Greg explains why a child repeats a bad behavior over and over again and what you can do to change this. You are the gravity in a child's life.
Timestamps:
00:00 Most common complaint from parents.
01:19 Children do not keep doing something unless they get something from it.
03:00 You are the teacher for your child.
03:54 You are gravity to your child.
06:41 You have to do something every time your kids aren't loving or responsible.
07:40 Enforcing "gravity" is not more work than nagging or neglecting.
09:53 Consistently love and teach and apply consequences.
11:50 Why enforcing "gravity" is important.
13:40 No more nagging.
15:28 Teaching with consequences.
18:52 Teach children the absolute consistency of emotional gravity.
21:48 Teach your children to respect "gravity" and they will grow up to be happy.
Transcript:
Most Common Complaint from Parents
Easily one of the most common complaints I hear from parents is some variation of this. Quote, “I'm doing what you said to do in the parenting training and in the parenting book, but it's not working,” end quote. Then the parent says something like, quote, “My child keeps whining or complaining or crying or interrupting or teasing or being angry or not going to bed on time or throwing tantrums or refusing to do chores or homework, or whatever,” end quote.
And, of course, they claim that their children keep doing these things, despite their having applied the principles in the parenting training. Understandable that they would, because which of us isn't interested in a miraculous and instant cure for everything? But note that the parent who says these things says the child keeps doing a thing, which means the child is repeating the behavior, usually over and over again. You can't keep doing something unless you're doing it more than once.
Memorize this. Children do not keep doing something unless they get something from it. Shoot, we’ve proven this with endless experiments with rats and monkeys. Rats and monkeys only repeat behaviors that are pleasant or, at the very least, reduce their pain.
And it's really true with our kids. And if it's a harmful thing, like they're being irresponsible or whining or whatever, they're doing it because we as parents are not doing something about it. We're somehow either encouraging the behavior, rewarding the behavior — that's Number One by far — or just by neglect, allowing it to happen, with whatever reward the child gets inherently from that behavior — power over a sibling, power over the parent, control, attention, whatever.
Most Important Parenting Principle
This is one of the most important principles I will ever discuss. I talked about it in the training and parenting book, but now I'm going to do it again, hopefully in a slightly different way that is even more memorable to you as the parent. You are the teacher for your child. You’re it, and you cannot be a part-time or intermittent teacher.
I mean, imagine if the public schools teachers were intermittently there. No, there has to always be a teacher there, always staying with our children. Loving and teaching children is nearly useless unless we are utterly consistent with doing both the loving and the teaching. If we do them intermittently, it is very confusing for the child. If we're inconsistent, every day is for a child like gambling in Vegas. They don't know where the cards or the dice or the roulette ball will fall. It’s bewildering to them.
You Are Gravity to Your Child
You are gravity to your child. Very important sentence. You are gravity to your child. Now, how does gravity behave? Well, it can be really complicated, and it talks about the compression of space-time, because of bodies that have mass, but we're not going to talk about that.
What we do know about gravity is it’s always there, at least on this planet. In this particular Dimension, gravity is always there. If you drop a ball or a glass or anything, it falls. You can count on it. It's useful to know. Not a bad thing.
It’s useful, useful for when you’re playing a sport, for example. Useful to know that if you jump off a cliff, you will fall, so that you can avoid jumping off a cliff. How often does that happen with gravity? Every time. Not most of the time, not ninety percent of the time, every single time.
Now sometimes we find gravity to be inconvenient, as when we drive too fast and do go off a cliff, or when we have to pick up a heavy object or climb a hill with a heavy pack. It might be inconvenient. But gravity isn't cruel, it's uniform. It's applied everywhere. And gravity is never merciful. No such thing. It's just consistent. But this a property of the universe. It never stops.
When you're falling off a cliff, that might seem enormously inconvenient at the time, especially when you hit the floor, two hundred feet below. But think what would happen if there were no gravity, even intermittently. Without gravity, buildings would just periodically lift off the ground with their foundations and then crash to the earth when gravity resumed, destroying the building and killing everyone in it.
The atmosphere of the Earth would simply diffuse into outer space, and we would have a planet with no air, which would, of course, mean we're all dead. It turns out that the sun would stop providing energy. It needs the gravity of all of that mass to cause the reaction that produces light.
Gravity in Parenting
Gravity is unbelievably important — and relentless. We’ve got to have it, and so must your children. You have to say something every time, like gravity, that they whine or complain or cry or interrupt or tease or get angry or mouth off when they're told to do something or fail to go to bed on time or throw a tantrum or refuse to do chores or homework, or whatever.
In other words. we have to do something every time they're not loving or responsible. Every time. I ask these parents who tell me it's not working, I say, “Well, how often do you do something when your child does…?” And they go, “Well…” They've already answered the question, because if somebody is asking them “every time,” they don't ever say, “Well…” They don't have to think about the percentage of the time that they do it. And “Well…” usually means “pretty infrequently.”
Now, many parents tend to complain that enforcing gravity, being gravity, is a lot of work. Let's look at that. No, it's not. Mathematically, it's not. Let's just say, for example, that you nag a child to do his homework or chores or to stop whining, and you do it five out of ten times that the child does that particular thing. That is a lot of work, having to nag five out of ten times. That's a drag.
Being Gravity vs Nagging
It’s actually worse than that. It's not just five out of ten times, total. If the child whined 100 times, you have to say something 50 times. And I don't know a parent who hasn't had to deal with exactly the same behavior in a child 100 times. Now you have to say something 50 times, and your children come to expect you to ask 50 times, because they've learned it's a complete gamble whether you will respond when they whine, for example, and they're willing to take the gamble in order to get away with it.
So they're willing to listen to you nag half the time so that they can get, the other half of the time, power, control, attention. And it actually turns out that even on the occasions that you nag when you're worried and angry and fearful, they still get their power, control, and attention. This would be virtually the definition of useless and insane, wouldn't it?
So out of 1,000 times, you have to nag 500 times. It's a mess. Now, that is a lot of work. So you can nag 500 out of 1,000 times and work yourself to death and train your child to behave badly, which is what we're doing when we respond half the time, or there’s another option.
Loving and Teaching and Applying Consequences
You could utterly, consistently loveandteach them and apply consequences. When they behave in unproductive ways — unloving and irresponsible — you could apply consequences ten times in a row without fail. I recommend this to parents all the time. It's really not a random number.
Studies have actually been done that if we stop doing something that’s unproductive for us, somewhere between 10 and 20 times, we can stop it. If you refuse to smoke 10 to 20 times in a row, it gets easier and easier. If you're consistent 10 to 20 times, that usually, not always — sometimes it’s more times than that, and then sometimes you’ll pick up again later — you'll have to be consistent still — but, see, consistency is easier to maintain than that 500 times of nagging. If you're consistent, that usually stops the habitual and unproductive behavior of your child.
Now, with a child, learning that the unproductive behavior simply doesn't work, that it’s even unpleasant, with applied consequences, you learn that you only have to loveandteach, which are pleasant activities, anyway, a lot more pleasant than nagging 10 to 20 times in a row. That is a lot less work than having to nag 500 out of 1,000 times. For those of us who are math- challenged, 10 to 20 is less than 500. And 500 is actually an estimate that’s low, because we tell our children what to do and what not to do all day long.
Teaching Emotional Gravity
Parents who are consistent in teaching their children gravity works every time do it so that they don't jump off the roof of the house and break their ankle 100 times. Would you say nothing if your child jumped off the roof of the house and broke his ankle 100 times in a row? No fool would allow their child to do that.
And yet, emotionally, we do let them do that. There's just not a broken bone that we can see, but there's a broken feeling. There's a broken pattern. There's a lack of a sense of responsibility, a lack of a sense of worth, a lack of feeling loved.
So instead, what if we now consistently teach them gravity so that they may fall only a few times, now and again? Not all falls are preventable, because they learn that gravity is there every time and has unpleasant consequences, especially emotionally, but they also learn that consistent gravity is good.
Speaking of physical gravity, if you know that gravity is reliable, you can stack boxes, you can build houses. You can learn to shoot a basketball. Without gravity, how in the world did you ever shoot a basket? They can run. They can jump. They can play — all possible because of gravity. And you can explain that to them. Yes, it can be inconvenient when you're lifting something heavy, but every other fun activity is possible because of it.
So no more nagging. No more. None. Teach your kids gravity consistently once, or at least once over a period of time, and they won't keep testing it. It's a good thing. The physics of gravity is always there. They will eventually pay for ignoring it, but in the short-term, you are emotional gravity.
They don't understand the overall principle of consequences always coming in the future. We will always pay for our choices. They don't have a concept of time. If you teach them that they’re irresponsible today, they're going to pay for it for the rest of their lives, it just sails right on by.
You demonstrate the consequences of emotional and responsible gravity now. And you do it every time. And then it becomes a pattern. If you don't provide gravity, you are in a prison of your own inconsistency, a prison where you are a prisoner to your fears and where you are also a prison guard, watching your children's behavior and seeing them in their own prison of fear and consequences and control and power.
And all those things that are not consistent with the happiness that we were looking for with our children. When we love them and teach them, we set them free. Our job as parents, irrevocably, is to loveandteach them consistently.
Teaching Sometimes Requires Consequences
One of my grandchildren, Sydney — she was almost able to walk. She was crawling pretty fast, but wasn't toddling yet, came with their parents to visit us. She wanted me to carry her out into the yard, where she was enthralled with the plants and lawn and gravel and dirt and mud and the kind of stuff little kids like.
And when we got to the dock at the lake, she could not take her eyes off the water. She crawled closer and closer to the edge so she could touch the water. Now, she hardly knew the dangers of water, which she proved by looking back at me for any expression of fear or disapproval as she drew closer to the edge of the dock.
I showed no fear or disapproval or even opinion. I already know that any child that age has already inhaled a mouthful of water in the bathtub, for example. So she knows the consequences of sucking water down her lungs, and I gave her the responsibility of figuring out what she could do with the lake.
I could have riveted my eyes on her. I could have warned her about getting too close, but this was a lesson she needed to figure out on her own. Children need far less nagging than we might suppose. They need experience with the natural results that follow — natural consequences most of the time and sometimes consequences imposed by us.
The dock was elevated above the water level by a short distance, but it was enough that Sydney had to lie down on her chest and extend her arm in order to touch the water. And she wanted to just stick more of her arm in the water. So she scooted her body a little further past the edge of the dock.
In an instant, as she reached down, she arrived at the point where more of her body weight was past the edge of the dock than her body weight that was on the doc. That's called moving your center of gravity past the edge of the dock, at which point the dependable effect of gravity pulled her off the dock and into the water.
Now, she was about a year old, so it was a frightening experience, where she was unable to swim and unable to breathe. I jumped into the water even as she was falling into the water — I didn't want this to be a life-threatening situation — and pushed her back up onto the dock, where she screamed loudly. I climbed onto the dock, showed no concern at all, held her and laughed. I said, “Was that fun?” She shook her head, no, and she stopped crying. By not controlling her every move, I allowed her to learn the effect of gravity and water, which are always there.
Consistently Teach the Consistency of Emotional Gravity
We need to teach our children about the absolute consistency of emotional gravity and water, and we have to do it consistently, or they will pay the price for the rest of their lives.
Let’s say you have a child who calls you and says he left his very important homework at home and he needs you to bring it to school, and you say, “Well, so is it really important?” — because you don't really want to go to school. He says, “I’ve got to have it in the next hour or I fail my class.” And it's tempting to just take it to the child, but you're not going to do that.
You're going to say, “If something is very important, like you just said, you'll learn not to forget it. It will help you to remember if I don't bring it to school today.” There will be fussing and anger and whining and possibly crying.
And you will say, “Whose job is the homework? Who has the class?” “Well, well, but,” and you’ll hear that. You’ll be lucky to hear “mine. And you say, “And part of the requirement of the class is doing your assignment and taking it to school. And that's your job. Your job isn't done until it's reported or turned in. I have faith in you that you'll learn this, and I'll see you at home tonight.”
Then when the kid gets home, if there is any attitude at all, you sit with that child. The child might miss volleyball practice, or whatever, until the child can say — I'm integrating a lot of things here from the parenting training — with no attitude, “It was my responsibility. It was my homework, and it was my fault that I didn't take it to school. It was not your responsibility.”
And you don't quit. You sit there with that child, if it takes till midnight until the child can say that and mean it. Or they don't learn gravity. You will find so many examples to teach your children that gravity and its consequences never sleep.
Similarly, you can't save them from gravity, or you teach them that it's not really a law. It's just an inconvenience that they'll suffer from time to time and consistently. If they believe that, they won't pay attention to it, and gravity will find them. It will. If you insist on it.
Now you save their lives. You're not punishing them. It's a good thing. It's necessary for the development of muscles and bones and lots of reasons that we’ve already talked about.
Teach Them to Respect Gravity
If we do teach our children gravity, and we make sure they respect it, they will grow up to be happy. If not, they will be unprepared and someday will be dragged to the ground by gravity. Possibly, never to rise again from the earth.
I have seen, over and over, kids who live on government assistance, who barely survive, who live in places that would disgust you to enter, because nobody ever taught them gravity. And so instead of their making choices and remembering gravity, they just let gravity keep acting on them.
And eventually, it just brings them to the ground. Their parents took their homework to school. They ended up jobless and disabled, and it all led to the circumstances I'm talking about. Not joking. And now they can't get up, because gravity is overwhelming to them, because they have had no opportunity to develop their muscles, or for their bones to get strong.
People who have been in space long enough find it much easier to break bones and lose their muscle strength, unless they intentionally exercise while they're there.
If you are consistent with loving and teaching your children, including consequences, you'll be teaching them how gravity works in life, not just in physics. You will be loving and teaching them what they must learn. This isn't an optional class.
They need your guidance. They need your gravity more than words can tell. Don't give up. The results are well worth every effort you make.
