Roxane Lehmann, Ph.D.

Will Lily Help the Tooth Fairy Out of a Jam?

Season 4, Episode 21

The Framework

“Choice” was the thing that seemed to tie the plotlines together tonight on “Modern Family.” Jay claims that if he’d had a choice he’d have written a spy thriller by now, but life always got in the way. (He nods at Gloria as he says this.) At Career Day in Luke and Manny’s class, Claire is pressed by the teacher to talk about her choice to be a stay-at-home mom. A girl with a laser sharp tongue, who interrupts to say that her mom went back to work when she was four, adds to Claire’s pressure to justify her choice.

And over at the Tucker-Pritchett house, Mitch and Cam are trying to convince Lily – under her own free will – to return the $100 bill Cam accidentally slipped under her pillow when he was playing the Tooth Fairy. It was this storyline that caught and held my attention.

Flipping the Frame: My Notes

Wanting to preserve Lily’s belief in the Tooth Fairy, Mitch and Cam are compelled to rely on influence more than control as they try to convince Lily to give back the $100. Thus, the power struggle the two had with their precocious six-year-old is not unlike the ones you and I might have with our teens as they battle for independence. And we can learn a few things from what Mitch and Cam did before, during, and after their conversation with Lily.

• Before beginning, ask yourself what you want most for your teen and for your relationship. In the beginning, Mitch and Cam wanted different things.

Mitch: I don’t understand why we don’t just go in there and tell her we’re taking the money, and that’s that.
Cam: Because this is a teaching moment, and we want her to want to give the money back.

Tip: In the moment we (like Mitch) may want our teens to be obedient and do as we say. But unless our teens’ health and safety are involved, it’s better to be more like Cam here, focusing on what we want in the long-term and using our influence to get there.

• Don’t begin the conversation by providing all the answers. Mitch and Cam made this mistake.

Cam (reading the letter from the Tooth Fairy): I’m writing because I made a mistake and gave you too much money. Please leave the $100 under your pillow tonight, and I’ll give you a dollar. Sorry if that bites.
Lily: No. I want to keep it!
Mitch (to Lily): Ahhh, well, it sounds like she’s really in a jam, and I think we’re going to have to give the Tooth Fairy her $100 back.

As it turns out, Lily had a plan for the $100. And Cam and Mitch could have saved a bunch of time and energy if they’d ask Lily here – at the beginning of the conversation – why she wanted to keep the money. Instead Lily stomps off, and Mitch and Cam decide to enlist some help.

Haley (in full costume): It’s me the Tooth Fairy, and I’ve come to ask you for a favor.
Lily: Is this about the money again?
Tooth Fairy: Well, yes, it is. I need enough for all the other children’s tooths – teeth.
Lily: Wait a minute! You’re not the Tooth Fairy! You’re Haley! … (then turning to her dads) Why did you lie? You said lying was wrong.

Tip: If we start by providing all the answers, we’re inviting our teens to look for the flaws in our ideas or methods – just like Lily did. It’s wiser to bring up your concerns and what you’re asking of your teen in a simple, clear thought. Try to come up with something that can be said in 30 seconds or less. And then encourage your teen to share their viewpoint and ideas first.

• And when it’s your turn to talk, don’t advocate for a course of action if it will cause your teen to argue against it. Again, we can learn from Mitch and Cam.

Mitch: All right, Lily, this is ridiculous! The Tooth Fairy has made a mistake. You need to put the $100 under the pillow, and that is the end of the story.
Cam: Because you believe that it’s the right thing to do. Don’t you?
Lily: But I want to buy a scooter.

Tip: When we worry that our teen will make a poor choice, our righting reflex kicks-in. Following our instincts we tend to argue for the outcome we desire (like Mitch did) by providing solutions based solely on our view of things. Then hoping to help our teens see the big picture, we often wind up asking questions that are variations of the one Cam asked. Questions such as “How can you say this isn’t a problem?” “What makes you think this isn’t dangerous?” “Why don’t you just…?” or “Why can’t you…?”

It’s tempting to ask these questions because these are often what we really want to know. But they’re wrong because the answer to any of them is a defense of our teen’s position. And as teens argue on behalf of a position, they become more committed to it – literally talking themselves into or out of something.

• Instead of arguing harder for your position, roll with their resistance. Lily reacted to her dads’ latest request to hand back the $100 by saying she wanted a scooter. And Haley demonstrated one way to roll with resistance when she replied by asking Lily about Santa.

Haley: You know, that’s what I’d do. I mean who cares what Santa thinks, right?
Lily: Santa?
Haley: Well, he sees everything. And this [keeping the money] will probably put you on the “naughty list,” but who needs presents every year? You’ve got $100. You can ride around that empty Christmas tree until you’re an old lady.
Lily: Can I have some time to think about it?

Tip: If you sense resistance from your teen, see it as a signal to shift your approach. Instead of letting your discussion turn into an argument, stimulate your teen’s problem solving by asking questions and floating your ideas by them – like bubbles. It’s hard to fight a question or an idea that is floated by you. And the questions and ideas that are floated by them are the ones that teens are most likely to store away to think about and act on later.

• Practice patience. When Lily asked for some time to think about it, her two dads had two different responses.

Mitch: You don’t need any…
Cam: Of course, sweetie.

Tip: When it comes to parenting teens, it often pays to be patient when we’re feeling least inclined to do so. Floating ideas by our teens, providing them with choices, and giving teens time to consider their options (as Cam did for Lily) aren’t as convenient as taking control. But when you practice patience, you’re more likely to get the long-term results you want most – for your teen and for your relationship.

Resources: Motivational Interviewing by Miller & Rollnick

Flipping the Frame: Your Parenting Experiences

• Early on in the Tooth Fairy storyline, Lily (with her $100 bill in hand) says she can’t wait to tell everyone in school. And Cam turns to Mitch and says: We can’t be the parents of a six-year-old who gets $100 from the Tooth Fairy. How do you think this concern might have affected their interactions with Lily?

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Reframe: Will Luke Be the Last Man Standing?

Season 4, Episode 16 (Rebroadcast from 2/20/13)

The Framework

The verb “fall” and its various forms like “fell,” “falling,” and “falls” help shape the storylines of tonight’s episode. In one storyline Cam is doing a movie-theme photo shoot with Lily and baby Joe as his models. All goes fine until Lily glues a wig to Joe’s head. Mitch and Cam eventually cut the wig off – and with it much of Joe’s hair. Now they’ve got another problem: Who’s going to take the fall and tell Gloria?

Woven into tonight’s storylines about falling there’s a string of con artistry – all orchestrated by Luke. And with perfect sitcom logic, Jay becomes the fall guy for baby Joe’s haircut when Luke blackmails him by revealing that he’s on to how Jay’s team won the bowling tournament: They broke league rules by subbing in a pro.

As it turns out, Luke also knows a thing or two about breaking rules:

Luke (to camera): I have to get [a] letter signed because I failed my assignment on the Revolutionary War. I recreated the Battle of Bunker Hill using one of my old science projects. Seemed re-revolutionary to me…

(To view the original post, click here.)

Flipping the Frame: From My Life as a Parent

We send our kids to school to learn content and skills and how to figure things out. But in many ways we parents are in the best position to teach our kids about how to work and to encourage them to work hard. So what do you do when you have a kid like Luke who seems to be always looking for shortcuts when it comes to their schoolwork?

My son was one of those kids. Try as his father and I might to model the advantages of hard work, our son’s preferences as a teen were different. I’ll never forget the supper one night when my husband asked our son, then 16-years-old, about his plans for the evening. Upon learning that the plans didn’t include any studying, my husband suggested that our son needed to take his schoolwork more seriously. Our son then turned to his father and, using his best “get out of my life” teen voice, told his father that he didn’t want to be anything like him. Our son saw his father working almost all the time without the big social life packed full of fun activities that our son craved for himself.

When your teen rejects your model – and they probably will to some degree – it’s important to remember you don’t need to accept their values or agree with their ideas. But respect is like air to teens; take it away and that’s all they can think about. So if you want to be able to influence your teen, you do have to respect that their preferences may be different than yours. And the wisest approach when it comes to school (and most other things that don’t involve their health or safety) is to try to strike a balance by providing some guidance while giving them some room to find out who they are. A fitting first response at our dinner table that night – the one I’d wished we’d been smart enough to have – might have gone something like this:

You don’t have to choose the work ethic we’ve chosen. You can choose to have a bigger social life. But to be successful and have the advantages that come with success – including the lifestyle we enjoy – require hard work.

Right now your work is school. You have to go. And you have to get passing grades. We hope you’ll do much more than that. We hope you’ll work hard enough to excel at school. But the choice about how hard to work is mostly yours.

It’s our job to help you understand that the choices you make about how hard to work now are affecting the habits you’re developing and the options you’ll have when it comes time to choose what to do next. If you want one of the cool, in-demand jobs and the matching lifestyle, you’ll have to do more than pass. The cool jobs are snatched-up by people who learn the self-discipline of working hard on stuff – even when that stuff is boring and seems irrelevant.

Keeping our emotions in check while having this kind of ongoing conversation is part of the safety net our teens are counting on us to provide. Here are a few other things that can help us strike the right balance when it comes to our kids’ schoolwork:

• Taking a longsighted view of their education. Our kids’ willingness to work hard is the best predictor of how much they’ll ultimately achieve. So rather than acting as if grades are the most important thing and punishing, threatening, and bribing them to get A’s, we’re at our best when we take a longsighted view and focus on instilling a willingness to work hard and a love of learning.

We can teach our teens to focus more on effort and learning by:

Asking more about their learning process and their opinions about their effort and less about the grade. (You can find a sampling of questions that foster a longsighted view of learning here.)

Sharing with them the findings from recent brain research, showing that learning prompts neurons in their brain to grow new and stronger connections. Tell them that their brains are like muscles and that the harder they work, the smarter they’ll get.

• Organizing your family’s routine to make schoolwork a priority. It’s wise not to impose more structure than our teens need, but if your teen seems low on willpower when it comes to getting at their schoolwork, try collaborating with them to establish a homework routine. Together agree on a regular starting time and the duration for study. A good rule of thumb is 10 minutes of study per school night for every grade in school. So for 7th graders this would mean 70 minutes a night, for 8th graders, 80 minutes and so on. And if you have an unmotivated teen who is floundering, consider rewarding them for regularly getting their homework done. (You can read more about using money to bribe your teen here.)

• Helping them get started on big projects. This is particularly important if your teen procrastinates when it comes to schoolwork. (You can read more about helping your teen overcome procrastination here.)

• Continuing to be a role model. Our highest form of influence in our teens’ lives is what we model on a day-to-day basis. So if you have a teen who seems to reject your hardworking model (as mine did), you can redouble your efforts to share the highlights of your day with them to model work as fascinating. And perhaps nothing we do can model the importance of hard work better than letting our kids regularly see us doing some type of mind work or quiet work while they’re doing their homework. Yes, we’ve worked hard all day. But our teens will argue that they have too. And you have to admit that demanding they get at their homework while we settle into watch our favorite TV show doesn’t send a particularly clear message.

Flipping the Frame: Your Parenting Experiences

• If you have a teen who’s a bit like Luke when it comes to schoolwork, what has your approach been? If you’ve done some tinkering to try to change your teen’s work habits, what have you tried?

Flipping the Frame: What’s in the Picture for Next Week?

Next week there will be a brand new Modern Family episode and a brand new post to go with it. See you next Monday!

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