Healthy Children Outcomes Series – 8. Parenting Skills

In Blog #7, we focused on the quality of parenting in each home (Parenting Skills 1 and 2).  In this blog, we continue with Parenting Skills 3, 4 and 5: 

1. Clear and high expectations
2. Intellectual, social and skill building stimulation
3. Participation in and support for the child’s life  

As a reminder regarding Parenting Skills, most important is the balancing of Authoritative Parenting and Nurturing and Emotional Support (discussed in detail in Blog #7).  The next three skills are not as important, but are still essential.  Let us unpack each of them.

Clear and high expectations provide the aspirational goals in the training of children.  A good way to begin this is to imagine how you would like your children to be when they enter adulthood.  For example, a successful adult understands that he or she has to be flexible in order to interpret accurately what behavior will work best in different settings and adjust his or her behavior accordingly.  Behavior in a restaurant should be different from behavior at home during dinner, which is different from eating at a friend’s home, and which is different from eating in the church basement after a funeral.  Therefore, one expectation is that children learn to behave appropriately in different settings.  This leads naturally to teaching children “restaurant rules,” “guest rules,” “funeral rules” and so on.  If the child learns and follows the rules, they deserve praise.  If they do not follow the rules, there should be a predictable consequence.  Parents can go through every aspect of being a successful adult, develop high expectations and then teach children with a clear focus.  As a second example, a successful adult handles money effectively.  This translates into having a clear plan to teach children how to handle money effectively.  The take-away from this is to really think through the skills that will help your child be successful as an adult, and from those, develop clear and high expectations.  Be patient and do not forget the kind in firm-but-kind. Remember that this is a learning process.

Intellectual, social and skill building stimulation begins with intellectual stimulation, chiefly reading to a child and fostering intellectual curiosity.  As the child turns into a toddler, puzzles, blocks and other toys expand abilities and begin the process of stimulating skill development.  If the child has a sibling group, the social stimulation begins, and if no siblings, play groups and daycares provide the stimulation in order to learn how to share, take turns and deal with difficult others.  Language development, and eventually the skills involved in being successful in school, garner more focus, and finally, participation in extracurricular activities expands that into society at large.  

As can be seen, we do not mention screen time.  Screen time, especially video games, generally retard development more than help.  Why is that?  First, watching television has one advantage – entertaining, or at least occupying – but two disadvantages: one, it interferes with the development of attention and concentration; and two, induces a pattern of passive reception rather than active engagement.  The reason that it interferes with the development of attention and concentration is because the average length of a scene on TV is 2-3 seconds.  Every 2-3 seconds, the child is exposed to new stimulation.  Assembling a wooden puzzle cannot be done in 2-3 seconds.  Second, passive reception of information is an inferior way to learn.  One interesting example of this was a study done in California many years ago.  Children who watched Sesame Street entered school ahead of children who did not watch it, but by the end of the first year of school, the children who did not watch Sesame Street passed the children who did.  Try learning a language by simply listening to a list of words and someone speaking.  Without repeating, writing and actively practicing, it just cannot be done.  Video games have the same drawbacks, plus a couple more.  First, they follow a pattern of action and reward that is addictive; brain development of the child is actually shaped by the process.  Second, children are not learning about what is real and what is fantasy and how to distinguish between the two.  They continue to do both, but need a firm line between the two.  Living in the worlds of video games prevents children from developing that line.  At the extreme, some children actually end up living in the world of fantasy.  This can lead to an adult engaging in fantasy relationships online, thinking that they are real friendships or romantic relationships, spending excessive time as an avatar in a fictitious community online, or engaging in activities on the computer, like tennis, playing a guitar or dancing, and thinking that it is real.

Allowing a child to watch children’s movies and television shows is not harmful if limited, and IF parents engage in intellectual, social and skill building stimulation most of the time.  However, it is difficult to find a redeeming quality in playing video games. 

Participation in and support for the child’s life has been shown to predict many areas of success.  For example, in one study, parental involvement with school was the primary predictor of academic success, and in another study, father involvement in school not only predicted academic success but also behavior and social success.  This does not mean that parental participation causes success; it means that a child living in a family that is child-focused is likely to do well.  The parents that go to school events and are in touch with teachers are also the parents that make sure the child does all of the homework, pays attention in class and studies for tests.  Having the good work habits developed in school when a parent also teaches the behaviors above leads to success in future situations, such as careers.  In one source, highly successful twin women were asked the secret of their success.  They responded that they “won the lottery with our parents – they were always involved.”  

Recap: In this and the prior Blog, we indicated that the quality of parenting in each home is highly predictive of outcomes for children.  We further indicated that social science informs us that high quality parenting involves five main ingredients:

1. Authoritative parenting, as opposed to authoritarian and permissive parenting
2. Nurturing and emotional support
3. Clear and high expectations
4. Intellectual, social and skill building stimulation
5. Participation in and support for the child’s life  

We defined each of these skills and gave what we hope are helpful examples.  Sometimes, two parents are strong in some skills and weak in others, but balance each other out.  Parents who do not get along might be critical of one another instead of working as a team.  For example, one parent, for example the father, might criticize the other for “being too easy” (nurturing but permissive) and the other parent, for example the mother, might counter with a criticism that the father is to “hard on them” (authoritative but not as nurturing).  Working as a team, they could bring both skills to bear in both homes, without either of them having to change.  Giving the children access to the mother for comfort and emotional support and having the father provide a lot of the structure (rules and consequences) in both homes is an example.

Better yet, both parents can work on improving all five Parenting Skills.  A parent who is not, by personality, a warm person can still develop ways to be emotionally supportive.  Learning to be authoritative is fairly easy, although it might take reading a book, watching lessons (the TV series, The Nanny, demonstrates authoritative parenting well), or even meeting with a parenting coach.  The grades children achieve do not reflect intellectual level as much as the good work habits of doing all of the homework, studying for tests and paying attention in class. Those can be the clear and high expectations set out in an authoritative manner.  Being actively involved in all aspects of a child’s life creates many opportunities for teaching skills and building confidence and pride.  

An important point is that this challenge is identical for parents living in the same house as it is for separated parents.  Most parents want to be the best parents that they can be and want their children to grow into successful adults, in every sense of that word.  None of us is perfect, and life for our grown children will not be perfect. However, it is good to strive towards giving them their best shot at having most things go well.  Improvements in parenting skills with separated parents works, not only best when those parents work as a team, even when that includes giving each other critical feedback, but only when given and received as information that can help improve.  This will be one of the topics in our next two Blogs on the co-parenting relationship.