Change Your Brain Every Day - The Hallmarks of Good Parenting

Episode Date: March 14, 2017

In this episode, we're going to discuss the characteristics of an "ideal" parent. I know it can be challenging, but it's doable. Be sure to listen and chime in on your thoughts by visiting brainwarriorswaypodcast.com. 

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.

Hi, I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. We're talking about teens and have they lost their mind? And they've certainly, you know, I always say insanity is hereditary. You get it from your children. And having raised now my fourth teenager, it can be stressful. Now, I adore all of mine, and they're employed or raising children. Nobody's in jail. No one's been to drug treatment. But it's work.

Raising teenagers is very different than raising someone who's three or four. I mean, both of the groups talk back. So now that's interesting because we actually are going to have a specialist on our show who I adore. I've got my two favorite parenting experts I get to be on the show with, my husband and Dr. Jim Fay, who wrote the book Parenting with Love and Logic, because I had a very stressful, very stressful young child who is now an amazing teenager. We had a very stressful. Right. But I did not know how to cope with it. And I'm like, so where did she get the strong will from? I don't know, but it was really challenging. I'm the leader. I'm the boss. Yeah, hands on hips. I'm like, there's only room for one of us, honey. So I had a really hard time with her. And fortunately, I had you. I had tools like

Parenting with Love and Logic. You're going to get to hear from him soon. But because I learned, I took it upon myself to learn how to communicate with her and learn how to deal with her. We now have this amazing relationship, and she's not a hard teenager. So I just want to give you hope. So in this podcast, we're going to give you some very specific tips on how to raise a teenager. Right. So one of the things we talked about, we ended the last podcast on teens with the melatonin and their sleep cycle. And I actually want to dig into that a little bit because we think that that is actually a big issue for teens. So teens not getting enough sleep is a huge issue, so much so one of my favorite books called Nurture Shock wrote about it. And they actually discussed the study in their book and they call it the lost hour. So it's that lost hour of sleep. It's actually probably more

like two hours, but for sure this lost hour of sleep that teens don't get because they're forced to wake up before they're ready and go to school. And some of them get up even earlier than that for sports and things like that. They don't have enough sleep. It actually, so teens we know are responsible for more than 25% of fatal accidents. And they're responsible for a lot of car accidents in general, which is why your insurance goes down when you're 25, right? Because your frontal lobes are myelinated. Right. Like we talked about last time. But also your sleep goes back to normal. So you're right. Sleep is just such a huge issue,

which is why I'm not a fan of zero periods. Right. And I'm not a fan of letting children stay up late. I'm not a fan of letting them have their phones late if they are undisciplined. When we actually didn't let Chloe, she wanted to join one of the sports teams that practice was at six, which meant she had to get up at like before five to get there. I'm like, absolutely not. So we figured out she had to go to bed at eight o'clock when she wasn't tired. There were still lots of things happening. She still had homework. And just managing this one issue, on average, children who get an hour less sleep at night have a higher incidence of suicide. And depression and car accidents and their grades

suffer dramatically. I mean, really, it's death from all causes. Right. So there were two cities that studied this. Actually, they put in a program where they started school at nine o'clock and what ended up happening was dramatic. So not only did car accidents go down by 25% in their, car accidents from teens, just the teen accidents went down by 25% in their town. Okay. But depression rates went down, teens reported being happier and something very interesting, their focus went up

and their SAT scores went up dramatically. Math scores went up by 56 points. Verbal scores went up by 156 points. That's really cool. Well, it just shows that when you don't get adequate sleep, it actually turns off 700 health-promoting genes. And it is one of the major issues with everyone in our society, really, but especially the vulnerable among us, which are teens. And another reason teens are vulnerable is parents have, they believe this nonsense that they don't have influence over teens. Oh, yeah. No, I get that one a lot. So it's like, oh, I can't control them. Oh, I can't have any influence. And I'm like, you don't have influence because one, you're not listening to them.

Two, you're not bonded with them. And three, you're not living the message that you're trying to give to them. So we're going to talk a lot about that with Dr. Jim Fay. But I want to just touch on that briefly because I get that a lot. So from some of my, even some of my friends who now have very large male teenagers, okay, so they're like, they're too big. I can't do anything. I'm like, really? You can't do anything? Who does the grocery shopping? Who washes their underwear? Who drives them everywhere? You know, I would be putting vegetables in the house and letting them wear dirty underwear if they

didn't listen. I'm not kidding. There is a lot you can do. Okay. So that shows them. So let's step back and let's just talk about the hallmarks of good parenting. And I always say the first, the two words, if you just remember these two words, you'll be a good parent for a teen.

And that's firm and kind. That when you start screaming at them, they get angry and they stop listening to you. If somebody screamed at you at work, you would not be okay with that. So firm and kind, and then it starts with bonding. And I think one of the reasons Chloe's such a good kid is you literally spend over a decade every night in her room reading. And dinner at the dinner table. And those are the two things that actually predicted whether or not someone became a Rhodes Scholar. Those were the common denominators.

And you read together. And when you just cleaned out her room recently and you looked at all the books. I had over 200 books and they were all these inspirational books. I was like, oh, maybe I do get some credit for this. So firm and kind. And it starts with clear goals. So what kind of child do we want to raise? And what kind of parents do we want to be? So you've got to ask yourself. So we want to raise a responsible child that is competent, that has good self-esteem, but it's real self-esteem. It's we don't tell her she's smart, never did that. We tell her she works hard. And so her self-esteem comes from

working. She loves to work hard. And that actually came from the longest longitudinal study looking at 450 inner city Boston school kids over a 70-year period. And the researchers at Harvard were looking at, well, what goes with self-esteem? What goes with effectiveness in life? And it was whether or not they were. Well, and you're the one who recommended the book to me, The Nurture Shock, which I thought was fantastic. And they talk about that study. They mentioned that one of the worst things you can do is praise your child for how naturally smart they are. One of the best things you can do is applaud their effort, even if they're a C student, but they're working their brains out. Because that means they will then work harder. It's a

work ethic. Where if you're reinforced, oh, you're so smart. Well, when it's hard for them, then they will go, well, I'm not really that smart. But if you praise them because they work hard, then when something is hard, they'll go, but I'm a hard worker. And I'll figure this out. So the next thing is clear rules. Rules. And you are more than me, rule-bound in life. Very rule-bound. But I think it's critical that there's rules at home.

This is how we treat each other in this family. Yeah. So one thing, just about what you were just talking about a second ago. At one point when you talked about being firm and kind, I remember being so frustrated as a parent early on that I almost had a breakdown one day and I'm like, this is not supposed to be this hard. And I wasn't the kind of parent I wanted to be. I was frustrated, angry a lot about, you know, her behavior and thinking she should just do what I told her to do. And it wasn't working that way because I had a very strong willed child. And once I figured that firm and kind thing out, one line that I used a lot that helped me,

whenever she would misbehave, I would give her the clear road to getting what she wanted. And I was very clear that when she didn't behave a certain way, my line, my typical line was, I don't do things for kids who treat me that way. And you shouldn't do things for people who treat you that way either.

You should expect respect in your life. And she grew up learning that. And the automatic answer when you behave that way is no. So those were just firm and kind. And I stopped yelling at her. And the firm part is so important because if you give in to a teen that has a tantrum, you've just taught the teen to have a tantrum. It's like when you give in to yourself, when you know you shouldn't, because the four-year-old in you is having a tantrum, you're creating your own internal behavior disorder. But don't demean them. Don't yell at them. Don't scream at them. Obviously, don't beat them. That is of no value. In fact, it's counterproductive. It teaches them violence. What we want you to do

is when you say something, mean it, back it up, but do it in a thoughtful way, in a kind way. And another thing we say a lot to each other is be curious, don't be furious. And along with the be curious, not furious is educating them about what's going on in their brain. So if you listened to the last podcast, explain to them what's happening, why they might be feeling so confused, right? So it's really important. So if you educate them and learn to listen, so you actually taught me this really well, because I used to be very authoritative. It's my nature to be sort of authoritative, but you taught me active listening. Well, it's so important. So clear rules, and then it's bonding. You did it with the time, but because you have ADD, that went, and a lot of people do,

and we talk about it a lot on the show, is because you have ADD, reminds me of Trump sometimes, where somebody is about to ask a question, and he starts to answer it before they've actually finished what they're going to say. And when you learned active listening, it actually made a huge difference because bonding requires time, actual physical time, which you've always given to her, but it also requires listening so people feel heard. And there's a great book called Never Split the Difference about negotiation. And in it, the author talks, he says, mirrors work magic.

So mirror the last three words or one to three words that someone has said. So let them finish what their question is or their comment or their thought, then mirror the last three words back and wait four seconds before you say anything. We're all, you know, we just want to get our point across. We want to pour our incredible, you know, 62 years of knowledge into their little brains, right? But their job is to disconnect from you.

But their job is separation, right? Independence and separation and competence. What we need to do is help them figure out their own solutions. Because as soon as you tell them how to think, they're not going to want to think that way. So one of you, you touched on it earlier about consequences, letting kids pay consequences is huge. So one of the things we have made very clear to Chloe is that she is responsible for her behavior and we have let her pay some painful consequences early in life because let them learn lessons while lessons are cheap, right? That's one thing I learned. I love the homework one. You have to talk about that.

So yeah, the homework one and letting her pay for her own babysitters. And we would leave her at home when she misbehaved and she had to pay for it herself or use toys to pay for the babysitter. So- I know, everybody listening now is, you're so mean. Right. It seems mean. And it only happened once.

Happened once. Both of those behaviors happened once. And I cleaned her room out once for three months and let her earn everything back, including her clothes. She only had school uniforms and pajamas. So I know it sounds horrible, but she never did those things again. It sounds awesome. Yeah. She never did those things again. And she was a strong kid. So talk about the homework. So we had this homework situation where you would really help her. Well, no, I didn't help her. It wasn't helping her. I had to drag her. Okay. So I somehow felt like my value, my self-worth as a parent was tied to her getting good grades, making sure everything was turned in on time, done right.

And she didn't want to do it. And so we would have this battle every single night over homework. And finally, one night, along with all this help, I learned how to do this. And it was uncomfortable for me at first, but then I just decided to try it. I walked in and I said, you know, honey, I love you so much that I realized something. These are your grades. They're not my grades. This is your homework. It's not my homework. If you don't want to do homework ever again, you don't have to do it. Of course, she looked at me completely suspiciously, rolls her eyes. She's like, that doesn't make any sense. And she got all mad. And I'm like, no,'t make any sense. And she got all mad.

And I'm like, no, you honestly don't. But you have to be willing to pay the consequences that go along with that. Well, hold on. I said, you have to be willing to pay the consequences. Now, I wouldn't have ever been comfortable showing up at school and explaining to my teacher why my work wasn't done. I wouldn't have liked sitting in the classroom at lunchtime because I was being punished. And I'm like, but it's okay because you're so cute and you're so sweet that I'm sure you'll make new friends next year when

all your friends move on to third grade. She got so angry. She jumped out of her chair. She's like, I never said I'm not doing my homework. I just said I'm not doing it right this second. To this day, I've never asked if her homework is done again. If she doesn't do it, then of course, we don't go anywhere fun. That's one of the consequences, right? The fun stuff gets cut out. I'm like, nope, we don't go. But she's doing school because it's her goal. She is obsessed with her grades and I don't have to say a word. And she has been ever since. So it's really powerful. So firm and kind, clear goals, listen.

But let me finish one thing about the homework thing. This is really important because one of the things I've figured out in helping people with this is they aren't actually willing to let their kids pay the consequences. So what I mean by that is I never took homework to school for Chloe if it wasn't finished. I never took lunch to school for Chloe if she forgot it. So she had certain responsibilities and I expected her to do them. She one time forgot her homework that was a huge group project. So it means the whole group was going to get marked down. And the teacher called me because Chloe looked at the teacher and said, my mom won't bring it. I already know she won't bring it. So the teacher calls me and she said, would you bring Chloe's homework to school? And I said, no, Chloe already knows the rules. If she

forgot it, then that's on Chloe. She's going to have to explain to the group why they're getting a lesser grade. That's a really uncomfortable consequence. And the teacher said, you're kidding, right? I said, I'm not kidding. If I bring it this time, she'll ask me the next time. If I don't bring it this time, she'll never forget again. And I said, there's one way she could figure out how to do it is if she has enough money, real world consequence says that if I forget something at home and I have a big meeting, I pay a courier. So if she's got enough homework, she can pay for someone to pick it up for her. And if not, it sits at home. But I'm in a meeting and I can't do it. She never forgot her homework again, ever. She's obsessed with looking,

double checking, triple checking to make sure she's got it. You got to let them pay the consequences. And when you do, they become responsible. And the idea behind love and logic is let them pay the consequences when they're cheap, rather when they're much more expensive. And they go to jail or lose a job. Or get fired or end up being divorced and so on. So firm and kind relationships, bonding, clear rules. Notice what you like about them more than what you don't, but you have to supervise them until they show,

they demonstrate they can supervise themselves. In fact, what you're saying is so important. There was a study done at Columbia University, and what they found is hands-on parents. It means you don't have to control them. It means you need to be there with them and be bonded to them. Like you said, if you're there with them, they don't make those bad decisions. In fact, they found that when people were there, hands-on parents, those kids were 25% less likely to actually engage in risk-taking behavior like drugs and alcohol. So they actually had less addictive behavior. So it was really important.

And that's one of the reasons where if parents have issues with addictions or parents have issues with ADD or depression or bipolar disorder, PTSD, whatever, you've got to get it treated because if you're not your best, it's hard for you to be able to focus on those you care about. So we've got two things left that I want to talk about. And one of them is don't forget what it's like to be a teen. So I find this, it's so funny to me when I've heard my, I've heard people actually say this, that I know my friends, I've heard them say this to their teens. It's like, when I was your age, I never did that stuff. I was such a good teenager, blah, blah. And I'm looking at them like they're from another planet because I was there. I remember. I'm like, okay, you weren't a good

teen. You made really bad decisions. So did I. You're lying. You're lying. And your kids know when you're lying. Okay. So if I actually am honest with my daughter in an age-appropriate way, but I use it as a learning experience, I will tell her, honey, I did make bad decisions. And I'm not telling you that so that you can make bad decisions. I'm telling you that because I want you to learn. These are the consequences I paid. And when you make adult decisions as a teenager, you get to pay adult consequences as a teenager, teen pregnancy, STDs, getting arrested.

Okay, there's a lot of things that your brain's not ready to handle. I'm hoping you trust me. So that's one. Well, and you have to be your child's not ready to handle. I'm hoping you trust me. So that's one. Well, and you have to be your child's frontal lobes until there's develop. And, you know, one of the most important things you can do as a parent, and you do this very well, is you need to know their friends. Because their friends, after about 13 or 14, their friends actually have more influence than the parents do. And so if you know who they're with, what they're doing, and they know you're going to check, they're much more likely to be better at supervising themselves.

But that's why get them involved with other kids who have parents who care about them who are involved as well. So the last thing I want to talk about is using their biology to your advantage, right? Sounds crazy because it seems like they're just going so crazy. But if you understand the melatonin thing and you figure out how to use the sleep to your advantage, don't get on their case on the weekends, let them sleep when they can and figure out how to work their chores around that. Also, oxytocin is also surging. So even though they might be wanting to be independent from you, if you do things, and also the dopamine factor, the fact that they do like to do exciting things, if you're that parent who teaches them, they have this need for high risk reward,

their risk reward center is going a little crazy. And if you teach them that they can have fun in a safe way and you reward them for doing it in a safe way, you don't just punish them when they do it wrong, but you reward them for doing it in a safe way, you might be really shocked at what happens. So I do so many fun, cool things. My daughter's friends think I'm this cool parent, but really what I'm doing is teaching them that fun can be really safe. You are a cool parent. I am, huh? We hope this is really helpful to you. Brain Warriors Way, helping your teen because that will save your sanity. Stay with us.

Thanks for listening to today's show, The Brain Warriors 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.