Rabbi Yitzchak Shmuel Ackerman, LMHC

When is a nachas note like a sledge hammer?  When you bludgeon someone with it.

You thought nachas notes are innocuous?  They’re actually quite powerful, and like most powerful things, they can be harmful when used improperly.

My weekly column is entitled Nachas Notes.  I named the column after the Nachas Notebook™ which I created many years ago.  It has proven to be a powerful tool in building more effective parents and more successful children. 

The Nachas Notebook™ makes parents more effective at building their child’s motivation to succeed at meeting expectations.   It does not require preparing charts, offering rewards or incentives, or threatening any types of punishment.   Parents who use the Nachas Notebook™ properly, consistently tell me that they are amazed at the difference it makes in their homes.

Here are some comments I’ve received about the Nachas Notebook:™

I have seen an amazing change in my relationship with my son.

I have gotten into the habit of accentuating the positive and it makes the negatives less stressful.

I am getting much less resistance from my daughter since I have been doing a Nachas Notebook™ for her.

In the two weeks that I’ve been writing a Nachas Notebook™ there has been much less contrariness.  I feel like I’m climbing up and out of the negativity soup.

If the Nachas Notebook™ has nothing to do with prizes or punishments, how does it work?  It works on the adage “nothing succeeds like success,” or as noted educators Jim Fay and David Funk expressed it, “the primary element that pushes us on to further achievement is a feeling of success.”  (Teaching With Love & Logic, page 208)   When you notice and knowledge your child’s success, you motivate him to succeed again and to achieve even more. 

Many parents have told me how well this works.  That’s called anecdotal evidence. Parents have described their experiences with the Nachas Notebook™ and believe in its efficacy even though they haven’t conducted a formal study to demonstrate  it.

Behavioral Economics professor Dan Ariely didn’t conduct a formal study of the Nachas Notebook™ either.  He did study the power of acknowledgment.  He measured the efficacy of far more subtle acknowledgement than the Nachas Notebook™ teaches you to express. 

He told the members of 3 groups of graduate students that they would be paid a token sum for finding instances where the letter S was followed by another letter S on a sheet of paper full of sequences of letters.  They had to find all 10 pairs of S’s on a sheet to be paid for that sheet, and could do as many sheets as they wanted to.  They were told to hand in each completed sheet before beginning another one.  Each group’s instructions were the same, except that only the 1^st group was told to write their name on each sheet.  The participants didn’t know that 3 different conditions were being tested, tested by what happened when they handed in the sheets.

The first group was called the “acknowledged condition” because when they handed each of their completed sheets to the experimenter, she looked at it carefully, nodded her approval, and placed it upside down on a pile of completed sheets.  When a member of the second group, the “ignored condition,” handed in a sheet, the experimenter placed it on the pile without looking at it.  When each participant in the third group handed in a completed sheet of paper, the experimenter, without looking at it, immediately fed it into a shredder.  That was called the “shredded condition.”   And it shredded the motivation of the members of that group.  Members of the shredded condition group completed on average 6.34 sheets, compared with 9.03 sheets for members of the “acknowledged group.”   That was what you would expect.  Noticing someone’s accomplishment motivates them to accomplish more.  What I didn’t expect was the outcome for the “ignored condition.”  The members of that group averaged 6.77 sheets, almost the same as the members of “shredded condition” group.   (The Upside of Irrationality, pages 74-76)

Think about what that means.  It means that ignoring your child’s accomplishment is tantamount to taking her accomplishment and shredding it, telling her that what she did is of no value at all. 

Saying nothing to your child when he does somewhat well is often interpreted by him to mean that he didn’t do anything worthy of comment.  He may be reading you correctly.  You may have thought that if you withhold comment your child will be motivated to do even better.  Actually, you have reduced his motivation almost as severely as if you had told him that his partial success was worthless.  Ignoring an accomplishment is tantamount to disparaging one.   Even when you think your child should feel a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment without your acknowledgement of what he has done, he may not.

Your child may not see the value intrinsic to an expectation you want him to meet. It may be as meaningless to him as the task Dr. Ariel assigned to his three groups.   Every time you tell your child that someday he will realize why you’re asking him to do what you’re asking him to do, you can be sure that he doesn’t realize it right now.   Every time you say, “this is for your own good,” they don’t see what’s good about it.  If they did, you wouldn’t be saying it.   Most children do develop intrinsic motivation to varying degrees at various points in their lives.   So do most adults.  We all benefit from extrinsic motivation most of the time.   The Nachas Notebook™ teaches parents how to do provide it and makes it a habit.  Extrinsic motivation works best when provided frequently and over long periods of time.

To recap, the Nachas Notebook™ is based on motivational research, and supported by the anecdotal reports of many parents who have found it to be a powerful tool in helping them and their children to succeed.  

A simple nod resulted in increased motivation compared with no acknowledgement at all.  Your Nachas Notebook™ entries record more effective expressions of acknowledgement.   How do you formulate a nachas note to be more effective?   When do you share Nachas Notebook™ entries with your child?

And how can a nachas note be like a sledge hammer with which you bludgeon someone?  How can that happen? 

G-d willing, we’ll explain how next week.

Rabbi Yitzchak Shmuel Ackerman is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor with specialties in marriage, relationships, and parenting.  He works with parents and educators, and conducts parenting groups for men and women.  He can be reached at 718-344-6575.