Non-Coercive Parenting: Dr. Thomas Gordon's Parent Effectiveness Training

My parenting skills have never been good. I can admit that because I was mis-parented, myself. And the behaviors I picked up from my own parents weren't just ineffective, they were damaging. Unintentionally, I perpetuated them on my own kids. The good news is, it doesn't take long to correct bad parenting and the results are almost immediate.

Through therapy, I learned to stop doing most of the damaging stuff. Just being aware of those behaviors allows you to stop them cold. But I was still left with an angry 22-year-old and a depressed 14-year-old, and no positive course on which we could move forward. Thanks to therapy, I now knew what not to do, but I didn't know what to do. Lucky for me, I have a very wise friend named Amber. I asked her for some parenting advice and she pointed me in the direction of Dr. Thomas Gordon's Parent Effectiveness Training (P.E.T.).

I'll be honest; the title put me off. I wouldn't have picked this one up in a bookstore. I wanted to be a good parent, a caring parent, a creative parent, a loving parent, a wise parent, but not an “effective” one. And what's more, I didn't really want to be trained. I wanted to be shown, taught, encouraged. Is there a difference? I don't know, but training sounds like something you do to dogs.

However, if you can get past the title, the content is pretty valuable. Dr. Gordon does something most parenting counselors fail to do: he brings ownership into the family system dynamic. When a problem arises, it's important to understand who owns that problem. And once you understand who owns the problem, it can more effectively be addressed. There's that word again, but maybe it's not such a bad word.

So when your child comes home from school complaining that he's being bullied, you first need to recognize that your child owns this problem. According to Dr. Gordon, it's his problem to solve. But that doesn't mean you can't help. In fact, that's what a parent is really for – helping their children solve problems and showing them how to do it for themselves.

Instead, though, many of us parents have spent a lot of time and energy trying to solve problems for our children. My parents did that. They were enmeshed with me, not allowing me to individuate and separate. You see this a lot on the playground of life. Enmeshing moms and dads are usually described as helicopter parents, although enmeshment involves much more than simply hovering over your child, trying to catch them before they even stumble. Enmeshing parents view their children as extensions of themselves, as little “mini me's” who exist mainly to meet certain emotional needs of the parent, including needs for loyalty, recognition, and affection, most of which are coerced out of the child and exist falsely. Enhmeshing parents tend to make their children's decisions, befriend their children's friends, micromanage their children's lives, adopt their children's interests (or more often, try to force their children to adopt theirs) and some, like mine, even attempt to live with their children as adults. But first and foremost, enmeshing parents try to solve their children's problems for them.

Healthy parents don't. They aren't coercive. They don't try to force behavior, they don't try to direct and manage their children's lives, which usually starts with trying to solve their problems. Healthy parents listen and are willing to help rather than control.

So when you've determined there's a problem owned by the child, Dr. Gordon recommends active listening, where you listen to how the child is feeling and reflect back what you hear. Easier said than done, for sure. But one of my younger son's biggest complaints was that he didn't feel heard. Not only does active listening meet the child's need to be heard, it gives them some mental space to begin generating the problem's potential solutions on their own. It's almost like the first hurdle any child needs to clear: “OK, my parent hears me. This means I exist, and not only that, I matter. Maybe I really am capable of figuring out this problem and fixing it.” Active listening also fosters more conversation between you and your child, and it's in these conversations (that they are now willing to have) that the child can bounce ideas off you, get your take, and receive your encouragement.

This is one area where P.E.T. shows its non-coercive nature. In no longer trying to fix your child's problems, you are no longer pushing your own agenda, trying to control your child, or forcing behavior. You're a guard rail, not a dictator.

Now, when the parent owns the problem, which you do any time your child's behavior bothers you, you then have a different conversation with your child. Instead of active listening, you give the child I-messages. That means you communicate things about how you, the parent, are feeling. And you avoid giving your child messages about them, otherwise known as you-messages. These you-messages are usually accusatory and tend to shut down communication. You-messages leave the child feeling resentful and uncooperative, even rebellious. You want to foster communication, and you do it by sharing how you are personally feeling.

Wait, what? This is so opposite of everything I learned growing up!

I-messages were hard for me to learn and do because I'm extremely I-message avoidant. Why? My father was a malignant narcissist. He would lecture me, often for hours at a time, about his expertise in law (he was an attorney) and investing and, really, everything: he lectured me about his expertise in everything. I don't think he ever knew or cared to know anything about me, his daughter. I wrote a book on economics for kids and to my knowledge, he never read it. The one time we discussed economics, he disagreed with my assertions and explained how he understood the topic much better.

Anyway, why am I so I-message avoidant? My narcissistic father drilled into me that I was self-centered.

As a result, I grew up wary of ever sending I-messages to anyone, let alone my own children. But as Dr. Gordon points out, your children can't begin to mitigate their own behavior until they know and care how the people around them are feeling. As parents, we often place the accusatory focus on the child and their behavior without ever giving them the full picture. We don't introduce them to their own world and the people in it.

Take for example, a child running through the house yelling and singing and making a racket. The shortcut parents often take is to lash out at the child with a you-message: you are loud, which is bad. Instead, we can start showing kids (without accusations) how they are affecting other people: mom can't focus on her work or brother is sleeping or dad needs some quiet relaxation time because he's sick. Knowing this about the people around them teaches the child how to navigate any environment and mitigate their own behavior, without limiting the message we give them to: "you are bad."

There is so much more to P.E.T. but my hope here isn't so much to teach the concepts as to pique your interest into learning more for yourself. I ordered an old paperback copy from Amazon, published in 1975. I read it in spurts and then try to digest and process the new ideas. None of them are easy for me, but the good news is that my relationships with both my sons are improving. We're talking more than we ever have. And my anger at their behavior has mostly dissipated.

It's been a while since I've read a book that I can hold in my hands. The pages are faded yellow and it smells sort of musty. This old paperback book is taking me back to my own childhood in the '70s, but in a good way.

If you have any experience with the P.E.T. philosophy and protocol, I hope you'll share it in the comments.