How to get kids to cooperate: Think like a firefighter!

If you are frustrated that your relationship with your child has too many struggles and too little cooperation, you are not alone. If you have looked to parenting books for help but have found the advice difficult to implement, you are in good company. In my previous three blog-posts, I have discussed my thoughts about why the sound recommendations in many great parenting books are not so easy to follow (click here to view). To summarize: following the advice of parenting books requires that we stay calm – however power struggles with our kids feel like emergencies and put us into fight or flight mode where we feel anything but calm. Once in fight or flight mode, it is difficult to calm down, and it is difficult to remember what we read in the parenting book. Instead, we slip into old modes of parent-child interactions which we absorbed as children in our struggles with our own parents. Once established, patterns of struggle between parents and children build up tremendous momentum and resist change.

So, what are we, as parents, to do if we want to reduce struggles and increase good feelings and cooperation in our families? To have success in making the changes that we want to make in our families, I suggest that we learn to think like firefighters.

Firefighters, and other emergency service workers, have to deal with extreme situations that can arise unpredictably, where intense experiences of adrenaline and fear arise that need to be calmed in order to deal with the emergency effectively, and where they may have to rescue civilians who are distressed, dysregulated, and disoriented.

Note the similarities to power struggles: they can arise unpredictably, they can stir intense emotional reactions in us that need to be calmed if we are to respond effectively, and they involve dealing with kids in the middle of meltdowns who are distressed, dysregulated, and disoriented.

In order to deal with difficult, dangerous and unpredictable situations, firefighters plan, practice, prevent, educate and debrief.

Planning

You do not want to be trying to figure out how to fight a fire in the heat of the moment. Firefighters have strategies, roles, and contingencies worked out ahead of time. They also make sure that they have the equipment that they will need to deal with most emergencies on their trucks in easily accessible places. The middle of an emergency is a terrible time to try to figure out what to do.

Anxiety and stress (such as that which occurs in a burning building, or in a power struggle) disrupts a person’s ability to think clearly and solve problems effectively. Solving many of the problems that regularly and predictably occur at a fire scene prior to a fire call – in the relatively calm and low stress environment of the fire house – leads to much better decisions than does trying to make decisions on the fly under the stress and chaos of the fire scene.

Practice

Firefighters practice the skills they need for dealing with emergencies. Frequently this practice occurs under conditions that simulate actual emergencies. Smoke machines are used to create the poor visibility conditions encountered in fires. Firefighters also use burn buildings which are specially built structures (or which are buildings scheduled for demolition) that can be set on fire so that firefighters can conduct live training drills.

Well-practiced tasks are much less likely to be disrupted by anxiety and stress. Practicing firefighting techniques under simulated and controlled firefighting situations helps the firefighter remain calm in real emergencies, and it establishes good firefighting habits that hold up in a real emergency.

Practicing implementing firefighting plans familiarizes you with the plans so that they are not newly encountered at the fire scene. Practicing plans also helps find places where the plans may break down in a real emergency.

Prevention

Firefighters deal with emergencies also by trying to prevent them in the first place. They enforce building codes and smoke detector laws that help prevent sparks from leading to life-threatening conflagrations.

Education

Firefighters visit schools to educate children about fire safety. They let them know what to expect and what to do in an emergency. Children are taught that they should “stop, drop, and roll” if their clothing catches fire. Firefighters wear their firefighting gear (called “turnout gear”) to schools. A firefighter in turnout gear, wearing an air mask looks a lot more like Darth Vader or some other type of monster than someone trying to rescue you. Seeing a firefighter in his gear at school helps prepare a child to recognize a firefighter in an emergency.

Debriefing

After the emergency has ended and the firefighters have returned to their station and prepared their trucks for the next call, they frequently take time to debrief. In a debriefing a time line of the event is constructed beginning with the time prior to receiving the call through to the event’s conclusion with the return to station. The process of constructing the time line has three main functions. First, it allows the firefighters present to have any confusion or misunderstanding about what happened clarified. Second, it allows for firefighters to express and vent any negative emotions that were experienced in course of the call. Finally, the time line provides a basis for learning lessons from the call – both what went right and what went wrong – that can be incorporated into planning so that future operations can be conducted more safely and effectively.

As parents dealing with entrenched negative patterns with our children, we can benefit from applying the methods of firefighters. Our process begins with debriefing. After an upsetting episode is over and things are calm, take a few moments alone, or with your spouse if he or she was present, to construct a time line of what happened. As with an emergency service worker debriefing, this process of constructing the time line allows us to get more clear about what happened with our child, to release the negative emotions that linger from the episode, and provides a basis for making plans for how to deal with events in the future.

After several of these debriefing sessions, the specifics of the negative interaction pattern with your child will become clearer; what triggers it and how it evolves over time. This knowledge provides the basis of making a plan for how to deal with problems when they arise. Your own brainstorming, tips from your friends, and your reading of parenting books come in here. They provide the basis of your emergency response plan. Having a plan in place means not having to think of what to do in the stress of the moment of an escalating power struggle.

After you have had the opportunity to put your plan in action, another debriefing session is called for and plans are revised. In future posts will be writing more about this process of making and revising plans through the debriefing process. I will also discuss the role of practice, prevention and education in helping transform family life.