Learn more about what motivates parents to get the training they need to eliminate the confusion and frustration in their families.
Timestamps:
00:00 What motivates people?
01:34 1) My effort will lead to success.
02:20 2) Reward
03:10 3) Satisfaction
03:53 These three factors multiply to determine motivation: examples.
09:40 How this relates to parenting.
12:44 Awareness, Insight and Foretelling the Future in parenting.
17:38 Foretelling
Transcript:
Often, I have been asked a variation of the following question: “Every parent I know—every single parent, including myself—has significant challenges with parenting, frequently problems that are overwhelming. I have been EVERYWHERE looking for answers, which are always superficial, incomplete, glib, or otherwise useless.
“In the Ridiculously Effective Parenting Training I have found the kind of answers I’ve always wanted: direct, practical, useful, and—best of all—they WORK. Why isn’t every parent grabbing hold of this training as though the lives of their children depended on it?”
Good question.
Motivation and Employees
One of my sons is a professor of business at a major university, and one concept they teach their MBA students is motivation. What motivates employees to work on a project diligently, quickly, and to completion?
First: Effort leading to success. In order to feel motivated, I have to believe that if I put in the described effort, I will perform well. Example: If 100% of people who take a scuba class succeed in learning to dive, I would likely be more motivated to take the class.
Second: Reward. If I perform well, will there be a reward? Example: If 100% of class graduates receive a certificate qualifying them to participate in ocean dives, and the class is guaranteed a trip to the Caribbean to dive, again I would be more likely to take the class.
Third: Satisfaction. Will I be satisfied with the reward? Example: If every diver graduating from the proposed class has raved insanely about how fun the actual diving was, I would again be more motivated to take the class.
And it turns out that the three factors MULTIPLY to determine whether I will be motivated to do a thing, in this case take the class.
Let’s assume that each factor is rated 0-10, and that I would have to be motivated at a level of 400—not especially high considering the maximum motivation of 1000 (10 x 10 x 10)—in order to actually enroll in the class. Let’s see what happens as the factors vary.
Let’s say I believe Factor 1—that my effort will produce success—at a level of 8.
I also believe Factor 3, that scuba diving will be fun—at a level of 9.
But I’m not so sure that if I take the class, I’ll actually make it to the Caribbean and go on a dive. So factor 2 has a rating of 3.
The average of those three numbers is almost 7, which you might think would be a sufficient number to motivate a person to try something.
But no. Remember that motivation is a result of multiplying the factors, not averaging them. Multiplying the three factors—8 x 9 x 3—produces a motivation level of 216, not even close to the level required for me to take the class, and far from the possible outcome of 10 x 10 x 10 = 1000.
So if even one factor is missing—or rates low—the motivation to do a thing disappears.
Motivation and Parents
Now let’s see how this factor rating works when motivating parents to be interested in learning how to better raise their children.
First: Effort leading to success. Most parents have tried anger, intimidation, begging, pleading, reasoning, bribing, micro-managing, hands-off approach, complaining, repetition, punishment, and everything else they’ve read, heard about, or experienced themselves as children.
Nothing has worked—for the PARENTS. Nothing even close to success has ever been reached. So, parents simply don’t BELIEVE that any amount of effort would enable them to complete a course promising a genuine change in parenting. I don’t blame them.
If nothing they’ve ever tried has worked, what are the odds that one more thing would suddenly be successful? So this factor has a rating—both from the reasoning above and from my experience with parents—of about 1 out of 10.
Second: Reward. Most parents have never seen anything modify their children’s behavior, not for more than a moment—like with bribing—so how could they possibly imagine that any change experienced from something new would yield a real and lasting reward, even if they follow the course exactly? Nah, no reason for hope. Factor rating? 1 out of 10, at most.
Third: Satisfaction. If I do succeed in finishing this course, and there is a reward, will I be satisfied with it? Will I LIKE the changes?
How in the world would a parent even be able to imagine this? Most parents have never even MET a parent who isn’t drowning in the job—nor have they met well-behaved and happy children—so how could they conceive of parenting being fun, fulfilling, even enjoyable? Impossible. Rating? Again, 1 out of 10 at best.
Now, let’s do the math from the figures above: 1 x 1 x 1 = 1 out of a possible score of 1000. Not surprising, then, that most parents are completely unmotivated to take a course in parenting. Completely uninterested.
The Motivation of Desperation
Ah, but there is one more factor not mentioned in the MBA courses on motivation: Desperation. When parents are confronted with sufficient whining, complaining, fighting, arguing, defiance, hitting, and yelling, SOMETIMES they are motivated to try something new.
Or if there is sufficient addiction to alcohol, drugs, porn, video games, and more. Or if there is cutting, imprisonment, suicidal thoughts and threats, or actual suicide. Then desperation becomes very motivating.
The problem with desperation as a motivating factor is that by the time desperation becomes motivating, the problems that led to desperation are often utterly impossible to solve.
The child is so entitled, angry, afraid, and lost that they refuse to give up the only tools that have ever enabled them to survive. They will not give up their addictions and other behaviors that have numbed their pain.
In short, if parents wait until desperation is their prime motivation, it’s usually too late to help the child, especially in the case of suicide.
Why Parents Aren’t Motivated
This appears to be an impossible dilemma: As parents we’re either not sufficiently motivated, or our motivation comes too late. What can we do about this? Awareness, insight, and foretelling the future.
Awareness and Insight
First a brief explanation of awareness and insight. When children behave badly, four factors tend to operate strongly that keep us from doing anything at all:
- The norm. Entitled, angry, and addicted children are now so common that both children and parents have come to accept it as normal. Well, these conditions ARE normal—meaning that they fall within the norm, or the average or usual—but they are NOT healthy. If a child’s unhealthy behavior is considered normal by him, he will fight to the death his right to continue that behavior. And if the parent regards the behavior as normal—“Well, other kids are the same”—he will do nothing about it, and the behavioral cancer will grow to its natural conclusion. When we accept unhealthy as the norm, we’re in big trouble, and that’s where we are right now with parenting.
- We don’t want to see it. If we recognize a behavior as counter to happiness, then we’d have to DO something about it. Mostly we parents are selfish. We don’t want to get up off the couch and “deal” with whatever civil war is going on in the next room.
- We don’t want to admit our part in it. If a child behaves badly on a regular basis, we have to come to one of two conclusions: either (A) the child is inherently bad, which no parent wants to admit, or (B) we have been neglectful in doing what it takes to help the child avoid or conquer this behavior.
- Magical thinking. We all love this one. We hope to win the lottery. We hope that our dream job will drop from the sky into our lap. We hope that unacceptable behavior from a child will just go away. We say, “Oh, it’s just that age,” or “They’ll grow out of it.” With that logic, we should just hope that we “grow out” of pancreatic cancer.
We MUST be more aware of the behaviors of our children that are not loving or responsible, because either kind of behavior will condemn a child to a lifetime of personal misery, addictions, severely troubled relationships, horrible parenting, and sometimes death.
Foretelling the Future
Which brings us to the third answer to what we can do about our abysmal attention to our children: foretelling the future. Once a child acquires a set of survival techniques—behaviors that APPEAR to be their actual personality, who they are—they are not likely to give them up.
These survival behaviors—all the entitlement, anger, defensiveness, arguing, and addictions—are their only means of decreasing their pain, so they hang on to them tightly. The longer we wait to do something definitive, the more impossible it becomes to do anything at all.
This is where we foretell the future.
If a three-year-old child is whining, demanding, entitled, and insisting on you doing everything for them, without serious intervention that child will grow up with all the same qualities, which will make personal happiness quite impossible, a fulfilling career highly problematic, and genuinely connected relationships unthinkable.
As parents we have to look at a particular behavior and see how it will play out years and decades from them. THAT can be very motivating.
If we don’t extend the effects of that behavior into the future in our minds, the child never will, and we will have doomed that child to a lifetime of victimhood and confusion about how they got to the terrible place they’re in.
I have counseled thousands of adults who have no idea how they became so miserable, and only a few questions reveal that it all began at age 3 or 4.
It’s not hopeless. We can be more aware and insightful. We can learn to love our children, and to address EVERY unloving and irresponsible behavior, thereby giving our children a chance at happiness for a lifetime.
There is no greater gift we could give them, no greater effort to which we could devote our lives.
