Calm Parenting Podcast - 2 Key Phrases When Kids Shut Down (For Teachers & Parents)

Episode Date: March 19, 2019

2 Key Phrases When Kids Shut Down (For Teachers & Parents) Frustrated because consequences don’t motivate your students or kids? Then listen to this podcast and learn two killer phrases that WILL reach deep down into a kid’s heart and change his attitude. Build your child’s confidence instead of crushing his spirt. Yesterday, Kirk challenged 600 teachers in NJ to try a radically different approach for the next two weeks. This works for teachers and parents. Here’s a challenge. Step up to the plate and bring Kirk to your community. He and his son can provide this same training to teachers, parents and students in YOUR community. Take thirty seconds and email [e-mail] the name of your school, church or organization and city. He’ll send you a one-page proposal. Forward this powerful podcast to your PTA, teachers, principal, school counselor and pastor. It only takes a minute, but could help hundreds of kids. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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around, but I wanted to send out what I think is going to be a really, really helpful podcast based on something I did yesterday in New Jersey. I was hired to come up and train 600 teachers for the Parsippany schools. And I'd had my presentation already ready because I've done kind of a standard presentation that's based on that brain booster. Some of you have heard of brain boosters or ADHD university program. It's really, really solid. Lots of insights, lots of strategies. But I got up extra early yesterday morning, worked out. And on the way to speak, I thought, you know what? I'm going to go for it because I've been working on this new program.

It's kind of like a no BS guide for teachers to change your classroom. And I've been wanting to do it, but to be honest, I just haven't had the courage to do it because teachers can be kind of a cynical group of people, which I get because nowadays it's brutal being a teacher. And they go to these professional development days and it's all these men and women in sport coats with PhDs talking about all kinds of theory, but they've never been in a classroom. And so the teacher's like, sure, that sounds great. You've got nice fancy words, but what do I do with the toughest kids in the classroom who are disrupting things or who shut down because they get overwhelmed or who refuse to do what I asked to do? What do I do with those kids? And so the regular presentation I do is fantastic and it answers a lot of those

questions. But this was a very different one. And I want to share a little bit of it with you because I wanted to speak directly to the teacher's hearts. And I wanted to give them 10 very specific action steps they can take. And the hard part of this for me was this is challenging. And I knew it was going to make them uncomfortable. But I also know if they do this, it will really change things. So on the way there, I'm driving in New Jersey, like 25 minutes, and I'm writing down my notes that I wanted to do while I'm driving, because that's what my dad taught me to do, right? While I used to drive us up to New York City for business, he'd be like driving with his knee, writing his notes. And so it was awesome. So I got there and I said, I'm going for it. So I'm just going to start with it, what I did. And this is very, very different.

But the first action step I gave to the teachers, and I give this to all the parents out there, especially the moms, is this. I want you to practice self-care. I want you to make yourself a priority. Because moms, teachers, nurses, social workers, counselors, people in helping professions tend to put everybody else first in their lives. And they're always giving, giving, giving, giving. And what happens is they get emotionally exhausted and drained. And as a mother, you end up saying, after all I do for you, I cook for you. And then you become resentful.

And if you don't take care of yourself, then you're not going to be able to handle kids when your kids aren't at their best. When kids have emotional meltdowns, it will immediately trigger an emotional meltdown for you because you're physically, emotionally, and spiritually drained. So one of the most important things you can do as a parent, as a teacher, as any professional, is to practice self-care. And this is not a selfish thing. It's very selfless. Because what happens is, look, I'm doing this podcast. I got up this morning. I've got a four and a half hour drive down to Northern Virginia. I'm training more teachers this afternoon than a five hour drive home tonight because I want to get home. I won't get home till about midnight. So I got up and I'm not, whatever, but I got up and I got my workout in because that gives me energy later.

And when I get down to Northern Virginia this afternoon, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to get to that school or somewhere close to it. And I'm going to lay that back in my car. And I'm going to take a little nap because I know that if I don't take care of myself, I'm just a jerk in life. So moms and teachers, I'll give you this one. I told the teachers, when you get home tonight, you're going to be exhausted. You're tired because you're dealing with kids all day. And you're going to get home and your kids are going to be like, mom, mom, I'm hungry. I'm tired. And I told these teachers, I want you to sit sometimes. Go home

and sit. Don't run around all night. Just sit on the living room sofa. Pick up a book, something you want to read, right? Not something, everything's always revolved around our kids. And then we wonder why the millennials are like they are. It's not their fault. It's a parent's fault because we taught them that everything revolves around you. And that's not healthy for kids and it's not healthy for parents. It's not healthy for the family system. So I told these teachers, when you get home, once in a while, I want you to sit and read something. When the kids come in, mom, I'm hungry. I want a snack. Feed me. Look at the child and say, you've got two legs and two feet. You can go to the kitchen, get yourself a snack. And when you're there, I'd like a snack and a glass of iced tea with a little bit of whiskey.

Kidding. But you start to do that and watch what you're demonstrating. You're demonstrating that your time is important and that your needs are important. And this is demonstrating self-respect. Because a lot of times your kids don't respect you because you don't respect yourself. And they don't respect your time because you don't respect your time because you're always running around doing everything for everybody else. And that is not selfless and it is not giving. It is not at all because you're making yourself emotionally drained. So then when your child comes home from school and has the

meltdown, now you can't take it and your words are this, you know what? I don't have time for this. I, you know what? I need you guys time for this. I need you guys to behave. And now instead of teaching your kids how to handle conflict when they're fighting, you have to separate them and send them to their room because you can't deal with it. There's no guilt or blame in that, but I want you to practice self-care. And that was a weird message to give to these teachers because that's not typical professional development day stuff. Second thing I asked them to do was this. Picture two or three of their most challenging students. And I realize I'm talking about your kids here. Because these kids, your kids, they are difficult to teach. They are. And they're frustrating. And it's difficult when you've got 20 or 25 kids in

a classroom who are struggling with focus and attention, who are really sensitive, who have anxiety, all of these issues. That's tough to deal with. But what I ask the teachers to do, picture two of these kids and write their names down. And then imagine what a day is like for our kids. Imagine what it's like to not sleep well at night because you've got a very busy brain that never shuts off and you're very sensitive to things. And because you've got a lot of anxiety and you're anxious about the school day and you wake up the next morning and you're tired and a parent rushes into the room, come on, get ready, get ready, get ready. You've got to go to

school. And your first thought about school is fear. Why? Because I'm not made for school. I'm not always that you go in every day and you kind of felt like a failure right like you're it's like putting a really super creative person in charge of finance or accounting you die from boredom and you wouldn't know what to do or more likely it's more like putting the finance uh person or the accountant in the ad agency or the marketing department or sales department, or picture this is a good one, the project manager or the engineer or the coding guy or gal into a sales position. You have good luck with that, right? You'd feel like a failure and you'd have anxiety every day because that's not your skill set. So I was telling these teachers, picture this kid getting up in the morning and every day he's asked to go to this place that pretty much exposes

all of his weaknesses because he's not naturally good at sitting still all day long. He's not naturally good at listening to people talk. He's got auditory processing issues and he's more of an experiential, tactile learner, but listening to things. To be successful in school, he has to memorize information for a timed test and then forget the information. Many of our kids have trouble with short-term memory, so it's a very difficult thing. Now, they have great strategic brains, but we don't really take advantage of that for our kids. That's what enables them to be good arguers. But so they're not good at a lot of these things, right? Following directions. It's not their strong suit, but you know what they are good at? They're amazing leaders

and they've got a lot of initiative, but we don't reward that typically in school. Now you've got the whole thing of like, now I've got to get on a school bus with other kids. And many of your kids have something called asynchronous development, asynchronous, out of sync intellectually. They're kind of up here, very bright kids. So they get along better with older kids and adults. They actually love getting sent to the principal's office sometime because they can talk about geopolitical issues and black holes and all kinds of adult stuff. But emotionally and socially, they're often a year or two behind. So they get along better with little kids and animals, right? But who do they struggle to get along with? Kids their own age. Who do we make kids go to school with and

sit in class with for 12 straight years? Kids their own age. And they're not naturally good at forging relationships and friendships with those kids, right? And then we say, oh, go out on the playground, make friends. You know that's a disaster because many of our kids are not very confident. So they can't play a game with other kids because they'll change the rules of the game. They're cheated or quit. They'll steal the ball, right? They'll butt in line. And then it makes it miserable. Or imagine this at the cafeteria. Can you imagine these kids at the cafeteria? They walk in and all the other kids are talking. They don't always have a lot of friends, so they

sit alone at the cafeteria table. And then you get in trouble for something because they didn't put things away the right way. Whatever it is, can you imagine? And so it's trying to get inside the teacher's brains, helping them imagine by the time this child walks into your classroom, he's done for the day. He's often emotionally exhausted just getting to school because when he got on the school bus and he heard kids laughing, he thought they were laughing at him, right? And sometimes they're a little bit awkward and your kids are a little bit odd and so they get made fun of.

It's not always a fun existence being one of these kids. And I'm not blaming any of you. There's no blame, but some of us in the morning, if you're not calm with your kids, you're rushing, come on, go, go, go, go, go. And everything's a rush and you're yelling at your kids, right? Because they don't eat. You know why some of your kids don't eat, right? Because they have so much anxiety. Their stomachs are upset all the time, which is why they're seeking simple carbs. And they just want to eat the same thing all the time because their stomachs are upset or they have gut issues of some kind. And so they're picky eaters. They're sensitive about their clothes. And then most of your kids in the wintertime don't want to wear a jacket or long pants. They'd rather

wear shorts when it's 28 degrees out. Then you're going to get in a fight with them. So the whole morning's miserable. They show up in the classroom. Class, are you ready to learn? No, because they're still thinking about everything that their mom or dad may have yelled at them on the way to school, right? And so I was trying to get inside the teacher's brains, help them get inside actually our kids' brains and know. No child wakes up every morning and says, hmm, let me think of all the ways I can be difficult and get in trouble today. I hope other people don't like me today. But that's what it feels like. Throw this one in. Imagine they've got the perfect brother or sister or the good child who does

everything well and they feel teamed up on. So you show up at school, you're not exactly ready to learn and then school's hard and all those different things add up. And so I gave teachers two things to say to our students. One is this, and I also looked, the cool thing about this training was so many of the teachers also are parents and they have these kids because I would see them taking notes and teachers tend not to take furious notes at these things. And they came up to me afterwards, and they said, you just described my child. And I not only got some tools to be a better teacher and to handle my classroom and these

kids, but now I know what to say to my kids when I go home. And there's great value in this. So I hope, I'm just going to do this really quickly, and I'll get back to what I told the teachers. Email my son, Casey, because I'm traveling this week week and I want you to reach out to him. It's Casey, C-A-S-E-Y, at CelebrateCalm.com. If you want, just put no BS in the subject line because that's kind of fun and he'll know what I'm talking about. And if you want to put the name of your school, your church, your foster care organization, whatever it is, your company,

because we do stuff for corporate events, and put your town and city, and Casey will reach out to you. And we can come and do this training, but we do the training not only for teachers, but we can do it for parents. And my son also does school assemblies for kids. Do you know how powerful it is to have everyone in the community, parents, teachers, and kids on the same page, learning how to help these kids and how to control their emotions and their impulses?

It's really, really cool to do this, and it's a very unique program. But you've got to do something because we don't just show up places, right? You've got to do something. You've got to take action. Look forward to this podcast. Send it to the teachers because they'll get something out of it. Send it to the principal, send it to counselors at school, send it to your PTA, get involved in your PTA, bring us in because this stuff can change. Look, the reason I changed my presentation yesterday is because I want

teachers to have 10 practical tools that they can be doing. And what I challenge them with is for the next two weeks, let's do it differently. So here are the two things that I asked them to do. I said, talk to these kids, pull them aside and say, does it ever feel that as your teacher, I've misjudged your motives? Does it ever feel like school, sometimes society misjudges your motives? Because I guarantee you, your strong will kids feel very misunderstood. And we say brutal things to them like, you know, if you would just apply yourself, you just need to work harder. And I told the teachers, and I was in New Jersey, so I used a little bit of bad language because they could take it. And I said, you know

what rises up in a child when you say, if you would just apply yourself, you know what rises up? You go F yourself. And you know what? And I hope that doesn't offend you. But I want people to understand in a visceral way what it feels like to have people come along and say things like, if you would just try a little bit harder. You know what that feels like inside? That's why I said it. Go F yourself.

I'm not going to work for you. I'm not going to try harder for you. And look, that's what we do to our kids all the time. So use that language as a parent with your child. Does it ever feel like I've misjudged your motives? And here's the other one. And this is when I could hear a pin drop in the auditorium after I said this. Can you imagine teachers and parents talking to our kids, coming up to a child when he comes into the classroom some mornings and pulling that child aside? And I don't care if he's 16, a 15-year-old girl, a 7-year-old, a 5-year-old and saying, you know, I can imagine no one else knows. No one has an idea how much courage it takes for you to get up in the morning and come to this school. And I'm glad you're here today.

Can you imagine what that must feel like for a kid to have an adult anywhere look at you and say, nobody has any idea how much courage it takes for you to get up and come here. And I'm glad you're in my class today. You start saying that to kids, I guarantee that kid's going to work his butt off for you over time because now he feels understood. The third thing I went to was this. It was an honest assessment for the teachers. And I'll give this to you as a parent. Is what you are doing working? Is it working? Because here's what all parents and teachers do. Consequences. That's all we ever do. Well, what's the punishment? What's the consequence for that action? All behavior plans are built around consequences and punishment. It doesn't work for two reasons. One, strong-willed kids don't care

about consequences. They don't. They'll take any consequence you give them, and they don't care if it makes their life harder. They don't care. And the second reason is consequences are very limiting. You know why? Because consequences are rational, and most behavior isn't rational. If behavior was rational, jails wouldn't be filled. Most of the decisions that we make are not irrational. And I joked, it's not really a joke, but I told the teachers this. I said, most of you in your marriage made an irrational decision because you're teachers. You're in a helping profession. So you think you can fix people. So you married a guy that was a fixer-upper and you thought you could fix him. And that was a terrible, terrible mistake. Or your friends say, you know, I see a lot of red flags with this guy. And you're like, I know, but I love him so much. Like that was a dumb decision. That was an irrational decision. And we make them all the time, but that's all we ever do in schools and home is do these consequences and the behavior charts and stern talks. You know what? If you don't start doing better, you're not going to be able to take the

class field trip. Oh, that's motivating, right? And look, our kids are completely different. Look, I want to talk to the men out there. And I know men listen to my podcast, not as many as we need to, but I know men do. I've got to tell you guys, look, I was the my way or the highway approach. My dad was career military. I get the tough guy approach. But if you've been doing this for seven years or 14 years with this child and it's not working yet, guess what? You need to change your strategy. It's not going to work. And you can't say, well, when he comes along, one day he'll get it, that I'm the boss of this home. It's my way or the highway.

Yeah, and you're going to alienate your child, and you're going to have a very angry teenage boy or a girl seeking out a teenage boy for comfort because she didn't get it from her dad. So dads, look, I talk to you tough because this is hard stuff for men and there's no blame or guilt, but I'm tired of getting all these emails from mom saying, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff. And then I get to like, yeah, but dad's not on board. He just pulls out the belt because he thinks that's going to work.

It hasn't worked for 10 years. It's not going to work now. So you've got to change yourself and stop hiding behind all of this tough guy stuff and all this stuff. Well, it was't worked for 10 years it's not going to work now so you've got to change yourself and stop hiding behind all of this tough guy stuff and all this stuff well it's good enough for my dad no it wasn't because you only have a relationship with your dad and you didn't respect your dad you feared your dad because I didn't respect my father I wish I did now in death I he's gone now and I look back and I know he was doing his best. So I love my dad, but he had four sons and we didn't really respect him. We feared our dad and we didn't have a relationship with him and we missed out on my dad's life wisdom. My dad grew up in the depression. He was the only one in his family that went to college and he worked three jobs to work himself through college. He slept overnight

as a janitor at college. He worked his way. He went into World War II. He served overseas. He was in the career military for 25 years. He gets out and he takes a janitor job again, and then he gets a sales position. My dad was a beast of a worker, and that's why all of my brothers are beasts. We are beasts in working. We'll do multiple jobs. We can pound it out. And that's how we honor my dad. But what we missed from my dad is a lifetime of wisdom and a relationship that we never had. And I don't want you to repeat that same mistake. Sorry for the side thing there. But man, this stuff's really important. Look, we're talking about human lives here. We're talking about relationships. I'm 53. Guys, when you get older, and moms, when you get

older, you're going to realize most of the stuff that you worried about when your kids were four and seven and 11 and 15 didn't matter. All that stuff doesn't matter anymore. Oh, we've got to work so we get them into the right college and we have to do all these things and I have to take them to extracurriculars. That doesn't matter. What matters is the relationship and building a trusting relationship. And I guarantee those teachers that reach into that child's heart and say, it took a lot of courage to be here today. I'm glad you're here. Look, that's choking me up because I can imagine the kid inside his heart's crumbling now because someone wants him in his class and someone finally recognizes how much fight there is in that kid. Because you know what we do with our kids with

their fight? We just call it opposition defiant disorder, which is a horrible label and diagnosis. Yeah, your kids have a lot of fight and they're usually fighting you, but that's partly because nobody's ever reached inside of them and say, I see that fight inside of you. And that's what gets you out of bed and gets you into the school every morning. And I'm glad you're here. And I guarantee you when you start doing that stuff, man, that kid will start working for you because he doesn't feel teamed up on because everyone's not coming to him with consequence if you don't start doing this. If you don't start applying yourself, that makes a kid shut down. So I didn't plan on being that emotional, but this is good stuff.

So I asked the teachers, I asked parents to do an honest evaluation. Is what you're doing working? And if it's not, let's take a different approach. For the next two weeks, let's do something radically different. And so I went through seven more steps. And I know some of them were very uncomfortable for the teachers because it's not what you typically hear at professional development. And it's not what teachers typically are asked to do. But it's what will work. And that's why I'm calling the no BS guide for teachers and I'm developing it's going to roll out in like another week or two a no BS guide for parents to raise strong-willed kids because you

need someone to cut through the clutter tell you exactly what to do and how to do it so even as a parent look I've got a new web page built but I'm not going to share it with you. If you're resourceful and pretty creative, you may be able to figure out what that webpage is. And if you do, email me because I'll give you a discount on a new program just for being resourceful like that. You might be able to figure it out. Or if you want to email us, I want to reward podcast listeners. And by the way, sign up for our newsletter at celebrate calm.com. The quickest way to find out about anything new

is to read our newsletter because I get, I get to do this in written form and it reinforces in written form. A lot of what you're doing, just sign up at celebrate calm.com. Um, you can find there's a little place to sign up for a newsletter or just email Casey at CelebrateCalm.com and say, sign me up for your newsletter, and he'll do that. It's just a really, really helpful thing to do. So do that. And if you're interested in a new program for parents and you email and say, I'm interested in it, I'm a podcast listener, we'll figure out some kind of special discount to give you. Why? I just like doing stuff that's a little bit fun. And I like people with initiative who go for it, who really want to change their kid's life and their family's life. Because this stuff's really, really cool. So bring us, bring us into your town, bring us into your school,

help us train your teachers. I've got to run now because I've got to get ready. Drive four and a half hours. I'm going to train teachers. And I just decided this morning while I was at the gym, I'm going to do this program. I've got to talk to the principal first. But I'm going to do this program today at the school because I believe it has the power to focus teachers for two straight weeks to do something radically different and get these kids turned around so we can close the school year out on a very positive note. So we've got a little bit of time coming up, I think in April. We've got some dates in Chicago and different places in May all across the country. And then back to school time is a fantastic time for us to do this training because we can start the next school year with all the teachers in your entire district, in your parish, whatever it is, all the schools can go together. We can do an

individual school. It doesn't matter to me. We can start the new school year, end the school year on a positive note, turning this around for our kids. Thank you for what you do for all the teachers listening. Thank you, thank you, thank you for what you're doing. And parents, thank you for being willing to change. Let us know how we can help you. CelebrateCalm.com. Email Casey at CelebrateCalm.com. Our phone number is 888-506-1871. Thanks so much. Bye-bye.