Dr. Vanessa (00:00):

The measure of success when it comes to discipline has nothing to do with your child’s behavior. The measure of success when it comes to discipline has everything to do with your behavior. And since we are the adults with presumably fully formed brains, it’s upon us to figure out how do we regulate ourselves in those moments so that we can show up and co-regulate our children?

Dr. Sarah (00:34):

What does discipline look like when it’s centered around supporting a child’s growth rather than just managing their actions? That is what I’ll be discussing with this week’s guest, Dr. Vanessa Lapointe. For those of you not already familiar with Vanessa, she’s a parenting educator, counselor and author of Discipline Without Damage: How to Get Your Kids to Behave Without Messing Them Up, and also Parenting Right from The Start: Laying A Healthy Foundation in the Baby and Toddler Years. Throughout our conversation, we offer practical tips for managing children’s big feelings and big behaviors, powerful insights about leaning into our connection with our kids, especially those sensitive kiddos and personal and oh so relatable stories like the time Vanessa’s son bit her, and the time my daughter head butted me, and how we both responded.

(01:31):

Hi, I’m Dr. Sarah Bren, a clinical psychologist and mom of two. In this podcast, I’ve taken all of my clinical experience, current research on brain science and child psychology, and the insights I’ve gained on my own parenting journey and distilled everything down into easy to understand and actionable parenting insights so you can tune out the noise and tune into your own authentic parenting voice with confidence and calm. This is securely attached. Hello, we have Dr. Vanessa Lapointe here on the podcast today. I’m so grateful to beginning to sit down and talk with you. Welcome.

Dr. Vanessa (02:13):

Likewise, and thank you for having me. It’s awesome to be here.

Dr. Sarah (02:17):

So a lot of people who are listening are probably familiar with your work, but if they’re not, can you share a little bit about what you specialize in and how you got interested in this line in the field? Psychology is broad. How come this ended up being your path?

Dr. Vanessa (02:36):

So I always knew growing up that I would work with children in some capacity, and I really thought that that would be working directly with children, which is how I started my career as a psychologist. I did session after session with young children who were struggling with behavior and anxiety and trauma and other kinds of things, and I realized pretty quickly that a lot of the, that came from facilitating positive change in a child’s life was actually talking with their parents about how the parents were kind of setting up the child’s world, how they were responding to the child inside of that world and how the child’s needs were or weren’t being met, not necessarily because parents weren’t good parents and sometimes because it’s really hard to figure out what are those needs and how do we meet them. So I had sort of become interested in exploring more of that, and then I became a mother and very quickly I realized that pretty much everything that I had learned in my somewhat behaviorist centric training really didn’t sit well. And at that point I began to study the greats like Gordon Neufeld and Dan Siegel and folks like that, and really found my entire orientation and how I approached my practice at changing significantly.

Dr. Sarah (04:09):

I love that. It’s so funny. I had a similar but slightly different path. I started out working not with kids, but with adults with chronic childhood trauma.

(04:22):

And when I had a kid, when I started getting really interested in the psychology of parenthood and just not even the psychology part, just as a mom being like, how do I raise my kid? I don’t know, tell me books. And I realized in learning and digging into parenting content and stuff as a new parent, it was like, oh, some of the things that really resonate with me are actually things I do with my adult patients to undo the things that they went through in their childhood. And that’s when it kind of clicked for me. I was like, if I can help parents understand attachment relationships and healthy communication and boundaries and all that stuff, then I might be able to help parents prevent a lot of the stuff that I was seeing in my practice. And so I pivoted to the parenting space similarly. I was like, well, there is something here. I want to combine two things that I don’t think are getting talked about at, which I think is very much why I love your stuff because we’ve drank in the same Coolaid.

Dr. Vanessa (05:26):

Yeah, girl.

Dr. Sarah (05:28):

Yeah. Okay. And you have a book, you have a couple books, but Discipline Without Damage was definitely a book that I was hoping to kind of dig into a little or just your work around discipline. I talk with, I do a lot of parenting support and I talk to parents a lot about, okay, what does discipline mean to you? And I’m sure you’ve had the same experience, but there’s a million different ways of defining it and they’re not all consistent and actually probably could be defined in a different way. But I don’t know. I’m curious how you describe to parents what the frame of discipline really is and how we have it’s gotten kind of convoluted and contradictory over the years and maybe clarify how you teach that concept.

Dr. Vanessa (06:23):

Yeah, I would say that as part of my central focus, when I begin to talk about discipline with parents, I’m spending a lot of time bringing to light concepts like co-regulation and what’s involved in really structuring the neural architecture of the human brain so that your child eventually one day is going to be pretty self-sufficient. And being able to manage their big feelings, make good choices, cope with stress, cope with change, all of the things that are going to come our way as human beings. And so it really is about how do we take discipline and make it be something that’s going to really support our child’s growth rather than get in the way of that growth. And from there then we get to have conversations about the importance of connection and why everything that we do with our children, the way that we respond to them, especially when they’re dysregulated, needs to center on connection and then linking that back to how the brain goes and grows. And so there gets to sort of be this coming together of a lot of different concepts related to discipline under this big umbrella of co-regulation.

Dr. Sarah (07:42):

And if people are now some people, you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while. You definitely have heard about co-regulation, but if you are just tuning in or maybe you missed those episodes, which we’ll link in the show notes, how would you describe co-regulation and why is that a precursor? Before we’re going to start looking at, because parents are always like, but okay, just tell me what to do. Just tell me what to do, what they do this, tell me what to do. And they do this. And so what I think is really important before we can do the teaching, they’ve got to have the part of their brain that can learn online. So could you explain how co-regulation gets to that?

Dr. Vanessa (08:23):

Yeah, so when our children are distressed either because they’re emotionally upset about something, maybe they’re physically uncomfortable or something has hurt them or they’ve got other sorts of things like they’re getting sick, they’re over tired, whatever, it’s when our kids are dysregulated, what they need is to be able to borrow some calm from our nervous system. IE be co-regulate by our presence. And so when we can come in and be the lighthouse in the midst of that storm rather than adding more stress, more discomfort to the storm that they’re already in the middle of, then we can co-regulate. Now, when you are co-regulating a nervous system, the vehicle by which you can do that really powerfully is relationship. And so I often talk about the co-regulation bridge, which is the way that we get access to our children’s brains is we walk across this bridge that we have built through the relationship that we have with our children, and when we’re able to do that, then we can actually calm that brain down, get the cortical layers of the brain, the outer layers of the brain sort of settled on top of this emotional core that’s been really reacting.

(09:46):

And when that all comes together, which may take five seconds, five minutes, five hours or five days, when that all comes together, now we’ve got something to work with. Now we can actually have a conversation about why we don’t use our hands to solve our problems and all the other things that we are working on with our children as they maneuver childhood.

Dr. Sarah (10:11):

And I often field questions around co-regulation and going towards that connection and that relationship bridge in the midst of some chaos, in the midst of perhaps even some destructive or aggressive or unacceptable behaviors. A lot of the questions that then follow is, well, are we just teaching them that that’s okay? Is that just reinforcing that bad behavior? And so how do you help parents reorganize their framework for what we’re defining as a bad behavior versus a dysregulated behavior and how that can help? We have to have a different way of looking at the whole picture, I think, to be able to really kind of shift to this model. How do you help people get there?

Dr. Vanessa (11:12):

Well, the first thing that I do is we scrub the word misbehavior from our vocabulary that there’s no such thing that we’re just going to look upon all behavior as communication and we’re going to look for what’s being communicated through that meltdown, through that lashing out, through that yelly shoddy moment, whatever. It’s the other piece that I like to land on is the ABCs of behavior, and so is the antecedent, the thing that comes before the behavior. The B is the behavior, and then the C is the consequence or the thing that comes after the behavior in sort of old school ways of approaching discipline. There’s a very extreme focus on the the thing that comes after the behavior like retroactively. We’re somehow going to squash that behavior by applying this negative kind of outcome to the behavior. As a developmentalist, I don’t actually find any value in focusing on that C. The value actually comes entirely from focusing on the antecedent, the thing that comes before. Now what’s on the list of things that come before? Well, it’s your kid doing that day. Has there been a lot of change in their life? Are they a very sensitive child or are they a kid who kind of goes with the flow of life and isn’t overly fussed about those things?

(12:42):

What did they have happened earlier in the day? How did they sleep last night? Did your dog die last week? There’s all these environmental kinds of things alongside a foundational belief that children are inherently worthy, they’re inherently good, they’re inherently valued for the simple fact that they breathe. And so when I can look upon a child and all I see is potential and then I’m really inspired to come alongside them and want to make life work for them, I want to figure out those antecedent kinds of things. I want to be the big person that structures life in such a way that child’s nervous system gets to grow as nature intended. And I’ll tell you a story. My youngest son who’s a very sensitive kind of human and very alerted to a lot of things, I was on the road doing a series of speaking engagements and had brought him along for the ride and it just so happened that there was a children’s fair happening in the city that I was speaking in.

(13:52):

And so the organizers of the event had arranged for my children and I to attend, and they had this gorgeous big blow up bouncy castle with a slide. And my three-year old was like in three-year old heaven. He just thought this was the best thing. And the way that the ride worked is that you gave them your ticket and then you had a certain amount of time to go kind of in and out and up and down this bouncy castle slide. And I knew that his time was coming to an end, and so I was letting him know one more slide and then we’re going to go. And it came time to leave and I picked him up and he was very upset about the fact that he had to leave the ride and he just leaned over and with all of his upper and lower teeth grabbed onto my arm in a really big bite.

(14:42):

That bite left a hard looking purple bruise and a bunch of puncture wounds from all of his little teeth, which I just actually thought gave me a bunch of street cred as a parent. Woke up the next day and then a few days later we were still on the road. He wasn’t feeling well, and so I was walking the floor with him and just kind of bouncing him and soothing him and all of the things. And he happened to look over at my arm while I was holding him and very gently he took his little three-year-old hand and he ran it over top of the bruise and he looked at me and he said, I bitch you and you loved me. So I use that example. He was three years old, and so often people say these things like, well, aren’t you just teaching them to bite? No. What my son learned out of that was the incredible power of being gentle and respectful in the way that we respond. And did that mean that he never bit or hit me again? No. Have you met a sensitive three-year-old, but he was biting and hitting only because he had lost control of his ability to manage his own body and his responses, not because he was a bad kid.

Dr. Sarah (16:03):

And when in control, and I see this all the time when I’m working with families is when a child’s out of control, they can do really destructive things that genuinely fluster scare and rage the parents, and we as parents can then kind of hold our child to that moment. Their worst moment gets kind of crystallized for us. It’s like, this is what kid could be like and this is what I’m working against versus, and it’s very hard then to remember in those hot moments how our kid is when they’re integrated, when they’re soft, when they’re in their sort of full self, when they’re really themselves and your son in that moment when he was running his finger over your bruise, that’s his integrated core self. That’s him being him. He was always there before, during and after that bite. And it’s important I think I always like to help parents be like, okay, yeah, your kid has these moments where they flip their lid and they’re doing these really scary things and that’s really not them. That’s their reptilian brain or that’s their, that is a, they’re on autopilot threat response mode in that moment, and we have to really stay connected to the integrated kid, the kid that goes and kisses their brother when their brother’s having a hard time, not the kid that punches their brother in the face in that moment.

Dr. Vanessa (17:42):

Exactly.

Dr. Sarah (17:42):

It’s hard though. It’s hard. I mean, we have to unlearn a lot of stuff that we have consciously and very unconsciously internalized from the past too, to be able to say, I’m allowed to not focus only on the B or the C, I’m allowed to focus on the A. I’m allowed to also stay connected to the kid who’s got the regulated part of my kid that’s not showing up right now, but I’m still talking to them. I’m always trying to talk to that part of my kid.

Dr. Vanessa (18:19):

Because that’s the truth of who they are. That’s the core of their being that represents their actual self, and it’s those challenging behaviors creep in when they’re having to take flight from their actual self to sort of survive. I love Neil Donald Walsh wrote this beautiful book called The Little Soul in the Sun, and he talks about without dark, you couldn’t know light. You have to have here to know there and left to know right and up to no down. And when you have a child who is sometimes really explosive and sometimes really reactive and can lash out and all of those things, always remember that the equal but opposite effect also exists because those kids who flip their lids and go sky high almost every single time are the same kids who have the biggest squishiest, softest hearts and are really at the effect of this kind of crazy world that we live in. When we can hold that in mind, we can get back to the truth of who they are.

Dr. Sarah (19:32):

Then that bridge you were talking about earlier is more accessible to us.

Dr. Vanessa (19:35):

True.

Dr. Sarah (19:35):

It’s very hard to want to cross a bridge to soothe a child that just bits your arm.

(19:42):

It’s a lot easier to go across a bridge that takes you to the kid that snuggles you, but we have to remember that this bridge that looks like it’s taking us to the kid that just bit our arm is actually taking us to the kid that’s super snuggly and we’ve got to soften. We have to find a way to find our soften moment. Sometimes I’ll tell parents when they’re really, really losing it on the inside to be like, just look at their little fingers. Do whatever you need to do to remind yourself they’re itsy, bitsy and cute. That’s why they’re built that way. They’re built to be cute. Evolutionarily speaking, we’ve evolved to have really cute babies with big eyes and bubbly heads and little fingers because we soften more when we look at them when they’re doing horrible, horrible stuff that drives us bonkers.

Dr. Vanessa (20:33):

That’s right, and it really does bring us back to why as parents, the measure of success when it comes to discipline has nothing to do with your child’s behavior. The measure of success when it to discipline has everything to do with your behavior. And since we are the adults with presumably fully formed brains, it’s upon us to figure out how do we regulate ourselves in those moments so that we can show up and co-regulate our children. And that’s where parents are invited to do their own work, so they get to be their best selves. They get to be their true selves in the way that they’re responding to their kids.

Dr. Sarah (21:19):

Are there certain, if you’re working with a parent who obviously if they’re working with you, they’re aware and they’re motivated to try to do this work, but we all have our where we start moments and they could have a long way to go. If you’re working with a parent who really struggles to keep their cool and stay soft, and it’s to really unpack a lot of stories about how I’m not really doing my job. If I’m not disciplining with shame or punishment, where do you start with them? What is the beginning? What’s the first step in getting this skill down?

Dr. Vanessa (21:58):

Usually, and it depends a lot on where the parent is at because parents do come in all sorts of different stages along this glorious path of growth. I will start with a conversation about this mantra that I landed on several years ago. The mantra is see it, then feel it, then be it. And that most of parenting stops at see it. We see the behavior. We don’t like the behavior, we squash the behavior. But what if we looked at the behavior as this sort of external facade and our first move was to get behind that wall? What would you feel if you were to be connected to your child in the moment they just lashed out and hit their kid’s sibling? What’s going on inside your child that they would hit? Can you feel for them the kind of distress and the upset and the perception of things being so unjust?

(22:58):

Can you feel that for them? Because as soon as you can feel that for them, then you will be not do because human beings, not human doings, then you will be for them in the moment what it is that they need. You will find the words, you will find the energy, you will find the tone to show up as a human being alongside your child. The challenge becomes in feeling it for our child, we are often blocked from that because we’re so mired in feeling it for ourselves. And when we can land on that, there becomes this sort of open door to go back to that parent’s own childhood. We parent as we were parented, we will teach as we were taught. And so that environment when we were very young became our mind. And now our mind, and this is from a Dan Siegel quote, our mind is now creating the environment in which our children are living and growing.

(24:01):

And so it’s on us to understand what is that mind all about? How come I get so reactive when my one child hits my other child? If that’s really normal behavior for a 3-year-old or a 7-year-old or whatever their age is, then how come I’m so reactive about it? And the answer to that is probably going to have something to do with how hitting hands were reacted to in your home. So what would’ve happened when you were a child and a sibling hit another sibling because of the times, we can probably assume that there would’ve been a smack to the bottom or there would’ve been some kind of loud response meant to squash that behavior. And now you’re a parent observing these same behaviors in your own children and it’s like somebody’s lit your hair on fire. Your kids are doing normal things, so why is your hair lit on fire? It’s because that child inside of you where all the ages that we have ever been, so we carry them with us for the rest of our days that five-year-old inside of you is freaking out because they’re like, whoa, you need to stop the hitting. Somebody’s going to get hurt. And not by the children, but by the parents. Yes. That’s what we get to work on.

Dr. Sarah (25:21):

I always say, I’m so glad you said that. I often, I think a lot of people will hear, well, they’ll follow us all the way up until that point, and then they say, I’ve internalized my mom, I’m hearing my mom’s voice. I’m just like my mom, or I’m just like my dad. I’m just being them. And I’m always like, no, no, no, no. You’re being the five-year-old that was being disciplined by mom or dad and you’re screaming not, you’re not supposed to do this because I am going to punish you. You’re screaming, oh crap, someone’s going to come and scream at us. Someone’s going to like, I got to stop you kid from doing this because I know I’m a kid too, and it’s not safe. And the panic. And also when our five-year-old selves show up as our driver of the car have driver’s licenses for a reason, they are not as equipped as we adult parents are. But it’s really hard to not get that five-year-old jumping out. But I find that when we shift that interpretation of this situation is like, oh my gosh, I’m being my five-year-old self right now. I’m being scared, not mad.

(26:33):

Then this pressure to parent correctly goes away and it’s like, oh, what does that five-year-old me need? And then it’s really easy to say, what does my five-year-old child need? Because if I can recognize what I need, what my inner child needs, and I can get there and give it to myself, I could. I just stay in that space to give it to my kid.

Dr. Vanessa (26:58):

And you can’t give what you didn’t get, which is the whole thing. You have to give it to yourself in order to be able to give it to your kid. And what happens then is that the inner child gets to witness on the exterior of you with your outer child, gets to witness like a templating of what happens when kids hit and then the inner child is healing while the outer child is growing and everybody gets to evolve and move forward and become their best self parent and child. And I really, I think that’s one of the greatest gifts that our children give us is this golden opportunity because you, I mean, you can get wake up calls in a lot of different ways and there’s nothing like being handed a wake up call by your own child. There’s something so galvanizing about that and so motivating about that we will do for our children what we often won’t do for ourselves. And so they gift us this chance to get to do it again, to get to re-experience childhood and this time in a way that we don’t need to recover from.

Dr. Sarah (28:13):

Or at least not from that. There’s always something.

Dr. Vanessa (28:16):

That’s right.

Dr. Sarah (28:18):

Yeah. I love that. I am curious too, when you think about, so we’re talking about rewriting a lot of our internal narratives. Maybe I’m not mad, maybe I’m actually scared or I can soften with a kid who’s doing something that I might’ve otherwise considered to be bad and I’m not going to reinforce it. I’m actually going to help them reconsolidate and actually build new neural pathways around regulation and safety, which will translate to better behaviors. When we think about what we are actually unlearning, what are the roots of that? What are the consequences of not doing that? The subtitle or the title of your book is Discipline Without Damage. What’s the risk? What are we risking? I don’t want to scare parents, but what could be damaged and how is it ever too late to undo damage? I have parents who have been using discipline strategies that involve really power dynamics and shame dynamics. And again, good parents, really good parents who love their kids deeply and they’re just trying to help their kids to behave in a way that’s going to set them up for success. But as they learn this, then they often experience some grief and a lot of guilt. And maybe I’m curious what your thoughts are around supporting parents through that process of forgiving ourselves and moving in a different direction.

Dr. Vanessa (30:04):

Yeah. Let’s start with right away. It’s never too light. You can have adult children and still get that turned around by healing the relationship and restructuring how you see them and see yourself. So it’s never, ever too late. You can address this across the lifespan. So just take a breath and know that there’s hope in all of that.

Dr. Sarah (30:29):

Yes.

Dr. Vanessa (30:30):

And that guilt piece comes alive so quickly probably because many of us we’re parented with shame and blame kinds of strategies, and so we know guilt and we know it very well. And the first step really is can you accept yourself as the parent who only did what they knew? You can’t change what you didn’t know. You know better now. And so you can shift into that, and I have this resolute belief that absolutely nothing is random, that there was a reason you were meant to start out that way and now you’re shifting to this way at this exact stage in your children’s lives. What that reason is, I sometimes think about my husband who’s a very gifted healer and works with a lot of parents around similar kinds of things, and he had some really challenging things happen in his life growing up, including some what would be called abusive.

(31:35):

Now, reactions from coaches and other kinds of people and those sorts of experiences as he healed as an adult became sort of this opportunity for him to have insight and ways that other people maybe couldn’t have. I really think that those experiences are what allow for him to see the truth of people’s hearts and to get, the parents are just trying to figure it out. If he hadn’t had those experiences, he wouldn’t be so good at what he’s doing now, having helped thousands and thousands of families across the world. And so how do you know it wasn’t supposed to happen exactly as it happened? You can’t know. And so just trust that everything happens the way that it is because it’s supposed to. Why? Because that’s how it happened. And so we can make our peace with that. And guilt is always expressed as anger, so guilt isn’t going to serve anybody.

(32:35):

Guilt is going to be one of those things that just keeps you stuck. So really coming to a place of acceptance that it was what it was and here we are, and when we know better, we do better. And then you can begin to lean into what that’s all about, where you can really take disconnection as a power. You take that out of the way that you respond to your children, and then I double dog dare you to see what kind of magic you’re going to create no matter when it is that you implement that change.

Dr. Sarah (33:08):

Yeah, I love that. I think to this idea of disconnection as a power, not we wield totally power. We’re powerless about a lot of things in parenting that we wish we weren’t powerless about, which is frustrating, and then that makes us double down on what we do have power around. I think it’s actually a really normal response. I get that. I fall into that trap too. My kid isn’t doing the thing I want him to do, so I say, all right, that’s it. If you don’t do this, I’m going to take this thing away that I have some power over. And I literally teach parents the exact opposite of this and still do it because when you get backed into a wall and you lid flips, you reach for these things you do. You’re human. I’m a human. We all have the teeth mark scars on our arms to show it. As you were telling you that story, total side note I made me think of this time, I was about to give a talk at night, and so I was putting my kid to bed and they always know, they always know when you need to do something after their bedtime, even if you don’t even tell ’em, they just feel it and they will not go to bed.

(34:17):

So she was having a complete meltdown. She wouldn’t go to bed, and I was like, oh, we ran out of time. I have to go. And I was doing something too close to her and she had accidentally in the throes of her rage smacked me in my lip with the back of her head, and I had this huge fat lip and I had to go and do a talk to parents about parenting. It was funny. I was like, yeah, I self-disclose as a psychologist when I’m doing individual therapy, I might not self-disclose as much when I’m doing parenting support. I self-disclose a lot because I’m like, yeah, because really hard to be a parent. I have a black lip, a fat lip because my kid just totally attacked me in the middle of a meltdown so that I, and I’m leaving her screaming so I can go to work and now I’m half here, half there. It’s hard solidarity, it’s just not.

Dr. Vanessa (35:16):

Oh yeah, that’s right. I started my doctoral internship where I was an infant psychologist working with kids under the age of six co-located with child protection services and three days before I was meant to start internship. My then 15 month old son, I was leaning over top of him and he jumped up. He didn’t want to be sitting down anymore and smoked my nose with his giant head breaking my nose, oh no. And giving me two black eyes. So imagine me walking in with all these child protection workers and they’re like a too bad about the new child psychologist. Oh my God.

Dr. Sarah (36:00):

Yeah. It’s battle wounds for sure. Now I don’t remember what my original thought was. I have to go back in my head.

Dr. Vanessa (36:08):

Disconnection as power.

Dr. Sarah (36:11):

Oh yeah. So we all do it. We all go there because hi, we’re human. But when we wield the power as it’s usually in a move of desperation, to be honest, and I think our kids smell that it doesn’t work that well. I want it to work, but it doesn’t work well.

Dr. Vanessa (36:37):

And kids know from the get go, that connection is life. Literally a human infant. You can water them and clothe them and feed them and shelter them, but if you don’t love them, they’ll die. It’s a basic human need to feel connection in some sense. And so there is a reason that we are biologically wired to become dysregulated and reactive in the face of disconnection or separation. We could die. It’s like we practice our own death when we face relational disconnection from the humans that mean the most to us and who are supposed to be taking care of us. And so that’s why over time, if you’ve ever seen a parent trying to leave the park or trying to get their kid to walk away from the toy, they’re not going to buy at the toy store. And then the parent says, well, I’m leaving.

(37:36):

You can stay if you want. And then all of a sudden the kid’s like and falling into line and chasing after the parent that air quotes works because the child’s connection to the parent has now been threatened. They’ll do anything to restore the connection. You put a child in timeout, you’ve threatened the connection, so now they will correct their behavior even if it doesn’t serve their development to do so, they’ll correct that behavior to give back into your good graces. So we’re just using their most profound need. It’s so important that it’s right up there with air as a need. We’re using that against them. Do this for me or I will take your error away. Right. Good boy.

Dr. Sarah (38:28):

Right. And I think on the one hand, I know the risks of doing this chronically with kids. It can create all kinds of severe attachment challenges for them, which we know is associated with mental health challenges and relationship challenges and sense of self challeng, all that stuff. And I’m also, I always have one ear on the kid and one ear on the parent, the heartbeat of the kid and the heartbeat on the parent because parents are like, oh God, I have done this and now have I destroyed? What am I the worst? Are you telling me I’m the worst right now? And I’m always so protective of my parents and be like, no, you’re human and this is where repair is the magic thing and practice and learning and being open to changing your strategies, knowing that sometimes the strategies that maybe you teach or I teach are long game strategies. They don’t have that instant gratification. They really don’t. Not always.

(39:35):

But you’re front loading the work for easier backend. I firmly believe that, but we have to tolerate some messier stuff. It’s not as jump into line immediately because I dangled something that you are desperately clinging to have, and it could be an iPad that works too. That’s also part of this, but it’s not. I think underneath that is an emphasis of I hold the power here. I’m going to make you remember that I could take it all away. It’s not really, even if you’re threatening something other than your love or connection, you’re still threatening it indirectly by reminding them that you have the power to end it all whenever you want to. So all that to say, how do we help parents not feel terrible guilt or fear that they’ve damaged something, but also you have to tolerate shifting. It isn’t necessarily going to look like a very easy replacement of some of these strategies that are very instant gratification kinds of strategies.

Dr. Vanessa (40:46):

Yeah. It’s like you have to be willing to sort of sit in the magic that is the messy middle. You have to be willing to sit in the magic that is development and development isn’t like tidy and pretty and you can’t put it in a gorgeous little box and wrap it up with a sat bow on top of it. Development is here and there and everywhere, and it’s up and it’s down and it’s messy and it’s beautiful. And to get really comfortable with that, it requires a little bit or a lot of self-referral as a parent where you’re taking your cues around all of this, not from the reactions of the world, not from the reactions of your mother-in-law, but really from your understanding, heart centric understanding of who your child is and who you are and what that longing is all about and well and truly. I mean, I just mentioned that I started my career working with child protection services and to date, I can tell you with a hundred percent honesty, I have never once met a parent who intended to do wrong by their child intended. I’ve met lots of parents who’ve struggled to figure out what the way through actually is, but I’ve never met a parent who had at their core and intention to mess their kid up. Not once.

Dr. Sarah (42:13):

Me neither, never. I think it’s really important to give yourself that grace as a parent and say, my intention is always good and the strategies that I use to honor that intention can shift, but I am a good parent and I love my kid.

Dr. Vanessa (42:34):

And the same grace that you’re giving your children as they develop, what would it be like to give that to yourself as you develop, as you figure it out?

Dr. Sarah (42:45):

Yeah, hopefully quite therapeutic.

Dr. Vanessa (42:50):

That’s right.

Dr. Sarah (42:53):

So I love talking to you about this. I feel like I want to ask one more question. If you were looking over the parents you work with, what do you think is one misconception about discipline that if you could tweak it, you could really try something different right now?

Dr. Vanessa (43:22):

I would say that discipline is about championing your child’s development. It’s not about controlling their behaviors. And as part of that, there is no timeline. You don’t need to nip that in the bud. You don’t need to make sure you teach them the lesson right then and there. So they really connect that lesson to that behavior. Development in the span of the human brain is between 25 and 30 years. So take a breath. You’ve got some time, make yourself a cup of tea. And really let’s get some perspective on what we’re doing and what we’re doing. As we parent our children, come alongside them with connection, remove blame and shame from what we call discipline. What we’re doing is we’re wiring up a brain literally billions, to the power of infinity neurons that are getting connected up over 25 to 30 years. Your infant children, by the way, are forming a million neural connections every second. So just think about that – mind blowing and unintended over the lifespan. That’s what you’re doing. So take a minute. It doesn’t all need to be figured out right now. And if in that very moment you’re like, ha, but I dunno what to say or do, then ask yourself this question, what would love say and what would love do and proceed accordingly.

Dr. Sarah (45:02):

Mic drop. I love that. Yes. That’s so helpful. What would love do?

Dr. Vanessa (45:12):

Yeah.

Dr. Sarah (45:13):

I do think a lot of the times when parents do act in a way that ultimately leaves them feeling guilty or doesn’t feel aligned with how they want a parent, 99 times out of a hundred, it’s because there was a sense of urgency, a perceived sense of urgency that made them feel they had to speed up and stop thinking things through and slowing down and tuning in. But to speed up and move faster, stop that behavior, nip it in the butt. Everyone’s watching like, shut this down, like I’m panicking. Make this feeling inside of me. Go away. Anything. But it’s usually that sense of urgency and so that I think gives a lot of, shines a very important light on the need to slow down. You got time.

Dr. Vanessa (46:00):

It’s not a race.

Dr. Sarah (46:00):

It’s not urgent.

Dr. Vanessa (46:03):

Yeah, that’s right.

Dr. Sarah (46:05):

Thank you. If people want to know more about your work, where can they find you and your books?

Dr. Vanessa (46:13):

Yeah, so drvanessalepointe, DR Vanessa Le Point with an E on the end dot com is my website. I’m super active on Instagram and Facebook and so you can follow along there. My book’s Discipline Without Damage and also Parenting Right From The Start, which is meant for parents of young children are available most everywhere that books are sold and all of my courses to work with me individually, all of that can be accessed via my website.

Dr. Sarah (46:42):

Amazing. Well, we’ll put links to all that in everything, and thank you so much. I love your, if you’re not following her on Instagram, you must or wherever you social media, but I’m always on Instagram and I love your stuff so much.

Dr. Vanessa (46:57):

Awesome, thank you.

Dr. Sarah (46:58):

Yes. Alright, well hopefully we’ll talk again soon.

Dr. Vanessa (47:01):

Can’t wait for that. Thank you again.

Dr. Sarah (47:04):

Thank you. We talked about discipline in this episode, so what are the best ways to discipline your child to foster overall wellbeing and mental health? With so much often contradictory information out there, knowing what exactly to do and how to do it can be confusing for parents. And that’s why I created a guide that simplifies the research on timeouts and offers three additional effective discipline strategies parents can add into their toolbox that prioritize mental health and wellbeing and still work to increase cooperation listening, and more appropriate behaviors. To download my free guide, three Psychologist Approved Discipline Strategies to Use instead of Timeouts, just go to the episode description wherever you’re streaming this podcast, or you can head to drsarahbren.com/timeout. That’s drsarahbren.com/timeout to download the guide for free. Thanks for tuning in and don’t be a stranger.