So, how do so many parents get sucked into Homework Help Hell? The short answer is that children can tap powerful neurological mechanisms to control how parents feel, good or bad. Now to the long answer.

Children's power over parents

It's very easy to feel someone's pain when you love them.
Salma Hayek

Darth Vader effect

Remember the original Star Wars movie? Darth Vader is standing in his Death Star with a bunch of his thugs. One of them standing across the room says something he does not like. From 20 feet away, Darth picks the thug up by the throat by merely gesturing with his right arm and pressing a button on his chest with his left hand. While there is no actual touch, you can see the victim writhing in pain. It took Darth Vader to the year 5000 to perfect this technology. For their own survival benefit, children have been doing essentially the same thing for thousands of years.

If, as a parent you doubt this, notice how badly you feel when you see your child rejected by peers, struggling with homework, or picked on by a bully. You can truly, physically experience their unhappiness. This is not an illusion, but a function of the mirror neurons  in our brains. This phenomenon provides the direct emotional connection to others that we experience as empathy. It is what motivates us to help others feel better because to do so actually makes us feel better. Contrary to pop psychology's axiom "take responsibility for your feelings", the common expression of "you make me feel" is both neurologically and phenomenologically accurate.

The distress call from children to parents is not experienced by parents as some ethereal, metaphysical, vague or fluffy kind of response. Children's distress causes a direct physiological effect on parents such as heart pounding, a knot in the stomach, pressure in the chest, sweating, anxiety, fear and anger. These mirroring sensations can be very uncomfortable for the parent.

Because parents actually experience their children's feelings, it provides a strong motivation to resolve their own negative feelings by immediately resolving the child's unhappiness. This strongly motivates parents to provide for the welfare of their children as they would their own welfare, because they literally feel the pain and want to stop that pain. This is particularly strong in mothers and is obviously a powerful force for the survival of the species.

Generally, this empathic connection between parents and children works very well, but there are times when this can lead parents to become overly driven by this emotional resonance with their children. They become too empathetic!

We all know that a child will ask the softer parent for the goodies or an extra privilege. Children are not dumb. They become increasingly skilled at playing on the parents heartstrings to get what they want, often to their own longer-term detriment. Because young children are not bogged down by culturally driven theories about how things should be, they track immediate behavior and emotions better than adults. Thus, they are better at shaping emotional and behavioral responses in parents than the other way around. This is not sinister, planful or evil. It is all at the automatic emotional level. Children's survival is dependent on tracking and shaping the big people, and they are very good at it.

For example, a homework session might unfold with Tara sitting at the dining table trying to do homework. Little progress is being made, and Tara laments about how boring, frustrating, impossible and unfair the homework is. Mom, who is not far away, feels her child's distress deep in her gut and is driven to save her young one from such misery. Soon mom is sitting shoulder to shoulder with Tara doing their homework because Tara is in need and it is mom's job to resolve her child's distress.

Tara's needy wails are reinforced by mom's attention. Thus, before long she wails more intently and mom works more intently to resolve her own bad feelings by coming to Tara's aid. Mental and educational professionals provide mother with the stories (diagnoses, recommendations, descriptions) she needs to justify this as helping Tara. The child clearly senses that more wailing leads to more help which means she has to do less, which, from Tara's point of view, is a better deal.

Some parents become, from time to time, suspicious that they are being manipulated. This idea is quickly pushed aside by their own physical need to terminate their empathy-driven misery and logically justified by a professional diagnosis implicating the child should not be pushed too hard. They never seriously consider that their child simply does not want to do her homework, does not like homework, wants to find a way out of doing homework, and is a clever young lady at getting "help" from her mother. I use the word clever, not mean, sinister, immoral, or evil. She is just doing what works for her in the short-run. It is adults who put negative labels on this behavior.

One mother I saw for treatment was even writing her daughter's papers for her. The teacher figured out who was writing the papers. She finally returned a paper with two grades, Mother A+, daughter F. Mom was embarrassed to say the least, and stopped doing that.

So far, I have emphasized the downside of mirror neurons. However, this same emotional mirroring allows parents to experientially share in their child's joys. All parents live a second emotional life through their children, thanks to mirror neurons. This is why a major goal of this book is to put the power to shape behavior back into the hands of parents and out of the hands of drug companies.

Mirror Neurons power the Darth Vader Effect

The power of mirror neurons is what gives children the ability to control parents' emotions in order to get what they want. What they want is not always the best for them in the long run, but it works in the short run.

Research has only recently uncovered the power and the neurological underpinnings of empathy, mimicry, modeling and rapport. Networks of mirror neurons widely scattered across the motor, speech, visual, and auditory parts of our brain cause us to actually experience what others experience. We don't just understand others experience, but we actually participate in it. This greatly enhances our ability to learn from and socially coordinate with others.

Mirror neurons were first discovered when experimenters were placing electrodes into individual motor neurons in a macaque monkey's brain to record activity while giving them different objects to handle. Neurons in a specific area fired when the monkeys reached for or bit into a peanut. What surprised experimenters was that when the monkey saw the experimenter pick up the peanut, the same neurons fired as did when the monkey itself picked it up. One of those "Wow" moments for any scientist! Of course, this led to testing this concept on humans and lo and behold, it was confirmed that watching others is actual experiential learning .

We use this mirroring to understand and forecast the behavior of others. We build complex mental models of others feelings, thoughts and behaviors. These models can be so complete that at times they can be subtly confused for our own. The mental models that parents make of their children are what allow them to experience their children's feelings as their own.

Under mirroring conditions, if I snap a rubber band on my wrist, the empathetic, physiological experience of that snap on my wrist can be electronically recorded in your body if you are watching me. The point is that you not only understand at an abstract level my experience of the rubber band snapping, but you experience it at a physiological level.

We transform into habit patterns these internal models that are learned from virtually participating in others experiences. These vicarious experiences allow us to quickly map other's thoughts, intentions, movements and feelings onto ourselves. This mapping allows us to rapidly interact in cooperative activities such as playing games, rowing a boat together, dancing, or taking turns in conversation . All of these activities require us to, in real time; plan our actions in relation to others. The effect is so powerful that it may be the basis for our developing language and culture.

Though we broadly absorb these empathetic feelings from our culture, by far the most intense is in the family, between parents and children. Since family members actually experience each other's feelings, this gives them a strong influence over one another because they can actually control how other family members feel. For parents, this can manifest in the sense of pride when our child wins an award, anger when they oppose our requests, fear when they fall, pain when they are upset, or depressed when they fail.

Mirror Neurons over-function in current culture

Over the million or so years that the mirror neurons developed in early humans, people in primitive groups had to spend a major part of their time finding food and defending the family. A child's distress signal often meant physical danger. This emotional resonance called the parents back from survival concerns in order to attend to the child's immediate needs. In the early years of man, the situation could have been life threatening to the child, as when a snake slithered closer. In our current civilized state, distress signals from children are far more likely to be emotional bruising than physical threat.

Sometimes this is useful. Other times it is not. It has assured the survival of the species for a million years. However, the conditions in which we live are far different than those in which this response developed.

Empathetic mirroring can exaggerate a "mother bear" over-pro-tectiveness of children to the point that it backfires and too much is done for the child, stunting his growth or reinforcing incompetent behaviors such as those described above and below. Unfortunately, this pattern is reinforced by current medical mythology which slaps defective labels on children: ADHD, ADD, learning disabled, and the like. This spurs parents on to do "more" for the child instead of restructuring the contingencies for more competent behavior.

Case study: depressed adolescent

When 16 year-old Chris and his family first came to see me, he was so depressed that he would stare into space and say nothing. He sat silently during the first day's lunch, barely answering direct questions. His affect was flat and expressionless. Chris was ending his first semester of his junior year failing most of his classes.

Chris's parents were very bright, caring and attentive. In a classic mirror neuron way, it was painful for both to see him suffer. Before they arrived for treatment, they had tried to resolve Chris's problems by spending many long hours discussing his problems with him as well as seeking extensive professional help. Chris had every possible assistance and advantage that any son could hope for. None of these strategies had worked.

Over the next four days of CAER treatment, Chris focused on his "dumb kid" story. He thought about how he had screwed up almost every aspect of home and school life, how uptight school made him, his conflict with his teachers and his parents, as well as his estrangement from his friends. As CAER extinguished the bad feelings associated with these images, they no longer had the power to depress him. Over the four days of treatment, he became talkative, bright, and animated in his demeanor. His parents beamed as they watched his transformation.

After Chris and his family returned home, he and his father made a deal with his school that would allow him to challenge each class by taking a comprehensive final exam. To continue in honors Chemistry he had to pass that exam with a B. He used his Christmas vacation for an amazing marathon study campaign.

During the first week back at school, he tested and passed all of his courses with A's and B's, except for a C in Honors Chemistry. Though I thought recovering in this fashion from straight F's was phenomenal for him, being demoted to regular Chemistry was a very significant and real disappointment.

Though Chris had taken a giant stride, not all the bumps were out of the road for both he and his parents The first evening after being demoted to regular chemistry, he reverted to his old depressed manner and did not study as he had diligently for many weeks.

Because of treatment, his parents had also changed and did not fall into counterproductive helping. They were momentarily baffled by his sudden reversion and were tempted to fall into a too helpful counselor role by engaging with his depression. However, they rallied and applied the same performance based good parenting that had helped turn his schoolwork around since returning from treatment. When his attempt to drive his parents mirror neurons did not work, Chris's depression promptly cleared up and he proceeded with doing his studies.

The parent's reaction was in strong contrast to their pre-treatment sympathetic, caring, supporting, therapeutic, loving "counselor" approach to parenting that had actually reinforced the very behavior that they were trying to help their son with. I am certainly not recommending that parents should not be caring, but it is how and when this is shown that can produce the wrong result. Performance has to be in the foreground and caring in the background.

Overly helpful parenting

Problems with parents being overly helpful seem to have gotten worse in recent times. The natural tendency (due to mirroring neurons) of parents to be over-protective of children used to be countered by cultural mores, which viewed strictness and harshness as necessary to instill moral rectitude, discipline and obedience in children. Any acting out by your child would reflect on your family's stature in the community far more than it does today. Inactivity such as shown by Chris was deemed laziness and not tolerated.