Page 37 - The Intentional Parent

• “I do not want to see myself as a parent who is at the mercy of my child’s nagging.”
Temperamental Variability and The Rule of 1000
Some kids are easier to lead than others. This is an unalterable fact of genetic variability. What I have been saying here that some kids are born “difficult.” Stubbornness, behavioral inflexibility and oppositional behavior can (and pretty much does) appear in all children from time to time, but there are children who completely excel at it. If you have a difficult to manage child it is easy to feel like a bad parent. If you are doing your best to lead, you are not a bad parent, you just might not know enough about kids.
One of the most important things to know is that while children vary greatly in terms of their temperaments, their willingness to listen to their parents, and their desire to conform to the demands of the environment, the actions you take will remain the same. What will vary is the time and the number of repetitions it takes for those actions to produce results. That’s where the Rule of 1000 comes in. When parents say, “Dr. Peter, I did what you told me and it didn’t work.” I usually reply, “Well don’t worry, you only have 999 repetitions to go.” When you are telling your child “no,” you are teaching them not to argue and they are learning not to argue. Ever try juggling? With good instruction, some people learn after a dozen times. Some, however, take hundreds of tries. If you try to teach someone to juggle who could care less about juggling, but has no choice but to learn, it can take THOUSANDS of tries. So, learning is a matter of:
• instruction • repetition
The Intentional Parent by Peter J. Favaro, Ph.D. 37