The Child Code by Danielle Dick Ph.D

Author:Danielle Dick, Ph.D. [Dick, Danielle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

But if you have a High Em child, you may find that the standard parenting strategies of implementing rewards and consequences isn’t working. In fact, it may be making the behavior worse. When parents with High Em kids start reward and consequence programs, often their children spend inordinate amounts of time in time-out (or experiencing other consequences), and rarely earn rewards. High Em children may start to internalize the idea that they are “bad” because there is now a system in place that documents how much they are failing their parents’ expectations. Parents become increasingly despondent that things are never going to get better. They wonder what they are doing wrong (or come down hard on what the other is doing wrong), or they fear that there may be something wrong with their child. In short, everybody is upset, the behavior isn’t getting better, and your relationship with your child is getting worse. What’s going on?

Rewards and consequences work by helping children make connections between the behavior you want to see (and conversely, don’t want to see), and giving them an incentive to behave accordingly. When High Em children continue to misbehave, we tend to conclude they just need more incentive to stop misbehaving, hence the doubling down on consequences. But High Em children aren’t lacking the motivation to behave properly, they are lacking the skills. They were born with a disposition toward strong emotions, toward distress and frustration. They can’t naturally manage these emotions. If you had a child struggling to read, or to do algebra, you wouldn’t expect that rewards and consequences would teach them their ABCs, or the Pythagorean theorem. Punishing them for their inability to read or do algebra is actually cruel, and would likely cause your child to start to resent you.

That’s what happens when High Em children are constantly being punished for their behavior. Parents become a target of their High Em child’s frustration and anger, which further angers parents. In chapter 2, we talked about how our genotypes influence the way other people respond to us. High Em children evoke negative reactions from their parents. Their High Em genotypes are really good at triggering our wrath, and then it’s off to the races in a feedback loop that escalates everyone’s bad behavior and leads to nothing but further anger and frustration. You ask them to do something, they refuse, you double down on your demand, perhaps accompanied by a consequence (“You’re going to lose your favorite toy if you don’t stop kicking the back of the seat!”), they ramp up the bad behavior to let you know how much they don’t appreciate the threat, and the next thing you know, everyone’s mad.

My dear friend tells the story of how her High Em child’s refusal to stop tapping her fork on the dinner table culminated in her husband emerging from their daughter’s bedroom drowning under an armful of princess dresses and stuffed animals. Apparently, in the heat of one final fork bang before a

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