What is the purpose of your program? Many of you approach your program as if the goal were to check off a lot of boxes. That’s not the goal. The goal is to produce change. It’s easy to lose track of where we are going and to get lost in the process. As you are looking at your one thing, think about goals. Think about those important things that we are trying to change or develop and focus and work with intention.

Intention is working with a targeted mental focus for the purpose of producing a specific future change.

One of the most glaring things I see when reviewing program videos are folks obviously working without intention, which results in very slow progress. I wouldn’t want to count all the processing videos I have watched that made me want to scream. As most of you know, developing processing skills is rather foundational and really important. You should also know that even an incremental change in processing results in wonderful things, like better understanding, increased language, increase in global maturity, improved behavior, and better cognition-global change! Understanding this importance, many families justly prioritize their processing activities; but what I often see are parents doing the activities without a lot of intensity, which means they are doing it without intention. I often have to pay very close attention to the videos to determine if the child is getting the sequences right or wrong because watching the feedback from the parent or helper, there wasn’t much difference in the response, whether the sequence was done correctly or not. Without quality feedback and reinforcement your child isn’t even going to know what the goal is and certainly is not going to be working with intention.

To digress a tad, on my last trip to our Cincinnati chapter, where I work out of a hotel that sits on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River, just across from the city of Cincinnati, I renewed my perspective on intention and intensity. Often on these trips I take a little walk along the river after I have my dinner and before I go back to my room to address more emails. Looking across the river I can see both the Cincinnati football and baseball stadiums. The Ohio River is a big river, and although the stadiums sit close to the river’s edge, they are still quite a way away. During the baseball season the Cincinnati Reds play, and during the football season the Cincinnati Bengals play. If I happen to be out in the evening and a game is being played, there is absolutely no question if someone gets a hit or a homerun or a team scores a touchdown. On this last trip, I was walking and looking out at the stadium when a touchdown was scored by the Bengals. The roar of the crowd from where I was across the river was almost deafening, and then the sky lit up with fireworks. The intention is to win the game, and it is understood that to win the game you need to get hits or advance the ball on the football field. The fans react with intensity to each of these events. There is no question of the intention of the players or the fans. It is also not surprising that teams in cities with good fans who help generate intensity and keep the players focused on the intention do well.

The goal of working on processing is to raise the processing level, preferably quickly. Watching these videos, it becomes blatantly obvious that more often than not the intention is to complete the activity and check off the box. I’m sure as the parent pushes themselves and their child through the activity, they think that they just need to do this another few hundred or thousand times and their child will move forward and ultimately, they probably will. But if we address not only processing activities, but also everything we do with our kids with intention, we can meet our goals faster, and generally much, much faster.

As an example of how we can create intention, I will at times do processing activities with criteria. What this means is that rather than doing a processing activity for a specific duration, such as a minute or two, we do the activity with a target. For example, if we are just starting to get auditory digit spans of five, working with criteria we will let the child know that the goal of the session is to get a five. As soon as they get a five, we have a party and the session ends. Their intention is no longer just to cooperate, to try or pretend that they are trying; it is to get a five! And our intention is no longer to check off a box, it is to get a five. It can be amazing to see how much faster we can move forward when the intention is clearly defined, and the child is receiving good feedback.

One of keys to focus and intention is data and attention to detail. If you are working on teaching your child to identify pictures, read words, recognize numbers, or complete a math process, you can only work with intention if you know where you are and where you are going. For example, if you are trying to develop your child’s sight word vocabulary you need to know what they know. Perhaps you have shown them 50 new words over a month or so. How many do they know? If I were flashing them the words, I would periodically stop on a word and ask them what it was or start a review session by testing a few words. I would mentally keep track of how many of the words they know, about what percentage they know, and even what types of words. Armed with some data we can do a number of things. If you provide your coach and evaluator with the data, they can make recommendations to do everything from change frequencies and durations, to how many new words are being introduced, to what kinds of words to introduce, or even to putting it away for a while. If the data is simply that we have checked off x number of boxes over these weeks, that doesn’t really help us reach our goal. The intention of every session should be to succeed, to teach your child to read more words; and to do that within each session, you need to be gathering data and work with intention.

Intention is every bit as important for every other aspect of program, whether we are teaching a child to walk properly, to track better, or to love looking at pictures. With absolutely every activity we do, we need to be mindful of what we are trying to achieve; and we need to be observant and constantly adjusting, modifying, and gathering data. Our intention is to produce new function, new abilities and to change your child’s life one piece, one step at a time.

I find intention to be a fascinating neurological phenomenon. You can consciously start doing something with intention, but then your brain appears to learn to apply it without conscious effort. As an example, through the years I have had children read short non-fiction articles as part of their program, primarily to improve reading comprehension. Generally, it would appear to the parent who was working with the child during the day that the child was engaged, and since we were working to develop reading comprehension, that they were actually reading to learn. I would on occasion have the parents do an experiment. The experiment was quite simple: at dinner after everyone had sat at the table, but before anyone was allowed to start eating, I would have the child’s father ask them what the story they had read earlier was about. Many parents were shocked when they discovered that their child couldn’t even remember the subject, let alone any of the content. A common answer from children to the question, “What did you learn at school today?” is “Nothing.” If the family repeated this for a few days, the child would start remembering more and more about the story; and if the parents randomly asked the dinner question, the child would usually maintain their new intention, which was not just to read the story, listen to the story, and answer specific questions immediately after reading the story, but to learn and try to retain the information. After the first couple of days I’m sure the child, when they sat down to do their story, was not consciously thinking, “I need to remember this because Dad is going to ask me about it at dinner.” The child’s brain had changed and was applying greater intensity to recalling the information on an ongoing basis. Your brain adapts and changes and even generalizes intention. Very cool!

One Final Note on Intention

Parents generally work with a child with better intention than anyone who is paid. As a parent there are a lot of things you could do with your day rather than work with your child. You don’t do it because you’re getting paid; and actually, many of you could be out doing things for pay if you weren’t home working with your child. You do what you do because your intention is to help your child. Even for you it can be tough keeping your focus and working each activity with the needed intention.

If you are having people help with program implementation or even sending your child to school or therapy, the issue of intention becomes significantly greater. If working with a child or children is a job, often the job is defined as implementing specific methods as best you can. Not a bad objective, but it’s not the right objective. The intention should be to produce results—good results and fast results. One of the frustrations I face every day of my life is educators, therapists, and even physicians applying the same methodologies day after day and week after week and year after year, in spite of that fact that they haven’t worked or haven’t worked well or worked fast enough. It is easy for people to get stuck in the rut of “this is what we do and how we do it and so be it,” regardless of the results or lack of.

Sorry for the little digression—back to program helpers. It is more difficult for people getting paid to help with program to achieve and maintain the proper intention than it is even for parents. As parents and bosses and supervisors, part of your job is to train your helpers well, clearly define the intention, quiz them on the data, and tie their efforts to achievement of the intended results, not checking off boxes. You might find it interesting to note that historically volunteers do a better job maintaining intention than people who are paid, and often the more people are paid, the poorer job they do of program implementation and working with intention. Obviously there are exceptions, but if you are not getting paid or if the pay is minimal, it is more likely that the primary goal it to help the child.

On occasions where we have had siblings help with program, we encourage good intention not by paying the kids or even rewarding them for their time, but for results. It has been fun watching how fast things can change if we do something like, “When Johnny can do two 5s in row, we are all going to go out for dinner and to a movie.” Everyone’s intention is tied to their successfully hitting the target.

Fifty years ago, when I started doing this work, I heard comments such as, “You must be a very patient person,” or, “You need a lot of patience to work with handicapped children.”

I’m not a patient person. To the contrary, I’m quite impatient, which is why I am constantly creating and looking for better ways to do everything. My intention is, and your intention needs to be, to be impatient, to work with intention, and to make it right, make it better, and to improve your child’s life. With our joint focus and intention and, yes, some impatience, we can do it.

Reprinted by permission of The NACD Foundation, Volume 32 No. 1, 2019 ©NACD

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One of the most common words children hear is the word “no.” I have heard parents spew it out like bullets being fired from machine guns at the same frequency and with what often sounds like similar intent.

Working with parents and their children educationally and developmentally can be challenging, but not much makes this tougher than an out of control child or a child who just will not listen to their parents.

The vast majority of behavior/compliance issues revolve around the lack of parental credibility. How do parents lose credibility? The easiest and most common way parents lose their credibility is using the word “no” and not properly defining it.

How do you think most children, be they six months old or sixteen years old, define “no” as spoken by a parent? It could mean Mom or Dad is saying, “Stop it for now,” “I don’t like it,” or perhaps, “later,” or that it is just the noise that they make when they’re in a bad mood. It rarely is defined as, “Don’t do that! Period. As in, never!” The word “no” is defined for a child by the consequences, or lack of such, that follow its use. Imagine that two parents sitting and having a conversation while their children are bickering and arguing. The parents feel that it is their responsibility to stop or intervene in their children’s inappropriate behavior, so they interrupt their conversation every few seconds to say or yell, “No” or “Cut it out” or “If you don’t stop I’m going to….” Even if there is ultimately a consequence, which probably doesn’t happen because the kids just ultimately stop on their own accord and move on to something else, the consequence is non-effective. And, unfortunately, if there is a consequence, it is actually perceived by the child as being unfair. Why? Because, in a variety of ways you told your child “no” without an action or consequence. Each time you use “no” in one of its versions without a consequence, the children are defining it as essentially meaningless, so they perceive your ultimate response as unfair! You are not following the definition as you have actually defined the word for them. In reality their brains have interpreted your lack of reaction or consequence as the definition (you don’t like it, but so what; or you have been ignoring me and now I have your attention), and your inconsistent reaction does not fit the definition, and thus it’s unfair. And they are correct.

Never say “no”, unless you are going to physically stop the offending behavior or deliver a consequence.

In the previous example the parents would have been much better off and maintained some credibility if they had just simply ignored what the kids were doing. Or they could have said “no” once, as they intervened and/or provided some immediate consequence.

Many parents are on a quest to find bigger and better punishments because “nothing works.” The truth is that inconsistency doesn’t work. So the issue isn’t that you are using the wrong consequence. You simply are being inconsistent. Sadly, after you have successfully taught your children not to believe you and you have lost your credibility and have tried many different “unfair” consequences, you may need to use consistent, big consequences for them to understand that the game has changed. But if you need those big consequences, don’t blame the children; blame yourself.

Parents: If you are consistent, you don’t need Teddy Roosevelt’s proverbial “big stick.” Your consistency becomes that big stick. It is, however, a good idea to speak softly and let your actions, not your tone, define your meaning.

Reprinted by permission of The NACD Foundation, Volume 31 No. 7, 2018 ©NACD

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All of those who attended the seminar are now familiar with positive environment and how to establish it in the home. We define a positive environment as one in which the ratio of four positive responses exists to every one negative response the child receives. The implications of a positive environment are extremely numerous; in effect it encompasses much more than just a child’s performance of his daily duties. It affects his entire attitude, self-image, and his relationship with his family and peers. It is virtually impossible to establish a positive environment in the home without the collection and use of data.

Many families have attempted to establish a positive environment and failed for various reasons. They have given up or delayed the program simply because of one minor setback or of a loss of temper that instilled the idea of futility in their minds. Realize now that it is impossible for one to be consistently perfect. For families to operate under the assumption that they will never say anything negative or lose their temper, is a farce. No one is continually positive or 100% perfect. Children err and look to their parents for correction. With the data-based program it is possible to establish realistic goals and to keep track of the child’s progress. Achievement of initial goals allows the introduction of higher goals, that will eventually enable the family to realize the four-to-one ratio of positive to negative responses.

It is not unusual to discover a family where the ratio is one positive to twenty negative. Obviously, in this type of environment a ratio of four positive to one negative is out of the question. A more realistic approach would be to establish a one positive to five negative ratio for the initial week. After accomplishing this goal, then begin establishing a 2-3 ratio and so on until reaching the four positive to one negative goal.

After establishing the goal, data becomes a priority to find out if goals are being achieved. There is no way during daily activities to accurately decide whether you are meeting your goals if data is not accurately kept. We have found “time sampling” to be extremely helpful in this data collection. Time sampling is merely picking a particular time during the day and keeping data for those specific time periods. This is more time efficient than carrying around paper and pencil twenty-four hours a day. Use this established time as the specific period in which to review your data. You cannot use the dinner hour one day and breakfast the next. There should also be a reinforcement involved in reaching one’s goal.

The data collected by the parent measures the responses. She should also create a means of reward for the child having reached his or her goals. If the children are negative to each other and are actively engaged in trying to become more positive, parents should collect data from them and enact the reward-reinforcement theory.
Again define reward: it is a response to a behavior that increases the frequency of that behavior. Whereas a punishment is a consequence to a behavior that decreases the frequency of that behavior. Establish a reward for a child obtaining a ratio of positive to negative with siblings and parents. If the reward is indeed a reward, the child’s behavior will become more positive.

Merely attempting to develop a positive environment is, without a doubt, the most important and significant step in creating a proper home environment. In an appropriate home environment, you can eliminate most of a child’s negative behavior. The child will then strive to achieve more positive behavior in order to obtain more praise and attention from the parental unit. There will still often be specific negative behavior that the family needs to identify and correct. Again the starting point for the elimination of this behavior is collection of data.

The first step in altering a child’s behavior through punishment or reward is to collect what is called base line data. To properly collect this data, establish a specific time period (approximately a week) and collect information on the frequency of that behavior within that specific period. For the base line data you are interested in how often the behavior occurs with you not responding any different to that behavior than you previously had. Once the information is documented, take steps in a corrective direction toward changing the behavior. Using the charting method you can discover if corrective measures are producing the desired effect.

If the behavior is one that you totally wish to eliminate and a form of punishment has been devised, through our compiling and documentation of the data, a marked decrease in the frequency of that specific behavior should be revealed. When such results are perceptively noticeable, we are reinforced with the knowledge that our efforts are bearing fruit. If we persevere in our program we will quite possibly eliminate the undesirable behavior.

Reprinted from the Journal of The NACD Foundation (formerly The National Academy for Child Development)

Reprinted by permission of The NACD Foundation, Volume 4 No. 2, 1983 ©NACD

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Minute for minute, the single strongest influence on a child’s development is that of his or her father. Whether that influence be positive or negative, constructive or destructive, helpful or unhelpful, is largely determined by the father’s knowledge, awareness, and true involvement.

Through my work with children and families, the status of fathers has been spelled out over and over again. The unfortunate truth is that most fathers have only a peripheral involvement with their children. Another truth is that in those families where the father is actively involved with his wife and children, the dynamics are dramatically different. The results are easily observable in the children’s self-images, rate of development and behavior. Unfortunately, it often appears that the greater the need for the father’s involvement, the less of it there is. If the child is well, happy, succeeding in school, sports, etc., the involvement tends to be high. In families with handicapped children, children with learning or behavioral problems where the need for paternal involvement is high, the involvement is often conspicuously low.

It is tragic that so many fathers miss what is potentially the most rewarding experience of their lives because of such excuses as “It’s a woman’s job to take care of the children. I’m too busy. It’s all I can do just to earn a living and pay bills. My wife and I just don’t agree, so I just stay out of it. I don’t know how.”

My goal is not to blame or add fuel to an existing family feud, but to assist the father in determining where he is, where he can be, to provide some very specific means with which to become a positive influence upon their children, that is, to identify the “process. ”

Because of the apparent complexities of the issues, many aspects of our lives appear to be beyond our abilities to make significant changes. Being unable to identify the specifics, we are unable to approach the problem in an orderly, logical manner. We make an effort, generally one lacking in focus, fail and back away from the problem. As with most issues, there are a few basics which, if identified and adhered to, greatly simplify the problems. In dealing with our families and children, we bring to the problem all of our childhood training and experiences, our cultural bias, thousands upon thousands of previous discussions and thoughts, as well as a plethora of conflicting ideas and approaches which we have heard or been exposed to in the past. Attempting to sift through the mess often only leaves us with confusion.

One of the world’s greatest minds, R. Buckminster Fuller, defined thinking as the dismissal of irrelevancies. In defining the various processes interacting in our homes and schools, I have attempted to identify steps involved in producing a positive change. It is important to look at the “process” objectively and as a whole before attacking the “what ifs, but ifs, and but I’s.”

Process Fathering Step 1 – Agreement Between Husband & Wife

Agreement between husbands and wives is often difficult, particularly when it comes to how to handle the children. I would suggest to the wife who is looking for her husband’s support and involvement that she does not attempt to get it by taking an inflexible stand on “her” way of handling things. No one “knows” when it comes to children, we only “think.” When one only thinks and doesn’t really know, it is wise to be flexible. Many different approaches can work if parents work together and are reasonably consistent. Both parents should be openminded, agree upon a game plan, and try it for a specific length of time. Later they should evaluate the results and either continue with what appears to be a winning plan or go to plan B, C, or D. The important thing is to do it together. Share the effort and the responsibility and be patient. Fathers often become impatient because their homes do not run as their offices. Unlike homes, offices are very single-minded. We should neither expect our homes to run like our offices, nor want them to do so.

Step 2 – One to One Time with Your Children

Many fathers never establish a relationship with their children. In the work world, pecking orders are established in groups but relationships are only established one to one. If you want to get to know someone you work with, you have lunch together, meet socially, etc. You get together on a one to one basis. The same factors are true of our home. Every child in the family needs to spend one to one time with his or her father. The one to one time can come while running out to the store, playing catch, “helping” with homework, etc. Relationships are established with quality time not by quantity of exposure. It is important to structure time preferably on a daily basis but at least weekly with each of your children, and make it positive.

Step 3 – Positive Family Unit Time

You want your home to be a good place to be, a place your children want to be. You want family outings and activities to be positive experiences. If possible, family projects and activities should involve every member of the family. Family unit activities can range from church attendance and participation to family fishing trips, raising animals, skiing, etc. Whatever the activity, you must make it positive. A family outing with the dictator getting on everyone’s case is not a positive family experience. Structure weekly activities.

Step 4 – Positive Intensity

To mothers, fathers often appear to have an unfair advantage. Mother can tell the child something a thousand times without apparent effect. The father, however, can say it once and produce an immediate response. Such is a father’s intensity. That intensity can be utilized to help eliminate negative behaviors but, more importantly, to build new positive behaviors. Father’s influence can encourage a child to do anything from liking spelling to enjoying taking out the garbage. Those things which elicit a strong positive response from fathers motivate children. The father who is actively involved with his child, who can identify when that intense positive influence is necessary, can dramatically effect his child’s development, education, and values.

Step 5 – Assume a Specific Responsibility

Fathers should assume the primary responsibility for some specific activity of the child. The specific activity could be homework, a specific aspect of a home rehabilitation program, an outside activity such as scouts, etc. The assumption of such a responsibility affords the father the opportunity to understand the ongoing responsibilities that his wife faces as well as helps create the opportunity for the one to one involvement with the child.

Step 6 – Maintain a Positive Environment

The final, but in many ways most important, part of the process is to maintain a positive balance of responses within the home. Simply stated, this means that more positive strokes than negative strokes must be given. Keep it positive!

Reprinted by permission of The NACD Foundation, Volume 7 No. 12, 1986 ©NACD

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Children often don’t behave as parents would like. Most parents suspect that if they reacted differently toward their children, their behavior would improve, but parents don’t know where to start. The first step is to identify the factors causing the problems. There are three major causes of behavior problems to watch for and eliminate:

• A negative environment
• A lack of structure
• An absence of constructive and positive feedback

The single-most effective method to improve a child’s behavior is to establish a positive environment. Additionally, the best way to teach a child correct ways of behavior is to increase the positive intensity of parental input.

Children primarily crave intensity, but parents tend to give the most intense reactions in negative situations. In fact, when a child’s behavior is difficult, parents commonly react with such negative intensity that it gets the sharp attention of everyone in the household. Intense positive reactions, on the other hand, are extremely rare. Because children do what works, parents are often confronted with persistent misbehavior. Frequently, for example, a mother might find her children pushing and pushing her with disobedience until she feels she could explode. She might even misinterpret the child’s motive as hate or some other negative feeling. What the child is really expressing is his or her need for an intense reaction.

In a positive environment, children engage in positive behavior because that is what works. In most children’s environments, the frequency and intensity of negative interactions far outweigh the positive. Nearly all parents give ten negative responses for every positive response. To create a truly positive environment, parents must give children at least four positive responses for every negative response.

Achieving a positive environment cannot be accomplished overnight. Information must be collected, and reasonable goals must be set and then updated. The parents may be used to expecting—and then ignoring—appropriate actions from their children. Parents must teach themselves to notice and reward the good things their children do. Moreover, when their child exhibits a positive behavior, parents need to make themselves comfortable with jumping up and down, In other words, parents must learn to use the same enthusiasm to praise the child that they formerly reserved for criticizing.

Within a structured home environment, a child often performs the day’s routine tasks without objection. However, it is not unusual for discipline to fall apart a little when schoolchildren are on summer vacation. Lacking the routine and structure of a set school schedule, children may turn once undisputed chores into the objects of a running battle. When the schedule is clear and positively supported, a child’s behavior becomes set. If children know that breakfast is only served at a certain time, they learn to be at the table by that time without argument. When an activity becomes negotiable, the parent’s authority is challenged. So often the behavior youngsters get away with varies considerably with the kind of day the parent is having. Since children have a level of concentration and a single-minded motivation that parents lack, a child’s singular determination not to clean his or her room will frequently triumph.

Following are some steps parents can take to create structure:

• Define activities that are not negotiable.
• Decide which behaviors will not be tolerated.
• Make the child aware of these restrictions by providing consistent, appropriate feedback.

This cannot be overstated: After setting expectations parents must explain those expectations to their children—clearly and specifically—and then enforce the rules. Telling children something as vague as, “Behave yourselves while I’m gone,” immediately causes anxiety levels to rise.

Also, ignoring jumping on the couch one day and severely punishing for it the next confuses the child. The expected behavior is no longer clear. When parents accept different behavior from time to time, the child will constantly test their boundaries. Not only does this lead to tension and arguments between parents and children, but it can also contribute to a building inner anxiety because the child can sense no firm limits.

Parents must consider possible reactions from children before acting and limit the number of actions or behaviors defined as nonnegotiable. Parents should schedule an activity a child sees as negative right before a positive activity. Parents ought to choose activities that can be enforced but do not require much positive attitude or concentrated initiative by the child. Here’s an example. Schedule chores to be done right after school, then allow a snack, television, or play only after the job is done. If an activity is required of a child daily, be prepared to enforce that activity. Never allow the issue to be negotiated. Learning should not be in this category. Reading, and anything else parents want a child to love, must be encouraged by a lot of positive input, not with forced compliance.

To be effective managers, parents must have realistic expectations and a structure of enforcement, reinforcement, and consequences. Children who learn that disobedience always results in the same consequence stop testing that rule. As a result, children feel secure within the appropriate boundaries parents have established. Parents must also reevaluate practices and punishments to be sure that what is being used is actually decreasing negative behavior and promoting a positive environment. Otherwise, it isn’t a punishment, but just another ineffective negative in the child’s environment. Make what is expected of a child explicitly defined. Be consistent in offering positive reactions to good behavior and in punishing unacceptable actions. Achieving a positive environment is a process of fulfillment.

Reprinted from the Journal of The NACD Foundation (formerly The National Academy for Child Development)

Reprinted by permission of The NACD Foundation, Volume 4 No. 1, 1983 ©NACD

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