‘Why can’t you make them behave?’ So much of ‘good parenting’ is about children’s behaviour. Right from the start we’re encouraged to try and mould our children, so they are ‘well-behaved’. We’re told to use star charts, and praise, and to set firm boundaries. Tell them our expectations and implement consequences if they don’t comply. Be authoritative, meaning both firm and caring. That’s what ‘good parents’ do. The promise is that if we do it right, our children will get the message and fall into line. We can bask in the knowledge that we are doing parenting ‘right’. And then along comes the child who hasn’t read the parenting manual. They rip up the star chart and trample over the boundaries. They put you on the naughty step and tell you that you’ll regret your behaviour later when you shout. The harder you try, the worse things get. You feel terrible, You wonder if you are to blame. After all, it seems to work for everyone else, doesn’t it? Is it all because you just aren’t firm enough? It’s not your fault. You have the wrong tools. Some children need something different. That’s because conventional parenting techniques are based on control – and some children react very strongly against that control. They are tuned in, super-sensitive to any hint of pressure. The more you try to control their behaviour, the more they refuse. You count to 3 and they say ‘So?’. You promise a treat and they say ‘I don’t care’. You implement a consequence and they say ‘You can’t make me’. And you realise that this is true. You really can’t make them. No one can make another person do things without their consent. Not unless you want to spend every day with your child in a head-to-head battle, and that isn’t the life that you want. This realisation is life-changing. Suddenly you are grappling with a new way to parent, and none of the old rules seem to apply. What happens then? That’s what Eliza (@_MissingTheMark) I are talking about in our webinar on Wednesday. The Art of Low Demand Parenting: Behaviour. Fully illustrated and with a down-to-earth and informal style throughout. Come and discover that you aren’t alone and it’s not your fault. Some children (and adults) need something different. Please share if you know parents who really need another way. eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-art-o…

When I was thirteen, I started at a new school. The other kids disliked me and called me names. I found the work boring and pointless. I felt like an alien. I dreaded each interminable day. I stopped wanting to go to school. Every Sunday evening I was filled with misery. If that happened today, they’d say I was anxious about school. I could have been said to have ‘Emotionally Based School Avoidance (EBSA)’ or ‘school anxiety’. Then, it was just called ‘school refusal’. I was anxious about school, that’s true. I was anxious about school when I was told that there was no choice but to go every day and that I ‘looked fine when you’re there’. I was anxious when I was told that if I didn’t attend school, I’d have no future. I was anxious when I was told that it was an ‘excellent school’ and that perhaps I just didn’t appreciate my luck. I was anxious because I felt trapped in a place where I was miserable. There’s nothing wrong with someone who feels anxious in those circumstances. In fact, I’d worry more about someone who DOESN’T feel anxious. Certainly most adults would. Once I had been defined as ‘anxious’ I could have been sent to see a specialist. I could have been told I had a mental health problem. My hatred of school would have been turned into a problem with me. ‘Successful treatment’ would have meant ‘Back to school’. And what I would have learnt was that I was the problem. I’ve have learnt to keep quiet and stop telling others how I felt. I’ve have learnt (as I already suspected) that there was something wrong with me, not the school. In fact I was lucky. That didn’t happen. I moved house and changed schools and the next school was different. I felt different almost immediately. Anxiety is a understandable reaction to many circumstances. It’s an emotional response to uncertainty, novelty or lack of safety. It lets us know that extra caution is required. It keeps us alert through hard times. It is useful. We need our anxiety. Yet with children, we’ve decided that their anxiety is the problem, that it means something is wrong with them. We’ve even told them this, with mental health awareness campaigns on toilet doors and in classrooms. We’ve encouraged them to see their emotional reactions as a sign of dysfunction, as something outside the ordinary. A problem in their heads, rather than a meaningful reaction to the world. By turning children’s distress into a mental health problem, we depoliticise it. Instead of asking questions about the school system and whether it is fit for children, we suggest that the problem is our children’s reaction to school. We’re using ‘anxiety’ to keep children quiet. We don’t ask whether our schools might be designed in ways which provoke distress and anxiety. We don’t ask if they might be developmentally inappropriate and in need of change. Instead we say that they need counsellors, and mindfulness courses, and emotional regulation apps. Ways to ‘cope’, whilst the system carries on regardless. If only our children could just stop having those inconvenient emotions, we think, then we could carry on as we were. There would be no need to change anything. But they can't. No more than I could, all those years ago. Our children’s reactions are showing us that there’s a problem. What will it take for us to listen? (with @_MissingTheMark)

If we implement ‘consequences’ when a child avoids something due to anxiety, then that’s punishment, not therapy. If you’re told to make home less pleasant to compel a child to do something they dislike, then that’s punishment, not therapy. If you’re told to force a child to attend school and that you should ignore their cries, then that’s punishment, not therapy. If you’re told to aim for solitary confinement during the day if a child don’t attend school, then that’s punishment, not therapy. If you’re told to take away things that children like to do because they didn’t do what you wanted, then that’s punishment, not therapy. Using distress to make a child do something they don’t want to do is not therapeutic. Therapy is collaborative, with goals which matter to the child. Therapy can be difficult. It can be challenging. It can involve taking risks and doing things differently. But therapy should not feel like being punished, especially not by your parents. If therapy feels like punishment, then it’s very likely that it’s not therapeutic. Punishment is not therapy. Illustration by Eliza Fricker @_MissingTheMark from the upcoming book What Can We Do When School's Not Working? Fisher, Fisher and Fricker, available for pre-order now.

When I started working with children who weren’t fine at school, I was surprised by what parents told me they were told to do by professionals. It didn’t seem right – were they really being told that they should make home less pleasant for their children if they weren’t happy at school? Could it really be that parents were being told that they must force children into school against their will, sometimes for months or years on end? Was it actually happening that parents were being told not to interact with their children from 9-3.30 if they didn’t go to school that day? Unfortunately, it turns out that this is exactly what was happening. Not just a few parents, but a torrent of them told me that they’d had this advice. I found books written by mental health professionals which advised parents to ‘show your children that you’re the boss’ or ‘aim for an atmosphere of solitary confinement during the school day’. As a mental health professional myself, the advice seemed risky. It has the potential to do harm. Make an unhappy child unhappy at home as well and you can push them towards depression. Repeatedly forcing a child to go somewhere against their will can lead to despair and hopelessness. And not interacting with a child because they haven’t gone to school? That’s just cruel. It leads to distress for the whole family. And as a former ‘school refuser’, the advice horrified me. For I remember what it was like to be ‘not fine in school’ and I remember that it was awful. Being expected to go somewhere every day where I felt alien. Wondering what was so wrong with me that I didn’t just get on with it like everyone else. And feeling stuck in limbo – if I went to school I felt terrible, but if I stayed at home nothing happened. Feeling that my life was going nowhere, but that the only way to change that was go to back to school. Back to a place which I hated. That was in the 1990s, but things had got worse since then. My parents were not threatened with fines or court. I was not excluded from the Prom or from awards days. There was no posters up on the walls about how school was the only way. Things had got worse, not better. There had to be a better way, but it didn’t seem like any professionals were talking about it. So I started doing so myself. I got a lot of pushback. People told me that I was encouraging poor attendance and that I had no idea what it’s like to work in schools. They told me that kids were ‘just trying it on’ and questioning the premise that school is always the best place for a child was dangerous. But I also kept hearing from parents who said, this really is happening. Our kids are unhappy at school, and we’re being told that the only solution is to make them more unhappy elsewhere. No one is looking at what is going on in our schools. So I wrote a book about it. Not alone, because this is a complex area which needs a multi-faceted approach. I wrote it with Dr Abigail Fisher, a qualified teacher and educational psychologist, and Eliza Fricker, illustrator and mother of a child who was ‘not fine in school’. Together we brought together expertise in education, mental health, psychology and lived experience. We interviewed young people and their parents, teachers and professionals. Some professionals were so scared about talking to us that they requested complete anonymity. Others withdraw their anonymous contributions just in case someone recognised them. They didn’t want to admit that they were moving away from the ‘attendance at all costs’ approach for fear that it might cost them their jobs. That really made me think that this book needs to be published. If professionals are scared to speak out, then something is up. Our free book launch is on April 16th. Please come and join us. Everyone will be sent a recording. eventbrite.co.uk/e/129258228…

A diagnosis is a strange thing. You might be hanging on for years for the appointment, waiting for the day when you will finally be give an answer. You might be holding out for that moment when you hope that your child will get the help and understanding that you can see that they need. Then it happens. You’re given the result, often with a lengthy report detailing all the things that your child can’t do – and then that’s it. Goodbye, they say, and you’re out on your own. Nothing has changed, and yet everything has. You aren’t sure whether to feel elated or just exhausted. That’s what Eliza Fricker (@MissingtheMark) and I are talking about in our next webinar. Now What? Diagnosis. It’s about the parents’ experience – what does it feel like, what does it mean, and what do you do next? Between me and Eliza we have been both sides of the process. Her child was given a diagnosis – and I have given those diagnoses. Come and understand the process better and what it means (and doesn’t mean). Please share with parents who might want to know. It’s recorded if you can’t make the time. eventbrite.co.uk/e/now-what-…

Last week I was working with a group of psychologists and psychotherapists, all specialists in trauma. We agreed that whether our job is manageable isn't the intensity of the trauma stories, it's whether there are colleagues who make you feel supported. Survival in a tough world is often about whether there are people who can see past the facade you present to your struggles below, even the ones that you try hardest to hide. If you don't get that, you start to burn out. You stop feeling empathy for others. You start to feel annoyed and angry when people need more than you can give. You start to be irritated with them and their behaviour. You reach for off-the-peg solutions, because anything else requires too much emotional investment. When it goes on for too long, you start to mock anyone who tries to do something different. You build strong defences between you and any suggestion that there might be another way. You push back. It's literally too much to manage. So when a child comes along who shows their difficulties through their behaviour, it's easier to decide that distress isn't the problem. It's easier to pretend that the reasons don't matter, that if we could stop them behaving, the distress would no longer be there. If this really worked, our schools and our world would be very different places. If we could control behaviour and the reasons for that behaviour would evaporate, then life would be a lot simpler. For we can control behaviour, that's not in question. That's why ignoring the reasons & focusing only on behaviour is so seductive. It gets results.The corridors are silent, young people stand up & make eye contact when an adult enters the classroom.We can convince them it's for their own good and tell them the alternative is chaos. We can make (most) young people comply with requirements, if we make the incentives high enough & the disincentives bad enough.Most will comply in the short term. It will look like it works. The real question is, what's the long term cost to all of us in ignoring the reasons why our children behave the way they do? For when we strip behaviour of its context, we ignore feedback and in this way we ultimately limit ourselves as well as our young people. with Eliza Fricker @_MissingTheMark

The Teenager’s Guide to Burnout is 99p on Kindle for a short time only! Please share with parents (and teens) who might want to know. amzn.eu/d/f4OvPmc

How do children find new things to learn? I'm sometimes asked if I don't worry that self-directed children will miss out on important learning. Here's why my worry is more for children who are at school. School-based education requires children to ignore their interests, in favour of an adult agenda. They are told that the things that fascinate them are less important than the things adults have chosen for them. This happens throughout their day. In order to keep them 'on-topic', schools limit their access to learning. Talking is restricted, they can't look things up or ask their friend, they can't quickly google a definition (perhaps of the fundamental theorem of algebra,as my son and I did yesterday following the Redactle puzzle). Schools do this in the deeply held belief that what they want children to learn is more important than what a child finds interesting. Space for children to follow their interests gets smaller and smaller as they grow older. With the result that by the time they are teenagers, the question 'Will it be on the test?' is more likely than 'Why does that happen?' or 'Can I find out more about that?'. Young people are told from early on that their interests don't matter, and they learn it well. We make so little time at school for children to practice the skill of following their interest. We dissuade them from seeing something fascinating and running with it. We tell them time and time again that we know best. But what if that process has side effects? What if following your interests is a really important skill to develop, one which often starts with diggers and dinosaurs, goes through Pokémon and Minecraft and then onto languages, coding, maths and all the other things we can learn? That's what I worry about, when I see children in art galleries with worksheets. I worry they miss out on the joy of sparking interest and following the trail. I worry that pulling them away has consequences for the future. I worry that they aren’t being allowed to see something and suddenly be so curious that they just have to know more. I worry they are learning that what interests them doesn't matter. So do I worry about self-directed children not finding new things to learn? No. The problem is more how to keep up with them as they find new and exciting things around every corner. The world is full of things to learn when you're interested. Nurture the interest, learning will follow. (with @_MissingTheMark)