Calm Parenting Podcast - Discipline When Consequences Don't Work

Episode Date: September 13, 2017

How do you discipline a child who doesn't respond to consequences? Who doesn't ever want to do things the way you want? How can you discipline without making your child feel like a failure? Kirk will show you how to handle misbehavior, blurting out, lying, stealing, screen time, and much more! Email [e-mail] or call 888-506-1871 to get practical help and our free newsletter. Email [e-mail] with any questions and visit us at www.CelebrateCalm.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price. Hello, everyone. This is Kirk Martin, founder of Celebrate Calm, and welcome to our podcast or Calmcast. You can find us at CelebrateCalm.com. We've got a Facebook page, Celebrate Calm. And I want to talk today about discipline. And I can't get to everything and every question you have, but I want to give you a framework for how we approach discipline. And I'll try to give you some very specific examples. So this is for especially those of you who have strong-willed kids, right? The kids who don't respond to consequences, right? Like you'll say, I'm going to wash your mouth out with soap. And they'll be like, oh, can we use Irish spring? And it just doesn't work because everybody else has lied to you and said,

oh, if you're just consistent, you follow through. Your kids will listen to you, and you've done that, and it doesn't work with these kids. So I want to give you some tools because these are also kids who are never going to do things the way you want it done, and they struggle with impulse control. Really bright kids, but they struggle at times. So I want to give you some tools. So let's lay the groundwork. Couple big things. Discipline

is something that you do for your child, not to your child. It's a gift. See, it's not about coercing them to achieve some kind of outward behavior. Because if we're honest with ourselves, sometimes we use discipline in order to make our lives easier. We just want our kids to stop being annoying and do what we say because that's easier. And that's not what my goal is here, right? So it's not about getting kids just to behave. It's not about consequences. It's about a changed heart. And it's about giving kids tools so they know how to control themselves. And I always ask three questions whenever I discipline a child. Number one, am I teaching the child something? See, discipline literally means to teach. Doesn't mean to punish. Doesn't mean to take away things.

It means to teach. And see, sending a child to his bedroom is fine, but it doesn't teach him anything. Now, you can say, well, I'm teaching him that what he did was wrong. Well, your kids already know that what they're doing is wrong, and that's why they lie. So if you have kids who lie, know that it's not that big of a deal. It's just them trying to get out of the consequence. It's a very normal thing for kids to do. The lying isn't the issue.

It's the fact that they didn't have the tools or the impulse control in the first place to do what you told them to do. So they get in trouble, and now they lie. Hope that makes sense. Second question, am I showing the child a different way to do it next time? Because if we don't show them how to do it differently next time, the pattern will repeat itself. And you've seen this, haven't you? Your child continually does something wrong again and again and again and again, no matter what consequence

you give? And number three, am I building my relationship with my child? Because we often miss that. I believe that good discipline will always lead to a closer, more trusting relationship with your child. Now, many of us who are very kind of old school or older, I had a career military dad. And so he would discipline his four sons, but it was basically fear and intimidation. And none of us had a good, healthy relationship with my father.

And I wanna break that pattern in your home so that your kids know you're firm, you're tough, you don't take any stuff, but you have a close, trusting relationship with them because I want your kids to be able to come to you when they have issues. But they won't if all you ever do is kind of yell and scream and bark consequences, which leads me to point number three, which is in order for your children to be disciplined, mom, dad, you have to be disciplined. You have to have self-discipline. Can you control yourself? Because if you lose it all the time emotionally, if you yell, if you lecture your kids all the time, if you can't control your mouth, how can your kids ever control themselves? And there's no blame or no guilt in any of that. It's a simple fact. You've got to own up to it. The fact that you're the leader in the home and you're the adult. And if

the mom or the dad loses it and can't control himself or herself, it's unreasonable to ask your child to control himself. So you've got to work on yourself. And you'll hear as you listen to our podcast, read our newsletters at Celebrate Calm, our blog posts, you'll find one of our biggest principles is this. There's only one person in life that you can control,

and that's yourself. And the quickest way to change your child's behavior is to first control your own. And I'll cover that a lot in other places. We've got a 30 days to calm program to help frustrated, freakish parents like you and I to calm ourselves down. But that's a big part of it. So let's go to another big point. And it's this. When I was a young dad, I thought that my job was to be the chief disciplinarian in the home. My job was kind of roaming through the house, catching my kids and my wife doing things wrong

so I could correct them. And one day I got it in my head. What if my job, instead of being the chief disciplinarian, is to be the chief source of wisdom? What if my kids, think about this, what if your kids, instead of just needing to be disciplined, what if they need some wisdom to be shown a different way to make choices? See, it takes it all out of that, all that drama and harshness into, son, you know what, you just made a bad choice. It doesn't throw me. I've seen it before. I've done it before myself. I'm not interested in sending it to your bedroom, but look, if you want to grab the soccer ball and come outside, I'll kick the soccer ball around and I'll teach you how to make a different choice next time. Because listen, my assumption is you don't want to lose all your stuff all the time.

See the tone in that? It goes from, I have to enforce consequences, which is important, to I'm here as an advocate. I'm here as a coach. I'm going to show you, I'm going to show you how to do it in a different way. I'm not upset at you. I'm not mad at you. I'm not going to create a lot of drama with discipline. I just want you to know that's inappropriate, but I'm going to show you a different way. So let's go through a few tools. And again, this isn't exhaustive, but it'll give you a good example. So let's say this is younger kids, right? So over the course of a decade, we had about 1500 kids with all kinds of issues, strong willed kids just come through our home. And we'd have 10 to 15 kids at a time in our home

because I wanted to be able to control the environment and teach kids in everyday situations how to control their emotions and impulses. So one day, kids are all sitting on the floor. They've got their Legos, their buildings. Kids love that. One little boy walks over to another boy, stands over him, pushes him, and steals the kid's Legos. Now, probably happens in your home. Kids fighting, can't control themselves. And so I've got two options there. And typically we'll say, you know what? You can't do that to your brother. Stop hitting, go to your room right now, go to the corner, whatever it is. And one day I said, Hey, here's the deal. I can give you a consequence or we can play rewind

and replay. That's what this is called, rewind and replay. This is, again, little kids. They love when you make things a game. So here's how it worked. I had the kid rewind the situation, which means he had to walk backwards out of my living room. Kids love physical stuff. If you blindfold them and make them walk backwards

so there's a chance they'll fall down the stairs, they will love it because they are risk takers. Anyway, so now I've got the kid. I'm like, dude, I know what you want. You want his Legos because his are really cool, but how you just handled that, it's going to get you beat up sometime. So not going to work. How can we do it differently? And so I would actually physically walk him through the situation and show him. So'd sit down I'd say last time you demanded that he give you his Legos nobody's gonna do that so how could you do it differently well I could compliment him and I could ask him so the kid says you have really cool Legos do you want to build a spaceship together and I was like that's how you do it. Now, here's what was cool. Sometimes the other kid would say,

no, I'm not sharing. And then the other little kid would look up like, oh, great, Mr. Calm guy. This calm thing really works. This is stupid. And he'd say, well, aren't you going to make him share with me? I said, nope, I do not control other people's behavior. I can only control my mind, my own, right? So those are his Legos. He doesn't have to share. By the way, little aside, for those of you who have kids who are age seven and under, don't worry about sharing.

All the research says little kids don't share that well and they can't. Just relax. They're not gonna be sociopaths. If you share stuff and if you're giving and you're kind and let people cut in front of you in traffic, your kids will do the same thing. Okay. So just relax with that. So here's what was cool though. Sometimes, right, when the other kids said, no, I'm not going to share. Now I had an opportunity to work with my kid and say, hey,

he doesn't want to share and that's okay with me. So how are you going to handle your disappointment? And now I have an opportunity to work on disappointment, which is awesome. Now, sometimes the other kid would say, sure, let's play together. And see, we just showed him a different way to handle that situation. Here's another example for you. Let me do this one. So giving kids wisdom and tools is huge. So you've got a kid in school, one of your children is in school, and most of your kids probably have trouble with impulse control and some of them blurt out. So a kid blurts out in class, I've got two options as a teacher. I can say, hey, Jacob, quit it. Stop blurting out or you're going to lose recess. But imagine if we were able to go to our

kids and say this, Jacob, oh, I know why you blurt out, man, because you've got this busy brain. It's always running with ideas. You're like a junior Thomas Edison, man. Always think of ideas are awesome. And I love that you're so passionate. You're never passionate about anything I'm actually teaching you, but I love your passion. You can't say that. That's kind of an aside, but I can't say I love your passion, man. So Jacob, here's what happens in my class. You get one of your ideas, you get really passionate about it, but then you're afraid you're going to forget and you blurt out my class and that's unacceptable. Now I'm going to stop right there. We'll add to it in a second. Two things are different in these two different discipline tools. In the first one, I said, you're being rude, cut it out, or I'm taking away your recess. In the second example, I said, hey, that's inappropriate.

See, when you say something is rude, you're assigning a motive to your child's behavior, and I don't want you to do that. Okay. Because when you assign a motive to someone else's behavior, it always causes them to become defensive and shut down. So stop that. I said it's inappropriate, which it is. Now, in the second example, I also did this. Instead of just saying you're rude, cut it out. I identified the root of the issue and I gave the child some wisdom. The reason you blurt out is because you have this great brain. It's strategic. It's why you're good at arguing. It's why you're good at Legos and chess and checkers. But because you have this very strategic brain, it means sometimes you struggle with short-term memory. And so when

you get one of these ideas, you're afraid you're going to forget it. And so you blur it out. Now, I didn't excuse it. Okay. I said, it's inappropriate. Excuse me. But I said, it's inappropriate. But now I gave him a reason because I don't want your kids going through school thinking they're just defiant little jerks who makes everyone's life miserable. Now here's where we add to it. Now I can say, Hey, Jacob, here's the cool thing. Every day, when you walk in my classroom, I'm going to give you these three little tickets, and I just make up a cheap little cardboard ticket. Three tickets. They're going to be called talk tickets. So here's how it works in my classroom. Every day when you get one of your amazing off-topic ideas, because that's how it's going to be, instead of blurting out, I want you to hold up a talk ticket instead.

Big principle. Whenever you tell a child to stop doing something, you always have to give him something appropriate to do. So instead of blurting out, hold up a talk ticket. I will either say, go ahead, redeem your ticket, share your amazing off-topic idea, or zip, you can hold it till after class. That afternoon, what's going to happen? He's going to blurt out, Mr. Martin, Mr. Martin, I want to tell you the new Star Wars video game is coming out. And then he holds up his talk ticket.

And you know, for many of your kids, that holding up the ticket was a supreme act of self-control. And watch where the intensity goes. And this is important. We need to give intensity to our kids when they make good choices, not when they make bad choices. So now I get to go and say, Jacob, you know, it was really cool back in the math class. You really wanted to share that idea and you started to blurt out, but then you caught yourself. You held up your ticket. That's what self-control looks like. That's impulse control. That's the way we do it in my classroom. That's cool. And now I give him a little fist bump. And now I'm just retraining his brain to begin holding up the talk ticket.

And that's an act of self-control. Hope that makes sense. Let me do this example because it's a tough one. Got a lot of kids, a lot of families where there's an adopted child and a lot of homes of adopted kids, especially those who are in orphanages, they steal and hoard things. So this mom comes to me and says, hey, daughter's about 10. She's stealing jewelry, my shoes, little stuff from my bedroom. Then she hides it under her bed. She won't let me in her bathroom. What consequence can I give to get her to stop stealing? And my answer was none. Because if there was a consequence, you would have figured it out already.

It's not a consequence issue. So let's look at a different way to deal with this. So I advised the mom and said, mom, do this because your daughter's already defensive. She knows what she's doing is wrong. So knock on her bedroom door one day because I like knocking, like respecting her space. And when she lets you in, go in and lie down on the bedroom floor. Don't stand over her in the doorway. Just lie down on the floor. One, it'll freak your daughter out.

And two, creates a whole different environment. And while you talk, say this. Say, honey, you know what? I can imagine, because it's a great phrase. I can imagine it must be scary being 10. Must be scary being 10 and finding yourself taking things from my room and stealing. Because I know you know that's wrong. By the way, that's a fantastic phrase to use with your kids. I know you know that's wrong. By the way, that's a fantastic phrase to use with your kids.

I know you know that's wrong. Right? Rather than, what were you thinking? How many times do I have to tell you? You may as well just say, you know what? You're an idiot. Because that's what we're really saying when we ask that question. Okay?

So much better to say, you know, I know you know that's wrong. I'm not thrown by this. So listen, here's where my heart is for you is that I know that you struggle with taking things from my room and I'm not concerned about my stuff, okay? What I'm concerned about is your heart and about your sense of peace because I know that when you take something from my room, then your brain and heart have to kick in. Where am I going to hide it? How do I get away without my mom finding it? And I don't want you to have to go through all that. So here's what I'm going to do.

In the living room now, I created this little box, just a little cardboard box. It's a treasure chest. And inside of it, there are just some little trinkets and some fun little things. So honey, here's what I want you to do. Every time, excuse me for the allergies. Every time that you get that impulse to go to my room and take something inappropriate, instead, I want you to go immediately to the living room. I want you to grab one or two little trinkets, little things from that treasure chest. Then I want you to come to me and show me. And here's mom, what I want your response to be when she does that. Honey, you know what? That was awesome. You know why? Because a few minutes ago, I know that you really, really, really wanted to go to my bedroom. In fact, I heard your footsteps up there. You were in my bedroom,

but you know what you did? Instead of taking something from my room, instead you came downstairs, grabbed something from the treasure chest, and you know what that is? That's a great decision. That's self-control. That's impulse control, honey. That's the way we do it. I'm really proud of you. And so, look, here's the deal.

I want her the next hundred times she gets that impulse, I don't know, 70, 75 times, I want her getting like the little trinket from the little treasure chest. But you know what's gonna happen? She's not perfect and she's going to struggle. So 25% of the time right now, she's going to mess up. And here's how I want you to handle it.

Honey, when you do mess up, and it's not an if, it's a when, because we all do mess up. When you mess up, instead of hiding what you took from my room, I want you to come and show it to me. But here's my promise to you. I will not shake my head. I will not lecture you. I will not berate you at all. I will hug you. And then I will whisper in your ear, honey, I know you know the right thing to do because your daughter does know the right thing to do, which is to take that thing back up and put it where she found it in your bedroom. But you have now established and built trust. And now when she messes up, she knows I can trust my mom. I can trust my dad because they're not just going to lecture and berate me. They're going to help me. And this is critically important

because your kids, your kids get in their teenage years and they're facing really tough stuff that we never faced as a kid. If they can't trust you, they're going to tell their teenage friends and ask them for help. But I want your kids coming to you and saying, mom, dad, I'm really struggling with some tough issues. And I know you're going to be disappointed in the choice that I made but I need your help to get out of this and I want you to have built such trust that now they come to you to extricate themselves from some tough situation instead of hiding it does that make sense so let me give you um one more two more examples, and then we'll wrap this podcast up, okay? So let's go and

switch gears to kind of just a good, tough discipline tool. And say this is a video, we'll work in screen time a little bit, okay? Say you tell your kids, say you have two kids, and you go, guys, here's the deal. This afternoon, I'm giving you 27 minutes to play your video games. Now, of course, I'm giving you that time. It's not a right. It's not enshrined in the Constitution. You don't have a right to have screens. Giving you that time.

I love the 27 minutes. Why? Because it's very specific and concrete, right? So if you say like, oh, you guys can go play for half an hour, who knows what that means? But 27 minutes is specific. Now, here's the deal with it. I'm giving you 27 minutes, but it is not my job. It is not my job to remind you when the 27

minutes is up. I want your kids learning how to manage their own time so they can set the timer on their iPhone. They can set a little timer that you give them, whatever it is. But moms, dads, I want to get you out of the habit of coming in. Guys, okay, two minutes left, one minute. Turn off your video games. Wind down because they always say the same thing. Hold on, we just need to save it. I need to get to the next level.

Oh, that stuff is awful and it will drain you. So from now on, here's how it works. You guys get 27 minutes and it will drain you. So from now on, here's how it works. You guys get 27 minutes and here's what happens. I promise you, because you guys have a choice. You have a choice. If you choose to turn your video games off at exactly 27 minutes, exactly 27, it's not a second longer. If you do, I promise you, you'll live to play another day. But if you stay on that video game or whine and complain for even half a second past 27 minutes, I promise you, you will have chosen to lose those video games for the next three days. Excuse me again. So you leave the room. Leave. Don't hover. You walk out of that room, you come back in after 27 minutes,

you're going to find your kids doing what? They're still going to be playing their video games because their job is to push and argue and manipulate to try to get out of it because we always play that game with them. So you walk back in the room and here's what you do. No long lecture. Moms and dads, very few words when you discipline.

It's short and sweet. It's even. It's matter-of-fact tone. Okay, no long. You know, when I was a kid, we were up milking the cows at 445 in the morning. They don't care about your childhood. It just makes you sound old. So stop it.

Okay. All I want you to do is even matter-of-fact. And you may say something like this. Hey, guys, just wanted to remind you. You just chose to lose your video games for the next three days. See, it's a statement of fact. You didn't make it personal. I can't believe that you guys don't have any self-control. I have to come in. It's not about you. It's about them. Hey, you guys just chose to lose video games for three days. Now, what's their response going to be? Mom, dad, thank you for being consistent and following through.

It makes us feel safe as children. Yeah, they're not going to say that. They're going to argue and yell. They may call you the meanest mother in the world, and that's fine. I'm not looking to a child for validation of my parenting. All I want them to know is this. When I tell you something, I mean it. Now, I'm going to take away the video games for three days or whatever you said you were going to do. Now we're going to teach them some impulse control. So here's how this works. After three days, you get video games back. Guys, here's the deal. Tonight, I'm going to give you 27 minutes again. But here's something cool little twist I'm going to do. If you turn your video games off two minutes early after 27 minutes, I promise you, I promise you, I will give you an extra four minutes to play tomorrow night. You turn it off two minutes early, I'll give you an extra four minutes to play. Why? Because I want to teach you impulse control and delayed gratification. Now, I don't know if your kids are going to do that or not, but if they do, and it's even two weeks later, and they end up saying, Mom, Dad, we turned it off two minutes early.

Now you get to bring that positive intensity and say, you know what was cool? You guys just made a good choice. You gave up two minutes to get four minutes. And I'm teaching them delayed gratification. I'm teaching them impulse control in context of something that they love. Now, we're coming up on the end, so I'm not going to get to teaching kids to listen the first time. I'll do that in the next one, okay? But I'll close with this, just a reminder. We want to teach kids.

We want to teach them through discipline. We want to show them a different way next time. And we want to build that relationship. And I'll do a great example in the next one of how to be tough with your kids, but build that relationship. But I want to keep these podcasts kind of short. So if you need help from us, excuse me. Sorry, sorry about that. If you need help, email us. Email my son because he was a strong-willed child. Casey, C-A-S-E-Y, at CelebrateCalm.com.

In fact, if you want, email me directly. It's Kirk, K-I-R-K, at CelebrateCalm.com. Send us your questions. We'll answer it in a podcast. We'll answer it in our newsletter, maybe on our Facebook page. If we can help you with anything, call us, 888-506-1871, 888-506-1871. If you want any of our products, you can go to our website at Celebrate Calm and we have some specials. We have a whole CD where we go through 30 different discipline situations just like this. And we're giving it away free this month as part of the

special bag that we do. It's called Get the Bag, and it's filled with CD sets on discipline, on the strong-willed child. It contains a CD that my son recorded for your kids to listen to, and it's really, really awesome. So if you like what we're teaching here, I want you to listen to this with your kids. I want your kids to listen to our CDs or our podcasts themselves, and I want your spouse to listen to our CDs or our podcasts themselves. And I want your spouse listening. So everybody's on the same page. But anyway, we love you very much. If we can help you with your family, we know it's frustrating as a mom and dad, but listen, if you're listening to a parenting podcast, you know what that makes you?

It makes you a great mom and a great dad. You know why? Because really good parents don't listen to podcasts on parenting. They're out there watching Jerry Springer. So thanks for investing in your kids. Let us know how we can help you. Love you all. Bye-bye.