Control vs Influence

Learning/Parenting/Attachment Concept

I was a founding teacher at a public charter school. It was exciting and affirming to be part of something so fresh and seemingly aligned with my values—especially since I was a bit of an accidental teacher, following an alternate route to certification and completing the requirements just in the nick of time to start that crazy, intense first year of what felt like unbearable imposter syndrome. Heads’ up—this article is going to betray my bias against our current education system (I’ll try not to dwell too much on my disdain) and the way most of us believe we’re supposed to parent.

Warning: this post may challenge you. I want to reiterate that I believe you are the eminent expert on your family, so pay attention to what resonates and what doesn’t. Maybe try to tune into what you believe is your intuition vs what may be conditioning. Either way, parents must be trusted to know how best to raise their own children, and if this one just doesn’t do it for you, no need to examine what you’re currently doing. I did feel compelled to share my experience as an educator and my resulting philosophy as rationale for why I feel so strongly about what I explain in this concept post.

What I wasn’t expecting as a fledgling teacher with a full class of second graders is just how hard “classroom management” was going to be! It’s not just part of what a teacher needs to learn, I would say it’s everything. You’ll probably not want to hear this, but I promise you, the content children are taught at school is far less enduring than the structure we’re conditioning our children to accept.

As you can imagine, teachers were given all kinds of “tools” to help us manage behavior. Mostly reward systems like star charts, contests, and pizza programs to encourage reading at home. It always felt wrong to me—to reward someone for “good” behavior seemed to just escalate the need for reward to continue to get the desired behaviors. Children stopped behaving like decent humans for the simple reason that that’s what they are: decent humans, and started doing it for the recognition and reward.

I need to interject a belief of mine here that I’m not just pulling out of nowhere but is the culmination of so many resources I don’t even know where to start listing. I’ve spent years as a self-directed learner obsessed with human behavior and motivation and I’ve come to this conclusion: Humans are amazing creatures who are naturally curious and creative, with a drive to contribute to a community in satisfying and meaningful ways. I believe we are innately wired for these traits and that when we start to use coercion to drive behaviors we want to see, we reinforce an external locus of control in those we “lead”, diminishing the natural internal locus of control.

I don’t think it’s a difficult leap from here to understand who benefits from a population mostly wired for external behavior drivers. Someone commented on a recent PITT article that humans are easier to market to if they’re homogenous and predictable. I couldn’t agree more. Homogeneity also makes us easier to direct. Children are wired to upload whatever is the current culture—this makes perfect sense from an evolutionary lens. How best then to standardize our population than to standardize the way we spend our childhoods?

Somewhere along the way (probably about the time we became agriculturalists; in his book, Free to Learn, Peter Gray talks a bit about how this shift came about and why) we came to believe that children are inherently bad and lazy until we “teach” them how to be “good” and productive. I can’t recommend enough the work of Carol Black; her essays on childhood and education are both achingly beautiful and painful to read. I believe that what our children need most are trusted adults with whom they have a healthy attachment who model decent human behavior and expect their children to exhibit equally decent human behavior. If we use coercion to induce that behavior, we teach them to not only become coercive themselves (“If you don’t do it my way, I won’t be your friend”) we teach them to accept coercion into their lives. Some may argue this conditioning is important since we live in a highly coercive society. I guess I would ask my usual question: how’s that working for us? I know for myself, coercion causes my counterwill to spike, every…single…time.

So what am I saying? I’m saying the way we engage children in the interest of getting them to adulthood will matter in their ability to be to be self-directed, with their intuition, curiosity, and creativity intact along with a drive to contribute to society in ways that feel satisfying and meaningful. I’m veering off a little here into Big Picture stuff because this vision drives so much of my own behavior, but back to influence vs. control:

I’m saying there’s a difference between leading through the influence of loving attachment (aka relationship/connection/respect) and controlling through the use of external behavior drivers (aka rewards/punishments aka coercion) and that the approach you use will affect your outcomes—both now in how your teen is responding to you and for their future adult selves. Is one better than the other? I’d say that depends on your values. (I’m a freedom-loving gal myself who lives a satisfying and meaningful life in a very intentional way.)

I’m saying that using imposed consequences to force the outcomes you want to see may have natural consequences that you don’t like. I know of the “four parenting styles” framework, and I think it has some value but I’ve not found it to be descriptive enough when it comes to these concepts of influence and control. Maybe I’m wrong; maybe I’ve just not found the right description of this framework. I’ll admit I’ve not spent much time looking.

I’m a big believer that how we frame things matters. That said, I think it’s important to realize that just by calling punishment a “consequence” doesn’t change it from being a punishment. Any imposed consequence is either a reward or a punishment and both are forms of coercion. Rewards and punishments are an intrinsic part of control, and many of you have probably heard this term: behavior modification. Today’s parents are expected to engage in behavior modification and support their school’s efforts toward reinforcing responsiveness to external behavior drivers. I’m not super interested in helping to turn my children into the consumers the plundering class would like them to be.

If this is resonating at all, I’d encourage you to look into the work of Alfie Kohn. Some of his book titles include Unconditional Parenting and Punished by Rewards. I discovered his work in my role as a faculty trainer at that aforementioned charter school and the information revolutionized my classroom—along with the knowledge that educators figured out long ago: our coercive grading system is incredibly damaging to curiosity and creativity, again reinforcing an external over an internal locus of control and grooming us for stratification.

Back to why I don’t love the “four parenting styles”. My parenting would likely be considered “permissive” (which is clearly undesirable according to the model) because I refuse to use coercion with my children. (Again, maybe I misunderstand the framework.) You might hear this sometimes worded as, “she doesn’t discipline her kids.” That sounds pretty crazy to most parents. (Unfortunately, we’ve changed the meaning of the word: discipline, which once meant “to teach.” Somewhere along the line, discipline and maybe even teach, in some ways, came to mean coerce. ) Does this mean I let them do whatever they want? Almost. But also, no. I promise I’ll explain these last few sentences soon.

At this point you’re probably wondering, then how the hell am I supposed to parent my kids? How do I get them to do what I think they’re supposed to? (See what I did there? If you haven’t given it much thought, I’d encourage you to examine the bit about what you think your children are “supposed to” do? That said, you’re the parent. You get to decide this part. Hopefully, you’ve spent time developing clarity around your values so you can intentionally model the desired behaviors and create expectations in your home based on these values.)

This is where the framing comes in. Structure and boundaries do not rely on rewards and punishments; however, in the absence of coercion, they do rely on attachment (influence, relationship) and patience; the ability to communicate the expectation and the value behind it; and of course, modeling. The “do what I say, not what I do” authoritarian approach is completely ineffective without coercion and generally results in broken attachment and resentful, subversive kids.

The influence approach requires a great deal of trust. Trusting in our children’s innate wiring to uptake culture (which evidence demonstrates is true and why the modeling component is so important) and that they want to please us (because they’re securely attached to us as their caregivers and are wired to follow our lead so as to survive into adulthood. Unfortunately we’ve created a culture that disrupts this natural attachment between parent and child. More on this coming soon.) When I write “trust in connection” it is in reference to this desire our children have to please us. Acting with naturally confident authority as the leaders in our homes demonstrates trust in ourselves and encourages the connection. I reiterate this idea often throughout my work: we must have trust in ourselves, trust in the connection we have with our kids, and trust in our kids. I’m hoping this piece helps my readers and clients to understand how all three trust components are enmeshed and one can’t really exist without the other two.

Let’s look at a simple example of using influence rather than coercion. Our 14yo son really loves to play video games (the internet goes off in our house at 10pm. This is an example of a structural boundary based on his parents’ values.) The landing at the top of our stairs has been set up for gaming with his friends, and he really likes to eat in this area while he’s playing. When he first started taking food up there, even though we’d asked him to clean up after himself, we’d often find the area a mess. Finally, I said, “We really want to support you to be able to eat in your gaming area. What do you need to be successful at keeping it clean?” We agreed to put in a trash/recycling system in the space that he would empty when it got full. (Why we didn’t think of this sooner is really the question, am I right?)

This was a simple solution we came up with together that’s working great. If he kept demonstrating that wasn’t ready to keep this common area clean then we’d have to re-examine his access to this practice of eating there, but he knows we’ll exhaust all efforts of support first. (Ideally, having some criteria for him to demonstrate readiness before being granted the privilege is probably the easier way to go, then you’re not put in a position to take something away.) We’re not perfect at this at my house, but you can see that my son trusts us to want to work with him to feel successful, and we trust that with enough support, he can handle this new responsibility. We also trust he wants to please us because it usually works out for him. (Sometimes this is called “power with”.)

Do you see how this differs from a punishment? Let’s contrast. Maybe our response is to take away his video games for a week for leaving the area dirty. Now we’re wielding our “power over” him, using one of his most loved activities to get what we want. This doesn’t involve trust and in fact, it damages it. He’s going to spend all that time he would normally spend playing video games thinking about how much he resents us for having so much control over him. Chances are high he’ll sneak in a game whenever he believes he won’t get caught. Punishment often leads to subversive behavior since the recipient rarely cares to please the punisher. Now the trust is out the window for both parties, leading to the need for more severe punishments which will likely further damage the connection; it becomes a vicious cycle that creates a defiant kid who resents you. I think this is more true than ever right now, and I have a piece planned for the newsletter that explains why. (In our not too distant past, it may have had less effect on the state of the parent/child attachment.)

It’s funny how that experience as an elementary teacher in a progressive charter school did so much to shape my views on human behavior, leading to an extreme aversion to our control-oriented education system. When I realized the true aim was to condition conformity is when I knew I couldn’t remain a classroom teacher. Your children don’t need me to train them how to be decent humans, and, to be honest, that wasn’t my job. My real job was to reorient them to external behavior drivers—though please don’t think this is a conscious awareness of most educators. They’re not explicitly taught that this is what they’re doing. I still think it’s ironic that many of the resources that combined to bring me to this awareness were part of the required reading for my position at this school; and of course, observing hundreds of children and the effects of schooling on them and their family attachments. I’m grateful for the education that I received there. It certainly helped me determine to not attempt to control my own children.

My husband and I were recently discussing this and reflecting on how it’s been to raise children without the use of coercion. (He resisted this approach and that’s made it more difficult. Trust is key to this working.) I tried to think of a time our children did something “punishment-worthy” and I could not pull one up. Maybe I don’t know what “punishment-worthy” looks like because I don’t operate in that framework? Or maybe it’s because they know we trust them? I know when I look at my (imperfect for sure) kids, I see decent humans. They have decent humans for parents who expect them to act like decent humans—so they do. This is what I mean by letting them do what they want—because usually what they want to do is within the realm of what decent humans do.

In the rare situation where behaviors cross a line into infringing on others (like the gaming area) or into extremely unhealthy and/or dangerous territory (beyond a reasonable amount of risk which I think is important in childhood—risk, I mean. Oh boy, another essential concept idea to add to my list along with natural consequences.) we have boundaries that have been clearly communicated and that we trust our kids to respect. For the most part, they just do. And if something becomes a problem, we work together with them to create a solution. There are times when we have to be the “agents of futility” but that’s an idea that needs it’s own post; that might be one for the newsletter since I’ll likely use a transgender-related example.

If imposed consequences are part of your parenting style and they’re working for you, then by all means, carry on. One of my favorite sayings of my late (very imperfect but decent) father is “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it.” Sometimes something you were doing worked for a long while, but now seems to have stopped getting the results it used to. (Adolescence often requires a different approach—we’re preparing them now to be able to self-direct, right?) This could be a good time to check in and think about what’s working and what’s not. How do you know when something’s not working? I can tell you when things weren’t working in my house. It was a trust issue—and maybe not what immediately comes to mind when I say that. I stopped trusting myself and the ripple effects were ugly; my family is still recovering.

Honestly, I’m pretty sure if you’re here reading this, you’re a decent human being. I’m pretty sure your kids are decent humans also. They’re not likely perfect—come on, whose kids are? If you think you know some, I’m pretty sure you don’t know everything about those kids and that family. There’s more going on than what they post on social media. Do you trust your self? Your kids? Do they know you trust them?

Some may say all this permissive, progressive nonsense is how we find ourselves in this mess. Children need less freedom, more structure, more feedback, more behavior modification, more supervision, more… You get the picture. Maybe they’re right. It just doesn’t ring true to me. I think when my trust dropped out is when things went off the rails for awhile for my family—that was a painful, confusing setback but I’d say we’re mostly back on solid ground and my kids are back on track toward those self-directed, satisfying and meaningful lives I hope they create for themselves as adults. I see plenty of evidence for this—but then again, I’m looking for it.

If this piece happened to resonate for you and you’d like to get better at influence, but you’ve relied heavily on imposed consequences up to now, it can take some time to restore trust and shift what you’re doing. Some helpful resources include the books: Hold Onto Your Kids by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate, The Awakened Family by Shefali Tsabary, or the book titles above by Alfie Kohn. You could also consider working 1:1 with me. I’ve been to hell and back to test this approach of influence instead of control and I’ve decided to stick with it. It’s working for me.

If you found yourself resisting, feeling defensive, worried, or any other uncomfortable feelings as you read this one, I’d love to hear about in the comments. I’m sure there’s much left unsaid in this post, and your comments will help me know what needs clarification.