Areas › Worry and anxiety › The cost of avoiding
Put it the way a grandmother would. Eat your peas and carrots and then you can have your pudding: go in, and then the thing you have been wanting.
Technical language falls out of your head at seven in the morning. A homely sentence survives, and it survives the argument too, because it is hard to be indignant at peas and carrots. Pick one reward that genuinely matters to this child, keep the rule to a single sentence, and resist adding clauses to it after a bad morning.
Qur’an and Sunnah
only those who are steadfast in patience, only those who are blessed with great righteousness, will attain to such goodness (Quran 41:35). The good thing sits on the far side of the patience, which is the shape of this whole arrangement.
وَمَا يُلَقَّىٰهَآ إِلَّا ٱلَّذِينَ صَبَرُواْ وَمَا يُلَقَّىٰهَآ إِلَّا ذُو حَظٍّ عَظِيمࣲ
but only those who are steadfast in patience, only those who are blessed with great righteousness, will attain to such goodness
Qur’an 41:35read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a secondary analysis of a one day acceptance and commitment therapy workshop with 83 participants, binge eating was examined as a form of experiential avoidance, done to get away from an inner state rather than purely for enjoyment. It is small, indirect and from another area of life entirely. The idea worth borrowing is that a treat can be doing a job, so where it sits in the day is not a trivial detail.
Lillis J, Hayes SC, Levin ME. (2011). Binge eating and weight control: the role of experiential avoidance.. Behavior modification doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Something wanted, placed on the far side of something hard, gives the hard thing a reason to happen.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Somewhere between five and ten children in every hundred struggle to get to school at some point, and one or two of those need real help with it. Your family is not a strange case.
Getting a child back through the gates is not the same as helping them. Ask what the school day is asking of them that they cannot face yet, and put your effort there.
You cannot outbid a bedroom with unlimited gaming and a free afternoon. Free access has to shrink before an earned version means anything at all.