Shut Your Mouth, Mom! An Interview and Podcast with Duct Tape Parenting author Vicki Hoefle
Last Friday, as the rain and sleet that had been falling since early morning turned to swirls of snow and strong winds — the beginnings of the Northeast’s so-called Winter Storm Nemo (don’t get me started!) — I was on the phone with parent educator, author and mother of five Vicki Hoefle. I don’t know if it was the threatening weather outside my window or her charming laugh, but I seriously wished we were chatting in person over hot cocoa. By the end of our talk, I also kinda wished she could come over and, you know, help me raise my kids. In case you’re not familiar with Vicki, she recently published a fantastic book called Duct Tape Parenting: A Less-is-More Approach to Raising Respectful, Responsible, Resilient Kids.
How much do I love those three R’s? A lot!
And Vicki’s message, that we have to do less in order to accomplish more resonates with me. As you all know from my last post, I tend to do a lot of talking at home. I tend, like many of us, to say the same things over and over. And yes, there’s something funny and universal in that portion of parenting, but if you think about it and go deeper, do you really want to be saying those things, directing the situation, packing the lunches and pushing and prodding to the next thing (time to go! Get going! Get your lunch! Do you have your homework?).
Of course you don’t. But the mistake we’re making — certainly I’m making it! — is thinking that if we just say it often enough, the kids will magically get it. Her take: Say it a lot less, trust them a lot more, deal with the short-term fallout and mess, and you’ll reach the promised land of responsible, resilient kids. Who have their homework and their lunch now, and their good jobs and happy lives and homes later.
Click here to listen to the podcast of my chat with Vicki.
I hope you take the 28 or so minutes to listen to it. Here’s a little bit of a highlight, to explain the concept behind Duct Tape Parenting:
Q: Where does the title Duct Tape Parenting come from?
A: Twenty some years ago, when I was raising my first child, who was three at the time, I wanted to come up with an exercise that would help me teach the parents in my parenting class understand that we, the adults, were making most of the mischief that was going on in our homes. So I thought, I’m going to get up Monday and just be quiet and watch my daughter. Can she figure things out? Will she come to me a million times? I’m going to be quiet. That lasted 30 seconds… I realized, I have no self-discipline. I believed my mouth needs to be going in order for my children to figure out how do anything. So I want to the garage and got some duct tape and put it over my mouth… as my mouth was taken out of condition, my mind went into a panic. Often, there’s this fear: what will happen if we’re not directing our children?
Eventually my mind settled down, and as I was quiet, my child’s brain started to turn on. I could literally see the gauges in her mind start to click. When I talk, her brain goes to sleep. But when I’m quiet,her brain clicks on. That became the easiest way for me to get parents to understand the less is more approach. Watch your kids for a few days and i guarantee you will learn things about yourself and your children that will change the way you parent.
Q: I love the idea of being quiet, of duct-taping my mouth. But I think if I did that, my kids would look at me like, why isn’t mom telling us anything?
A: And that’s what my daughter did. I could see the confusion on her face…. But my “aha” moment came when I saw that [when I was quiet] my kids were thinking. I wanted to raise thinking kids. But thinking kids are messy, they make a lot of mistakes as they’re they’re trying to navigate what they need to do. And in our effort to help them navigate more easily, we mistakenly get them to turn off their brains and just listen for cues from parents, teachers and coaches.
Q: That sounds so right, and yet I feel, and I know I’m not alone, that I can’t just sit there and let them miss the bus… what do then?
A: I get this question all the time! What parents are looking for, when they ask that, is this: They want to do the ONE THING that’ll suddenly make their kids snap to and do everything they should. But that won’t happen [right away], because you have them trained to listen for your directions. So you have to first go through detox. You have to give them three or four days to figure out that if they don’t take responsibility for their time and their stuff, it’s not going to happen. They are trained for our cues, so they don’t know what to listen for [inside themselves]. You have to get over that hump…
If you’re still prompting them through the morning, what happens when they go to college? When does their brain click in? I can be inconvenienced for a few mornings if I know the end result is kids who are always ready in the morning. So make an agreement with your child: If you miss the bus, I’ll drive you, but you pay me the $5 it would probably cost to take a cab to school. They’re learning, and learning means you make mistakes.
Kids making mistakes is the best learning tool we have, and it’s the one parents are the most afraid to implement. All it takes is for the child to be late for school, to have to go into the office or come to class unprepared, for him come home that day and say, “this is not happening to me again,” and all of a sudden you have a child who is really participating in his life. It’s thrilling to watch that moment.
But I had to buckle myself down when I’d think they’d have a tough day. But I think life gets tougher between 18 and 80 than it is between 0 and 18, so this is actually good practice for them to become resilient, to learn that they can overcome challenges…
Vicki and I went on from there to talk about chores and how maybe the approaches I’ve taken to get my boys to pitch in are not the best practice (you know, stuff like, “when I was your age” or “I insist you fix your bed”). Listen in, you won’t be sorry. And let me know what you think.
February 15, 2013 @ 7:37 am
My kids were entering 1st and 4th grades when I decided to play a game with them. They get ready and catch the bus for 20 straight school days, and I would get them a 6-month membership to their favorite online game (Disney Toontown). If they missed the bus at any point in there, they had to start back at zero. Oh man…They started marking off the calendar and everything! Before Halloween they had earned their memberships and I only have to drive my kids to school on special occasions. Oh yeah, I also don’t even have to get out of bed in the morning to get them ready if I don’t want to. Bonus!!
February 15, 2013 @ 7:45 am
This is such a great interview. Such wonderful insight. I have many reactions. One is that I feel i have already missed the boat with my almost 11year old (who by the way would not care if he showed up late to school). Another is that I am not sure that I am able to implement this (seems hard). A third is that I think when we were kids and when your interviewee’s kids were little 20 years ago, there was not as much to remember. I know that us a cop-out and really nothing more than a lame excuse ( or perhaps all the more reason to prepare them) but 20-35 years ago first graders did not have homework every night and a myriad of activities (soccer, gymnastics, karate,etc) to keep track of. But still this is such great information. I really want to try it ( I took notes!)
February 18, 2013 @ 11:59 am
I think that Sally touches on some valid concerns. In some ways, life IS harder and busier for kids now than it was for us. I’m a step-mom to two boys, ages 3 and 6, and the scheduling gymnastics for their week is just crazy. Their father and mother both work, so the boys both start and end their day at daycare; the 6-year old takes a bus to school from the daycare and is returned there while the 3-year old stays in daycare all day. Depending on the day (or if something goes horribly awry at work for mom or dad), a different parent may be picking them up at 6pm than dropped them off at 7:30am (long day for kiddos!). On top of that, the 6-year old has two weekly activities – CCD and a school-sponsored Lego Robotics class – and the 3-year old just started once-weekly 30-minute karate classes.
I am definitely a believer in “slow scheduling” and I think that one activity (well, one fun activity – I don’t put CCD in that category, haha) per week is enough. I think that generally, “life is too busy/complicated” is a situation to be changed, not an answer in itself. But it still is really, really a lot to remember at times, even for the grown-ups. I also think that a lot of the reminding tendencies come from US being too busy, too. We don’t have time for kids to mess up or make mistakes, we don’t have time for them to think through their morning or evening or whatever. We are on rush mode all the time and they just get carried along through the day on that wave. So a big part of chilling out about the kids taking responsibility for their own stuff means under-scheduling myself at times, leaving more time for tasks in the beginning, etc, just to prevent myself from getting super-frustrated and jumping in.
And I try to use my own judgment on what are “kid responsibilities” to remember and what aren’t. Homework: definitely a kid responsibility. My parents NEVER checked my homework when I was a kid and I got pretty diligent at doing it myself. Library books: kid responsibility. Snow boots: kid responsibility (the school does not allow him to go outside at recess without snow boots, which seems ridiculous to me given the mild winters these days but whatever; a couple times of being forced to sit inside after lunch have made snow boots a top priority for him). My childhood was a wasteland of forgotten lunches, frantic homework checks, and minor disappointments, and I think it was some pretty vital stuff. The real world imposes its own consequences and they are far more instructive than any made-up consequences parents can come up with.
I do kind of clash with their dad on this, though. He is a classic “constant remind”-er and it drives me up the wall sometimes. ie on the subject of the library materials – we often end up with a late fee on a borrowed DVD, because the DVD gets forgotten in the player and we return just the case. Yet somehow – SOMEHOW – the kids never ever forget to check both the DVD player and the Wii for their favorite games and movies before they head back to their mom’s house. Because if they forget THAT, then they have a crummy consequence – a week without their favorite thing. I think that a simple basic consequence would end the library DVD problem. Forgot it? Then we don’t get DVDs next time. We can revisit the issue the time after that. But he feels like it’s too much for them to remember, since HE often forgets it himself (because he’s thinking of “adult” responsibilities, is my response – library materials being a kid responsibility to remember) and so he reminds, and reminds, and then goes to check himself, and then lectures (because of course it’s still there), and then it begins again. Sigh.
I am, I think, even worse than a Mean Mom. I’m a Mean Step-Mom and I’m fully aware of how that sounds. But before anyone gets a Cinderella vision in their head, I will note that my meaner tendencies just get channelled through their dad – I am not the primary disciplinarian so he sets the rules and the tone. If I feel strongly about something, we talk about it, but once we’re in front of the kids, all rules are set by him and I actually mostly just get to be the fun one while he is the heavy. So I’m a Stealth-Mean Step-Mom, I guess. Long-time reader and lurker, stealth-mean step-mom, and Wii champion of of the world (as far as two boys are concerned).
February 18, 2013 @ 12:28 pm
Alexandra,
thank you SO much for this long and thoughtful comment! i agree with you, wholeheartedly. I do think that oversheduling and not having “room for error” is part of what prompts many parents to be constant remind-ers as well as do-it-for-them-ers, if that makes sense. But we have to work to build time into our lives, even busy working families. Thing is, even though my mother didn’t work outside the home when I was a school age kid, she WAS busy, just not with OUR things. Her realm was the house and the running of it, and she did her thing while we did ours, and we suffered the consequences of forgotten whatevers. My sister is 3 years older than I am. When she was 10 and in fifth grade, she informed my mom that she was no longer needed in the mornings. I tried to pipe up with something like, ‘uh, maybe for you, sis! I’m only 7!”, but that’s the way it was. My sister probably had the motive of wanting to have cold cereal instead of the Wheatina or oatmeal my mom would make, but the upshot was that we got our breakfasts and our lunches, got dressed and brushed and got ourselves out the door, around the corner and out of sight to the bus stop.
There are pluses and minuses to all of it, but I still maintain that if we keep our eyes on the end game, we’re better off.
Oh, and in case those of you reading aren’t also “friends” with Mean Moms Rule on Facebook, I shared a fun anecdote there that ties into this. The other day, I was talking to my 8 year old’s teacher. She has three kids, two of them young teens. She lives in a different district, a relatively wealthier area with a contingent of moms who drop off gourmet lunches for their little dears from time to time. Once, she said, her 14 year old daughter texted her father: “i forgot my lunch.” Her dad texted back: “Sucks for you. Now put your phone away.”
Which is just genius! I’m betting she didn’t forget her lunch again.