Last month I attended a conference where one of the authors of the book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, spoke about the challenges of changing everyday behaviors related to public health. Dan Heath spoke about big issues like changing the way we eat and exercise. His underlying message was that we (health and human service professionals) often make our jobs too hard for ourselves.
When we’re trying to impact community-wide social changes we often forget, or ignore, a few key lessons about human nature.
One of these lessons about human nature is the idea that we are more likely to change our behaviors if we have specific instructions about how to change our behaviors. Dan Heath explained, for example, that a food drive can be more successful if we tell people what kind of food to donate or if we give people a map to show them the location of the food drive. These specific instructions make it easier for people to make the change that we seek.
In a similar way, the authors of Switch talk about the challenges of parenting. In particular, in one chapter of the book, they talk about parents who engage in acts of child abuse. The authors cite a fascinating intervention that works one-on-one with parents to change their abusive behaviors. The key to the intervention is to script the parents’ responses to their children – to essentially teach parents how to interact with their own kids.
The program achieves amazing results amongst many of these abusive parents. The message, according to the authors, is that for many parents “child abuse…may be partly the result of a lack of understanding, a lack of clear instruction or guidance on what to do. This is not to excuse the parents’ behavior, of course. It is simply to point out that simple scripting has power beyond what any of us could have predicted.”
In many ways, the simplicity of the intervention makes perfect sense. We know that most parents have too few role models of positive parenting behaviors. We know that too many media images of parenting involve extreme behaviors of permissiveness vs harsh discipline. We know that blurred gender roles leave many parents grasping to figure out how fathering and mothering can be complementary parenting styles.
During this April – Child Abuse Prevention Month – scripting for parents is an achievable goal. As professionals across Minnesota, we have a duty to craft messages that are simple, direct, and specific. We can achieve change if we, first, are willing to change the way we approach the massive challenges of public health.
-Paul Masiarchin