Our confidence, our ability to navigate the world independently through good and
through bad times is really tightly tied to our sense of control.
See, you either think you control your universe or you believe you're a victim of
circumstance. In the worst of times, a sense of control is the key is survival.
In the best of times, it's central to flourishing. It makes the difference in
whether or not you're gonna recognize and grasp those opportunities.
Self-control, being able to put off immediate pleasure, has actually been
proven to be really tightly tied to success. You know, some people are born
with more impulse control than others and some people have a capacity to plan
better than others. Well you know what, parents certainly can support learning
about delayed gratification. You've been doing it from the time your kid's been
two years old, you know. We did it when our child was 2, when we told them to
take turns, that it was fair to share .We did it then but we do it every day even
during adolescence when we encourage our kids to study, when we create
opportunities for them to save opportunities to do chores so that they
can save for the future. We also help kids get a sense of
control when we help them learn to take overwhelming tasks like a term paper and
to break them down into small pieces, or any problem at all and to turn it in, to
take it from feeling like a mountain into understanding that every mountain
just has one hill piled on top of another, piled on top of another. And then
when you look at the mountaintop, you feel paralyzed like you can't accomplish
anything. But if you just imagine walking up on the first hill, it's doable
and the top of the mountain doesn't seem so far away. That's teaching kids take
control. We also know that kids learn a sense of control by how we praise them
or how we criticize them. We learn this from another wonderful body of
scientific work from Carol Dweck, right, that people either have a
fixed mindset, meaning that I can't change very many things, "I am like
this," or a growth mindset, meaning "I can control my universe. The actions I take
are going to make a difference," and her elegant body of research showed that
kids gained that sense of lack of control or control by how we praise them.
When we praise them by just telling them what they were, "you are so beautiful, you
are so handsome, you are so good at math," kids felt like they were what people
told them they were and they were afraid of thinking outside the box. But when
instead we praised in this way you did (blank) and therefore (blank) happened to
you, kids gained a sense of control. So are you gonna say to a kid, "you are so
smart?" That's not giving a kid a sense of control. Or do you say, "you did really
well on your test because you studied so hard?" Think about it who has control. Who
feels like the action that they took matters. We also know that how much
control parents take in their kids lives makes a big difference to whether kids
have that internal sense of control, "what I do matters, what I do makes a
difference," versus "things just happen to me." It begins with discipline. For parents
to understand how to discipline, it's really as simple as understanding where
the word comes from. It shares the root with disciple. It means to learn, to guide
ideally in a loving way. It doesn't mean to control and it doesn't mean to punish.
When we raise kids by saying things like "you'll do what I said!
Why? Because I said so," they don't learn they have control. They learn that they
are controlled. When we say to kids instead my job is to have you become
independent, my job is to have you grow, but I have to do so to make sure that
you're going to be safe while you do it and all you have to do to get more
freedoms is to demonstrate that you can handle it, kids feel like they're in
control and they are gonna take that knowledge that they learn early and
childhood and carry it through with the rest of their life. We also know from
decades of research how much control parents should have in
their kids lives. There's something called parenting style and when we look
at parenting style, we look at two forces that could be in opposition. One is love
and warmth and support and the other is monitoring and rules and boundaries and
control. How much control should parents have? Balanced. They should be warm and
loving and they must also have rules and boundaries.
That's called balanced parenting and we know that when parents balance their
control over their child with their child knowing that it comes from a place
of caring and warmth and love, those kids have less anxiety, less depression. They
do better in school. Those kids are less likely to use drugs
Those kids are going to have their first sexual experiences later. They're less
likely to be bullied. They're less likely to be bullies. They're safer in cars,
right. They're less likely to witness violence. In every category those kids do
better. So many people worry that if they fail, they're gonna lose it all and so
they just protect themselves from any possible failure and so many parents
also worry about the possibility that their kid will fail if they don't
succeed at absolutely everything. Fear of failure doesn't give you confidence. It
actually gives you a loss of a sense of control because you're afraid to
confront difficulties, because you're afraid you're gonna lose if you don't
succeed. When we allow our kids actually to fail sometimes and they
learn that after failure usually comes recovery and opportunity for growth, those
are the kind of people who have a sense of control in their lives and who are
willing to take chances. We want to protect our kids and there's so many
ways of doing it and one of the ways of doing it is to just watch them closely
in absolutely everything they do. But when you understand
that adolescence is about figuring out how to stand on your own, then you begin
to understand that when parents are watching and hovering all the time and
controlling everything, kids aren't going to learn to control their own lives.
Instead, they're gonna feel controlled. Let me tell you something, if you install
control buttons in your child during adolescence where they don't feel like
they can do things on their own because you're controlling all of their actions
and everything they do, when your kids can get out of the house, they're not
looking back. Remember that your goal is interdependence. You want to be involved
in your child's life for decades to come.
The secret of remaining interdependent is for your child to know that you honor
their independence. Again it's about not installing control buttons that kids are
gonna have to move away to turn off. When it comes to resilience, you know, we
should really draw from the serenity prayer because it speaks very directly
to control: "Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."