Summit 1 Video Script
UNIT 8
TV Documentary: Being a Better Parent
PART 1
Jay Schadler: Parenting may be the most
challenging and important job we’ll ever face.
It’s certainly the most mysterious. Our children
come with no instruction manuals, no
blueprints guaranteeing success. And so we
puzzle over the great riddle of raising our kids.
Dr. Lawrence Kutner, a clinical psychologist,
teaches at Harvard Medical School and is a
columnist for Parents magazine.
Dr. Kutner: What makes it difficult now is that the
problems faced by parents of this generation are
quite different from the problems faced by
parents of one or two generations ago.
Jay Schadler: We begin with Barry and Barbara
Cohen, who’ve been fighting with their two
sons, ages nine and seven, about everything
from homework to bedtime. Unsure of what to
do, Dad does what was done to him.
Barry Cohen: I spanked one of my children so
hard, I hated myself. I said . . . I looked, I said,
“What am I doing?” I knew I couldn’t continue
like that.
Barbara Cohen: Is Daddy a good parent?
Child: No. No! Turn it off!
Barbara Cohen: And why is he not a good parent?
Child: Because he yells at me! He hits me. He
punishes me. He makes me go to bed early.
Barbara Cohen: And why does he do that?
Child: Because he’s mean!
Jay Schadler: Tell me an episode when you
lost control.
Barry Cohen: The two of them would be fighting. I
would tell them five minutes before, “Don’t
even look at each other. Don’t sit near each
other. Just stay away from each other.” A minute
later, one of them is crying or both of them is,
are crying. I would be so upset myself that I
would lose control. I’d wind up spanking them.
Everybody would be crying.
Summit 1, Second Edition
Copyright © 2012 by Pearson Education, Inc. Permission granted to reproduce for classroom use.
Page 1 of 3
Jay Schadler: And where do you think you got
that idea to do that, in the first place?
Barry Cohen: My father was a screamer. My
mother was a screamer.
Jay Schadler: Barry comes from a long line of
screamers.
Dr. Kutner: And that’s what he grew up with and
that’s what he knows and that’s what he’s
perpetuating. Even if it doesn’t work, that’s the
one technique he’s comfortable with, so he
keeps doing it.
Jay Schadler: Yeah, but you can’t always be
explaining to kids.
Dr. Kutner: Well, no, you can’t always be
explaining to kids, but you can say, “You guys
are acting out too much. You’re going to have to
quiet down. I want you in your room
until you can quiet down.” That’s very different
from the, “You in your room, you
in your room.”
Jay Schadler: Do you believe in spanking?
Dr. Kutner: By itself it’s a lousy technique. It
doesn’t teach the child anything new, except to
fear you.
Jay Schadler: Kerry and Michael Pollack have two
sons, seven-year-old Zachary and four-year-old
Dylan. Capturing the chaos on tape is easy
compared to calming the storm. What would
you do?
Kerry Pollack: Go upstairs until you stop crying
and . . . when you can be quiet.
Dr. Kutner: That’s an absolutely classic temper
tantrum. The kid is unable to express in words
the intensity of the emotion that he or she feels,
and so it comes out with flailing arms and
kicking legs and screams. They’re completely
out of control. So what you want to do is you
stay calm. Your child needs to borrow your
calmness.
Jay Schadler: I like that idea.
Dr. Kutner: What you do is you walk over and
physically move your child, even if it’s only two
or three feet.
Jay Schadler: Why?
Dr. Kutner: It shows that you are in control of the
situation.
Summit 1 Video Script
Jay Schadler: There are times, are there not, when
punishment is absolutely called for?
Dr. Kutner: Well, discipline is different from
punishment. Discipline has to do with teaching.
And yes, there are times when a kid needs to
see the consequences of behavior. What I like
having is natural consequences of things. Your
child loses his baseball mitt all the time, you
don’t go out and buy another one.
Jay Schadler: How about time outs? What do you
think about time outs? Pretty effective?
Dr. Kutner: There are two purposes to time outs.
One is your child has to calm down, get back in
control. The other is the parent has time to calm
down and get back into control. What we found
with time out is that the shortest period possible
is the best.
PART 2
Jay Schadler: Of course, as children grow older,
the menu of parenting problems becomes more
complex. How do you give your child a taste of
independence without risking their safety? It’s a
balancing act Marilyn McLaughlin struggles
with every day . . .
Marilyn McLaughlin: No, your lung sounds
pretty good.
Jay Schadler: . . . as a single working mom with
two girls, thirteen-year-old Erin and eleven-
year-old Melee. Here’s what happens when
Melee, her eleven-year-old, asks to have thirty
extra minutes after school to hang out with
friends.
Marilyn McLaughlin: I do not approve of you
being out on the streets without adult
supervision for that length of time by yourself.
Melee: I don’t hang out on the streets.
Marilyn McLaughlin: Melee, where do you hang
out and talk to your friends?
Melee: In school.
Erin: In the schoolyard.
Marilyn McLaughlin: No, you . . .
Melee: There’s a lot of people play basketball and
we sit around and talk.
Marilyn McLaughlin: But there’s no adult
supervision over there.
Summit 1, Second Edition
Copyright © 2012 by Pearson Education, Inc. Permission granted to reproduce for classroom use.
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Melee: There’s a guard.
Marilyn McLaughlin: No. The guard is not
looking out for you. He doesn’t care what’s
going on.
Melee: He stands by the gate until, like, six o’clock
at night.
Marilyn McLaughlin: The whole matter . . .
Erin: Also, Miss Golden’s out there watching us.
Marilyn McLaughlin: The whole matter of fact is
this, that I feel very uncomfortable . . .
Erin: She’s . . . she’s just in the schoolyard!
Marilyn McLaughlin: How do I know she’s just in
the schoolyard? I’m supposed to trust you to
say you’re just in the schoolyard?
Melee: Yes! You are!
Dr. Kutner: Here we have the daughter, who is
telling her, “This is what I need. I need more
independence.”
Jay Schadler: Right.
Dr. Kutner: “I need more time.”
Jay Schadler: Maybe we can . . .
Dr. Kutner: The mother is saying, “I don’t want
you to spend time on the street.” They haven’t
met in the middle to say, “I know you need
more independence, more autonomy. Maybe we
can find someplace that isn’t home, but where
there is adult supervision. Maybe there’s an
after-school program where I, as your mother,
will feel more comfortable, and you’ll get to be
with some of your friends and there are going
to be adults around.”
Jay Schadler: It’s natural for kids to keep pushing
the boundaries, testing the limits of their
freedom. For Bill and Ellen Owens and their
twelve-year-old son, Patrick, a rock concert has
drawn the borderline between them. The
argument moves to their living room, where
both parents and child slip into their well-worn
roles.
Patrick: When was the last rock concert you were
at, Dad?
Bill Owens: Thirty-five years ago.
Patrick: Exactly!
Summit 1 Video Script
Ellen Owens: But Patrick, they weren’t in the
papers thirty-five years ago saying that people
were seriously hurt at concerts.
Patrick: The Promise concert was not in the
newspaper either.
Bill Owens: Yeah, but we’re not going to know the
next one that’s going to blow up into a riot with
the mosh pits, people are going to get hurt and
killed and call the ambulances if someone’s
going to bring a gun. Yeah, we are scared.
You’re right. Damned right.
Jay Schadler: This is a twelve-year-old boy.
Dr. Kutner: Right.
Jay Schadler: Is that too young to go to a concert?
Dr. Kutner: There’s no age cutoff either way.
What’s important is that if this is such a big deal
for the child, how can the parents see that their
main need, the child’s safety, is addressed? That
could be with a chaperone. If they’re scared that
he’s going to get injured in moshing, how could
he avoid it? If he finds himself surrounded by
this . . . if people are grabbing at him, what does
he do?
Summit 1, Second Edition
Copyright © 2012 by Pearson Education, Inc. Permission granted to reproduce for classroom use.
Page 3 of 3
Jay Schadler: If they decide not to let him go to
this concert, should there be other options given
at this point?
Dr. Kutner: Yes, they should let him do something
different; otherwise he’s going to keep on
pushing the envelope, keep on pushing for
more.
Jay Schadler: As diaper changes and midnight
feedings inevitably give way to first dates and
late night parties, the best advice may be to
remember that the ultimate goal is not about
making carbon copies of ourselves, but a
healthy, happy original.
Kerry Pollack: I’d like my kids—our kids—to feel
really good about themselves, and I think if they
can feel that way that they can accomplish
whatever they want.
Bill Owens: I’d like my kids to grow up and move
out.