Exhaustion results in desperation strategies by parents

Experts take the emotions out of Homework Help Hell and Teacher Telephone Terror

After many rounds of Teacher Telephone Terror and homework Help Hell, parents become exhausted and desperate. Many have read numerous books on parenting and tried much of their advice to no avail. Feeling at a loss for what else to do to help their child, they begin to cast about for experts who can help them.

The illusion that your child needs a little more "understanding" or "patience" the professional provides is the same illusion that keeps the overweight person looking for the next magic diet that will cause her to lose weight without willpower or being hungry. Just as there is no magic diet, there is no magic expert who can work solely with your child and effect change. Ultimately, changing the child's behavior has to include the parent, and not just to report on how Josh or Jessica are doing in therapy! This is why I will never treat a child without including both parents (unless a single parent).

Much of therapists/tutors/teachers/coach's greater effectiveness with your child is not their greater skill, but their lack of dysfunctional (as described elsewhere) conditioned and mirror neuron responses to your child. This makes them more imperviousness to pain induction strategies by the child, and the child knows it.

The child realizes that the Darth Vader Effect is just not going to work as well on a tutor or teacher, so they are less likely to try it.

What the experts really offer is emotional distance from homework Help Hell and Teacher Telephone Terror. Because the emotional reactions of the child do not impact the tutor like they often do the parent, the tutor can stick with their plan as their intellect and common sense dictate. Parents, on the other hand, are often driven by their emotional arousal, be it a guilt, anger, anxiety, depression or frustration. Therefore, what you are buying when you outsource parenting is not technical skills, but planful, vs. emotionally driven, interaction with your child.

There are obviously times when it is appropriate for the child to have other adults instruct them. Examples might be music or sports lessons and coaching, or academic coaching of subjects the parent does not have the skill to do, such as advanced physics. What I am referring to here is "brat" behavior and remedial academic skills. Remediation of these problems should be done by parents. It is simply not possible to "fix" the kid and send him home to parents who do not change their strategies.

One big problem is that quite literally, parents in the current day and age do not have the stomach for letting their children experience some pain. It is not a matter of knowledge, but getting rid of the emotional barriers that prevent parents from doing what needs to be done. Getting rid of emotional barriers moves parents up many grade levels in parenting the same way that I am able to help children move up five grades levels in reading in a morning without teaching reading.

You do not need drug vendors to chemically subdue your child, counselors for him to have someone to talk with, or tutors to help with his homework. You do not need to outsource parenting! Children need real, loving, positively emotionally connected parents, not outside experts, or "surrogate parents." It is parents who are also positively emotionally connected to their child who can provide positive motivation for their child's success.

This outsourcing of homework help hell, for example,  only cordons off one of the more intense parts of the problem. Usually, if homework help is hell, similar behavior patterns are overflowing into other parts of parent-child interaction.  If the overall problem is not resolved, parents will attempt to cordon off the other problems by delegating to drugs, tutors, psychologists, nannies, and sometimes to a residential placement center. It is a slow insidious process that is easy to observe and a nightmare to experience.

Outsourcing parenting is a sad outcome since one of the joys of parenthood is helping your child learn, grow and develop.

There is a positive side to neural mirror neurons. They give you an immediate personal experience of your child's achievement, joys and success. His success at learning to read a harder book, or mastering a new skill during homework, can be experienced as your own personal achievement with all the associated good feelings. This helps bond you to your child and your child to you.

If you outsource parenting, you miss this personal participation in the joy of your child's growth and development. If you are not going to participate in this, why have a child?

In an email, a mother described her and her husband's personal participation in their son Scott's post-treatment success. "Also, that evening he asked Joel (dad) if he could read a story to him. I thought Joel was going to cry! Last night, he worked on homework (to catch up) for a good three hours without complaining. He did an English page that before I could not imagine him being able to do himself. We explained it and he did it!"

Can you hear the joy in her pride filled words?

In this scenario, Scott would have experienced his dad's emotion of parental pride in his achievement as a powerful reinforcer. We all want to make our parents proud and so would Scott. That is the powerful reinforcement for Scott's continued performance. Pride is much more powerful coming from a parent than some tutor or psychologist.

The joy is not just in academics. One dad described it when he said, "at football practice, it was fun to watch him have fun."

I know you did not plan on homework being hell vs. heaven. And, I know, and so do the parents cited above, that it does not have to be that way.