I recently argued that we needed to use all the layers of Bruce Schneier’s Cooperative Pressure stackup to help kids (and workers) align with society. Each of these layers uses a different type of “pressure” to guide people into doing the right thing. Each pressure is distinct, and works better with different people at different times. Because people can be so different, and even the same person can be different at different times, we need to use all the layers to grow a good society and good people.
My post didn’t really cover how to use those layers though. Here I’m going to talk about ways that I think are good for guiding kids to do what’s right. I have two kids and I’ve done a lot of tutoring, but I’m not a teacher or a child psychologist. This post is my best guess, but don’t take it as gospel.
At a high level, I’m mostly thinking about ways to give kids structure. Give them a lot when they need it, while also helping them learn and grow into people who need less structure overall.
The main ways I think of giving kids structure and motivating them are:
- moral pressure: help kids see the good in what you want them to do
- social pressure: help kids see how what you’re asking for helps their friends, or helps them to connect with others
- institutional pressure: help kids see how following a rule will get them a reward that they want
- security: physically prevent a kid from doing something harmful
I’ll give examples of how to use each of these below. If you want a more official discussion of (some of) this from a different perspective, I recommend Playful Parenting as a general guide to helping kids grow.
Where are you taking your kid?
Before diving into different ways you can motivate your kid, or apply pressure to change their behavior, let’s talk about why you’d want to do this in the first place. My goal as a parent is to raise my kids up into capable, hard working, kind, curious, happy people. I want them to become people that I want to know and be friends with. I want them to thrive.
Much of parenting is helping kids to adjust their understanding of the world and their behavior so that they can thrive within the society they were born into. That means helping them grow and change and learn skills in order to do things that they don’t yet understand are valuable. In order to do that, we want to create a bridge from their current behavior to more virtuous and useful behavior.
This sounds very generic, and that’s because every kid and every family is different. The kid’s current behavior might be screaming every question they have, in which case we want a bridge that leads them to use indoor voices and wait for appropriate times to ask questions. The kid’s behavior might be showing frustration by hitting, in which case we want a bridge that leads them to using their words to describe their problems and negotiate. Every situation will be different.
The commonality between all these situations is that we need the bridge we build away from misaligned behavior to be well anchored at both ends. Given the kid’s current values and understanding of the world, it needs to make sense for them to get on the bridge in the first place. We also want the bridge to lead them to a place they’re happy with, so that looking back on their lives they’re happy with how they ended up.
The Cooperative Pressures that I’ll talk about below are ways to anchor this bridge where the kids already are. They give a reason to the kid to change what they’re doing now, in the moment.
Anchoring the bridge at the other end depends on choosing the right goal. If you just want a kid to shut up, you can force them to change by using the pressures here. The bridge you build that way won’t lead somewhere the kid will like, and that will cause problems for them and for the whole family.
I think most (all?) parents have a felt sense for what it would look like for their kids to thrive. It’s worth spending some time thinking about that and writing down what it looks like for your family. Then when you’re parenting, you can use these cached thoughts to help guide the exact ways that you use each of the pressures.
For me, seeing my kids thrive means seeing them take charge of their own needs. It means they get their own snacks, eventually make their own dinners. It means they can talk with us and their friends about how they’re feeling, and ask for help when they need it. It means they can share their opinions openly and honestly, but do so while respecting those around them. It means they offer to help their friends. It means they work hard, and that they can play and have fun. That’s the direction I want to guide my kids in.
Every kid is different, every day is different
What works for one kid one time may not work another time, or another kid. When addressing behavior problems, the first thing to do is look at what is actually happening right in the moment. This can be hard, because often parents can get really stressed out if their kid is misbehaving. Try to take a breath and then think about the underlying need for the kid. Not necessarily what they are explicitly asking for (though do pay attention to that), but what the emotional need is.
Are they looking for connection? Do they want more control of their decisions? It may be really hard to give them exactly what they’re asking for, but maybe you can help give them something that serves the same underlying need.
What the kid is doing also helps define what kind of pressure is best to bring to bear. A kid in full meltdown mode won’t be able to respond to rewards or punishments, even if they might want to otherwise.
One goal is to try to catch issues early, so that pressures higher on the stack are more effective. If a kid feels safe, in control, and connected to their family, then appeals to their own virtue are more likely to be effective.
When you have to intervene in issues where the kid is already highly emotional in some way, you can start out at a lower level of Schneier’s stack. If a kid is very young, very distracted, or very emotionally activated, you may have to physically prevent them from doing something harmful. As they become more able to think and pay attention, you can move up the stack to rules, connection, and virtue.
The key when picking how to motivate a kid is just to try something. If it doesn’t work, you can drop down a layer. When things start to work, try to go up a layer. It doesn’t matter if you pick wrong at first, just try to pay attention to how it’s working for the kid and adjust.
One thing you do want to do is maintain consistency. You need to be as virtuous, and as rule-following, as you’re asking your kids to be. That means that if you make a rule/reward agreement when your kid is upset, you need to follow through on it after they’re more calm when it might seem less necessary. It means only making agreements and rules that you can stand behind.
Cooperative Pressures
Keep in mind that you don’t have to use these in isolation. You can use multiple strategies from different layers, and lower layers can act as a backstop if higher layers aren’t enough at a given time. The layer that works best for your kid can change (up or down) over time and for different activities.
Security
Security here means physically preventing harmful actions. It can mean grabbing a kid’s arm before they can run into a busy street. It can mean carrying your kid to a sink so they can wash their dirty hands. It can mean moving hard objects out of the way while they scream and flail and kick their feet because they’re so upset.
When kids are small toddlers, security is basically all you have. They aren’t old enough to comprehend or remember rules about putting stuff in power sockets, so you have to secure the sockets to prevent it.
Similarly if older kids are very upset, they might be unable to listen and just need space to chill out. Once they’ve had time to calm down, they might be more able to respond to higher levels in the Trust Pressures stack.
No matter the kid’s age, security should be used as minimally as possible for that kid in that situation. When kids are very young a lot is required all the time, but as they age you can quickly move up to other methods.
Institutional Pressure
Institutional pressure is made up of the rules your family follows and the rewards and punishments related to those rules.
In general, rules work better when kids know about them beforehand. Pulling out some new rule by surprise is going to be hard for a kid to think about when they’re feeling overwhelmed. Obviously that will still happen a lot, but when it does it makes sense to talk about the rule more after the triggering situation has passed and when the kid is more centered.
When talking to kids about rules, try to:
- make the rule understandable to the kid
- make rewards and punishments proportional to the severity of the situation
- make rules that apply to everyone appropriately
- involve the kids in making rules, rewards, or punishments
- allow or encourage bargaining as long as things stay safe
It’s also ok for rules to be silly! My family has a rule that if my kids make a threatening motion towards their mom (like a punch or a kick in the air that’s pointed at her), then she makes a tickling motion back at them. The kids both love it and hate it. When it happens they giggle and shriek, then stop their violent motions.
Rewards can be very useful in short term situations, but you may not want to come to depend on them all the time. As an example, I spent a couple months giving my kid one chocolate chip for each word he wrote in his homework. That’s not sustainable long term, but it was a great backstop while we worked on the underlying reasons he was having trouble with his homework. As the reward was less necessary we slowly stopped the reward. It’s important to be honest and up front about this kind of shift with the kid. You can say something like “that reward was good, but now you’re a little more grown up and it’s time for something different.” If the kid wants to bargain and negotiate, that’s great! Bargain your way into a slow fade of the now superfluous reward.
Social Pressure
The way Schneier describes this is actually more of a “reputational pressure” of wanting people to think well of you. I want to expand that to more of a social pressure, where you want to have strong relationships with people in general (not just have a good reputation). I see this as the friendship and connection that can grow when two people are acting well towards each other. A desire for this growth in connection acts as a pressure towards that good action.
One thing you as a parent don’t want to do here is use your connection with your child as a bargaining chip. Social pressure is not institutional pressure, and your connection with your kid shouldn’t be a reward for their good behavior. I’m not advocating for emotional manipulation of any kind. I do think unconditional love and connection between a parent and their kid is good.
At the same time, you (the parent) are a person. You have feelings and needs that are as real as your kid’s, and those feelings and needs should be respected. It’s ok for you to feel upset if your kid is mean to you, or to feel proud and adoring when your kid does something really cool. All of those feelings are good, and it’s ok to act on them. The one trick is being careful so that any emotional baggage you have doesn’t fall on the kid if they happen to trigger it.
If a kid is yelling in your ear repeatedly, it’s ok to say “I love you but I don’t want to be near you if you do that”. This isn’t a threat, and your continued presence with them isn’t a reward. It’s boundary setting to maintain the health of the relationship.
Kids need connection. Real, honest connection. With their parents, their friends, their community members. You can provide that real, honest connection sometimes. You can be real about when you’re proud or excited by something they do. You can show them if you’re upset or hurt by something that they did. You can let them be motivated by that.
The way to use social pressure with your kid is through providing information. You can help them to understand how other people are likely to react to things. As an example, kids may not understand that screaming really loudly can upset others and push people away. Helping to explain that will let the natural social pressure influence with what the kid is doing.
Moral Pressure
Moral pressure is what pushes people to do something because it’s right. It’s the internal sense of virtue that people have. In order to act from a moral stance, kids need to be centered. It will be hard for a kid to act out of internal virtue if they are afraid, enraged, or feels no sense of control. For this reason, I think moral pressure is best taught before or after a behavioral situation, and not right when it’s happening.
Instilling virtue in children is one of the most important parts of parenting, so it’s frustrating that it’s hardest in the moments where it’s most salient. I think it’s almost always worth calling out the moral dimension of any dilemma, but I’ll usually fall back to another kind of pressure pretty quickly. Once an issue is resolved and my kid is more calm or connected, I can return to the moral dimension and talk about other ways to resolve that kind of issue when it comes up again.
One thing I really liked from Hunt, Gather, Parent was the heavy emphasis on stories. Tell your kids stories about people who show the virtues you want to instill. Talk about those stories extensively. Find ways to connect their current behavior to stories they already know.
When kids are really young, you can make the stories into little monster tales about bad behavior. Hunt, Gather, Parent gives the example of telling your kid there’s a monster in the lake in order to get them to stay away from the water. In our family we told stories about mold-monsters that would eat the couch if you poured juice on the couch, or ant-monsters that would eat the house if you left crumbs on the floor. These types of stories help to make abstract or difficult to explain risks legible to young kids.
I have friends who hate this idea, and consider these types of monster stories to be lying to kids. While I do think there are bad ways of doing this, I don’t think telling monster stories is automatically bad. In particular, I think that very often the goal is to communicate abstract risks or abstract values to kids that are too young to really get it. A three year old kid doesn’t understand the risk of falling in a lake and drowning, but they grasp the risk of monsters very quickly. They don’t understand how mold grows, or how gross having ants in the kitchen is. But they do understand a monster that could get them.
When my family used this strategy, our kids would sometimes ask us if the monsters were real. We would often say something like “mold monsters aren’t real, but mold could grow.” If they had asked about a lake monster, we would have admitted right away that it wasn’t real. But the story explains the risk. The idea of a mold monster did get our kids to stop dripping their juice on the couch, even thought we weren’t trying to get them to truly believe in the monster.
It’s also important to keep updating how you talk with kids about values over time. You shouldn’t be warning a 14 year old away from a lake due to monsters. Just like at some point a kid discovers that the real Santa is the love they have for their family and friends, they’ll eventually learn that the real lake monster is inability to swim and the real mold monster is just mold.
When you talk to your kids about risk, values, and virtues, do so in a way that connects to what they’re able to process and think about now. As they grow, you’ll keep finding situations to readdress those same values and risks, and you can adjust each time to where your kid is currently at.
Alfie Kohn talks about using the 3 Cs of Content, Collaboration, and Choice to help instill goodness in kids.
Content is what you’re asking of kids. Are you asking to do something actually important and worthwhile? Are you upset over something real, or over something that doesn’t really impact anyone? Is the content of our request understandable by our kid right here and now, given how they’re feeling? Coming up with good content is why I earlier suggested that you write down explicitly what it looks like for your kid to thrive. It can be easy to push a kid in a wrong direction out of frustration, so pay attention to content in order to avoid this.
Collaboration means that kids need to be involved in deciding what they do. If they aren’t actively deciding on their own actions, then they aren’t acting out of virtue or an internal moral sense. Sometimes this is totally fine, but as parents we do want to instill the moral sense. That means that sometimes your kid needs to be doing things that they decide on, not you. Collaboration can be weak, such as explaining why it’s important that a kid follow some rule. Collaboration can be strong, such as when parents encourage their kids to help make a plan for how to fix some problem.
Choice is also connected with collaboration. Letting the kid decide what to do lets them exercise their virtue. They exercise it in the sense of enacting virtue, but also in the sense of strengthening their virtue. They need to choose it, and you as a parent need to set up opportunities for them to make those choices.
Social Pressure Connection
Let’s return to the social pressure layer of Schneier’s stack. It’s much more important for parent/child relationships than it is for the relationships that Schneier discusses in his book.
To get a sense for how important, let’s look at Playful Parenting’s advice. That book makes the argument that kids really have two axes for their emotional needs: connection and agency. We need connection and agency in order to support teaching virtue. Kohn would phrase it as collaboration and choice. The connection is critical to supporting kids in figuring out how they want to act. They need to be able to work through different ideas and try them on, to find the idea that fits the situation. Trying on new ideas is way more comfortable when you have the support of a family member right there with you.
When kids feel connected, it will be much easier for them to hear your asks. It will be easier for them to activate their own preexisting moral virtues. This is why it’s so important that connection not be a reward. That undercuts their ability to actually engage with you.
Play
There’s a lot more to be said about how to do all of the above well. In particular, as you approach all of these pressures it’s best to try to do so with a sense of play. Make jokes. Make up games about what you’re trying to teach them to do. Make up fake rules for kids to break. Make up goofy rewards and punishments for minor real rules.
This may sound like a lot of work, but you can let your kid guide it with their own sense of humor. Just “yes, and…” when you can.
Play is a major way that kids think. Playing with your kids will help them to understand the rules, and why they’re there. With kids, more serious means less thought. To get them thinking, get them playing.
I’ve already recommended Playful Parenting, and I’ll do so again here because I think it’s such a good book for giving examples of how to approach interactions with your kid in general.