Rejoicing Over Positive

A previous chapter urged you to decide upon some high priority psychological skills to target with your child; the immediately previous chapter listed ways of influencing your child toward more competence in those skills. This chapter will give some very specific ways of responding to your child’s positive examples to bring out more positive behavior from your child.

How It Works: The Notion of an Interpersonal Environment

At one point in time the thinking of the experts about a program such as this was fairly simple-minded. People do more often the things they’re reinforced for. Give them reinforcers after they do good behaviors, and you’ll get more good behaviors out of them.

That notion is still true, and it is very powerful. But the real world is more complex than that. Giving certain types of reinforcers for certain behaviors feels like bribery to both the giver and the receiver. On the other hand, responding with enthusiastic interest, approval and excitement probably works by more influence methods than just reinforcement. Stimulus control and modeling also operate, and these combined with reinforcement go together to create an intangible but very important something I call the “emotional climate” or “interpersonal environment.”

By these phrases I refer to how things feel between people, what the prevailing mood is, what sort of tones people speak to each other with, how they look at each other, whether they are in a mood to be nice or to be hostile.

By the things you say in the presence of your children, you contribute to the interpersonal environment. This very intangible environment is a major cause of very tangible physical events: whether people hit each other, break things, run away from home, get admitted to psychiatric hospitals, kill each other, commit suicide, get divorced, get psychosomatic illnesses, do productive work, succeed in school, sleep well, stay friendly, or succeed economically. Sometimes words are “magic.” By saying the magic positive words, in the magic positive tones, and by avoiding the words that cast the negative spell, you can make very tangible actions turn out positive.

In thinking about the interpersonal environment, we avoid the “rat and pigeon” model of reinforcement and punishment in thinking about why people do what they do. We take into account that a “reinforcer” or a “punishment” doesn’t just strengthen or weaken a given behavior; it also does something to the quality of the relationship between the people involved; it also creates a memory of an emotional tone that predisposes people to kind or hostile acts.

In the next few chapters I will talk about factors that set the emotional tone of a family. Let’s list them here:

Seven Factors That Affect the Emotional Climate

1. Stability of time together.

Frequency of time spent together, quantity of time spent, regularity, dependability of time spent.

2. The degree of challenge of the activity.

Is what people are trying to do together too hard, too easy, or just right? The difficulty can be assessed regarding many skill areas: intellectual abilities, physical stamina or coordination, patience, self-disclosure, handling losing, accepting help, social skills, and others. If the task or activity generates lots of negative affect, or passivity, or avoidance behaviors, a participant may need to drop back on the hierarchy of difficulty.

3. Approval versus disapproval.

Of all the utterances that you make, what fraction are approving, and what fraction are disapproving?

4. Directiveness versus responsiveness.

Of all the utterances that you make, what fraction are directive and what fraction are responsive? (Directive means trying to get the person to do something other than what he or she is already doing, OR get the person to pay attention to something other than what she is already paying attention to. Responsive means making a response to what the person is already attending to, without trying to change the person's behavior or focus of attention.)

Examples of directive utterances are commands, suggestions, criticisms, new topic questions, and new topic statements.

Examples of responsive utterances are facilitations, tracking and describing, reflections, follow-up questions, and follow-up statements.

5. Differential Reinforcement.

5.1 Differential attention: How often do you turn your attention toward positive behavior and away from negative behavior? How often do you turn your attention toward negative behavior and away from positive behavior?

5.2 Differential excitement: How often do you show high excitement in response to positive behavior, and low excitement in response to negative behavior? How often do you show high excitement in response to negative behavior, and low excitement in response to positive behavior?

5.3 Differential request-granting: How often do you grant requests that are reasonable and politely stated, and refuse requests that are unreasonable or impolitely state? How often do you use the opposite pattern?

6. Positive models versus negative models.

How many positive models do you expose the person to, and how positive are they? How few negative models do you expose the person to, and how negative are they?

7. Problem solving techniques.

When two people have a problem to solve, do they state it in non-blaming terms? Does each listen empathically to the other's statement of the problem? Do they generate options, and think rationally about the pros and cons of options? Do they avoid raising their voices, interrupting, and insulting, and do they come to a decision together about something to try?

This chapter will deal mainly with ways of responding with approval, attention, and excitement to positive examples.

Prescription for Immediate Response

Here’s a general rule, with some qualifications we’ll speak of later. Watch and listen to your child, and often give enthusiastic attention when you see positive examples of psychological skills.

Using this principle often requires much more of a revision in thinking than people realize. It requires, first of all, that they move from a short-term focus to a long-term focus. If I am nagging at the child to do something, or threatening the child, I usually define “success” when the child does what I want immediately after I nag or threaten. But when I see a positive example and give enthusiastic attention, the chances are that I won’t see the behavior repeated immediately. I may not even see any sign from the child that he enjoyed my enthusiastic attention. I’ll have to be patient, and keep using enthusiastic attention for several days, and see if the rate of the positive examples goes up over several days. In our instant-gratification world, this shift in thinking is often very difficult.

Now let’s think of some of the qualifications on the rule of giving enthusiastic attention when you see positive examples.

Enthusiastic Attention Doesn’t Necessarily Equal Praise

You’ll notice that I said “enthusiastic attention” rather than “praise.” There’s a difference: enthusiastic attention does not necessarily imply an “evaluation” of a “performance.”

Suppose Mary is building something with a construction toy, enacting skills of imagination and sustaining attention and thinking before acting.

Here’s a way of responding with praise:

“Mary, what a good job you’re doing of building that. It really looks great! You’re so imaginative!”

Here’s a way of responding with enthusiastic attention without praise:

(Parent kneels down and studies what Mary is doing, with a very interested look. Mary says, “This is the part of the space station that picks up the radar signals.”) The parent says, “I see! They face in different directions, so they can get them no matter where they come from, huh?”

Suppose I see my son Johnny enact the skill of expressing appreciation to my daughter Mary. Mary has built her something with a construction toy, and Johnny says, in an approving tone, “Wow, Mary, did you build that whole thing! That must have taken you a long time!”

Here’s a way of responding to that with praise to Johnny:

“Hey Johnny! I like your saying nice things like that to your sister!”

Here, on the other hand, is enthusiastic attention without praise:

(Parent kneels down beside Johnny and pats him on the back, looks at what Mary has made, and then looks at Johnny.) “I think you’re right, Johnny! I couldn’t agree with you more!”

Or suppose Johnny enacts the skill of sustaining attention, by studiously pouring over a book for longer than he has before. Here’s a way of responding with praise:

“Wow, Johnny, it’s great that you’ve been studying that book for such a long time—you’re getting more skilled in paying attention.”

Here, on the other hand, is enthusiastic attention without praise:

Parent looks at the book, smiles at Johnny. When Johnny looks up, parent says, “You’ve been reading that for a long time! It must be interesting!”

For another example: The parent is lying on the floor with Johnny and Mary and the three of them are doing dramatic play. Mary’s character says to Johnny’s character, “Have you lost your magic bag? I’ll help you look for it.”

Here’s an example of responding with praise:

“Wow, Mary, your character did something nice by offering to help. I sure like to see that.”

Here’s an example of enthusiastic attention without praise:

“You’re going to look for the magic bag too, huh? Maybe I’ll look too, and maybe one of us can help that man!”

Praise often interrupts the sequence of interactions somewhat to make an evaluative statement, and enthusiastic attention does not interrupt things as much. In enthusiastic attention, any evaluation is only given implicitly in the positive tone of voice you use.

Why do I make this distinction? Because it’s possible to have too much evaluation going on, even if that evaluation is positive, in the form of praise; but it’s almost impossible to have too much enthusiastic attention going on. Some children reject praise, as though they don’t want to be evaluated one way or the other. Sometimes you don’t want to hear that you did a good performance or a bad performance, you just want to be off the stage altogether. You may reject the attempt of the other person to control your behavior through praise, and you may resent the reminder that someone else older and wiser knows what the standard of good and bad quality is. Evaluative praise also can bring on problems of grade inflation: if some scribbles are the greatest work of art a parent has ever seen, where does the child go from there? None of these problems come from enthusiastic attention that responds simultaneously to the child and to what the child is already interested in.

Having said this, let me backtrack and say that the overuse of praise is a problem I seldom see. Praise is good, not bad. Overtly evaluative comments have a very important place in the life of a child. Comments that evaluate behavior are part of how children learn a value system. But it is possible to overdo praise. You want praise to be special and not something that is done over and over so many times that it loses its thrill. Enthusiastic attention, with an approving tone of voice, on the other hand, is something a parent can deliver literally hundreds of times per hour, thousands of times per year, without any negative effects. It can thus unobtrusively reinforce the tiny, positive-side-of-neutral positive acts that are the real building blocks in the child’s growth in psychological skills.

Sometimes curiosity is another good way to give enthusiastic attention. “What you just did was very interesting. How did you figure out how to do that?” or “Where did you learn to do that?” Sometimes another brand of enthusiastic attention is just to classify it, with an approving tone of voice: for example, “Hey, what you just did is an example of fortitude!”

Finding Ways to Take Pleasure in the Child

Imagine that you have just given a speech. One person pays you the following compliment: “You really made good use of gestures! Your delivery was very polished! What you said was well organized!” A second person pays you a different compliment: “I’m really glad I came to hear you! I’m going to be able to use what you said, to help people! I’m excited about trying it!” What is the difference between these two? The first is carrying out the role of an evaluator, a judge, giving you a high rating on a performance. The second is in the role of a human being who was affected by what you did, giving you feedback on how your actions affected his emotions. The second person is saying, “You produced positive emotion in me.”

The second type of compliment seems to be more universally welcomed, by children as well as adults. The first type presupposes that the performer wants to be evaluated by the evaluatee. The second type only presupposes that one person has interest in what effect his action had on someone else.

So many “behavioral” programs of reinforcement prescribe giving positive responses for good behavior, but overlook one crucial fact: for the reinforcement of the adult to be really meaningful, the adult must actually feel positive emotion. If a parent says, “Oh, thanks, that really makes me feel good,” but looks and sounds depressed and frustrated, the utterance will probably not have much effect on the child. That parent will be likely to say, “Yes, I praise and give attention, but it doesn’t have any effect.” On the other hand, if the parent really gets a very large kick out of what the child did, the tones and looks of approval and excitement are easy to come by.

If you agree with this, then the task of “reinforcing” positive examples is much more complicated than simply mouthing words of pleasure and interest. It may entail rearranging your own pleasure mechanisms, so that you feel pleasure in things you didn’t feel pleasure from before!

How, does an adult “psych up” to take pleasure in a child’s positive behavior examples? Here are some of the thought patterns I find myself using to help myself feel this pleasure. I look for any ways that the child’s positive behavior actually made me better off, made my life better or more interesting, and consciously celebrate those. I contemplate how many years children have ahead of them to use the skills they are learning, and I think about what an accomplishment it will be if I can impart a skill that the child will use well for the rest of his life. I contemplate the violence and hostility that prevails in the world, and think about how good it will be if the skills of kindness are imparted to even one child. I think about how the emotions of childhood experiences tend to get called back by reminders from events throughout the rest of life, and thus reason that if I can have a child experience some very pleasurable productive time, I am seeding memories that will be resources helping the child to feel good throughout a lifetime. I remember with pleasure some of the adults who were kind to me and had fun with me in my childhood, and I remember the feelings I had then; this makes me more sensitive to feeling good about happy productive things the children do. When I am with groups of children, I try not to assume that the children will want to do what I want them to do, and whenever a child actually helps me by doing a task for me or by cooperating with my directions, I feel a combination of relief and gratitude. I think about some of the times in childhood when I had childishly happy times, and I hope to be able to feel some of that child-level pleasure as well as the parental-level pleasure from being proud of the children’s accomplishments. I think, for a particular child, about what the child’s previous habit was, and I celebrate in my mind if the child rises above the previous habit to a new level of skill.

All this doesn’t mean that the adult has to be at the pinnacle of happiness before encountering a child. However, if the adult is able to let the children lift his or her spirits at least temporarily and is able to have fun with the child, the activities described here will be many times more effective.

To summarize this point: look for the ways of thinking about things that will help you to feel pleasure in things the child does. If the child is behaving badly, it is harder to take pleasure in the child. It becomes much easier as some of the techniques described here start to take hold. If it is hard for you at this particular moment to take pleasure in the child very often, don’t get too discouraged. But please keep persisting until you are able to honestly say that you take a great deal of satisfaction from things the child does, very often.

The Key Role of Excitement and Emotion

The key dimension of level of energy and excitement is contained in the word enthusiasm. This dimension does not refer to how you choose your words when you speak to your child. Emotion and excitement mainly get conveyed through tone of voice and movement and facial expression. How do we tell whether someone is excited? Unexcited people

talk more slowly

move more slowly

talk in a deeper voice

have a smaller range of pitches in the utterance

talk quietly

And excited people do just the opposite: they

talk more quickly

move more quickly

talk in a higher voice

have a larger range of pitches in the utterance

talk more loudly

The tones of your voice and the looks on your face are nonverbal communication. When it comes to reinforcing a child’s behavior, usually the nonverbal communication is more important than the words you say. If you speak to the child with a tone of real enthusiasm and a facial expression of joy, whatever you say will be much more rewarding.

Tones of voice are especially important with young children. Here’s a way of understanding why this may be true. If you are a three year old child, you are only part way into the task of learning what words mean. But almost since your moment of birth, you have been able to respond emotionally to smiles and frowns and angry or happy tones of voice. The response to nonverbal language, the language that is the same over all cultures, is hard-wired, built into your brain, whereas the language of your culture is only learned. Doesn’t it seem logical that you might respond more strongly to the nonverbal communication than the actual meanings of the words?

Please continue to imagine yourself as a 3 year old child, and imagine yourself doing something smart or good. Imagine someone saying to you with an expressionless face, in a monotone voice, “What you just did was the best thing I’ve ever seen.” Does that hit your pleasure centers?

Now imagine yourself doing the same something smart or good, and imagine someone smiling, and in a very animated voice saying, “Wow! Hey hey! Look at that!”

The monotone response above had lots of semantic meaning, and the animated response conveyed almost no semantic meaning. But the nonverbal information would make the second response much more reinforcing for almost all children. For some reason, children usually get reinforced by displays of energy from the adults who take care of them.

Rehearsing Giving Enthusiastic Attention to the Examples You Have Generated

Noticing the positive examples of high-priority skills and responding with enthusiastic attention, in a way that feels natural and doesn’t interrupt things, may sound easy; you may think you’re already doing it. You can get better at it than you are now! I haven’t achieved perfection in this difficult art, and I have yet to see anyone else do so either.

One of the problems is that some of the positive examples are quiet and do not attract attention, whereas some of the negative examples are loud and attention-grabbing. A child asks for candy at a grocery store counter and is told no. If the child throws a major tantrum, the parent is likely to notice; if the child says to himself, “I can take it,” and does not otherwise respond, the parent is likely not to notice or react in any way. How can the parent prime himself to notice the quieter positive things?

A very important task for the parent is to get clearly into mind the good behaviors that you are wanting to see more often from your child, and mentally to rehearse giving approval and attention to these behaviors. In other words, use fantasy rehearsal to improve your own skill of recognizing the positive examples in the child. To do so, do the following exercise.

Exercise: Rehearsing Giving Enthusiastic Attention

To practice giving enthusiastic attention, look again at the list of “positive examples of skills” that you made for your child, the examples you’d like to see more of. If you haven’t made your list yet, you can use the lists in Tables 2 and 3 of Chapter 2. Look at each behavior listed, and imagine that you just saw or heard your child doing this example. Then actually say out loud something that constitutes enthusiastic attention, just as you would say it to the child. Practice saying things like this:

You’re sticking on that for a long time! How’s it coming?

Thanks, that’s a big help to me!

You wanted to keep watching television, and you didn’t get to, but you stayed cool. That was fortitude!

When you started talking with that boy, he seemed to feel good. Did you figure out that he wanted someone to talk to?

You’re thinking of several options, aren’t you?

I surely do like it when you say OK like that.

Exercise: Practicing Approving with Different Degrees of Energy

Keep in mind the following three gradations of emotional tone in the voice:

No excitement

Small excitement

Large excitement

And work with the following list of things one might say:

Good for you.

Look what you’ve done.

You helped me out.

Thank you for doing that.

That’s interesting.

You finished it.

We’re getting it done.

The exercise is to practice saying these things with each of the three gradations of tone, until you are sure that your tone of voice has the full range and that you are thoroughly familiar with what all parts of the range sound like.

You can do the second part of the exercise with a partner. Pick one of the three tones to use, and say one of the phrases. Let your partner guess what degree of excitement you were trying to portray, and see whether your partner guesses correctly. Use the list of positive examples in tables 2 and 3 in chapter 2, or the list of positive examples you’ve made for your child, and imagine responses to these positive examples, in addition to practicing with the above phrases.

Is the idea to put large excitement into all the utterances that you make to the child? No. If you did that, you would sound very strange and phony, and probably overload the child. Is the idea to make a calculation of how good the child’s behavior is, and then as an accomplished actor or actress, fake the emotion of excitement and enthusiasm? No again. The idea is to have your tone of voice responsive to the way you feel, so that you can communicate your feelings to the child, and also to rig up your own pleasure centers so that you really feel excited about the good things the child does, in proportion to how good they are. A little acting practice, and trying on the tones of voice of large and small excitement, will only aid you in adjusting your own pleasure mechanisms. You rig up your ways of thinking so that when you come out with tones of approval, you don’t feel like a phony!

Let’s take stock. So far we’ve done lots of thinking to define the highest priority skills, and we’ve generated lots of positive examples of each of them. We’ve practiced watching like a hawk for the positive examples, and upon seeing them, giving enthusiastic attention. We’ve practiced making the tone of voice very animated and excited when giving such attention. If you do all these things, you will influence your child very positively by doing so. Now, there are three more elements to the plan we outline in this chapter: telling someone else about the good examples, the nightly review, and the positive behavior diary.

Telling Someone Else About the Good Examples

If there are people other than yourself—your spouse, your parents, your friends—who care about your child’s development, they will naturally want to hear about the positive examples of your child’s growth in psychological skills. Telling them about these examples purely for their own pleasure is a good idea. But there’s another benefit for the child. Have you ever heard people talking about you “behind your back,” in a positive way? It almost never happens to me, but I if it ever does, it feels great. Plus, it reminds me of whatever positive thing I did, and probably makes me more likely to do it again. In view of the fact that hearing oneself talked about is often a powerful reinforcer of behavior, it makes sense to take opportunities to celebrate your children’s positive behaviors with other people.

Sometimes celebrating is not the natural thing to do. Imagine that you are spending the afternoon with little Johnny, and Johnny has said “Thank you,” in a nice tone when you got him something to eat. He has also shared a toy airplane with his brother, very cooperatively. He has also done a good example of fortitude: he was playing another fun game with his brother, and he acted very nice when you had to interrupt the game to take them somewhere. But also, during this day, Johnny had a tantrum when you told him he couldn’t watch a TV show, and he flailed around and screamed so loudly that you were afraid the neighbors would call the police.

Now your spouse comes in, and says, “How was the afternoon?” Johnny is toddling around in hearing distance. What do you say? Do the positive things get reported, or forgotten? Most people would probably go right into, “I was afraid the police were going to come today!”

I’m suggesting that you do what is for many people the unnatural thing, and to say, “The afternoon had its ups and downs, but some really good things happened. Some of the ones I liked were that Johnny said ‘Thank you’ when I got him a sandwich, and he let his brother play with the toy airplane he likes so much...”

Notice that we’re talking about specific, concrete positive examples, not abstract descriptions: we want to be low on the abstraction ladder. Here’s another example: We prefer statements like, “Johnny’s brother accidentally knocked his blocks over, and Johnny said, ‘Don’t worry about it. I know you didn’t do it on purpose.’” We get much less mileage out of statements like “Johnny was very good while playing with his brother.”

If you want to recount the negative examples to someone else in great detail, I recommend doing so in private, especially with young children. If you feel that the child’s behavior was so bad that it would be misleading simply to recount the positive examples, recount the negative using language high on the abstraction ladder, and recount the positive with language low on the abstraction ladder. For example: “This really wasn’t a good day. It was very unpleasant to be with Johnny. Nonetheless, there were a few good things: he did say to me, ‘May I help you put these toys away,’ and then put a whole bunch of poker chips and dice into the box...”

The Nightly Review

Here’s what’s meant by the nightly review. Let’s start by talking about the simplest technique, namely that for preschool aged children. Just before the child goes to bed, remind the child about the positive examples of the high-priority skills you saw and heard the child do today. Say something like, “Before you go to bed, let’s remember some things you did today. I remember one thing, you obeyed me really well when I asked you to put your hat and coat on, and you said, ‘OK daddy!’ Also I sure liked hearing you say ‘thank you’ so politely when I got your sandwich for you.” If the child remembers other good things he did and tells you about them, so much the better. Or, if the child wants to reciprocate by telling you about smart or good things you did, that’s great too. If you want to volunteer a positive example you did, and tell the child about it, that’s great too. Don’t try to pull memories of positive examples out of the child if they don’t flow spontaneously.

What if the child seems to take no interest? You don’t let that stop you! Instead, you simply make the nightly review very, very short. As in the following: “Well I guess it’s about time for lights out. By the way, I really liked it today when you said to your brother, ‘Hey, nice drawing!’ Well, good night.”

I timed myself, and the nightly review portion of that utterance took a little under 10 seconds. Even if the child takes no interest at all, nothing is lost. But as the nightly review gets to be a regular pattern, the child almost always will come to take an interest in it. The main point is this: the parent does not need the child’s permission or cooperation in order to do the nightly review. The parent simply does it, and if the child takes an interest, the parent responds with enthusiasm. If the child does not take an interest, the parent simply moves on.

Now suppose someone sits down by the child and says, “Well, you did put your coat on, but I sure didn’t like how you picked over your food at supper. And why didn’t you come inside when I called you?” That’s not the nightly review. Especially with young children, it’s not a good idea to keep reminding your child over and over about the bad things he did. Having him go over the undesirable things in his mind is not good because each time he goes over them, in a sense he’s practicing doing it again. You want him to be thinking over and over again about good things to do, not the bad things.

So one purpose of the nightly review is to help the child do a “fantasy rehearsal” of the positive behaviors the child did earlier. The nightly review may exert its influence more by fantasy rehearsal and reinforcement for that rehearsal, than by reinforcing the original behavior. For young children, reinforcement or punishment usually has to come fairly quickly after the behavior to be very effective. The most effective consequences come within a second after the behavior. Those that come ten minutes later are often not nearly as effective. Yet the nightly review seems to help. I think that it works by the child’s calling up a visual and auditory image of the positive behavior, and feeling good about it. Thus the fantasy practice of the positive behavior is reinforced.

Variations on the Nightly Review for Older Children

As a child gets farther into the grade school years, and even into the high school years, the nightly review should not cease, but it should be different than what I’ve described so far for younger children. The preschool child doesn’t mind being the “center of attraction” for the nightly review, and doesn’t mind having lots of positive evaluation focussed solely on himself. As the child gets older, however, the child realizes that the nightly review is a technique for personality improvement, and can start to resent the implication that people think his personality needs to be improved more than someone else’s.

Thus as the child gets older, there needs to be more equality in the nightly review technique, less of a one-sided operation, more something that everyone does together. There needs to be more of a sense that the nightly review is a technique for all family members, especially including adults, that the child is let in on, rather than a technique for children. This is one general principle behind the success of any of the methods in this book when applied with older children and adolescents.

As the child gets older, she can take more responsibility for remembering positive patterns herself rather than having a parent do all the remembering.

And finally, as the child gets older, the child can benefit from recalling mistakes as well as positive patterns, trying to determine a positive pattern that would be a desired substitute for the mistake, and fantasy-practicing the preferred substitute. Caution: in all versions of the nightly review, only the person himself should bring up mistakes, not other people, unless people have achieved such a high degree of “nondefensive openness to the truth” that you aren’t risking the whole custom by doing so.

Let’s forget about children for a minute, and imagine an adult couple. Each night at a certain time, they spend a few minutes in the following activities, given in no particular order:

Each recalls his or her own positive examples from the day and celebrates them.

Each congratulates or thanks the other for positive examples they saw or heard the other do.

Each rehearses in fantasy any positive pattern that is a particularly desirable one.

Each can mention a mistake he made, and mention what positive pattern would be desirable to replace it with next time, and fantasy rehearse the replacement behavior.

Or each can mention a positive pattern he would like to do more often, and fantasy rehearse it, despite having done neither the pattern nor its opposite today.

People don’t criticize each other at all during this ritual. They don’t pry into each other’s lives during this ritual. They don’t whine at the other person if the other person can’t think of any positive examples, but instead they try to think of a positive example they saw the other person doing.

If you can do this with good feeling, and if you can make it into a regularly recurring ritual, I predict you will find it to be of great value to yourselves. If your spouse doesn’t want to participate, or if there is no spouse, then you can do it yourself, out loud or onto a written journal.

Then, you simply allow the children the privilege of being in on it.

The general theme of what I’m saying here will recur over and over. I suggest that you devise self-improvement methods for yourself, and include your children or your whole family in them, rather than having “behavior programs” for your children only. The difference in atmosphere is very important. You want the child to see individuals in the family as working toward higher and higher functioning, rather than someone more powerful inflicting control techniques upon someone who is the identified patient.

This notion of fantasy practice is very important. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, people have been able to improve their skills in all sorts of athletic endeavors, in public speaking, in interpersonal behavior, and other realms by fantasying themselves doing the patterns of thought, feeling, and action that they want to do. It’s an underutilized tool, and a very useful one.

This is why I ask you to utilize this tool, by imagining doing certain things with your child. Let’s put this tool into practice in an exercise on the nightly review.

Exercise: The Nightly Review

I want you to fantasy practice doing the nightly review, in a way appropriate for your child’s age. Get some positive examples in mind, and make a mental movie of yourself holding a nightly review discussion.

Did you imagine yourself doing it? What did you see in your movie? Did you see your child feeling good about the recognition and attention? Did you see problems coming up? For some people, the biggest challenge is simply withholding negative and critical comments.

So now we have three ways of making the positive examples come out more frequently: give immediate attention and approval and excitement; tell a third person about the positive example; and do the nightly review. I am often asked, what if the child doesn’t do any good things?

There are several answers to that question. The first answer to that is to study the skills axis very carefully, and watch the child more closely. Almost always, the parent who says this is missing all sorts of good things that the child is doing, by not noticing them. The second answer is to put the child in situations where the good things are more likely to happen, for example in one-on-one interaction with an adult, with nothing in reach except things you want the child to explore. With the combination of these two methods, which I use when a child comes into my office, I have yet to see a child for as long as 30 minutes without there being at least two or three things to celebrate in the child’s behavior; often the total is much higher than that.

The third answer is to define celebration-worthiness relative to the child’s own baseline habit. In other words, you take all the things the child does and arrange them in order, from most desirable to least desirable. The most desirable 10% or so of the things that the child does are by definition the ones you want to reinforce, even if those things are not the things you eventually want to settle for.

The fourth answer is that the modeling techniques we will talk about in later chapters will go a long way toward making positive behaviors start coming out much quicker and more frequently. When you put lots of positive examples into the memory bank, you can expect the positive examples to start coming out in the behavioral repertoire. But let’s save this large topic until later on.

The Positive Behavior Diary

The positive behavior diaryis a record of the good things people have done, with the recording done low on the abstraction ladder. The positive behavior diary is a form of monitoring. It also allows you to have a much longer memory for the positive examples you see. The child learns that doing positive examples gets not only attention today, but enduring commemoration.

One of the most powerful ideas in this book is that every image of positive, skillful thought, feeling, and behavior that you can collect is a resource. Every positive pattern that can be stored in the memory bank or on paper or other media, becomes a pattern useful to refer to when searching for a response to a new situation similar to the old one. Therefore it makes sense to collect images of positive responding, with as much zeal as you can muster. One great place to collect these images is from the best examples of what your family members already have done.

Get a spiral notebook or a blank book, or a file folder for loose pieces of paper, or open a file with your word processor. On the first couple of pages, write down the high priority skills that you are particularly wanting to foster.

Example of what you might write on first pages:

Important skills:

Enjoying doing kind things

Complying with adults’ requests

Putting up with frustration

Expressing glee

Having a good social chat

Be sure to leave some space for new skills when they move into the high priority zone.

Next, start making diary entries. Watch like a hawk for positive examples of any of these, and jot down in the diary a little story telling what your child did that was good in any of the high priority categories.

It’s still important that the entries be very concrete. You want the recounting of the positive example to create a mental movie in the mind of the child, with a specific setting, specific characters, and specific utterances and actions.

How not to do it:

7/7/96 Complying: He complied well after lunch today.

How to do it:

7/7/96 Complying: Today after lunch—I: “Could you please help me out by putting napkins in trash can?” He: “Sure, I’d be glad to do that.” And he did it.

Here are some more examples of positive behavior diary entries.

4/7/93 Fortitude. “May I watch Terminator on the TV?” “No, too violent, we’re boycotting it.” “OK. I guess I can handle it.”

4/7/93 Enjoying kind acts. To sister: “Want me to read you a story, Jennifer?” “You can pick any one you want.” “I like it when you pay attention like that.”

4/8/93 Sustaining attention, handling aloneness. While I was on phone, he looked at Children’s Pictorial Encyclopedia for 15 minutes.

4/8/93 Conflict resolution. With Alex from across the street. Doing Carmen game on computer vs. bikes and hike outside. “How about if we do the computer for half an hour, and then I get to show you some things outside?”

After you’ve made these diary entries, then what? Use the same principles as with telling another person about the positive examples, and doing the nightly review. If at any time the child wants the entries read to her, do so with enthusiasm. If the child gives permission and you think the child would enjoy it, let grandmother, uncle, cousin, and next-door-neighbor see the book in the child’s presence and chat with the child about the positive examples. Use the book at the nightly review, and every once in a while recount the highlights of positive behaviors of the last week, the last month, etc. In other words, let this book make the child’s positive behaviors lead to everlasting fame. Over time, you can watch and see if there are more and more positive examples to choose from, and if it gets easier and easier to pick an entry for the diary. If these things happen, progress is taking place, and you can celebrate! And when you get more ambitious, and want some fun, there are three other things you can do with these positive examples. You can make illustrated stories out of them, you can make plays from them, and you can make songs about them. We will talk more about these later.

The hardest part about this task, (next to getting yourself to do it at all) is to be concrete and specific.

A second tricky thing about this task is looking for positive examples of all the skills on the high priority list for the child, including the subtle examples of very little things the child does or says. Most parents can recognize the child’s helping with a household chore as a positive example of helping, but some become overly focussed on this sort of example and miss the others.

Using Tape Recorders for the Positive Behavior Diary

Keeping a positive behavior diary is not very much work, but with the large amount of paperwork in the world, it often doesn’t tend to get done. Here’s another way of creating a permanent record of positive behaviors that I find quite helpful.

You get two tape recorders, and keep them in the child’s room. One tape recorder is the one where you record the stories of the child’s positive examples. Each night at bedtime, after you finish reading some stories to the child, you turn on that tape recorder and tell stories, in as interesting and dramatic fashion as you can, of the positive examples you saw the child carry out. The child listens to them. When you are done, you stop the tape recorder and leave the tape at that point, ready to begin again the next night. Then when you have accumulated a full cassette of these modeling stories, you put a new tape in the first recorder, and continue recording new stories each night. In addition, you play a story or two on the second recorder, from the old tape. Thus each evening the child gets reminded of positive examples that have occurred that day, and in the more distant past. You don’t have to do any writing at all to make it happen.

Linking the Positive Examples to the Abstract Skill Concepts

You notice that in the sample diary entries I gave earlier, we didn’t just narrate the event; we also noted what skill it was an example of. One of the reasons to do that in the positive behavior diary is to make sure that you look for examples of all the high priority skills, not just one or two. But there’s another reason. You want to get in the habit of talking with the child about these positive events as examples of the skill, rather than just as isolated events. Example: the child is playing “Chutes and Ladders,” and he has bad luck: his person lands on a square that sets him way back in the game. He snaps his finger with displeasure but goes along and plays by the rules, and continues to enjoy the game. It’s fine and perfectly good to say to the child, “I like how you didn’t get real upset when you got that setback.” But if you say something like the following, you also educate the child in the concept of fortitude, or putting up with not getting what he wants: “That was fortitude! That big setback was a frustration for you, but when you went along with the rules and kept on enjoying the game, you were showing you could tolerate it!”

And why do we want the child to become familiar with these concepts? It’s so that the next time something unwanted happens to the child, the child to say to himself not something like, “Aw, this is terrible! That’s so dumb. Why do things like this happen to me.” We want the child to think something like, “Here’s a good chance for me to show how skilled I am at putting up with not getting what I want. If I do a good job with that skill, I’ll deserve to celebrate and feel good.” Can you see how adopting the second way of thinking, if generalized far enough, would lead to a totally different orientation toward the world? It’s a world where challenges are continually being thrown at you for the exercise of psychological skills, but where your skills are constantly getting more and more developed with each challenge you face.

The Positive Pattern Diary with Older People

When using the positive pattern diary with older children and adolescents, adults use the technique in the service of their own self-improvement, and invite the children to be a part. If parents are trying to improve themselves, the child will probably not be so rebellious and resistant to attempts to improve himself.

One way to do this is to conduct a family nightly review session, with one person designated as recording secretary. The secretary’s job is to record the positive examples that people have done or fantasied about.

The best way to approach this task is to realize that any person’s positive example can be a resource for any other person. For example, the image of a child’s helpful act can be a resource that can make the parent better able to enter the spirit of helping. The parent’s example of delay of gratification or complaince at work can be a resource for the child to use at school—if the child hears about it, and if it’s described concretely enough for the child to get a clear image in mind.

Suppose you can’t get a spouse and all the siblings to convene for the nightly review. Even one parent can make it work with one child. The parent reviews his own positive patterns and those of any other people, for his own good. If the child takes an interest in what is written or spoken he is welcome to do so.

Enthusiasm and Positivity Not Contingent on the Child’s Positive Examples

Adults’ enthusiasm and upbeat tones of voice do far more than just to provide reinforcement for whatever the child did in the seconds preceding it. Parents’ tones of voice and animation of behavior model for the child. A parent’s upbeat enthusiasm is a stimulus situation that sets the stage for all behavior that follows it. Such positivity is very potent in eliciting positive behavior from the child. Even objective-formation is affected: enthusiasm and joyousness in a parent help the child to share the parent’s goals. Why? Because an enthusiastic and upbeat parent, who is enjoying life, seems to be onto something good, something a child will want to get in on. Conversely, with an unhappy and irritable parent, the child may think, “If your values [or these psychological skills] are so great, why aren’t you happy?” The child is then likely to imitate the peer or the television hero who seems to be enjoying life more than the parent. For adolescents, we should assume that they are on some level thinking, “Show me, with the happiness of your own life, the evidence that the values and competences you endorse are worthwhile.”

The conclusion from this thinking is that “noncontingent” positivity from the parent—that which comes out of the blue rather than in reponse to something positive the child did—may be at least as important and constructive as the “contingent reinforcement” the behaviorists promote. Or in other words, don’t wait for the child to do something good before you demonstrate enthusiasm! If you can set the stage from the first moment of your interaction with the child, for a positive, upbeat emotional tone, the child is much more likely to respond in kind. When I was a child, often my first experience upon awakening would be to hear my father jubilantly singing a song whose words started out, “Wake with the singing bird, shout out those lucky words, here comes the sun!” I will always be grateful for this noncontingent positivity, despite the fact that often I did not imitate such jubilance in any immediate way.

Now let’s summarize the methods advocated so far. After getting familiar with the skill concepts, you pick some high priority skills, and get very clearly in mind a bunch of concrete positive examples for each of them. Then watch like a hawk for any examples you see your child doing. Give enthusiastic attention immediately when you see those examples. Do this with excitement and emotion in your voice and face, so as to communicate accurately the positive emotion you have generated from within. Tell other people about those good things. Sit down each night and review the positive examples; keep a diary (on paper or on tape) to help you remember them. When you review the positive examples, link them to the skill concepts some of the time. Do this as an ongoing self-improvement project as well as a way of positively influencing your child. And don’t wait for the child to do positive things before showing the child how to be upbeat and enthusiatic and positive.

I have seen parents bring about rapid and very positive changes in their children by these steps alone.

Rejoicing Over Your Child's Positive Examples of Psychological Skills