I heard Po Bronson with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air (For Parents, The Return of Tough Love?) back at the end of September and I keep thinking about it. Today, I’ve got some time to cover it.

Bronson and co-author Ashley Merriman do something to which I’m very partial. They go back to the research look, at the data, and demystify and debunk some modern parenting perspectives that we’ve allowed to become conventional wisdom.

Most importantly Bronson, Merriman let the research lead us back to the most important piece of structure and parenting that we all know but can’t always uphold- consistency. Given the right combination of setting, opportunity, external pressures, and/or personal fatigue, it’s mighty tempting to open a negotiation and compromise with your child when you know you shouldn’t.

Parenting perspectives aside, good parenting boils down to setting clear expectations and being as consistent as possible in expectations, demands, and consequences.

This kind of solid parenting is something at which good boarding schools have always excelled. Clear expectations, consistent expectations, clear consequences, and an ability to resolve conflicts stand as hallmarks of the best boarding schools.

On Parental Conflict

Mr. PO BRONSON (Co-Author, “NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children”): Mark Cummings’ lab out of the University of Notre Dame is looking at this very phenomenon very closely and he has parents simulate arguments in front of their kids, or he has kids watch videotapes of arguments and he has parents as conspirators in his experiments. And normally when a kid watches a fight between parents, an argument, a quite heated conflict, that kid will then lash out afterwards or during it and act aggressive. But there’s one thing that happened in those experiments that makes all that aggressive behavior in the child go away: it’s watching the fight get resolved, it’s watching your parents work it out in a constructive way.

And when I read this, I understood that taking it upstairs, you know, I might have a moment of conflict with my wife and I’ll say that according to Cummings’ data, you know, parents are bickering to each other seven to eight times a day and the kids are a witness to it. It’s wrong to imagine that kids aren’t seeing this and feeling it. But when we take the arguments upstairs, the kid sees the fight begin but never sees it amicably resolved, and that’s hurting kids more.

In fact, Cummings’ work is now showing, this most recent data, that kids who are exposed to constructive conflict, and it can be quite heated, but when it’s resolved and worked out in front of the kids, those kids are being reported by teachers as having better well-being and better social skills, and sort of more adaptive in their environment at school. We need to – parents need to model for kids how to work through arguments – how to work it out.

GROSS: So are you suggesting parents fight in front of the kids and then hopefully they’ll reach an end of the argument, have an amicable resolution, and the kid will learn from that?

Mr. BRONSON: Mark Cummings would never say, hey, go out and fight in front of your kids, it’s a really good thing to do. He would say that, more that, don’t pretend your kid isn’t seeing some of your conflict. Parents believe they are sort of hiding their kids from this conflict but the kids can feel it. And so the important thing is to be aware when you did start something in front of your kids to then really try to model, for the benefit of the kids, working it out. And that might mean holding your tongue and enthusiastically trying to compromise in front of the kids so they can see from their parents how to do this with their own friendships…(NPR)

Pitfalls of Modern Daddydom

GROSS: In your book “NurtureShock” you cite a really interesting study that compared, quote, progressive dads, traditional dads and disengaged dads, in their styles of parenting. What is meant by progressive dads?

Mr. BRONSON: Well, these are the modern fathers who are co-parenting, who can change a diaper one-handed and pop up the port-a-crib in 30 seconds and know how to, you know, feed the baby and put the baby to bed and are very actively involved in their children’s lives.

GROSS: And a problem that emerged in this study is that the fathers who came under this category of progressive dad are having trouble – some of them, anyways, were having trouble disciplining their children. They didn’t want to hit their children or scream at them of course, but they weren’t sure what to do instead. What was the discomfort that they had with the idea of disciplining their children?

Mr. BRONSON: Progressive dads – they imagine this wonderful, you know, tight bond with their kids, and they haven’t really thought about the fact that disciplining their kid is going to be part of the job. And they don’t necessarily – they know how to be great to their kid and nice to their kid but they don’t necessarily have a strategy for disciplining. And as a result they experiment as discipliners. They – one day they’ll say well, you know, no dessert. And the next day they’ll act really mean to their kid or angry or offended, trying to show their kid what they’ve done is wrong. And then the next day they’ll withdraw some other privilege or say you have to go to bed early and it becomes very inconsistent.

And the science of disciplining your kids says the one mistake to make is to be inconsistent. Any form of consistent discipline is better than inconsistent discipline where you’re losing your cool and you’re confused. And as a result the children of progressive dads, when they were rated by teachers and others at their schools, were acting out or being just as aggressive as the children of disengaged dads…(NPR)

Read an excerpt from NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children.

Po Bronson’s New York Magazine archive.