How Kids & “Good” Behavior Really Work, and How Parents Can Help

Congratulations! You’ve had a child.

Now that that’s done, you’ve come to realize that children arrive with three things that you may or may not have anticipated: 

1. Their own personalities and temperaments, possibly overlapping with yours but undeniably their own, regardless;

2. Extremely strong opinions about everything from sleep to food (see above); and

3. A set of tickets.

Yes, tickets. They’re invisible, but extremely real, and understanding them can solve a lot of misunderstandings between adults and kids. These tickets are acquired with age – usually, but not always – and renew daily, or sometimes around midday. Their number varies by child; your seven-year-old will have a different number of tickets than my seven-year-old, and that’s just the way it is. You can support the acquisition of these tickets, but you can’t buy them or give them to your child, try as we all might. 

These tickets represent what the behavioral goddess Michelle Garcia-Winner refers to as “expected behaviors,” and what I sometimes refer to in extremely technical terms as “keeping your s--t together.” Now, here’s the theory behind these tickets. Basically every child wakes up each day intending to do their absolute best. No matter what direction that ends up taking, kids want to please their parents and teachers, they want to feel connected to others, they want to be independent and successful and thoughtful and all of those things we want for them, too. 

Accomplishing most of those things often depends on, well, keeping their s--t together in whichever way their context requires. For example, a big part of doing well in school involves keeping one’s s--t together: you have to stay in your seat, maintain focus, stay emotionally regulated so that your friendships go smoothly and you can work well with others, keep a pleasant tone when talking to your teachers, eat with expected table manners, modulate your volume to be heard but not too loudly in a room with 20+ others...it’s a lot. To add to this, being able to keep one’s s--t together in the first place involves a lot of work on the part of the prefrontal cortex, which doesn’t finish developing until about age 25. 

Back to the tickets. Each child has a certain number of tickets, which represent how many times they can actually keep their s--t together – sorry, engage in expected behaviors – in a given day. As I said before, different kids get different numbers of tickets; that’s just how it works. And different activities have different costs too: sitting through a reading group in school might cost one child ten tickets and one child a hundred tickets; same for attending a birthday party, family dinners, and just about anything else you can list. 

Different kids get different numbers of tickets; that’s just how it works.

Once your child has spent the tickets they have for a day, or morning, or whatever, they are out of tickets. They have worked as hard as they can, kept their s--t together as much as possible, and – now, here’s the hard part for parents and teachers alike – they’re probably not going to be able to bring their best selves to much until their tickets have a chance to refresh. 

I used to see this in action in my classroom en masse, whenever we’d go on a field trip or have a big event like a poetry share or class play. My students would be amazing, well-mannered and in control the whole time. The guests would leave. And then, for whatever portion of the day was left, my kids would be...out of tickets. Even at school, which is usually where they try to hold onto at least some tickets until the end of the day. 

The only time this turns into a bigger problem is when adults don’t recognize that a child has run out of tickets.

Experienced parents and teachers can even anticipate times when a child will be using up a lot of tickets, and do what they can to help navigate the rest of the day on what I think of as borrowed time. For instance, I wouldn’t schedule exams, additional visitors, or new curriculum units to start on the same day as a “big ticket” event, because I would’ve been setting my class and myself up for failure. I’ve had to learn to do the same as a parent, even with far fewer children and tickets to manage. 

Does this mean that an “out of tickets” child has free license to behave however they’d like? Of course not! The rules are the same, which is also comforting to someone who feels less in-control than usual. But just acknowledging a child’s lack of tickets can go a long way, as can the way you choose to lovingly hold the line. 

Here are three examples of phrases you can use...

• “I bet it’s hard to sit through lunch after you had to be so still during the assembly. Even if you’re tired, you need to be in your seat so you don’t choke or spill your food. Let’s take a wiggle break as soon as we’re done eating!”

• “I know you’re tired after your recital, and I know you can be polite while being tired.” 

• “You worked so hard on your math test today. Why don’t you take a relaxing break before starting your chores?”

What does your child need the most tickets for? Comment below and share your high-ticket situations and tips!