When your child keeps failing at something and can't things get right: using empowerment zones to help them grow beyond constant failures (Pt. 1)
When kids constantly struggle with some task or action, they need a ladder to help to get out of the hole. There are helpful, simple ways for parents to do this--as well as some traps to avoid.
Hi everyone!
I’m back. The play was charming and I was happy with how it turned out. I also had a pretty unique situation where all of our children, their spouses, and our grandchildren came out to visit for a week. It was a joyful time!
Today I want to talk a little bit about what I like to think of as empowerment zones and explain why I think they are a powerful tool for helping your child—and for helping you help your child.
We all are familiar with the concept of a comfort zone, where we can operate with ease and comfort. And we all know some things are well beyond us: places we simply cannot operate at all.
But, somewhere in between is a sweet spot, a place just beyond our comfort zone where, with some extra support or help, we could act—thereby stretching our abilities.
This is an adaptation of something called the Zone of Proximal Development, which was positive by a Russian educational theorist named Vygotsky.
The idea is simple but very powerful.
While not without some detractors, Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development undergirds a lot of our educational practice today and is a really useful concept for parents and teachers alike. I use it all the time and find it to be incredibly helpful in organizing my attempts to help someone grow.
In education, we talk a great deal about scaffolding, which might be thought of as the extra support or help we give to move a student from what they can currently do to the next level—it’s a structure we build that helps them reach a little higher than they could on their own.
While we might be talking about academics at school, this concept applies to anything we are trying to help our children learn, do, or improve, at home, school, or anywhere else.
The problem most of us have is that we see the place our child is and we see where they are not, and we want to move them from Zone A to Zone C while skipping Zone B. And, in doing that, we don’t provide the proper support, or scaffolding, to help them. This sets us—and them—up for frustration.
So when your child is having trouble consistently with a concept, a behavior, or something more practical, such as remembering to do homework or doing chores, if they are forgetting materials or having social problems, or any number of things, one way to address this is by carefully exploring where your child's ZPD is.
In other words, what can your child currently do for themself? What do you want them to be able to do? What are the support, structures, and assistance that you can provide to help them grow? The idea is to create experiences that will be good stretches, but not break them.
A few case studies
While these examples are very specific, the principles can be adapted to nearly any situation where a parent is trying to get their child to grow into more productive or helpful behaviors or patterns.
1: A happy example:
A friend of mine has a wonderful child who has some learning differences, some of which are moderate and some of which are fairly significant.
My friend's child is also, like other children, prone to be lazy, tends to procrastinate, and would rather have fun than study.
My friend struggled to know when, and on what occasions, he should push and hold accountable, and when he should show grace and understanding. Over many years they had a lot of tension and conflict about school.
Eventually, the child had a comprehensive battery of tests done that outlined what was realistic given the child’s learning differences, what the child could not do, and what the child could fairly be expected to do, along with some recommendations for how to do this.
This was incredibly empowering for my friend because he now knew when he should hold his child accountable, where he should extend grace, and when and how he should offer help. He knew what the child was capable of doing. For example, he knew that procrastination was a choice. The child was capable of doing work, this was within the zone she could control. He also knew that helping make sure the was organized was important because that was something the child was not capable of doing.
So, holding the child accountable, but also helping create a routine and a system to help with keeping materials organized and recording assignments, etc., was critical.
We may not always have such an obvious need, nor do we always have a battery of tests that will conveniently answer every question and give recommendations for us in every situation.
But if we sit down and do a clear-eyed analysis of our child, we can likely think about this. Where are their social, academic, relational, and practical Zones of Proximal Development?
A sad example
When I was a child, we didn't know about ADHD. It turns out I have it. And like most things, I don't do much by half. So I have a pretty major ADHD.
Now, what I'm going to tell you is not meant to be a criticism of anyone, because we didn't know it back then. We didn't know what it was or that it existed. So I'm not being critical, but I do want to make a point.
It became obvious very early on that I was bright and had the ability, according to the teachers, but my effort and execution didn't match my potential. I was easily distracted, I rarely stuck to anything, and I was not interested in doing good or quality work.
That's a really hard thing for parents and teachers to manage, especially when there's no name for it. Well-meaning people tried to help over the years.
The school counselor suggested to my mom that I get a small notebook, carry it around, and write down everything I needed to do. It makes sense, right? A lot of people use that method to great effect, even as adults.
However, the problem was that I always lost or misplaced the notebook. I never remembered to have it with me. So this was not a helpful solution. The counselor’s solution was logical, but well outside of my ZPD.
This is a real danger. We often come up with solutions that make sense for adults but don’t help the child, or that are impractical and don’t work in the real world.
So, when that didn’t work, and my grades declined all the more, I was given a paper to take to my teachers each Friday afternoon. It had a space for each class, and they were to fill it out for their class and indicate my current grade and if I had missed assignments.
However, in the public school I attended, by the time I got to my locker for my last class, got the paper, and started making the rounds, the teachers were gone: their doors locked and the lights turned out.
I would then get in trouble because I hadn't got my sheet signed. I would tell my mom that no one was there and she would tell the counselor and the counselor would tell her that I was mistaken and they were there.
But they were not! I even braved going into the forbidden territory of the Teacher’s Lounge, but they weren’t there either.
Again, with the best of intentions, this was not a setup that was going to help me. It sounded so good and logical to adults, but it was just a bridge far beyond my ability and power.
So, we have to think carefully about what we ask of our kids as we try to help them grow and move to a new place.
The difference between unhelpful reminders, helicopter parent-style rescuing, and helpful scaffolding
I'm a big proponent of stepping back and letting our kids manage more of their lives. I think most of us instinctively and impulsively overparent—that is our default setting and it is causing harm to our kids, collectively.
I also believe that children learn, as we all do, by making mistakes and facing consequences they don’t want to experience again.
So I don't think parents should jump in to rescue them. We should not be working to cushion our child from the consequences of their mistakes. Nor should be the ones actively trying to keep them from making mistakes, for example, by bringing things to school or instinctively intervening in challenges and difficulties that come their way.
But we do need to be attentive to the zone that the child is operating in. Someone who never brings their homework home needs help coming up with a plan to bring their homework home. But the plan has to make sense for them and it has to be realistic and it has to address the root of the problem.
The plan can’t simply be to tell the child to do it more emphatically. Nor, will punishments work very well—or even incentives.
On the other hand, the plan cannot simply be trying to make someone else do something different to accommodate our child. That is not helping them grow from one zone to another. That merely tries to stretch their comfort zone to include more and more areas of their lives, and that is seriously deleterious to their growth.
If the child never remembers anything, then just telling them to remember, or punishing them for lapses, isn't going to do much good.
Perhaps a daily checklist would be useful. Or a pre-flight checklist where, before leaving for school, the child puts things in their backpack while a parent watches….there could be lots of possible ways to help the child.
So, if a child keeps leaving their gym clothes or band instrument at home and is losing points, the answer is not to try to get the PE teacher or band instructor to change their policy. That is simply trying to extend the child’s comfort zone and it’s going to keep them from growing. If the plan consists of trying to make someone else change to accommodate your child, it’s a big red flag. (N.B. I am not talking about cases where schools are legally required to provide reasonable accommodations to a student, nor am I talking about making other necessary adjustments for important reasons).
Nor is the solution for the parent to bring their band instrument or PE bag to school every time they leave it at home. They will never learn.
Nor is the solution to just tell them more often and more emphatically to remember.
Again, remember the idea of scaffolding—what sort of structures, processes, tools, and supports do we build around our children to give them the skills, support, or help to successfully move from where they are operating now to where they can operate at a higher level?
What about a checklist on the back of the door they use when leaving for school? Or a reminder on their phone? Or waking up 3 minutes earlier so they have time to carefully consider all they need? Or making sure that the band instrument is put directly into the car after practicing?
There are several possibilities here.
Baby steps are critical, as is adaptation.
A story where I learned an important lesson
One of my children, when he was young, had some challenges with some emotional regulation. It wasn't malicious. There were some real problems, but it was something we had to address. Drawing on an educational psychology class I had, I created a weekly reward system, using routine and variable rate incentives.
It should have worked, and for a very short time it did. It was out of the textbook, literally, but it didn’t work for long.
A child psychologist who specialized in the disorders our child was struggling with looked at my system and said it was a very good plan, but that it was too much for my child.
First of all, there were too many behaviors we were trying to address, and it was done once a week.
Our child needed something simpler—focusing on the bare minimum, on a single behavior. And the time frame we were monitoring and rewarding needed to be reduced from a week to every hour.
When that worked, we went to every three hours, and then three times a day, and then twice a day, and then daily, 3 times a week, and finally, once a week. That worked well. We also added some additional behaviors to monitor, one at a time, but only once the current behavior was stable.
The problem was I had jumped far, far ahead of his ZPD and had not included scaffolding to help him. We were in unrealistic territory, as well-intentioned as my efforts were. And when working with children, “unrealistic” will always have a bigger impact than “well-intentioned.”
I will talk more about how to intervene in a helpful way and share some thoughts on creating useful scaffolding next time.
Until then, happy parenting; you’ve got this!
Sincerely,
Braden