078: You have parenting goals; do you know what they are?
26th November 2018 • Your Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive • Jen Lumanlan
00:00:00
00:48:12
Shownotes
We all have goals for our children, even if these are things that we’ve never formally articulated and are ideas we’ve inherited from half-remembered bits of parenting books and blogs (and the occasional podcast) and the way we were parented ourselves.
But do you ever find that the way you’re parenting in the moment doesn’t necessarily support your overarching goals? So, if you have a goal to raise an independent child but every time the child struggles with something you step in and “help,” then your daily interactions with your child may not help your child to achieve that independence.
In this episode Dr. Joan Grusec of the University of Toronto helps us to think through some of the ways we can shift our daily interactions with our children to ones that bring our relationship with them (rather than our need for compliance) to the fore in a way that supports our longer-term parenting goals.
Dr. Joan Grusec's Book
Parenting and children's internatlization of values: A handbook of contemporary theory - Affiliate link
References
Coplan, R.J., Hastings, P.D., Lagace,-Seguin, D.G., & Moulton, C.E. (2002). Authoritative and authoritarian mothers’ parenting goals, attributions, and emotions across different childrearing contexts. Parenting: Science and Practice 2(1), 1-26.
Dix, T., Ruble, D.N., & Zambarano, R. (1989). Mothers’ implicit theories of discipline: Child effects, parent effects, and the attribution process. Child Development 60, 1373-1391.
Grusec, J.E. (2002). Parental socialization and children’s acquisition of values. In M.H. Bornstein (Ed.). Handbook of Parenting (2nd Ed)., Volume 5: Practical issues in parenting (p.143-168). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Hastings, P.D., & Grusec, J.E. (1998). Parenting goals as organizers of responses to parent-child disagreement. Developmental Psychology 34(3), 465-479.
Kelly, G. A. (1995). The psychology of personal constructs (2vols.). New York: Norton.
Kuczynski, L. (1984). Socialization goals and mother-child interaction: Strategies for long-term and short-term compliance. Developmental Psychology 20(6), 1061-1073.
Lin, H. (2001). Exploring the associations of momentary parenting goals with micro and macro levels of parenting: Emotions, attributions, actions, and styles. Unpublished Master’s thesis. Stillwater, OK: Oklahoma State University.
Meng, C. (2012). Parenting goals and parenting styles among Taiwanese parents: The moderating role of child temperament. The New School Psychology Bulletin 9(2), 52-67.
Miller, P. J., Wang, S. H., & Cho, G. E. (2002). Self-esteem as folk theory: a comparison of EA and Taiwanese mothers’ beliefs. Parenting: Science and Practice, 2, 209-239.
Dix, T., Ruble, D.N., & Zambarano, R. (1989). Mothers’ implicit theories of discipline: Child effects, parent effects, and the attribution process. Child Development 60, 1373-1391.
Grusec, J.E. (2002). Parental socialization and children’s acquisition of values. In M.H. Bornstein (Ed.). Handbook of Parenting (2nd Ed)., Volume 5: Practical issues in parenting (p.143-168). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Hastings, P.D., & Grusec, J.E. (1998). Parenting goals as organizers of responses to parent-child disagreement. Developmental Psychology 34(3), 465-479.
Kelly, G. A. (1995). The psychology of personal constructs (2vols.). New York: Norton.
Kuczynski, L. (1984). Socialization goals and mother-child interaction: Strategies for long-term and short-term compliance. Developmental Psychology 20(6), 1061-1073.
Lin, H. (2001). Exploring the associations of momentary parenting goals with micro and macro levels of parenting: Emotions, attributions, actions, and styles. Unpublished Master’s thesis. Stillwater, OK: Oklahoma State University.
Meng, C. (2012). Parenting goals and parenting styles among Taiwanese parents: The moderating role of child temperament. The New School Psychology Bulletin 9(2), 52-67.
Miller, P. J., Wang, S. H., & Cho, G. E. (2002). Self-esteem as folk theory: a comparison of EA and Taiwanese mothers’ beliefs. Parenting: Science and Practice, 2, 209-239.
Read Full Transcript
Transcript Jen: [00:22] Hello and welcome to today’s episode of the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today we’re going to dig into the literature on something I’ve been doing a bit intuitively for a while now, which is on setting goals for our parenting. Something that Dr Rebecca Babcock Fenerci said during our conversation on Intergenerational Trauma really stuck with me. She said, nobody sets out to be a terrible parent. In other words, all parents are doing the best that they can. Now everyone has parenting goals, whether we fully articulated them or whether they’re circulating somewhere in our subconscious that are formed by relationships we had with our parents and half remembered bits of parenting books and punk post, but what if we could bring all this stuff out of our subconscious and articulate it so that we can work towards achieving these goals? I’m not saying we should set goals like ‘by next month my introverted son is going to love going to parties,’ but if we understand what high level qualities we want our children to have as they grow up, will have a much better chance of actually achieving those goals. Jen: [02:17] So here with us today to think through all this is Dr Joan Grusec, who’s professor Emerita at the University of Toronto and have spent decades thinking about and researching this topic. Dr. Grusec received her Ba from the University of Toronto and her PHD from Stanford University before she returned to Toronto. She notes on her website that effective parenting does not involve simply the application of specific strategies and techniques or the adoption of specific styles of interaction, but the interaction of parenting strategies and children’s features like temperament, age, sex and mood, as well as something called the domain that the child is operating and that we’re going to discuss a lot more today. So don’t expect to come out of this episode with a tidy template for goal setting, but rather a framework to think about the goals that you have for your child and some ideas on how to apply it. Welcome Dr. Grusec; thanks so much for joining us. Dr. Grusec: [03:05] Thank you. Jen: [03:08] All right. Let’s go back to, well not the beginning here, but kind of a long time ago now. So you and one of your students did a study that has become something of a classic, I think it was published in ’98 in which you looked at parents’ goals when they imagined interactions with a child that could lead to conflict in a short vignette or in a previous experience with their own child. And I think you found that the parent use different strategies to work with their child depending on whether the parents’ center of control was themselves, the child or their relationship with the child. Can you tell us some more about that study? Dr. Grusec: [03:44] Well, I think what we were trying to do, Paul Hastings and I and in that study was to look at the situation where a child has misbehaved and the parent is responding to that misbehavior, presumably wanting to improve things for the future. But we wanted to emphasize that there isn’t one response that can be made or that all parents make and parents have different things that they want to achieve in this same situation. So some parents or at some time and not at other times. Some parents may just want immediate compliance. They want good behavior, the child is throwing a temper tantrum and they want the child to stop, and those were, what we’d call parent-centered goals. Sometimes parents are interested in teaching a value or in trying to do something that will ensure or make it less likely that the child will misbehave in this way in the future, or sometimes they’re focused on the child’s emotional needs and why is the child so distressed and so upset or what’s bothering my child? Or how does this look for my child’s perspective? How does my child see this situation? Maybe I should take that into account when I’m responding. And the, uh, the last goal that we identified, and this was us asking parents, “what are the goals that you have when you’re interacting with your children in a situation where you want to change their behavior?” So last goal we call relationship-centered. And basically this is just a desire on the part of parents, particularly mothers, I must say mothers reported this more often than fathers did just to make sure that everybody ends up feeling happy and satisfied with the outcome of the interaction. Jen:[05:47] Okay. And so what strategies did parents use in each of these kinds of situations? How did they differ? Dr. Grusec:[05:53] Oh, they differ in the, “I just want you to obey me” focus, a parent centered focus. It was mostly some sort of power assertive approach. Taking advantage of greater physical strength to move the child physically out of the situation or just to speak sharply to the child and say, “don’t do that.” So there were more of what we call these power-assertive interventions. In the case of child-centered goals. It was more some power assertion, some setting of rules. This is not the way we behave, but with an explanation or with reasoning or was some attempt to explain to the child why this was not acceptable behavior. In the case of relationship-centered goals that would be more like a taking the child’s perspective, trying to convey to the child that parent understood what the problem was even though the behavior needs to be changed and to see if they could work out some sort of compromise if that seemed appropriate. Jen: [07:08] Okay. And so it occurs to me that parents’ goals probably shift; the strategies that they use really shift depending on the situation. And so I’m thinking if the child has a tantrum at home, then maybe I can use more child centered in relationship centered strategies like staying calm… Dr. Grusec: [07:28] Absolutely, yes. In the grocery store it’s more likely to be a parent-centered. Jen: [07:34] And so, okay. So what I’m curious about then is firstly the effectiveness of these strategies. Is it just as effective to say, you know, to use the power assertion method in the grocery store. Even if you wouldn’t do that if the child was at home. And secondly, you know, is it ever a good thing to use these strategies or should we be using more child centered relationship centered strategies? Dr. Grusec: [07:58] Well, I think that a combination of child centered and relationship centered strategies are probably best. And when we get to talking later on about domains, I’ll explain why this is the case. Parents who want obedience and who are just focused on “I want my child to salute when I ask for it,” they’ll get obedience when the parents there, but they’re not going to get that same kind of good socially acceptable behavior if there’s no one there to demand that. So although obviously picking a child up and taking them out of the supermarket when they’re behaving badly is probably about the only thing you can do in the final analysis, it’s the other relationship centered and child-centered goals that probably are going to pay off. Jen: [08:50] Okay. And so that leads me to something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, which is what parents have for parenting their children. I’m thinking both at a high level and at sort of daily interaction levels. So in the US particularly, there’s a high value placed on independence of people of all ages and so that might be a high level parenting goal that a lot of parents have is to raise a child who is independent, but there’s also a really big trend even beyond helicopter parenting to what I think is now known as lawnmower parenting where a parent attempts to mow down any potential obstacles in the child’s way. And it seems to me is there that kind of runs counter to the goal of independence. So I’m curious about what you’ve noticed about the goals that parents state about their child rearing kind of on a day to day level when you know obedience isn’t necessarily thing in all cases and these higher level goals and how parents, interactions with their children affect these goals. Dr. Grusec:[09:47] Well, I think the problem here is that we as parents often do one thing, manifest one kind of behavior, but we talk in a different way about it. And so we send out confusing signals. So we may value independence. We may talk about independence, we may talk about its importance, but then if we behave in a different way in a way in which we’re encouraging a child to be dependent, then it’s a very confusing situation. Jen:[10:25] And so I’m curious about the cause and effect direction of this and a fairly recent study that was done in 2012 found that parents in a Taiwanese sample with children who express negative emotions, we’re more likely to be authoritarian, which means to use these power and coercive strategies to achieve compliance. But the study didn’t help us to understand whether having emotional children leads parents to be more coercive or whether coercive parenting leads to the child expressing more emotions. So I’m curious about whether you know of any research that’s been done that can help us to understand this direction of causality. Dr. Grusec:[11:02] There’s a lot of research. I think the direction of causality is a question that every researcher faces. There are a number of methodological approaches that at least try to deal with the question of is the parent affecting the child or is the child’s behavior driving the parent? So one way of trying at least to get a little bit better, greater insight into this issue is to do what we call longitudinal studies. So we take measures at two points in time. So let’s say you’re interested in the effect of a given parenting behavior on the child. You would collect data about the child’s behavior two time points, one month apart, six months apart, two years apart, whatever, five years apart, you collect that data and you have measured the parent’s behavior at the first time point so that if you find a change in the child’s behavior that is related to, or correlated with a child’s behavior at the first time point, then you have a little bit more information, a little bit more permission for suggesting that there might be a causal relationship. Dr. Grusec: [12:27] That’s one approach. Another approach is to do an experiment, but this is very hard in the child rearing research area; I can’t tell you to spank your child and tell another parent to speak kindly to their child and see what happens. So not too many experiments can be done, but intervention studies are another way of trying to get at some notion about whether the parenting behavior is having an effect on the child’s behavior so that presumably in an intervention study would have one group that received training in responding to the child’s wishes or whatever the variable was that you thought was important and another group was usually a wait list group because you think your intervention is going to work, so you come back, you measure the two groups at the beginning of one group’s intervention, and then with the waitlist control, there shouldn’t be any change in their behavior in comparison to the group that received the intervention. Dr. Grusec: [13:40] So that is another way I think that ultimately the answer to your question is that parenting and child rearing is bi-directional. Parents influence children and children influence parents. There’s a recent study by Swedish group, for example, in which they looked at direction of the effect using a longitudinal study with Swedish adolescents and there they found a much greater effect of the adolescents on the parent’s behavior than vice versa. Now this is an older group, adolescents are something different from younger children. Then I think there’s, again, lots of evidence that parents do have an effect on the…parenting has an effect on the behavior of younger children, but as I say, I think it really. It’s both ways. Parents are people too. They have feelings, they respond to reinforcement, so it’s not surprising that they can be affected as well. Jen: [14:50] Yep. We have goals and failures and these things just like children as well, so staying with the topic of using these different techniques. I think the parents often use these parents-centered techniques when you just kind of want short term compliance, but maybe they use more child in relationship-centered techniques when they want longer term compliance and perhaps even at a later date. And I read one study that tested the techniques that mothers used to get their child to sort out some spoons and forks when there are some attractive toys close by and found that when the mothers tried to instruct their child to comply, the child actually resisted complying and they were more likely to say something like, “do it yourself.” But when the mothers knew they were going to have to leave the child and attended to sort the cutlery, they were more likely to reason with a child which turned out to be more effective. And so the research concluded that sometimes we do choose, we would make a mental choice about how we’ll ask our child to do something, but sometimes we don’t necessarily do that. We don’t go through that process; our automatic pilot just comes on and in those cases we might use more of the parent center techniques which are less...
Transcript Jen: [00:22] Hello and welcome to today’s episode of the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today we’re going to dig into the literature on something I’ve been doing a bit intuitively for a while now, which is on setting goals for our parenting. Something that Dr Rebecca Babcock Fenerci said during our conversation on Intergenerational Trauma really stuck with me. She said, nobody sets out to be a terrible parent. In other words, all parents are doing the best that they can. Now everyone has parenting goals, whether we fully articulated them or whether they’re circulating somewhere in our subconscious that are formed by relationships we had with our parents and half remembered bits of parenting books and punk post, but what if we could bring all this stuff out of our subconscious and articulate it so that we can work towards achieving these goals? I’m not saying we should set goals like ‘by next month my introverted son is going to love going to parties,’ but if we understand what high level qualities we want our children to have as they grow up, will have a much better chance of actually achieving those goals. Jen: [02:17] So here with us today to think through all this is Dr Joan Grusec, who’s professor Emerita at the University of Toronto and have spent decades thinking about and researching this topic. Dr. Grusec received her Ba from the University of Toronto and her PHD from Stanford University before she returned to Toronto. She notes on her website that effective parenting does not involve simply the application of specific strategies and techniques or the adoption of specific styles of interaction, but the interaction of parenting strategies and children’s features like temperament, age, sex and mood, as well as something called the domain that the child is operating and that we’re going to discuss a lot more today. So don’t expect to come out of this episode with a tidy template for goal setting, but rather a framework to think about the goals that you have for your child and some ideas on how to apply it. Welcome Dr. Grusec; thanks so much for joining us. Dr. Grusec: [03:05] Thank you. Jen: [03:08] All right. Let’s go back to, well not the beginning here, but kind of a long time ago now. So you and one of your students did a study that has become something of a classic, I think it was published in ’98 in which you looked at parents’ goals when they imagined interactions with a child that could lead to conflict in a short vignette or in a previous experience with their own child. And I think you found that the parent use different strategies to work with their child depending on whether the parents’ center of control was themselves, the child or their relationship with the child. Can you tell us some more about that study? Dr. Grusec: [03:44] Well, I think what we were trying to do, Paul Hastings and I and in that study was to look at the situation where a child has misbehaved and the parent is responding to that misbehavior, presumably wanting to improve things for the future. But we wanted to emphasize that there isn’t one response that can be made or that all parents make and parents have different things that they want to achieve in this same situation. So some parents or at some time and not at other times. Some parents may just want immediate compliance. They want good behavior, the child is throwing a temper tantrum and they want the child to stop, and those were, what we’d call parent-centered goals. Sometimes parents are interested in teaching a value or in trying to do something that will ensure or make it less likely that the child will misbehave in this way in the future, or sometimes they’re focused on the child’s emotional needs and why is the child so distressed and so upset or what’s bothering my child? Or how does this look for my child’s perspective? How does my child see this situation? Maybe I should take that into account when I’m responding. And the, uh, the last goal that we identified, and this was us asking parents, “what are the goals that you have when you’re interacting with your children in a situation where you want to change their behavior?” So last goal we call relationship-centered. And basically this is just a desire on the part of parents, particularly mothers, I must say mothers reported this more often than fathers did just to make sure that everybody ends up feeling happy and satisfied with the outcome of the interaction. Jen:[05:47] Okay. And so what strategies did parents use in each of these kinds of situations? How did they differ? Dr. Grusec:[05:53] Oh, they differ in the, “I just want you to obey me” focus, a parent centered focus. It was mostly some sort of power assertive approach. Taking advantage of greater physical strength to move the child physically out of the situation or just to speak sharply to the child and say, “don’t do that.” So there were more of what we call these power-assertive interventions. In the case of child-centered goals. It was more some power assertion, some setting of rules. This is not the way we behave, but with an explanation or with reasoning or was some attempt to explain to the child why this was not acceptable behavior. In the case of relationship-centered goals that would be more like a taking the child’s perspective, trying to convey to the child that parent understood what the problem was even though the behavior needs to be changed and to see if they could work out some sort of compromise if that seemed appropriate. Jen: [07:08] Okay. And so it occurs to me that parents’ goals probably shift; the strategies that they use really shift depending on the situation. And so I’m thinking if the child has a tantrum at home, then maybe I can use more child centered in relationship centered strategies like staying calm… Dr. Grusec: [07:28] Absolutely, yes. In the grocery store it’s more likely to be a parent-centered. Jen: [07:34] And so, okay. So what I’m curious about then is firstly the effectiveness of these strategies. Is it just as effective to say, you know, to use the power assertion method in the grocery store. Even if you wouldn’t do that if the child was at home. And secondly, you know, is it ever a good thing to use these strategies or should we be using more child centered relationship centered strategies? Dr. Grusec: [07:58] Well, I think that a combination of child centered and relationship centered strategies are probably best. And when we get to talking later on about domains, I’ll explain why this is the case. Parents who want obedience and who are just focused on “I want my child to salute when I ask for it,” they’ll get obedience when the parents there, but they’re not going to get that same kind of good socially acceptable behavior if there’s no one there to demand that. So although obviously picking a child up and taking them out of the supermarket when they’re behaving badly is probably about the only thing you can do in the final analysis, it’s the other relationship centered and child-centered goals that probably are going to pay off. Jen: [08:50] Okay. And so that leads me to something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, which is what parents have for parenting their children. I’m thinking both at a high level and at sort of daily interaction levels. So in the US particularly, there’s a high value placed on independence of people of all ages and so that might be a high level parenting goal that a lot of parents have is to raise a child who is independent, but there’s also a really big trend even beyond helicopter parenting to what I think is now known as lawnmower parenting where a parent attempts to mow down any potential obstacles in the child’s way. And it seems to me is there that kind of runs counter to the goal of independence. So I’m curious about what you’ve noticed about the goals that parents state about their child rearing kind of on a day to day level when you know obedience isn’t necessarily thing in all cases and these higher level goals and how parents, interactions with their children affect these goals. Dr. Grusec:[09:47] Well, I think the problem here is that we as parents often do one thing, manifest one kind of behavior, but we talk in a different way about it. And so we send out confusing signals. So we may value independence. We may talk about independence, we may talk about its importance, but then if we behave in a different way in a way in which we’re encouraging a child to be dependent, then it’s a very confusing situation. Jen:[10:25] And so I’m curious about the cause and effect direction of this and a fairly recent study that was done in 2012 found that parents in a Taiwanese sample with children who express negative emotions, we’re more likely to be authoritarian, which means to use these power and coercive strategies to achieve compliance. But the study didn’t help us to understand whether having emotional children leads parents to be more coercive or whether coercive parenting leads to the child expressing more emotions. So I’m curious about whether you know of any research that’s been done that can help us to understand this direction of causality. Dr. Grusec:[11:02] There’s a lot of research. I think the direction of causality is a question that every researcher faces. There are a number of methodological approaches that at least try to deal with the question of is the parent affecting the child or is the child’s behavior driving the parent? So one way of trying at least to get a little bit better, greater insight into this issue is to do what we call longitudinal studies. So we take measures at two points in time. So let’s say you’re interested in the effect of a given parenting behavior on the child. You would collect data about the child’s behavior two time points, one month apart, six months apart, two years apart, whatever, five years apart, you collect that data and you have measured the parent’s behavior at the first time point so that if you find a change in the child’s behavior that is related to, or correlated with a child’s behavior at the first time point, then you have a little bit more information, a little bit more permission for suggesting that there might be a causal relationship. Dr. Grusec: [12:27] That’s one approach. Another approach is to do an experiment, but this is very hard in the child rearing research area; I can’t tell you to spank your child and tell another parent to speak kindly to their child and see what happens. So not too many experiments can be done, but intervention studies are another way of trying to get at some notion about whether the parenting behavior is having an effect on the child’s behavior so that presumably in an intervention study would have one group that received training in responding to the child’s wishes or whatever the variable was that you thought was important and another group was usually a wait list group because you think your intervention is going to work, so you come back, you measure the two groups at the beginning of one group’s intervention, and then with the waitlist control, there shouldn’t be any change in their behavior in comparison to the group that received the intervention. Dr. Grusec: [13:40] So that is another way I think that ultimately the answer to your question is that parenting and child rearing is bi-directional. Parents influence children and children influence parents. There’s a recent study by Swedish group, for example, in which they looked at direction of the effect using a longitudinal study with Swedish adolescents and there they found a much greater effect of the adolescents on the parent’s behavior than vice versa. Now this is an older group, adolescents are something different from younger children. Then I think there’s, again, lots of evidence that parents do have an effect on the…parenting has an effect on the behavior of younger children, but as I say, I think it really. It’s both ways. Parents are people too. They have feelings, they respond to reinforcement, so it’s not surprising that they can be affected as well. Jen: [14:50] Yep. We have goals and failures and these things just like children as well, so staying with the topic of using these different techniques. I think the parents often use these parents-centered techniques when you just kind of want short term compliance, but maybe they use more child in relationship-centered techniques when they want longer term compliance and perhaps even at a later date. And I read one study that tested the techniques that mothers used to get their child to sort out some spoons and forks when there are some attractive toys close by and found that when the mothers tried to instruct their child to comply, the child actually resisted complying and they were more likely to say something like, “do it yourself.” But when the mothers knew they were going to have to leave the child and attended to sort the cutlery, they were more likely to reason with a child which turned out to be more effective. And so the research concluded that sometimes we do choose, we would make a mental choice about how we’ll ask our child to do something, but sometimes we don’t necessarily do that. We don’t go through that process; our automatic pilot just comes on and in those cases we might use more of the parent center techniques which are less...