Switch - Chip Heath [26]
An abusive parent typically finds the five-minute exercise utterly exhausting. (And you understand why—the parent’s Rider has to supervise every single moment.) Funderburk and her colleagues demand that the parents practice the same set of behaviors (called “child-directed interaction”) every day, whether in the lab or at home, so that the behaviors gradually become instinctive. The more instinctive a behavior becomes, the less self-control from the Rider it requires, and thus the more sustainable it becomes.
Parents are taught skills that feel unnatural at first. They are taught to look for opportunities to praise their kids’ behavior. (“I like how hard you’re working.” “Good job. You’re being very kind to that doll.”) They are taught to simply describe their child’s behavior, so that the child feels noticed. (“Oh, look, now you’re putting the car in the garage.”)
Later in the program, after parents have become better at having short positive interactions with their kids, they are taught how to give commands so that their kids will listen and obey. They are taught a very specific formula for a command—combining a command with a reason so the command doesn’t feel arbitrary. (“Johnny, it’s almost time for the bus to come, so please put your shoes on now.”)
Funderburk and her team at the University of Oklahoma studied 110 parents who had abused their children. Half of them were randomly assigned to take 12 sessions of PCIT, and the other half were assigned to take 12 sessions of a form of angermanagement therapy, focused on helping them control their emotions—the standard treatment for abusive parents. After the therapy sessions concluded, the parents were tracked for 3 years. Across 3 years, 60 percent of the anger-management-therapy group committed another act of child abuse. In contrast, only 20 percent of the PCIT parents re-offended.
PCIT did not eliminate the problem: One in five parents abused his or her kids again. But, from the perspective of behavior change, the results are staggering. Most of us believe in our hearts that child abusers are irredeemably flawed. Who could hit a child other than someone who is disturbed in some basic way? It simply boggles the mind to think that the behavior of child abusers could be altered by only twelve sessions of therapy concentrating on such simple instructions.
Funderburk said, “In my experience, the physically abusive parent has the same goals as a normal parent; it’s their method and their ideas that are wrong. They think that their child is woeful, because they told their 3-year-old to just play in the front yard, and then he wandered off into the street. And they don’t understand that a 3-year-old might forget an instruction, or might not have that kind of impulse control, so they think they have to punish the child for his own good because he was disobedient and dangerous.”
Earlier, we said that what looks like stubbornness or opposition may actually be a lack of clarity. The PCIT intervention suggests that child abuse, too, may be partly the result of a lack of understanding, a lack of clear instruction or guidance on what to do. This is not to excuse the parents’ behavior, of course. It is simply to point out that simple scripting has power beyond what any of us could have predicted. Even child abusers become pliable in its presence.
7.
In 1995, the same year Brazil’s president Cardoso announced the privatization of the railroads, a group of high school students in Howard, South Dakota, started plotting a revival. They wanted to do something, anything, that might revive their dying community.
Howard and surrounding Miner County had been shrinking for decades. Farm and industrial jobs had slowly dried up, and nothing replaced them. The median price of houses in Howard was only $26,500. The population was about 3,000 and shrinking. The county had the highest elderly population per capita in South Dakota, and it also