Calm Parenting Podcast - Stop Punishing Kids For Having A Busy Brain

Episode Date: October 9, 2024

Stop Punishing Kids For Having A Busy Brain You have a child who struggles with things like blurting out in class, not completing work, difficulty writing, having emotional outbursts. How can you help build your child’s confidence instead of breeding anger, frustration, and shame?! Does your child need to see a therapist? Kirk answers these tough questions and gives you scripts and an action plan. Visit https://celebratecalm.com/products/ to purchase the Get Everything Package at the lowest prices of the year. AG1 Visit https://drinkAG1.com/calm for a FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D3K2 AND 5 free AG1 Travel Packs with your first purchase. AirDoctor AirDoctor comes with a 30-day money back guarantee so if you don’t love it, just send it back for a refund, minus shipping! Head to https://airdoctorpro.com/ and use promo code CALM and you’ll receive UP TO $300 off air purifiers! OneSkin OneSkin is the world’s first skin longevity company. Get started today with 15% off using code KIRK at https://oneskin.co.  SIMPLISAFE Protect your home with 50% off a new SimpliSafe system, plus a free indoor security camera, when you sign up for Fast Protect Monitoring. Just visit https://simplisafe.com/calm. There’s no safe like SimpliSafe. WILD INTEREST PODCAST FOR KIDS Wild Interest is the new podcast created and hosted by children, exploring nature, science, current affairs and much more! Wild Interest: find it wherever you get your podcasts. It’s wild! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Calm Parenting Podcast listeners get an exclusive 20% off an IXL membership when you sign up today at ixl.com slash kirk. Visit ixl.com slash kirk to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price. So you have a child who struggles with things like blurting out in class, not completing his work, difficulty with the writing process, having emotional outbursts. How can you help build your child's confidence instead of breeding anger, frustration, and shame, or just a child giving up? Does your child need to see a therapist? And how can we help our kids so we just don't ruin their confidence? That is what we're going to discuss on today's episode of the Calm Parenting Podcast.

Welcome, this is Kirk Martin, founder of CelebrateCalm.com. Look, this is very, very typical with our kids, right? And so what do we usually do? We give consequences. Parents write and say, oh, we tried taking things away. We've grounded our child. Nothing seems to work. And so in the last episode, we talked about giving you tools to deal with your own triggers, your childhood trauma, so you can learn how to control yourself. But in this episode, I really want to focus

on your child because there's a great danger in how we treat and talk to our kids who are different than others. And it can be devastating for these kids. It can ruin your relationship. It can ruin their relationship with themselves. Look, some of you listening, you were this child. And you're now only understanding yourself and getting some healing in parenting your own strong-willed child. And that's very, very powerful. So first note in this situation, right? So we've got a kid, struggles with the writing process, with blurting out, with not completing homework. It could be

20 other behaviors, but let me just focus on a couple. You know what we're really doing? We're punishing a kid simply because he or she has a busy brain, a brain that we're sometimes not comfortable with. And we label as things like neurodivergent. When, look, I've made this point before. If I started my own school for kids with brains like this and I had 500 kids there and I taught them the way that their brains work best and they'd be standing up and moving and we'd have music playing and they'd be using movement rhythm in class our kids would thrive we take a so-called neurotypical child and put them in my school well now they become the neurodivergent one. It depends on the

environment and what you're asking a child or a grown adult to do. But let's stay focused on that. We're basically punishing a kid because of the way their brain naturally works. because this child is more of like an idea guy than an executive function kid who struggles with short-term memory and blurts out or who has trouble getting all those swirling thoughts from head to paper. So we're punishing a child for the way their brain naturally works without actually giving them tools, without actually teaching them about their brains. We just said, do this or here's your consequence. And this will create a sense of helplessness. It continually reinforces, you're a bad kid. You're not capable. There's something wrong with you. We're trying to consequence a kid into being able to get

his brain to process information more quickly. Like with many of your kids, writing essays in class is really hard. And so let me just do this. I'm just going to do this off the top of my head. Here are a few things I would do if your child struggles. Number one, normalize it. Of course, writing about things that you're not really interested in or passionate about is difficult. Getting all of those interesting ideas out of your head, organized and onto paper, especially if you have dysgraphia or dyslexia. Of course that's hard. See, normalizing isn't making an excuse. It's letting them know there's nothing wrong with you.

It's supposed to be hard. So let these kids, especially at the beginning of the school year, let them write about things they're interested in so you can get a success. And I use this analogy a lot. Like Casey and I have read a lot of Dostoevsky. I don't know why we're fascinated with Russian stuff. And we like to torture ourselves with long books. But if I told you, hey, I want you to write an essay about the difference in writing style between Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, you might be like, why? I'm not interested in them. And I'd be like, well, if you just apply yourself, I think you'd be capable. See, we do that snotty stuff to our kids.

Let them write about something they're interested in. It's all arbitrary what we ask kids to write about. You really just want them to get a success and learn the process. Now, the hard part for many of your kids is getting all of those swirling thoughts out of their head, organized, and onto paper. That's hard. So I taught 1,500 kids in our home how to do this. And forgive me if this offends you, but I taught them a word, vomit. I taught them, vomit the thoughts from your head onto paper. Why vomit?

Because little boys and girls are sometimes disgusting, and they will remember that word when they're in the middle of class and they're like, I can't do it. I'm getting writer's block. I'm frozen. I don't know what to write about. And now I'm frustrated, and now there's a teacher walking around and standing behind me. That's not easy to do, but when you vomit those thoughts from head to paper, it's a brain dump. And I'd encourage you, let your kids, especially with teenagers, try this. Make it messy. Let them make it messy on their first draft. I just want to get stuff out onto paper because once it's onto paper or once it's onto their computer, now you can cut and paste and move it around.

Let them have extra time to write. Dump it out on paper. If they can do this in class, awesome. Let them write and have it sit overnight so it can kind of process. I just did this myself. That new program I wrote, The Discipline That Works, I started it from scratch. It is 65 pages of written material. That was a lot. It was like a small book. And I am slow with this process. I got overwhelmed. Where do I start?

Where do I fit in this information? I am a, I think, fairly experienced. I was going to say accomplished, but I just said experienced instead. Man. And it was hard for me to do, but I would write, and I'd vomit out the thoughts, and I'd get them out there, and then I'd mix and match on my page, and I had all these triangles and rectangles and circles and moving things and arrows because that's how my brain processes best. And I'd listen to music and I would eat a snack while I did it. If your kids can do that at home, let them listen to intense music and chew gum. It can be helpful. Sometimes with younger kids or even older, I'll make visuals like

a sheet of paper with five blocks on it so they can kind of chunk their ideas because all writing assignments are basically an introduction, three support points, and a conclusion. It just helps them visually to do that and feel capable. So try some of those things. That was an aside, but that's called giving kids tools to be successful. Many of your kids, if they're given that process, are actually very good writers because they have very good ideas. So instead of trying to consequence a kid in order to get his brain to process information better, well, let's give them tools, right? And so what else do we do? We give kids consequences so they'll stop getting emotionally reactive. But we do that when their own parents struggle with this. Do you ground yourself because you can't control your own mouth and you talk too much and yell too much? No.

And you've seen the limits of consequences. So grounding a kid and taking away screens isn't the answer here. It's to show your child practical ways to stimulate their brains. And we go through that in great detail in other places. So I'm not going to do it right here, but I want to reinforce that discipline means to teach. Watch what we are doing to a kid and how devastating this can be. Now, here's what kind of not to do, which is what many schools do. And this is a case study where this was a student named Eric.

And I'll just use it to demonstrate what to do and what not to do. So most schools will develop a behavior plan listing, say, blurting out as an undesired behavior. And then the teachers were instructed to count and record in the child's daily plan the number of times that Eric blurted out during each class. To hold Eric accountable, his parents were to review the record each day after school. Can you imagine how you'd feel if every single day your boss and your boss's boss kept track of every poor decision you made at work, everything you did wrong. And then they sent home this list and your spouse asked you about it. Think about it.

It's what we do to kids and we're like, well, we just need to remind them that they can't do that. And now you've got three or four or five people reinforcing this, yet nobody's showing the child how to do it differently. They're just saying, stop doing this or else. And by the way, we are often maligning their motives and saying, oh, that's rude when you do that. And the child's like, I'm not intending to be rude. I don't know why I do this. And so what happens is the school and parents enforce an ever-escalating series of consequences when the behavior does not stop. And before long, this kid has lost all privileges. And all of the adult's energy is focused on lecturing and imploring Eric to stop blurting out.

And this whole process becomes self-defeating. And now the kid can't even go on the class field trip, which further isolates your kids. And this is sometimes when some self-hatred and resentment takes root, and you don't want that to happen. So let's take a look at a different approach we often take with kids who are blurting out so we can meet the child's underlying needs and encourage positive behavior. Because until this point, everybody had only told Eric what not to do. No one had given him tools to behave another way, nor had anyone told him what to do.

So remember that. Always focus more on what you want your what to do. So remember that. Always focus more on what you want your kids to do. And so because when we only focus on, no, no, stop, don't do that. We train the neurotransmitters in the child's brain to fire, to come alive when they receive negative feedback. That isn't what we want to do. We want to switch that around so the child's brain fires when they're successful when they do what they're supposed to do and that's a big difference one of the primary things that I want to do for our kids is give them insight into how their brains work if you don't do this kids will will hear from parents, teachers, and a therapist

that their behavior is bad and they just need to stop it. And they may internalize that there's something wrong with them or their brain, but there's not. What if the teacher were to say, Eric, I am so glad you're in my class. You have this amazing brain that's always thinking of ideas and you think of ideas other kids don't. You're like a junior Thomas Edison or like Steve Jobs who invented the iPhone. You've got this really really creative strategic brain and you're a great thinker but sometimes you struggle with short-term memory. So what happens is that you're sitting in my class and you get a really cool idea in your brain but then you're afraid you're going in my class and you get a really cool idea in your brain,

but then you're afraid you're going to forget the idea, so you blurt out the idea. Now, you know that causes a disruption in class, so we can't do that, but I have a few ideas to help you. So let's pause here for a minute. Think about this. Someone is finally coming along and helping you as a kid understand why you do certain things, that you're not being rude, that you're not a behavior problem. They're giving you context. Everybody has strengths and weaknesses, right? Part of your strength is you're a strategic thinker. You see the big picture. You have good critical thinking skills. That's why they're so good at arguing with you, playing chess and checkers, seeing patterns and things.

It's all the same part of the brain. So someone's giving context. Yeah, you've got some strengths there and you have a corresponding weakness, which is you struggle with short-term memory. And so now you're normalizing that. So certain things in school are going to be harder for you because of that. So certain things in school are going to be harder for you because of that. And wouldn't it be a relief to know that I actually have some really great qualities, that I am an idea guy, because that resonates inside. I feel like that, but nobody's ever said that to me. And now someone,

an authority figure, a a parent a therapist someone is actually speaking truth to me and I know many of you especially on Instagram I'll see this have noted that after watching a video and hearing me say something like oh a strong will kids have to reject what others want first so they can own it themselves and you're like like, oh, for the first time, I understand why I've always done that. I always thought I was just oppositionally defiant, like parents or teachers or psychiatrists had labeled me. And now that insight is liberating me

and it helps heal some of those childhood wounds. So let's give that insight and then we can be proactive so we don't create childhood pain and wounds in the next generation. So then the next step is what? To give them tools. So a huge part of our process is giving kids tools to succeed instead of punishing them for failure. We gave Eric several physical and mental tools so that he could express his ideas at an appropriate time. Our teacher gave him a special notepad, had a little light bulb at the top to write down ideas that came to him,

because that's a great life skill, using a special glitter marker. His morning teacher placed an idea box on her desk, and the desk and the students were encouraged to write their ideas and questions on scrap pieces of paper and then place them in the box. And then we made a game of it. Every day before or after lunch, the teacher had students pull two questions out of the box. Half of them were from Eric. And her willingness to answer her students' questions forged a closer bond between them. It spurred discussions and reinforced being curious,

asking questions, having ideas is a really positive thing in life. And the class actually came up with several new ideas. Now, my favorite tool is called the talk ticket. So you make up three cardboard tickets. And then as a teacher, I pull Eric aside and said, hey, here's how this works. Every morning, I will give you three talk tickets to redeem. Every time you get an idea and want to blurt out, instead, I want you to hold up a talk ticket. Remember, we're not just saying, hey,

don't do that. Don't do that. We're giving him something to do. up a talk ticket and I'm either gonna say hey write your idea down on the your idea page and wait or go ahead and share your amazing off-topic idea I'm kind of kidding but that's always gonna be off-topic I'm a realist so then the child has a tangible physical sensory tool to hold it allows the teacher to come along later and say, oh man, Eric, back in math class, I know you really wanted to blurt out and you started to, but then you held up your talk ticket and you controlled yourself. That is self-control, my friend. Fist bump, really well done. See, don't you think that will begin to change the child's behavior? Because now he feels like he has a tool and he can be confident and now he doesn't feel helpless. That's such a cool

change to make and it doesn't have to be that hard. So I also want to change the focus and the perception of everyone around him. See, in order to counter the self-perception that he was just a bad kid and a failure, we wanted Eric to identify with his gifts, not his weaknesses. I really want your kids to understand their gifts. So look, we label our kids and what happens? We define them by their weaknesses. That's brutal. Don't do that. So all the teachers began calling Eric their idea guy. Hey, look at the next Steve Jobs walking down the hallway. And they would ask him to develop creative ideas and even help them with some lesson plans. They used his gifts, gave him some ownership.

Can you imagine what that would do for your child's confidence to have your identity switched from becoming the rude kid, the bad kid who's always in trouble to the creative kid who has great ideas and problem solves? So do that. Now I wanted to answer this question because I get it a lot and it's a little tricky. But it's this. I would be careful before deciding to send your child to just go talk to a therapist. Am I against therapy or therapists? Absolutely not. My best friend is a therapist.

I have family members that are therapists. I'll just be brutally honest why this bothers me so much. We're not talking about a kid with a mood disorder, depression, bipolar disorder, attachment issues, or some serious issue. These are behavior issues, and he's not being aggressive or violent. They're just basic issues. This is a kid who blurts out or who gets overwhelmed in school, who feels bad because he can't or he or she can't write in class and they feel bad so they get emotionally reactive, by the way, like their parents do. And I know you're at your wits end, moms and dads. So you're like, well, let's have a therapist talk to him. But be careful with this. What is this child supposed to tell the therapist right he comes in

hey eric we need to talk about your behavior in class do you understand that it's wrong to do these things yeah well why do you continue to do that i don't know right and so it's a therapist like the principal and teachers and parents then dually lecture the child about making better choices and the child will end up nodding his or her head right partly to be done with this awkwardness and this shame and then of course agrees to do better and there was 50 minutes where nothing was accomplished and on the way now, mom or dad feels the need to ask details about the appointment, which is embarrassing. It feels like an interrogation and reinforce what the therapist said about making better choices. Are we going to do that now,

honey? And you feel more pressure because you just popped 150 bucks for an appointment. And if I'm the child, guess what I'm doing? I'm slouching in the back seat. I'm feeling teamed up on. I'm tearing up. And inside I'm thinking, I just spent seven hours struggling through school and now you're making me talk to some stranger? I don't know about what? Why are you asking me about this? You're all the grown-ups. I'm just a kid. Why don't any of you know why I'm doing this? I'm a little kid who isn't hurting anyone. I'm just overwhelmed and now everybody wants to punish me and take away my things. I don't get to go to recess or the class field trip. And literally everybody from seven in the morning till the time I go to bed is endlessly talking to me about things I'm not good at. Look, good luck not breeding some anger inside a child. So now that sense of being the bad kid takes root and we'll get anxiety now

about going to school and then his stomach's going to be upset and he'll only want to eat simple carbs and won't want to go to new places and see how this all snowballs. Think about this. Imagine you're an engineer, a project manager, an an accountant and now i put you in a job tomorrow you start a new job you're creative director of an ad agency and so your boss comes in and asks hey where are the new ads that you're supposed to create and you respond hey i'm not good at this and then you have to meet with the general manager and the ceo and hr to explain why you're failing. And all the other people around you are thriving and creative and turning in cool ads, but not you. And you're going to say, but I didn't choose this job. Yeah, neither did your kid. We throw them into a system

designed for other kids where our kids' weaknesses are exposed and their strengths are rarely acknowledged because we don't, usually the system doesn't acknowledge or reinforce, hey, you're a great leader. You're a great critical thinker. It doesn't. And so that's why we have to, what would you feel like if every single day you came home from work and people had been on you about what you're not good at doing and you had to report to your spouse that you didn't get a promotion, that you're probably going to get fired? See, that's what it feels like. So we have to give these kids skills and tools not punishment i'm just encouraging you be very aware of the going down this path and taking them to a therapist to just further reinforce that you're a failure and i'm just being honest here as an older guy who's done this for 25 years we've

gotten countless emails from people it happens every Oh, we've spent thousands on therapy and other treatments and nothing's worked. And inside I'm thinking, we get these kids better than anybody. We have insights into your kid and strategies, detailed, concrete strategies for these kids that work. Look, you don't have to get our stuff. Listen to the podcast. It's free and use that insight.

But if you do want to change things, we have 14 programs, over 35 hours of very detailed strategies. And we try to be fair. We priced it for, it costs less than two visits to a therapist. And we help people financially. Again, there's no pressure. But if you get the programs, they come immediately on an app and you can share it with your spouse, your own parents, family members, teachers. And I would encourage you, let your kids

listen. Start by letting your kids listen, maybe to this particular podcast or maybe a previous one to see if it resonates with them, to see if they feel heard and understood. That alone is very valuable. So thank you. If you need help, go to celebrate calm.com, but listen to the podcast. Thank you for that. Thank you for sharing the podcast. Thank you for letting me challenge you with things. I really do respect you for that. Okay. Love you all. We'll talk to you later. Bye-bye.