changing decision that last year filled me with dread.  Firstly, I became convinced that much of my resistance to a big change is probably because our innate loss aversion makes us value what we already have more than what we might gain (“the disadvantages of a change loom larger than its advantages, inducing a bias that favours the status quo”).  Secondly, I was reminded that, because even a drastic change like paralysis only affects people’s mental state when they’re focused on it, and other things regain focus over time, “nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you’re thinking about it”.

Some of the questions raised in this book are extremely hard to answer – such as whether people’s reluctance to automate life-or-death decisions, based on the “stubborn psychological reality” that “for most people, the cause of a mistake matters”, making a death caused by computer error seem more tragic than one caused by a human, should be overruled if an algorithm is available that makes fewer mistakes than a human expert.  I particularly struggled with the material in the final section about the contrast between the evaluations and priorities of the “experiencing self” and the “remembering self” (which disregards the duration of experiences, basing evaluations instead on moments of peak intensity and the way situations end).  Despite acknowledging that “memories are all we get to keep from the experience of living”, Kahneman mostly presents our tendency to base our decisions on the priorities of the “remembering self” as a mistake, but I felt (with my own experience of childbirth in mind) that – since we only experience each situation once but live with the memory of it for the rest of our lives – the emphasis on memory seemed reasonable, although choosing to disregard lived experience does of course raise major concerns. This section seemed to suggest more questions than it answered, such as the challenging question of whether medical interventions should be prioritised and designed based on how feared a condition is, how much suffering people actually experience in their daily lives, or how they evaluate their situation when reflecting on it.

In his conclusion, Kahneman notes with regret that in attempting to improve judgements and decisions, “little can be achieved without a considerable amount of effort”, and that the main route to avoid biases is to learn enough about them to recognise situations where errors occur, and then to consciously slow down and engage System 2.  He does also present some helpful advice and techniques though:

• “Decorrelate error” by making judgements as independent as possible, e.g. when conducting a meeting, ask each participant to summarise their opinions in writing first;
• In single-issue negotiations, avoid anchoring effects by going first if possible, and if you think the other side has made an outrageous offer, “make a scene, storm out or threaten to do so, and make it clear – to yourself as well as to the other side – that you will not continue the negotiation with that number on the table”;
• Before making significant decisions, hold a “pre-mortem” meeting where people imagine a disastrous outcome for the currently favoured plan;
• Start by considering base rates and averages when making estimates and predictions, e.g. always obtain and use statistics from similar projects as a baseline when making predictions, and consider how strong the correlation is between the predictors you’re considering and the result;
• Use simple checklists and formulas (such as the Apgar score) to assist with decision making – e.g. conduct interviews with standardized, factual questions, using “a disciplined collection of objective information and disciplined scoring of separate traits” to rate candidates;
• Use “risk policies” such as “never buy extended warranties” to group gambles together when considering potential losses and gains, and remember that “you win a few, you lose a few”;
• Remember that “intuition cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment”, and that experts are only reliable when they have experienced good feedback from a predictable environment.

Perhaps more controversially, he also concludes (with Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, the authors of “Nudge”) that the vulnerability of human decision making to biases, particularly the powerful impact of framing effects, means that people “often need help to make more accurate judgements and better decisions, and in some cases policies and institutions can provide that help”.  The “libertarian paternalism” advocated here consists of things like making pension plans opt-out rather than opt-in, and regulating the way that messages of importance are communicated (such as displaying the more intuitive “gallons-per-mile” alongside mpg on new cars) in order to provide a “nudge” towards decisions believed to serve people’s long-term interests.

Early in the book, Kahneman describes experiments using problems with intuitively appealing wrong answers that could be solved correctly with only a little mental effort.  He describes people who are more able to resist the tempting fallacies (presumably by deliberately slowing down to check their initial answer and search their memories for additional relevant facts) as “more alert, more mentally active, less willing to be satisfied by superficially attractive answers, more skeptical about their intuitions”.  According to Keith Stanovich, these qualities are not guaranteed by the possession of high “algorithmic” intelligence, but rather constitute a separate ability, “rationality” (or being “engaged”, as Kahneman describes it).  It would appear that this is the aptitude that we need to develop if we wish to avoid some of the pitfalls described so convincingly in this book.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane - Neil Gaiman

This classic Gaiman fantasy adventure manages to pack in a lot of thoughtful observations about childhood ("Adults follow paths. Children explore.") and the nature of memory ("Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.") I loved the opening epigraph, a quote from Maurice Sendak that sets the tone perfectly: "I remember my own childhood vividly... I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn't let adults know I knew. It would scare them." There were some powerful and insightful scenes, such as the father trying to drown his son in the bath while under the influence of an evil spirit, but failing because of his grim determination not to hit his children as he was hit, and the child's later announcement when presented with the possibility of erasing that portion of time that he wants to remember it "because it happened to me. And I'm still me." The ending, where the narrator's briefly regained memories and understanding fade away once again, is beautiful and bittersweet.