Skills Axis

As a parent, a large part of your job is to try to help your child achieve psychological health. But what is psychological health? What should a psychologically healthy individual be able to do? It will be worth your while to think for a long time about what things a psychologically healthy individual can do well, and what some examples would be of doing those things well. The clearer the picture you have of what healthy psychological functioning is, the easier it will be to help your child achieve it.

For some parents enlarging your job description in this way may be somewhat daunting. For example: a couple was having behavior problems with their boy. At first they had the attitude, “We’re not really interested in psychological skills. All we want to know is what to do when he hits, or when he has tantrums, or when he yells hostile things at people, or refuses to go to bed. When he’s not doing these things, he does OK.” The attitude was, “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. I’m just interested in fixing this one type of problem behavior.” My answer to these parents was that in a half hour I could give advice about what to do immediately after those behaviors occur. But if that’s all they do, they are much more likely to come back to me and complain that “I did what you said, and it didn’t work.” Or that “it worked for a few weeks, but now there are problems again.” This is the reason why I ask parents to change their thinking: to start thinking about building psychological skills, and not just about stamping out problems.

We began thinking about the boy’s problems in the following terms: If he hits and is hostile to other children, the solution is not just that he stops hitting and being hostile; it’s also that he starts getting more pleasure from being kind and making others feel good. If he has a tantrum whenever he doesn’t get his way, we want him not just to stop having tantrums; we want him to start showing more examples of fortitude, and feeling proud about those examples. If he is scared of going to bed, we want him not just to stop thinking scary thoughts; we want to help him start thinking comforting thoughts that give him security. Children, like adults, are always doing or thinking something. Nature abhors a vacuum. Children can stop doing problematic things much easier if there is some adaptive, desirable pattern to fill up the vacuum.

His parents found that there’s another very important reason for thinking about what skills you want to see more of rather than just thinking about what you want less of. When you are trying to increase the frequency of something the child does, you do it by congratulations, positive attention, celebration, setting and presenting positive models, providing opportunities for positive practice, and other pleasant interactions. Working with the boy when he was not exhibiting problematic behavior, by immediately celebrating the positive patterns he exhibited, recalling and reenacting those patterns later on, putting on plays that model desirable patterns, reading stories that illustrate kindness, and other such activities proved to be much fun for all of them. These activities tend to strengthen the relationship: make deposits in the emotional bank account rather than withdrawals. Also, the parents found that the sorts of celebrating sentences that they said when they saw him doing a positive example of one of his top-priority skills were just the sorts of sentences that they wanted to hear him saying to other people more often, and to himself. And sure enough, they gradually began to hear lots more utterances of “Congratulations” and “Wow! Hey! That’s interesting!” coming from him over time.

It was very useful for his parents also to use reprimands and punishment to decrease his negative behavior, and we will spend time on these techniques later on. I’m not advocating a total abandonment of punishment. But the more you can emphasize the positive, the more successful you’re likely to be. Sometimes you can bring out the good behavior so much that it just crowds out the bad behavior, without your having to do anything specific about bad behavior other than ignore it.

So if you want to proceed systematically, here’s how I recommend you start out.

1. Get very familiar with all the psychological skills listed in this chapter. Think and read about how the positive examples of these skills look and sound.

2. Decide on the three or four psychological skills that are of highest priority for your child to develop at this time. If you’re trying to solve problems, pick the skills that you think are most likely to help your child get over them. If you are acting preventively, pick some skills to focus on for now, and rotate to a different group later on.

3. Get in your mind a very concrete list of positive examples of each of those skills, that you can watch carefully for. That way when you see the skills developing, you can give them a boost by paying attention to them and celebrating them.

In the table that follows there is a list of 62 psychological skills, in 16 groups. (I call this an “axis” rather than a plain old “list” because the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals have looked at psychiatric problems in terms of several “axes”; I propose the skills axis as one more.) Your time will be well spent in reviewing this list and pondering how your child is doing in each of these.

The psychological skills axis is just as useful for adults as for children. Psychological skills are the patterns that help us deal with life, from its beginning to its end.

Goals are very important: if you don’t know what you want to accomplish, you’re much less likely to accomplish it. The skills on the axis are the goals for psychological development to pursue as long as you have an influence on your child.

You may be thinking, “I want more than just skill in my child. I want character, personality, psychological adjustment, morality, and motivation.” As you study the skills axis, you’ll find that it covers all of these. I use the word skill much more broadly than most people do. The concepts on the skills axis were taken from a variety of sources—all that I could get my hands on—and they represent an attempt to combine all these ideas into a common language. We can talk, for example, about the “character trait” of honesty, or we can talk about the “skill” of being honest when it is difficult to be so. We can talk about the “psychic structure” of having a conscience that is not too harsh and punitive, or we can consider feeling an appropriate degree of misgivings or guilt about wrong actions as a skill. We can talk about the “motivation” to do kind acts, or we can talk about the skill of feeling good when one helps others—delivering to oneself the pleasure that provides the driving force for the motivation. The skills axis is the result of translating different types of language into the language of skills. It’s good to do this, because all these skills can be learned, can become habitual, and involve patterns of thinking, feeling, or acting.

Here’s another advantage of using the skills axis concepts to think about life: they are specific enough to lead you to clear action steps. Imagine that Dr. Alexander observes her daughter Grace, who is having problems in preschool. Dr. Alexander concludes, “She just isn’t having a good time. She somehow isn’t making it, there. She’s miserable. But other kids seem to be having a good time. She’s different somehow.” These concepts do indicate that there’s a problem to solve, but they’re too general to give much indication of how to solve it.

After a thorough education in skills axis concepts, Dr. Alexander observes and reflects upon Grace’s behavior again. Now she comes away with the following conclusions: “She’s not very good at starting up interactions with other children; for that reason I think she’s very lonesome. Once she gets started, however, she can usually play pretty nicely. She’s also not very good at handling failure in a performance, and gets humiliated too easily to be able to enjoy singing and dancing with the other children. But she’s good at complying with the teacher and at sustaining attention to things. I want to try to help her with skills of starting interactions and handling failure, and see if that makes her more happy.”

After the skills axis education, Dr. Alexander is much more equipped to help her child than she was before. She is now ready to help the child learn the skills that are responsible for the child’s unhappiness. If she also becomes well versed in using modeling, monitoring, reinforcement, attribution, and the other methods of influence to be outlined later, and has access to ancillary materials we will talk about to aid in these things, then she can form a very concrete plan to help her daughter.

What words we use to conceptualize the world really affect how we handle it. The parent, or the child, who has the skills concepts in his or her vocabulary has tools that will be helpful in promoting psychological growth.

Children can and should get these concepts into their vocabularies. Even preschool children have learned to think in terms of the skills. I will speak later about systematic ways to teach these concepts. I would recommend that any adult seriously interested in promoting children’s psychological growth go through them and get very familiar with them. One major way to get these concepts into the child’s vocabulary is to comment favorably on examples that the child did, or that the parent or someone else did. The child shares a toy with someone, and the adult says, “That was a kind act that you did!” The child asks for something and gets told “No,” and handles this with equanimity. The adult says, “That was a good example of fortitude!” In each of these cases the child is not only getting recognition and approval, but is getting some instruction in the meaning of the concepts of kindness and fortitude.

There is a song, a jingle, that I have used to help people remember the sixteen psychological skill groups. (This is on a collection of songs I recorded, entitled Spirit of Nonviolence.) The words are as follows:

What are the qualities that make life better?

What makes people good?

What lets people live in happiness and peace

And brother- and sisterhood?

Productivity, joyousness, kindness

Honesty, fortitude

Good decisions made every day

Nonviolence and not being rude.

Friendship-building, self-discipline, loyalty

Conservation and self-care

Compliance and positive fantasy rehearsal

And courage, if you dare.

The table that follows presents the full list of psychological skills.

The Psychological Skills Axis

Group 1: Productivity

3. Competence-development. Working toward competence in job, academics, recreation, life skills

4. Organization. Organizing goals, priorities, time, money, and physical objects; planfulness

5. Enjoying aloneness. Having a good time by oneself, tolerating not getting someone’s attention

6. Pleasure from approval. Enjoying approval, compliments, and positive attention from others

8. Pleasure from my own kindness. Feeling pleasure from doing kind, loving acts for others

10. Pleasure from others’ kindness. Feeling gratitude for what others have done

12. Pleasure from affection. Enjoying physical affection without various fears interfering

13. Favorable attractions. Having feelings of attraction aroused in ways consonant with happiness

14. Gleefulness. Playing, becoming childlike, experiencing glee, being spontaneous

17. Empathy. Recognizing other people’s feelings, seeing things from another’s point of view

19. Honesty. Being honest and dependable, especially when it is difficult to be so

20. Awareness of my abilities. Being honest and brave in assessing my strengths and weaknesses.

21. Frustration-tolerance. Handling frustration, tolerating adverse circumstances, fortitude

22. Handling separation. Tolerating separation from close others, or loss of a relationship

23. Handling rejection. Tolerating it when people don’t like or accept you or want to be with you

24. Handling criticism. Dealing with disapproval and criticism and lack of respect from others

25. Handling mistakes and failures. Regretting mistakes without being overly self-punitive

27. Painful emotion-tolerance. Tolerating painful emotions; avoiding the vicious cycle of “feeling bad about feeling bad”

28. Fantasy-tolerance. Tolerating unwanted mental images, confident that they will not be enacted

29. Positive aim. Aiming toward making things better. Seeking reward and not punishment

30. Reflectiveness. Thinking before acting, letting thoughts mediate between situation and action

32. Awareness of your emotions. Recognizing and being able to verbalize your own feelings

33. Awareness of control. Accurately assessing the degree of control you have over specific events

34. Decision-making. Defining a problem, gathering information, generating options, predicting and evaluating consequences, making a choice

35. Toleration. Non-bossiness. Tolerating a wide range of other people’s behavior

36. Rational approach to joint decisions. Deciding rationally on stance and strategies

38. Option-evaluating. Justice skills: Recognizing just solutions to interpersonal problems

39. Assertion. Dominance, sticking up for yourself, taking charge, enjoying winning.

40. Submission: Conciliation, giving in, conceding, admitting you were wrong, being led

41. Differential reinforcement. Reinforcing positive behavior and avoiding reinforcing the negative

42. Forgiveness and anger control. Forgiving, handling an insult or injury by another

43. Nonviolence. Being committed to the principle of nonviolence and working to foster it

44. Respectful talk, not being rude. Being sensitive to words, vocal tones and facial expressions that are accusing, punishing or demeaning, and avoiding them unless there is a very good reason

45. Discernment and Trusting. Accurately appraising others. Not distorting with prejudice, overgeneralization, wish-fulfilling fantasies. Deciding what someone can be trusted for and trusting when appropriate.

46. Self-disclosure. Disclosing and revealing oneself to another when it is safe

47. Gratitude. Expressing gratitude, admiration, and other positive feelings toward others

48. Social initiations. Starting social interaction; getting social contact going.

50. Listening. Empathizing, encouraging another to talk about his own experience

51. Self-discipline. Delay of gratification, self-control. Denying oneself pleasure for future gain

52. Loyalty. Tolerating and enjoying sustained closeness, attachment, and commitment to another

53. Conservation and Thrift. Preserving resources for ourselves and future generations. Foregoing consumption on luxuries, but using resources more wisely. Financial delay of gratification skills.

55. Habits of self-care. Healthy habits regarding drinking, smoking, drug use, exercise, and diet

56. Relaxation. Calming yourself, letting your mind drift pleasantly, letting your body be at ease

57. Self-nurture. Delivering assuring or care-taking thoughts to yourself, and feeling comforted from these thoughts

59. Imagination and positive fantasy rehearsal. Using fantasy as a tool in rehearsing or evaluating a plan, or adjusting to an event or situation

60. Courage. Estimating danger, overcoming fear of nondangerous situations, handling danger rationally

61. Depending. Accepting help, being dependent without shame, asking for help appropriately

62. Independent thinking. Making decisions independently, carrying out actions independently

About the Order of the Skills

I have regrouped the skills since the time of their original publication. At that time I tried to group them in a rough developmental sequence, using the ideas of Erik Erickson about how psychological development takes place. Since that time, I’ve become convinced that all of these skills begin developing very early, and all of them can continue developing late in life. For example, I originally listed trusting (including deciding who is trustworthy in what ways) at the beginning of the list, to correspond with Erickson’s stage of “basic trust versus mistrust.” But decisions on whom to trust for what are very complex and people continue to develop this skill throughout adult life. Conversely, many other skills such as productivity, joyousness, and kindness probably get their start very early in life. I finally gave up on making the order of skills correspond to stages of life development.

As the skills are now grouped, the sixteen group headings in themselves cover psychological health fairly well, even for those people who do not go into the depth required to get familiar with all sixty-two individual skills. The sixteen skill groups also seem to cover principles of ethics fairly well also; they permit a merging of psychological skills and ethical principles.

The names of the first few skill groups, even without the rest, form a rough approximation to defining psychological health. When someone asked Sigmund Freud what the psychologically healthy person should be able to do, he replied, “To love and to work” – I translate that as kindness and productivity. Since it’s difficult to sustain working or being kind without deriving pleasure from these activities, we should add joyousness to the very short list. Productivity, joyousness, and kindness in themselves form a pretty good image of a psychologically healthy person, and a good person.

A Trek Through the Skills Axis

It’s good to spend time thinking about what the psychologically healthy person can do. The paragraphs that follow are only an introduction. The other way of learning about psychological skills is to reflect on particular concrete examples of each one of them. As we’ll talk about later, there are lots of stories, plays, and vignettes I’ve written that help to do this. But let’s start by simply describing them.

The productivity group has to do with using effort to accomplish something. It is linked to the concept of “work capacity” – how much effort is someone capable of expending before saying to himself, “I’ve had enough!” The infant who learns to roll or crawl to get closer to some object of curiosity is practicing productivity. The toddler who tries various techniques to engage an adult’s attention is also expending effort to accomplish a goal, even though the toddler usually can’t express this goal in words. Academic and career work are only the most obvious manifestations of productivity. Work toward improvement of psychological skills is an extremely important portion of this skill. I put the productivity group first because people can improve in all other skills, if they can work at them enough.

The essence of productivity is striving toward goals. The skill of purposefulness includes having goals, and having worthy goals. What are goals that are worthy of directing life’s effort? Unless we give children a different answer, I fear that the answer they get from today’s media-oriented society is that we live in order to consume goods, get famous, be beautiful, and triumph over our foes through violent competition. It should worry us to read polls asking young people whom they admire the most, and to see actors who portray violent “heroes” regularly showing up, while the names of Nobel Peace Prize winners are forgotten if ever noticed. The rampant violence in today’s U.S. culture is probably partly due to lack of messages to young people that there is a higher purpose in existence than to beat the enemy. For females, the goal of being beautiful is constantly presented in the media. Among adolescents and young adults with anorexia and bulimia, a very helpful process is to consider whether there is a higher purpose in existence than adjusting how one looks.

In forming worthy goals, a useful orienting notion is the overarching goal of making the world a better place, and of enjoying doing that. The qualifier to such a seemingly grandiose idea is that making even one person happier makes the world a better place.

One of the jobs of parents is to transmit to children your highest and best ideas of the purposes of existence. If you don’t do this, the mass culture will transmit other ideas.

Having worthy goals is not enough for productivity; you also have to log in enough effort to accomplish them. The inability to keep working long enough is one of the defining features of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, the most frequent reason why children receive drug treatment. Our biological makeup has lots to do with how easy it is for us to pay attention. But lots of evidence suggests that sustaining attention to tasks, like any other skill, gets better with practice and reinforcement and the other influences I’ll talk about later. For young children, listening when someone reads books, and having conversations, and doing dramatic play with toy people, when done for longer and longer periods of time, constitute what I call practice in attending to verbally encoded information. And the tasks of schoolwork, which later will put great demands upon the child’s attention span, also involve attending to verbally encoded material. I had the pleasure of directing a research study that found what you might have expected: when parents spend time reading to, talking with, and playing with preschool aged children, the children develop better attention skills.

3. Competence-development. Working toward competence in job, academics, recreation, life skills

There is a story of two people who sawed wood all day; one worked continuously; the other stopped from time to time. Yet the second sawed much more wood. When the first one asked, “How did you do it,” the second answered, “During the time I stopped sawing, I sharpened the saw.” The moral is: invest effort in the activities that make other effort more effective. The person who can take pleasure at getting more competent at skills has a real advantage for psychological health.

4. Organization. Organizing goals, priorities, time, money, and physical objects; planfulness

Disorganization is one of the biggest enemies of productivity. The ability to make and follow plans, use to-do lists, use appointment books, make and follow budgets, file papers, and organize physical objects is crucial to those who would be successful in this complex world. Although the literature on these skills is more often classed in business sections than mental health sections of libraries, the skills are central to mental health. Children are often given medication for disorganization that is thought to be a manifestation of attention problems; few of these children are systematically taught organization skills.

The skill of self-discipline is another that is crucial to productivity. This skill is so crucial to so many other areas of life that it is given its own group; we’ll come to it later.

Our brains constantly signal us to avoid pain and seek enjoyment. Some people’s lives seem to be based around a “pain economy”: if they do this or that, they will reduce their fear or guilt. Others seem more based on an economy of seeking the positive: if they do this or that, they will feel proud or happy. You can train two rats to run in a maze by different methods. One gets its feet shocked until it finds its way out of the maze. The second gets some tasty food when it finds its way out. Both may be doing the same behavior, but the second is probably enjoying the process more! Similarly, two people can be performing on stage. One may be thinking, “I can’t screw up, or I’ll look like an idiot!” The second may be thinking, “What a thrill it will be to put on a good performance!” The second point of view is much more conducive to happy performance!

The ability to take pleasure in various aspects of life is not just biologically determined – we program and reprogram ourselves with respect to what to feel good about. As parents, one of our main goals is to help children take pleasure in the sorts of things that will help them the most.

5. Enjoying aloneness. Having a good time by oneself, tolerating not getting someone’s attention

It’s a cliché to speak of a child acting up “to get attention.” But commonsense wisdom is correct that attention-seeking is a frequent motive for children’s misbehavior. Children often do unkind or irritating things, not out of malice, but because these behaviors get people to look at them and talk to them. For example, a child at school pokes another, just to get some interaction going. A five-year-old child whines or knocks things over just because people in the family are not noticing her.

One answer to this problem is “differential attention,” or giving more attention to positive behavior than negative behavior. We’ll talk about this much more, later.

But some children need to learn to exist on a leaner diet of attention. They need to get the ability to be at peace with themselves for longer times. Being with people, but not attended to, is sometimes harder than actually being by oneself.

As parents we wish our children to be able to take pleasure both in solitary activity and in a variety of aspects of social activity, many of which are included in the other joyousness skills.

6. Pleasure from approval. Enjoying approval, compliments, and positive attention from others

People constantly send us signals – sometimes subtle, sometimes otherwise – about whether they approve or disapprove of our behavior. Although people can become overly dependent on others’ approval, the ability to take pleasure in approval is one of the major skills that keeps us on the right track, keeps us oriented toward activity that makes others feel good instead of upsetting them.

This skill is the ability to say, “Hooray for me, I did something good,” when appropriate, and to feel good in response to that thought. The external world usually does not offer us payoffs for our effort on a schedule that maximizes our accomplishments. For example, the child who is doing homework may experience no immediate external reward, and may even experience very little delayed external reward. But if the child can deliver himself his own reward, his own feelings of pleasure from accomplishment, he will enjoy the process of homework more, and will be much more likely to complete it.

8. Pleasure from your own kindness. Feeling pleasure from doing kind, loving acts for others

If all children could somehow be “programmed” to feel great pleasure from making others happy, the world would be transformed in a major way. But even though this utopian fantasy may never occur, the person who can take pleasure from making others feel good has a major advantage for happiness. This person can take great pleasure from the sorts of actions that create stable and happy relationships and useful economic results.

Great development of this skill results in a learner who expends effort not just to get grades or to do better than someone else, but who takes direct joy in finding out about the world.

10. Pleasure from others’ kindness. Feeling gratitude for what others have done

The person with this skill appreciates what others have done. Not only is this person less likely to be called a spoiled brat; the appreciation feels good and directly makes the person happy.

11. Pleasure from blessings. Celebrating and feeling the blessings of luck or fate

With this skill the person takes pleasure from the blessings that are outside of any human being’s control – chief among them being the existence of such a complex universe, the existence of life, and the chance to be alive.

Pleasure from blessings, pleasure from others’ kindness, and pleasure from one’s own accomplishments and acts of kindness are the antidotes to what Beck has called the depressive triad: a negative view of the self, other people, and the world.

12. Pleasure from affection. Enjoying physical affection without various fears interfering

Physical affection is one of the great pleasures of life. Along with the self-discipline and self-care skills required to avoid inappropriate or harmful physical contact, we want our children to be able to take pleasure in the physical contact that is appropriate and good.

13. Favorable attractions. Having feelings of attraction aroused in ways consonant with happiness

Some people find themselves attracted to people who are not good for them. For example, some women find themselves attracted to “tough guys” who end up being abusive to them, passing up relationships with more kind and rational men who somehow don’t have the “chemistry.” Some people tend to seek mates who are helpless and in need of a rescue, those who make them a “knight in shining armor.” But the job of knighthood and rescuing can get old fast. Some people are attracted to others purely on the basis of their physical appearance, disregarding their psychological skill strengths and weaknesses. The skill of favorable attractions means you’re attracted to the sort of people who are good for you.

14. Gleefulness. Playing, becoming childlike, experiencing glee, being spontaneous

The skills of gleefulness, silliness, and humor are directly related to happiness. In our efforts to help children become “mature” and “responsible” we should not forget the importance of these skills. Generating pleasure from silliness and humor is a major anti-depression strategy. It helps greatly in making life worth living.

The ability to appreciate and produce humor is useful for social relations and enjoyment of life. One of the purposes of humor is to allow enjoyment to come even from the tribulations of life (as in “We’ll look back on this and think it’s funny.”) Humor is a very complex skill. It’s very difficult to teach. One can develop a mean-spirited sense of humor that seeks out the negative aspects of other people in order to laugh at them.

The skill of kindness should go on the priority list for almost every child. It is vital to all of human relations. Perhaps this is why it is central to most of the world’s religions and most systems of ethics. If your child learns to take genuine pleasure in doing kind things, he tends to have friends and be accepted by them; he tends to give pleasure to you and get the sense that you enjoy having him around. A child who enjoys his own acts of kindness has an immediate source of pleasure from sensing that he has made someone feel good; he also gets a more delayed pleasure when people are grateful or kind in return.

17. Empathy. Recognizing other people’s feelings, seeing things from the other’s point of view

The essence of kindness is making other people happier, and empathy allows us to tell whether we are making others happy or not. The skill of empathy involves being able to pick up on the often subtle cues that reveal what other people are feeling—the nuances of tone of voice, facial expression, and behavior that give clues as to how to act with people. Those without this skill often unintentionally lose friends. Do you know anyone who blithely keeps talking forever, and doesn’t seem to pick up on the glances at the watch, the fidgeting, and the direction of eye movements that would tell most people, “Shut up and give me my turn to talk?” Or have you known a child who can’t infer the subtle point where roughhousing or teasing other children ceases to be fun and the message is, “I’m not kidding! Back off!” Empathy allows people to get accurate feedback from others.

The skill of conscience, of feeling bad about hurting others, is another where balance is required. Total lack of conscience leads to antisocial behavior; too severe a conscience leads to depression and possible suicide. Feeling just bad enough about harming other people is a skill that the psychologically healthy person should have in her habit repertoire.

19. Honesty. Being honest and dependable, especially when it is difficult to be so

The habit of honesty has probably been studied too little by mental health professionals. But as M. Scott Peck has pointed out, comfortableness with deceit is necessary for almost all forms of evil and antisocial behavior—because one must lie to avoid bearing the consequences of it.

20. Awareness of my abilities. Being honest and brave in assessing your own strengths and weaknesses

Many people go through their lives with very significant skill deficiencies, yet they never get around to working on them, acknowledging them to someone else, or even acknowledging them to themselves. Why? Because it is painful to admit faults. In a sense it’s pleasant to convince yourself that you’re doing everything right, and that all problems are someone else’s fault. But such pleasantness comes at a dear price, because by giving up responsibility for outcomes, we also give up a feeling of ability to control them. We can purchase blamelessness by convincing ourselves of helplessness.

At other times it’s somehow more pleasant for people to think, “I am totally unable to do this, I’m worthless in this area.” How can overdoing your skill deficiencies be a relatively pleasant thing to do? Because it gets you off the hook, and again avoids responsibility. For example, it’s sometimes easier to say, “I am just no good at schoolwork,” than “I could be good at schoolwork, but I am making choices that make me not succeed.” The first proposition avoids responsibility, at the cost of accepting helplessness.

With respect to your own abilities, “the truth shall set you free,” even though that truth may be painful.

21. Frustration-tolerance, fortitude. Handling frustration, tolerating adverse circumstances.

One way of looking at life is that you are constantly dealing with either things you don’t like, or things you do like. If you can handle both undesirable situations and desirable situations very well, you will do OK. Joyousness has to do with handling desirable situations, and fortitude with undesirable ones.

We put fortitude very high on a child’s priority list when the child has tantrums when he can’t get candy at the grocery store check-out line; when he yells or hits when he has to turn off the TV and go somewhere; when he cries when another child preempts his playing with what he wanted; when he gets overly upset or mad when a game doesn’t go his way, and so on. Fortitude, the ability to handle adversity, is a key skill. Unfortunately, positive examples of its presence usually attract much less attention than negative examples of its absence. When a child yells at a hundred decibels and kicks the parents when he can’t get what he wants, that attracts attention. When the child says, “May I have this,” and the parent says “No, you’ll have to wait,” and the child says nothing and goes along cooperatively, that usually doesn’t attract so much attention. But since attention reinforces behavior, using “differential attention” in just the opposite way would be better for the child. One of the benefits of thinking in terms of skills is that you can learn not to overlook positive examples of skills like frustration tolerance.

Here’s a list of types of thoughts people have in response to frustrations, as well as to favorable situations. Learning to choose consciously how one wants to think is key to almost all psychological skills. Fortitude is only one of the groups that is particularly fostered by getting very familiar with these types of thoughts and learning to choose consciously what patterns you want to dwell upon.

We’ll study these at greater length later on. But you can probably guess, from the names of these thoughts, how some are more conducive to fortitude than others.

22. Handling separation. Tolerating separation from close others, or loss of a relationship.

Handling the actual moment of “Good-bye” from a parent or other caregiver is the most concrete example of skills of handling separation. Handling it when a friend moves away, a love relationship ends, or when one becomes a widow or widower all involve variations upon the skill of handling separation. Sometimes the difficult part of a separation is being rejected by another—the blow to one’s self-concept; at other times it is pure loss of the relationship and the bond. Being skilled at separation does not mean that there is no pain involved. If I felt no pain, ever, when a beloved spouse died, I would be less than human. The good reasons why separations feel bad are the same reasons why people form social bonds in the first place. Part of human nature is to have a hard-wired need for other people. But the skill of tolerating separation is one of degree: not feeling extreme pain over minor separations, not letting major separations produce total paralysis of the ability to enjoy life and contribute to others.

23. Handling rejection. Tolerating it when people don’t like or accept you or want to be with you

Rejections are stressful in several ways. There’s the pure displeasure of losing a relationship and breaking a bond of attachment. There’s also the insult, the message about what you are: you’re not worthy of friendship for this person. There’s the pain of generalization, of the thought, “Maybe I’m not worthy of the friendship of other people as well.” Those who hurt the worst are those who generalize the farthest: “I’m not worthy of any relationship with anybody.” It shouldn’t be surprising that lots of suicidal people have recently suffered rejections.

The good news is that people can learn to handle rejection better. They can learn to tell themselves, “There are more fish in the sea,” rather than “This means I’m a terrible person.” Interestingly, those who can handle rejection well may get rejected less often: people find others more desirable when they are so needy or desperate for acceptance.

24. Handling criticism. Dealing with disapproval and criticism and lack of respect from others

Handling criticism is a skill in short supply among us human beings. You move toward diagnosing a shortage in this skill when a child has tantrums whenever she is corrected, or when she gets depressed and sullen for a long time whenever she gets feedback that her work at school is not perfect. You consider this skill deficiency when a peer who calls the child a name gets an instant fight.

The skill of handling criticism begins with the recognition that no one is perfect. Imperfection is not (usually) a crime. When you are criticized, it’s good to do some self-appraisal, to ask yourself, how much truth is there in the criticism. If the criticism is false, the tasks are to celebrate internally that the criticism isn’t true, and to decide whether and how to deal with the other person’s misperception or malice. If the criticism is true, the tasks are to learn from it and to decide how much effort to put into improving. The verbal skills of responding without unnecessary self-effacement or hostility can be studied in great complexity.

25. Handling mistakes and failures. Regretting mistakes without being overly self-punitive

Skill in handling mistakes and failures is one of several skills where a delicate balance is called for. If a child goes into a depression when she gets a B on a test rather than an A, or feels suicidally guilty upon missing a basketball shot in a game, we say with confidence that the child feels overly bad about mistakes and failures. Freud would have said that the child had a “harsh and punitive superego.” Eric Berne would have said that the child has an internal “critical parent” that is too hard on the child. On the other hand, the child who cares not a whit whether he passes or fails, and who is unfazed when he makes mistakes that prove expensive or self-destructive, may have an even worse problem. The skillful people feel worse about mistakes and failures than about successes, but not so bad that they paralyze efforts toward improvement.

A special case of frustration is not only not getting what you want, but also seeing someone else get it. Jealousy, envy, and rage are often the responses in the unskilled individual rather than sheer disappointment. But learning to handle this situation is central to family life, especially in coexisting with siblings. The “Oedipal Conflict” so dramatized by the Freudians, in which a child wants to exclusively possess one parent and is jealous of the attention the other parent gets, is in skills language a challenge to the skill of nonjealousy and magnanimity.

27. Painful emotion-tolerance. Tolerating feeling bad without making that make me feel worse.

28. Fantasy-tolerance. Tolerating unwanted mental images, confident that they will not be enacted.

The skills of painful emotion-tolerance and fantasy-tolerance have to do with being able to feel bad and have unacceptable ideas come into the mind without getting into a vicious cycle about them. For example: someone gets anxious, thinks “This is awful, I’m dying,” and those thoughts make the person more anxious, which make the person surer that death is imminent. Or someone notices himself fantasying someone else’s death, and gets so scared by it that he can’t function. The skillful patterns involve “gutting out” unpleasant feelings and thoughts until things get better and avoiding vicious cycles.

This group of skills allows people to come up with good responses to situations. When examining the skills of individual decision-making, we consider the individual as the unit. When thinking about joint decision-making, we think about a decision that will affect more than one person, and the skills that the individual uses to work out agreements with others.

29. Positive aim. Aiming toward making things better. Seeking reward and not punishment

Decision-making is the art of making good outcomes happen. In order to do this, you need first to desire good outcomes for yourself and others, rather than bad ones. The skill of positive aim is the opposite of being a masochist and sadist. How does one ever get into the habit of wanting, on some level, to get sick, get hurt, or to fail? Perhaps it’s a case of conditioning: when these things happened, someone took care of me, when I was doing well and succeeding, I didn’t get what I wanted. How do people develop pleasure in making things turn out badly for others, even people who have not harmed one in any way, such as those whose computers are damaged by viruses? The answer to this question is complex, but the skill of positive aim is an antidote to aiming to harm oneself or others.

30. Thinking before acting. Letting thoughts mediate between situation and action

The skill of thinking before acting is a prerequisite for good decision-making. Many situations we face are too complex to respond to by reflex or by doing what comes naturally. We often need to take the time to send a decision through the more complex pathways of thought and calculation rather than to respond by reflex. People with problems of impulsiveness should put this skill on their priority list.

Using language fluently enhances psychological health. When I have words to name what is going on, I’m better able to think about it, understand it, and respond to it intelligently. One of the major ways to help children process the interpersonal and intrapsychic world is to teach them the words they can use to think about life most effectively. For example: if the child has no words in his vocabulary for self-discipline, long-term goal, and temptation, then the child is more likely to default to thinking, “This isn’t fun, therefore I’m not going to do it.” But the child who has these words is more able to think, “This isn’t fun, but it will help me achieve my long term goal. I need to use self-discipline and pass up the short-term temptation.” Thus vocabulary can empower the person to enact patterns that were otherwise not possible.

32. Awareness of your own emotions. Recognizing, and being able to verbalize your own feelings

An important subset of verbal fluency is being able to recognize and put into words one’s own feelings. Some psychiatrists have described a set of patients as “alexithymic,” or without words for feelings. Being able to express your feelings is certainly not a solution to all problems, but it is a very important starting point. If all you know is that you feel lousy, you’re not very close to a solution. However, if you identify your feeling as guilt, or loneliness, or anger, and if you figure out why you’re feeling this way, then you’re closer to a solution. You’re guided in the direction of making recompense, finding some company, or getting someone to quit doing something irritating.

33. Awareness of control. Accurately assessing the degree of control one has over specific events

The “serenity prayer” refers to more than serenity: the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. The wisdom to know the difference equals the skill of awareness of control. The child who feels totally responsible for his parent’s break-up is usually making the error of feeling more control than is real; the child who disavows to himself any responsibility for vandalism carried out by a group of which he was a part is usually making the error of feeling less control than is real. The person who remembers conflicts with other people as simply arising out of the blue, with the other person’s doing something obnoxious, and who can’t remember or understand the role that she herself played in the gradually escalating hostility, is making a very common error that denies her own control. It is important to realize that this skill, like all others, can be learned and practiced and improved.

34. Decision-making. Defining a problem, gathering information, generating options, predicting and evaluating consequences, making a choice

The skill of rational decision-making is one which has benefited from burgeoning research in recent decades. The process—defining the problem, gathering information, listing options, evaluating options by predicting consequences and weighing probabilities of consequences—is the analogy, for one person, of the joint-decision process for two people. It is sometimes comforting to realize that all the negative experiences of the past do not necessarily need to be worked through: for a reasonably happy life, all that is usually needed is to make reasonably good decisions a reasonably large fraction of the time. If your child can learn to make decisions that are at least not in obvious contradiction to what she wants, most of the time, she will be ahead of what most people seem to do.

Decision-making should be not only rational, but moral. It’s not good enough for a child to be a cunning decision-maker on how to be selfish and materialistic in the most carefully plotted way. Rather, a sense of principle, an idea of what constitutes right and wrong, is extremely important. Students of the development of moral reasoning in children, such as Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, have spoken of various stages of moral development. The early stages are hedonistic: you think that what is good is what gives you pleasure. Intermediate stages may be based upon authoritarian reasoning (i.e. actions are good because they follow the law) and bargaining-based reasoning (it is good to do good things to others because it makes it more likely that they’ll do good back). The highest stages are principle-based: I choose to adopt certain principles, a belief system, that will guide me whenever I make a specific moral judgment. One such principle is the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. A similar principle is the philosopher Emmanuel Kant’s “categorical imperative”: act so that you can wish that the principle behind your action would become a universal rule for all to follow. The utilitarian philosophers, such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stewart Mill, would use as the central moral principle the goal of maximizing the total happiness in the world.

What happens when what one person decides affects another person? Particularly, what happens when two people want different things in such situations? What happens when two people can’t both get their way in some immediately obvious manner? Too often the result is violence. Civilization means that conflict is handled in some way other than that the most powerful wins.

35. Toleration. Non-bossiness. Tolerating a wide range of other people’s behavior.

People can generate unnecessary conflict by being too picky. When other people have to act just in one certain way, many of them are not going to like it. Thus toleration of a wide range of other people’s behavior means that a lot of joint decisions are much easier. It’s easier to say “OK, that’s fine with me,” when you have this skill.

36. Rational approach to joint decisions. Deciding rationally on stance and strategies.

Many people approach conflict with strong emotions: anger, or perhaps fear. This skill means fully using the cool, thinking part of the brain, searching for the best outcome rather than being driven to lash out or submit.

A very important skill is generating reasonable options. In a research effort I made, I gave children the following situation:

Pat and Lee live together. Pat likes to make a dish with fish and sauerkraut, that gives off a very strong smell. Lee does not like that smell at all, and it bothers Lee whenever Pat makes his dish. What do you think they can do about their problem?

Research on the problem-solving process initiated by Spivack and Shure, among others, has strongly suggested that the children who are able to think of greater numbers of nonaggressive options for the solution of problems like these tend to be better adjusted, as rated by teachers, peers, and parents. In other words: the child who can not think of anything they could do, or the child who can only think of options such as Pat’s using a grenade on Lee, Lee’s poisoning Pat’s sauerkraut, and so forth, tend not to do as well in relations with others. Those who can think of options such as Pat’s cooking the dish on an outdoor grill, using a large fan to remove the smell from the house, Pat’s cooking the dish only when Lee will be away for a long enough time for the odor to go away, and so forth, tend to do better with people.

Thinking of options in situations like this is a skill that can be improved with practice.

The skill of option-generating is obviously also applicable to individual decisions, notwithstanding the fact that I arbitrarily put it in the joint decisions group.

38. Option-evaluating. Justice skills: Recognizing just solutions to interpersonal problems

Once options are listed, a decision needs to be made as to which options are more just, more likely to work. A child achieves a major development when she realizes that justice should be “blind” to who the persons involved are. That is, if it’s only fair you should not interrupt me, then it should also be fair that I should not interrupt you. In other words, “Because it makes me feel good” is not a sufficient reason to explain why a certain option is just.

39. Assertion. Dominance, sticking up for oneself, taking charge, enjoying winning.

40. Submission: Conciliation, giving in, conceding, admitting one was wrong, being led

In the process of joint problem-solving, both assertion and submission skills are necessary. The person who automatically gives in, who is unable to state the case for his own point of view, and whom people use to “mop up the floor” is lacking in assertion skills. On the other hand, the person who feels that he can never give in, that his manhood or personhood is threatened if he ever backs down, is lacking in submission skills, and if he meets another submission-deficient individual, he risks ending up in deadly battle. A healthy mixture of assertion skills and submission skills, with good judgment as to when to invoke each of them, characterizes the psychological healthy person.

41. Differential reinforcement. Reinforcing positive behavior and avoiding reinforcing the negative.

The skill of differential reinforcement, of seeking out the good that others do and focusing on it and recognizing it, and at the same time trying not to reinforce the undesired behaviors, represents a different approach to conflict than the highly language-oriented set of negotiation skills. Sometimes it works better. For example: a child’s whining causes conflict with his mother. It may be more useful for the mother to reinforce requests made in a non-whiny voice and to ignore those made in a whiny voice, than to negotiate with the child about whining.

42. Forgiveness and anger control. Forgiving, handling an insult or injury by another

There is no one who does not from time to time get insulted, harmed, injured, or taken advantage of by another person. Anger can be a useful emotion, in mobilizing energy to oppose those who would take advantage of us. On the other hand, when anger is not useful to us, it is good for us to be able to let it go. It can be very destructive to believe that the only way to let anger go is to “let it out.” Feeling angry is a behavior that one can cease to do, voluntarily, just as one can voluntarily cease to hit oneself with a fist when it becomes clear that this behavior is only causing pain.

43. Nonviolence. Being committed to the principle of nonviolence and working to foster it.

In a world where the human race has gained the technological power to extinguish itself, and where many children live in environments where gunfire aimed at other human beings is part of everyday life, devoting at least some effort to improving this situation is the mark of a person with a sense of priorities. Enlisting children in efforts to promote nonviolence on a societal level has been found to help them choose nonviolent solutions to problems individually.

44. Respectful talk, not being rude. Being sensitive to words, vocal tones and facial expressions that are accusing, punishing or demeaning, and avoiding them unless there is a very good reason.

Disrespectful, hostile talk does not “get out” hostility – it tends to escalate it. This skill is to verbal aggression as the skill of nonviolence is to physical aggression. Yelling, taunting, and profane language directed at others are often the predecessors to physical violence.

Both nonviolence and respectful talk could be subsumable under the skill of kindness. But it is too easy for people to feel that they are very kind people, when they are kind to their friends and rude or violent toward their enemies. For this reason, ethical systems have found it useful to incorporate specific rules against the harmful as well as in favor of the helpful.

Trusting is not just believing that someone is saying the truth. At its most basic level, it is the belief that someone is not out to harm you, and that the person may even wish you well. Without this belief, forming relationships is quite scary. Children who have been raised in very unkind or abusive environments naturally have trouble with this skill. But sometimes other children overgeneralize from the unkindness of one or few people, and conclude that all are unkind. A child who has been jeered by one child needs the skill of discernment to keep from assuming that all other children will act the same.

Studies have shown that children with conduct problems, e.g. aggression, hostility, tend to interpret ambiguous actions of other people as motivated by the intent to harm. For example, if you show a picture of someone with the hand raised, friendly children tend more to guess that the hand is raised in a greeting, whereas aggressive children tend to guess that the hand is raised to hit or slap. The skill of trusting is basic to how we interpret other people’s actions. If someone doesn’t speak to me, does that mean that person is trying to reject me and make me feel bad, or is it that the person is preoccupied, shy, or doesn’t see me? A sense of paranoia about other people’s intentions is the opposite of the skill of trusting.

But sometimes people’s intentions are not good, and it is possible to err on the side of gullibility as well as paranoia. Suspicion is very appropriate at certain times. Thus the skill of trusting requires discrimination and choosing, trusting at times and mistrusting at other times, rather than having blind faith in others’ goodness.

46. Self-disclosure. Disclosing and revealing oneself to another when it is safe

The skill of self-disclosure allows a person to talk with a trusted friend, to disclose whatever is on one’s mind, without great fears of humiliation or shame or exploitation. Many people spend a great deal of time in psychotherapy learning this skill. A psychotherapist once wrote, concerning psychological disorders, that “You are only as sick as your secrets.” For many people, the biggest hurdle on the way to psychological health is the notion that their problems are so shameful that they must be hidden from everyone.

47. Gratitude. Expressing gratitude, admiration, and other positive feelings toward others

The skill of feeling good about other people’s kind acts was listed in the joyousness group. The skill of communicating appreciation to others is listed under friendship-building. Children who lack this skill sometimes find themselves without friends.

48. Social initiations. Starting social interaction; getting social contact going.

The skill of social initiations is the art of starting talking or playing with adults or other children. Five year old Timmy was a child that other children disliked. Timmy was in a group free play situation, and he wanted to start playing with other children. So he went up to two children playing building a house with Legos, and said to them, “Come here, look what I have!” The children ignored him because they were already wrapped up in what they were doing. In frustration, Timmy then knocked over the house they were building. Now they were really mad at him. But his motive was not malice—he just wanted to get some interaction going, and he didn’t know how to do it more skillfully. Rick, on the other hand, was a popular child. Rick happened to be interested also in starting playing Legos with two boys. Rick started by squatting down near the boys and watching what they were doing for several seconds. Then he joined them, unobtrusively. He first said, “Looks like the roof is ready to go on! ... This looks like a good piece for the roof.”

For older people, the skill of social initiations entails choosing an appropriate moment to say, “Hello, how are you?” or an appropriate moment to introduce oneself, or an appropriate remark about what is happening, or other ways to get interaction started comfortably.

Once friendly interaction is started, the art of continuing it in a mutually gratifying way is what I call the skill of socializing. For very young children this is primarily oriented around toys and play; for older children there is more of a premium on structured games; for both older children and adults, there is a particular premium on conversation skills.

50. Listening. Empathizing, encouraging another to talk about his own experience.

The art of listening is crucial to friendship-building as well as joint decision and other skills. Here I am not talking about a child’s “listening” to parental commands and carrying them out—that’s the skill of compliance. I’m talking about the skill of hearing someone say, “Wow, I can’t believe how many problems we had to do for homework! Whew, they’re all done!” and replying with something like, “Sounds like you’re really relieved to have them finished!” rather than something like “I’m taking a field trip tomorrow,” or “That wasn’t so many you had to do. Quit bellyaching.” The art of empathic reflection of the other person’s thoughts and feelings was perfected by Carl Rogers and used in client-centered therapy. It soon became apparent that reflective listening was too useful to confine to therapy. Much good has been accomplished when family members, coworkers, and other people learn to listen empathically to one another.

The empathic reflection of the other person’s thoughts or feelings can be taught to children as young as first grade. Children who can be empathic to other children have another skill conducive to making and keeping friends, since the world is populated with people who would like other people to show an interest in them and really listen to what they have to say.

51. Self discipline. Delay of gratification, self control. Denying oneself pleasure for future gain.

Pleasure and pain evolved in our brains to give us a “first approximation” guide as to what to do. For example, we get pleasure from caloric intake and from sexual activity, partly so we won’t forget to eat and starve to death, or forget to procreate and let the species die out. It’s pleasurable to rest when we’re tired and seek stimulation when we’re bored.

But one of the major challenges of existence is that not everything that is most immediately pleasurable is the best choice. It’s often better to pass up the pleasurable food, to forego sexual activity, to save money rather than spend it, to prepare one’s taxes rather than go and bet on the horse races, to do homework rather than play video games, to hold one’s tongue rather than lash out at someone who is acting obnoxiously. In these cases our thinking brain, our decision-making on what is best to do, has to override the part that seeks pleasure and avoids pain. Doing this has been called self-discipline, self-control, delay of gratification, self-regulation, and will power.

One of the crucial maneuvers in exercising self-discipline is to provide yourself internal gratification with each step of work that his done. For example, a student takes a practice test that he has made up; while doing so he imagines himself doing well on the real test that will occur soon. He imagines how good he will feel to be well-prepared. Thus by the miracle of imagination, he brings a portion of the future gratification into the present.

52. Loyalty. Tolerating and enjoying sustained closeness, attachment, and commitment to another

The skill of loyalty is what enables a person to stick in a relationship when the going gets tough, not to be a fair-weather friend, not to capriciously drop one person when another becomes more interesting. It’s also what enables people to take seriously the commitments they make to others.

53. Conservation and Thrift. Preserving resources for ourselves and future generations. Foregoing consumption on luxuries, but using resources more wisely. Financial delay of gratification skills.

The skill of saving money and avoiding unnecessary consumption is not a topic I see mentioned frequently in the mental health literature. But money represents another area where striking an ideal balance between present and future, between delay of gratification and consumption of gratification, is crucial to a happy life. Neither spendthriftiness nor miserliness is conducive to happy living. I label this skill so as to emphasize the saving aspect, since in our present day culture those who save too much seem quite rare compared to those who consume too much. A constant barrage of advertising seems to be quite persuasive!

This skill involves foregoing consumption not only in the interest of the self, but of others. It’s difficult to argue that huge consumption on luxuries is ethical when there are people who are starving, sick and uncared for, uneducated, and living in violence, and when the fate of the entire human race is threatened by nuclear and other forms of destruction. A dollar spent on entertainment or prestige possessions is a dollar that cannot be spent on more worthy causes.

The skills of courage and carefulness need to be balanced with one another. Between the two, I would rather that my own children err on the side of carefulness! Taking unnecessary risks, while feeling invulnerable to danger, is a good way to get killed, permanently injured, or to receive big setbacks. Fear, like anger and guilt, did not arise for no reason. Assessing when danger is present and either avoiding it or working to protect oneself from it are skills that every human being should have in the repertoire.

55. Habits of self-care. Healthy habits regarding drinking, smoking, drug use, exercise, and diet

Habits of self-care are a set of skills, most of which also involve self-discipline. Avoiding cigarettes, alcohol, and other unnecessary drugs, avoiding speeding in cars, eating healthy foods, and getting adequate sleep and exercise are habits with huge consequences upon physical health. If the entire population could adopt just the healthy habits listed in the last sentence, there is no doubt that vast amounts of illness, disability, and premature death could be avoided.

56. Relaxation. Calming oneself, letting the mind drift pleasantly and the body be at ease

In the first half of the twentieth century Jacobson promoted the technique of progressive muscular relaxation as a remedy for what were then called nervous ailments. Jacobson taught people to relax by learning to sense the tension in muscles and consciously make muscles go limp all over the body. His technique is still extremely useful. Large numbers of research studies attest to the usefulness of learning relaxation, including some studies where relaxation was to be a control group contrasting with something else expected to be more effective. Later in this book I’ll go into more detail about other techniques that have arisen after Jacobson. Imagery techniques are a prominent addition to the armamentarium: e.g. imagining oneself in relaxing surroundings, imagining and recalling nurturing and kind interactions between people. Biofeedback procedures also are a useful adjunct. Relaxation skills are useful enough to be part of the routine education of every child.

57. Self-nurture. Delivering assuring or care taking thoughts to oneself, feeling comforted thereby

The skill of kindness to others, when reflected upon oneself, produces the skill of self-nurture. This is the ability to comfort oneself, to “be one’s own best friend.” Many depressed or suicidal individuals are deficient in the skill of saying friendly things to themselves and refusing to be hostile to themselves.

There are better things to do with life than to oppose all authority. In order for organizations, including families, to run smoothly, people commonly put more decision-making power in some people’s hands than in others – for example, more power in a thirty-five year old adult than in a 6 year old child! Compliance skill is almost always on the priority list of children who get labels of “oppositional” or “antisocial.” But the issue of compliance is important for all children.

Compliance in children is a vital skill for an adult’s mental health! I have seen parents who exhibit clinical symptoms of depression that appear to be mainly brought on by the stresses of dealing with a very noncompliant child. When every transition from one place or one activity to the next becomes a power struggle, an adult’s quality of life is greatly reduced. The interesting point is that the child’s quality of life is correspondingly reduced. The child is much happier when reasonable rules are followed and reasonable commands obeyed without a struggle.

The skill of compliance is a very important predecessor to self-discipline skills. I obey a reasonable and legitimate authority, even when I don’t feel like it, because I know the long-run consequences will be more favorable. If I get good at obeying a reasonable parent who tells me to do things that make me better off in the long run, even when they are not immediately pleasurable, I am getting lots of practice that will help me obey the directives that I myself generate – and this is self-discipline.

Compliance is to be balanced by skills of independent thinking. I speak of compliance as obeying reasonable authority; there are many out there who would like to be obeyed despite being unreasonable and bad! If I should be ordered by a fascist dictator to execute innocent individuals, I would hope to exercise the skill of independent thinking, not the skill of compliance. Classic studies have found people all too willing to carry out harmful acts toward other people simply because someone who seems to be in authority tells them to do it.

59. Imagination and positive fantasy rehearsal. Using fantasy as a tool in rehearsing or evaluating a plan, or adjusting to an event or situation

The skill of imagination is the ability to deal with situations that are not actually present—to create a mental representation and work with it instead. We can practice skills in imagination. We can desensitize ourselves to scary situations by imagining ourselves handling them well. We can use imagination to anticipate problems in our plans and having solutions handy beforehand. We can use imagination to enhance the quality of our humor and enrich our vision of living. For this reason, daydreaming, fantasy play, and storytelling among children are not simply pleasurable activities—they are exercise of a vital skill.

This group lists a general skill of courage, and two specific types of courage that frequently need to be targeted.

60. Courage. Estimating danger, overcoming fear of nondangerous situations, handling danger rationally

Anxiety is one of the most common complaints of people who come to mental health professionals. Courage skills are the direct antidote to unrealistic fears. A variety of techniques have become known to help people reduce those fears that are not useful to them, and applying these techniques can dramatically change lives for the better.

61. Depending. Accepting help, being dependent without shame, asking for help appropriately

The courage to admit, “I could use some help on this” is often the major hurdle for psychological development. Especially in the mental health arena, “needing help” is stigmatized. “You need help with your problems” can be a jabbing insult. Many people seem to confuse the thought “I can use some help with a psychological skill deficiency,” a thought that applies to almost everyone, with “I am crazy and should be locked up permanently,” a thought that applies to almost no one.

The courage to ask for help is needed not only in seeking mental health treatment. People have driven around in frustration looking for places, too proud to ask the person standing on the corner who could have given them clear and easy directions. People have gradually gone deaf without having the courage to ask for hearing aids. People have gone through life unable to read, without being able to go to someone for tutoring. People have watched lumps on their bodies gradually grow into fatal cancers without having the courage to ask a doctor to examine them.

The skill of depending is at the bedrock of much further development. A child who can depend well on a parent comes to care about the parent’s approval and disapproval. The child learns what things get your approval and disapproval, and gradually starts supplying approval and disapproval to herself, thus acquiring a conscience. But if dependency is disrupted, and the child doesn’t see the parent as much as a source of gratification, the child will not care as much about the parent’s approval and disapproval. The foundation of the process is not built.

The skill of depending starts to develop as soon as an infant starts to be held, comforted, spoken to, fed, and cleaned. This skill is practiced throughout childhood whenever the child is the recipient of a kind, giving act.

62. Independent thinking. Making decisions independently, carrying out actions independently

Just as dependence can require great courage, so can independence. It is possible to need other people too much, to fear their loss or disapproval so much that one will do anything—use drugs, engage in unwanted sexual encounters—to remain a part of the group. The skills of independent thinking and acting allow one to say to others, “I know you would like for me to do this. But here is my decision, and I’m going to act on it, whether you like it or not.” Perhaps a two year old who says “No!” may be practicing this skill in ways that prepare for crucial resistance of peer influence in adolescence. Or at least, that idea may be a consolation to the parent when the child first learns that short and powerful word!

The Skills Axis as Curriculum Outline and Menu of Targets

If you have thoughtfully read through these descriptions of all sixty-two skills, congratulations. Although lengthy, the skills axis is very useful. There are two major ways that you can use it. One is as a “curriculum outline” of what you want to cover in the “course” on psychological health that you give your children. With most people that course will not be a formal one (although one of my main goals has been to create materials that permit just that). But even in the absence of a formal course, it’s good to provide influences toward all these skills, or at least all the groups, during some point in childhood.

The second use of the psychological skills axis is as a menu of targets. If the child has a problem – e.g. sadness, lack of friends, low motivation toward schoolwork, etc. – then which skills can we improve in order to solve the problem? Often we can pick three or four skills whose improvement will greatly remedy the situation.

Moving Along the “Abstraction Ladder” in Thinking About Fostering Psychological Growth

In using the skill concepts to solve particular behavior problems, it’s best if we can move flexibly up and down what has been called the “abstraction ladder.” The abstraction ladder has to do with whether our words refer to something specific and concrete (lower on the abstraction ladder) or something held in common by a large number of concrete and specific examples (higher on the abstraction ladder).

Suppose someone thinks that a child “acts bratty” or “seems maladjusted.” Brattiness and maladjustment are concepts that could refer to large numbers of possible concrete behaviors and circumstances; for this reason they are concepts high on the “abstraction ladder.” They are also negative descriptions of the child.

A good next step is to answer the question, “What are specific examples of brattiness, or maladjustment?” The answer should take the form of specific incidents. “When he couldn’t get candy at the grocery store check-out, he screamed for a minute.” “When he had to turn off his television show to go to the doctor, he cried with an angry voice and said to me, ‘Why do you always do these things to me!’” “When he was building a tower with some blocks and his toddler sibling knocked them down, he got so upset that he kicked his own toys around.” These descriptions bring up concrete mental images. They are therefore lower on the “abstraction ladder.” We have moved from abstract negative generalizations to concrete negative examples.

The next step is to move back up the abstraction ladder, to a skills axis concept, a concept of the positive skill the child needs more of, a concept that will be useful than the concept of brattiness or maladjustment. You look at the specific negative examples and see what they have in common. All three of the examples I just cited had something very important in common: they were cases where the child could have used more frustration tolerance, or fortitude. So fortitude gets tentatively put on our list of high priority skills for the child to improve in. We’ve now moved back up the abstraction ladder; the concept names a positive skill we would like to see developing more thoroughly in the child.

If we see and recall more examples where fortitude would greatly help the child, we become more sure that it is on our priority list. If, on the other hand, we see only a steady stream of positive examples of fortitude, we conclude that our previous examples were a fluke. Thus the more examples we gather, the more sure we are one way or another about the child’s skill.

Now that we have moved up the abstraction ladder to the skill concept, we want to move back down the abstraction ladder one more time, to generate a list of positive examples of the skillful pattern. We want to think of all the positive examples of fortitude that we can: the child remains calm when he opens the refrigerator and finds that it doesn’t have what he wanted in it; the child quickly finds another goal after asking an older child to pick him up, but the older child isn’t interested in that game; the child remains calm when in preschool he is enjoying a puzzle, but has to interrupt his activity so that his group can go outside. We want to generate as big a list of these possible positive examples of the each high-priority skill as we can.

We have thus moved down the abstraction ladder to the specific negative events, back up it to the positive skill concept, and back down it to the specific positive examples of the skillful pattern. When we reach the stage of concrete and specific positive examples, we can do several things. We can give the child models of those positive examples, so as to get the desirable patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior into the child’s memory bank. We can watch for specific positive examples the child does in real life and make sure to reinforce them. And with the more abstract skill concept in mind, we can recognize other concrete examples that didn’t make it onto our original list, when we see them. And finally, we hope that generalization will occur so that when the child gets lots of attention and approval, for example for certain instances of fortitude, the child will be more likely to come out with other examples of fortitude.

Exercise. When thinking about the question, “Which of these skills could my child most benefit from growing in, at this time,” search through your memory for specific examples of problem behavior or unhappy emotion that you’ve noticed. Think to yourself, “What could my child have known how to do better, that would have helped him in this situation?” For each problem situation, come up with one or two or three psychological skills. Do this for several problem situations. If the same psychological skills come to mind over and over again, these are the ones you will choose to put on the priority list.

If you are using this book for prevention rather than for cure, simply think of three or four skills that seem would be most useful and productive to focus on at this time.

Exercise. For the three or four psychological skills that you have decided are most important for your child to develop, try to think of as many concrete positive examples of that skill as you can, and write them down. This is the answer to the question, “What could I envision my child doing if she were very accomplished in this skill?” For example, if the skill is fortitude, you might include such examples as not getting too upset when she can’t visit a friend, not putting up a fuss after being told she can’t have some candy, and saying “That’s OK, don’t worry about it” when someone forgets to do something she wanted done. Imagine little movies of skillful behavior, and jot down their plots. Compare your list with the sample list of concrete examples that are present in tables 2 and 3.

If you’re successful in these two exercises, you will have a large list of positive things to watch for. And this is important. You want to be watching for a wide range of positive behavior from your child. You want to have enough examples in mind that you will see positive examples very often.

When you do the process of generating specific examples, you find that appropriate examples vary depending upon the child’s age. The notion of what is skillful or desirable changes as the child gets older. That’s why it’s nice to see some other children your child’s age, and particularly some rather happy and well-behaved ones, so that you can develop reasonable expectations of what the child should be able to do.

One of the most common sorts of target behaviors that parents think of is household chores. This is highly appropriate! Useful work in the house can exercise productivity, joyousness, kindness, fortitude, and other skills. Lots of useful work for the family is one of the best antidotes to the extremely common ailment of spoiled brathood. Useful work also helps children have a sense of their own worth – especially if they experience the genuine gratitude of family members for the help they give. I believe most children in current U.S. culture could stand lots more house work.

Having said this: if the child is acting up because of low skills of social initiations, social conversation, and conflict-resolution, then you shouldn’t expect a cure from targeting his raking the leaves, washing the dishes, and taking out the trash. You want to look for opportunities to model, provide practice in, and reinforce the specific skills he needs to learn the most. This often means you’ve got to become a more subtle and refined observer of interactions. The positive examples may not come out and knock you between the eyes and say “notice me” the way they do when the child has washed the dishes and taken out the trash. The positive examples may consist of a positive, enthusiastic tone of voice where previously there was a grumpy one, or an appropriately disappointed response where previously there was an absolutely miserable one.

Compare the types of positive examples you generate with the examples listed in the following sections. These are appropriate for young children. Some of these same behaviors are appropriate for older children and even adults.

Specific Examples of Skills, in the Home

Kindness: Saying “Thanks for the supper” to his or her parent; picking up something his or her mother drops and giving it to her; saying “Good morning” in a cheerful tone to a family member; speaking gently to his or her pet and petting him nicely; saying “That’s OK” in a gentle manner when a parent forgets to do something he wanted him or her to do; saying “That’s interesting,” when his or her sister mentions some of her thoughts; saying “Don’t worry about it” in a gentle way when his or her brother seems to feel bad about a mistake he made in a game; giving his or her brother a piece of his or her dessert; saying “What have you been up to?” and listening nicely to his or her sister when she tells him about her day; offering to help a parent carry something; saying “You’re welcome” in a gentle way when someone says “Thank you”; sharing a toy with another child; patting another child on the back, affectionately; offering to push someone in the swing; offering to take turns, and letting someone else take the first turn; going up to another child and socializing in a nice way; smiling at someone.

Compliance: Saying “OK” without arguing when he’s told it’s bedtime; keeping his voice low when his mother asks; playing inside on a rainy day for an hour and following the “no throwing the football inside” rule; leaving something alone that his or her parent asks him or her not to touch; playing gently with his or her friend after his or her mother tells them to stop wrestling, coming when his or her mother says “Come with me”; getting dressed without problems when asked to do so; brushing teeth when asked to do so; following the rule of staying at the table during a meal; turning the television off, or not turning it back on once it is turned off, as requested.

Fortitude: Saying “OK” in a nice way when he asks for some candy and is told he can’t have any; keeping cheerful when the rain spoils his or her plans to play outside with his friend; handling it without yelling when his or her brother breaks one of the things he owns; looking calmly for something he can’t find, without losing his temper; not yelling when he has to stop watching a television show to come to supper or to go out somewhere with his or her parent; being cool when his or her little brother grabs something out of his or her hand—getting it back, if he wants, but not yelling or hitting; being cheerful when he doesn’t get a present that he has asked for; being cheerful when he has to come inside...

Sustaining attention: Listening while someone reads to him or her, for a little longer than before; having a chat with one of his or her parents without having to run off to get into something else; playing with the same toys for a reasonably long time; paying attention to a play that someone puts on for him or her with toy people; telling a story, and staying on the topic for a reasonable time; working at a task longer than before.

Practicing Using Language: Listening while someone reads him or her a story, having a chat with someone; asking a good question about something he is curious about; telling about things he has seen and done; talking back and forth with someone; using a longer sentence than before; using some new words.

Enjoying Aloneness: Playing by himself when his or her parents pay attention to a sibling; paying attention to something else when a parent is on the phone; letting his or her parents talk to each other for a while without interrupting; watching what some peers are doing with each other, without butting in immediately; letting a sibling play with something, and get the parent’s attention, without taking that thing away; drawing a parent’s attention to a sibling in a favorable way; letting a parent read or write or lie down and rest without interrupting, being able to handle it if some peers do not want him or her participating with them in an activity.

Handling your own mistakes and failures: In a game, failing to make a goal or win a point etc. without getting too upset; losing a game without getting discouraged; failing to do something he tries, and then working harder rather than giving up; being corrected for something, and then making an effort to do better; remembering a previous time he made a mistake, and saying “This time I won’t (or will) do X, because I learned from the last time”; talking out loud to himself when he has made a mistake or failure, and saying “What can I do about this? I could do this, or that...”;

Social initiations: Watching some peers do whatever they’re doing before joining in with them; paying attention to what peers are paying attention to rather than drawing attention to himself; starting to socialize in any way that does not irritate the peer; saying “Hi” to a peer he knows; introducing himself to a peer he doesn’t know; asking if some peers would like another participant in an activity; finding someone who is lonely, and talking or playing with that person; offering to share something he has with a peer, as a way of getting interaction started; asking a question about something a peer is doing, as a way of getting interaction started.

Letting the other do what she wants: In playing, letting the other play with a toy without taking it away from her; responding to the other’s suggestion of “Let’s do this” by saying “OK!”; responding to the other’s question of “May I do this?” by saying “Sure!”; responding to the other’s looking over her shoulder at something she is doing by tolerating it, rather than asking the other to go away; responding to a younger sister’s tapping lightly on her knee by tolerating it rather than bossing her to quit doing it; in dramatic play, letting the other person direct the course of the plot for a while; in dramatic play, when the other person says something like “Pretend this is a lake” or “Pretend that this is a goat,” going along with the suggestion; letting sister show off without telling her not to be such a show-off; letting a friend play with something that she is not particularly interested in playing with, without telling the friend to put it down and play with something else.

Courage: Trying an activity she’s never tried before; getting to know people she’s never met before; venturing the answer to a question raised in a group, when she’s not very sure of the answer; doing something in the dark; doing something that is not dangerous that she was inhibited about doing at some point in the past.

appreciating it and laughing when someone else says something funny; doing an imitation of something or someone that is funny but not derisive; imagining a silly situation and having fun with it; surprising someone with a trick that is not harmful.

Exercise: Choosing Your Own High Priority Skills

I’m going to be mentioning throughout this book that you will get lots better results if you can model for your child some reasonable and systematic efforts at making yourself a better person, rather than just trying to make him a better person. The skills axis is designed for adults as well as children. So I invite you to go back to it, and think about your own life. What skills are highest on your own priority list?

Having a child can be a great way to motivate yourself to “Be all that you can be.” If you use the techniques mentioned in this book upon yourself, in your child’s presence, your child will more likely learn the crucial skills of self-development, and self-starting.

Chapter 2: Psychological Skills