Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today we’re going to discuss a topic that virtually all parents find difficult at one point or another, and that’s setting and holding limits. What’s the purpose of setting limits? How do we know we’re setting one where we should be setting one? And how do we set them without getting into a big fight over something that ultimately turns out to not be that important? And can there really be cultural issues at play here? Why yes, of course! It’s parenting, after all… So we’ll look at all of these things today. First, let’s examine our WEIRDNESS – or, how people in countries that aren’t Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic do things. The anthropological literature is replete with examples of how children’s behavior is controlled in other cultures, as well as historically in our own. Shame is one of the most common tactics used, as illustrated by this anecdote from a study of the Ngoni ethnic group in southern Africa that I think we mentioned in our episode on storytelling: “A proverb might suddenly be dropped like a stone into a pond. The conversation rippled away into silence, and the boy or girl who had refused to share some peanuts or had been boasting began to wonder to himself: “Can that be for me? No? Yes? It is me. I am ashamed.” No one said anything but the shamed one took the first chance of slipping away to avoid further public notice. The use of proverbs [was] an effective at of making a child learn for himself and apply the lesson.” Zinacantecan elders in Mexico critically discuss the child’s behavior while the child is present but otherwise don’t interact with the child; the child is expected to ‘overhear’ and modify their behavior. Shame is used in a variety of Asian cultures, from Bali to China to Japan to Taiwan. Parents in these cultures will tell others of the child’s misdeeds in front of the child, will ridicule, mock, and laugh at the child. Samoan children are reigned in with threats that animals will come and eat them, and the Kaoka elders on Guadalcanal warn that giants will take naughty boys and girls and carry them off to a cave, where the bodies are cooked and eaten. Frightening Bible stories – as well as folk tales - have been used to control European children; in the 1800s children in England were taken to the gibbet to view rotting bodies hanging there while being told moral stories – and then they were whipped when they got home to make sure the lessons stuck. And where stories, proverbs, and shame fail, corporal punishment picks up. The Mfantse in Ghana will even lightly cuff an infant for crying for no good reason, while parents in Samoa “believe in the unique efficacy of pain as a means of instruction, and the Rwala Bedu in Syria will spank small children with a stick and slash older children with a saber or dagger. Corporal punishment is most common among societies where tribal warfare and inter-village conflict are frequent, as well as where living space is at a premium and children must learn to control their emotions so as not to encroach on other people’s space. There is actually some evidence from neuroscientific research that the release of adrenaline during emotional arousal enhance memory. I plan to do an in-depth episode on spanking at some point but this research suggests why people in so many cultures around the world use physical punishment: because it helps the child to remember the event and their transgression. Perhaps the child might also learn some unintended lessons as well, though, including “I can’t really trust my parent” and “it’s OK for bigger people to hit smaller ones.” In addition, this can cause the excessive power assertion in the relationship becomes more apparent to the child than the parent’s love and caring, which may result in the child’s acting out of their hostile impulses particularly to other people who don’t have power (so siblings, for example) and possibly toward people who do have power if these people are permissive (such as permissive parents). In societies where children are actively encouraged to fight each other then acting out on violent impulses is perhaps not a bad thing, but in our society where we want our child to get on with their siblings and friends without hitting them, we can start to see how our own interactions with our child serve as role models for how our child treats others. And, as a side note, I have yet to find an anthropological study that discusses the children’s experience of being shamed or beaten or how this impacts them as adults. The studies always focus on parental practices without ever looking at what are the effect of those practice on the child. And there’s Dr. Amy Chua’s book “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” which argued for the Asian parents’ much more controlling approach to child-rearing. The book was written for a Western audience, of course, but it turns out that Asian children may actually genuinely appreciate this style of parenting. Two American researchers surveyed both European American and Korean adolescents and found that the more controlling European American parents were, the less warm the children perceived the parents to be. But in Korean children the pattern was reversed – the more controlling the children rated their parents, the warmer they rated them as well. So some of the same behaviors engaged in by European mothers would be perceived by Korean children as acts of love and caring, rather than efforts to dominate and control. But that study was done in the 1980s, and in the 1990s some Chinese researchers studied second grade children in Beijing and found that parents who used more power-assertive parenting behaviors had children who were more aggressive and disruptive in the classroom, weren’t liked as well by their peers, and had lower school achievement. Parents who used a more authoritative style, so proved limits and structure but also warmth and connectedness, had children who were less disruptive in the classroom, were well-liked by their peers, and had better school achievement. A much more recent study from 2014 found that both Chinese and Canadian children preferred parental discipline that was based on warmth rather than love withdrawal, which implies that Chinese parenting approaches are rapidly becoming more westernized. Anthropologist Dr. David Lancy notes that “the rarest strategy [for engendering compliance], favored in WEIRD society, is to “reason with” children. This may not be as effective at controlling behavior but, as a side-benefit, it does give some early preparation for being an effective negotiator. Reasoning with children accomplishes two goals. It is a way to manage children’s behavior, especially when shaping more complex skills, and it also facilitates the development of the teacher-pupil relationship.” My aim in telling you this is not to demonstrate the superiority of WEIRD methods over those of other cultures, but to point out that parents in different cultures are preparing their children to participate in different kinds of interactions as older children and adults, and so different kinds of preparation is useful for this than for interacting in our society. Even within WEIRD cultures there is a variety in practices: all of the five sets of parents who were interviewed for one study reported using corporal punishment, with most stating that it must be accompanied by an explanation for its use (this is, of course, a small sample and is pretty typical for interview-style studies). One parent believed you should “spank with love and instruction.” Other methods used included scare tactics and intimidation, and spanking early in an effort to avoid the need for it in the future. One parent said: “I’m real conscious of making sure my cute little Black son here doesn’t become one of the people they (meaning European Americans) are afraid of walking down the street (in) five more years.” Another said “I’m trying to teach her…survival techniques, like how to survive when the odds are against you.” These African American parents are thus using the tools they have to prepare their children for the kinds of societal pressures the parents have been dealing with their whole lives. By contrast, European Americans are socializing our children to take a dominant place in the world. The way we permit them to negotiate boundaries teaches them that they can not only generate their own ideas but also challenge an adult’s initially proposed boundary. If our child misbehaves in public we might feel that both we and our child are being judged, but we know that others are not looking at us thinking we are bad parents because of our race. And we also know that in an ambiguous situation our child is likely to be given the benefit of the doubt and will be allowed to explain themselves before a decision about their guilt is made. So as we learn these methods, please do keep in mind that this set of practices has a goal that is unstated but no less powerful for being so. We should also teach our children that there are instances where while it may technically not be harmful for them to break a rule, not all children may experience the same luxury and there are times when we should not allow rule negotiation because of this unfairness. Also, please be kind to parents you see out in the world, even when their discipline styles don’t match with your own. They are likely doing the best they can with the tools they have to meet their particular parenting goals. The research on respectful boundary setting originated in the work of Haim Ginott, an Israeli elementary school teacher who studied psychology at Columbia University. Ginott worked with troubled children at a Guidance Clinic in Jacksonville, FL where he developed his approach based on both compassion and boundary-setting. Ginott proposed that denying feelings makes the feelings more powerful, while acknowledgement of feelings allows people to heal so they can become better problem solvers. At the same time as showing respect for their children’s emotions, Ginott advised parents to be “strict” with unacceptable behavior. At the time this approach was untested, but Dr. John Gottman said in the foreword for his book Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child that he could “provide the first quantifiable evidence to suggest that Ginott’s ideas were essentially correct:” these ideas founded the basis of emotion coaching, which we learned about recently in the episode on emotion regulation. So Gottman saw accepting emotions but being strict with behavior as two sides of an equation, with emotion coaching being the one we already learned about, and setting limits being the other. Also connected with Ginott’s work is self-determination theory, which proposes that all humans desire autonomy, competence, and relatedness, which is associated with better life outcomes for all people, not just children. So I’ll just briefly define each of these ideas: autonomy is the desire to feel like we control our own lives, which can be a difficult one for children who typically go through their day with every move scripted by an adult. Competence is the desire to feel a sensation of mastery over tasks and activities, which is often what children are trying to do when we’re hustling them along to the next activity or telling them to stop doing something. And relatedness is a sense of connection with others, which can suffer when much of our time is saying “Hurry up and…” or “Stop…”. What we want to tease out here is how we can set limits in a way that supports autonomy, competence, and connectedness so we achieve the benefits of self-determination, while still enabling the parent to set needed limits. We can also look to Dr. Diana Baumrind’s idea of an authoritative parent, which is a parent who is an authority (and who isn’t permissive) who makes age-appropriate demands, sets limits, and monitors children’s behavior, then the research shows that children do better when parents are “in control.” But there is a difference between being “in control” and being “controlling” – if you’re in control then you provide rules, guidelines, and limits. Controlling parents find compliance to be the most important skill their child develops, pressure their children toward specific outcomes, discourage discussions and negotiations on limits, don’t provide reasons for limits, and don’t respect children’s viewpoints. They may coerce their child into achieving a certain outcome or punish them if they don’t achieve it. But once again, this view of what are appropriate limits for children seems to be very highly focused on what are appropriate limits for White children, which is to say that Black parents might use a more controlling style of parenting not because they believe it’s the best approach for their child’s development, but because it’s the best approach to keep their child safe. So we think about refreshing our approach to setting limits, the first thing to understand is when we *can* set limits. As Magda Gerber, the founder of RIE has said, we need to remember that “discipline is not a set of rigidly enforced mandates, but a process in which the child learns to become a social being,” so we shouldn’t expect things of our children that are against the nature of their developmental stage. We can’t expect a toddler not to say “no,” or not to take all the available toys out, or not to grab a toy they want from a friend. Gerber says “knowing when to give [children] freedom and when to introduce limits is…the backbone of the RIE approach.” So by introducing limits we are introducing structure, which means providing guidelines and information that children need so they can meet the parent’s request. When you provide structure you communicate your expectations by doing things like making sure your request is age-appropriate, providing a rationale for your request, providing acceptable choices, and following through as needed. So perhaps the best way to avoid having your child throws balls in the house is to store balls outside so you don’t even have to set a limit, but if your child finds a ball and makes out like they’re going to throw it, you could say “I don’t want you to throw the ball in the house because I’m worried something might get broken. You can roll it on the ground if you want to or take it outside.” If your child proceeds to throw the ball, you could say "I can see you really want to play with the ball. I don’t want anything inside to get broken. I’m going to put it outside and you can play with it out there or find something else to play with indoors.” A more controlling approach would be to see your child about to throw the ball and say “Don’t you throw that ball! If you throw it, I’m going to spank you,” which doesn’t help the child to understand why the limit has been set or have any autonomy in determining how to meet it. It makes the child feel like they’re our enemy rather than our partner, so relatedness is undermined as well. Because at the end of the day, we don’t want to be reminding our child *forever* not to throw balls in the house, or to brush their teeth, or to tidy their rooms. We want them to take on these ideas as their own – ideally because they want to do these things for themselves, not because we are pressuring them to do the activity. This reminds me of the types of self-regulation we discussed when we talked about rewards with Alfie Kohn. When we have to reward the child for cleaning her room or punish her for not doing it, she’s externally regulated. We’re essentially doing the regulation for her by controlling or coercing her. She may have internalized the rule slightly when she engages in introjected regulation, which means the pressure and coercion are still there, but they come from inside her, so she might be thinking “I don’t want to tidy my room but my parent really wants me to do it.” She may feel guilty, anxious or uncomfortable if the room stays messy. A child who is using identified regulation has identified with or personally taken on the value of the behavior and sees it as important to their goals. She might clean her room because she recognizes that she’ll be able to find things more easily when it’s tidy. She doesn’t enjoy cleaning it, but she does it willingly. The final stage is integrated regulation, which is when the person has examined the issue and decided that it fits within their other beliefs and values. She doesn’t feel guilty if she doesn’t clean up, but she cleans up because she values having a tidy room. One of the things that prompted me to reach out to Alfie Kohn in the first place was to understand whether you can reward someone at the beginning of the process and expect them to integrate the idea later on – in other words, if I reward my daughter to get her to clean her room now, will she ultimately decide that cleaning her room fits with her own values so it becomes integrated into her ideas? Mr. Kohn was adamant that this is not going to happen, that extrinsic motivation in the form of parental control undermines the development of integrated regulation, and by extension the same happens with limits. After all, punishments and rewards are only...