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 Howard Glasser, MA,and Jennifer Easley, MA, Transforming
the Difficult Child. Center for the Difficult Child Publications,
Tucson, AZ 1998. paper. Glasser runs the Center for  the Difficult Child in
Tucson. He specializes in helping parents and teachers of ADD/ADHD,
oppositional-defiant, and other "intense" youngsters,
as he calls them. He calls his approach "The Nurtured Heart
Approach," because he believes that he shows how parents
and others in charge of such children can "get to"
them--can get to their insides, where they crave adult attention
and approval, even if from the outside they appear to spend their
time extracting blame rather than praise from the adults around
them. His technique is essentially an application of operant
conditioning principles: when the child is in the least little
bit behaving, or even on his way to behaving, in the manner you
desire, you need to instantly reward him with attention and verbal
reinforcement. When he is behaving in troubling ways, you must
apply consequences, which have been pre-announced, in a calm,
cool, collected kind of way--as neutrally as you can--so that
the child is deprived of your negative attention as much as possible.Glasser notices that "intense" kids will go for the display -- the fireworks--your upset and scowls and raised voices and even your spankings are actually rewards for whatever they were doing that got you to behave like that. Kind of like when rats in a maze learn tricks to make a bell ring -- your "going off" is the bell ringing that rewards them for whatever behavior produced it. We like a lot of things about Glasser's book. It's intended for parents of kids he calls "intense" -- kids for whom the usual methods aren't working. But, as he notes, many of the techniques tend to work with regular or average kids as well. Glasser has applied the techniques to adolescents, apparently; the cases he references are of younger adolescents or preteens. Here's what we think is good about his approach, in dealing with adolescents: it helps the parent to tone down the parent's own emotional response to a child's stepping over the line, it stresses just what the Q&As in our Archives stress, in regard to limit-setting: announce consequences in advance, implement them without fuss, never nag or warn, and implement them every single time (be consistent). Our sense is that Glasser's more detailed techniques will work better with children and younger adolescents, but his principles of withdrawing your emotional response to limit-testing, applying consequences neutrally and consistently, will work with every age child and are crucial in managing adolescents. We also like his use of what he calls "Video Moments" for school-age or younger children--moments in which a parent/teacher simply states what s/he is observing that the child is doing, e.g., "I notice that you're working hard on your drawing. It looks like a fancy car with green stripes and a red top." (p.47) Such observations simply communicate to the child that you "see" him/her--that you are paying attention-- and, they reinforce your child in that moment, for whatever s/he may be doing--because attention is a primary reinforcer (that is, it's innately reinforcing--we need it from birth). However, we can see how this could backfire with adolescents/pre-adolescents, who are not usually so motivated for their parents to " notice" them and may react with withdrawal to a parent's observation of what they are doing. Adolescents are very sensitive to being "spied" upon, intruded upon--and suspicious of your motives for approaching them. While a parent who sets up her teenager to live in the pool house so he can come and go freely is going too far (an image from the PBS special on the Heritage High School syphillis epidemic), we believe every teen or preteen needs a private space that is all his/hers, free of adult intrusion except in emergency, and that parents of average kids in this age range will do better to allow the child to approach them than to appear "too" interested in whatever their child is doing. Having said that, when a teen/preteen is stuck in serious misbehavior and/or in a relationship with a parent that is largely negative, a technique of "noticing" and commenting on the child's acceptable behavior, rather than focusing on troubling behaviors, seems entirely appropriate and could pay off bigtime, if accompanied by neutrally-administered consequences for exceeding limits. The book is highly recommended for parents of ADD/ADHD children and any other kinds of troubling children--and for parents of average kids who are stuck in a dead-end routine of acting-out followed by consequences that don't seem to work. Click to order Transforming the Difficult Child! [to top of this page] |
"Joey Pigza Loses Control"
is an intriguing story about a child with Attention Deficit Hyperactive
Disorder and his relationship with his adult-ADHD dad. Joey Pigza's
parents are divorced. His dad misses his mom, but has ADHD and
doesn't always take his medication. The paternal grandmother
is a character who presents challenges of her own during Joey's
visit with his father. Not exactly the ideal family -- which
is the charm of the book. A National Book Award finalist. Any
accurately-diagnosed ADHD kid would love it! Get
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