I’ve been going through oodles of old papers, and last weekend, I got rid of a study I had held onto for a long time. Now I wish I still had it to hand because I’ve been thinking about it a lot.
It tracked daily verbal comments from adults to children in a mid-sized cohort of families over a few weeks. Every verbal communication was recorded as positive, negative, or neutral. What do you think the daily ratio of negative to positive comments was? 2:5? 3:1? What do you think it would be in your house?
The average daily negative-to-positive-comment ratio was 147:1! (I’m not absolutely, 100% sure about that 147 figure, but it was well over 100, and for some reason 147 has stuck in my brain. If you’re familiar with the study and you can help me be confidently precise, please do so!) I remember being astonished when I saw how unbalanced that ratio was. I thought I was doing much better, but was I? Was there even enough time in a day to be negative 147 times?
I tried to tally my own negative and positive comments toward my children for a few days. I lost count, always petered out before the end of the day, but definitely did enough data collection to realize that my negatives way outnumbered my positives. From the time the kids were up, there was a lot of “Hurry up! You’re dawdling,” “You didn’t cut your nails,” “I don’t think that shirt really goes with those pants.” It was clear pretty quickly that you could easily rack up 147 negative utterances in a day.
I don’t believe there’s anything inherently wrong with any of those comments above; rather, the issue is that they weren’t ballasted with an equal or greater number of positive comments. So the net result was this word flurry that could have been generalized to: “Nag, nag, criticism, criticism, fault-finding, nitpickiness.”
To be clear, I’m not one of the people who believe everything a child says or does should be praised, and critical or corrective words should never pass a parent’s lips. If my child cleans the bathroom, and I perform a quality control check and I can see that the sink was poorly cleaned, I’ll make sure to lead with a positive observation about how good the tub looks, but I’ll definitely point out that the sink needs a little more lovin’. If an older child is defending an opinion and I ask about her sources, and what she tells me is flimsy, I’ll say, “Your point is interesting, but your data is weak.” Honestly, I think that’s part of my job description. I’m helping my children become adult humans. I want each of them to be able to formulate, articulate, and defend a minority opinion well and calmly. I also want them to be able to keep a bathroom clean.
But I also want them to feel that the balance between corrective observation and positive reinforcement tilts toward the plus side; I want my home to feel warm and positive. When I first read that study about the prevalence of negative comments directed at children, I tried to become more conscious of my verbal output, with results that varied according to the day and its demands. But becoming aware of the issue was important.
I seem to be hearing some variant of a certain idea all over the place recently, on a show I’m streaming, in an essay: “You love your children; you provide for them. There’s nothing more a parent can do.” Well, of course, there’s a lot more a parent can and should do. Noting what you say to your children is one small part of that more. Without that attention, I think we parents risk becoming like the voice of the teacher in the Charlie Brown TV specials (“Wah wa wa wah wa waaaaah”), an occasionally prominent sound that’s never associated with anything pleasant.
Love this!