Transcript
A (0:00)
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B (1:20)
So you have kids who don't listen all the time. They don't always do what you want them to do. They want to try to do it their way. They're stove. I understand this is really frustrating when you have a strong willed child because the more you push, the more they resist, the more you lecture, the more they tend to shut down. These are assertive, persistent kids who get a vision of what they want to do in their brains and then they go to carry it out and they tend to tune everything else out. And one of the first things we go to is consequences because that's all we've been taught as parents is, well, you just need to give them a consequence and that will change their behavior. But it doesn't work. And I've seen this on Instagram and even on Thanksgiving Day we got email after email about this. So I thought I would record a special kind of crash course in understanding how we approach things, how strong willed kids work. And I'm going to try to keep this around 20 minutes because of the holidays. So forgive me because I don't have it all scripted out. But I think you'll find this helpful, especially those of you who are who aren't as familiar with what we do. So welcome. This is Kirk Martin, I'm founder of Celebrate Calm. You can find us at Celebrate Calm. This is the Calm parenting podcast. So here's the thing about external consequences. They tend not to work at changing human behavior. Look, we have. There are consequences, deadly consequences for eating too much and unhealthy, for drinking too much, for smoking, for speeding. And yet human beings do all of those things every single day. Why? Because we're usually trying to address the outward behavior that a child or adult is engaging in, but we're not getting to the underlying reason. There's an assumption when you give a consequence that behavior is driven by rational thinking. It's not. Almost everything you and I do is irrational, driven up by something that's emotional. There's usually something deeper going on. And so we react to the outward behavior given external concepts consequence and then wonder why it isn't motivating to our kids inside. Because you can't always consequence a child into doing something right. Like if your child's not doing schoolwork or is kind of shut down, it's like, well, I'll just take away everything they own. Your kids don't care because that doesn't change the fact you haven't given them tools to do their schoolwork differently. And you also haven't sparked the internal motivation. And so there are real limitations to this. And the other part of this is when you have a strong willed child, you have to understand that they value things different. The things that they value are very different than you do. Because we go in thinking, well, they just care about making good decisions and pleasing people and being a compliant person and caring about school and making their bed. No, they actually don't. What they value more than anything else is their own agency, their autonomy, their independence. They want to touc the hot stove. It is part of the process. It is a good part of the process. It's just irritating and annoying for you as a parent. But you know, I talk bluntly and I don't do guilt or blame. But it's also annoying that you continue to try to change their very nature. This is how they came out of the womb, is it not? And yet we continue to fall back on our kind of ineffective. And sometimes it just becomes lazy when I see the. Well, if you give them a harsh enough consequence, no, it won't work. They will fight you harder or they will just give up for right now. Shut down and you have nothing left. And we have to be honest that sometimes we're just trying to change kids behavior for our own convenience because it just irritates us. I know as a dad sometimes I just wanted my son to listen to Me, because it was just easier that way. I was just bark things out because that's what my dad did. That was what I was raised with. And so I want you to know that just getting kids to behave and listen to me is not my ultimate goal. It is to teach kids to be responsible for themselves. And as long as I'm micromanaging and controlling their behavior, I'm actually being responsible for my child's behavior. Because we all have control issues and we have anxiety. And so I encourage you to approach this in a different way. So the question becomes, well, do we just let kids get away with things? Absolutely not. This is not permissive parenting. This isn't just do whatever you want. Not at all. So one concept we go through all the time. And I encourage you, listen to past episodes. There's an episode from August 4th on a child who won't accept responsibility. And it goes through the idea of ownership. So I believe, we all believe very clearly in giving kids very clear boundaries and expectations. It's just that I create larger boundaries for the strong will child because I know they're going to push. It's in their DNA. And so ownership says this, hey, I'm going to create a big box for you to live in. Conceptually, I have very clear expectations, very clear boundaries. This is what my objective is, what I want you to do. But within my boundaries, I give you some space, some space to do things differently than I would do them as long as we accomplish the same goal. See, I'm not saying if you do your homework, if you get your chores done, if you get this done. No, it's getting done. I just relinquish control over how you accomplish it. Because with our kids, I want to make things a challenge. Our kids love a challenge. They like doing things in a different way. See, when you give them a challenge, it does a couple things. Your kids are very big into needing brain stimulation. That's why they procrastinate. It's why they push people's buttons. It's why they pick on their siblings. It's why they argue with you. It's why they tap pencils and bounce their legs and they chew on things. That is all the need for brain stimulation in your kids. And when you make it a challenge, oh, you're stimulating the brain. They also like to do things differently than other people do it. So that's why you will tear, rip your hair out thinking I just asked you to do simple things and you won't even do it. It's so easy. Let Me show you how. Well, soon you show them how they're like, well, I don't want to do that. That's duh, that's boring. That's stupid. So I give them some space to own it a little bit. Listen to that past episode by the episode we recently did on why consequences don't work. That's October 2nd. I'm trying to keep this short and giving you some reference points here. So here's another thing I want you to think about is one of our big things is I like to give kids tools to succeed. See, consequences are, hey, if you don't stop doing that, you lose X. In a sense, what we're doing is we're punishing a child for failing. But instead I come alongside and I give them tools to succeed. Right? It's an example of a kid who's blurting out in class, hey, if you don't stop blurting out, you miss recess. Well, they're just going to miss recess because we haven't given them any practical tools to help them with blurting out and we assume they're just being rude. Blurting out. That's not what's happening. These are kids with very busy brains. And so then they also have a lot of ideas, but they struggle with short term memory, so they're afraid they're going to forget their ideas. So what do they do? They blurt out and then we just say, hey, cut it out.