Transcript

[00:00:00] it has been a bit since I've been here, there was a lot of things that happened. And I took a slightly longer break than anticipated, but I think there's some valuable sort of things to share in this.

[00:00:12] I'm a person who is highly motivated, highly dedicated, highly focused. And it can be very, very hard for me to step back, but I've also. Highly dedicated, highly motivated to my family. And one of the things that happened in the late fall is that we sold our house and we moved to a condo, it involved a renovation and it involves some school changes.

[00:00:34] It involved a lot of changes in general, actually. So one of the things I had to recognize is that there are things that I need to step back from. And in order to be able to focus on my family. And I think that is not always easy to do, especially when we have our extensive to do list or the things that we feel passionate about or the things that society tells us that we should be dedicated to. So my podcast, I said this before is something that I do as a community service. Um, I am not in any way paid for this.

[00:01:04] It's something that I enjoy doing and I have missed doing. Um, but it is something that I do. I'm going to put air quotes for fun. Um, so one of the things I had to step back from was being able to podcast. So I'm glad to be back. And I'm hoping that you're glad to have me back and let's start tackling some, some topics.

What Happened to Good Old Fashion Respect?

[00:01:25] So one of the things that. I wanted to talk about today. There's two topics that I want to tackle pretty soon. I asked him my Instagram stories last night, actually, which one I should do first. And I got a solid 50, 50. It's a 50 50 vote. One of the things I said is, Hey, would you like me to talk about good old fashion respect?

[00:01:45] Because it is something that I've been asked a lot about. In my work. And one of the things that I've found is parents are really struggling. Educators are really struggling with kids being, disrespectful. That they're just not listening and they're not sort of being kind to adults and people who have a lot of life experience and world experience and that kind of thing. The other topic I said is, Hey, shall I talk about perfectionism?

[00:02:14] Or should I talk about. You know, the things that are sort of contributing or maybe what I think causing kids to just not want to do stuff without being perfect at it right away. Right. I don't want to try that because it's too hard. I don't want to do the thing because I'm not going to be good at it. Right.

[00:02:33] So that idea of like kids aren't willing to take as many risks with anything, whether it be artwork or a new sport or climbing something at the playground or whatever the case may be. So those are the two topics that. Um, I was asked or I've been reflecting on thinking about, and I asked in my stories and I got a solid, we want both. So I've definitely planned to do both. I just wasn't sure which one I was going to do first.

[00:02:58] So we actually think I'm going to do respect first because it is something that during my time away from podcasting, I was still doing all the things that have to happen. Um, and one of those is sort of extracurricular activities.

[00:03:14] And another one of those is supporting sort of kids in schools and what that looks like. And sort of this fear of parenting in general, I did an in-person parenting program. At a, at a local gym to me. And it was really cool because it's the first time I've run my program in person. And even though it was a small group, I got a lot of great feedback, but the theme, whether it's been in my virtual or in my one-on-ones or in my interactions in the world, The theme is that parents are pretty exhausted.

On-Call Parenting

[00:03:46] And one of the reasons they're exhausted is from what I call 'on-call parenting.' And that is where a kid says something and you respond immediately. And one of the reasons you respond immediately is because you're kind of afraid of how they're going to react. If you don't. Right. Are they going to freak out? Are they going to yell at you and all those things. And one of the things that I like to sort of boil that down to is my kindness model. So I have the language of kindness. It's sort of like one of my foundational concepts. Kindness to self, kindness to others, and kindness to the planet. We're going to focus on the second one, which is kindness to others.

Kindness in Calm

[00:04:24] Now, quite often in this category, a lot of people will be like, okay. Yeah, of course. Be kind to other people. That's pretty, you know, status quo. One of the things that I like to say is what does kindness in calm look like? Uh, so that's a pause for reflection. Let's think about what does kindness in calm mean? That means when we're in our safe space, when we're just, you know, navigating the world together. When we're in our homes, having conversations with our kids. What does that tone of voice look like?

[00:04:56] What did those interactions look like? And one of the things I, I noticed even about myself when my kids were younger, I used to be quite a sarcastic person. Um, it was kind of my motive like funniness, if you will. And one things that I realized when my kids were younger is sarcasm is not super kind. It doesn't promote kindness and it definitely doesn't promote, excuse me. It definitely doesn't promote kind interactions. Right. It's kind of like belittling. And I was like, I, it was sort of an aha moment for me to realize. Oh, Hey, wait a second. Is this the way I want us to engage? Is this the way I want us to talk to each other? So kindness in calm is this idea of how do we talk to the people that we are closest with? How do we navigate those conversations? And quite often when we take a step back and in the last sort of 20 years of working with people and almost four years of working sort of more intensely one-on-one with clients, one of the first things that comes up is. Actually, no, I'm a bit of a doormat and I allow my children to speak to me a bit like a doormat.

[00:06:03] Um, And there's so many layers to this. And there's something. And I love to call unintentional reinforcement, this idea that there's a bunch of things that we do, and we don't mean to create reactions or relationships around them. We're just trying to get through the day. We're just trying to problem solve. We're busy and we're overwhelmed. And sometimes we just don't have the capacity for the negative reaction for the pushback, for the, whatever the case may be. But one of the byproducts of that is we have kids who kind of believe that adults are there to service them. And that respect is something that they don't understand. Now here's the part B conversation.

[00:06:43] So we have kindness in calm. How are we talking to each other on the everyday? And when we really step back and reflect on that, a lot of people find, oh, how I'm talking in my home. Isn't actually super kind, AKA respectful. And so there, we have one model of what does respect look like and, and where we really target it is not in conflict because we already know that's an area that we have to focus on.

[00:07:08] We have to focus on in conflict and difficulty and how we treating other people. What does that look. Like less often do we think about, well, what about when things are kind of okay. How are we talking in those moments or when they're sort of, you know, equal, what does that look like? Right. What does that space look like? And then.

Rethinking Adult-Child Relationships and Respect

[00:07:29] the part B is a lot of parents and people and educators right now are sort of rethinking Children and child development and how we want to raise kids. And one of the sort of intentional concepts coming out of that is we want to do less punishment, less shame, less blame, less physicality, right? Or no physicality. And One of the sort of tricky pieces in that is when kids are operating in fear, they do things. Now, what we've also learned is this is not a great way to do things, and it has all kinds of implications in terms of trauma, and in terms of actually really learning to develop and be an authentic human being, and trajectories look like is not great.

[00:08:13] So what we say is, okay, we need to be more intentional about how we're raising kids, but we're missing a big piece here. So if fear and blame and shame and all those things were motivating kids to be quote unquote respectful, if we really step back and think about that, we're like, Oh, wait a second.

Fear Based Respect

[00:08:29] They actually listened to adults because they were afraid of them, not because they respected them. Those are two very different things. And you can sort of think about that in terms of your own life, right? Do we, do we resonate with the idea that we actually authentically respect someone that we fear?

[00:08:45] Probably not. Right? So if we're thinking about respect as a concept and we're like, okay, kids right now are really disrespectful and they're, they really just don't listen. There is a missing piece here. There is a definite missing piece here. One is how are we talking in that calm, right? Kindness in calm.

[00:09:01] And what are we modeling at home? The other piece is, if we are not using shame, blame, fear, or discipline models, where, where kids fear adults, how are we teaching them what respect looks like? And this is, you know, if you look at some, some different cultures across the globe and historically the idea of like what, what is the value of elders and what is that sort of place and I like to talk a lot about this idea that. Adults and kids are not the same, right? If you look at their brains, of course, they're not the same. Yet we talk to kids as if they are these mature little adults, and they're not. They are not. Brain development, I mean, the trajectory on that we know is at least 25 years, I know.

Never Assume Kids Know

[00:09:47] I've said it before. But this idea that Children are smart. Intelligence is one thing, but they are not wise, right? Adults are wise because you've had lots of life experience to go along with your learned experience. Kids are not wise, and they have not learned much about life. So we can't assume that they know those things.

[00:10:09] Now, if we're thinking about respect, In this sort of realm, we have to think about, okay, what are we modeling at home and what are we teaching kids about respect and our expectations around respect? And how are we showing and telling kids our expectations around respect? Right? So if we're not forcing respect, which is not really actually the definition of respect. If we are not forcing kids to listen, to pay attention, to do what they're asked to do all those things.

[00:10:38] How are we teaching them that people have value, even people we don't necessarily like? And I talk a lot about this with kids who maybe don't like their teachers, for example, there are personality conflicts and not everyone is a great match, right? I'm sure we can all think of bosses that we had to interact with that were not our favorite people, but we needed to interact with them because that is a valuable life skill.

[00:11:01] In my opinion, you need to be able to interact with people that you don't always get along with. And you need to be able to get through things. I'm currently in school right now. Um, I've gone back to school for my master's in counseling psychology to become a certified therapist. And there have been some very tricky elements of doing this, right?

[00:11:18] Being thrown back into different kinds of group work and stuff like that. We all have to coexist with different personalities and how we work through that really is important. We can't just avoid it. So this comes back to the idea of respect. How do we respect, right? How are we respectful even when we maybe don't agree, right? How do we respectfully disagree? This is a skill we now need to teach, right?

Teaching Kids to Respect Adults

[00:11:46] So this idea and I'm gonna use sports as an example because I've seen this and it's funny I was thinking about this the other day. I know I have a podcast about like not Throwing kids into extracurriculars and I realized in hindsight I was like I should have been very specific about that I should have been young kids and I think the general theme of the podcast was that we don't need to throw young children into lots of extracurriculars because they're still trying to navigate the world and build their personalities and quite simply the sort of Paid model of extracurriculars has really influenced why kids do so much stuff.

[00:12:19] But there is an important value in extracurriculars for older kids, right? Sort of the 10 plus zone. That's a really important part of their, their life skills as they go up through the tween and early teen and on years. So it's not that extracurriculars are quote unquote bad. It's that they have a role to play in different developmental sort of areas. Anyways, so my kids are in sports and one of the things that I have noticed is a lack of respect to coaches. Right. And I was having a conversation at a tournament recently with a couple of the coaches and they're like, yeah, they just don't listen, they don't pay attention. They just kind of are living in their own worlds and depending on. The style of coach, the age of the coach in terms of like their world experience, the expectations really do vary, but the central theme regardless was, hey, we're all having a bit of a hard time with getting these tween teens to be respectful and pay attention and sort of be on board.

[00:13:22] And one of the things I said is we haven't taught them what respect looks like before you listen to coaches because you were afraid they were gonna make you do a thousand push ups or whatever the case may be. Right, so there was a fear based model and now, There's a less so and it's less socially acceptable to do some of these things and that's a conversation for a different topic I know people have lots of thoughts about that But let's just like focus in on why kids aren't running over to listen at the timeout when it's at practice, they're not fully engaged or whatever the case may be, right?

[00:14:00] It's that whole lesson on what does respect look like and why is it important and how does it, how does it sort of help everyone, right? How does when the coach calls you over for the time out. Why does it matter that you run over? Why is that an important thing to do? And I know people are like, well, that's quite obvious.

[00:14:23] I have a saying. State the obvious until you know a child knows. So, I know we assume children are awesome and intelligent and amazing and they know so many things. And they do. But we also assume they know way more than they do. Especially about things that are no longer a given. Right. This idea of like, why is it important to run over at a time out to listen to our coach?

[00:14:51] Why does listening to people that we may not agree with matter? What's the life skill in that, right? So when we're thinking about respect, there's sort of two avenues that I like to talk about. One is how are we modeling it in calm? What does that look like? So we often focus on sort of negative conversations and talking about like how we should speak to each other in conflict.

Kindness Does Not Mean People Pleasing

[00:15:14] Right. But truly, how do we talk to each other in calm? Cause that's where you can have the great lessons about respect, truly respect. Um, and I like to call it kindness because that sort of helps kids resonate with like. Kind. How can I be kind? Because you can be kind with, with people you don't agree with, right? You can disagree with kindness. There's, that is a very real thing. Kindness does not mean placating. Kindness does not mean people pleasing. Kindness does not mean being agreeable. It means, how are you saying what you need to say without attacking, without the nasty, right? Without that.

[00:15:54] And then the part B is, how are you building and fostering respect as a life skill? And how are we teaching it? Because if it's not a fear based society, if we're not using fear. Which again, isn't really respect, but it did garner attention from children to adults, right? When they were afraid of their teachers, coaches, parents, et cetera, they did do things quickly. So in the absence of that, how do we help them understand why that's valuable?

[00:16:23] Why doing those things is valuable. And I'm going to tell you straight up, it is not a one time conversation. It is little tiny conversations woven in. Right? It's tiny conversations woven in to help them understand what that looks like with the layer of adults have a lot of lived experiences. Some of those lived experiences shape them to be difficult.

[00:16:46] It shapes them to be difficult. It also shapes some to be sort of knowledgeable and worldly. And how do we learn from All those layers from very difficult personalities to very interesting, worldly personalities, because everybody has something to offer and everybody has something we can learn from. But if we want to truly teach respect as a value, we have to think about those moments where respect isn't happening and say, aha.

[00:17:19] Why isn't it happening? Well, am I modeling it? And am I actually actively teaching what respect could mean? So that's my take on teaching respect. I have a couple other layers to the conversation that I'm going to build on. But I'm going to start here with this little sort of conversation about how are we actively teaching kids about respect by modeling and teaching.