Families who seek my professional help are usually in great distress. Though crises or triggering events may stimulate parents to seek help, the underlying issues have typically been brewing for years.
Parents are ambivalent and often unsure about how to deal with children’s misbehavior, failure to perform, negative attitudes, isolation, and defiance. While loving and sacrificing for their children, parents need to set limits, hold kids accountable, and guide them toward necessary skills for independence. It’s an overwhelming job, often fraught with angst, especially when children depart from responsiveness, reason, and acceptable norms.
Maintaining standards while providing encouragement and effective consequences can be challenging. When parents first meet with me, they are frustrated, embarrassed, and frequently resentful or angry. Their kids are not following the “script,” and they are beleaguered with confusion and pent-up resentment about the lack of rewards for their parental efforts, their children’s dysfunction, and the attendant family discord.
Though we shouldn’t excuse or minimize the destructive impact of children’s negative behavior, it’s important to recognize that errant actions, emotions, and attitudes often stem from erratic and disregulated brain function. Correcting and regulating the underlying neurological basis for bad behavior is a necessary and productive means for improving functioning, diminishing symptoms and acting out, and rebuilding relationships.
In my practice, we accomplish this without drugs by using EEG neurofeedback to train brains to self-regulate. This proven and widely used treatment settles a lot of issues and typically results in the abatement or elimination of symptoms. (Yes, my colleagues and I have successfully administered many millions of neurofeedback sessions, despite the mainstream professional community seldom telling you about it.)
The neuropsychological approach to mental and behavioral health through developing better biological brain function is vital. Yet, we must also recognize and deal with the reality that behavior is also a product of conditioning. People—all of us—get away with what we can. This is not an indictment of moral character or a broad diagnosis of pathology. Rather, it’s a practical summary of common behavior, underpinned by the reinforcement of consequences that shape our actions and probabilities.
If I can “get away” with parking illegally, I will tend to do it more often. If your child argues, pesters, or ignores your directions, you will tend to raise your voice in repetition, eventually resulting in frayed nerves, resentments and conflicts, and the habit of needing repetition and anger to motivate any appropriate action.
Therefore, a competent and effective plan to shape appropriate behavior and reduce maladaptive behavior must include the treatment of the patient’s brain and the environmental circumstances and contingencies that maintain and strengthen habitual actions, both desirable and undesirable.
As well, it is critical to help parents appreciate the basics of the treatment modalities along with realistic understanding and expectations about their child’s behaviors.
My methods incorporate a four-pronged approach to obtain effective outcomes:
For decades, I’ve relied on EEG neurofeedback to improve attention and focus, brain organization and self-control, and to reduce anxiety, depression, frustration, stress, impulsivity, anger, panic, acting out, and overreactions.
Neurofeedback is a training—like going to the gym for your brain. It develops mental fitness: improved strength, endurance, and flexibility. Improved strength allows for better concentration, cognitive and emotional processing, and stress recovery. More endurance provides resiliency and the ability to sustain motivation and goal-oriented work. Flexibility is key to transitioning from one activity or set of conditions to another smoothly and without resistance or emotional overload. Just as a car has different speeds and proper driving requires safe and fluid transition to maneuvering at the right speed for the conditions, our brains have many different “speeds” of EEG patterns that facilitate or inhibit “states” conducive to adaptive functioning for various changing conditions. Relaxation and sleep require and promote certain states, while focus and mental processing activity require different states.
The continued presence and exhibition of inappropriate or overaroused behavior reflects brain habits that are “locked-in” to inappropriate states. Inability to sleep is one good example. Flying into a rage when asked to stop doing one thing and start another is again a common reflection of brain inflexibility.
Parental frustration over children’s failure to acquiesce and accede to standards and requirements is typically coupled with fragmented understanding of the child’s capacities, limitations, and motivations. Continued battles and struggles getting kids to comply often lead parents into confusion and doubt about their own assumptions regarding discipline, strictness, and what to do when nothing works.
Stereotypically, the male figure in the family is harsher and harbors the view that the mother is “too soft.” Ironically, this position conveniently ignores the fact that the female is usually the parent doing most of the child care and supervision while the father spends time at work (even when many mothers work and assume the burden of child supervision). The dominant parent’s allegation of the other parent’s permissiveness also myopically overlooks his lack of success in obtaining the child’s compliance! It’s easy to judge another’s being “too soft” while neglecting the necessity of parental teamwork in guiding and correcting the child.
Parents often beseech me, pleadingly, with the questions, “Can he control what he does? Am I expecting something he’s not capable of—or should I assume he can, but won’t, and punish him accordingly?”
This is a sincere plea, but belies a simplistic dichotomy that begs emotional resolution for the parent by means of determining when to bring down the hammer.
I interpret and answer the parents’ plea by explaining my assessment of their child’s inherent developmental and individual abilities within the context of behavior patterns that have been established and the validity of parental expectations.
Through examination and assessment, I can quickly determine the child’s cognitive, emotional, and maturational abilities to fulfill what the parents demand. Often the failures reveal gaps between the child’s capabilities at the time, emotional roadblocks and traumas, and parental misunderstanding about why the child does not or cannot perform. It’s typically not as simple as “can but won’t” or power struggles within the family.
Debriefing parents on their children’s “can do” levels and the impact of their brain deficiencies upon compliance and performance helps parents gain more realistic perspectives with which to adjust expectations. This is not an indulgence or excuse program, but rather an evidence based appraisal of the child’s strengths and weakness that should inform the setting of standards and consequences. Such an assessment also allows parents to relieve the pressures they put on themselves and their children.
For example, test data that show a child’s attention or impulse control performance below the 5th percentile indicate that the failure to listen, follow through, or inhibit acting out is fostered by brain disregulation that has to be corrected at the biological level.
Avoidance of homework or academic deficiencies typically follow the relentless requirements of assignments that the student cannot sustain due to mismatches between curricular demands and cognitive and neurological processing and/or insufficient entering achievement levels. The more the brain becomes stressed and frustrated, the more that avoidance, procrastination, resentment, and trauma will ensue.
Helping parents appreciate the factors that account for cooperation and performance failures sets the stage for implementing more supportive and constructive expectations and interventions.
As stated earlier, behavior patterns are a combination of individual capacities and limitations shaped by the repetition of acts and consequences that result in stronger probabilities of habits.
People get away with what they can—meaning that self-interest, habit, and reward gratification strengthen through either favorable consequences or negative consequences that the individual can withstand in order to preserve his likely or desired behavior. Despite heightened affect and aversive consequences from parents unruly and “stubborn” children can withstand the storm because their payoff is to continue in their preferred ways. The solution I usually to analyze the behavioral determinants and reset incentives, payoffs, and response costs for errant behavior.
Parents at their wits’ end complain that they’ve tried everything—and they lament that “consequences don’t work.” What they overlook is that they have been implementing “consequences” in a manner that unintentionally reinforces (strengthens) the bad behaviors they want to eliminate.
I teach parents the fundamental rules governing habits: how to reduce unwanted behaviors and shape desirable behaviors. This involves boiling down principles of learning theory and habit formation into comprehensible terms with step-by-step instructions and guidance for effectively changing the conditions that motivate and control behavior.
We develop a behavior plan based upon scientific principles and the parents’ values and circumstances. I guide and supervise the parents’ implementation of the “new rules” and procedures, including monitoring and evaluation of the results. We make adjustments as needed.
Acknowledging the old adage: If you keep doing the same thing, you’ll probably get more of the same results—we change course by introducing sound and effective environmental contingencies (if you do this, then that happens) so that predictable improvement occurs.
Well-intended plans often become subverted by parents’ emotional overreactions in response to stress, frustration, and anxiety. Even with children’s efforts and brain improvement, the history of child underperformance and family conflict can lead parents to a breaking point.
Anxiety is an ineffective teacher: it scolds and undermines without providing profitable direction. Just as parents inadvertently heighten their children’s anguish, their own anxiety overtakes them and defeats efforts to implement rational and consistent change.
With the collusion of brain dysfunction, faulty environmental controls, and parental overreaction, it’s no wonder that “nothing works.”
It’s a start to instruct parents about how their own anxiety interferes and overrides attempts to behaviorally manage their children more fruitfully. But, knowing is not enough. We need to do something to subdue anxiety and keep it from sabotaging plans and efforts.
Toward this end, I use Voice Technology to quickly eliminate all kinds of anxieties and traumas. This technique is instrumental in ridding parents of the accumulated stress and frustration that impedes their best parenting efforts. Often, one or two treatments relieves the blockage that has sidelined parents for years. As needed, we can also do Voice Technology by phone to assist parents in episodes of crises, frustration, or reversion to old haunting habits and overwhelm.
The combination of these interventions provides comprehensive assistance, education, specific instruction, and interpersonal support to get parents back in the driver’s seat to steer and guide their kids toward healthier functioning. Restoring family peace and harmony without capitulation to bad habits and dysfunction is in everyone’s interests.
The methods outlined herein also apply in family situations where the children are older, perhaps living out of the parents’ residence, or “stuck” at home as young adults, retreating to their room in isolation. Or, in some cases, grandparents have custody or, in practice, play a large role in childrearing. And, there’s the unique and ambivalent role of watching one’s children raise their kids and treading carefully the boundaries between giving advice, stepping in, and letting go.
The same principles apply with adult children, too. Many of them need to regulate their brains and emotional functioning. They need advice and professional input on their children’s strengths, weaknesses, and development levels and help in setting achievable expectations. Seniors often need assistance in setting limits on their involvement with their kids and grandkids, and the same behavior principles of habits and probabilities come to bear.
As we age, we need informed and graceful adaptation to what we can and cannot do—even in situations that can be heartbreaking. To continue loving while learning to let go requires constant maturation and psychological and spiritual development. Once a parent, you’re always sequentially ahead of each child. That doesn’t mean always knowing what to do, being right, or choosing the best course of action. Practicing wise guidance, discovering when to refrain, and doing the best you can under trying circumstances are the tests you are given as a parent.
— Mark Steinberg, PhD
