Children"Mornings are a horror show. Jeff repeatedly needs to be nagged into doing everything. He's easily distracted and just doesn't seem very motivated to get ready. I end up yelling at him a lot and it affects the entire family."
"When Amanda comes home from school the battle begins. I want her to get some of her homework done before she goes out to play. She promises she'll do it when she comes back in but of course that doesn't happen. If she can't find a friend to play with, then she literally hangs on me to do something with her. Even if I play with her for a little while, it's never enough. I end up pushing her to watch more TV!"
"Getting Tim ready for bed is a challenge. He's always trying to negotiate for extra time to play or watch something. And he dawdles through every step unless I'm there with him, which, of course, I resent."
What sets this group of complaints aside from many others is that all the children were described as not having any problems in school. In other words, we are not likely to be dealing with children with significant problems in attention and concentration (i.e., children with ADD). Instead, I want to focus on one of the central themes in each of these vignettes, namely the difficulty each child has carrying out tasks, even play, on their own. Psychologists refer to this as children who have problems with "self-regulation". Parents talk about it in terms of poor self-discipline. It's often hard to differentiate this problem from children who just need a lot of attention. On the other hand, I suspect the two issues are very much related.
Some children have always been "easy". They slipped right into natural rhythms of eating and sleeping as infants. They amused themselves with toys or anything lying around. You could actually put them down for a little while when they weren't asleep and get some work done. These children have a natural temperament that scores high on self-regulation. Parents generally refer to them as "easy children" and the rest of us are very jealous! Actually, I often find that most families have at least one easy and one more difficult child.
Let's return to the key point I made earlier - the teacher reports that this child is delightful in school, not the challenging, argumentative, dawdling child who shows up at your front door. The key difference is that school is far more structured than home. There is a schedule that is usually posted, often reinforced with bells, and is being followed by the other kids, so it is generally accepted as a fact of life and carried out routinely.
Home is a totally different environment to your child. Especially today's home life. Schedules are rarely set, there is little in the way of a dependable routine, and everything seems negotiable. Children who are poor "self-regulators" don't fare well in these more variable environments and it typically shows itself in behaviors described by the parents at the beginning of this column: clinging, challenging, losing focus. And once parent and child gets locked into power struggles over trying to make the child accommodate to the routine the parent wants, it takes on its own set of even more painful and unsuccessful struggling.
What I often recommend as a basic strategy is to bring some of the structure of school into the home. Create a chart/poster for those times that generate the biggest struggles. Involve the child in creating the chart. It should have pictures of the tasks to be done and the times when they are expected to be completed. Listen to the child and try to allow some genuine input to the schedule. Yes it may require separate posters for different days. And sometimes another child in the family will want one too (though usually siblings will accept the explanation that Tim has trouble staying organized and they don't).
The resulting scene is the parent pointing to the chart , reminding the child where he/she is supposed to be according to the chart, and moving along. It's as if the chart is requiring these behaviors, not the parent, and it's harder to argue with an inanimate object. Add in the typical school reinforcement, i.e., stickers or smiling-face stamps for a job well done and often the process becomes a much more pleasant one for everybody. The best reward for improved efficiency is always some extra parental attention with the time you've gained from less nagging.
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