Transcript
Kirk Martin (0:00)
Hey moms and dads, don't you just.
Advertiser (0:02)
Love when your child reminds you about a school project at bedtime the night before it's due? With Skylight Calendar you can avoid those last minute oops moments. It visually displays your family schedule in one place with different colors for each family member so you can eliminate those last minute surprises that upset your kids. Skylight Calendar is a WI fi connected digital display that syncs seamlessly with with all your calendars and visually showcases your family schedule on an HD touchscreen. You can manage events, chores and grocery lists on the go with the free Skylight app. This is a game changer for families like ours and your happiness is Skylight's happiness. So if in 120 days you are not 100% thrilled, you can return it for a full refund, no questions asked. This is a great Mother's Day gift. And right now Skylight is offering our listeners $30 off their 15 inch calendars by going to skylightcow.com calm go to skylightcal.com calm for $30 off your 15 inch calendar. That's S-K Y-L-H-T C A L.com calm.
Advertiser (1:20)
So do you have kids who struggle.
Kirk Martin (1:23)
To connect with kids their own age, their classmates? Do you have kids who sometimes dominate conversations? They get bossy during play dates or with siblings? Some of these kids will isolate themselves. How about kids who get anxious about going back to school or going to summer camp? How about kids who fight with their siblings? Look, this is all very normal for our kids and I want to give you some tools to help your kids and to help you. So that's what we're going to discuss all on today's episode of the Calm Parenting Podcast. Welcome. This is Kirk Martin, founder of Celebrate Calm. You can find us@celebratecalm.com Look, I just want to jump right into this. I have a lot of ground to cover. I think I'm going to do this in two parts. So this is part one. Number one. Let's look at why our kids do struggle sometimes with social skills. Many of your kids have something called asynchronous development. Asynchronous, out of sync. So intellectually, they're kind of up here a little bit advanced and that's why they have amazing talks with adults and they're very good in the adult world. But emotionally, socially, sometimes they're a year or two behind. So you'll notice they're often really good with younger kids. Younger kids are kind of drawn to them and they naturally connect or some of your kids are really good with animals. But who do they struggle to connect with? Kids their own age. Who do we send our kids to school with for basically the first 20 years of their life? Only kids their own age. And that's very arbitrary and unnatural. It doesn't happen after school. Look, none of you work at a company where it's only 37 year olds, right? That is very unnatural. And so what happens is our kids have a natural weakness. Not a disorder, just a weakness in that area. And now it's exacerbated because we put them in this arbitrary situation and now it starts to blow up and we got all worried about it and then it's once again it is you as the parents of a neurodivergent strong willed child, maybe child with adhd, who then is put into the position of becoming defensive and thinking oh no, now I have to get another specialist to work on yet another problem. And what I want to encourage you with and even warn you about is this. I want to work with our kids nature, not against it. Look, you're not going to turn your child into a neurotypical child and I don't want you to because neurotypical kids have all kinds of issues. We just don't label theirs. Right? We don't label them with energy deficient disorder or risk aversion disorder or say they have or focus their whole childhood on, you know what? You're not very creative thinker and you're not a very good strategic thinker. That's going to limit your career options. And we don't say they have a compliance disorder. We don't do that to other kids, only to our kids. And I want you to be strong and confident because look, we can work with our kids nature. Just think about this. Our kids are uniquely good at relating to other adults. What are we raising our kids to be? Not children. We're raising them to be adults and they're very good at that. So we can work with, with their nature. I don't want you spending your child's childhood trying to get them to be normal or like all the other kids. Your kids are already normal. There's nothing wrong with them, they're just different. If you change the situation then our kids have the unique advantages, the advantages of say being able to hyper focus. You put them in certain jobs. All of that energy is extremely helpful. So look my heart in this is I don't want our kids to begin to internalize from a young age. Something is wrong with me Well, I have attention deficit. No, not really. You can hyperfocus. You have an advantage. Well, I have hyperactivity disorder. No, you don't. It's just being measured against an arbitrary standard of sitting still in a classroom for seven hours a day, five days a week, listening to someone talk about something you're not interested in. There is no job in the world where you have to do that every single day, all day long. You choose your job in your industry anyway. I don't want our kids to internalize. Now, it's one more thing as a parent that you think you need to fix. Well, now we have to do social skills group, and we have to get a special therapist for this as well. And what happens is you will get to the end of your child's childhood and realize you spent 80 or 90% of your energy trying to fix things that largely don't need to be fixed. And meanwhile, we didn't show our kids all of their advantages and put them in situations in which they would thrive. Because if you don't do it the right way, your kids are going to shut down and become defiant and angry and not have confidence. But if we do it the right way, we. We can raise really confident kids who are aware of their struggles, have tools to overcome some of those weaknesses, but who walk around knowing, no, I have a good brain, and I've got advantages, and I can't wait to use that. So one of the other reasons that your kids may struggle, some of your kids are on a spectrum, and it's a spectrum. And some kids who are way down the line on that spectrum, well, they're going to miss a lot of social cues. And a lot of these kids are very bright kids, and so they're very much up in their brains because they're always thinking about things. Well, when you're that internally focused, you miss some social cues and you might be one step off from the other kids your own age. A lot of our kids struggle with anxiety. Well, if I have anxiety, I'm going to be very internally focused because I'm just trying to hold everything together. And I'm sorry. Worried about, like, just doing everything right like this. Well, I can't relax and look outside of myself. And so your kids become a little bit awkward, and that's pretty normal. Another thing that happens is this. Your kids tend to be very independent, and that's a really good thing. It just means that they're not always going to want to do group projects with other kids and collaborate. I hate collaborating. I. I'M not a good collaborator. You know why? I don't like other people's ideas all the time and I want to do it my way. Does that hurt me? Sometimes? Yeah. I'm sure I could have a much bigger platform if I just collaborated with all kinds of popular people. But I don't want to. And I want to do. I like the way I do things. I don't have, look, I don't do podcasts the right way. I don't have bumper music at the beginning and an announcer to come and introduce me. And, and I don't want all that. And so your kids are very independent. By the way, when I was in college, you know what I did? I didn't want to collaborate with other kids because I didn't want my grade to be dependent on theirs on these projects. So from my freshman year when we got together, I'd say, look, here's the deal. I'm very conscientious. I'm going to work really hard, I'm a very good writer. I'm going to do this project and we'll all get good grades. But I don't want to meet with you four or five or six times and waste a lot of time. And inside, my real motive was some of you aren't that bright and I don't want my grade depending on what you did. Now, I'm okay if you judge me for that because I know some of you are great collaborators and that's a great skill to have, but so is being independent. Look, you know what else that also hurts with siblings because it makes it harder connect with siblings at times. Some of your kids are not very good at sports. Most of the kids that came to our camps back in the day just not good at sports. Well, sports is a very common place that you connect with other kids. And our kids tend to be more do independent things like gymnastics and rock climbing, martial arts. Many of our kids, how many of you have kids who would be much happier down the street Talking to a 60 year old guy about electromagnetic currents rather than kicking a ball around with a kid his own age? Many of us have those kids, right? And so here's what we often see with our kids. They are bossy. Sometimes they dominate conversations. And I want you to know why. It's not that they're just being jerky. It's that when you struggle with anxiety, anxiety is caused by unknowns and, and conversations can be scary because some of these kids have auditory processing issues. So hearing things is harder for them at times. And if someone asks me a question that requires a response, but if I dominate the conversation now, I eliminate that unknown. Some of your kids will act silly in class or they'll do something mischievous and bad to be the bad kid. Why? Because it's just an immature. Quite honestly, it's a sad attempt to get other kids to like me because I don't know how to connect with them. But if I act silly in class or I do something bad in the boys bathroom, then the other kids will like me. Right. And so another thing that happens is they get very possessive of their friends and what's happening inside. They don't know this is happening, but I want you to know so that you can help them with it. Is this. It took a lot of emotional energy for me to find one friend in my class and so what? And this kid, he doesn't make fun of me and he's a little bit different like I am. And so I'm going to cling to that kid because I don't have a lot of other options. Look, your kids are naturally, just very, just naturally good with other kids. And the cool kids in class, everybody wants to be friends with them. They have 20 different options. Some of your kids have like two options in class when they find that person. Oh, they lock onto it. So these things cause our kids to struggle, cause them to not get invited sometimes to the birthday parties. And I know that hurts you. So we just moved into a new.