Dr. William (00:00):

If we give kids more control over their lives, it means that we’re seeding control. And if the low sense of control is the most stressful thing you can experience, which it is, it means that we experience less control, we’re going to be more anxious. And so much of this is working on ourselves and reminding ourselves that it’s right and it’s safe to trust our kids more and to worry about them less.

Dr. Sarah (00:28):

One of the most stressful things a person can experience is a low sense of control. So what does that mean for how we parent our children? Joining me this week is clinical neuropsychologist and the founder of the Stixrud Group, Dr. William Stixrud. He’s also a faculty member at the Children’s National Medical Center and an assistant professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the George Washington University School of Medicine. Additionally, Dr. Stixrud is the co-author along with Ned Johnson of the nationally bestselling book, the Self-Driven Child that has been published in 18 countries and 17 languages and has sold almost a million copies worldwide. His latest workbook, the Seven Principles for Raising a Self-Driven Child was just released this March and offers step-by-step resources for parents striving to raise self-motivated, secure, and joyfully driven children. So we explore how secure attachment is the foundation for developing autonomy. Why treating our kids with respect early on sets the stage for resilience and confidence, and how supporting not rescuing your kids when they’re in distress can have a lifelong benefit. So from navigating meltdowns and unwanted behaviors to building self-directed motivation outside of conflict moments, this episode will give you very practical tools and things you can apply right away for giving your child appropriate control, helping them to trust their own judgment and foster a really truly internalized sense of self to help them feel confident that they’re capable of handling whatever challenges might arise.

(02:05):

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.

(02:34):

Hello, welcome back. Today we are going to be interviewing Dr. Williams Stixrud, thank you so much for coming on the show. I’m very excited to hear.

Dr. William (02:47):

Thanks for having me.

Dr. Sarah (02:48):

Yes. So you have written a couple very important books in the world of parenting. Can you talk a little bit about the self-driven child and maybe the work that you do that led up to kind of orienting you to this is the thing that parents just need to understand.

Dr. William (03:10):

Sure. So I’m a clinical neuropsychologist and I made a living for over 40 years now testing kids who are struggling in some ways. And I noticed very early on that so many parents of school aged kids, they say, I dread dinner time because after dinner it’s like World War III, just fighting for my kid to get his homework done. And I see adults spending 90 units of energy trying to get a kid to do something and the kid would spend 10 units of energy and it didn’t change until the energy changed. And so that had a formative experience for me. And also when I started to study what stressed us, the brain in the late 1990s, I realized that the most stressful thing you’d experience is a low sense of control. And I also learned that all the mental health problems, anxiety, mood disorders, substance use disorders, they’re all related to a low sense of control and they’re all stress related problems. And the most stressful thing you’d experience is a low sense of control. So I figured that sense of control must be a pretty big deal if it looks like it’s the key to mental health.

(04:19):

And also my co-author Ned Johnson, and I lectured a lot about motivation in a process. I did a lot of research on motivation and everywhere I looked to try to understand how do kids become that, develop that self-motivated, intrinsically motivated quality.

(04:38):

All the arrows pointed in the direction to autonomy, you have to have a sense that this is my life and I’m not being forced to do it. And so that’s kind of how I got to this idea of a sense of control is so important. And I think Ned, my co-author, Ned, and we think the two important things we can do, most important thing we can do for our kids, our number one, help them feel that they’re deeply and unconditionally loved, that kind of secure attachment and also develop a healthy sense of control, especially as they get older over their own lives. But we can start when they’re really little.

Dr. Sarah (05:13):

I think that’s so important laying the groundwork because obviously, I mean you bring up attachment, my topic of choice started a whole podcast on it, but I feel like they’re connected, right? If you, because the ability to feel in control of your environment as a child who is presumably a part of a larger family system is a relational thing. It requires both the child to experience authentic sense of agency and control, but that really requires the parents to participate in that. And that I think is where, because it’s a dance, that’s where it can get tricky.

Dr. William (05:54):

That’s a really good point. And without secure attachment, you never feel safe. So things always feel out of control. So I think they really are very related.

Dr. Sarah (06:06):

Yeah, I am a mom, I get into power struggles with my children, and I have to navigate this my own urge to control what is happening and what they are doing and what they’re not doing. And I also, when my best self is parenting, I’m really aware that I want my kids to cross the finish line by themselves to sit and struggle, to feel my trust in their ability to figure stuff out without me swooping in. And sometimes those things can be in harmony and sometimes they’re at odds. I have conflict around this as a mom who knows better but can’t help myself. There’s a compulsive quality sometimes in the moment to being like, I could just do this faster. I have an agenda, or I’m scared that something really bad’s going to happen, or I’m frustrated that you aren’t doing it the way I want you to do it. There’s a lot of self-talk. It happens on the parent side.

Dr. William (07:08):

It’s true. And there are times when you’re late, you just put on the kid’s shoes, he doesn’t do it himself, and that’s not the end of the world. It is just that. But in our first book, the Self Driven Child, the subtitle is the science and sense of giving kids more control of their own lives. And there’s so much science to support this idea that ideally kids when the time they’re little, do you want to do it this way or this way? We respect that they’re individual people who have their own minds and their own preferences. They like some foods, they don’t like others. They’re the ones who know when they’re hungry and when they’re full.

(07:50):

And just treating them respectfully from the time that they’re little. I think just getting our head around that’s the right thing to do because ultimately our goal, at least from my point of view, is for kids to be able to run their own lives successfully before they leave home. And to do that, they have a lot of practice setting their own priorities, setting their own goals, solving their own problems, resolving conflict, and making their own decisions. And we can start from the time that they’re very little, do you want to do it this way? Which one you want? Which outfit do you want to wear? And respectfully, and I think that getting our head around the idea that it’s right for kids and the way kids develop that kind of resilient quality, that confidence that they can handle stuff is through handling stuff. Once we realize that they have to, you don’t develop that kind of emotional courage to go into a stressful situation and knowing I can handle this because you develop that by having handled stuff in the past and just being clear about we don’t want to deprive kids of every opportunity to deal with distrustful stuff. I was interviewed by somebody, I think in Finland, they call it curling parents where you’re sweeping the ice out of the way, but they call lawn mower parenting.

Dr. Sarah (09:11):

That’s their version of snowplow parenting.

Dr. William (09:14):

Right? In any case, but once we get our head around the idea, they have to go through that in order to develop a brain that when strength and stressful happens, they go into coping mode as opposed to try to avoid during their freaking out. And so no, it is not because if we give kids more control over their lives, it means that we’re seeding control. And if the low sense of control is the most stressful thing you can experience, which it is, it means that we experience less control, we’re going to be more anxious. And so much of this is working on ourselves and reminding ourselves that it’s right and it’s safe to trust our kids more and to worry about them less.

Dr. Sarah (09:58):

Yes. It’s so interesting, and I know you’re very familiar with space Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions, and I talk about it in your book, but I think I am this close to being certified. I owe my supervisor like my case reports, but I’ve been certified in space more or less, and Ellie Liebowitz has been on the podcast and so has Yara Snee and those, I love space because I feel like it talks a lot about this one instilling in anxious children specifically that they can handle the feeling of being worried about something or being stressed about something or wanting to avoid a feeling. And we aren’t going to continue as parents to modify the environment or modify our behaviors to keep rescuing them from that feeling. But I think when I do space with families, more often than not, I’m really managing parental anxiety in space is so systematic. We look at accommodations, we slowly peel them back, but in peeling back an accommodation, we create so many plans and most of those plans are for managing parental anxiety when they know if I don’t do this thing, my kid is going to freak out and they’re going to feel this thing and I don’t know how I’m going to handle them feeling that.

Dr. William (11:32):

Yeah, yeah. I love the space program. In fact, I haven’t done therapy over 30 years, but I actually got trained in space myself. The approach speaks to me in part because it’s a way to help kids change without trying to change them, and that’s without using force or control. And I love that, and I love the emphasis on supportive statements. The space has these basically two approaches, which is one, you increase supportive statements, which is I know this makes you really scared and I’m a hundred percent confident you can handle it, that idea. So the focus is not on preventing kids from never experiencing the hard things, it’s just that it’s the tolerating. I know you can tolerate this, and it’s the tolerating, the dealing with it that changes the brain in a way that because if a kid has to tolerate some kind of discomfort or anxiety in this case that the prefrontal cortex has to activate and whatever the prefrontal cortex activates to kind of cope with stuff, it dampens down the stress response and that trains the brain When something stressful happens to activate the prefrontal cortex, dampen down the stress response and cope as opposed to had said earlier, kind of tried to avoid or just getting really anxious and freaking out.

(12:55):

So yeah, I think that managing our own anxiety, I’ve felt my whole career that if our kids are having a tough time in any way, our most important work is on ourselves. And that’s what I love about the space program. It’s as effective in treating anxiety in children as therapy is for the kids themselves, even though it only involves the parents and the parents are told, don’t try to change the kid at all. That’s not, we’re trying to change the kid. We’re trying to do what the right free get you to do the right thing even though it’s hard and that’ll help your kid. I love that.

Dr. Sarah (13:30):

And I love that Ellie always says he’s like you. I think it is a very nice job. I think parents can sometimes hear like, well, I have to fix what I’m doing and then I feel like I did something wrong. And so we can feel shame or blame for ourselves. I think Ellie does a very nice job of being really clear if your kid has anxiety or if your kid is struggling in any of these places where there’s this lack of control or that you’re getting into these behavioral power struggles. I use space for things outside of anxiety all the time, like behavioral dysregulation, emotional regulation challenges all the time. I find it really helpful for that. But because I think it’s a regulation issue, not necessarily anxiety is a regulation issue. Explosive behaviors is a regulation. It’s all regulation based. But you as a parent, just because you have the capacity to shift your behaviors to make an impact, doesn’t mean you caused it, right?

(14:32):

You may not have caused it, but you have the power to shift your approach and it shifts your child because we’re so in sync with each other. I always say, when you’re in a dance with your kid, instead of constantly trying to get them to stop doing the dance, change your dance, they will sync up with you because they’re so hardwired going back to this neurological stuff, their brain and nervous system is tracking you for safety constantly. They don’t even know they’re doing it. They’re hardwired, they’re from birth, been wired to track you. And so if you do something different, they’re going to eventually, not immediately, because at first they’re going to be confused and they might be mad, but they will eventually sync up with you.

Dr. William (15:17):

Yeah.

Dr. Sarah (15:24):

Hey, just jumping in here for a quick moment because you just heard us talk about a therapy practice called SPACE, Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions. And I want to let you know about a resource that my group practice offers for parents who want to dive deeper into this powerful therapeutic approach at Upshur Bren Psychology Group. We run a virtual four week small group space program designed specifically for parents of children and teens struggling with diagnosed anxiety OCD or excessive worries. This group helps parents create a personalized roadmap to support your child not by changing their behavior, but by focusing on the one thing you can control your own to join the wait list or learn more about how space and other evidence-based parenting supports can help you navigate parenting challenges like anxiety, emotion regulation or behavioral struggles. Visit uspshurbren.com. That’s U-P-S-H-U-R-B-R-E-N.com. You can also schedule a free 30 minute consultation to learn more about our services and receive our personalized recommendations for the best support that aligns with your family’s unique needs. I’ll stick some links to all of that into the episode description so you can easily access this from wherever you’re streaming the show. Alright, now let’s get back to the conversation.

Dr. William (16:48):

I was trained many years ago in family therapy and oftentimes the approach was I’m going to work with whoever wants to change. And commonly, it wasn’t the kid who wanted to stop tantruming, it was the parents who wanted to stop. I think you’re exactly right that we have so much power, not over our kids, but power to change our own steps to these unproductive dances. And that’s kind of why the title of the second chapter in a self-driven child is, I love you too much to fight with you about your homework. And I wrote that actually in an article in McCall’s magazine in 1986 because I just saw so many families with, as I said, you got this World War ii, all this fighting over homework, and I learned in 1986 that homework doesn’t contribute to learning in elementary school. I thought, what’s all this fighting about?

(17:48):

So I said, that takes two to fight. Just tell your kids I love you too much to fight with you. And then say, I’m, I’m willing to do anything I can to help you. I’m willing to be your homework consultant. I’m willing to sit with you from six 30 to seven 30 every night and help. I can teach you stuff if I can, but you’re the most precious thing in the universe to me, and I don’t want to fight with you all the time about this. Also, I don’t want to act like somehow I’m supposed to be able to make you do this. I couldn’t make you do this. All you have to do is flop on the floor. And I think that focusing on what we can do, there’s a chapter in our second book called The Language and the Silence of Change that talks about the space program and also about other approaches for helping people change that don’t require us to try to change them. Because when we try to change people, as Libo says, what we get every time is conflict and resistance.

Dr. Sarah (18:42):

I mean, his whole model is built on nonviolent resistance, which is what I think you might be.

Dr. William (18:47):

Yeah. Well it is interesting too, Sarah, that I had dinner with Ellie and a couple other people a couple months ago, and in our second book, one of the people who reviewed our second book said, well, who had more psychoanalytic kind of angle and things? Well, we should emphasize co-regulation more than these not accommodating. And I asked Ellie, I said, how young of kids can we use this approach with? And he said, any age two or three. And so I felt happy about that because it just seems right that what we want kids to do is to tolerate, is to have the experience. We don’t want them to be chronically overwhelmed. We don’t want them to be traumatized, but we aren’t talking about toxic stress. We’re talking about mild moderate stressors that we support kids in handling and letting ’em know you can handle it. It’s just a great message.

Dr. Sarah (19:44):

So can we talk about, I mean we could put a whole bunch of links in the show notes for all the episodes we’ve done in co-regulation, but I think parents still don’t fully understand or there’s a lot of misunderstanding about it, I think. But I very strongly believe that if we’re dealing with a conflict with our kid and we can prioritize the regulation part first, a lot of the things we want to happen are agenda items can get realized in the calmness afterwards. But if we push our agenda in a dysregulated moment, we’re going to derail our goals.

Dr. William (20:32):

Yeah, I mean, I think we talk, in our first book, we talk about stress contagion and the fact that if a parent is stressed, the kid feels it. And we are concerned more about highly stressed parents making their kids dressed. In the second book we talk about calm is contagious as well. And it turns out the calm is contagious, is actually a mantra of the Navy seal. So go into situations and have to calm them down.

(21:01):

And so all emotions are contagious. And so it just seems to me we’ve always wanted, in my work, I want home to be a safe base. I want kids to feel safe at home. Life is challenging enough outside to come home and have a lot of fractured relationships or a lot of stress or a lot of pressure, a lot of fighting about stuff. It is what it is. But ideally home is a safe base. And so I think that you’re absolutely right that when I first, I gave a series of workshops several years ago on this idea of being a non-anxious presence, which is not a term that I made. I wish I did. I didn’t make it up. I got it from a guy named Edwin Friedman. But the idea is that any system, whether it is a couple, it’s a family all the way up to schools, churches, synagogues, corporations, they work best if the people in charge of the leaders are not highly anxious and emotionally reactive.

(22:06):

And when I heard about this 20 years ago or so, I thought, well, that makes sense because if you’ve got a toddler who’s having a tantrum in a store, it’s much easier to deal with it if you stay calm. If you’ve got an infant that’s trying to sleep and you’re trying to soThe it, if you stay calm, it’s just much easier. If you’ve got a 15-year-old who’s coming home from school and just got dumped by his girlfriend, you can be much more helpful if you stay calm. And just, it made sense to me that this is the direction in which we want to move of being a non-anxious presence that allows us to co-regulate with kids in a helpful way.

Dr. Sarah (22:43):

And I think when we can get our calm in a space, I think a big myth with co-regulation is if I’m calm and I’m effectively co-regulating, then I should be sitting with a calm child. That’s how I know it’s working. And I think what parents don’t always get is that you kind of have to think about the arc of that dysregulation hitting. It’s like, yes, if you can co-regulate, you may not see how much higher that arc could go because you’re stopping the escalation, right.

Dr. William (23:18):

Right.

Dr. Sarah (23:19):

But, your child still has to get down from that peak, and they might not necessarily do that as fast as you expect. And so I’m curious if there are any strategies for co-regulating or miss that you think parents maybe put too much pressure on themselves to see a particular type of outcome with it that would be helpful to rethink?

Dr. William (23:45):

It is not something that I’m an expert. The co-regulation is not something I’m really an expert on, and so you would have much more ideas about that than I do. And so no, I think that that giving up the idea, making peace with the idea that we really can’t control our kids and it’s scary at first.

(24:16):

But it’s very empowering. What you realize that, I remember when my son was like three and four, sometimes he’d start to tantrum about something and I’d say, Elliot, you’re acting like I think I could make you do this. I couldn’t make you do this. All I’d have to do is flop on the floor. I prescribed these various ways that he could beat me if I tried to fight him on it, if he fought me on it. And so I think that that idea of giving up, trying to force thinking they’re supposed to, and sometimes if you’re late for school, occasionally have to pick ’em up and put ’em in the car, but that’s not forcing them. We’re doing it. It’s not them. You really can’t force a kid to do anything.

Dr. Sarah (25:00):

Right.

Dr. William (25:00):

And so giving up that idea that we supposed to be able to force our kid supposed to be able to make ’em do stuff, I think is really empowering. And I tell it also contributes to that kind of calmness that allows you to co-regulate, but I’m not an expert in that topic.

Dr. Sarah (25:17):

But it sounds like you’re saying the same thing I would say, which is you have to kind of let your own mind accept that this is going to be hard and I as a parent am going to try to not control. If I give up control of my child’s emotional expression, all of a sudden I can orient myself to the things I can control. Like you were saying, control is a massive predictor of the stress response. When I feel out of control, I feel stress. When I feel in control, I feel calm. Probably doesn’t feel quite that fast in the moment, but that’s generally the direction your train is moving in.

(25:57):

And so if I can orient myself in these hot moments off of the things I cannot control, which is my child’s body, I have so many kids parents that work with kids, they’re like, they spit, they scream, they kick. I’m like, you can probably physically hold them from the kicking, but the thing like spitting, screaming, these are the hardest ones. I have seen kids pee on floors in rage and I’m like, yeah, the more you try to control that, the more you will quickly. They will quickly realize you cannot. This is massive power struggle territory.

(26:38):

When we really are trying to hold tightly onto things that we aren’t actually control of and our child becomes fully aware of that, we really get into some tricky territory. So I often am like, if you can’t physically stop them from doing it, move your attention off of it and onto where you direct your attention is also where a child is going to pay attention. And so if you keep trying to control spitting, for example, which you just cannot stop a child from doing and they know it, right? That’s why some of these behaviors happen, I think out of sheer desperation for some semblance of control on the part of the child. So when we are in these entrenched power struggles, I think we have to really, it’s almost like a radical abdication of control, which is really hard because we have to really unlearn some patterns. What do you recommend for parents in these situations where it’s like, okay, I get theoretically I’m totally on board. I want my child to have authentic control. I let them pick their pajamas. I let them have these really authentic choices in life, and also they cannot hit their sibling or they can’t spit at school when they’re mad. And so with these behaviors that we don’t have control over, how do we start to peel back some of that hyper attention on these really explosive behaviors?

Dr. William (28:06):

Yeah, I suggest that parents not tell themselves you can’t hit your brother because you can’t stop. They’re alone for a minute. You can’t stop it. It is disempowering to parents to say, you can’t do this. Certainly with little kids, we can say, I can physically block you from doing some things, but as you say, I can’t stop you from doing everything. And I think so much of the focus for me, once you’re stressed and your kid’s stressed, forget it. I mean, there’s really nothing meaningful you can do. You can’t teach your kid anything. You can’t impose a consequence that’s going to have any kind of benefit when you’re mad. And so we recommend that the people walk away, tell your kid, I want to help you, but I can’t right now. I, I’m mad. I got to calm down and go to the next room. If the kid follows you, close the door. And I think that there’s nothing you can do in the moment with a kid who’s really out of control. Now, if you’re making peace with that, you aren’t supposed to be able to, is really helpful. The idea, you aren’t supposed to be able to control your child because if it’s not possible, if you really can’t make somebody do something, you can’t make them stop.

(29:32):

You can’t make them want what they don’t want. You can’t make them not want what they want. Then making peace with that, okay, now we’re dealing with reality. And the reality is that when I’m upset and my kid’s upset, I can’t think straight. He can’t think straight, and nothing’s going to come out of this. So keep the kids safe as you can, but try to take space and calm down then deal with it.

Dr. Sarah (29:59):

Yeah. So I really agree with this and I think I always describe these hot moments as before, during, and after. And there’s the during obviously is in the heat of the moment. There’s so much, there’s just nothing really. All we can do is manage the safety and try not to make things worse. Don’t pour gasoline on the fire and keep everybody safe. That’s it. And maybe manage your own regulation. But then there’s the after. We can do some after means everyone’s calm again.

(30:33):

But we can do some, maybe there’s a consequence that we discuss. Maybe there’s collaborative problem solving, maybe there’s, I call it the debrief. I’m helping them connect the dots, try to figure out what happened, what made it worse, what did you want to have happen, what did I need for you to have, what did I want to have happen? And how do we get there in the future? That’s all in the after. But then there’s the before, which is between the after and before the next time, which is most of our life. We’re actually in the before most of the time, and I feel like we don’t leverage that period of time for building skills, for identifying our child’s wants and intentions and goals.

(31:19):

That’s the agency building space. I feel like we’re not going to do it in the moment in after we can sort of do it, but we still have an agenda, right? We’re trying to teach them some type of lesson that’s usually our own agenda. I think it’s helpful to try to figure out what their agenda was in the moment, but in the quote before space unrelated to some tricky moment, just life. How do we build some of these self-directed, did self-drive qualities in our kid? What does that look like in real life when we’re not in the middle of a hot moment?

Dr. William (32:02):

I was just talking to the family the other day and around with a couple little kids, family. People my age were with people who had young kids, like four years old and there’s some broken glass and they swept it all up and they couldn’t see any more sharks, but there’s a 4-year-old girl and who was walking towards the glass and her dad said, honey, there’s some broken glass there. And your brother stepson’s broken glass a couple of weeks ago and it got cut and it hurt. And I don’t know whether you will or not, so you may want to put on your shoes. And the kid chose not to and walked over where the glass wasn’t and didn’t get caught. But the point, what struck with my friends was that she didn’t say, honey, you can’t walk there. It was treating you respectfully. You could hurt yourself.

(32:56):

There obviously was something, a landmine or something. You’d stop her from doing it whether if she wanted to or not, but where we can’t, we can give ’em a choice to do something that maybe they think I can do it. And he said, no, it’s too dangerous. I play this game. I used to play with my grandchildren when they’d climb up a slide and I’d say, oh, please don’t do that. You’re going to hurt yourself. You’re going to fall play. That makes me too nervous. And they’d laugh and laugh and laugh as they did these things. They weren’t going to die from them. They probably weren’t going to break an arm, but they may fall. And even at their age, they asked me sometimes to play that game. I be them not to do something that may be a little bit dangerous, but not life-threatening. There’s ways that we could encourage kids and support them in doing things that could be a little bit risky that where they could step on some glass and do something, but say, give ’em the information and let them decide.

(34:01):

That may seem like an extreme example because it involves safety. On the other hand, if a kid gives a little glass in his foot, it’s not at the end of the world. And the respect you convey to a kid when you say, you may want to go put on your shoes, honey, you could get glass in your foot as opposed to you can’t walk there, go put on your shoes. It changes kids. It just a little bit of, it doesn’t have to do all the time, but just a little bit of this kind of idea of letting ’em know your situation and what do you think is the right thing for you to do?

Dr. Sarah (34:37):

Yeah, they’re like a collaborator.

Dr. William (34:39):

Yeah. Well, yeah. I think that the model, the metaphor that I used starting in 1986 is the idea of a consultant. But what we’re really doing is we’re helping kids. We’re teaching them. We’re teaching. You may want to try it this way. I was so struck when early in my career where 40 years ago, it was much more common than it common than it is now for kids, particularly in public schools, that if they were struggling in kindergarten, they would repeat the kindergarten year kind, give them the gift of time.

(35:14):

And what I was so struck by the fact that I’d test a kid who is 19 years old and I’d say, where are you in school? The kid would say, I’m a senior in high school. I should be a freshman in college. But they made me repeat the first grade kindergarten. They’re still pissed about it all these years later. And it just seems so strange to me. I said, and this may seem crazy, what I started doing is I’d say to the kid, I’d tell to the parents, tell the kid, nobody’s going to make you repeat kindergarten or first grade. It’s going to be your call, but I want you to make a good decision for yourself. So I want you to talk to your first grade teacher and tell your kindergarten teacher and the first grade teacher and see with you to think you’re ready and talk to Dr. Stixrud, talk to your aunt’s, a teacher – talk to her so you can make a good decision for yourself. And I was so struck Sarah by the fact that I’d see these kids who are six and seven years old make as good decision for themselves as I could make their parents could make. And when we do that, just the confidence that engenders kids and I want them to trust when they leave home, you want them to trust their own judgment, not yours, right? To be confident. I talked to a mother the other day who I’ve done for a long time. She said, my son’s 35 years old. He’s the happiest person I know. He didn’t choose a path in life that I would’ve chosen. He didn’t go to college, and he’s a rock and roll musician and his band’s doing pretty well, but he needs to pick up these service jobs to make enough money, but he’s completely fulfilled.

(36:48):

He loves his life and his fiance says he’s the most confident person she’s ever met because he trusts his own decisions. And this mother, the mother worked with me for years and knew this approach about where we can let kids decide, let them solve their own problems, offer to help them, and certainly one of the most empowering things we can say for ourselves and our kids, is there a way that I could help as opposed to leaping in. But La Leitz makes the point that because we’re mammals, that we’re wired to protect and to smooth our young, which is why it’s so hard that let them take some risk or make decisions that we think may not be the best decision for them. But for my money, I mean, we start early on. I remember when my son was little three has a good Jewish mother and wonderful Jewish mother, and she’d say, honey, you got to eat some more. And I’d say, Elliot, you’re the expert on you. You’re the one who knows when you’re hungry and full. So eat when you’re hungry and stop when you stop when you’re full. I use that message a lot with little kids that you’re the expert on you. You know what it feels like to be tired, what it feels like, deal with the dog, I need to take a rest. And just encouraging kids to think about themselves as the people who know themselves the best.

Dr. Sarah (38:13):

I also feel like you were talking about wiring earlier, how when we feel a lack of control, we have that stress response, but when we have to practice solving problems in the face of that control versus having all the problems solved for us, then the stress response sort of stays in the, we learn to avoid.

(38:33):

But if we practice solving problems, we’re activating the prefrontal cortex. I’m also wondering if that also what you’re describing here is if I practice thinking about or reflecting on or going inward instead of being fed and told when I’m full, which orients me out of my body, helping a child build that skill of going inward and having that sort of interceptive sense, I’m trying to tune into my internal cues to know when I’m full. That’s like wiring, mindfulness, wiring, self-awareness, wiring body awareness, and all of that is probably really creates this whole web of wiring in the brain that’s really strength-based.

Dr. William (39:34):

Completely.

Dr. Sarah (39:36):

Yeah, there’s so much, I think parents don’t realize how much they’re stepping. They want to help and they don’t realize that they’re actually interrupting a process that might otherwise really strengthen the child’s brain and nervous system.

Dr. William (39:57):

Yeah, it’s a really good point, Sarah. Two of the things that I learned studying stress in the brain that led me to a sense of control. One was a neuroscientist by the name of Sonya Lupin said, I defy you to think of anything that makes life stressful that you can’t summarize with the acronym nuts. And its novelty, unpredictability, perceived threat and a low sense of control and against that low sense of control is the most special thing. Also, a guy named Steve Meyer at the University of Colorado for 30 or 40 years did studies with rodents whose brains are organized a lot like ours. We’ve learned that from them and being able to control stressful situations. And the basic paradigm was rat A and rat B, they’re both into these little plexiglass cages, their tails outside the cage with a little electrode on it. There’s a wheel inside the cage, rat A, his tail gets shocked and it’s not painful. It’s annoying though. He wants it to stop, and he discovers if he turns the wheel, the shock stops. Rat B turns the wheel when he still gets shot. Nothing happens.

(41:10):

When Rat A has turned the wheel. This is where I learned that the prefrontal cortex is activating and it’s dampening down the stress response. So he’s turning that wheel and he learns, I can make this thing stop. I can stop this thing. I can control the stressful situation. So he has several experiences like that, and eventually you disconnect the wheel. The wheel doesn’t work anymore, and still he just turned that wheel. He is not very stressed. Prefrontal cardiacs activate. He just goes into coping mode. You put him in a cage with big scary rat, he just copes with it. He’s not very stressed because he has that experience of being able to control stressful situations. And that’s what we wanted. The trained rat B, by the way, turn the wheel and nothing happened. Rat B turned into a nervous wreck that developed ulcers and was very easily stressed. Rat a, they call rat a, they called California, laid back rats who had experie. That’s what it took. It wasn’t, it wasn’t overwhelming experience. It wasn’t traumatizing, but it was stressful. And realizing I handled something stressful, I can control it. It changed their brain in a way that made them almost impossible to stress as they got older.

Dr. Sarah (42:22):

That’s really interesting. It makes sense to me that in the moment, rap B would maybe develop some learned helplessness. I have no control over my environment. I’m going to give up. Maybe their seeking system just starts to turn off, turn quiet, and then rat A, I could see, oh, I can make this stop. So I have agency. I have confidence that I can control this situation. But what I think is super interesting about what you’re describing is that they would generalize that confidence to other situations where they still didn’t necessarily have that same level of control. If I’m in a cage with a big scary rat, I turning a wheel and I’m going to change any of that, but I still have a calmer stress response. It’s like, we can take this one experience and it builds something bigger that we can use later no matter what.

Dr. William (43:17):

That’s my understanding. That’s partly why I’m just so passionate about this idea. And it’s interesting you mentioned learned helplessness, the Steve Mayer and Martin Seligman who worked on the learned helplessness research, and the classic paradigm of that research is dogs in the cage gets shocked several times. There’s no way to escape. And eventually you open the cage door, the dog gets shock and doesn’t try to escape. The assumption was you kind of learn, what can I do? I’m helpless. Seligman and Meyer wrote a paper, I think in 2017 called Learned Helplessness at 50 what we got right? And what we got wrong. And what they got wrong was those dogs didn’t learn helplessness. They failed to learn a sense of control.

Dr. Sarah (44:10):

Oh, you just made my brain explode. I got to go read the paper.

Dr. William (44:13):

Because the idea was happening. And what happens is that basically it was so trauma, the experience of being shock and not being able to escape was so traumatizing that when it happened that they’d go into the freeze part of the stress response, they just freeze. They couldn’t move, they couldn’t move. They could protect themselves by freezing. And it wasn’t that they were thinking, oh, nothing I can do about it. They froze and they failed to learn that sense of control.

Dr. Sarah (44:49):

And so were they just a nervous system shut down at that point?

Dr. William (44:52):

Exactly. In rats, I think a Raphael dorsal nucleus that activates that freeze response, and it just kind of paralyzes, and that’s how they deal with extreme stress. And we can’t tell. People can deal with extreme stress just by just getting paralyzed and not moving.

Dr. Sarah (45:18):

And I think that, I’m trying to think of, obviously not in such extreme situations, day-to-day life with kids, we want to build the agency. We want that self-driven confidence. I’m hearing you look, we need to give them opportunities to make mistakes, step on the little bit of glass, not follow our instruction, and then see what happens in that situation. Reflect on it. We’re supporting them though. We’re not just like, all right, I’m just going to let my kid run in glass and we’ll see what happens. It’s like we have to give them the sense that we’re there with them, but we’re not going to make all of these decisions for them.

Dr. William (46:06):

I don’t want to give kids more responsibility until they’re mature enough to handle it. You don’t let a five-year-old decide whether to cross a busy street by itself. I mean, I guess you could after enough training, but generally you’re downtown say, either I’ll pick you up and carry you. We’ll hold my hand, we’ll walk across the street. I mean, yeah, it’s not a matter of kids need to make all their, the 4-year-old gets to run our family, four year old’s the boss. It’s not that at all. It’s just that we want to shift our goal from thinking, my goal as a parent to make sure is make sure my kid always does the right thing, always does what I expect, always behaves, always does his homework, to thinking my job as a parent to help my kid ultimately figure out how to be successful in this world, how to function well in this world.

(47:02):

And ultimately as they get older, figure out who they want to be and what kind of life they want to create. It’s that teaching. And part of it is modeling. Part of it is working out limits with kids so that they feel safe. And part of it, again, offering to help, not trying to force it, offering our advice and our wisdom and not trying to ram it down their throats, not telling ’em a million times. It’s letting them make decisions where they can’t and letting them know, I’m confident that you can make a good decision for yourself if you have the information you need, and I want you to practice trusting yourself. It doesn’t mean that five-year-olds have to make all their own decisions at all. It’s just that’s the goal, is to move in that direction where we’re supporting expressing confidence in them that they can handle their life, they can make their decisions, they can solve their problems with our support as needed. Whenever I want kids to have all this help and all the support they need, I just don’t want to have more than they need. And I also don’t want ’em to be fighting. The health and support that we offer them is probably in their own best interest.

Dr. Sarah (48:13):

Right. Yeah. I feel like the resistance comes is probably directly proportionate to their perception of how impeded they feel in their ability to follow their plan A.

(48:29):

And so we do have to pull back, but I agree. I think it’s really important. Parents, I genuinely, it can get confusing for parents. They hear all these things and they think it sounds nice, but then they’re in the middle of a crowded parking lot and they’re like, wait, what am I supposed to do in this? I feel a competing thing coming on. I always say to parents, it’s your job to keep your kids safe. It’s your job to keep them healthy. It’s your job to move them through the schedule of the day. And it’s your job to make tough decisions, and it’s your job to love them. If they’re struggling with something that’s outside of those job descriptions, it’s not your job.

Dr. William (49:11):

And I would say that it’s your job safe as much as you can. And I think that because I work with a lot of older kids as well, and with older kids, especially with teenagers, the best thing we can do is say, I can’t keep you safe. By ideally kids, by that time, kids have enough experience trusting themselves and paying attention and making decisions that we don’t have to worry so much about them doing risky because kids want their life to work. They don’t want to mess up their lives. But no, I agree. And when we think somehow our job is to make sure our kids always do the right thing. In our new book, there’s Post-It notes about something, and one of ’em is that it’s more important for a kid to understand who’s responsible for what than it is that he always does well, because I see a lot of kids who have a ADHD or learning disabilities or a lot of anxiety and adults are working a lot harder to help the kid be successful than the kid does. And I find that it never changes until the energy changes and people say, I feel like I’m working harder than you are and weaken if I’m going to weaken you if I do that, and I care too much about you to weaken you. And usually my experience is when adults do that, they change the energy. The kids will step up to the plate.

Dr. Sarah (50:49):

No, I think in trying to help them be safe or be healthy or be successful, even in that, right, the question isn’t how do I manage your safety at all times? But how do I teach you how to orient yourself towards your own safety or towards your own objectives or towards your own sense of success, your own unique intrinsic sense of, I always say self-actualization is more important than achievement because you could focus on achievement potentially at the expense of self-actualization or self drivenness perhaps in this context. But if you focus on self-actualization, helping your child identify what is their true path, then more often than not, achievement will follow, but it’ll be their own definition of achievement. It’ll be self-driven.

Dr. William (51:45):

I love that. I love the idea of self-actualization because it really is helping people find their own path. And I work with a lot of parents who feel of teenagers feel, and even school aged kids who feel that they’ve got to be pushed all the time to maximize their potential. And my feeling is that when kids that we’ve pushed all the time, they burn out. And the way you maximize your potential is by creating a life that you’re happy with and figuring out what’s important to me. We can talk with even little kids about what are the things that, what is most important to us? What are our values? We talked a little bit about, quite a bit about this actually in our new book, talking to Kids about what if there’s a reason that you’re on this planet? If we’re religious, God, why do you think you’re here? What is it about you? They help kids understand that this comes easy to me, that I have this quality, this can help me. I can help other people this way. I love that idea of thinking about self actualization. It’s really cool.

Dr. Sarah (52:50):

Thanks. Well, I mean, this was so interesting. I’m so grateful for you sharing your time and all of your wisdom. If people want to learn more about your work, if they want to find these books, I think they build upon each other. So definitely both of them would be a really good place to go. Where can they connect with you? Where can they find your work and follow along?

Dr. William (53:17):

Yeah, the Self-Driven Child, the first book and second book is, What Do You Say? It’s about communicating with kids to develop the kind of motivation and stress tolerance and a relatively stress-free home and new workbook. It takes principles from the first two books and simplifies it with exercises to work through any resistance, or This is not the way I was raised, or my parents say, I’m just spoiling my kid, or I am letting him run the family. That kind of thing. How to deal with that stuff. So I think the books is one place. The Self-driven child.com is our website, and my co-author, Ned Johnson, has a Self-Driven Child podcast, and we do that together occasionally, but he has a lot of really interesting people on the podcast that talks part about our work.

Dr. Sarah (54:19):

Amazing. So we’ll link to all of that so people can find you, and thank you so much.

Dr. William (54:23):

Oh, what a pleasure.

Dr. Sarah (54:26):

Such a pleasure.

(54:26):

If you enjoyed listening to this conversation, I want to hear from you, share your thoughts and your feedback with me by scrolling down to the ratings and review section on your Apple Podcasts app or whatever app you’re listening on. And let me know what you think of this episode or the show in general. Your support means the absolute world to me, and just a simple tap of five stars can make a real impact in how this show gets reached by parents everywhere. So thank you so much for listening, and don’t be a stranger.