TRANSCRIPT

5 B I G G E S T C OMMUN I C A T I O N

M I S T A K E S P A R E N T S MAK E

( & WHA T T O S A Y I N S T E A D )

www . t each - th rough - l o ve .com

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5 Biggest Communication Mistakes (& What to Say Instead) Transcript Duration 53:37

SLIDE 1: Welcome

Lori Petro: Welcome to the 5 Biggest Communication Mistakes & What You Can Say Instead. My name is Lori Petro, I’m the founder of TEACH through Love. Thanks for joining me. We do these calls all the time, so if today is your first one, make sure that you are on my mailing list to be notified of the next one. And, of course when you share these calls and recordings with your friends, you are building a network of support and that’s really what it’s all about, especially when we are talking about learning to communicate in new ways. Support is so important. So, I want you to do a little exercise that we’ll come back to during today’s call. I want you to make a list of all the things that your child, or your children, have done right today and I want you to label that, Column A. I want you to list every time that your child behaved as you wanted him to, every time your child cooperated as you wanted him to. And then, on the other side of that paper, I want you to list, Column B. And, I want you to list all the things where your child did not do what you wanted, did not respond, or listen in ways that you wanted, perhaps was misbehaving. Or list those times when you felt angry, upset, or frustrated. So, that’s what we’re going to do while we are waiting for everyone to pop on the line. We are going to do a little exercise if you are just joining us. This class may lead to more questions than it answers for you, depending on where you are in your conscious journey, how old your kids are, how long you’ve been following this path to peace, or whether it’s new to you. So, don’t get frustrated, don’t get exasperated, or feel like you go home and try some of these ideas and nothing changes. This isn’t really about giving you tools that you can take, and it will make your kid behave exactly as you wanted. If that were possible, there would be some very rich people out there handing that out, and we’d be eating that up and buying it up, but that’s not really the way it goes. It’s really about creating relationship. And, that is what I hope to do here with you today is to give you some new communication “ins” to bridge that relationship with your children. I’m also going to share, with you, my three-week series called Conscious Communication: Think, Speak, Act. I will share all about that at the end.

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So, for anyone that’s just jumping on the line, welcome again, my name is Lori Petro and I am the founder of TEACH through Love. I really want to thank you for joining me today for another “Free Call Friday.” I love doing these calls. We are really creating an amazing community. You guys have been so supportive in responding to each other, -whether through blog posts, or our teachable moments, or just on the Facebook page. And, just supporting other parents that get frustrated or feel like they’re doing something wrong, you guys jump in there and offer your words of advice, and your wisdom, and your experiences, and that’s really really helpful. So, I want to thank you for continuing to provide that support to everybody. Like I said, we do these calls every month, so if today is your first one, I’d love to know what you think. Feedback from you always helps make these calls better. And, that’s really what this is about. This call is my way of supporting you and giving back. And, I want to make sure that you get valuable things out of this. SLIDE 2: Rumi Quote I don’t teach parenting, per say, but I know that it’s parent education, but I really teach communication skills. And, communication skills which help develop healthy relationships between the members of our family. And, this is the reason that I think I teach this now, coming from a creative background, an artistic background, I sort of landed in this public speaking, teaching, realm. But, it’s really because communication was my greatest struggle and my deepest wound. And, so, if you have communication troubles, or if you feel like you can’t relate to your kids, you have trouble talking to them, and you really want to actually be heard. And, you want to do it without screaming for three times, or yelling, or nagging, then you are in the right place. Because I really believe that we can profoundly change the way that we think, and think about, and speak to each other. And, when we do, when we make those changes in how we think and speak to each other, then we also change the way we experience each other. And regardless, even of behavior, it doesn’t really matter what other people are doing. When we can shift the way we see things, then our experience changes. And, that’s what I want us to do today with our kids, because I need us to look beyond behavior. We need to start identifying some different things. We have to put our focus somewhere else if we really want to give our kids the quality feedback that they need. And, I really believe that a lot of our troubles come from the way that we communicate.

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SLIDE 3: Compassionate Communication So, the ideas that I’ll share today about compassionate, conscious, communication are (in part) based on my understanding of the Nonviolent Communication Process, NVC. This was an organization. The Center for Nonviolent Communication started by Marshall Rosenberg–-you can look them up online. And, this process of communication is really a way to use language so that we can access our humanity. I really truly believe that the unconscious ways in which we communicate are creating a great deal of stress on our relationships, not just with our kids, but with other people in our lives as well. I grew up in a home with a lot of arguing, with a lot of stress, high conflict, but, also, a lot of love and a lot of abundance. I was really well cared for. But, I was a really sensitive kid as well. And, I know a lot of you have sensitive kids. And, the verbal harshness that I was exposed to, and that defensiveness that was disguised as humor, or the critical remarks that were disguised as support, were confusing to me and they were unpredictable. Growing up I was very confused. I didn’t have the best ability to get my words across. There was a bit of a delay between my receptive and expressive language. So, I would shut down; I would get stuck. My brain was literally stuck. And, when I was being punished, or judged, or shamed into compliance, I really shut down. I grew up 38 years later to find out that I was growing up with undiagnosed Aspergers. But, I moved through all that and I learned to communicate. But, what I found out were some really important things that I needed as a child that I wasn’t getting, that people weren’t aware of. Now, everybody’s got different experiences. We all come from different family backgrounds. So, this is not to blame anyone’s particular family, or your culture, or your history, but really to get in touch with how it affected us. And, what kind of lens we are looking through based on our experiences. So, that’s what I want to talk about today. I want to show you the five biggest mistakes that are so, so common and so unconscious that most of us are completely unaware of the kind of damage that they are doing to our connection and to our kid’s sense of safety. SLIDE 4: Limits Don’t Have to Be Unkind In order to show positive behaviors, we have to feel safe. We have to feel like we belong. We have to feel like we have value. We have to feel like we are able to be heard and to express ourselves. A lot of traditional parenting interrupts that process. Now, small children, under five-years-old or so, they’re not yet capable of a lot of language skills. They may have a lot of

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language, but they are not always capable of expressing themselves in the best ways. There’s lots of emotional outburst. They’re also very attuned to the messages that we’re sending–-not just our verbal messages, but our non-verbal messages. Eighty percent of communication is non-verbal. And, ninety-five percent of behavior is unconscious. So, imagine how much we’re saying and doing in the absence of awareness. And, our kids are taking in and they’re creating meaning and memory which is informing their future behaviors. And, it can be frustrating with small kids, because they need a lot of repetition and a lot of attention, a lot more attention, sometimes, even than older children. But, it is worth the time and the patience if you can stick it out in the first five years. I have a lot of parents who come to me and say, “Oh, my two-year-old just doesn’t listen, they just scream whenever they don’t get what they want.” If you have a child that’s that little, 2, 3, 4, 5, even six-years-old, they’re just immature. They just don’t have the ability to regulate their emotions, and everything is being filtered through their mid-brain, because that’s the primary area of development, and it comes out in the form of big reactions. Expecting our children to just accept our limits without pushing back, without testing, without getting upset, that is something you should just take away. Take that right off the table, because that will lead you to more frustration. Expect your kids to push back. Expect them to not be okay with limits right away. And then, just be okay with them not being okay. Because kids who can handle, manage, and speak about their emotions are the kids who have been given the freedom to express their emotions. I’m not saying unsafely. We don’t let children scream in church while there is a wedding going on. Right? We have to remove them. We don’t let them do that at a dinner or at a restaurant, sometimes we have to take the right kinds of precautions, or we have to do what we need to do to help our kids regulate. But, they never deserve to be demeaned, to be judged, or to be forced into compliance, or forced into feeling things that they can’t feel. SLIDE 5: Benefits of Emotionally Intelligent Discipline But, kids who can manage their emotions, who can think about their emotions, who can sense the emotions of other people and be aware of them so that they can respond, they do better in school. These are the kids who have better impulse control. These are the kids who have the better ability to self-regulate, -who have personal restraint. They have more of this than the kids who are not given that opportunity to learn about their emotions. A lot of the traditional advice around discipline revolves around denying kids the time for that emotional processing in favor of obedience, or their silence, or compliance. And, I don’t think

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it’s on purpose; I don’t believe that we do this on purpose. It’s just that it was never really considered important. But, now we know more about the brain. We know how learning takes place. We know what conditions are required for our kids to grow their skill set. SLIDE 6: Regulate to Educate Learning can’t happen under stress or fear. And, that is exactly what punitive discipline creates. And again, it’s not our fault; many of us don’t really even have a handle on our own coping skills. That’s why it’s really hard to not get upset and not freak out when our kids are not showing coping skills because we haven’t really got a handle on our own, so some of us really need to do that work first. You need to actually be able to recognize your triggers, and take care of yourself, and your needs, and your own emotions before you can really start to consciously communicate. Because when we are stuck in our own drama, and our own stories, and our own baggage, we can’t consciously communicate because we’re stuck. We’re stuck in a place of fear and thinking, “we’re not going to get what we need,” that “this isn’t how we want it to be,” that “we aren’t getting what we should be getting” and then that leads us to treat people in ways that deny our responsibility, that judge, that lay blame, all these kinds of things. SLIDE 7: Is It a Match of a Mismatch? I want you to make a list of all the things that your child has done right today and list every time that your child behaved as you wanted him to. If not today, just pick yesterday, if they’re at school or something, pick the last day that you spent together. And then, on the other side of the paper, on column B, I wanted you to list all the times where your child did not do what you wanted or did not listen to you. What I want to know now is, how hard was it to make this list? Was it a difficult list to make? Are you aware of all of the ways that your children are cooperating? Are respectful? Are behaving? Which list took longer? I want you to think about which list took longer to make? Which list took more time? More thought? More effort? For most people, it tends to be the second list that’s really easy to make. You know, when what we wanted was not matched by our kid’s behavior. That, sometimes, is really easy to draw up. And, what that means is that we’re really in touch with what’s wrong with the situation; but how in touch are we with what’s going right? With what kind of skills our kids do have?

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If you were really aware, if it was really easy for you to make the list of all the things that your child has done right today, and the ways that they were able to cooperate, and the positive qualities that they showed. If that list was easy for you to make, then I bet this is probably something that you’ve worked on. It’s a skill that you’ve taken the time to develop, that you took time and put that effort into your relationship with your child so that you’re actually consciously aware of those kinds of ideas. This is something I want you to take home and do every morning. When you wake up do you think of all the ways in which your child is going to disobey you and all the frustrations you are going to have? Or do you focus on, when you wake up, think about all the ways in which you can be peaceful together. And, relate in respectful ways together. SLIDE 8: Brain Facts The brain likes predictability. The brain likes sameness. A lot of the times our unconscious beliefs and our habits, the way we think about our kids, can inform our actions, again, unconsciously, and really undermine our relationship and our influence. Like I said, so much of the traditional parenting advice does this. It undermines our relationship, our authority, our power. It erodes our relationship with our kids because it uses things like fear. We create patterns of fear and then those fear patterns are stored in the body, and over time they weaken our influence. We use a lot of things to control and train our kids, but each time that we do that we put them in a state where most of those lessons are lost. And, we create negative cycles of behavior and this frustration for you. But, knowing this about the brain, we know that now, okay, we can replace these patterns. The brain needs repetition. It can make changes and adapt. For the next week, I want you to start paying attention to all the ways in which you and your kids, or your child, are getting along. If your relationship, right now, is in this state of repair where you’re not really focused on getting them to do things, but you’re focused on building up that trust and that intimacy, and it’s hard to focus on what your kids doing right because there is so much struggle or problems right now, then focus on the outside. For example, the next time you drive to work notice how many other drivers are driving safely, cooperating with you, letting you in, putting on their signals, making sure everyone is free from an accident and appreciate that. When we shift our focus from what we don’t want to see anymore, and we start noticing things through gratitude, through appreciation. Then, things start to change. We’re also, then, in a place where we’re empowered to take notice of our own behaviors, of our own feelings, and then speak from a place of awareness. Young children experience the world through their relationships with other people, with their parents, specifically. And, to communicate effectively means that we have to honestly express

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what we would like, and we have to do it without using those relationship interrupters, those communication mistakes. And, that’s what we are going to talk about right now. We need to pay attention to these unconscious mistakes. SLIDE 9: Stop Judging Yourself And, the first mistake that I want to talk about is judgment. Judgment is something that we use a lot. And again, we can be really unconscious of using it. But, what we want to do is be able to observe conflict, behavior, situations, without judgment. Making observations that are free of assumptions, to be able to describe what’s happening without using evaluation, without using our moral judgment or our diagnosis of the situation, our opinion, our interpretation, without evaluating, to be able to carefully observe without labeling it. Judgment puts kids on the defensive. Judgment implies that there’s something wrong with the other person. Whenever we hear a judgment, we don’t usually feel more inclined to get cozy with that person. We usually create some distance. Now, I don’t mean judging of behaviors and right and wrong, I mean the judging of our children. And, that’s what we usually mix up, kids and behavior, and it kind of gets rolled into one. Kids can’t really separate themselves from their behaviors, so I want us to remove the judgment altogether. The first mistake we make is judging. And, when this happens we experience separation because someone is right, and someone is wrong. Whenever one person is right and wrong then we have a big divide there. We’ve created this situation that limits our solutions, it limits our possibilities, it limits our connection, or our ability to find a peaceful resolution because we are too much in a position of defending ourselves. Judgments are these opinions, these interpretations of what we think. They imply wrongness, or badness, or they are not in harmony with what we expect. Sometimes, they include blame, insults, put-downs, criticisms. Judgment sounds like, “you always.” “You always forget to,” or “you never,” “you never listen,” “you never do what I ask” or “stop acting like a baby.” Even in the positive, we can be playful and be judgmental. “Come on silly girl,” “stop being such a silly boy,” or “don’t be a naughty boy.” We think that we are doing it kindly because we are doing it with a sweet voice and a smiley face, but we are still using our tone and our eyebrows to judge and let our children know that we are judging. Judgment doesn’t help our kids change the behavior; it just puts them in a fear state. When we say things like, “what’s wrong with you” or “you’re always goofing off,” “you’ve been acting up all week. Or if we have teenagers, we can say, “turn off that music, it’s too loud, that awful

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racket, it’s way too late.” It’s sort of evaluative. Yes, it may be true from our perspective, but can we say it, can we shift it, can we change and just say what we see, what we observe with our eyes and our ears. To the child who’s playing his music too late, to the teenager, we can say, you know, instead of “it’s way too late, you’re making all that noise,” the child can rebut, “that’s not noise, that’s my favorite band, it’s not late, I don’t have school tomorrow.” We give them room to argue, we challenge them. Instead we can say something like, “It’s 2am and I hear your stereo playing.” That’s the observation right there. That is more likely to get whatever we have next heard when we remove the judgment. And, we can judge a lot. We judge kids who get aggressive. We might say to a child who pushes another child, “how dare you do that.” What we really want to do is we want to go up and we want to say what we saw. “I saw you hit your friend; I’m wondering what’s going on for you?” That’s the next step. But, instead of judgment, let’s just stay there for a moment, because I don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. But, instead of judgment, if we can just move to observing, to stating just what you see. Instead of saying, “You don’t care about anything I say.” You can say to your child, “When I ask you a question and you don’t respond, I’m unclear. I’m confused. Would you be willing to answer me so that I could have clarity, so that I can have more understanding, I want to understand?” Because when you say, “you don’t care about anything I say, you don’t care about anything I ask,” that is such an accusation. An accusation is never going to bring your child closer. Or, if you have kids who like to dress themselves, and sometimes they come down and our first thought is, “That outfit is ridiculous. You are not wearing that. Go change.” Has anybody ever felt like that? I have a seven-year-old daughter. She picks out some pretty crazy outfits. I love her flare for fashion, but sometimes I’m like, “really?” It can be tempting to say, “No way. You can’t where that to wherever we’re going.” But, instead can we go, “Oh I see that you picked out your own clothes. You have a blue shirt and you have your dress shoes on. And, you have a pair of jeans.” Just say what you see on. Then, you can move on to, instead of saying, “That’s not going to work. Absolutely go take that off.” “I like that you got dressed independently. I’m not sure this outfits going to work. Let’s go look in your closet.” Now this, again, none of these… I’m giving you starter phrases. I don’t have time in the 45 minutes that we have together to go in depth. I’m giving you starter phrases, so please don’t take these and then think that your children are going to immediately do what you say. What I’m going to do is give you lots of starter phrases to start opening up the lines of communication so that we can move from these labels, and criticisms, and these put downs, to giving our kids quality feedback and information. The first step to do that is just observe.

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SLIDE 10: Blame Let’s move on to our second biggest mistake, communication mistake, that you might not even be aware of. And, that is blame. Blame is when we deny responsibility. When we put it on others to make it about right and wrong. I know it’s really hard not to want to tell our kids how they have faulted us, or how they have done wrong, or done someone else wrong. And, blame can seem like innocent, like “I’m not blaming, I’m giving her feedback about what she did and the way she did it and how it affected others.” That’s great if we can really give that feedback in a nonjudgmental, non-evaluative way, but often we can’t. Instead of blaming, we want to move to - let’s talk about feelings. Let’s really say, instead of, “you make me so angry,” let’s really say what we feel by getting in touch with our emotions and our body sensations. And then, saying what we’ve observed without assigning that blame. To be able to differentiate our feeling from our thinking, and to be able to express internal feeling states in ways that don’t blame other people or don’t put it on other people to change the way we feel. Blame sometimes sounds like, “I’m so tired of your behavior.” We’re blaming our kids, our tired is because of them. Or, “we could have gone to the park, but you didn’t do what I asked on time.” Or, “you’re making me very angry.” I hear that one a lot. I hear parents tell their kids how they’re making them so angry and that is really a denial of responsibility for our own anger. I’m not saying that we don’t feel that anger but placing the responsibility on your child to shift your emotional state is going to create an unhealthy dynamic and it’s going to make the child, eventually, stop listening to you because it’s just way too much responsibility for them. Blame might sound like, “If you don’t place nice we’re leaving.” Now, this might be true if the child doesn’t play in the way that we’re hoping for, we may set that limit where we are leaving. But, can you set that in a way that doesn’t sound so punitive, in a way that doesn’t blame the child for his inability to show a skill, and instead give the child the consequence, “this is what’s going to happen,” without making him feel bad about it. Because when kids feel bad, they can’t reflect on their behavior. Maybe you could say, to the child, instead of “We could have gone to the park, but you didn’t do what I asked in time.” You can simply say, “We weren’t able to make it to the park. We’re not able to go today. It’s frustrating when plans change.” When your child starts to get upset, you acknowledge the feelings, “It’s frustrating when plans change, we can try again tomorrow.” Right? You don’t need to argue with your child. You don’t need to blame them for the situation. You can say, “We weren’t able to get dressed in time. I know it’s frustrating when plans change. We didn’t make it. We weren’t able to do it, but we can try again tomorrow. How do you think we can do it tomorrow so that we can make it on time?” Right? Now, your child is part of the solution instead of feeling responsible for the horrible outcome.

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To the child that hits their little brother, instead of going in and blaming them for their inability to control their impulses, you can say to a child, “I feel angry when I see your little brother hurt. It’s my responsibility to keep everybody safe and I can tell that you’re having some trouble with your body right now. You are not able to stop hitting. How can I help you?” You’re going in and you’re saying to your child, “I see that you’re hurting and I’m here to help, because this cannot happen. We cannot hit. Hitting hurts.” But, we’re not going in and saying, “How dare you hit your brother again. I told you that’s not nice.” Because all of that shuts our kids down. It makes them afraid, and when they are afraid they don’t learn, and they don’t connect. When you get frustrated, they’re not doing their homework, you might be tempted to say, “schools not for socializing,” “you’re not living up to your potential,” “you’ll have to quit your sports if you’re grades don’t improve.” You might want to say to that child, “I know that you’re really loving school and that you’re excited about all the new friends that you’ve made. I don’t think you were expecting to get a C in your math class. I wasn’t expecting that either, what do you think got in the way?” This is going to help your child reflect on their behavior more so than feeling blamed for being unable to meet an expectation. Kids are going to grow up and they are not going to be able to meet a lot of expectations. It’s going to happen a lot. So, know that, and be prepared to start a conversation that is open to a cooperative resolution. Instead of saying, “If you don’t place nice, we’re leaving.” Sharing is a big one for little kids who don’t actually have the ability to understand sharing and do it in the way that we think. But, instead of saying, “that’s not nice, if you don’t play nice, we’re leaving.” Acknowledge what you see, the feelings that are going on. “You’re not ready to share the doll. You’re having a lot of fun with her. What can we do next?” Sometimes, you want to leave the conversation up, or excuse me, leave the solutions and the problem solving up to your child. Let them make an offer of a suggestion. Then, they feel involved, they feel like they belong, they feel like they have something to contribute instead of just being told, “well, if you can’t share the doll then we’re putting it away, or if you can’t do this then we’re leaving.” And, they’re like, “I can’t do it; I can’t stop but I don’t want to leave.” And, we leave them with not a lot of choice. When we feel embraced by supportive people, by love, we’re more likely to be helpful. And, when we feel disconnected from those people and disconnected from love and in that state of fear, from threats, or force, or from not knowing what to do and not having any support, we’re more likely to be hurtful in our behaviors. The idea is to get your kids to change their internal state, their state of regulation. When we are regulated we can connect to the higher parts of our brain, the executive function. Little kids don’t have a lot of access to that executive function. They need a lot of repetition and a lot of constant attention. They certainly don’t have access to it when they are being blamed, and they’re being put in time-outs, and they are being shamed, when we’re yelling at them. Because when we do all of those things we’re engaging the lower centers of the brain, the reactive centers, the flight or fight response, and we are setting up programing.

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instead of berating your child for having feelings or for causing those feelings in you because you see a situation and the feelings rise up and then you choose to go with those feelings, instead of blaming that on your child, give everybody, including yourself, the space to feel and then to get some comfort and support. You need to practice self-empathy first, for yourself, so that you’re not triggered. When you’re triggered, we need to get control of those emotions that are triggered so that you don’t start responding, which would really be reacting, from those triggered places. Because when you are triggered, you’re not… you’re engaged, just like your kids, in your lower brain centers, you’re not engaged in your thinking that is compassionate, cooperate, that’s able to plan, to reorganize, to think deeply about things, to think about more complex issues. You’re engaged in very primal mechanisms, fight or flight. And sometimes, I know that when our kids are crying or they’re yelling in anger, they’re having those tantrums, they’re melting down. We feel overwhelmed. We feel irritated. But, our kids don’t deserve to be blamed for this irritation that we feel. When our kids are pressing our buttons, we need to own it. We need to somehow find that support system so that we don’t make our kids responsible for our stuff. We need to start to learn to really listen, and not just listening to the words that their saying, but really listening and receiving the messages that are coming underneath their words. Because, again, kids don’t always have the words to express themselves, but you can be sure that a child that is yelling at you and telling you that they hate you, is feeling really angry. Instead of saying, “How dare you speak to me like that.” Say, “I hear you’re angry. You’re so upset that you’re screaming these words that I know you would normally never say. Should we take some time to calm down or can you tell me more about that in ways that I can understand? Would you be willing to reframe that? I want to help you.” If your child is old enough, and I’m not talking about a three-year-old who’s in a meltdown mode, you don’t want to be responding to that child like that because they’re not taking that in. If your child is in meltdown mode and you’re at that point, silence is going to be really golden. You can give non-verbal cues to show your empathy. But, if you have a child that is older and still in control of his senses and his behavior, or hers, you can respond in ways like that. Listening is really about feelings, it’s about hearing the feelings that are behind those words. And then, connecting them to the needs that are coming up. But, your child can sense, so much, about your tone, about your body language, the look in your eyes. And, they sense whether you are interested in what they have to say, whether you are curious about it, whether you really care, or whether you’re just trying to get them to do something. Be aware of the intention that you go to your child with. If your intention is simply to shift behavior and stop something. Now, if the behavior is unsafe, of course we have to stop it. But, if your intention is to go in and simply change your child’s behavior irrespective of what is going on, regardless of other circumstances, your child is going to sense that, and they might hold on to their position, because they feel that.

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SLIDE 11: Guilt The third biggest communication misstep, moving right along now, is guilt, that sense of “I’m bad, what I’ve done is bad,” the sense that I’ve made another person unhappy. That feeling that I’ve caused pain. We think that this might be a way to get kids to reflect on their behavior, right? We might say “How do you think your friend feels?” But, that doesn’t really cause kids to reflect on their behavior because they end up feeling bad. And again, when we feel bad, we don’t get to reflection. Reflection is a skill located in the higher brain centers. It’s an executive function skill. To be able to reflect on behavior is something that takes time, and it’s built through empathy. When our kids feel like we have empathized with them. When they feel heard and validated, they will be able to then perspective-take when they’re old enough. Perspective-taking take some maturity, and again, little kids that we are expecting so much from, they don’t have this maturity. Now, guilt sounds something like “You’re not making me happy.” “Your brother is little, you’re the big brother, you have to be nice and take care of him.” Or “You’re a big girl why would you do that? You should know better.” I think we can shift this. What can we say instead? Instead of saying, “you’re not making me happy” to the child who’s disobeying you or not holding your hand while in the crowd or things like that. You can say, “I’d like us to have a good time. I feel overwhelmed when we are all speaking so loudly.” I’m just using this as an example of maybe we’re all in the car. This is a real-life example so it’s kind of where it came from. Instead of shouting “You’re making me angry, we’re not going to be able to have a good time.” “I’d like us to have a good time and I feel really overwhelmed when we’re speaking, when everyone is speaking so loudly. Because we’re in the car, it doesn’t work for me. I need to concentrate when I drive. Would you be willing to…?” I love the phrase “would you be willing to.” Now, you don’t want to use “would you be willing to” when you actually need your child to complete a task where there is no leeway around it. Because “would you be willing to” is a request. It says, “would you be willing to contribute to my needs.” My need is to concentrate. Sometimes, we want to say, “I need you to be quiet! If you don’t be quiet, I can’t drive! we’re going to get into an accident!” Ugh! The guilt, right? And then, the child is in the back paranoid if they say something or freaking out and screaming because they’re paranoid that they’re going to get into an accident and that just causes us stress to go. So, we don’t want to use guilt. But, we can share our needs. My need is that I need to concentrate when I drive, and the screaming isn’t working for me. Now, if you might not want to use “would you be willing to use different voices” in that situation, but you might want to pull over and say, “What can you guys do to help me? I can’t drive like this. I want us to have a good time.” Again, this is inviting your child to be part of the solution,

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instead of just being the problem. A lot of times our kids think that they are the problem. And, they interpret our anger in ways that we’re really even unaware of. They are interpreting our anger to mean, you don’t like me, you don’t love me, I’m bad. SLIDE 12: Shame And, that leads me into our fourth biggest communication mistake and that’s shame. That’s feeling that “I am bad.” We want to make clear requests; shame leads us to use our emotions to control other people, to manipulate other people by making demands on them. But, I want us to learn how to make clear requests for the actions that we want other people to take. I don’t want us to use that shame to manipulate someone into doing it for us. I want us to be able to request what we would like in ways that clearly and specifically state what we do want, instead of what we don’t want. We do a lot of that “stop hitting, don’t touch that, stop crying,” but we really want to shift that. We want to create this natural willingness and giving, this natural desire for our child to give and contribute. But, we can’t do that with shame, because shame leads to demands. And, we make demands out of this place of fear, of dysregulation, of worry. And, whether the demands are explicit or implicit, whether they are hidden, or whether we’re outwardly demanding something by threatening the other person. Maybe we’re using our disapproval or punishment. But, none of this leads kids much choice nor the coping skills that they need to get through situations. It’s pretty much like if they fail to comply with our wishes, then we react with this force, and we’re giving them a warning, we’re telling them ahead of time about the force, so that makes us feel better. But, their only choices are to obey or to rebel, and when that’s when the only choices presented to someone it leads to resentment. Sometimes, we have to make demands on our kids. Sometimes, we have to put the shoes on because we have to go. We can do it without being punitive. We can do it without getting angry. But know, when can we make a request, when we can we ask for willingness instead of demanding. Because anytime you can ask for willingness it’s going to bring your child closer, it’s going to engage their heart space, engage them in that relationship so that they are going to want to listen to you more, they’re going to want to actually respect you because they have self-reflected. Instead of saying, “I said clean your room!” Which is a demand or, “why can’t you do what I say, you never do what I say.” How can we shift that? What can we say to a child? We can say something like, “You know what? It’s important to me that our house is clean. And, I would like you to keep your commitment and straighten up the clothes in your room. Is there something that is preventing you from doing this that I could help with?” Now, we’re not assuming we know

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why our children aren’t doing it, that it’s just because they never listen to us or they never want to, but we’re actually giving them an opportunity to share with us what’s going on. Sometimes, we disguise our demands as requests. We might say, “Would you like to help me clean your room now?” or “Would you like to practice your piano now?” But, that’s where we don’t want it to be a request if it really is a demand. If we really have to make sure that our children practice the piano on Tuesday, then we have to be okay with going in and saying, instead of, “you need to practice, you’re wasting money, you’re never going to get better, you’re being irresponsible,” all that guilt and shame, we can say “I noticed that you haven’t practiced your instrument this week. I know it feels like a drag sometimes, but it’s important to be responsible, and we made an agreement to go every Tuesday to class. So, I’m going to leave your violin in the dining room and you can practice after dinner or before dinner.” Now, you’ve set the limit; you’ve given your child some choice and opportunity. Again, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t going to protest right there. But, that your opening is “here’s the limit.” You can be willing to listen and hear what your children have to say after that as long as you can remain composed and confident and not willing to argue or negotiate. You don’t have to argue or negotiate with this child who’s upset with your limit. If a child has trouble and you come in and demand that they clean up their room, they might shut down because it’s overwhelming. With a smaller child you might want to say something like, “It’s time to clean our room. Would you like to pick up all the toy cars or would you like to pick up all the clothes?” We break it down into small pieces because “go clean your room” can seem like an overwhelming request. Do you have a child who has a younger sibling who’s always touching their stuff? Instead of blaming, “you’re the big sister,” “you’re the big brother,” acknowledge their feelings. “I know it’s hard to have a little brother who touches your things all the time. I’m wondering what we can do to make sure that you have more privacy. I know that it’s upsetting when he touches your things and when he moves them. You must have been feeling pretty upset to yell at him like that.” Now, your child doesn’t feel like you’ve put him on the spot, that you’ve blamed him for everything but that you are actually willing to help him find a solution to his problem. SLIDE 13: Fear Now, the final and biggest communication mistake that we use is fear. We use fear verbally and nonverbally. Like I said, so much of our communication is nonverbal. It’s sent through messages through our body language. It’s really important to decide whether we want to use fear and punitive consequences to teach children because we may see some short-term compliance. But, when you use fear or threats, a raised-

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eyebrow, a sigh, a withdrawing of your attention or your love or your affection, that’s using fear to get what we want. And, you may get what you want in the short term, but you probably have to keep applying more and more fear, upping the fear as kids become desensitized. Some kids may laugh it off; kids who laugh in the face of your discipline, there not laughing at you, they feel afraid and sometimes we do really awkward things when we are afraid, like laughing. Because we can’t deal with the fear; we can’t deal with what the person is saying about us and sometimes that happens. So, don’t take a child who laughs at your face as one who’s being more defiant, it’s actually a kid who’s really stressed out. SLIDE 14: Make the Shift This moving from using fear to get control, to get what we want, to using quality feedback. We want to be able to express what we want to our kids, but we want to do it in ways that we’re not going to regret later, that we aren’t going to feel guilty about. It’s not going to disconnect us more. We want to give quality feedback and create a quality of connection that gets everybody’s needs met through this compassionate giving. So, instead of judging and demanding, we want to start giving quality feedback. So, what gets in the way of people achieving these shifts? Moving from judgment to observation? Moving from focusing on blame to focusing on feelings? Instead of using guilt let’s really address what my underlying needs are, “I have a need for peace; I have a need for harmony; I have a need for order. I want our house to be clean.” Instead of, “I need you to clean up, so you can help me feel better.” “It’s really important to me that our house is clean, I would love it if you would be willing to participate in this and help me. What would work for you?” Moving from that guilt to acknowledging needs. Moving from that shame which leads us into demands, to making requests, asking for contribution, to being willing to distinguish when we are really making a demand or when we’re really making a request or when we actually need to make a demand. Mixing them up, making a request when we know we need something to get done because when we make a request and then the child says “no,” we can get triggered. But, if we go in knowing that we’re making a request and they say “no,” we can reevaluate. It doesn’t mean it’s the end of the conversation. Even if you go in with a request and you get a “no,” it doesn’t mean that “no” is the answer that you have to stay with. It means let’s get a little more curious, let’s investigate more, “Tell me more about your idea.” When you don’t know what to say to your child, sometimes the best thing is to say nothing. The next best thing is to ask for more information, “I’m having trouble understanding, I need more help, tell me more about your idea.” Instead of running in and demanding that children stop fighting or dolling out consequences and right or wrong, “you play with this; you play with that

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because you didn’t do this.” Go in “I saw you hit your friend and then you took the truck. Tell me about your idea.” Instead of assuming that the child was just being bad and naughty and taking it, go in and ask for more information. It’s going to invite the child to share their world with you again. And, the last one of course is moving from fear and punitive consequences to that quality feedback. What gets in the way of people not making these shifts? One of the big things, I mentioned before, is not getting that support from others. It can be really hard if we are not in a community or if our families are not on board with speaking in compassionate ways and they just expect kids to behave because we’re the adults. It’s not going to get us very far. And, if you have a kid like me, who was really resistant to authority, because I wanted to know more, not because I didn’t think that anybody didn’t deserve respect, but I needed more information. I needed to feel… it needed to feel authentic to me. This is why I do this work. Because a lot of those kids out there that are temperamentally sensitive to behavioral control, they get a bad rap and they don’t deserve that bad rap. They need to be treated with respect. That’s why I’m really passionate about that. When your child’s not in agreement with your decisions or your limits and assuming that these limits are valid, necessary whether they are for safety or health or family rules, social limits, whatever they are, you don’t need to rationalize your limits. You don’t need to negotiate. You don’t need to legitimize. You don’t need to over explain your reasons. This is where we get caught up in that fear, because we fear that our kids are not going to accept our limit. They don’t need to. We need to keep them inside the boundaries. We don’t need to get upset when they feel upset with those boundaries, that’s natural. It’s normal. We don’t have to make our kids happy. Expect that they’re going to push back. This is really how they learn to assert themselves and how they learn to remain composed when there’s obstacles that don’t move. When you remain composed, you are giving them that model. You’re creating a positive feedback loop for them to refer to, for them to encode, for their brains to encode. We don’t have to react to our kids who scream or protest with the desire to prove our point, or show our power by arguing, or providing endless reasons on why we are enforcing a limit. Let it go. The communication breakdown happens when we insist on arguing, on denying, on moralizing, on judging. The objective is to not allow those unconscious fears and those automatic reactions to take over. We want to maintain our composure even when our kids can’t. And, we want to try to aim to empathize with the feeling without making them need to believe that we are right. They’ll get it eventually. Louder is not more effective. Threats are not necessarily more effective. They are especially not effective in the long-term even if they get you short term compliance. If your child doesn’t want to leave the park, instead of threatening them, “if you don’t come over here right now,” be okay if the four-year-old can’t stop playing because they can’t stop their impulses, or the six-year-old. You can say, “you’re not done playing, you’re having so much fun, I get it, playing at

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the park is fun and you don’t want to leave. You’re upset that it’s time to leave. I told daddy that we’d be home by six for dinner, so we need to leave the park so that we can be on time because he’s expecting us. I can help you and I can carry you to the car or you can walk. Which do you choose?” And then, if we have to carry a screaming, flailing child to the car, can you be okay with that? Can you trust that that child will be able to manage their emotions, each time, better and better, each time you respond in that calm, compassionate way. Because every time you respond with calm, compassion, you secure and strengthen the neural connections to kind and compassionate. But, every time you use fear and threat and force, that’s what you teach your child to use to get his way, fear and threats and force. And, his fear, and threats, and force at four, five, six, seven, eight is yelling, screaming, throwing things. Maybe saying “I hate you,” pushing people. So, really value the silence that is a precious time to connect with your kids, to use your nonverbal language. You can use your eye contact. You can use touch. Don’t feel like you need to have that automatic comeback every time that your kids refuse a limit. Because when you feel like you’ve got to have those comebacks, that’s when you get pressured to use those punitive measures. You can use empathy and not give in to the limit. SLIDE 15: Honesty, Sincerity, Confidence, Sensitivity, Empathy, Compassion, Humility To wrap it up here, you guys. This is really all about authentic, congruent, expression of our feelings and our needs without blame by avoiding the labels and the judgments. But, we really have to know what’s going on underneath that anger. A lot of us are dealing with anger and dealing with yelling. You need to use relationship building communication skills. We need to practice some deep listening, some active listening, so that we can help our kids identify their emotions and then find ways to appropriately express them. But, we have to do it first. If you can’t do it, that’s the first step. We’re not going to be able to help our kids do it if we’re not really in touch with our own feelings and needs. Emotional learning really is the most significant kind of learning that your child can do in the first five years of life. The ability to name their emotions, to feel them fully, without those evaluative statements from adults, and being able to manage them is going to build that foundation that they need for personal success, for academic success, for all of the personal values and the things that are important to you, those goals, those long-term goals that you have for your children. They rely on a well-laid emotional blueprint. Kids who can be flexible. Help your child put the solutions into action by approaching them with curiosity and with the willingness to help instead of just judge, label, shame, and blame. Thank you so much for reading! Want to learn more? Click here.