Parenting Philosophies – What Do You Do With the Ice Cream?
| January 23, 2012 | Posted by Issa under Parenting |
Near the beginning of my childcare career, I read the book How to Behave So Your Children Will, Too by Sal Severe. As a newcomer to childhood development theory, it made comforting sense, seemingly outlining sensible ways to react to children’s misbehavior. These days I don’t look on this book so highly. It’s full of behavioral modifications and reactionary prescriptions. Your kid does this and then you do that. The book presents a view of the parent-child relationship that is transactional, overly rigid, and entirely carrot-and-stick. Severe recommends charts and stickers, total parental consistency, punishment escalation until the child complies, and utilizing his detailed lists of reward options for different age groups.
One section of the book stood out to me, and I’ve thought of it many times over the years. Chapter Six begins with a tale of Severe spending the day with a couple and their 3 kids. The day ends with everyone taking a trip out for ice cream. When the dad later asks Severe for parenting advice, Severe says that they did the ice cream thing all wrong by not connecting the special treat to the kids behavior.
Successful parents connect special events to good behavior: “You have had an excellent day today. Mom and I would like to take you out for some ice cream.” You can be more specific: “I saw you sharing several times today. That’s something that makes Mom and me feel fantastic. When we feel good, we like doing something special.”
The chapter is called, “Never Give Away the Ice Cream”.
That phrase stuck me through the years, even as my childcare philosophy radically veered away from this conditional, controlling mindset. “Never give away the ice cream” became a catchphrase in my mind, representing the kinds of relationships I did not want to have with children.
Now, fast forward. For parenting advice, I’ve come to rely much more heavily on Alfie Kohn’s Unconditional Parenting (UP) and people advocating a consensual parenting approach. I also ran across Taking Children Seriously (TCS), which is a philosophy that seeks to be entirely non-coercive with children. On a TCS email list, one person was asking for suggestions about getting kids to leave a business that is closing when the kids don’t want to leave. Another person suggested offering the kids ice cream on the ride home or some other enticing thing.
Hmm. In the Severe book, he advocates withholding the ice cream until it can be a reward for good behavior. In this email conversation, someone is recommending the ice cream as an enticement for good behavior. Those seem like they could be opposites, yet they veer awfully close to one other with the tactic of using ice cream to gain compliance.
Then another TCS list member asked if ice cream makes the time-after-leaving nicer, why not offer it to make the time-before-leaving nicer, too? Why would you only offer it at this specific time?
This exchange caused a real light bulb moment for me. If ice cream is such a good thing, why are you withholding it all the time? If you aren’t withholding it, if your child can freely choose when to have ice cream or not, then ice cream is removed as an option for coercion. This was a sharp reminder that while parenting philosophies seem to swing along a spectrum, it’s also possible to just get off the spectrum entirely.
In Unconditional Parenting, Alfie Kohn talks similarly about love, punishment, and rewards. People often think that punishing bad behavior and rewarding good behavior are vastly different, but they are really just shades of the same thing, and the name of the thing is control. Kohn talks about the emotional dangers of withholding parental time, attention, and love, even through such widely accepted practices as time-out.
Love is even better and even more important than ice cream and should be ever-present in the parent-child relationship. In a very real sense, love is the food and fuel that grow the child. Or it ought to be anyway. What happens if you take your love off the table as tool for control by making sure love is always, actively given and (more importantly) received?
Coming back around to ice cream, let me just say that ice cream is really, really yummy, and I eat it whenever I want. Should I suddenly start hiding it or not buying it because I have a child? Should I reserve it only for times when I deem that he’s been good? Should I save it up for times when I need to prod him to do something?
How about this instead? What if there was ice cream in the freezer now and then, and Dylan could eat it or not eat it whenever he liked, the same as I can, the same as Joshua does, the same as you do? How might my relationship with Dylan be entirely different if, instead of the ice cream sitting between us as a tool of control, ice cream was just the yummy sweet treat that it is? I’m guessing that our relationship will be a bit sweeter as well.
I had never thought about ice cream and food rewards that way before, but I agree. I always thought food as bribery was wrong.
I feel also that this can lead to unhealthy feelings about food. Sweets were tightly controlled in my house when I was growing up, and I binged on them once I gained a little independence. I still use dessert as a “reward” for myself – everyday.
Back to the point, though: I always thought I would use sticker charts or something, but you are suggesting not using tangible “positive reinforcement” at all? I need to read these books.
Book given. :-)
For anyone else, I highly recommend Unconditional Parenting
if you want a pretty quick read, Punished by Rewards
if you want to dive in further, and the Unconditional Parenting DVD
if you want something even easier.
I’ve read that book too, and it totally changed the way I looked at my parenting strategies. (Once I picked up the shattered pieces of my ego off the floor, anyway.) It’s a hard thing to do in practice, though, and I’m always tripping over the line between bribery and not-bribery.
For example, I’m pretty sure that offering a reward – like a cookie – that hadn’t been on offer before is a straight-up bribe. (Some days I’m okay with that.) But if we were already planning to go to the park, and I need Libra to use the potty before we go, and he refuses – I’m not so sure that reminding him that we are going to the park only after he goes potty is bribery. (And yes, some days we have stayed home instead, because he would rather not go potty.)
Parenting: it’s hard! But like you, I do feel that it’s so, so important that my kids understand that my love for them isn’t something they have to “earn” with good behaviour. And as long as it’s not the only thing they’ve eaten all day, they’re welcome to help themselves to the ice cream in the freezer.
I’m not so sure that reminding him that we are going to the park only after he goes potty is bribery.
I think there are a lot of shades of gray here. It reminds me of discussions I have had about adult relationships, about where is the line between setting a personal boundary (absolutely okay) and being manipulative or passive-aggressive (probably not okay).
It’s hard to tell sometimes about punishments, bribes, rewards, and praise. Sometimes it can hinge on the tone of your voice or how you react if the kid turns you down. I think the important thing is to be mindful of the potential effects of behavior modification techniques and mindful of where they might sneak in on you. But if you’re doing that, it’s not the end of the world if you bribe him out the door every now and then! :-)
I’ve gotten to the point where if I think it is a natural consequence, I don’t consider it a bribe or a punishment (and yes, I was a lit major, so I can spin anything so that I can justify it as a natural consequence… but I try to be honest about it.)
I, as the mother, have decided that going to the park involves getting ready. We have to be dressed appropriately (and by this I mean, vaguely close to what the weather dictates, not color coordinated or anything like that), we have to have made sure the dog has been taken out and has water, we have to make sure we ourselves are ready, and part of that is going to the bathroom. I don’t see it as a bribe or punishment at all if we can’t go because we refuse to get ready.
As far as leaving a store, I will tend to leave until the end of our errand run the thing that the kids will most want to do. The lady at the bank always gives them a lollipop. If we do the library FIRST, and then when I want to leave I say, “Let’s go to the bank,” and the kids happily comply because they know there’s a lollipop involved, is this bribery? Kinda. Blatant manipulation? I guess. But why not arrange things so that life goes a bit smoother?
I do agree with everything you say, but I feel like in my everyday life I “cheat” a bunch so we can avoid as much screaming and crying as possible.
“so we can avoid as much screaming and crying as possible.”
Well, I certainly think that’s a worthwhile goal! One of the valuable things I took from Alfie Kohn is that what matters most is how your kids interpret things, which is not necessarily the same as how you mean them. Do your kids feel like they are being bribed and manipulated into complying? Or do they just feel like the library is fun and then the bank is even more fun? Leaving my favorite place until last on the errand list sounds like something I might do for myself, so I can easily see that as a habit that’s friendly for everyone and isn’t “manipulative” in the negative sense that we mean that word.
Found you by way of BlogHer…oh, I LOVE this post! Imagine letting a child enjoy ice-cream for the sake of ice-cream, and making sure they feeling loved all the time. What a world that would be!
I do understand WHY some parents use ice-cream or other bribes. I’ve been tempted many times. What I don’t think most PARENTS understand is that if you focus on the relationship instead of behavior modification, you never HAVE to use bribes.
I actually just started a series on unconditional parenting on my blog to explain what it is, how it works, and the challenges of making it real. Come by and check it out, I’d love to hear your input!
http://mamammalia.blogspot.com/2012/01/introduction-to-unconditional-parenting.html
Hey Sylvia, I found you through BlogHer just last week or so, and I commented on that UP post (I’m Issa ::waves:: hi!) I’m so glad to see someone blogging about UP. I’m looking forward to your whole series, and I’ll try to set this baby down and comment now and then! :-)