What does being aggravated by your kids mean to you? According to a new Child Trends research brief, it means three things:

1. Feeling frequently bothered by your child
2. Feeling your child is more bothersome than other children the same age, and
3. Feeling frequently angry with your child.

This sounds like a good definition of aggravation. But here’s the surprise: a comparison of parents’ feelings of aggravation reported between the late 1990s  to feelings reported as recently as 2012 found that parents’ aggravation has risen from 20% to as much as 35%.

One-in-three parents these days feel aggravated by their kids, up from one-in-five two decades ago.

Stressful family relationships matter. Researchers in this study note that “on average, children of parents with high levels of aggravation are less well-adjusted and experience more negative outcomes.” This means that feeling aggravated with your children makes your children behave more badly, which means you feel even more aggravated than before. This vicious cycle undermines your happiness, children’s academic success, and everyone’s physical and mental health.

Researchers suggest that the increase in parent aggravation may be linked to inappropriately high expectations for children’s behavior.  Kids are not allowed to be kids but are expected to be unquestionably obedient and compliant. The researchers also suggest that these unrealistic expectations are combined with harsh discipline methods that increase family stress without satisfying children’s need to be treated with respect.

Feeling aggravated is not caused by children actually being more aggravating than they used to be. Your kids are not worse than you were at the same ages. It’s caused by parents making less time for their kids and being too rigid and demanding.

So take a quick check: do you often feel aggravated by your children? Are you frequently bothered by your kids’ behavior and frequently angry at them? Do you imagine that your children behave worse than the kids next door? If these feelings are common for the grownups in your household, take these steps to make life go more smoothly:

1. Slow down and pay attention to your kids. Notice what they’re good at and what they find difficult to do. (Hint: they may be good at sports but not so good at cleaning up after themselves.) Realize that this is who they are right now. You can’t blame them for being who they are.
2. Take the time to teach what you want your kids to do. Once you realize your children are not so skilled at some things as you are, you can teach them the skills they need. Be patient and teach things step by step. Provide chances to practice.
3. Avoid harsh punishment. Harsh punishment makes you feel worse and it doesn’t do much for your children either. It upsets everyone and leads to worse behavior, not better behavior. Wise up about discipline.
4. Remember that your relationship with your children is lifelong. The respect and support you give your children now will repay itself in strong, positive interactions for years to come. A relationship that is characterized by aggravation isn’t a relationship that builds a foundation for the future.

It may be that you’re more aggravated by your children than your parents were with you. But that’s not because you were so much better as a child. Give your own kids the gift that you received, the gift of reasonable expectations and loving support.

© 2014, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Ask for Dr. Anderson’s new book, Parenting: A Field Guide, at your favorite bookstore.

If you spank your child you might be convinced that you’re doing it “right.” You might think that spanking is good for a child and not only stops bad behavior but leads to improved behavior over time. A new study confirms that you would be wrong on both counts.

Thirty-three parents who said they spank agreed to be recorded over four to six evenings. Most of the parents were the children’s mothers, and were married, well-educated, white, and worked outside the home. Their children were, on average, a bit younger than four. The recordings captured 41 instances of corporal punishment (spanking, slapping, shoving, shaking, pinching, and so on) that happened mostly while the parent prepared dinner or was bathing the child before bed.

The scientists, led by psychologist George Holden from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, found that these parents spanked in three ways that are especially troubling: they spanked in anger, they spanked quickly instead of as a last resort, and they spanked for minor misbehaviors, not in response to serious problems or dangerous behavior. In addition, parents hit their children repeatedly, instead of giving a single swat.

As you know by now, I do not believe spanking is effective but I understand that many parents do spank. So, if you hit, I invite you to observe your own spanking behavior.

• Quick to hit? In the study, parents spanked quickly, within half a minute of noticing a problem behavior. If they tried first to redirect children, restate rules, or even send a child into timeout, they didn’t try very long. Often they hit first.
• Hit for what? In the study parents hit their children for silly things like sucking fingers, eating improperly, and getting out of a chair during dinner. In 90% of the hitting incidents, the trigger behavior was unimportant, even just normal child stuff.
• In the mood to hit? Recordings revealed that parents were angry before they hit their children. Their children didn’t make them angry; mothers were angry already. Most parents spanked on impulse and emotionally, instead of thoughtfully.
• Hit how often? Parents in the study hit repeatedly. One mother hit her child 11 times in a row. Another parent spanked a baby only seven months old. Although previous studies (based on parents’ own estimates) determined that parents hit two-year-olds about 18 times a year, this study using actual real-time recordings found that parents hit two-year-olds at a rate of 18 times a week.
• Hit with what result? Many parents say they spank because it’s the only way to get through to their children. But it didn’t work that way for parents in this study. The recordings reveal that children who were spanked misbehaved again in just 10 minutes.

If you spank, slap, or hit your children, take a long, hard look at that. How effective is corporal punishment, really, in making your life more serene and happy? How better behaved for how long are your children as a result of being hit? How much better do you feel about yourself as a result of being a parent who hits?

Corporal punishment has been associated in other studies with everything from low school success, obesity, bullying behavior and delinquency. If spanking isn’t effective at home anyway, is it worth the risk of derailing your child’s future? I think not.

Please, think before you hit.

© 2014, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Join Dr. Anderson in an online conference for teachers and parents. Find out more at Quality Conference for Early Childhood Leaders.

You know the old saying, “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” I think this was intended to keep kids from blurting out impolite truths like, “This dinner is terrible, Grandma!” But many of us have taken things a bit too far. In many families, children are forbidden to be angry, unhappy, frustrated, or afraid. Negative emotions have become taboo.

Just listen to the moms and dads around you. They tell a child, “Oh, no, you don’t really hate your brother. Give him a kiss and a hug.” They say, “If you’re going to be in such a temper, go to your room!” They say, “There’s nothing to be afraid of. Don’t be such a baby.” Children who express the emotions they honestly feel are corrected, if those emotions are negative. It’s as if happy talk is the only talk that’s allowed.

This is silly and it’s also unfair. We grownups feel completely justified in sharing our bad moods with everyone around. We yell, we fume, we stomp around and slam things. We feel justified in our expressions of anger and feel just as justified when we sulk, sigh, and express our unhappiness. Moms and dads are allowed the complete range of emotions and even though we might try to tone things down when we’re near the kids, we certainly don’t keep things bottled up when the children aren’t around.

But children are often restricted to expressing a narrow range of emotions. We don’t want to hear them when they’re angry. We expect kids to be civil and calm much more than we expect of ourselves to be, even though children are far less able to control themselves.

So what do we do? We hate it when children yell, throw tantrums, whine and pout. How can we allow kids to express all the emotional bandwidth they actually have without getting angry ourselves?

1. Lower your expectations. Life isn’t always happy. For children, especially, when events frequently seem out of their control, a serene morning is hard to come by. So avoid being surprised when kids get upset. They don’t always have to be happy.
2. Give up being 100% responsible. You know very well that you can’t make someone else happy. If your child is unhappy right now, that’s not necessarily your fault and it’s not necessarily your responsibility to fix. If there’s something you can do to cheer someone up, fine, but your child’s mood doesn’t mean you’re a bad parent.
3. Avoid emotional contagion. Bad moods can infect everyone around if you let them. You’re not being heartless if you don’t join your child in feeling sad, mad, or bad. By staying calm and unruffled yourself, you keep the entire day from spiraling out of control.
4. Be supportive. Many times a child’s disruptive actions are meant to share feelings that are hard to express another way. So your recognition of your child’s feelings might be exactly what is wanted. Say, “I can see you are upset,” or “You feel really angry right now.” Ask your child to tell you about it. Help your child in alternative ways of expressing what’s going on.

There’s a fine line here. Give your children the freedom to feel and express the full range of emotions without having to join your child in expressing negative feelings too. But watch out that you’re not so uninvolved and cool that children feel ignored and rejected.  Strong, capable people lead emotionally rich lives. Make that happen for your children and for yourself.

© 2014, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Ask for Dr. Anderson’s book, Parenting: A Field Guide, at your favorite bookstore.

You know how this goes. You warn your kid about dangerous stuff or even just things to avoid, only to find they completely ignore you. They even act surprised after-the-fact that you ever warned them at all. Your warnings seem to fall on deaf ears.

There’s a reason why. Negative consequences are processed differently in the brain than positive consequences. The reasons why a risky behavior might be fun are more available to a child’s mind than the reasons why it might be dangerous. This fact can help us help our kids.

Researchers at University College London asked 59 people aged 9 to 26 to estimate the likelihood that any of 40 bad things would happen to them. The bad things ranged from stuff like getting head lice to breaking an arm or being seriously injured in a car accident and included stuff like, appendicitis, bicycle theft, home burglary, knee surgery, losing a wallet, sports injury, bullied by a stranger, and being stung by a wasp.

After they guessed, they were told the real odds of each event.

Then the participants were asked to guess the odds once again. Everyone was good at reporting odds if the risk was actually less than what they’d originally thought. But they were less good at remembering the odds of bad events that were more likely than they’d thought before. And the younger the child, the worse they were at remembering worse odds.

The problem wasn’t a matter of poor memory, since better-than-expected outcomes were remembered just fine. The problem was a matter of brain development. Positive information is registered in many different parts of the brain. Negative information is registered primarily in the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain responsible for weighing consequences and making judgments. However, the prefrontal cortex isn’t fully developed until late adolescence, even as late as the mid-20s.

So now what? How can you warn your child about risks and have those warnings be remembered? Researcher Tali Sharot says simply, “We learn better from good news than from bad news.” So instead of telling children about bad outcomes, emphasize good ones.

• Instead of warning about the dangers of smoking, point out that non-smokers have better lung capacity and do better at sports.
• Instead of carping about the need for fruits and vegetables, point out that the anti-oxidants in fruits and vegetables promote smooth skin.
• Instead of fussing over your child’s driving, remind her that good drivers pay less for car insurance.

Admittedly, we still will worry and warn. We’d feel that we weren’t being good parents if we didn’t. But we shouldn’t be surprised that children don’t seem to process our warnings or apply them at the critical moment. This we should expect.

We have to be prepared to make our warnings over and over, and in as positive a way as we can. Nothing we can do will hurry brain development. Keeping our kids safe and healthy until their brains catch up is still a parent’s job.

© 2013, Patricia Nan Anderson. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Ask for Dr. Anderson’s new book, Developmentally Appropriate Parenting, at your favorite bookstore.