Switch - Chip Heath [25]
Until you can ladder your way down from a change idea to a specific behavior, you’re not ready to lead a switch. To create movement, you’ve got to be specific and be concrete. You’ve got to emulate 1% milk and flee from the Food Pyramid.
6.
How far does this theory go? How much difference can specific instructions make? Let’s subject the idea to the toughest possible test: Can you change child abusers by scripting some critical parenting moves for them?
In 2004, a study was conducted of 110 parents who had abused their children. Seventy-three percent of them had assaulted their kids—hitting or punching them with their fists. Twenty percent had engaged in even more violent assaults, resulting in broken bones or severe lacerations.
The parents tended to blame their abusive behavior on their kids. “They’ll say, ‘I had to discipline my child this way because he’s so rotten and he won’t listen,’” said Beverly Funderburk, a research professor at the University of Oklahoma’s Health Sciences Center. The parents believed that they’d gotten a “bad kid,” or a stubborn one, and that violence was the only way they could get their kids to obey.
The mission of Funderburk’s team was to change these parents, to stop their abuse. If you think that sounds naive and even hopeless, you’re in good company. That’s also what Funderburk worried about when she first began the work.
She practices what’s called parent-child interaction therapy (PCIT), which tries to disrupt the escalating cycles of coercion and frustration that characterize abusive situations. In the first step of PCIT, parents are given an assignment: “We want you to play with your child for five minutes a day. Here are the rules: You’re going to devote 100% of your attention to them, you’re not going to answer the phone, you are not going to teach them their ABCs. You’re just going to enjoy them.” The parents are incredulous that five minutes will accomplish anything. “For goodness’ sake,” said one parent, “I spend every minute of every day on this child.”
At first, these five-minute play periods take place in a laboratory setting. The parent and child sit in an empty room with only a table and chairs. Three or four toys are put on the tabletop. The parents are instructed to let the child lead the play session, and they’re forbidden to give commands, to criticize, even to ask questions. Letting their child direct the action is incredibly difficult for them.
During the play session, a therapist watches the parents through a one-way mirror and gives real-time coaching by means of an earpiece. Funderburk describes a typical interaction:
The parent and child might start coloring, and the parent tries to play along by coloring on the child’s paper. The child objects. So we tell the parent, “Okay, get a separate piece of paper and imitate what your child is doing.”
If the child is coloring a rainbow, the parent colors a rainbow too, saying, “I’m coloring a rainbow just like you. You’re using green, I’m going to use green.”
And some kids, if they’re particularly oppositional, might reach over and grab the parent’s green crayon yelling, “I want that.” And we teach the parents to say, “Okay, I’d be happy to share that crayon with you … in fact let me put all the crayons over by you so you can reach them all.”
Or perhaps the parent says, “I’m going to color my rainbow with pink now.” And the child says, “Pink is ugly, don’t do pink!” If the child has been particularly nasty we may just ask the parents to ignore the comment, but otherwise we coach the parents to agree with their child, “You’re right! Pink is not a good color for the rainbow! I think I’ll do red.”
We try to