Re-Training a Princess

I said I wanted to write a post on why the charming/innocent/wide-eyed princess behavior is so difficult to respond to. I don't necessarily mean that it is more difficult than other behaviors to deal with calmly. Which behaviors affect us emotionally depend on different factors, including our own personalities.

What I mean is that it is difficult to know how to respond to it. It is the sort of behavior that gets reinforced.

Let's take a simple case: imagine dealing with a kid who speaks disrespectfully to you. You can (1) clearly explain what behavior you want the child to stop; (2) explain and model the sort of behavior you want in its place; (3) refuse to respond to the negative behavior; and (4) reward the positive behavior.

Now it might not be easy to do this consistently, but at least you know what you need to do. The child calls you a b*tch and you pretend not to hear or remind the child that that is inappropriate. The child does not get your attention until after he or she addresses you appropriately.

See? Simple. Not necessarily easy to do, but simple to plan.

But what do you do about a Princess? How do you explain what is wrong with making your eyes too wide, or using that particularly sweet tone of voice, or smiling while making eye contact? How do you model the behavior you want? How do you explain to someone who is seven or fourteen or forty what the difference is?

But let's say somehow you manage that. Somehow you get the person to understand the difference. First, be sure to write up how you did it and send it to the rest of us. Second, you need to figure out how to only reward the non-manipulative behavior.

Please forgive me, but I'm going to give an example from dog training. You may know that if you want your dog to stop doing something, you must not reward the behavior, ever. Our Cattle Dog tends to bark at us when we are playing fetch with her. She brings us the ball and we pick it up (with the plastic ball-throwing device) and she barks at us. We have been trying to stop this behavior for years, but we haven't had much success. See, we want to throw the ball for her. That's the point of playing fetch. The goal is that whenever she barks, we drop our arm. When she calms down, we throw. And it would work too, except sometimes, actually quite often, she barks when we are in the beginning of a throw and we can't or don't stop. So though I know that I did not throw the ball because she barked, from her perspective, it just worked.

Princess behavior, lying, and other forms of manipulation are like that, only worse.

What do you do when you meet your little princess in the kitchen in the morning and ask, "Cereal or eggs?" and she bats her eyes at you and says, "Eggs, please." Do you not feed her? Calmly tell her that she can only have her eggs if she asks with less charm?

Of course you can stop rewarding the behavior in terms of no longer letting the kid get away with breaking the rules. That may help. But from the princess's perspective, the behavior continues to work, just not quite as well. Our princess engages in a behavior and sometimes gets what she wants, and so the behavior is rewarded, and the behavior continues.

I'm not saying that this behavior cannot be modified, but I am saying that it is really, really difficult. I do know that what must be done is beyond me. The thought of trying to explain what the behavior is that I want and then to insist upon it constantly is too much for me.

So I am committed to just not letting myself get pushed into doing something I don't want to do, and trying not to let myself get too annoyed by it.

I've done really well in the three hours I've been working on it. Rhonda (that seems like such a mis-fit name know that I know her) wanted to go to the store. I told her that I had already gone. She said, "If you go again will you take me?" I said something ambiguous. The truth is that I haven't told her that she is not allowed to go to the store with me. I'm not certain that she is really not allowed, I just know that I don't want to go anywhere with her. A couple hours later she came out and asked if I was going to go. I said no, Hubby was off shopping right now.

"But you promised you would tell me so I could go too!" Imagine here the face of someone who has just been betrayed by her very best friend.

"I don't remember saying that, but in any case you won't be able to get to the store tonight."

"Why not?"

"Because no one is going to take you."

"But I really want to go" she says, her lip almost trembling, eyes pitiful. I swear she looks like my dog does when I accidentally step on her tail.

"Sorry, you're not going." I find that right now I am managing to be impressed with the performance, which is better than being furious.

She holds the pitiful face, just looking at me.

I pat her on the shoulder and say, "Really good try, but you're not going."

She adds a dash of confusion to the look of pain and betrayal.

I go back to my book and eventually she walks off.

I have no illusions though. Sometime soon she will come up to ask me if she can do something that she is allowed to do. She will throw me her best, most charming look, and I will not even notice. I will say, "Of course you may."

And she will smile in triumph.