Many experts agree that parental pressure contributes to anxiety, depression, and even addiction among children. But according to renowned psychologists Chris Thurber, PhD and Hendrie Weisinger, PhD, pressure itself isn’t bad – the issue is how pressure is applied. Their new book, The Unlikely Art of Parental Pressure: A Positive Approach To Pushing Your Child To Be Their Best Self, is the first to provide in-depth solutions for creating healthy pressure, offering step-by-step advice that parents and care-givers can begin to use immediately with profound long-term results.
“Parents apply pressure because they care, but they hinder progress and create problems because of how they apply it,” Thurber and Weisinger write. “Our goal is to give parents a healthy road map and practical tools to ensure that the instinctive pressure they apply to their children promotes development, not distress.”
The authors have identified eight ways to transform harmful pressure into healthy pressure. In the book, they provide multiple, true-to-life sample conversations to show exactly how to adopt these behaviors, which, in turn, will nurture internal motivation, improve parent-child interactions, build deep connections, sidestep cultural pitfalls, and, ultimately, help children do well. “With a modest adjustment today, you can be an even more effective parent tomorrow. Week by week, your modest adjustments to how you push your child will pay bigger and bigger dividends in their mental health and performance,” they explain. The eight transformations are:
Expect Their Best, Not The Best – How parents state their expectations to their child has an enormous effect on the youngster’s motivation. Unfortunately, when expectations emphasize highly specific achievement or perfection, kids may develop low self-esteem and become pessimistic about achieving goals.
Tame Your Core Expectation – When parental expectations are unrealistic, they can induce harmful thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in their children. Parents can avoid expressing unhealthy expectations by emphasizing consistent effort instead of specific outcomes. The authors point out that a parent’s definition of success will always differ from their child’s, and they discuss the insidious and constant expectations established by social media.
Increase Your Warmth – “The difference between warm and cold parenting is not in the emotions that we feel but in the affect we display—how we express our feelings,” the authors write. They explain what parenting with warmth looks like, and how it will change a child’s experience of parental pressure.
Turn Up the Heat – Building on the importance of warmth, Thurber and Weisinger provide a variety of strategies that will enhance one’s ability to parent with warmth. Many of these hinge on demonstrating empathy, and the authors describe how empathy will enable parents to better convey the lessons they wish to teach.
Earn Respect, Not Rebellion – To earn respect, not rebellion, parents need to engage their children in more conversations about thoughts and feelings and not let conversations about expectations and outcomes dominate their interactions. The authors provide examples showing how this works as well as a chart that illustrates the differences between harmful and healthy communications.
Praise, Criticize, and Question Effectively – The authors offer a multitude of tools – including the Six S’s of effective praise: Soon, Spontaneous, Sincere, Specific, Striving, and Stand-Alone. They also address effective criticism and questions, including discussions of rewards and consequences.
Be the Believer – As children age, they demand increasing amounts of independence. The authors offer detailed guidelines for determining the optimum level of parental involvement in a variety of circumstances.
Open Your Mind and Your Heart – Parents are not the only source of pressure on today’s youth. The book addresses sociocultural sources of pressure, and how parents can contribute to local, national, and global movements that support children’s healthy development.
“Never do we suggest that parents stop pushing their kids. Quite the opposite, in fact. We endorse the balanced pressure that parents apply when they combine high standards, reasonable rules, and unconditional love with the freedom for kids to make some of their own decisions, falter, and learn from mistakes,” assert Thurber and Weisinger.
I had a chance to learn more in this interview.
Why is it a natural impulse for parents and caregivers to pressure their kids?
It’s natural for parents to pressure their kids because they love them. They want the best for them. Millennia ago parental pressure would have had evolutionary utility in so far as it helped children survive long enough to reproduce. Today, parental pressure is a cross-cultural psychological force that comes in both harmful and healthy varieties.
How can they differentiate between healthy and unhealthy pressure?
Healthy pressure:
1. Is child-centered and realistic, not a function of the parent’s aspirations. (When parents seek to meet their own needs via the accomplishments of their child, they are creating harmful parental pressure. It is not the child’s job to make parents proud.)
2. Includes: the six Ss of effective praise; criticism that is focused on improvement; and devoid of perfectionism. (By contrast, harmful pressure includes vapid praise; criticism focused on flaws; and an emphasis on perfection.)
3. Communicates unconditional love. (When kids perceive that value and their parents’ love as contingent on their performance, that’s harmful pressure.) Harmful pressure can cause young people to sidestep cultural conventions and ethical behavior in the name of achievement. Harmful parental pressure is often behind lying, cheating, stimulant abuse, competitive fallouts, anxious perfectionism, and a sense of urgency.
How can families help kids balance societal, peer, and parental/caregiver pressure?
Happy, healthy kids do not balance pressures from different sources. That would entail holding onto lots of harmful pressure and somehow “making it all work.” Parents and other caregivers should focus on the eight transformations from Pressure Parents to Support Parents that we describe in The Unlikely Art of Parental Pressure. In addition to these eight transformations, parents can be instrumental in attenuating unhealthy pressure from non-parental sources. These include: pressure to adhere to unrealistic beauty standards; pressure to be heterosexual; pressure to define success according to name brands (of schools, clothes, places of employment, level of income, etc.); and pressure to follow a traditional career trajectory.
1. Encourage kids to follow their interests and work hard, not follow a particular recipe for so-called success. Compare less.
2. Instill an excellence mindset in kids. Teach them to focus on doing their best, rather than to be the best. Rank less.
3. Lower your kids’ sense of urgency. Teach them to relax, to savor experiences, and to be creative. Panic less.
4. Teach them to learn from mistakes. Nobody is perfect, nor needs to be. Praise their effort more than the outcome. Score less.
Why is empathy important?
Empathy forms a connection with another person, by validating how they are feeling or what they are thinking. Pressure Parents frequently fail to empathize because they equate empathy with agreement, but the two are not the same.
When your child is expressing a strong negative emotion, it doesn’t matter whether you agree or disagree with what they are saying…at least at first. Unless they feel understood, they won’t listen to your creative solution, wise counsel, or alternate perspective. Lead with empathy.
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ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Chris Thurber, PhD, co-author of THE UNLIKELY ART OF PARENTAL PRESSURE, is a board-certified clinical psychologist, educator, author, and father with a BA from Harvard and a PhD in child and adolescent psychology from UCLA. An acclaimed keynote speaker, he serves as a clinician and instructor at Phillips Exeter Academy.
Hendrie Weisinger, PhD, co-author of THE UNLIKELY ART OF PARENTAL PRESSURE, is a world-renowned psychologist and pioneer in the field of pressure management, as well as the author of a number of bestselling books. He has consulted with and developed programs for dozens of Fortune 500 companies and government agencies.
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