The American Psychological Association proudly presents
Alan Kazdin, PhD ADPP, the 2009 Award
for Outstanding Lifetime Contributions to Psychology.
Dr. Kazdin's outstanding contributions in leadership
over four decades of research, education, scholarship, and practice,
make him one of the most influential psychologists
in the history of the profession.
Dr. Kazdin is the world's expert on child-rearing practices...
(Dr. Alan Kazdin talks about the Kazdin method for parenting)
(What is parent management training?)
Parent management training is a set of techniques
that are really well studied on how to change child behaviour in the home.
And you do that by training parents to interact differently with their children
based on that research.
And once you do that the children really make major changes.
So parent management training is a psychological procedure
to develop in parents' new ways of interacting with their children
that make a difference in how their child behaves.
(What makes children defiant?)
Defiance is usually something... not doing what someone else wants.
And developmentally, here's how it goes:
A child is kind of, you're carrying them around in a carrier,
you're putting them here, you're putting them in bed, you're feeding them,
and they're kind of just a loving piece of baggage
that you're in complete control of.
Now they get to be two or three -- usually it's three.
'The terrible two's' come on at three. They don't come on at two.
They don't always come on.
But what's happened now ... now your child can walk around
holding onto a coffee table or couch,
and he or she can get into things.
And now you start making a new kind of command or demand:
"Don't touch that, that's mommy's favorite vase...
I told you not to touch it, what are you doing?"
And the child is not being oppositional,
the child's not being manipulative, the child's not controlling.
He's kind of innocent in that way.
But the parent is not attending to compliance,
but attending more to defiance,
and the child has a stronger will
by virtue of just being in more control of his or her environment.
And when you identify this in adolescence:
"You want to go out with whom, with that person,
with all those tattoos and earrings that are coming out of every orifice,
are you kidding me?"
There's the place where control is maximum, but it's gaining from early childhood on.
I can walk, I can ride a bike, I can go into any room in the house, I can open doors,
I can go into the refrigerator.
So now a parent is seeing a person that they can't carry around and do everything with,
but the person has demands and needs and wants and wishes that conflict,
and the parents are saying don't do that. Don't do that.
You're being defiant. You're not listening.
Well. It's kind of normal development.
And even in a perfectly normal home a child is compliant
maybe 80% of the time with a parent.
So it's not so much defiance -- it's who's labeling it. It's the parent.
(Do parenting books do more harm than good?)
That's actually a marvelous question and this is actually a sad topic for me.
Psychology and its research have not had much impact.
So for example, when you read the best sellers on parenting --
much of the books, much of what is in the books is not benign -- it's actively wrong,
actively wrong.
And so we see that parents are receiving information,
a lot of information that is filled with myth and it's just ill-informed.
And so parents feel empowered.
The genre is so depressing that I was flirting with the idea of writing a book on parenting.
And I thought the first step for me would be to read the books on parenting.
And I went and I looked at the self-help section.
And I bought several best selling books, and I read them.
And it was the most depressing experience.
You know I read such nice things in my career, and this was just horrible --
just one thing after another -- No.
That violates what we know -- No. That violates what we know.
Well that's very interesting, we don't know that yet,
that could be true but you're saying it is.
But let's let that one go. And it was wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
And so the message isn't getting out there.
Also, even the books that seemed informed that say, "Praise your child".
Well, no, that's not anywhere near enough.
The praise has to be done in a very special way -- a very special way.
The special way is not my way. It's based on the research.
And so if you're trying to praise your child,
it's not going to get the behaviours you want.
It's guaranteed it's going to fail. It's got to be done in a very special way.
Parent management training takes all that research and says, "this is what we know,
and this is how it has to be done".
We'll help you do it. We'll actually teach you how to do it.
It's not threatening, it's not nasty, but we can't talk about it.
We have to get you up and practicing it.
(Good Examples of Bad Advice)
If your child is angry, and hits a sister
-- it's really important to understand that child,
make him feel understood so he doesn't have to hit people.
Always good to talk to your child.
Always good to feel understood.
Some of my best friends feel understood.
It won't change the child's behaviour at all, reminding your child to do things.
Keep reminding your child to get it done.
And you might even find yourself saying,
"If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times."
What does the research show? Don't keep reminding.
It's not going to work.
There are other ways to get the behaviour you want,
but the more reminders is associated with less compliance.
So if you keep firing these nags, you're guaranteeing that they won't work.
You're guaranteeing it.
Punishment is a way to change your child,
harsh reprimand, or maybe even showing them who's really in control. No. No. No.
Here's what we know.
Punishment, moderate amounts of punishment to high levels of punishment
lead to side effects that are really bad...
more aggression, more hitting of one's peers.
Time out -- time out, it's a brief period of time.
One book says your child should be in time out for hours if necessary
so that they'll understand.
No. No. Time out is not about understanding.
Your child goes to time out to think about what he or she has just done.
No. No. No. That has nothing to do with time out.
The research is very, very clear about that -- that's not relevant.
(What works... guidance in homework as an example...)
Parent training works on three areas:
One's called antecedents, what comes before the behaviour,
and there's a lot of research on this, how you craft and change the behaviour,
and then the kinds of consequences you give.
And we're going to use antecedents, which is how you start the situation.
And there are some technical things here. So we say the first night,
"I'm going to help you with your homework, and we're only going to do this for a minute,
or two minutes."
And so, "I'm not doing homework," "You don't have to,
I'm going to do it with you, I'm going to sit there --
let's just see what your homework is,
and if you don't want to do it, I'm going to do the first two problems.
And then we're done, we're totally done."
Now, common sense says, "That's not what I want, they've got a whole hour of homework!"
Oh no, I will get you the hour, that's not a problem. It's got to be done this way.
So the parent goes, sits down, cut out the tension, no nagging,
and says, "Okay, so where are the first two problems?"
And the child says, "Here", so, "Let me do it, let me do the first one."
And you could ask the child a question about it, or you could just do it.
Doesn't matter. Now, you do this for a few nights, and then you take turns,
"You do the first one later, help me do the problem", then you do two problems.
So the next night you go in, one of the nights, you say,
"I'm going to sit here, you think you can do these two problems?"
Now when the child does it, now you have to praise it.
Now in adolescence, praise isn't so effusive.
But you've got to praise in a special way. It should be a little bit enthusiastic,
it should say exactly what you're praising, and it should be followed with a touch.
For a teenager, it should maybe be a high-five, or if teenager's too cool,
then you might just do a fake high-five in the air.
So the child does that problem, the first night you say,
"That was really good‚ I was going to do this by myself, you jumped in to help me,
that was really great."
The child smiles. Now, so over the period of two, three weeks,
you're sitting there with the child.
You ask the child to get started without you, and so there are things like that,
so pretty soon the parent is praising, for just a little good behaviour:
up to three minutes with the parent in the room,
five minutes with the parents in the room.
Five minutes in, five minutes out, and then you praise that.
"You did that without me, that was really great." You could have point charts.
We do point charts for parents, it makes them more structured --
we don't need them for the children.