Chapter 16 - The Other Parents of Your Children.

Throughout their lives your children will be exposed to the influence of other adults to whom you delegate certain parental responsibilities. Since those people carry out parental functions with your children, they, too, will have a strong influence on your youngsters' growth and development. I refer, of course, to grandparents, relatives, and baby-sitters; teachers, principals, and counselors; coaches, camp directors, and recreational leaders; YMCA and YWCA program directors, Boy Scout and Girl Scout troop leaders, Head Start teachers, Sunday school teachers, and Little League managers; and parole and probation officers.

When you turn your children over to such surrogate parents, what assurance do you have about their effectiveness? Will these adults create relationships with your sons and daughters that will be "therapeutic" and constructive or "non-therapeutic" and destructive? How effective will they be as helping agents for your youngsters? Can you turn your children over to these youth workers and trust that your children will not be damaged?

These are important questions because your children's lives will be strongly influenced by all adults with whom they develop relationships.

Many of these parent surrogates learn the skills through a P.E.T. class or video self-study. We have also worked with such people in our other specially designed training pro grams: Teacher Effectiveness Training, Leader Effectiveness Training, and the Conflict Resolution Workshop, as well as other programs we offer. We have learned that most of these professional people are remarkably similar to parents in their attitudes toward kids and in their methods of dealing with them. They, too, usually fail to listen to children; they, too, talk to children in ways that put them down and damage their self-esteem; they, too, rely heavily on authority and power to manipulate and control children's behavior; they, too, are locked into the two win-lose methods of conflict-resolution; they, too, hassle and harangue and preach and shame children in attempts to shape their values and beliefs and mold them into their own image.

Naturally, there are exceptions, just as there are exceptions among parents. But, by and large, the adults who touch the lives of your children lack the basic attitudes and skills to be effective helping agents. Like parents, they have not been adequately trained to be effective "therapeutic agents" in an interpersonal relationship with a child or adolescent. And so, unhappily, they can do damage to your children.

I will use schoolteachers and school administrators as examples, but this does not imply that they are the most ineffective or most needful of training. But because they spend so much time with your children, they have the greatest potential for influencing them, for good or bad. Drawing on our experience of working in many school districts, it is clear to me that schools, with very few exceptions, are basically authoritarian institutions that modeled their organizational structure and leadership philosophy after military organizations.

Rules and regulations for student conduct are almost invariably determined unilaterally by adults at the top of the hierarchy, without participation of youngsters who are expected to obey them. Infractions of these rules bring punishments-- in some cases, believe it or not, physical punishment. Even classroom teachers are not given a voice in establishing rules of conduct that they are expected to enforce. Yet, these teachers are usually judged more on how effectively they maintain order in the classroom than on how effective they are in encouraging learning.

Schools also impose on children a curriculum that most kids consider dull and not at all relevant to what is going on in their lives. Then, recognizing that such a curriculum is not likely to motivate students by virtue of interest and relevance, the schools almost universally employ a system of rewards and punishments-- the ubiquitous grades-- that almost insures that a certain rather large percentage of children will be labeled "below average."

In the classroom, children are frequently scolded and put down by their teachers. They are rewarded for their ability to recite back what they have been told to read, and often chastised for dissent or disagreement. Almost universally, at least in the upper elementary-school grades and in junior and senior high school, teachers are quite ineffective in getting their classes to participate in meaningful group discussions because many teachers habitually respond to students' contributions with the "twelve roadblocks." So open and honest communication from the students is discouraged by all but a few teachers.

When children "act up" in class, as they naturally will in such a "non-therapeutic" and uninteresting climate, the conflicts are usually handled by Method 1, in some cases by Method 2. Kids are often ordered to go see the principal or the counselor, who are supposed , to try to resolve these teacher-student conflicts- although one member of the conflict is not present- namely, the teacher. So, usually, the principal or counselor assumes the child is at fault and forthwith either punishes or lectures her, or extracts a promise to "cease and desist."

In most schools, students are blatantly denied civil rights- the right of free speech, the right to wear their hair as they prefer, the right to wear the clothes they like, the right to dissent. Schools also deny children the right to refuse to testify against themselves, and if kids get into trouble, administrators seldom follow the customary procedures of "due process of law" guaranteed to citizens by the judicial system.

Is this a distorted picture of our schools? I think not. Many other observers of the school system are seeing the same deficiencies. (See references in the Suggested Reading List to books by Holt, Neill, Rogers)

Furthermore, one need only ask youngsters how they feel about schools and schoolteachers. Many kids say they hate school and that their teachers treat them disrespectfully and unfairly. Most kids come to experience school as a place where they must go; they experience learning as something that is seldom pleasant or fun; they experience studying as tedious work; and they see their teachers as unfriendly police officers.

When children are assigned to adults whose treatment of them produces such negative reactions, parents cannot be expected to shoulder all the blame for the way their kids turn out. Parents can be blamed, yes, but other adults must share the blame.

What can parents do? Can they exert constructive influence on the other parents of their children? Can they have a voice in deciding how their children are talked to and treated by other adults? I believe they can, and they must. But they must become much less passive and submissive than they have been in the past.

First, they must alert themselves to detect in all the institutions that serve youth any evidence that their children are controlled and suppressed by adults arbitrarily exercising power and authority. They must stand up and fight against those who advocate "being tough with kids," who sanction the use of power in dealing with kids under the banner of "law and order," who justify authoritarian methods on the grounds that one cannot trust children to be responsible or self-disciplined.

Parents must get off the bench and go to bat to protect their children's civil rights whenever they are threatened by adults who feel that kids do not deserve such rights.

Parents can also advocate and support programs that offer innovative ideas and methods for bringing about reform in the schools-- such as those that provide curriculum change, eliminate the grading system, introduce new instructional methodologies, give students more freedom to learn on their own and at their own pace, offer individualized instruction, give kids a chance to participate with adults in the schools' governing process, or train teachers to be more humanistic and therapeutic in relating to kids.

Such programs are already available in communities that want to improve their schools. Many more are in the planning stage. Parents need not be afraid of such new educational programs, but rather should welcome them, encourage administrators to try them out and test their effects.

The program with which I am most familiar is our own: T.E.T.-- Teacher Effectiveness Training. This course has been offered in many hundreds of school districts in all sections of the United States, as well as in other countries. The results we have seen have been encouraging.

In one junior high school in Cupertino, California, our program was responsible for the principal's involving both teachers and students in a project to rewrite all the student conduct regulations. This participative adult-student problem-solving group discarded their old thick rule book and substituted two simple rules: no one has the right to interfere with another's learning, and no one has the right physically to harm another! The principal reported this effect:

• "The reduced use of power and authority over the entire student body resulted in a more self-directed student population with pupils assuming more responsibility for their own behavior as well as the behavior of others."

In another school, in Palo Alto, California, by using our Method 3 conflict-resolution procedure in a classroom that had all but disintegrated because of lack of discipline, a teacher reduced the number of "unacceptable and disruptive acts" from thirty per class hour to an average of 4.5 per class hour. A follow-up questionnaire revealed that 76 percent of the students felt that the class had accomplished more work since the problem-solving sessions and ninety-five percent felt the classroom atmosphere was either "improved" or "greatly improved."

The principal of Apollo High School in Simi Valley ( wrote about the effects of Teacher Effectiveness Training on him and on his school:

• 1. Discipline problems have decreased at least fifty percent. I find it to be a satisfactory and effective method of handling behavior problems without suspending students. I learned that suspension only eliminates the problem for three or four days; and it does nothing to counteract the causes of the behavior. The skills I learned in the P.E.T. class facilitate problem-solving within the student, between the staff and administration, and between teachers and students.
• 2. We have instituted school meetings wherein we feel we prevent conflicts before they arise. We use Dr. Gordon's problem-solving method, and have been successful in preventing conflicts from becoming behavioral problems.
• 3. My relationships with students have improved immensely, by allowing students to have the responsibility for their actions and behavior and to have the privilege of dealing with their own problems.

The principal of an elementary school in La Mesa wrote this evaluation of the T.E.T. program:

• As an elementary-school principal working with a large number of staff members trained in the Teacher Effectiveness Training program (sixteen out of twenty-three) I have observed behavioral changes in both students and faculty directly attributable to this program:
  • 1. Teachers feel confident in their own abilities to handle difficult behavior problems.
  • 2. The emotional climate of classrooms is far more relaxed, far healthier.
  • 3. Children are involved in establishing the rules under which their school experiences are structured. Therefore, they have a personal commitment to these rules.
  • 4. Children are learning how to solve social problems without using force or manipulation.
  • 5. Far fewer "`discipline cases" are referred to me.
  • 6. Teacher behavior is far more appropriate, i.e., student counseling is done now when the student has a problem, not when the teacher has a problem.
  • 7. Teachers are far more effective in solving their own problems without resorting to use of force with children.
  • 8. Teacher ability to conduct meaningful parent-teacher conferences has increased.

Significant changes can be produced in schools by giving administrators and teachers training in the same skills that we have been teaching parents in P.E.T. But we have learned that schools are not open to change in those communities where most of the parents are committed to maintaining the status quo, are frightened of change, or are steeped in the tradition of authoritarian treatment of youth.

My hope is that more parents can be influenced to start listening to their kids when they complain about the treatment they receive from many teachers, coaches, Sunday School teachers, and youth leaders. They can begin to trust the validity of their youngsters' feelings when they say they hate school or resent the way they are treated by adults. Parents can find out what is wrong with these institutions by listening to the kids and not always defending the institutions.

Only by aroused parents will these institutions be influenced to become more democratic, more humanistic, and more therapeutic. What is needed more than anything I know, is nothing less than an entirely new philosophy for dealing with children and youth, a new Bill of Rights for youth. No longer can society treat children as children were treated two thousand years ago, any more than it can sanction the way minority groups have been treated in the past.

I offer one such philosophy of adult-child relationships, in the form of a credo, upon which our P.E.T. programs have been built. Written several years ago in an attempt to put the P.E.T. philosophy into a succinct and easily understood statement, it is handed to the enrollees in our courses, and offered here as a challenge to all adults:

While I have no doubt that this credo, if adopted and practiced by adults in institutions serving youth, would in time bring about constructive reforms, I also realize that such reform may be a long time in coming. After all, today's adults are yesterday's children and are themselves the products of ineffective parenthood.

We need a new generation of parents who will accept the challenge of learning the skills for raising responsible children in the home. For this is where it all must start. And it can start there today, this minute-- in your home.