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The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast
1KHO 849: A More Settled Existence | Dr. Vanessa Lapointe, Discipline Without Damage
00:55:46
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- [00:01]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
This episode is brought to you by Google Health. Stop chasing someone else's definition of health. What matters is what's healthy for you. Google Health offers a new kind of coach built with Gemini for effortless tracking, sleep insights and holistic coaching tailored to you. Visit googlestore.com to learn more and start a new relationship with your health. Requires Google Account, Google Health app, Internet and Google Health Premium subscription. Features subject to change. Availability and results vary. Not intended for medical purposes or works independently of Gemini apps. Check responses for accuracy. Here we go.
- [00:31]
Ginny Rich
Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. My name is Ginny Rich. I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside and I have a wonderful author and also psychologist, founder of the Wishing Star Lapointe Developmental Clinic, supporting families and children for well over 15 years. Dr. Vanessa Lapointe, welcome.
- [00:48]
Dr. Vanessa Lapointe
Thank you so much. It's great to be here.
- [00:52]
Ginny Rich
I'm excited to talk about your books because they're like the foundational things you need to know, I think so often. And we, you know, we become parents and then everything is sort of a knee jerk reaction and you don't know why you're saying what you're saying or why you're doing what you're doing. And so these are foundational elements. You have a book, it's a national bestseller. It's called Discipline Without Damage. Now this one's been around for a decade, but still so applicable. How to get your kids to behave without messing them up. That's fantastic. And then also parenting right from the start, laying a healthy foundation in the baby and toddler years. So these are fantastic resources for families. Can you talk us about what you're seeing in the last 15 or so years or a little longer? You talk about people are coming to see you because of behavioral challenges, anxiety, depression, emotional upset about life transition and transitions and other things that are making day to day life difficult for kids and the, and the adults.
- [01:50]
Dr. Vanessa Lapointe
You know, I think it's an interesting time to be raising children because there was a time, an era, my parents and their parents era, where we didn't have this industry called the parenting industry. And in fact, you know, my grandma, who's long since left this lifetime, she, she would be like, what, what is your job? Like, I don't understand why do the parents need to know how to parent? So it's interesting because now all of the sudden there's this enormous flood of information available to parents everywhere. And I think the experience, experience of parents is that they're at the end of a firehouse with information they want to do right by their children, but they're uncertain of how to make their way. And a lot of the parents that I end up supporting, they come in because there's stuff going on with their kids, you know, that the child has developed significant behavior issues, mental health stuff. They're not sleeping, like whatever the case might be. And the parent really feels lost as to which direction to go. And also feels largely at odds with a lot of the, you know, so called advice they've been given. And so they're just trying to make sense of things in a way that resonates with who it is that they are.
- [03:02]
Ginny Rich
Yeah, yeah, it's quite the time to be a parent. A couple other things that you bring up in your books are the change in pace. So this is a really fast paced life. And then also in tandem with that, there's this quick fix mentality, you know, what can I do about everything as a sound bite. But obviously parenting is this long term investment into children. And, and then you just talk too that, you know, there's all these blow ups that happen in public. You know, your kid might have a tantrum and everyone's judging you. And yet the, the things I think that we do with children are antithetical to children. So you gave a story in here. One of the stories I thought was an excellent one was about being at one of those indoor play places. You know, I'm like, that's, I mean those are in some ways like super over stimulating and overwhelming. Or the grocery store, right, that's another place kids are bored. About 100 years ago, no kid went to a grocery store because there wasn't any of those. You know, you were outside digging up your own potatoes. Now there were their own hardships, but there are a lot of things today that I think make it hard to be a kid. So can you talk about this, this statement where you talk about empathy. You say, I ask parents to imagine the world through their child's eyes, like sitting in a grocery cart seeing all these things that are made to be marketed to children that you want, then you can't have them and you're two and a half, you know, that type of thing. And you say you get a lot of backlash about that. But you wrote, where along the way
- [04:32]
Narrator/Additional Sponsor Voice
did we so lose sight of the child's soul?
- [04:36]
Dr. Vanessa Lapointe
Yeah, it's, it's pretty profound. And I really think, you know, my way of viewing children is that they come into the world wholly formed for the developmental agent stage that they are at, which is to Say that they are not adults, but nothing about them needs to be fixed. We need to come alongside who it is that they are and what it is that they need in order to honor their developmental journey and allow nature to take its course without us putting a whole bunch of roadblocks up in the way. And when we, you know, we live in this fast paced world, families are under a lot of pressure, time wise, financial pressure, other kinds of things. We don't got time for our kid to be melting down in the grocery store or wherever it is. And so we've come up with these like strategies, like cut that out, whatever we can do to make it go away. But ask yourself this question. When you're two and a half, your brain is still massively in flux and coming online, you have very little capacity internally to self regulate around emotions. And then we start throwing choice language at you. Make a good choice. Remember we talked before we came inside, what's your choice? You know, we go at kids with all of that kind of stuff and the truth of the matter is this kid doesn't know a choice from anything else. Like that's not, that's not where they're at. Where they're at is their little nervous system is like, and we're making a good choice. Like, pull yourselves together. Do you really think that that's what your child needs in that moment? It's not. And as soon as you can come around to seeing it the way that the child is experiencing it, then you will be so brilliantly equipped to have your responses and ways of stepping in be perfectly aligned with what your child needs.
- [06:26]
Ginny Rich
It was interesting to read that. You know, you speak all over the place, right? So you've got these fantastic books and people can go to your website. I'll put the link in the show notes. You've got courses, you run programs for parents that people can do in real time. So one of those just closed up. But they open up at different times. People can go on the wait list. There's one that will open up probably in the fall. But you say everyone wants to know about discipline. And you wrote. So you say discipline is by far the most important topic. And then you say, typically by the time children reach their second birthday, parents are consumed by the subject, discipline of subject of discipline. So I was talking to a friend about it just yesterday because I had read your book and I knew that we were going to have this conversation today. And our kids, all of them nursed for a really long time. They nursed until at least three so that's. But I also think that's kind of normal too. Like, worldwide. Historically, it's not really super normal in the United States, maybe Canada, I don't know. But anyway, I. And I had a kind of a small, enclosed group of friends and everyone just knew my kids nursed until they were really. They had like full sets of teeth and talking in full sentences. So anyway, anytime that they ever had an issue, like if they were upset, if they were hungry, if they fell, if they hurt themselves, they would run over and nurse and then they would be fine. They would either fall asleep or they would be fine. And it was like magic. I just used to think, how. How do other parents deal with these ages with they. When they don't nurse? You know, it was like a. It was like a magic trick. The kid will be completely fine, hysterical, and three minutes later, fine. And then they passed those stages and then those. Those ages were done. So we didn't really have any of these issues.
- [08:16]
Dr. Vanessa Lapointe
Yeah, I mean, I love that.
- [08:18]
Ginny Rich
It was interesting to me to think everybody's worried about discipline at one and a half or two or 22 months. And I'm like, well. And you get these. I guess even if you're not nursing, like you gave the example. You just like hold your. You hold them, then they get over it, or they fall asleep or they eat a little something because they were hungry.
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Dr. Vanessa Lapointe
Yeah.
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Ginny Rich
And it's like not a thing. Yeah. Grow out of that stage.
- [08:43]
Dr. Vanessa Lapointe
That's the mentality right there. Like, to just come alongside whatever it is. And, you know, My older sister is a longtime lactation consultant, and so she's deep in the world of like, breastfeeding and all of the things. And we are amongst the minority in terms of this weird, like, your kids need to be weaned by whatever age. And we do all these weird things to make that all happen. Where if you really, like, you know, look around the world, there are actually some places where if you do not breastfeed your child until they're well through toddlerhood and preschool years, they might die. And so that becomes like a real health thing. So. So just to again, take stock of so many of the things that we think are air quotes normal around parenting and child raising are actually derived from what the culture demands, given the pressures that are placed on families. And you're right, that was a magic trick because that is one of the most readily available forms of CO regulation that you can offer a young child. It's literally as though you've reached your loving hand into their amygdala and their limbic system. And you're like, awesome, I got you. You know, the whole system can just settle and then they're right as rain. Because that's how development is meant to work, right?
- [10:03]
Ginny Rich
Which I didn't under. I didn't understand any of the signs of it until I read your book. And then I thought back, because our kids are obviously older now, but I thought back about like age two, two and a half. I'm like, was I worried about discipline? Like, no, they just nurse and so it's a pen. Then I was like, oh, this is why it worked. Once I read your book, I understood the why. So can you talk about the part now in our particular case? You know, I had this small group of mom friends that we would go out and hang out with. They, I mean, they may have thought I was super odd, but we were friends, so nobody really said anything. There wasn't many opportunities that I was like, out in public, people be like, why are you nursing that really old child? And my kids were tall too, like the oldest water. We probably look like he was, you know, a lot older, but. But you did something similar. So you told this story about being at the indoor play place, which is just, I mean, lights and kids bumping into each other and unnatural, but fun sometimes. Fun for when it's raining. But if you go with the bad weather days, you know, everyone else is there too. And so your child is overstimulated to the point where he pops you on the face. I mean, it gives, gives you a little sack in the face, right? With the, with his fist. And there's this judgment of others. Everyone's like, you know, throwing in their opinion on what you should do. And you're like, why? Just held him and you know, try to help them calm down, right? Trying to look through the eyes of what is it like to be a three year old in this environment with music blaring and, you know, all these sweaty kids running around, that type of thing. And so can you talk about that part of dealing with the judgment of others when you're like, look, we're going to co regulate. And whether that's just through holding him or just like giving him time to calm down, nursing, whatever the situation is. And yet people are like, you know, that kid's going to be a murderer. You know, like people have all these judgments.
- [11:53]
Dr. Vanessa Lapointe
That's exactly what they say. You should see my DMs on Instagram. It goes off because people are so concerned that if you are kind to a young child who is struggling that you are somehow going to turn them into like a sociopathic, narcissistic, bloody, bloody blah. That kids need to be shaped up and they need to learn respect and they need to learn all these ideas. The truth of the matter is what that child needs to learn is that, you know, yes, there are limits around behavior and yes, we live in a world where we kind of have to like work alongside other people so there will be norms and expectations and those kinds of things that need to come into play. And if we really want to instill in our children the capacity to be able to hang on to themselves so that they can be contributing members of society and kind of mesh reasonably well with the world around them, then what we want to do is offer that to them. We want to model that to them. We want to show them that when you are at your worst. I got you. Which means that when they get a little bit older and they see people around them at their worst, they will be the kind of citizen who's keen to step in and who's keen to support and who's keen to champion. Our job is to meet them exactly where it is that they are at and to not allow the ideas of the world, which as we've just discussed are not aligned with the needs of children, to dictate the way that we raise our kids. When we really get the science of child development, like once you see it, you can't unsee it. And the problem is that people, you know, they often somehow there's become this kind of layering up of my child behaves a certain way and that somehow has something to do with me. I'm a bad parent, I didn't do a good enough job, blah, blah, blah. And so we have a two year old having a meltdown or a three year old in a play place who's overstimulated. Well, especially a sensitive 3 year old who's overstimulated. Have you ever met one of those? Like of course he's going to have a meltdown. And it's not because I'm doing a bad job as a parent. It's because that's a nervous system are wired and we need to get down and get real with what that's about so that we can support them in ways that actually work over the longer term.
- [14:14]
Ginny Rich
Yeah, you wrote children's behavior. This is what I've seen with experience of our own kids. Children's behavior will sort out eventually when they reach a particular stage of development, age, temperament, and level of need, but only if the world around them has been adjusted accordingly. There is freedom in knowing this. So you understand that, you know, at some point they're. They're not going to be three anymore. Their brains are continuing to develop. So whatever. What are they capable of as a 21 month old, you know, with. They're not adults, like. And so you talk then about honoring that and having empathy toward that. You know, I'm like, well, what if there was a bunch of adults running around some smelly, sweaty play place? Yeah. And it just. There's things that can throw you off, and that's understandable. Can you talk about what you would say to people who would say, are you really going let him get away with that? That kid needs some discipline. You should teach him a lesson. You know, you should. What? You know, timeouts, they work pretty well, that type of thing.
- [15:12]
Dr. Vanessa Lapointe
Do you know how many I tell a story about this in the book and I've, over the years had so many people reach out to me and say, oh, my. I really hope I wasn't that mom, because I live around where you live, and I'm worried I was that mom. I'm like, no, I know who it was.
- [15:27]
Ginny Rich
You don't.
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Dr. Vanessa Lapointe
You don't need to worry. And, you know, the thing is, you're here in the service of your child. You're not here in the service of those judgy McJudgersons who think that they have something to offer you about how to parent your kid. And my boys are now 19 and 22. So I'm largely through, you know, those early years where other parents, particularly people who I'd never met before, would offer me parenting advice. And initially I found myself feeling like I needed to defend my choices. And then I. I matured a little bit and I realized, you know what? I can offer a one liner, which is something along the lines of, you know, thank you and. And I've chosen to do it a little bit differently. And I just leave it at that. Where I'm at now all of these years later, I've really made my peace with the idea that I am not actually on the planet to convince anyone of anything. I'm going to speak and do my truth, and y' all can come along or not. And that's great. And so now when somebody says about whatever, I just say thank you.
- [16:31]
Ginny Rich
It's good. Wow. Vanessa, that's it. Yeah. Thanks.
- [16:36]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
Yeah.
- [16:37]
Dr. Vanessa Lapointe
Yeah.
- [16:38]
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- [20:12]
Ginny Rich
Can you talk about how these. That these traditional approaches don't work? So you're talking about timeouts, consequences, removal of privileges, reward programs, and targeted praise used in an attempt to control children. I interviewed this man named, I think his name is Dr. Ross Green, and he was talking about how it's the same kids that are getting in trouble all the time. And so if it was going to work, it would have worked by now. I mean, they're getting in trouble all the way through. So he's got the explosive child lost at school, and I think he had a new book that just came out.
- [20:44]
Narrator/Additional Sponsor Voice
So he's got some great books.
- [20:45]
Ginny Rich
But I was like, oh, you know, that does make sense. Everybody knows who was the kid. Like, when I was growing up, his name was Taylor Best, and everyone is the worst, you know, because he was like the one that was, like, cursing you out in the second grade, you know, and I was like, oh, you know, so everybody knows, you know, who the kids are that are consistently getting in trouble. And Raw screen is like kids do
- [21:09]
Narrator/Additional Sponsor Voice
well if they can.
- [21:10]
Ginny Rich
So these things that we're doling out, like they actually like legitimately just don't work. Yeah.
- [21:17]
Dr. Vanessa Lapointe
And the problem is that we are a social species, like at our core. That is the essence of our nature. We are meant to exist in contact and closeness and connection with one another. And if you think about that list of things that you just ran off, you said, timeouts, consequences, removal of privileges, the use of reward systems, go down to the core of what's at the foundation of every single one of those things. And to really let it land, put it into adult terms. So let's say you're behaving badly. I don't know, maybe you had a terrible day. Maybe your mother in law said something that really upset you. Maybe you didn't get a lot of sleep last night and the kids had been going off all day. Like whatever it is, you've had a terrible day and your partner comes in the door and you're a little spicy, you know, like you chirp a little bit and you're grumpy about things and like, you know, maybe you think he's 10 minutes late and so you have something to say. Well, like, tick tock, thanks for joining, you know, blah blah. So maybe you're a little like that. And imagine that your partner then responds to you and says, what's wrong with you? Why are you talking to me like that?
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Ginny Rich
You need a timeout.
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Dr. Vanessa Lapointe
This is unexpected. You need to time out. All of us moms would be like, okay, deuces. But imagine they, they gave you a consequence or they told you, you know, you wanted to go with your girlfriends to brunch on Saturday morning. No, more like imagine that. Do you use deep inside your soul in response to that? Do you feel this like, you know, this swell of just like love for them and like you really feel so like understood and so seen and so settled by that. You are definitely, definitely going to put your best foot forward from this point going on because you like, come on, that's not what happens. What happens is they knew something important to you brunch with the girls and now they've taken that away from you in an effort to control you. There is nothing about that that feels connected, that feels close, that feels founded on relationship. Everything about that feels like coercive control because that's what it is. And so the idea is that these discipline approaches, you know, timeout. How is it not connection based? Well, it doesn't take a rocket scientist consequences. How is it not connection based. Well, how do you come up with the consequence that you choose to use on your child so that it will do the trick? You come up with that consequence because you know your child, you are in an intimate relationship with them. You know their loves and their heart's desires and the thing they were most longing for, you know, this afternoon or tomorrow morning. And then you're like, haha, no more.
- [24:01]
Narrator/Additional Sponsor Voice
Right.
- [24:02]
Dr. Vanessa Lapointe
And of course, you know, the child then puts the behavior away to begin. They may put the behavior away, but what have you taught them? You've taught them nothing. You've taught them that coercive control is how we get people to do what it is that we want. You haven't gifted them an opportunity to develop up their nervous system a little bit more so that they can regulate a little bit better from the inside. You haven't extended to them the experience of unconditional love. You haven't given them an opportunity to see that even when they're at their worst, you're going to be there and you're going to help them find their way through. They've learned nothing except coercion.
- [24:37]
Ginny Rich
And what you say is, and this I love that you brought up the example of as an adult, like you're having a bad day, you lost job, you got in a car accident, you know, you burned your finger on the pa, on the pot, whatever. Like there are these things. And then if someone were to come at you with a timeout or consequence or removal of privilege, it will make it worse. And so that's what you wrote. These attempts have never worked and never will. In fact, these approaches seem to cause an escalation.
- [25:07]
Dr. Vanessa Lapointe
Yeah. Because now, and like I'm 51 years old, if you come at me with any one of those consequences, oh boy, like buckle up because we're in for a ride now. You thought that we would go there. Well, you just, you haven't seen nothing. Because now what's going to happen is I'm going to defensively to protect self, defensively detach. I'm going to step away from you rather than leaning in to take your guidance and, and, and leadership and all of those good things. As a child who's got a parent that's kind of being like that, the child's not going to go, whoop, new thing.
- [25:43]
Ginny Rich
Thank you.
- [25:44]
Dr. Vanessa Lapointe
And then it's on. And the truth is, the impetus behind putting pen to paper to write that book, the Discipline Without Damage book, was because what I was seeing at the clinic, we had 150 kids coming through that clinic every single week. And what I was seeing was that those children, many of them had started out either with just, you know, kind of intense temperaments, which means more meltdowns and more, you know, acting out and more whatever and, or they were kids who had low level emerging mental health stuff. So a little bit of anxiety, you know, these kinds of things starting to trip out, which tends to show up as challenging behaviors. And then parents were responding the way that all of us experts had been telling them by putting their kids in timeouts, sometimes for hours at a time, sending them to their room, taking away from them all of the things that they loved, you know, all of that sort of coercion and control stuff. And then their kids do develop full blown anxiety. Then their kids do develop like diagnosable behavioral conditions. But they didn't need to, it wasn't necessary. The, the mental health diagnoses were the fallout from the discipline approach.
- [26:56]
Ginny Rich
Well, that's big because you give stats in this book. So the one we're talking about mainly is discipline without damage, how to get your kids to behave without messing them up. But also you have parenting right from the start, which is laying a healthy foundation. In the baby and toddler years. You had written some statistics in discipline without damage. Now this is from a decade ago. Today, approximately 68% of children ages 5 to 17 have a diagnosable anxiety related condition. By the time they reach it all hood, this number has more than doubled to 18 to 20%. It's, it's 1 in 5, um, children are 10 times more likely today than children born just three generations ago to be diagnosed with depression at some point in their lifetime. So these are big changes and you can kind of see that cyclical effect. You gave a bunch of examples in the book. Like another one that you gave was a little girl at a wedding. You're like, okay, well that, I mean that's not an environment suited for a three year old or a four year old. Obviously we take kids to those types of things and we try our best to, you know, keep them in, in a good state. But it's just, it's an adult environment. So you've got this little kid that's trying to adapt. And so you could see how in, and you talk about, in the book, it's like we're so fast paced. Can you talk about the part where it's like we're expecting kids to almost like live beyond their maturity and then when they can't, then we're using these discipline approaches that foster Disconnection and it just kind of snowballs.
- [28:20]
Dr. Vanessa Lapointe
Yeah, you know, I think it's all rooted in fear because people think, you know, you've got a tantruming little kid or a little kid that just pushed another kid over and stole their toy or whatever and then they allow fear to completely take over their brain. And what they're doing is they're projecting like 30 years down the road. They're like, oh my God, this person's never going to be able to hold a job down. This person's not. Well, your 2 year old is not 32. And we cannot by downward extension take the expectations that we have of adults and apply them to children. And then because that's not working, make the child wrong for the fact that they're not 32, they're actually 2. Like if you look at. So I started out my education really focused on development and a lot of things to do around learning. So I did a deep dive as a graduate student into what does it take to actually onboard the skill of reading? Well, the early form of reading would be, you know, you see like the golden arches and the goes McDonald's like where your pairing a visual symbol with some kind of a verbal expression. And then you know, there's layers and layers and layers of other skills that they will onboard in the coming decade or so as they move towards becoming proficient readers.
- [29:47]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
Cool.
- [29:48]
Dr. Vanessa Lapointe
That applies to every single other aspect of human development. Self regulation, being able to manage your behavior, being able to manage your stress, being being able to deal with your anger, being able to control your impulses. Like every single one of those things that we are on kids for is actually exactly the same as that reading thing. It's just that it's become charged because we take it all really personally and we allow for others judgments of us to be incorporated into our decision making process. And then we're in this pressure cooker of working actually against the natural development of the human child. And you know, the end of the day we've made things so much harder for our children and also for ourselves.
- [30:36]
Ginny Rich
Yeah, that's true. Yep. Yeah, for everyone, for everyone involved. Can you talk about how challenging behavior is normal for children?
- [30:45]
Dr. Vanessa Lapointe
Yeah. You know that this is a quote from Freud. That which stays in festers and comes forth later in uglier ways. So the bottom line is better out than in. And when you're a little kid, you know, like we all have those mornings as adults, you get out of bed and nothing feels quite right. That first sip of coffee doesn't hit the way it normally does. You go to like, you know, figure out what you're gonna wear for the day. Nothing feels just right. You go to do your hair and you're having like one of those hair days. Like we've, we've all had those kinds of days. And when that happens, it's tricky to kind of hang on to ourselves and it's tricky to make good choices and all the kinds of things. And so if you think about a child. Sorry, can you repeat the question, Jenny, so I can dial in on that?
- [31:34]
Ginny Rich
So you said this challenging behavior is normal for children. I just want to talk about that because I mean, you know, sometimes we, we are trying to get rid of all the challenging behavior, but if we understand that it's normal and that you
- [31:49]
Dr. Vanessa Lapointe
actually want it, you want them expressing. Because now let's say it's your kid who, unless either 2 or 3 or 5 or 6 and they've got out of bed and they're having a hot day, their job is actually to let you know that that's the kind of day that they're having. And with that, then you can come alongside and you can give their little nervous system what it is that it needs so it can continue to go and grow. So if you have a three year old or four year old or six year old, imagine they're having one of those tricky, sticky kind of mornings. Have you ever heard a child of that age come to you and be like, hey, mom. So here's the thing, like I am a little bit out of sorts this morning. My nervous system just feels like it's on tilt. I can't quite make sense of why. I'm gonna go and do a little bit of meditation and I'm gonna journal and then like, I'll circle back and I'll let you. Like, kids don't do that. Most kids, they don't have language to attach to this experience. What they have then is behavior. And so behavior becomes their form of communicating what's going on in the inside world, which allows us to arrive at an understanding of what it is to be a developmentalist, which is what I'm speaking about, versus what it is to be a behaviorist, which is all that other stuff that we've been talking about. And if you think about the idea of behavior and the ABCs of behavior, it's the antecedent, the thing that came before the behavior, that's the, the B, the behavior, the C, the consequence, the thing that comes after the behavior. As a developmentalist, I am entirely about This a the antecedent. I want to figure out what's going on for you. How come this environment is not working for you? What is the mismatch right now between your little nervous system and this story time environment at the public library that seems to be going off at the moment? What is happening around you and how am I going to step in? As you're a big person, get that all realigned so that you can be brought to rest versus the behaviorist who is trying to create pressure backwards onto the behavior by applying these sort of negative consequences, AKA discipline as the rest of the world knows it. And that's just like. That is very 1982 and it is 2026. And so we know better now. We do better.
- [34:09]
Ginny Rich
I mean, it reminds me of like I talked about at the very beginning. I'd have a kid that was, you know, kind of going berserk, and then they would nurse and then they would fall asleep, you know, five minutes, and they're like, oh, I didn't realize you were so tired. Yeah, you know, that type of thing. And, and you. I almost, I felt like there was always. You can remember, like last night we were out late at someone's birthday party or, you know, me or their tummy hurt, or. I mean, there's just so much. So to ask the question, what's going on? You say in this book, child development includes impulsive, unregulated and intense behavior. So you don't have to be so fearful like you brought up earlier. Know that that is a normal thing. And then your books will help you to know how to respond.
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- [36:15]
Ginny Rich
a passage actually from parenting right from the start, where you really talk about this as a gift and you use this, a beautiful phrase. I loved it, Vanessa. So you say, you know, my son, my children, they provide these gifts by, you know, then they're upset. So then, you know, we're trying to
- [36:32]
Narrator/Additional Sponsor Voice
figure out how to deal with ourselves
- [36:34]
Ginny Rich
and all of that. And then we grow. So you, and then you use this phrase, a more settled existence. I thought, oh, isn't that what we all want, a more settled existence? So you say, I first had to grow myself up, up. I was not prepared, emotionally or otherwise, for parenthood. Despite being a psychologist in the making, parenting is the hardest task in the world. So you have this child and, you know, it forces us. It forces us hopefully to start to grow in different ways. And so you're talking in these books about learning how to have a mindful response. So first of all, can you just talk about what that is? I mean, I think it's very easy to become the type of person that just responds like how our parents did, and to really have put no thought into that at all.
- [37:20]
Dr. Vanessa Lapointe
Well, and we tend to parent as we were parented, even if you swear to yourself, nope, I'm going to do it different. I'm not going to do that. You will wake up on some random Tuesday morning and hear your mother's voice coming out your mouth. It happens to the best of us. And so the deal is that when you look at what actually governs our concrete choices and actions every single day, only about 5% of that comes from up here. The other 95% of that is coming from deep down in the recesses of your own nervous system and will be a byproduct of how you were raised and actually by extension, a byproduct of how your parents were raised and your grandparents were raised for about seven generations. We can trace the genetic trace back to some of those formative experiences. And so then, you know, I'm a mother. My children were born in the early knots. And so I was parenting through the early 2000s, and you know, we knew a few things more about child development then than what my parents would have known when I was a child. And yet there I was on random days, at random times with like smoke coming out my ears, even though I had woken up that morning and meditated for like half, half an hour about how I was going to be a really gentle and respectful parent all day today. And then, you know, I lose the plot partway through. Why is that happening? It's not for lack of understanding, it's not for lack of motivation, because I really wanted it. The reason that it's happening is that I have this whole subterranean world that was wired into my system that I'm, I'm trying to work against so that I can show up for my kid. Now, good news though, when we have children, the child inside of us, because we're all the ages that we have ever been, like, they never leave you. There's, there's an imprint of the two year old you still inside of you, neurologically and emotionally. So we're all the ages that we have ever been. Which means that when we enter the experience of parenthood, we've actually been in that experience experienced once before as a child. And we can now reconnect back to those parts of ourselves while we are parenting the children on the outside of us. And we can create a new template for the inner child which then allows the real time mind to start to shift. And then you start to feel like you're, you know, hitting pay dirt a little bit. Like things become just easier and it's not such a grind anymore. And it's one of those things where if you're trying to like, like, you know, track it, measure it every day, you, you will be very frustrated. But you know, if you just kind of lean in and keep the faith, I'm always pat, you keep the faith. If you just kind of lean and keep the faith, you know, there's going to come a day six months from now where you're like, ah, you know what? This actually feels so much better. What happened.
- [40:22]
Ginny Rich
Yeah, it's beautiful because that's what we all want. We all want to grow. So you have a whole section in this book. This is from Discipline Without Damage, where you're talking about mindful responses you wrote. Whatever you do remember the considerable emotional and physical damage that big People who have lost their control of their own upset can cause by aggressing on children. Children are too vulnerable, too needy, and too dependent on us to have them endure the traumatic upset that comes from physical aggression from the adults that are in their life. So this matters a lot to have mindful responses. And so then you have nine stepping stones for finding your way in the moment. I wanted to talk about a couple of them. Then people can pick up the book to learn about some of the others. But one of the ones that you
- [41:05]
Narrator/Additional Sponsor Voice
gave was called Stay Low.
- [41:08]
Ginny Rich
And you gave this beautiful example. And I thought this was such a great example because you're talking about nerves. So this is in. In this case, you're talking about figure skating. You're a figure skater, you're nervous before a competition, and what does your coach do? So we're going to talk about that. But I thought, well, that's a fantastic example because childhood is filled with moment where you feel nervous. You know, we were at. There's a new Mexican restaurant in our little town, which is fantastic. And so then my daughter, who's nine, she's like, wants to get the kids taco plate but doesn't want the beans and the refried beans. And she was like, I'm too nervous to ask, you know, I mean, tonight, have the refried beans. This comes up all the time. Like, I mean, yes, you're going to go out and figure skate away and do your twirls and your twists and your jumps and all that, but also you might be nervous and to ask for no beans. So this is part of life. And how do we deal with that too? Can you talk about staying low, what that means, what your coach did and what we can take away from that as parents or, or teachers, any adults working with kids.
- [42:12]
Dr. Vanessa Lapointe
Yeah. So staying low, if you think about the idea that because we are a social species, there is actually interaction in the physical space between our two nervous systems. So if your child is really nervous about something and you are like, yeah, I got this, I got you, I got me, I got us. Like, I'll show you the way through. Then the commingling of those nervous systems, because you've stayed low, the commingling of the nervous system means that your child's nervous system, which might be a little amped at the moment, is going to actually, like, come down to meet where yours is at. And so as a grown up with a child who might be facing angst about whatever it is, you want to be able to come alongside them and help them you know, make sense of the circumstance, but also just lend them a little bit of your nervous system, which, like, it's about eight or nine feet out from where it is that we physically are sitting, that we actually can measure the impact of our nervous system on the nervous system of another human being. I know, talk about magic, right? When I was a kid, I was a competitive figure skater. True story. Loved it. Like, I ate, slept, and breathed skating. I was also very sensitive and a real nervous competitor. I was not a great competitor. I needed to have much bigger killer instinct to get out there and just, like, decimate the field. I didn't have that. And problematically, what had happened for me was that I had gotten really nervous at quite a large competition that was like all of the, you know, royalty from the Canadian figure skating community were all there. So it was a big meet, and there were a lot of important coaches and a lot of important figure skaters there. And I was out skating. Kurt Branning was a big deal back then. He was there with his coach watching. Like, I was petrified. I was so at the effect of all of the pressure. So out I go to compete. I don't feel great. I woke up that morning not feeling great. My mom had forced me to eat a piece of dry toast because I. I told her my tummy's upset. Dry toast and apple juice. So that's what was in my belly and off I got to do my performance. I throw up on the ice and throw up on the ice. It's hot when it comes out of your body, but it freezes when it hits the ice. And so they had to bring shovels out and chip it apart and scrape it off the ice. And there were other girls that had to skate after me. The whole thing was, like, so horrifyingly embarrassed. And so then the issue became. I was so scared it was going to happen again because it was really embarrassing. And I had this beautiful coach who worked with me. She. We're still in touch even to today. And. And she would come alongside and we would really visualize, we would work through everything. And she was so solid, like, she believed to the core of her being that I was going to be okay. And that's how she would show up before every single meet. She would walk the halls with me and we would make throw up sounds like kind of as a joke to just get it out of the system, you know? But what she was doing was she was offering this experience of co regulation to great effect. I will tell you, you wrote so
- [45:30]
Narrator/Additional Sponsor Voice
beautifully about Your coach.
- [45:31]
Ginny Rich
Coach walked the halls of the ice cream. Breathing, you know, doing all the breathing and all with the calmest, kindest, most certain tone of voice imaginable. She was an adult who knew how to stay low. So then that helps. That helps to bring down the nerves and that. That high energy that inks the energy that a kid might have. Another one that you said, I'm going to give. We'll talk about one more. And then I also want to talk about prevention, because I loved how you talked about the needs of a child. Like, can we create the world that they need? And. And a lot of times, then you don't even have to deal with all this stuff. Okay. But one more in terms of learning how to have mindful responses is sometimes you just leave. So exit gracefully if needed. You talk about, like, just sometimes, like, sometimes just, like, let it go sometimes, you know, you're trying to hold the line. Just don't, you know, exit gracefully.
- [46:28]
Dr. Vanessa Lapointe
Yeah. And where that comes from is, I think so many of us, we, you know, we. We issue a direct. We state a rule or boundary or whatever it is, and then it's not going the way that we wanted for it to go. And we can feel like this. Like, this wave of, like, starting to come up from inside of us. And before it hits your brain, like, whilst you still have one cortical cell still online, you need to get out of there, like, because you're now about to, like, vomit that all over your kid, then you're gonna have to clean that up on the other end. And the cleanup is actually way worse than if you had just said, you know what, my darling, Mommy needs to pee. I'll be right back. That's a graceful exit because you've recognized I am not going to be able to hang on to myself in this situation. I'm going to get out of here. I'm going to go to the bathroom, close the door, and I'm going to take five really big belly breaths. I'm going to breathe in for six, hold for six, breathe out the mouth, in through the nose, hold for six, out for six. I'm going to do that five times. I'm going to reset the nervous system, and then I'm going to decide what am I capable of. Can I go out there and hold a boundary firmly and kindly, or if I go out there and try and restate that boundary, am I about to lose my schmick all over my kid? And if I'm going to lose it, then I'm just going to Step aside for the time being. Now, the truth of the matter is, if you do that all day, every day, where you're just like, meh, forget that one. Meh, forget that one, then, like, that's a bigger thing. Then we're going to need to talk about what's up for you and why is it so challenging for you to be able to hang on to yourself? But if every now and then you need to exit gracefully stage left, do that. It's the lesser of all of the possible evils.
- [48:19]
Ginny Rich
I. I actually like the example, which is kind of a, you know, on the opposite spectrum of what we're trying to do, which is like, balance out screen time, getting kids outside. We're talking about that in a minute. But like, the example you gave was, let's say on Tuesdays they get to watch one show or you have some sort of a rule set up and your child asked to watch an extra episode and you already said no. But your child has had a hard day and his reaction is very big and loud. What's more, you have had a hard day and you realize a big, loud reaction is bubbling up in yourself as well. And you realize you should not have said no to the request because you just don't have the energy to hold the line in a way that puts connection front and center. And so you just say, oh, I left the sprinkler on. You know, I'll be back in a little bit. And then, you know, it gives time for the show to go on to the next one. It just buys you a little bit of time. And I thought it was a great. A great permission, I guess.
- [49:14]
Dr. Vanessa Lapointe
Yeah, yeah, we can all just take a load off, you know, like, I think we feel like we gotta stick the landing on every single thing. And we hold ourselves to these impossible standards. When, you know, Winnicott theorized many, many years ago that the world doesn't need perfect mothers, children don't need perfect mothers. They just need good enough ones.
- [49:34]
Ginny Rich
Yeah, let's hit one more topic. You talk about creating the world your child needs, and this is a lot about play. This is also a lot about learning to grow yourself so that you can know how to react in different types of situations and have a mindful response. But, but there is a. There is a part where, you know, I see that we are not setting kids up for success. The, you know, the school age has dropped so young. The school day is so long. There's a lot of academic pressures. There's not a lot of time for Reese for recess so can you talk about what kind of a world a child, and especially a young child needs so that we're not constantly having to deal with like, dashed expectations, like, because the expectation maybe shouldn't be there to begin with.
- [50:25]
Dr. Vanessa Lapointe
Yeah, yeah. And, and then we pathologize the presentation of the child and we say they have all of these, you know, disorders when the truth is they're running out of nature deficit and they haven't been allowed to play and be kids enough. And so, yeah, they lear look a little disordered, but we did it to ourselves. So for a young child, the first thing is get connection focused in every single part of how it is that you see them, how it is that you respond to them, how it is that you breathe. Like, relationship is our foundational currency. It is as important as air in terms of life. Young children will die in the absence of any kind of connection. And so it really is our, our foundation. The other thing that I would say is that we can, you know, we're raising children during a time where there's a veritable anxiety epidemic happening all around us. And if we think about how does the human nervous system form and how is it meant to have formed? And if you look at the work of, you know, researchers like Stuart Brown, who's been a big figure in the world of play, you look at Peter Gray like, you look at all of these, you know, long standing, very wise to voices, Teacher Tom, who I just think is the best. If you think about what they've all been saying all these years, the bottom line is, is you let kids be kids. What does that mean? Young children are meant to play. They're not meant to sit and learn letters and numbers and all of the things that will come once the brain has been primed for the way that it is that we kind of do life. So they need to play. And play is not something that you, like, do when you're trying to buy yourself some time. Play is something that kids need repeated access to and there needs to be lots of opportunities and there'll be starts and stops with that. It needs to be child led if you can have them be outside. We know that when we put our feet on the earth, something happens in our souls. And a lot of our kids are not, I'm telling you, a lot of our kids are not accessing that world. And so they don't, they don't get the neurological benefits of what it means to be a child and be out in nature and be moving your body and exploring and being in and of the world. They don't get that kind of exposure just to nature. But they're also, because they're not outside, they're missing out on heaps of other things, including social opportunities, the opportunity for gross motor development, fine motor development, like every single developmental domain is going to be touched by that. And as a. An answer to the anxiety crisis, really, if we were to tend to children's nervous systems and allow them to play, allow them to be bored, like, really let them be bored. Learn to love boredom. They begin to hear their own voice, their own self, their own sense of who it is that they are. When you just leave them in the spirit of nothing, you know, where they get to just now they're going to create. I believed for many years that I was the reincarnate Laura Ingalls Wilder. I had the bonnet, I had the skirt. And I spent, I mean, days just, you know, wandering around, baking. I made a lot of mud pies. I lived my best life. I had science experiments going along with that. I got cornered accidentally by a bowl, the neighbor's bowl. Once had to figure my way out of that situation, which I wouldn't recommend for your children today. But the point that I'm making is left to just explore. I had this wildly wonderful childhood, and I really think as an adult, and I look at the childhood my children had, I look at the childhood that a lot of my clients are having these days. It's very different, and it definitely changes the way the nervous system develops. We do see that there is a significant impact on children who are. I did not homeschool my children, just for the record, but children who are homeschooled as a group, they do tend to develop academic skill a little bit later. So reading, writing, the. These kinds of things. Once they develop it, though, all bets are off. Like Sky's the limit. The capacity to critically think and to problem solve and to be interested and to be emergent and to be excited about learning just increases exponentially when young children don't have it shoved down their throats. So let kids be kids. Let them play. And let them play outside, if possible.
- [54:57]
Ginny Rich
Yeah, yeah. And you have this. I think it's such a key. You wrote the cost. There is a cost to the. Like, the child's need for connectedness has been used as a bargaining chip, like, for too long. For too long. It shouldn't have to be a bargaining chip, their need for connectedness. So, I mean, I learned a lot. The books are fantastic. Discipline without damage is one. And then the Other one is called Parenting. Right from the start, can you tell people where they can find you, where they can find the courses and where they can find that program for parents? I know one has just filled up, but maybe for. If someone's interested down the road.
- [55:31]
Dr. Vanessa Lapointe
Yeah. So My website is Dr. Dr. VanessalaPoint with an E on the end dot com. I have a discipline without damage course which is seven modules and you can go self placed. I also have a course up there now on anxiety and talking about, like, my way of seeing children and what that means for how we respond to the anxiety pieces alongside a bunch of other videoed seminars. And then I run a program for parents called the PTJ, the Parent Transformation Journey, which is a six month program. We just, as of May 1st, started another group. And so we'll be starting the next group at some point, probably closer to October, November, with registration beginning in September. And we do run our wait list for that. It always sells out and fills up. And so if you're interested in that, you'll definitely want to get your name on that waitlist list.
- [56:20]
Ginny Rich
Yeah. Because this is our opportunity to grow. It's a beautiful thing to say. This is a gift. When. When our. When our feelings are triggered, then we have a chance to look at them and to grow ourselves in light of this new understanding that it's emerging from parenting our children and from being around kids who are, you know. What did you say? Delightfully. Something like delightfully chaotic or something like that.
- [56:43]
Dr. Vanessa Lapointe
That's the word. Delightfully. The.
- [56:46]
Ginny Rich
The delightful chaos of children. Thank you. Thanks for spending this time with me. I so appreciate it. It's a treat to get to know you better. We always end our show with the same question. What's a favorite memory from your childhood?
- [56:57]
Narrator/Additional Sponsor Voice
That was outside.
- [57:00]
Dr. Vanessa Lapointe
I. So we had a dog whose name was Homer. This is long before the time of the Simpsons. And Homer was my guy, you know, like, we went everywhere together. We did everything together. And I. I also had horses, which I rode a lot. And it was a wonderful kind of childhood. But I somehow ended up turning Homer into a horse. And so he would just run around and I would ride on his back, like, hang on. And we, you know, we would explore the forest and the. And the beaver dam down at the. At the pond and like all of the things together. And so I have to think I have a lot of fun memories of childhood, but hanging with Homer and getting to do all of the things. He was my buddy and we had a good time.
- [57:47]
Ginny Rich
And isn't that regulating to have a pet. Oh it's so beautiful. It's all this interwoven. This was such an honor. Vanessa, thanks so much for being here.
- [57:55]
Dr. Vanessa Lapointe
No kidding. You've taken over the world because you are like dynamo. I love it. Such great energy.
- [58:04]
Ginny Rich
Thank you. Thank you. This was such a treat.
- [58:06]
Dr. Vanessa Lapointe
Likewise. Thank you for having me.
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