Hi, this is Janet Lansbury, welcome to Unruffle. Today I'm pleased to host Dr. William Stickrude. He has a wealth of experience and wisdom to share from his decades of working with families as a therapist for children with learning and mental health challenges.
He often sees the same client from childhood through adolescence and adulthood, so he's able to see the results of his practice. He's a co-author with his associate Ned Johnson of two popular books, The Self-Driven Child, which to me feels in many ways like the perfect counterpart to the ideas I share for caring for kids in early childhood and how they might translate to understanding our role as parents with great school, middle and high school age children. I love this book and I'm looking forward to reading their recently published follow up offering, What do you say? How to talk with kids to build motivation, stress tolerance and a happy home.
I'm hoping Bill will share his secrets for encouraging our children's healthy motivation and their and our sense of control, which is he believes is the key to mental health. I'm excited. Hi, Bill. Welcome.
Thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me, Janet. Well, I just dored your book. It's so compatible with the kinds of messages that I try to give to parents as well, so it was wonderful to experience how this looks and feels in your work with children who are mostly grade school and older, right?
I would say that, yeah, I test kids. I'm a neuropsychologist and I test kids for a living and I test kids from from 40 or so, but mainly I see school age, middle school and high school kids. And you work with them and their parents as well? Yeah, I mean, I do evaluations and then I tell parents what I learn, I tell kids what I learn, probably most of the kids I follow over time.
So I'm seeing a lot of kids now that I tested initially 20 years ago. And do they come to you because they have issues or concerns? Yeah, yeah, I see kids primarily because they're having learning problems or attention problems or emotional problems or social problems. Did I try to figure out what they're good at, what's going right and what's going wrong and how to help them?
And you've written this book, The Self-Driven Child, the seller with Ned Johnson. What is your connection with him? Well, we became friends probably 10 years ago, maybe 12 years ago. Somebody introduced us and said, you guys think so much alike.
And we're very different. I'm 20 years older. I'm a neuropsychologist. Ned is the Washington DC area's test prep guru.
He has a big business helping kids do better on standardized tests. And he realized that the way he does is very similar to the kind of things that I've been lecturing about for many, many years. And we started lecturing together about motivation and about how too much stress affects kids' brain and their development. And we realized as we worked together that we saw we had two major concerns.
And one was this what we were calling an epidemic of mental health problems and adolescents and adults, but also in the last several years, and kids from 5 to 11. And then also, with so many of the kids we see have what we consider to be unhealthy motivation is that they're either they're obsessively driven. They'll sacrifice anything to get into most elite college. Sacrifice their health and their friends and their family.
And other kids who do as little as possible don't seem to have any kind of internal drive. And we realized that there's something that connects these two things, the points to a cause and a solution. And what we concluded was that what connects these two things is a low sense of control. Because a low sense of control is that is it the root of all the mental health problems.
When you think about it, if you're anxious, you're thinking it's not control. If you feel depressed, you've got no sense of control. If you have substance use problems, your life is chaotic. So we realized that that's the key to a mental health.
And also every place we look at Janet to try to understand how to kids, little kids, grew up to be self motivated. All the arrows put in the direction of autonomy. They have to sense that this is their life and they are continually being forced to do things. And they don't have these areas that are free and clear for them to be autonomous.
Right. That downtime and self-directed play, it's everything, right? It's therapy for them. It's how they learn.
It's how they practice taking on different roles. It's so interesting. Two of my granddaughters, their mother was very distracted by very limited technology. We're virtually none for the first few years.
And all they did when they were five years old, was play, they're 10 and seven now. And whenever they have a minute, they play, they make up games. They go to the dentist. They come home and they play dentist.
That's the way that mammals have always learned to be adults. That's the way that they manage their feelings. That's the way they try things out. That's the way they learn what they do affects other people.
And I think on the parents end, it can be hard. I mean, there's all this peer pressure to have your children in classes from the time they're infants and have these schedules during the week where you have these scheduled events. And you can't really have that kind of play that you're talking about in the night promote also, which is about good periods of time each day where there's really nothing that children have to do. And I think if children aren't used to that, then it can be tough for them to kind of wind down into that space.
That could be tough for parents sometimes, but it's really everything. It's huge. I agree. It's interesting what you said before how you saw the two different ways that this manifested this feeling of lack of control that it manifested in obsessively wanting to try to keep control in terms of I got to keep achieving, I got to keep doing, I've got to keep holding this all together and keep on this track or I can't handle what happens if I feel like it's falling apart.
And then the other end of it where they kind of give up and say, what's the point? I can't control anything. And so I don't want to do anything. Yeah.
Yeah. And lecturing about and writing about this sense of control for, I guess, about six or seven years now, it's a really, really powerful construct. The research on anxiety problems looks like they're all rooted in low sense of control. Same thing with depression.
And the research is looking at cognitive behavioral therapy, which is probably the most effective approach for treating children's anxiety and mood problems. The reason it works is it increases their sense of control. And again, every place that we look at, I try to understand how to develop that healthy self-motivation that to drive to develop themselves, as they get older to realize, I need to develop myself to provide useful service to this world. That's the kind of way that I think about developing kids' motivation is that healthy self-drive to develop themselves to have something useful to offer this world.
And that starts with them getting a chance to connect with themselves and see who they are, which goes back to the play thing. From the time that they're babies, they can feel a sense of agency about, do I want to reach for this fall or do I want to suck my fingers or do I want to look over here at this corner of the room where I see a shadow that's interesting, allowing them to have those kinds of options, gives them this sense of, this is what I like to do. Yes. Yes.
It's so interesting that some years ago, I was reading the work of this guy named Reed Larson who studies adolescent development. And at one point, his career was looking at how the young children turned into self-motivated adolescents and adults. And he said, it's not through dutifully doing their homework every night. It's through what he called the passionate pursuit of pastimes.
He described that flow experience, the experience of flow where you're actively engaged in something that you're interested in, whether it's fun for you or trying to solve a hard problem, where it's not so easy to be boring and it's not so hard that it's wildly stressful. But it's kind of in your sweet spot and you're working hard to figure it out, to solve something or to beat somebody for competing. And so the idea is if a three-year-old is building a little fort of lake and wogs or playing with Legos and building something, they're really concentrating on it, they're really focused on trying to make it right, that experience shapes the brain in a way that develops that intrinsic motivation, that self-drive. And so it wasn't through somehow doing what's expected of me.
What other people are telling me to do is through that passionate pursuit of pastimes. And we can start, as you said, by respecting, that they may have different tastes and they may like some things or they may think about something differently than I do. And respecting that individuality, I think, is really healthy at the same time that we're helping them to be part of the family and part of the community. You made a really good point in your book and it's a question that I'm asked often about, well, if you're allowing children to play as they wish and you're not trying to engage them in focusing on certain kinds of learning that you think they should be working on in the early years, especially, then what happens when they get to school and they can't focus on it.
And you made this great point that my mentor, Dr. Gerber, used to also make you say the best way to motivate him for the things you think he should focus on is to let him spend time on the things he wants to focus on. Right, right. And for Ned and me, my co-author and I co-authored me, our North Star, and thinking about motivation is self-determination theory, which is one of the best supported theories in psychology developed about 30 years ago.
And the main idea is that to develop that intrinsic motivation, the drive is coming from you. You have to have three needs met, one's for a sense of competence and one's for a sense of relatedness and a sense of autonomy. And I think that when we respect autonomy, that kids feel respected and it really helps our relationship with them and those two things as we foster competence and we point out, gosh, look what you just did, six months ago or three months ago, you couldn't do this. If you foster that sense of competence, they can develop skill.
These are the most important ways that I know of the ability to build that kind of healthy self-motivation in case. Well, that reminds me of another quote that I wrote down from your book. You talked about competence. It's an internal rather than external barometer of accomplishment, growth mindset.
You're getting better. Remember that you can't develop competence for them and any attempt to do so will just undermine their own motivation. Makes sense to me. Me too, but I mean, it's very powerful actually because I think that a lot of times as parents, we've put that on our job description that we've got to help them achieve this and help them achieve that and it really can create a lot more anxiety in us and isn't helping.
Right. So it's so interesting because anytime a kid tries to do something, whether they're two years old to try to do something or they're three or four and they can't do it and they try again and they figure it out, it changes the brain. It develops the circus in their brain so when something hard happens to cope and they feel confident they can cope because when you're dealing with something hard, even something that's stressful, what happens unless you're just overwhelmed? What happens initially is that your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that you can think logically and put things in perspective and calm yourself down when you're stressed, your prefrontal cortex activates and leaves into action and when the prefrontal cortex activates, it dampens down the stress response.
So we watch kids ideally, even when they're little, as much as possible with our support, to solve their own problems, to deal with the stressful things that they handle. But also just when they're playing, kids trying to get a lego construction together and it's frustrating for them and eventually figures it out. That's what builds confidence. And if we pointed out, man, you just stuck with that incredibly, a lot of kids would have given up.
It made those kind of just kind of off-hand comments. In my experience, those are the things that really structured in a kid's brain. I'm a competent person. I can learn.
And when they do need help doing the smallest thing, if they say, I can't do this, I can't do this, well, what are you trying to do? Where are you trying to put that one? Asking questions, but keep bouncing the ball back to them, just being an emotionally supportive person. And it's hard to do.
It's kind of like an art to be able to give that minimal intervention. It's true. One of the things I used to do, Jen, when Mike is a little, if they get frustrated, Daddy helped me with this, I'd say, well, I'm going to look at my watch here. And if you try for a minute and a half to figure out your own, you still can't do it, then I'm going to help you.
But I want to give you a chance to figure it out. Oh, that's a good idea. Yeah. What would happen if you tried it this way?
Yeah, and they're the kind of suggested way as opposed to telling what to do. Yeah, you can always break something down into steps and just give him the first step. I remember my son had to draw a picture for his book report and he had to draw a picture of this wolf and he said, I can't possibly draw this picture. I think he was maybe in third grade.
And I said, yeah, I mean, it is hard to draw pictures. What do you want to draw first? Which part of it do you want to draw first? And he said, the nose.
And I said, okay, well, shape what the does be? How would you like to draw that? And it was amazing. Like he made this pretty cool picture.
I was so proud of myself because it was an experiment on my end. But to see how that worked with an older child, I'm used to doing it. I work a lot with the younger children. I'm used to doing it with them.
And it's amazing. And they don't naturally have this feeling like being stuck is a bad thing. That's something that we can unfortunately influence them to feel more when we're, we're either not going to finish it or get it or that we're starting to feel for them. Oh, gosh, maybe they can't do it.
And I've got to help. I've got to rescue. And then they start to pick up from us that anxiousness and receive that same sense of urgency from us and see that, oh, gosh, this isn't a safe place to be just in the middle where I'm not getting it. Right.
And as you said, it's hard because we're mammals. We evolved to suit and protect our young. And in our second book, we talk about this research of somebody, a person by the name of Jesse Barrelli. She studies what she calls parental over control.
And she has a study where these kids are in a room with some kind of computerized puzzle and they're trying to put it together. And the moms are in the room. And the moms are only given one instruction. Don't help.
What happened? Invariably. And they're measuring the kids' heart rate and the mother's heart rate. And so the kids start to solve this puzzle and it looks easy, but it's much harder than it really is.
It starts to get frustrated. The kid's heart rate goes up. Mother intervenes and says, honey, they tried this way. Mother's heart rate goes down when she's doing something that gives her sense of control, but the kid gets more stressed as mom gets involved.
So yeah, it's not that we don't want to be supportive. It's not that we don't want to help our kids. It's just that we don't want to jump in. I did this exercise.
I did with a parent educator some years ago where we thought about, well, let's say your second-grade girl comes home and that she's crying because everybody in her friend group got invited to a birthday party and she did invited. What we asked the parents to do was ask themselves, whose problem is it? Because the way they were wired is so hard to do that. It's not such a to start soothing or something.
That's okay. I'll call the mom. Right. Just in just mind that we can listen, we can understand, but if we jump in and solve it for them, we deprive them of that opportunity to solve themselves and to shape that brain, this experience and going into coping mode.
And it makes it harder for them the next time because they feel dependent on us making them feel better. Yeah, it's exactly right. You talk also in your book about the concept of the non-exious presence. So what are some of the keys to being able to be that for our children?
Well, can I just mention how I got to this idea? Please. I was just turning two. Her language was coming along really well, but she started to stutter really badly.
She went for a couple of days where she didn't talk. I've never been more panicked in my life, Janet. She doesn't talk. She'll never get better.
She'll be teased the rest of her life. A couple of days later, basically her mouth caught up with her brain and she stopped stuttering. I realized that all of our fears, parents, it's about the future. It's about they're going to get stuck in some ways and never get better.
That was a really formative thing for me, realizing that all our fear is about the future. The kids are going to get stuck. My experience is if we as parents don't get highly anxious and too involved, kids go through stop and they go out of it. The other thing was, when I used to do therapy, I'd sit with parents and one of the parents would start to cry.
They'd say, I just wanted to feel good about himself. I struck me many years ago. I said, I think it would be easier for us to help him feel good about himself if we weren't worried sick. Somebody introduced me some years ago to this idea of a non-exious presence.
I love the idea. I love the term. I didn't make it up, unfortunately, but I was introduced to it. The idea is that independent school in Washington, D.C.
asked me to do a program with parents on how to become a non-exious presence. I never quite thought about it in terms of parenting. I realized if you got an infant who's crying and wailing, it's a lot easier to sue them if you stay calm. If you got a two-year-old who's having a tantrum in the store, it's a lot easier to handle if you stay calm.
If you got a 16-year-old who's coming home and girlfriend is bumping, if you can stay calm, you can be much more helpful. We know that kids are more stressed and they're certainly much more fearful. It's like the message that young kids get is be very afraid. They get older.
It seems to be very afraid. Given how many kids are so anxious and fearful. And you've really seen that rise? Well, I see my own practice, but the statistics on it are just mind-boggling.
The search in general now calls the status of mental health and adolescence, the defining public health crisis of our lifetime. I think for parents of young children, there's so much we can do to strengthen them. I think in part, if we move in the direction of being a non-exious presence, we help kids in dozens of ways. For example, if a little kid falls in the playground and our kids learn to react to things that happen to them, in part by watching other parents react.
And so so many kids, they fall in the playground and they look to say, shall I cry? Am I okay? If we stay calm, it's different. Oh, honey, are you okay?
And I'm not saying if something really bad, we shouldn't be nurturing. We want to be nurturing, I think in our first book we spoke with this book. It's going to be a magical character. And he says to these group of kids that I'm sorry I couldn't keep you safe.
And the kids say, you did something much more important. You helped us feel brave. And part of the way I think about this non-exious presence is not being overly emotionally reactive, not being burdened by excessive anxiety or worry, and being able to communicate that courageous attitude as opposed to a fearful one. Because there's a lot of things that you can worry about in this world and I'm saying we should never worry.
It helps us stay safe in many ways. Ideally, if what we communicate is, yeah, that makes me actually stupid, but I know I can handle it. And you can too. It's a very powerful way to help kids develop confidence that they can handle stuff and also to communicate that courage.
I'd love any thoughts about what I just said and I'll tell you some of the ways that we think about encouraging parents to move in that direction of being a non-exious presence. For me, when you said courageous, that really hits home for me because I started to imagine, and this is when I had to take my upset first toddler out of a grocery store or someplace or when I had to do anything. I would see myself and I've talked about this, the parents that listen here probably for me say it, but I would put out a superhero suit, like in my mind, to be confident for you because I'm very sensitive. I tend to take on everybody else's moods of my child afraid that affects me too and then I'm sure I affect them back.
And I would imagine if you were a fire person coming in here to help somebody that had to jump out of a building, you know, you would be very confident for them. You would know that this is the most important thing, that you weren't panicking and that you weren't afraid and that you believed that they could follow into that net and they'd be okay. So I take it to that level. I really needed a lot of work.
And what I found is it's easier for me to be courageous for my child than for myself. Yeah, and my co-author in our second book, he has a twin brother, and he has an EMT. And what he does, he goes into situations. I'm an emergency situation in a family.
He says, I think we're under control here. You don't have to panic. Should I let you know if it's time to worry? You know, it's just modeling because when we wrote our first book, the Self-Dramed Job, one of the things we emphasized is the research on what's called stress, stress, and contagion.
The idea of stress is contagious. I mean, if you're around a really stressful person, your brain picks that up and it increases your stress level. As we're researching our second book, I learned that one of the mantras of the Navy seals is calm is contagious. And it's contagious because all emotions are contagious.
And that's part of the reason why I encourage parents to move in that direction of being a non-anxious presence in your family, because then what you do is you communicate, you infuse calmness in your family and your kids feeling. Yeah. How else can parents do that when there are so many concerns, especially as parents? You know, there's a lot of concerns in the world and then there's concerns as parents, which magnify everything.
One of the things we talk about, I think in the introduction to Self-Dramed Child is that most human beings are living the safest time in the safe and place in human history. And many of our fears as parents are related to the 24-7 news cycle and the fear that the parents have of young children like being abducted is all based on that we get these alerts and it turns out that the rates of child abduction are extremely low except for parents are divorced. One parent will take a kid without the other parent knowing it. But the perception of danger is much greater than it really is.
So that's one thing. What I ask parents to do is to take a long view in the sense that most kids turn out fine. And because I test kids who have problems and I've fallen kids for 40 years, I know that in vast majority of kids, even the ones I see are having problems, they turn out fine. In fact, I got a Christmas card two years ago, Janet, and the outside said, you were right.
I opened it up and it's a picture of these three young adults with their spouses and the parents had written, they all turned out great. Ah, yeah, these are kids who I evaluated very points, started in the mid-1990s through the early 2000s and I hadn't seen any of them 10 years. And I just got an email from my mom who I saw, I thought she was eight, who's now like 38. And she had autism.
And she did my job saying she's just so great, doing so great. So just take a long view and remember that all our worry about our kids is about something happening now, oh my God, this is not going to get better. And it's because of low sense of control, it's the most stressful thing you can experience in the whole world. That if we don't know if a kid has a problem and we don't know how to solve it, it's very stressful.
So we kind of work on ourselves as you did, Janet, to experience more of that kind of inner calm so that we can radiate that calm to our family. We train ourselves to remember that if I don't get stuck, my kids are not going to get stuck and we can take stuff to solve these problems. And that usually they turn out really good. So if our children are going to feel that sense of control, unless we feel that sense of control, we can maybe derive our sense of control from that visualization or belief that trust that might probably will be just fine and get through these things.
And you know what, our job as parents is not as complicated as I think we can make it just like with the news cycles, there's so much parenting advice out for people now. And it's overwhelming and it can sound like this is such an intricate thing. You know, it's something that we're putting out there to try to help the various parenting advisors, me, it can make it appear as if, oh, there's so many details we have to get right. Really, those are just supposed to help you if you're stuck maybe, but it's not that complicated.
It's really not. And you and I have adult children can acknowledge I have three adult children also. I remember my son had tanks and learning disabilities and I worried about the things about the ticks and about the teeth and that. And I realized the most important thing I can do to help myself is to work on my own fear of my own anxiety and realizing that my fear is all about as he got older, if his ticks were terrible that might affect him negatively somehow.
And he's a PhD psychologist. He's a very successful, wonderful human being, beautiful, wide, beautiful children. And but yeah, I had a lot of worry. But I realized that I was more upset than he was.
And I just worked at it. What I realized is that if I see kids going through a hard patch, that I see it, this is part of their path and I'm going to help them through it as opposed to thinking this is a disaster that perspective of accepting where kids are. We think about the idea of unconditional love and unconditional acceptance, arguably the most important thing we can do for our kids is let them know we love them immeasurably no matter what they do or how hard they try or how they behave. This is one of the ways that we do it.
And if we look back at our own lives, how many rough spots have we all had? And how positive were those for us? Right. Before we started recording this, you mentioned this experience I talked about in the subject of a child where when I was in first grade, I cried the whole first week.
I'd never been in a situation where I didn't know anybody. None of my friends from kindergarten were in my first grade class. But I was kind of a little bit on the anxious side anyway. And one day, the girl said next week said, this word, the bill is crying.
And she said, he's going to be fine. And I realized she's just modeling this non-anxious presence and communicating confidence that I could handle it. I love that teacher. She's got an award of some kind.
I mean, and how simple that is. She believed in you. She believed in you. And that feels good.
Well, I know there's this new program, it's a brilliant program out of Yale for helping kids with anxiety, the acronym is Space. It's supported parenting for anxious, childhood emotions. And one of the main things parents are taught to do is to express empathy. But I know this is really scary for you.
And then, but I'm 100% confident that you can handle it. Because what we do, because we're mammals, what we do when kids find something stressful, we try to protect them from it. If a little kid is afraid to go into the bathroom by himself, we go in the with him, like that kind of thing. And it turns out that we make that kind of accommodation to a kid's anxiety.
It just makes them more anxious. And so what we're taught to do is to eventually not make those accommodations. But the first step is to express that. I know that going into the bathroom by yourself makes you anxious.
But I'm also 100% confident that you can handle it, which requires us to manage our own anxiety and then to communicate confidence that you can handle it. So that we communicate that that way of courageous attitude. That's so important, I think. But again, it all stems from the trust that we have in, I guess, ourselves as parents and therefore toward their children.
You said it well in your book, it takes courage to trust a child to make decisions, to trust in a child's brain development, to ignore the pressures that cause us to protect our kids from themselves or to be overly involved in their lives. It takes courage to face our fears about the future. It also takes humility to accept that we don't often know what's in our kid's best interest. It takes a change in mindset to focus on ourselves, our own emotions and attitudes as an extremely important element of our child bearing.
Yeah. I like that five years later, I still like it. I like it too. But then you also say as hard as all of this is, the harder route by far is trying to control what we really can't.
Yeah. In the book, we talk about some postulates of motivation. And one of them is that you can't make a kid do something against their will. And I think that knowing that knowing that, knowing you really can't make another human, even a little kid, you can't make a little kid do something.
You know, if your kid, you need to get in the car to go see grandma and they don't want to get their refusing, you can pick them up and put in the car. But then they are getting the car. You're putting in the car. You really can't make somebody do something.
And when you make peace with that, that if I really theoretically, I really couldn't make him do something, you make peace with that, you realize, well, that's not my rule. It couldn't be my responsibility. I was making the right thing. And for me, as older I get, and the more I see that some disaster looks like a disaster, it leads to something really good.
I get more humble about knowing what's in a kid's best interest. And inclined to take that attitude that this is your life and you get to figure it out. And I'm going to help you. We talk about the idea as parents being a consultant to their kid rather than their boss or their manager or their homework police, who's always running their lives.
Because our goal is for kids to be able to run their own lives before they leave home. And that's why it's adjusted to parents of young children is think about, you're going to start turning over the keys that you're five-year-old. But the idea is, let's move in that direction. Moving it for myself, I'm going to go in the direction of a non-atrized presence who can support my kid in making wise decisions, practice making decisions for themselves, learning from their feedback, who can trust my kids.
I can say, I have confidence you can solve these problems. That's my rule. And the kids' role eventually is to figure out who they want to be and be able to run their own life. And I say that because I was giving the lecture about the self-driven child in Houston before the pandemic.
And I happened to mention the most elite high school in Washington, DC. And a woman came up to me afterwards and said, I'm a therapist at the manager of clinic hearing and Houston. This really good mental health clinic in Houston. And she said, we know this school in DC really well because so many of the graduates get into the top colleges in the country.
But as soon as they get to be, as soon as they realize that everybody's there as far as they are, or as soon as they ask a girl out, she dumps them. They can't handle it. So they take a medical leap of absence and become here for treatment. And she said to the one, they just don't have enough experience making their own decisions, solving their own problems, running their own life.
And I just, I gave a lecture recently. This guy came up and he said, I just finished my doctoral dissertation on promoting autonomy in two-year-olds. But do you want to do it this way or this way? Start out by giving them limited number of choices so that you're coming back to that respect for it that you mentioned earlier.
So for the parents that listen to her regularly and know my work, they know that a lot of what this podcast ends up being about is how to actually set limits the children and have those boundaries for them and all of those things which are to me in a different category than what you're talking about, but not completely. I mean, we still give children choices with things that we have to help them do, like getting into the car seat, for example. Do you want to be the one to go in by yourself? But we do have to take charge of them because if we don't, that creates a kind of stress that doesn't help them to function either.
As we say in self-taught and childhood, this idea of being consulted doesn't mean that the kids, the boss, the family, we see this squarely in the tradition of what's called authoritative parenting as opposed to authoritarian or laissez-faire. And in authoritative parenting, we're the guides of the family. We're the leaders of the family and we work out limits with kids. And ideally, so three or four, we sit down and talk about limits so that they're agreed upon and everybody knows and they feel fair.
We want to minimize the extent to which we're forcing limits when we're mad, go to your rim, but if little kids have too much freedom, as you said, it just makes them anxious. They can't help them. Kids with laissez-faire and parenting where there's fair limits, fair rules, family rules that are enforced, it makes them really anxious because young people, they need to feel that my parents are in charge. And ultimately from that position, we treat them respectfully and know that the way kids become good decision makers is by practicing to make decisions.
And the way kids learn to treat other people respectfully is by being treated respectfully. So we can give kids choices, we can give them freedom, we don't let them walk over us. They are the boss of the family. They can't do anything they want.
It's a delicate balance, but it's doable if we realize that kids need limits and it's really good to treat your kid respectfully, like he or she is a human being who has a mind of her own. And it's also true that when we treat kids respectfully, they're more likely to go along with us. When they feel loved and appreciated and enjoyed, it's more likely to just go along with us not fight us. That's where on the same team, they know that they feel that.
The way I see it and teach it again from infancy, so there's two areas, even though we want to make a children's choice when they can handle it, sometimes they can in the kind of boundary type situations or situations in their care where they really need us to take the lead. But then there's this whole other area of play learning that's theirs that belongs to them and the more we support that while staying in our lane and not trying to micromanage it and decide what it should be, the better. I love that. It makes a complete sense to me.
That's how I learned this and it just felt really clear. Like I'm a person that needs things to be very, very clear in my mind to be able to even try to do them. Yeah. And I really feel like my major mission and certainly one of the reasons that I've been I wanted to write this up to a child is to help your parents feel that it's safe.
It's safe not to worry about your kid all the time. It's safe to feel that you can trust your kids a lot of time. It's safe to feel that you aren't supposed to know who they're supposed to be and what they're supposed to be like or what's always right for them. You couldn't know because when something happens to a kid, do you judge whether it was good or bad the next day or five years later or 10 years later?
Certainly one of the most important experiences of my entire life was the first time I went to graduate school in English literature, I went for 20 straight weeks and I didn't turn into single assignments. I was just so anxious and insecure. I worked with a lot of underachievers and I said 20 weeks, I turned to nothing. Not that.
I have nightmares about that. But the point is, so at the second quarter, I turned to anything I flunked out and I felt like my whole life had gone up in smoke. And it took me about a month to realize is the best possible thing could have happened. No way should I have been an English professor.
I always felt like an imposter. I felt that I'm out of my league. I wanted to do something with children. All my professors gave me incomplete.
It's one flunk me so I couldn't go back. And I prayed that I'd meet him and be able to thank him. But honestly, God Jan, two years later, I walk on the campus of University of Washington where I'm taking some classes in education and I see this guy. And I go up to him and I say, you probably don't remember.
He didn't remember it. But I said, you flunked me two years ago. It was the best possible thing that could have happened to me. Thank you.
It was a very satisfying experience. But the point is that if we see what kids are going through as part of their path to figure their lives out and our job is to support them and help them. And as you said, to provide structure and direction is necessary. It's just a lot easier.
Yeah, it works better for us. It's easier. It's less stressful. It's going to be staying our lane and let them do their work and we do ours and trust everybody to do their job.
It's safe to do it. And I great confidence that you do because I walk this walk with my own kids and I do wonderful adult children who grew up in no academic pressure at all and both at PhDs. And this approach of really fostering a sense of control as they get older, playing more that consultant role to help them figure out who they want to be. The three questions that I ask to think about my relationship with kids is who's life is it, whose responsibility is it and whose problem is it?
And I want to remember that I don't know who they want to be. They're like, I want to remember that I don't want to take responsibility for something that is really a kid's responsibility, like to be their homework, for example. And also that I don't want to solve problems that they're capable of solving themselves. And you share so many incredible case studies and you have a whole chapter on navigating learning disabilities, ADHD and autism spectrum disorders and how your approach can work with children that have those challenges.
And yeah, I mean, the other thing that you said is the enjoyment factor. So not only is it easy for us when we're not trying to do jobs that aren't going to work for us because they're not our job, we're not as able to enjoy the unfolding of the person because we're so busy worrying about if they're measuring up in this way or that way. And you offer these points around being a non-anxious presence. Make enjoying your kids, your top parenting priority.
Don't fear the future. Maybe easier said than done. Yeah, I mean, we got to put trust out there, right? Yes, yes.
The joy might be said, when I used to do therapy, starting about 35 years ago, I did a lot of therapy with parents. And what we came to me was that let's set our highest parenting priority is simply enjoying your child. Because when you enjoy your child, she experiences herself as a joy-producing organism, as opposed to an anxiety-producing or an anger-producing or frustration-producing organism. And it's not that we have to enjoy the 30 seconds.
But the idea is just being spontaneously enjoyed. That's how people have a sense. I'm likeable. And so what I do with parents is that we work backwards.
Let's make that our goal. What's keeping you from enjoying your kid most of the time? And it may be some behavioral thing. It may be something in the marriage.
It may be some of the pressures at work. Maybe insomnia. Let's work on these things. So the goal being to enjoy your kid.
So your kids start to see himself as a joy-producing organism. Yes. And it also can be because we're trying to do right by our child, putting up on the team, or whatever. And that we're dragging them to practice because they don't want to go.
And it's impossible to enjoy your child that way. But what I remember is when I could observe my children playing, which they allowed me to do about to the age of five. But their ideas and I just remember one time my daughter, she was like, I was a child. I was waiting for me yet.
I was teaching actually and she had to come that day. And I see her over there. She was using paper clips like something that was there. And she was making people out of paper clips and they were talking to each other without even bending them or destroying them or anything.
She made up this whole story with paper clips. And it's just that kind of stuff that children do that's so cool. And we can really see who they are and their imagination and interests and all of these things. It's so much more interesting.
But anyway, I'm going to finish your list here. Don't fear the future. Commit to your own stress management. Make peace with your worst fears.
Adopt an attitude of non-judgmental acceptance. Yeah. What is that? Mental acceptance.
Well, I think most parents kind of buy the idea that it helps kids to feel that they're loved unconditionally. And I think what that means is kind of warts and all. And it means that we accept them and we love them and we approve of them even if they're having a hard time, even if they're trying to figure stuff out. And so this non-judgmental acceptance just means that if they're acting badly, we'll intervene in some ways.
But we would take the attitude that we aren't judgmental. We're going to give them the idea you're a bad kid or this is not acceptable to me kind of everything. That we deal with and respectfully and say this isn't working. Or I don't let people talk to me that we all see in five minutes.
And we would find ways of disrespectful to the kid and give the kid the message, I can handle. I can handle your strong feelings. I can handle your bad behavior. Because we know there's a reason they're acting like that.
Exactly. It's going on inside them. It's hardly ever really about us. So we don't need to take care of them.
Right. Part of the goal of becoming a non-acious presence is that when we're in call, we're much better listeners. We're much better able to convey empathy, to express empathy for kids. We're less controlling.
And we're much more able to solve the problem or figure out the issue because we're not under stress. Exactly right. Just recognizing that once you're stressed or your kid is stressed, you can't think of it. Don't bother trying to teach a lesson or don't try to tell your kids something that they can really get their attention.
If you're stressed and they're stressed because they really can't hear it because we have all to respond instinctively. So the prefrontal cortex that can think logically and rationally, basically you get shut down because the last thing you'd want to do if you're being attacked by a William Ameth is to stop and think about it. So that recognizing that we start to feel stressed is not the right time to lecture our kid or to try to teach him something. We say, I want to talk about this.
I want to help you with this. But I'm a little stressed right now. I'm going to take a walk or I'm going to go in my room for a few minutes. But I would come back and let us work this out.
This not anxious presence is a powerful idea. It's a goal. And it's a goal moment to moment. I feel like it's not like, oh, I got it.
I'm the not anxious presence forever. It's something that we're constantly just trying to keep in our mind the importance of. And we see when we do it that it really helps. It helps calm that person down.
It helps them pass through it. It helps them figure things out and not get stuck in our stuff. I could talk to you all day long. Gosh, I'm fascinated by all these topics that you're an expert on.
I would love to have you come back another time and go over one of these other topics. But for now, I want to thank you so much for speaking with me today, sharing all your knowledge. As you say, we think of chronic stress in children as teenagers as the societal equivalent of climate change, a problem that has been building over generations and will take considerable effort and a change of habits to overcome. And that's what you say in your book.
And wow, that's scary. But we can all be taking steps in that direction. The idea is we want a calmer world or a more peaceful world. And we work on that ourselves.
There's so many things that we can do to make clients better for ourselves and our kids. And we can model for our kids, really taking good care of ourselves. And we work on our own stress management, whether it's exercise or meditation or yoga. We model for our kids that I take care of myself so I can be at the top of my game.
And I think we're working with you. Not much, but try to enjoy our kids. Even as they get older too. I'm having just as much fun if not more with my adult children as I do.
My little ones. And I love working with little ones. That's why I do it. It's true.
And I love being a parent at every age. I loved raising teenagers and having young adults is just fabulous. It's a great role. Same.
All right. Thank you so much. My pleasure, Janet. All right.
You take care. You take care. Okay. Bye.
Please check out some of the other podcasts on my website, Janet-Lansbury.com. They're all indexed by subject categories. So you should be able to find whatever topic you might be interested in. Thanks so much for listening.
We can do this.