Willpower

remark brings a smack or the loss of treasured privileges. Seemingly tiny or even random differences in your own behavior or in the situation seem to spell the difference between no punishment at all and a highly upsetting one. Besides resenting the unfairness, you learn that the most important thing is not how you behave but whether or not you get caught, and whether your parents are in the mood to punish. You might learn, for instance, that table manners can be dispensed with at restaurants, because the grown-ups are too embarrassed to discipline you in public.
    “Parents find it hard to administer discipline in public because they feel judged,” Carroll says. “They’re afraid people will think they’re a bad mother. But you have to get that out of your head. I’ve had people stare at me when I take a child out of a restaurant for being rude, but you can’t worry about that. You have to do what’s right for the child, and it really is all about being consistent. They have to grow up knowing what’s appropriate and inappropriate behavior.”
    When Carroll applied her consistent brand of discipline in the Paul household, the results seemed miraculous. By the end of her weeklong stay, the triplets were making their beds and picking up their toys; Lauren was proudly putting on her socks; the parents looked calm and happy. At least, that was how it was edited to appear on the program, in keeping with the usual arc of chaos to bliss. But could this discipline really make a lasting difference once Nanny Deb and the cameras departed? We checked up on the Pauls in 2010, which was six years after Carroll’s visit, and Mrs. Paul declared the experiment a long-term success. “We don’t have any real big issues anymore,” she said, explaining that the four-year-old hellions of television fame had grown up into ten-year-olds who were flourishing academically and serving on the school’s leadership council. At home, they were still doing their chores.
    “Until Nanny Deb came, I never thought they could do those chores themselves,” Mrs. Paul told us. “I thought it was too much to ask them, but they just didn’t have the guidance or structure to know what they were supposed to do. It’s easy for a parent to say, ‘Go and clean up your room,” but that doesn’t tell the child anything. You may as well tell them to stare at the wall. You need the discipline to go in there with them and model exactly what to do—show them how to fold a piece of clothing and put it in the closet or the right drawer.”
    Once Mrs. Paul did that a few times, the children took to doing it on their own, although it still occasionally required some parental supervision—and the resolve not to backslide and do the jobs for the children. “Sometimes,” Mrs. Paul said, “I come into the kitchen and their cereal bowls are still sitting there, and I find myself wanting to grab the bowls and clean up. It’s easier for me to do that than go find them. But no matter where they are, I have to remember to ask them to come back and clear their own plates. That’s where I have to exercise self-control.”
    Which brings us back to the familiar question for parents: How do you acquire and maintain self-control? How do you calmly, consistently discipline the children when, as Mrs. Paul realized, it’s so often easier to let things slide? The answer, as ever, starts with setting goals and standards.

Rules for Babies and Vampires
    Long before children can read rules or do chores, they can start learning self-control. Ask any parent who has survived the ordeal of Ferberization, which is based on a technique found in a Victorian child-rearing manual. It requires the parents, against all instinct, to ignore their infants’ cries when they’re left alone at bedtime. Instead of rushing to the infant’s side, the parents let the infant cry for a fixed interval of time, then go offer some comfort, then withdraw for another fixed interval. The process is repeated until the child learns to control the crying and go to sleep without any help from the parents. It requires great self-control by the parents to ignore the heart-rending screams, but the infants usually learn quickly to put themselves to sleep without any crying. Once an infant acquires this self-control, everyone wins: The infant is no longer anxious at bedtime or when he or she wakes up alone in the middle of the night, and the parents don’t have to spend their nights hovering by