Optimistic Parenting Strategies for Challenging Children

Episode Transcript

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Hi everyone, welcome to the show, I am Dr. Nicole, and today, we’re going to be talking about child behavior challenges through the lens of how our attitude and behavior as adults impacts the behavior of our children. Typically, when we think about children exhibiting challenging behaviors, we focus on what they’re doing, right? But it’s critically important to focus on what we as the adults are doing, because if we want our children to change, then we need to be willing to examine ourselves and make some changes as well.

It was several years ago when I read a book about this by Dr. Mark Durand called Optimistic Parenting, and it mirrored exactly what I’d seen in my work with families, both as an educator and a psychologist that the attitude that adults bring to the situation makes a tremendous difference in whether kids improve or not. And he’s going to talk with us about what the research shows, what it means to be an optimistic parent and why it’s so important, and I feel like with everything that we’ve got going on in the world right now, it’s more important than ever before. So let me tell you a bit about him.

He is a professor of psychology at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. He has received over $4 million in federal funding since the beginning of his career to study the nature, assessment, and treatment of behavior problems in children with disabilities. Before moving to Florida he served in a variety of leadership positions at the University of Albany, where he established the Center for Autism and Related Disabilities at the University of Albany, SUNY. He serves on a number of editorial boards, reviews for dozens of journals and has over 100 publications on functional communication, educational programming, and behavior therapy. 

He has authored several books on adjusting behavior challenges in children, including sleep issues and we use that book all the time in the clinic as well and it’s wonderful. Dr. Durand developed a unique treatment for severe behavior problems that is currently mandated by states across the country and is used worldwide. He also developed an assessment tool that is used internationally and has been translated into more than 15 languages. I mentioned his book Optimistic Parenting. It is absolutely a favorite of mine, dog-eared and well-worn. I refer to it often in practice. It’s such a pleasure to have you on the show today. Welcome, Dr. Durand.

Dr. Mark Durand:

Thank you, Nicole, and hello to everybody. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

So great to have you here, especially during this time when parents are spending more time than really ever before with their children with schools being closed and programs not happening the way that they typically do, so I feel like the timing couldn’t be better for us to be having this conversation. I think let’s start with the terms ‘optimistic parenting’. What led you to use that term? Why do you believe that’s so important?

Dr. Mark Durand: 

I was trained behaviorally and I worked in an experimental clinic with children with autism who had severe behavior problems. The philosophy always was if the program is not working, it’s not the child’s fault. I somehow didn’t design it properly, I needed to break down steps more, I needed to use different reinforcements. I liked that, because that was a more optimistic way of looking at what we were doing. However, we also worked with parents and teachers, and I might touch on the teacher part of it too, but I worked with parents who, as you said, we developed some treatments for severe behavior problems. This couldn’t or didn’t do it. They didn’t go through on the intervention. So we knew, and there are hundreds of studies on this technique. We know it can work by doing it. And me and my colleagues at the time blamed the parents. Basically, they’re not doing their job, they were stressed, maybe, they’re not motivated enough, probably. 

I’ll give you an example: Sleep. A little girl that we were working with and she tantrumed so much at bedtime and in the middle of the night, her father who was a surgeon, couldn’t sleep at home. He had to sleep at the hospital, and that caused all sorts of problems. The family and the mother was beside herself. So I developed a number of different programs and they just didn’t get carried out. So one night, I just said look — tonight, when she comes out of her bed and she comes into your room, just walk her back to her room. Put her into bed, close the door and let’s just see what happens. We have nothing earth-shattering there. I called her the next day, said “How did it go?” She goes, “I didn’t do it. I let her back into my bed with me and then she fell asleep.” So we were talking as a team about that and again, kind of saying, well maybe she’s not motivated enough to work on this right now, she’ll come back. She never came back. 

So I started to look at if I think children who we give programs aren’t progressing, I didn’t do it right. Well, if I gave a parent a plan and it didn’t work, who’s fault is that? And that’s my fault. I didn’t do it right. So we did a series of studies looking at — I was interested in looking at how children ages 3-6, looking at their behavior problems at 3 and following them up for 3 years. We would predict that children that would get better, their behavior problems would reduce or children that got worse or stayed the same. 

And you would think it was the severity of the disability or the severity of the behavior problem at age 3, but that wasn’t the best predictor. The best predictor was pessimism in the family. Parents who are pessimistic about themselves or about their child’s ability to change, and we’ll talk a little about the different aspects of that, there’s a number of different aspects. Then, they just gave up. And so we’d see parents who, at the dinner table, the child is crying — gave him a cookie so he’d stop crying. And I always used to say to people, look, they’re not stupid. We gave them parent education. They know they’re not supposed to do that, but what they’re thinking and feeling at the time is driving them to do that. They would come back and say, “Well we’ve had so many nights of bad meals, I just thought I’d give it to him tonight and I’ll work on it again tomorrow.” It all comes back, all those feelings come back. So we thought, alright, that’s what I call parental pessimism. 

Well, we know in cognitive behavioral therapy that we can make people more optimistic and… Seligman’s work, so we said, what if we combine behavioral education, teaching them how to work with their child with this cognitive-behavioral component? Teaching them how to think about a situation differently. So we did a study, and I’ll talk about that later, but the point was, can we make parents more optimistic? And if we can make them more optimistic about themselves, about their child’s ability to change, then maybe they’ll be able to carry out the interventions that we designed for them. That’s where optimistic parenting came in. And we can talk more about the design of the study and what we did. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

You know, it’s so interesting because as you said, often we make an assumption that what allows kids to — or the factors that really matter in terms of whether kids improve on the whole or with specific behaviors is the severity of their impairment or even another one that’s often thrown out there is the intensity of treatment that they’ve got and how much treatment. But what I have seen over the years is exactly what you’re saying, we have kids who come from years and years of intensive, really thorough all kinds of treatments, there’s not been a lack of education for the family, there’s not been a lack of intervention and yet, kids aren’t doing very well or they’re not changing. And then we’ll have kids come in from families who really haven’t had access to anything, and their kids — when you look at the initial assessments like, wow these are pretty significantly impaired kids, and yet they’re doing really well. So so much of it does come down to the piece of how we view the child’s capacity to change and our ability to impact that in a positive way, right?

Dr. Mark Durand: 

Right. One of the things that we’re learning is, if you are pessimistic about your child’s ability to change, about the ability to do this, it makes you depressed because you feel like you have no control. So if they start an intervention and it does not work quickly, they give up. They say, “See, I knew it wasn’t going to work.” A lot of what we’re doing in the different techniques we use is getting parents to stay in difficult situations. So your child is screaming in the supermarket, don’t’ leave. Stay there. Because if you leave, you may not come back with your child. What happens when you become anxious? People are judging you, and probably people are. 

Our optimistic families say — we had one mom — I did some of this work in New York, who is a typical New Yorker and her kid was screaming in the supermarket, and someone said, “Why don’t you discipline your child?” And she walked over to her, pulled out a card and said, “This is my diagnosis of my child. Why don’t you mind your own…” And then she cursed, “…business?” You know, “I’m a good mom. I have a plan, I know how to handle this, and you butt out.” Flip-side, you have parents who hear that kind of feedback and get very anxious and feel like people are looking at them and people are judging them, so they just want to escape. If you escape an anxiety-provoking situation, you never reduce the anxiety. So a lot of what we’re doing is designed to get you to stay. Be mindful and be mindful of good things and be mindful of difficult things. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Let’s talk about the research because this was an idea or a hypothesis that you had coming out of the work that you were doing, but there’s good data behind this. You’ve studied this now and seen the impact of this. So let’s talk a bit about that. 

Dr. Mark Durand: 

Okay, so what we did, once we discovered this kind of pessimism aspect, we actually selected families who were pessimistic. Families who had children with significant challenging behaviors and lots of different diagnosis and who were also according to some of our scales, pessimistic. Kind of unfortunate because we would get families who want to be in the study, to teach them how to work with their child but they were optimistic and they couldn’t be included. So we had to screen them out. The children were between the ages of 3 and 6, they had to be significantly, on scales that we had, had significant behavioral problems. And then we randomly designed this clinical trial where we put one group who had these kids and were pessimistic into just the behavioral education aspect. So we taught them how to look at your child, how to do an assessment, why do you think they’re doing what they’re doing, with formal assessments, teaching them how to design plans and carry through their plans. 

And then we had a second group who were the same, equivalent group, but we also added in this behavioral, cognitive-behavioral component. So we’re teaching you not to give your child a cookie at the dinner table, but now we’re teaching you also how to examine your thoughts. What do you say to yourself when this is all happening. This takes some work. This is what psychologists do. We look inside. What are you thinking and feeling about this. But after, it was an eight week season for both of them. But after a few weeks they start to realize, “Oh, I’m thinking I’ll never have a normal dinner again, my mother in law judges me about how I’m spoiling my child and I’m not disciplining and that makes you do things that you know you shouldn’t. So we’d get them to sort of look at those kinds of thoughts. We have about 13 categories of thoughts like that. 

The other is, if your child has a diagnosis, we often have parents who say, “Well, he’s got autism, that’s why he does it.” You think that, and you know you’re not going to change the autism, then you give up. We got that a lot with sleep disorders. Doesn’t sleep. And that’s because he has autism. Okay, it’s not inevitable. We improve. Definitely imperfect, but we improve sleep in your child. In the two groups, and they both got the same amount of time with us. So we made sure that those are the sessions with cognitive behavioral therapy weren’t longer, we looked at those two groups. What was interesting at the end of the study, at the end of the 8 weeks, and we followed them up — what we did was kind of pick the problem situation at home, asked them, pick the worst situation you have: Taking a bath, getting on the bus, whatever it is, mealtime, and then we scripted it. 

So that we had them do this over and over again. We videotaped it. And then after the 8 weeks and then a year later, we asked them to repeat it and we wanted to see how the children would change. What we found first was puzzling that both groups, the children behaved better and that was not what we were expecting. We were expecting that the children that got parents who had gotten cognitive behavioral therapy would get better. But then we went and looked back at those videotapes. And instead of just looking at what the child was doing, we were looking at what the parents were doing. What we found was in the parents who didn’t get the cognitive behavioral therapy, they gave up. If your child isn’t going to bed at night and you’re wrestling — we had one mom who just got into bed with her child, put the television on and waited until he fell asleep. What we taught her is what made things better. “I let him wear the same shirt every day because he gets upset if he doesn’t wear the same shirt ever-day.” We call that the concession process, where you start to concede to all these things that your children are doing because it’s easier at first. But we found when parents were more optimistic like in the other group, they were pushing their children. We had a videotape. 

So one mom who was trying to get her child, a very young child, to put his toys away. And at one point, before, she ended up just doing it herself. After 8 weeks, she was getting him to put his toys away, and he ran out of the room. And she just waited. What he was doing was going to his room and getting a book that she would read to him. That was his reinforcement. Boom, he brought the book back. She said, “Okay, now. Pick up all your toys, pick up all the toys”, and she would sing while he was doing it to make it pleasant. And then cheered when he did it, and then read the book to him.” She didn’t give up. She didn’t just say, “Ah this is too much trouble. She persisted.

What we found when we looked at the two groups that the parents who got the cognitive behavioral therapy approach were more optimistic about their child’s future, they were more likely to take them out in public, would have fewer fears about their child, what their child was doing. Again, we were not conceding, we were not saying “I’m not going back”. We had a mom who had three kids with autism and when they got to her father’s house, they ran in the backyard and they were three kids and swings, but only two swings. Do the math. They got upset, so she brought them inside and she said “It wasn’t kid-friendly and they were doing all these things, and I got heart palpitations and problems.” She was a health patient, she was having an anxiety attack. So she’s like “Now I can’t go back to my father’s house.” I was like “No, that’s the worst thing you can do is not go back.” Because what happens as these kids get older, your world starts to collapse and you go to fewer places. So I worked with young adults in group homes who run the house because people are afraid. So what we’re trying to do is catch them early and learn, there are rules. “I will persist with them. I’m a good mom” This is another thought that they have, “I’m not a good mother or father. And so that’s why this isn’t working.”

That’s the study and that’s the data we got out of it. It was very encouraging because we could teach them to feel better about themselves as a parent and could give them techniques to learn how to deal with those negative thoughts and overcome them. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

So it’s not just about educating and modeling and making sure that parents know what to do, it’s also the education, building the awareness and the mindfulness around how they’re doing that, particularly how they’re thinking and feeling. There are so many pieces that go into that. Parents come to the experience of parenting a child with special needs with all different backgrounds, experiences, we all come to parenting with our own stuff, right? I’m curious, are there some things that you find most often get in the way of parents having optimism?

Dr. Mark Durand: 

Some of this is by nature, so there are optimistic people and there are pessimistic people. So what we want to do is see, can we teach people who are naturally pessimists. It’s called pessimistic attribution style. So if you’re a pessimist and something bad happens, you overgeneralize. “Always happens” and I talk to people about this all the time, and you have to start saying to yourself, “Well, it doesn’t always happen. I took my child to the supermarket, it was big, it was noisy, I didn’t feed him ahead of time, I didn’t give him something to play with while we were there.” I said, “If you take him to a smaller store or you feed him ahead of time, does it go better?” And they kind of sheepishly said, “Yes.” Style is just to overgeneralize, we call it catastrophizing. And it was like, “That was terrible, so I’m not going to go back again.” “God I went to the pediatrician’s office and he’s backing out. This always happens when we do that.” So we pinpoint this out to them that that way of thinking can be changed. And that’s what we wanted to do with our study and our research. Not every parent has the same style or thoughts.

A big one, one of the biggest ones is, “I have no control. I can’t do anything about this.” We had a mom, they had a dog, and they had a child and the dog had a medical problem and was urinating on the floor. And the son would step through it. She’s trying to help the dog, she’s trying to help the kid, she’s just saying, “I’m getting so frustrated, I don’t know what to do and I feel like I have no control.” That’s terrible, feeling like you have no control, especially in major life things, like at this point and time in our lives where we don’t have a lot of control. You get depressed. That’s what one of the theories of depression is, it’s that you feel out of control. So you have to — what we do is give them ways of thinking differently about these situations. 

The mother who had three kids and they were having a hard time in her father’s house, we pointed out that she had control. She didn’t think she did. We got her rounding them up, put them in the car saying, “You misbehaved, and next time we’re going to have some rules, we’re going to the house, so you can wander through it and you can do this.” We were like, okay I can do this and not be depressed about it and not be anxious about it. 

So those are kind of some of the things that we look at. There are lots of different ones, different styles. People feel judged, some people feel like, “Why am I always responsible?” We had a mom who was giving her son a bath, and he didn’t like taking baths and she was complaining about it, she goes, “I don’t understand…” — we have a video of this, “I don’t understand why he won’t take a bath!” Well, he got in the bath fine. But she’s sitting here thinking, “Why am I always the one that has to give him a bath? It’s 8 o’clock at night, I just came home. Someone else should be able to do it. I don’t understand why he doesn’t like baths.” Then they can’t get him out. He loves swimming, but he won’t do this for the bath. Well, he actually got out of the bath fine. She remembered in our session how it went and then I said, “So what did you do about that?” And then she shook her head, held her head and said, “I didn’t reward him because I was too busy thinking of these other things.” This is where I talk about mindfulness. How you learn how to be aware of the good things that are happening and if we have time later, we’ll talk about gratitude and how those kinds of things can help you through those difficult times. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Yeah, and I think you said something earlier too that stuck with me, that seems to be an important piece of this for people, if parents, even from an education standpoint that so often, they’re given a diagnosis, or in the case of many families, multiple diagnoses and not — that there isn’t a discussion around, and there are a lot of things to improve the challenges you’re dealing with. And you should expect that these things improve, right? So lots of parents walk away from that, thinking, “Oh my goodness, this is just something that I have no control over, my child does these things because of this diagnosis, there is nothing to be done.” And that can be a really problematic thought process as well. 

Dr. Mark Durand: 

Well, and there is also guilt. In fact, I gave a keynote at the Juvenile Arthritis Association, and this resonated with them because they were saying, “My child is in pain, they have painful treatments, and so why should I push him to brush his teeth? Why should I do this?” Because they feel terribly guilty about all of this. And it’s going to help your child, help your child become more independent, even though yes, they have a problem. We’re dealing with that a lot. A mom who had a child with autism and her approach was: Give her everything she wants. If she cries… give her everything she wants. Because God somehow put her on the planet with me, and I’m supposed to help her and school was furious because they would hear the stories about she would cry and scream and knock her head on the wall and she gave her cookies and she gave her soda, and they were having a hard time with her in school. So she went through our optimistic parenting aspect, and three weeks later, she said, “I didn’t realize I was doing it wrong.” She couldn’t change. When in fact, she can! She had severe problems, but the mom said, “I look at her now,” and I said, “she’s understanding me. She understands what’s going on, and if I want something, I can’t scream and yell and carry on. I have to be nice to my mother. She didn’t say that, she wasn’t verbal.” That mom could see that this was possible. And that made her more, she said, powerful. I’m in control of this situation and I can help my child. So that’s kind of the ultimate outcome we want. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

I love that. That’s great. Let’s dive into some of the strategies. In the book, you talk about 10 tips for Optimistic Parenting. You cover those in lots of detail. Let’s focus on a few. You touched on exploring thoughts and feelings and bringing awareness to that. Believing you’re a good parent, believing your child can change, you know, these are important factors. Let’s touch on the expressing gratitude, because your book was really the first time I had seen somebody pull that component that we know from the literature in psychology and positive psychology, especially has an impact, can pull that into this realm of working with kids and families with special needs. Let’s talk about that one specifically. 

Dr. Mark Durand:

Sure. I’ll give you an example. I teach a positive psychology class, and I have my students do several exercises, but two of them are: Three Good Things. You have to every night for a week, write down three good things that happened that night or that day. And it could be small things: I found a parking space near my class, had a great talk with my friend but we want to kind of get you to focus on the positive instead of the negative. My wife and I would sometimes, when my child was younger, we’d go out to dinner and we’d talk about — we call it HIM. We talked about HIM all the time. This happened and that happened and that happened, and it’s like, no, we can’t just dwell on the negative.

 Another thing that we do in class is called a Gratitude Letter. I ask them, pick somebody you always wanted to thank, but never did. Could be your grandmother, could be your mother, could be your boyfriend, it could be whomever. Write them a letter, thanking them for what they did for you. You have to hand it to them in person. They have to read it to you, they have to read it in front of you and then process the rest. That has been one of the most moving experiences many of my students have ever had. We had students who — and by the way, if I tear up — I cry at Hallmark commercials, so just be warned.

He wrote this letter to his grandmother who raised him, and he never felt he really thanked her for that. Wrote this letter. She cried, he cried, he came back to my office a year later after he’d graduated. He goes, “You know, we just came back from a meeting with my grandmother who’s dying, and we talked about — how do you want to celebrate? And she said, “Read that letter” So it was like so moving, and he said, “Thank you so much for doing this.” 

Incredible. We had a young woman who overdosed, she was taken to an emergency room. The doctor took care of her, she was nasty to the doctor. For years, felt terrible about how she acted. So she wrote her a note, found her, because she didn’t know her name, she kind of described her, and the doctor was in tears, and it was so moving to this woman who got it off her chest and could thank this person for saving her life and being so kind to her when she was being so rude. So for parents, we will often say — instead of focusing on the bad teachers you had or the ones you didn’t get along with, are there some that were really great? Did you ever really thank them? Do something like that for them because this means the world to teachers. I know when I get that feedback, I show my wife, it’s like, “Look what this student said from my class!” So the gratitude part is really important. It makes you focus on the positive again, that there are some good things out there. It also makes you feel better and research says it can reduce depression for a month or two, if you’re having a difficult time. So it’s helpful for parents to kind of focus on that and not have to always focus on this one poorly. 

Let me kind of do a side note here, we also talked about — we haven’t done it, but optimistic teaming. Working with both the parents and the teachers to listen to each other. So I give the example of a parent who gets a letter from school saying your daughter tantrumed in the playground. What’s the mother thinking? Mother was thinking, “I must be a bad parent. They’re blaming me for my child’s behavior at school.” What does the parent do? The parent doesn’t write back. What does the teacher think? Teacher thinks the parent doesn’t care. So we try to get inside of their heads to see, this is why she’s doing this, this is why the teacher is doing this, and can we kind of find some common ground to understand how this affects her. So can we say, yes she tantrumed but then she stopped and we did well, and it kind of reflects positively on both of them. So it’s a thing that can get beyond just the family dynamic and work with other people. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

I think that’s so true. Often when I was a teacher myself and certainly when I consult with educational settings or those kinds of environments… one of my rules is that you have to provide as much positive feedback to the parent about the day or the situation as you are negative. Because doing the work that I do with families and with parents, you’re so right that often, as professionals, we don’t realize the profound impact that that has on parents and how that feels to them and where they go in their own mind with that, so I think that’s such an important point. 

And speaking of that, where we as parents go in our own mind, which we often are not even paying attention to, that’s such an important part of this, right? and so many of the examples that you’ve given, being aware of what our thoughts and feelings are about the situation. In the book, you give lots of strategies for that. What’s a starting point for our parents who are listening, or even professionals who are listening too? Is there something that you think is a helpful starting point for people to be aware of that internal process?

Dr. Mark Durand: 

Well, again, it is practicing being aware. So we have families do diaries. We have a thoughts diary, so we say, pick a situation that happened. A negative situation and a positive situation. Write down what you were thinking while that was happening. So “I feel out of control” was it, “The disorder” “People are judging me” “Why am I always the one always responsible?” So write that down, so you can practice thinking about this. But we also have them write down positive things and what are you thinking about that time? The bathtub example I gave was one where the mother initially had it down as a negative, but realized it was a positive. And because of all these thoughts that she had, she wasn’t being aware of that. She wasn’t really paying attention to what was going on. I’m a runner. I was sitting on a park, sitting on a bench because I was tired and hot, and I saw this mother walking with her young daughter and holding her hand and on the phone with her friend, and the daughter said, “Look mom, a bug!” The mother said, “That’s nice.” She goes, “Look mom, it’s a green bug!” She goes, “That’s nice.” She keeps talking on the phone with her friend. She goes, “Look mom, a shiny, green bug!” And finally the mother said, “Okay, that’s nice.” And the girl hit her. And she said, “Why did you hit — I’ll call you back! Why did you hit me?” And I wanted to say, “I know! Because she wanted to show you and impress you. She might have been a world-famous entomologist someday but you were too busy on the phone.” And this is where we get into mindfulness again. 

Be aware of what’s going on with your children. We have this tendency as a parent, when your child is being good, you’re off doing something else. You’re making dinner, you’re calling a friend, because now you get a break. But that’s also a time where you should be focusing on the good things. You don’t have to do it all the time, but practice thinking, being aware of what you’re thinking. Then we have a number of techniques that can help them break those thoughts and break them so they don’t happen to them. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Give an example of a strategy that you use for that, because I think people are like, “Oh, yeah, how do I do that? I’m aware, gosh, as I’m thinking about it, I do tend to really focus in on the negative or I have this story that runs in my mind about “Why even bother, this isn’t going to get better?” Those kinds of things. What is an example of something that you teach parents to do to shift that?

Dr. Mark Durand:

Well one of the techniques is called distraction. So we had a couple come in, and this is the one that had three kids with autism. And she goes, “Kids are bouncing off the wall, on the house, we’re blaming each other, we wanted to do this, why’d you give him candy? And I said, “Come up with something that would just distract you from these negative thoughts, and they thought for a minute and the mom said, “Yippee ki-yay!” And I didn’t know what that was, and the facilitator there didn’t know what it was. The facilitator and I thought it had something to do with their sex life, but it was from a movie. And it was Die Hard, Bruce Willis and before he was going to shoot somebody, he would say “Yippee ki-yay” and then he would say something I can’t say. But it made them laugh! It was like just shoot them off. It was like, okay this is a bizarre situation, you have three kids, they’re all over the place, how bizarre is that! And by the way, other families have the same situation. But we can either bicker over these children or we can just say, alright, this is bizarre. Let’s move on. See how we can get things under control. So, distracting thoughts pushes you away from blaming somebody or feeling bad about yourself, and just saying this is bizarre, so we’ll deal with it. 

That’s one of the techniques. We also have some others like this substitution where we give them other thoughts to think about. We have one that’s kind of an affirmation. Basically, you say to yourself, “I’m a good parent, I’m doing the right things, this will get better over time.” So you practice the positive part to it.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

I think that piece about telling yourself you’re a good parent — because one of the tips is to believe you’re a good parent and that can be so hard for moms and dads to do, especially if you have a really challenging child. A lot of people equate their sense of being a good parent to their child being happy all the time. So when the child is distressed with anything the parent is saying or doing or any limit that they’re setting, immediately, the feedback that the perception on the part of mom or dad is, “I’m not being a good parent because my child is upset right now.” And what you really are talking about is that being a good parent and believing we’re a good parent means recognizing that our kids aren’t always going to be happy with what we’re doing and that’s not a reflection on whether we are good parents or not. 

Dr. Mark Durand: 

And it’s the outcomes. I used to joke, my son was a difficult child. Took him about 35 years to grow out of that phase. No offense to anybody, I’m sorry about the dismal outcome! But when he was difficult, my wife and I would have this conversation about how we do the right thing dealing with him. As I said, he’s in school, he’s doing okay in school, if it wasn’t for us and toeing the line, he could be in jail right now! He could be involved with drugs. So there’s always somebody out there who’s got it more difficult than you do. So I just said, “We’re doing fine.” We had a child who was born difficult. He wasn’t born with a disability. Born difficult. Even early eating and sleeping, how I got into the sleeping disorders is letting my son sleep. So it was like — but we keep persisting and like I said, 35 years later, he likes us. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Success!

Dr. Mark Durand:

In fact, when he went away to college, he said, “I’m the only male in my dorm who knows how to make a meal and do laundry.” He goes, “None of them know how to do that!” Because their parents were just trying to be friends and it’s difficult and he used to fight with us about doing those things, but he then agreed that these are good skills to have and “I have more than my friends.”

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

So it’s that reframe of being a good parent or how we feel about ourselves as a parent needs to be more about the long game and the outcomes and are we persisting and trying and persevering versus attaching to our sense of ourself as a good parent to whether our kid is happy in the moment. 

Dr. Mark Durand:

Well, in the book, I give the example, I used to do marathons. And in one marathon, I was at mile 20. You know marathons, I had 6.2 miles to go, and my back hurt, my legs felt like tree trunks. I could see the ending 6 miles aways and I thought, “I’m never going to make this.” It was like one foot in front of the other. And then I could hear someone shuffling just a little bit faster than me behind me and passing me. And he was about 90 years old. I thought, “This 90-year-old guy is going to beat me to the finish line!” And any kind of energy I had was just like washing away. But on the back of his shirt was a quote, and it said: “Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.” You’re going to hurt. How you deal with that hurt is up to you. 

I then started figuring my wife’s going to be at the finish line, I get to eat and drink anything I want today, so I kind of refocused, except not on my pain, but on all of the good things that will come and it worked! I got to the end miraculously because I didn’t think I had it in me. So that’s the kind of thing: Pain is inevitable, but suffering, how you deal with it is up to you. So when you’re challenged by your child, I can choose to kind of focus on all the negative things, or I can choose to look at the future, I can choose to say I’m a good parent because not a lot of parents can handle this. It’s a way to get to that finish line. That’s kind of what this is, it’s like they say, it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon. So you may get through it today and feel like it didn’t go well — you’ve got tomorrow. So you have ways to improve and this is where you got social networks too where you get to talk to people who can bolster you up and say they’re really impressed with what you’re doing. That’s very important and again, the gratitude about what we had happen, here we are, we’re alive, and especially tonight, we’re alive. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Such helpful and important reframes and things to think about and some very tangible starting points for people. I want to make sure that our listeners know where they can find out more about your work and your books. 

Dr. Mark Durand:

Well, my website at the university, University of South Florida St. Petersburg, I have my media and some description of the work, but Amazon carries all my books. So I happen to have 15 books. Some of them are textbooks on abnormal psychology, but the Sleep Better book is there, the Optimistic Parenting book is there. For professionals, I also have this series of protocols. So a professional who may want to do this with families, the protocol is written out step by step by step, each session — they’re on there. It’s called Positive Family Intervention, you know, it leads to optimistic parenting for professionals, but it includes all the assessments. There’s also a parent workbook that goes along with it if they want to use that. So Amazon, you can look my name up and I have a page with all the books that I have, so that’s another way to find them. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

And we’ll have the links to those books in the show notes as well so people can access them. Highly recommend them. I’ll try to twist your arm and have you come back on the show at another time to talk about the sleep stuff because that is profoundly important work and that book is great too, but highly recommend that all of you check out optimistic parenting and the other resources that Dr. Durand has available. Can’t thank you enough for taking the time to have this conversation today, really appreciate it. 

Dr. Mark Durand:

My pleasure. I wish everybody well. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

And thank you to all of you for listening, we’ll catch you back here next week for our next episode of The Better Behavior show.