Calm Parenting Podcast - Turn Disruptive Students into Helpful, Confident Kids

Episode Date: January 9, 2022

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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 may struggle in school. Maybe your child is impulsive and gets in trouble a lot. Or maybe this child has trouble sitting still so he gets up and walks around class and talks to classmates and that's disturbing other people in class. Or maybe your child blurts out and is disruptive in that way. Maybe your child struggles to connect with peers so in order to fit in your child says inappropriate connect with peers. So in order to fit in, your child

says inappropriate things or silly things just to try to fit in. Maybe they struggle at times with recess because they don't always play well with other kids and they want to change the rules of the game and cheat or quit, right? And maybe you have a child who's very emotional and sometimes melts down or maybe shuts down in class. And we'll label them as being, well, he's refusing to do his work. When in reality, he's just overwhelmed. That's for another podcast. But you have kids who struggle in school and they're real struggles. And you know who else struggles? Teachers. And here's why. You and I are parents. We may have a couple strong will kids at home and we struggle with getting them to do simple chores

like putting your shoes on, picking something up. Imagine being a teacher nowadays. You're competing with social media, you're competing with video games, with Minecraft, right, with Roblox, all those things. And maybe you have 20-25 kids in your class and six, seven, eight of them are strong-willed. It's difficult. And so I want to do a couple podcasts to help teachers with practical tools. I believe we have trained more teachers in this country than anyone else. Hundreds of thousands of them. And typically what happened was a school or school district contacted us,

bring us out for a professional development day. But it's expensive because we have to travel. It takes a lot of time. So this fall, some parents said, hey, what if we sponsor it? What if we sponsor it so that you can speak directly to our school's teachers? And we were like, awesome idea, let's do it.

Because here's what's cool. It can be any afternoon they choose, right after school. Give me an hour because I talk really fast. I can give teachers at least 15 practical ideas that actually work in the classroom. So that's what we've done. And I want to share an example of what a real life teacher did to help a student so that you can suggest that to the teacher. If you want to do the training, sponsor the training, you can. If you just want to send a teacher our podcast, you can because we want to help them. So reach out to Casey, C-A-S-E-Y at celebratecalm.com because he's the reason for

all of this anyway. It was because he was struggling in school that I began going into his school and sitting in class to try to take all the research and science and marry it with very practical applications and interventions to help the teachers help my son and so now it's kind of blossomed where now we've helped you know literally helped hopefully millions of students because now their teachers know what to do with them. Instead of crushing their spirit, they build their confidence. So by the way, this is Calm Parenting Podcast. Forgot to say that, but you guys already know that and I'm Kirk Martin. So

if you need help, find us at CelebrateCalm.com. So here's the email from a teacher and I want to share this because we trained their school just a couple weeks ago. And this is just one hour training. And this is cool what this teacher did. So she said, we have this student, she called him Jacob, because that's the name I use for the stand-in for the Strong Willed Child, usually seeks attention during the start of my class. Today, I noticed we were running low on hand sanitizer. So I sent Jacob down three flights of stairs to retrieve a couple bottles of hand sanitizer for me. When he got back, he was calm and he was focused because he had completed a quick yet necessary job for me. Let me stop right there. This is awesome what the teacher did. Look, you have a couple options.

You can start getting in on that child. Jacob, Jacob, listen, I need you to put that down. Jacob, I need you to sit down and be quiet. I am about to start class. If you do not listen and you cannot follow directions, you will not be getting recess or going on a class field trip, and I can go negative on it. Because watch, we have one of two options when we treat behavior. What we typically do as adults, and this is parents and teachers, is we react to the outward behavior. We see a child doing something, and we react to it. And we usually react by giving consequences. And consequences don't work for the strong-willed child. They just don't.

And so what happens is we end up punishing a child for failing. Think about that. The child failed, did something wrong. And so then we punish the child hoping that that somehow is going to change his or her behavior. It doesn't work. It's not even logical. But what if we know that a particular child struggles in a specific area, and instead of punishing for failure, we were to proactively give that child tools to succeed. This is what this teacher just did. Her entire mindset toward Jacob is different now. Before, it was core negative idea of Jacob is he's a disruptive student who doesn't follow directions and is disrespectful toward me. Well, look, if I view another human being like my

spouse like that, it's not going to work well. Instead, she started to see this is a kid who needs brain stimulation, likes specific jobs, and likes to please when given a mission. And so with a simple change in her mindset and a simple strategy, because we teach a lot on how to give kids specific jobs to create a success, please write that phrase down. I want to create successes. She sent him down three flights of stairs. Why? Well, one, that's where the hand sanitizer is, but also because it wears them out because guess what? He had to come back up three flights of stairs. We got him working, exercise, specific job, right? To go get that. And when he came back, guess what she got to do?

Hey, Jacob, nice job. Really appreciate your help. So instead of, if you can't do this, you lose X. Now we're like, hey, you're a really good helper. Appreciate it, my friend. Now sit down because we're going to start class, right? He was calm and focused because we got his brain focused on following a specific direction that wasn't academic, right? Now let's keep going with this. Toward the end of class, Jacob was finished early. I remembered that our next project would be a ceramic clay project. So here's what she said. Watch again before I get that. Let me go what we would normally do. Jacob, Jacob, you need to leave your classmates alone. Find something to do, right? It's too vague. Instead, she said, hey, Jacob, could you help

me out? Again, we teach teachers, like we try to teach you very specific phrases. Our kids love feeling helpful. So one of the most magical phrases you can ever use is, hey, I could really use your help. So she said, could you help me out by preparing the ceramic clay for next class? And here's why this was brilliant. She said, this involves slamming the clay slabs onto the table and kneading the clay like bread dough. Here's what we had trained them about, the teachers. There are three columns we use on this chart that we go through. And the first one is on giving kids order and structure. The other one is stimulating their brain with purposeful missions.

And the third column is about meeting sensory needs. Many of your kids, even if they don't have a diagnosis, because it doesn't matter, they have a need for sensory pressure. They play with things in their hands. They're always pushing up against you or up against things, and they like that physical pressure. It orders their body, and it makes them feel calm. It also is really good when you're kneading that dough and when you're slamming that clay onto the desk. It feels good in your body, but it also helps your brain process information. It's really, really helpful.

And guess what? Now he's busy. So instead of his busy hands kneading the head of another student, he's kneading the clay like bread dough. And here's what she said. Jacob was purposeful, eager, and not disrupting my class. In fact, he taught other students how to prepare the clay as they completed their drawings. That, Mrs. Teacher, is a beautiful thing that you just did because she ended up with win-win. There are so many wins in that.

There's a win for the teacher because now she took a student who's usually disruptive and now turned it into a positive, which is what we talk about in parenting all the time. You take what irritates you most and you bond over it. You turn it into something constructive. She did more than help this child avoid losing recess. Do you know how good it feels when nobody else believes in you in life?

And you feel like you're swimming upstream. And you don't necessarily get along with all the other kids in class and typically your teachers and parents are negative towards you and always you're on red on the behavior charts and you're always in trouble. We have to talk about your behavior and you feel awful in life and now a teacher multiple times is saying you're really helpful. You're really good at that and thank you. She just built this child's confidence. She just turned what was normally a disruptive student into a student who feels good about himself, who followed directions because he did, who now feels capable of doing assignments because we didn't start with do the hard assignment. We gave

them something else to do. It doesn't have to be that hard. In fact, a lot of times it's much more simple to do these things and get the win. So I'm going to keep it there. I'm going to try to do some different podcasts on different behaviors that we can change and work on in the classroom, but I want to keep it simple. Please share this with your school. Share it with a teacher and say, look, this is 11 and a half minutes, not that long, but I think this would help you with some of your students. If you want to sponsor this training at your school, it's really easy. You can reach out to Casey, Casey, C-A-S-E-Y, celebratecalm.com, or go to our website, and there's a tab called Teachers, and you can click on that, and we show you how to do it,

and it's a gift to your school and those teachers, but hopefully it's a gift to you and your child as well. And we will work directly with the school to schedule the training around their schedule. I'll do it at six in the morning if they want. If they want it at 3.30 in the afternoon, no matter what time zone they are, I don't care. If you're overseas, we'll train people by Zoom in the Netherlands or in Romania. I don't care.

I wanna help teachers. So thank you for listening. Thank you for sharing. Love you all. Enjoy your children.