The Kid Whisperer Asks Parents: What Do You Think You're Doing?

Scott Ervin spends part of his working life at Chicago O'Hare International Airport, though not as a traveler. He calls it a Variable Stressor Family Interaction Lab, a place where he can watch parents deal with their children under different levels of strain. Ervin, who writes the Kid Whisperer column distributed by Tribune News Service, travels the country teaching adults strategies for working with kids. He says the airport keeps his professional perception sharp.

What he sees there confuses him. When a child, whether 4 or 14, is throwing a fit or acting like a jerk, he says, parents often respond by speaking softly about feelings, emotions and going to a happy place. He writes that he wants to ask them, "What do you think you are doing?" He says he means it as a sincere question, not a rhetorical one. He knows they are trying to do something. He just isn't sure what.

He lays out his credentials before going further. Before having his own child later in life, he worked with thousands of kids as a teacher and principal. He created the strategies and procedures that became, by his account, the world's first behavior management manual for PK-12 teachers. He also admits that his first two years of teaching were spent screaming and yelling at first- and fifth-graders. He says he offers all this so readers won't mistake him for a judgy parent trying to look smarter than everyone else. His main claim is that he has worked with kids for about 25 years, and most readers probably haven't.

To answer his own question, Ervin says he went online and found the idea of validating a child's feelings. He suspects that is what the parents at the airport are attempting. He concedes there is something to it. Telling kids it's okay to have a feeling is good, he writes, and a few small studies suggest that children solving a problem show more resilience and feel better when told their frustration is okay.

He says he has done this for 23 years. In his example, a kid says a math problem is really frustrating, and he answers that it's totally okay to feel frustrated and to keep going. That teaches children that all feelings are acceptable and that the adult believes they are capable and resilient. He may add help solving the problem a different way, but he calls validation and gentle encouragement the key parts.

His argument is that the scene at gate G11 is something else. In his telling, he teaches that feelings are never wrong. Parents soothing a misbehaving child, he says, are teaching that actions are never wrong. He argues that attention given to negative behavior reinforces it, making it more likely to be repeated, explored and heightened. His approach, he says, makes kids more emotionally healthy, while the parents' approach turns children into monsters.

He widens the claim to schools. Teachers today, he writes, will say the country is in a Behavioral Apocalypse, with legions of kids arriving on the first day of school having been accidentally trained to get attention and a sense of control by causing problems for others. If parents don't stop, he warns, schools will eventually stop working entirely, and some already have. He says the country will follow.

The piece is an opinion column built on personal experience and observation, not a research review. Ervin himself acknowledges that the studies he found are small, and he offers no data on the airport scenes or the classroom trends he describes. Readers should take it as one educator's view of where parenting and school behavior are headed.