Change Your Brain Every Day - Taking The First Step - When is The Best Time to Get Started with Love and Logic Part 2 of an Interview with Dr. Jim Fay

Episode Date: March 29, 2017

It's always a question of when or how should I get started. So today, we'll have Dr. Jim Fay guide us on how to get things started and moving forward when implementing the principles of Love and Logic 

Hi, I'm Donnie Osmond, and welcome to The Brain Warrior's Way, hosted by my friends Daniel and Tana Amon. Now, in this podcast, you're going to learn that the war for your health is one between your ears. That's right. If you're ready to be sharper and have better memory, mood, energy, and focus, well then stay with us. Here are Daniel and Tana Amon.

Welcome back. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. I am here with Tana, and we are continuing our series on Parenting with Love and Logic with Dr. Jim Fay. We are so excited to have him here with us. And Dr. Fay, we want to talk about little kids and your best tips teaching parents over the last three decades. What's the best way parents can start with love and logic? And when should they start? That is interesting. You know, that first year of life, those little kids are just a bundle of needs that they cannot fulfill themselves. So they cry, and we pretty well know that

there's some important need needs to be fulfilled, and we should do that. About the time they get to be a year old, then they become a bundle of needs and a bundle of wants. And when they cry, we can't tell which it is. But we've found that the more simple you make this, the happier parents are. We've found parents who have read so many psychology books that they're afraid to say anything to their kids. So we generally say once they're about one year of age, we want to make sure we're having so much fun with them when everything is going right. There's all this laughing and giggling and touching and smooching and being silly. So the kids really want to be around us. And then when things don't go right, instead of figuring out, oh, what's going on here and all that, we use the O'Hood song.

And the O'Hood song is actually, we sing it. And the reason we sing this when kids do something wrong is we can't be angry and sing a song at the same time because it's that anger and frustration that makes things worse. So there's some steps to follow and people who follow these steps find out when their kids are 16 years of age, they can say, oh, and the kids know that they better toe the mark. So first step is, oh, oh, and we just sing that out big and bold like that. Oh, a little bit room time. This is so sad. Or, oh, a little playpen time.

This is so sad. And we whisk them off to their room. Now, usually they're kind of upset at that point. And especially with the strong-willed kids, it's good to use a little paradoxical psychology with them. I like to say on the way to the room, have a nice little fit. We'll see you when you're sweet. And off they go into the room. And some people have written me letters about that. Why would you say that to a kid? Well, you tell a strong-willed kid to do

something and he can be pretty sure he won't do it, right? Or the opposite. Yeah. So get them into the room now and we give them some choices so we can share control. Say, do you want to stay in there with the door open or door shut? And your strong-willed little kids will come roaring right back out, and then we say, how sad, you chose shut. And now, do you want to be in there with it shut or locked? Now, I don't like a kid in a locked room because of all the danger issues there. So we advise parents to keep a little washcloth handy and wedge it between the door and the door jam up high where the child can't reach it. So that, in fact, actually disables the door.

But if there was a fire or something, we could hit that door with our hand and it would pop right open. So we've covered that safety issue there. But they're going to go in there until they're perfectly calm. And then they're not going to come out at that point. See, timeout was the big thing for years, you know, timeout, timeout, but timeout really never worked very well. And one of the reasons it never worked very well is kids came right back out as soon as they were calm. They never had a chance to really settle down and think about why they were in there. So we advise parents once the child is calm and never, ever before, regardless of how long it takes.

Once he's calmed down, then we say, well, sweetie, you're calm. I'll set the timer. And if you're still calm when the timer goes off, you can be with us. So I like five minutes. And I don't think it's too abusive to insist that a kid learn how to be calm for five minutes. That's interesting. My husband had that same philosophy with when we called it timeout, but it was essentially sort of what you're talking about now. But we would always say, you taught me to say, it doesn't start until you are quiet. And so then she would have that time.

And I literally had to sit with her for an hour one time because she was really small. So I had to like, I didn't sit with her, but I had to wait for her for an hour for her to be calm. She just chose to keep screaming. And the time was really, really slow for you, Tana. And it went really, really fast for her because she was in brainstem, right? Right, exactly. So, yeah, I've known parents who actually train their kids to have long rages by trying to hold out for a little while and then letting the child out while they're still in a rage. So they start to learn, well, the way to get my way is to have a rage. And that's counterproductive.

So this timer business becomes really, really important that it has to start only after they're calm. Then once they come out of their room, they meld back into the family, maybe a little hug, but we don't need to talk to them about while they were in there. You know, the family dog could figure out why he was in there. We don't want to treat our kids like they're not as smart as the family dog. Oh, that's funny. But, you know, there's actually books out there teaching you how to make sure that your kids understand everything they do or that you do to them. That's kind of like saying, you poor, stupid, pathetic little thing.

You can't figure this out. I have to explain it to you. Never have to tell Rex the family dog anything. He figures it out. Where people will get in trouble on this is they will forget to do it as a song. You know, there's an old thing about, well, will they have a negative association with their room? Well, if you do it the old way with anger, you get in that room, you know, you settle down. Well, they're going to associate it in a negative way but going in there with a song

and the parent being happy as a lark it just doesn't happen that way so so the attitude is so important i think that's the biggest thing i saw tana change is that she became her coach. She had more empathy. There was less of sort of the negative chatter. And that was huge. But it's a practice. You know, I always say to parents, always try to be curious, not furious. And if you can keep with that mindset, then you begin to parent with empathy. Well, but what I just want to point out one thing is that it did take a lot of practice. I used to listen to your CDs. It'll tell you how long ago it was. CDs in the car, and I would listen to them over and over and over. And it probably took a good year,

year and a half for me to change my behavior because I've had 40 some years on the planet of doing things a certain way and I had to change that. So by the time I finally- Well, and your history. Right. And this would be a good, important topic for us to talk about what you grew up in. Chaos, drama, trauma. You know, a very loving mother, but it's like my way or the highway. But also constant drama. Constant drama because of having ADD in your house. And then a dad who

was absent, but when he was present. Dictatorial. And both you and I are devout Christians, but he was a pastor and rigid and mean. but rigid and mean. And so if you have that as the model, even though you don't like it, it's part of the program that happens. And so when Chloe's being disrespectful, it would just flip you out. Right. It would really irritate me. So it took time. I think that's the point is the first thing was the awareness that I didn't want my daughter to grow up in the same environment that I did. And so I was willing to do the work to find the answers to do that work. You have to be recognized and be willing to change it, but then know that it's not always going to

happen immediately. Like you have to work at it. You're the parent and you've got habits that you might need to work on and that's okay. So I was sort of gentle with myself on that, but I would listen over and over and over. And that's the beautiful thing about Love & Logic. It's not just the book. There's the institute, there are courses that people can take. MP3 downloads. And in a society with an eight-second attention span, it's very important to commit to deep learning rather than, you know, give me the four tips to be a great parent. Oh, no, you have to submerge yourself. I'm going to tell you right now, the tips are awesome as a reminder, but you have to submerge yourself in the material because you're the parent and you've got to start, if you don't want the same

outcome, quit doing the same things, right? But that's a habit you have to develop. You know, that's why we put so much on CDs still. People need to listen to those in their car, you know, and listen over and over and over. And people worry, they say, but what if my kids hear these things? Good. Well, the beauty of love and logic is even if the kids know what you're going to do, they can't do anything about it. All they can do is just say, I hate it when you're sad for me. Well, I could be mean if that would help. Right. Right. It's funny. Yeah. It's

just been so, and the CDs are actually really funny. So they help. It makes it easier to listen to. Well, one of the things we've found is that the people who make the fastest progress on Love and Logic are the people who don't try to learn everything at once. They pick out one technique and they say, I'm just going to work on that one thing until I master it, no matter how long it takes. That's funny. That's what we teach. We always suggest that parents start out working on begging, backtalk, and arguing, because that's such a simple thing to deal with. And once you get that under control,

everything else goes a lot easier. And if you never get that under control, everything else goes a lot easier. And if you never get that under control, it doesn't matter what techniques you know, they won't work. So we teach people just to go brain dead when their kids start begging and arguing. And they say once what their stance is on it. But suppose the kid is saying, it's not fair. And they never do that when you're offering them ice cream. It's when you've set a limit, right?

They're going to test the limit. It's not fair. And the answer is, could be. And what did I say? And turn and walk away. And if they want to come back with, yeah, but my friends have to, could be, and what did I say, and turn and walk away. And if they want to come back with, yeah, but my friends have to, could be, and what did I say,

so that they hear the same thing every time when they try to do something that they shouldn't be doing. That's funny. I have a saying that I said to my daughter when she, because she did the whole it's not fair thing, and I would look at her and I'm like, honey, fair is a place where they sell bad food and farm animals.

And it has nothing to do with life or the situation. And she had no idea what I was talking about, but it totally confused her. But she would stop, you know, she would stop it. I'm like, life's not fair, babe. No one told you it should be fair. Yeah, because it was the same thing every time. And she knew it wasn't going to pay off

that arguing and backtalk and begging is not going to pay off. There was an old farmer who the only thing he'd ever say to his kids when they'd start to argue, he'd say, well, Jane, no time for making kitten britches. Yeah, cat pants. That's so funny. We never knew what that meant, but I grew up and when my kids started to argue, I heard the same thing. It was coming out of my mouth. And I called up my dad and I said, I can't believe I'm talking just like you did. Now, what did that mean?

We never knew what it meant. He said, Jane, I don't rightly know. I just kind of figured when a kid says something that ain't too bright, you should just match it up. That's hilarious. Highly effective, say the same thing every time. Yeah, I love it. So on our next segment, we ought to talk about kids who are strong-willed and defiant and how we can create a mantra that will mean something to them.

Yeah, I love that. So, and I want to end as we go into our next segment on kids who are a little bit older. One of the things that as she got older, when she would say something's not fair, now she can rationalize better. And I would just say to her, honey, no one told you life was going to be fair. It's what you make it. And we started that with my mantra. And so she started taking responsibility then. And that worked really well for us. But I had to say it a lot. Well, we are going to come back. We'll talk about how you can give them a chance to have their say in a really healthy way during this next session.

Well, we're going to come back and talk about what may be the hardest part of parenting, which is parenting with teenagers. Stay with us. We are here with Dr. Jim Fay, the author of Parenting with Love and Logic. You can learn more about his work at loveandlogic.com. They have amazing courses. There are email tips you can get for free. So stay with us. Thanks for listening to today's show, The Brain Warrior's Way. Why don't you head over to brainwarriorswaypodcast.com. That's brainwarriorswaypodcast.com, where Daniel and Tana have a gift for you just for subscribing to the show. And when you post your review on iTunes,

you'll be entered into a drawing where you can win a VIP visit to one of the Amen Clinics. I'm Donnie Osmond, and I invite you to step up your brain game by joining us in the next episode.