Ep 154: How to talk to our kids? with Ned Johnson (Part 2)

Part 2 with Dr Ned Johnson where we discuss strategies for motivating children to do chores and homework, such as involving them in decision-making and offering support rather than control. We also talk about the big picture---where we hope to form strong relationships with our children, and also have children who grow into independent, self-reliant adults.  The conversation concludes with the reminder that the time spent with children during their upbringing is crucial and should be focused on building trust, support, and independence.

 Ned Johnson is an author, speaker, and founder of PrepMatters, an educational company providing academic tutoring, educational planning, and standardized test preparation.   Ned coaches clients to manage their anxiety, and find the motivation to reach their full potential.  In 2006, Ned co-authored the book Conquering the SAT: How Parents Can Help Students Overcome the Pressure and Succeed, which tackles the outsized role anxiety plays in standardized testing. With Dr. William Stixrud, Ned co-authored The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives and “What Do You Say?: How to Talk With Kids to Promote Motivation, Stress Tolerance, and a Happy Home”.   Aa sought-after speaker and teen coach on study skills, sleep deprivation, parent-teen dynamics, and test anxiety, and his work is featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, BBC, and many others. 

Dr Jessica Hochman is a board certified pediatrician, mom to three children, and she is very passionate about the health and well being of children. Most of her educational videos are targeted towards general pediatric topics and presented in an easy to understand manner.

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The information presented in Ask Dr Jessica is for general educational purposes only. She does not diagnose medical conditions or formulate treatment plans for specific individuals. If you have a concern about your child's health, be sure to call your child's health care provider.

Transcript

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Hi everybody. I'm Dr Jessica Hochman, pediatrician and mom of three. On this podcast, I like to talk about various pediatric health topics, sharing my knowledge, not only as a doctor, but also as a parent. Ultimately, my hope is that when it comes to your children's health, you feel more confident, worry less, and enjoy your parenting experience as much as possible. Welcome back to part two of my conversation with author and speaker Ned Johnson. Today we're going to talk more about his book. What do you say? How to talk to kids and promote motivation, stress, tolerance and a happy home. Today we talk about how, while it's important for our kids to learn to make their own decisions, what are we parents supposed to do and say when our kids make decisions that, quite frankly, we know aren't the best choices. I'm excited for you to hear Ned's wise and rational advice, and if you want to learn more from Ned, definitely check out his books, which I will link in the show notes below. And as a reminder, if you're enjoying ask Dr Jessica, don't forget to subscribe and leave a five star review. All of the reviews really help the podcast grow, and also they make my day. Now onto the conversation with Ned Johnson. I'll tell you, though, as a parent, that the place where I notice I have the hardest time not keeping my cool is when it comes to things that I know that are better for them, that they are not going to want to do on their own. So for example, getting to bed on time, turning the TV off, those things I find I have to show a little bit of parental anxiety to push them to do the thing that I know is better for them. Yeah, I don't know if that's the wrong approach, but I can't help it. I they're not going to do chores, they're not going to turn the TV off, they're not going to do their homework unless I give them a little bit of a nudge. So, so it's a great point. I mean, you know, the most effective parenting is not authoritarian. My with a highway laser, do whatever you want kid, I don't care, but authoritative, right? And, you know, you're the CEO of the household, right? Of course, there are things that have to be done, and they're not naturally motivated to you. And that's, you know, it's like, you know, you're probably not thrilled to, you know, doing laundry or, you know, going grocery shopping or whatever, but you do it because, because it because it has to be done, right? You know, it's gonna it's nice to have clean clothes, it's nice to eat food, right? You know? And so, so, so our feeling on this is that when we have natural authority, and it is completely appropriate to have expectations, right? But even within there, even for where things, where kids are not intrinsically motivated, we can still think about this, so I'll pick on chores first, right? Brilliant psychologist friend of mine made a suggestion because we I was having the same darn things with my kids like, you know, Katie, could you clean? Could you could you empty the dishes? Matt, could you please sweep the floor? Whatever. And one thing that I didn't realize is, in their heads, they're paying attention, feeling like I got asked more times, you know, I get more demands from dad than Matthew does, and it's not fair. And of course, she knows the total demands of her she doesn't see what goes on with Matthew And so So Anne said, try this. Have your kids make a list of all the chores that need to be done. What are daily chores and what are weekly chores? Put each of them on a tile, and then you go. And then you just each every week, you pick one, you pick one, then if the kids want to swap them, they can swap them. What turns out, I would never have guessed it. Everybody's least favorite chore in the family was doing dishes. Except for me, I love doing dishes. It's really clear to me how to go from a disaster to not a disaster. And something called the Development Network, which maybe we'll talk about later. When I wash dishes, I and I when I do yard work, I just my brain starts thinking about it. Yes, I do my best thinking when I'm washing the dishes or washing my hair, but dishes take longer than my hair. So I kept working on doing the dishes. So it didn't matter what I picked I ended up doing the dishes which was the thing that I wanted to do was the thing they least wanted to do. And so in this the model for intrinsic motivation, because people, how do I get kids to do things? Well, by definition, that's controlling. If we really want kids to feel to want to do things, not just to work hard at schoolwork, chores, anything else, not just to work hard, but to want to work hard. The model is what's called self determination theory, there are three psychological needs, a sense of competency, a sense of relatedness and a sense of autonomy. So I give a lecture to school in Arizona, and a mom asked the exact same question, and she said, Well, I can't get my kids to the chores. And I said, let me just ask a few questions. How do you come up with a list of chores? Well, I know the things, and I read them down and list them. Okay, great. Do they choose what to do or do you assign them to? No, I assign them to, okay, great. Do they get to choose when they do them or tell you where? You tell them when to do it. Why I tell them when? Because this is why they tell them when they have to do it. And if they're doing it, you jump in to help them. You just let them do it, even though they're making messes. Oh, no, I have to correct them, because they're making a bigger mess than they're making it worse. So they have no choice on what they have no choice on when they have no choice on how. So their autonomy is zapped, and if you keep jumping in there to correct them, they're feeling like low competency. And of course, you've now turned to the chore police, so the relatedness with you is low, and you're surprised they're not really motivated to do this. Right? What? If we can use the language of, Listen, guys, this is a household. We all live here, right? We need and we don't want it to be a hot mess, right? It doesn't have to be, you know, Grandma clean every single day. When grandma cleans, we really need to clean, but it needs to be like, livable clean. So let's work on this. And most things are kind of Pro are best handled, as we do with spouses or partners, right? With collaborative problem solving, right? And so you could say, and again, can you guys make up a list of things, and then can, let's figure out a way to, sort of to break into do this fairly. We as parents tend to say, here's the way that is fair, but our perception affair and their perception fair may be different things, because we so often are trying to get our kids to change their things when, if we're completely honest, the only thing we can really change is our own energy and our own in our own dance steps before we then do introduce technology. If you follow the American Academy of Pediatricians, we try to do everything we can to have a big collaborative experience of playing with our kids, not just handed to them as electronic babysitter. And then when you start to give, give to them, allow them to have their own devices. You negotiate the things in advance, right? Okay, so how many hours? And then every week you have, you have, you know, family meeting and say, How did this go, you know, and they, I really need more time. You just trying to negotiate. But it doesn't mean that you never say, Nope, okay, and we're done with that. You know what the cell phone is now the at the time, the iPhone is now in time out, right? And the iPhone will get out of time out tomorrow, right? Because authoritative parenting, the best model for parenting is both high love and high discipline, because if there's no discipline children. They don't feel safe. And mom said, I can't do this. And then I got to do it anyway. What else did she tell me that she doesn't really believe thinking I had, I used to have a recurring issue with with my daughter, my oldest daughter, because I would want her to, let's say, do a chore. I wanted to clean her room, or, you know, I had an expectation for a chore, and I would ask her to do it, and she wouldn't listen. And then I would get more aggravated, and we'd have a dispute, because she felt like I felt like she wasn't listening, she wasn't doing what I asked her to do. And then she would get more resistant. And how we worked around it was if I was clear with my expectations and I didn't demand of it her that moment, things went much better. So if I said, this is what I want you to do every week, I expect that you clean your room once a week. I expect that you help put your dishes in the sink. And I didn't have an immediacy to my request, it seemed to go much better for us. So to your point, I think it's being clear with what we expect, but it's the way that it was said for me, saying in a way that she can hear it. Yeah, yes, yeah, no. I think that's great, and that immediacy is such a good word, because if it's, you know, sweetheart, I really, you know, grandma's coming this week, and we really need to have your room come. Do You Think You Can Get It Clean by, you know, by Saturday morning, rather than, I want you to clean it today? Yeah, I've learned she hears that so much better. Yep, I do too. My wife's like, drop what you're doing right now and go and go and go fix this thing really, right? I wouldn't say that to my wife, because I, you know, I don't really want the locks in my door change, right, you know. Or if you do have a meeting, say, Listen, I'm really in a pickle. You know? I know that you're busy doing this stuff, right? Could you? Could you put that in positive help? Because I could really use your help. It changes the energy, right? I always smile that we so often talk to children, our children, especially in ways that we would never talk to another adult. I agree. It's such a good point to keep in mind, because probably, and this leads into your second book, how to talk to kids, but I know they'll respond so much better if we talk to them with more respect and less less of an authoritarian tone. Yeah, I always smile. I you know, I was, um, where I am. There are a lot of people who have those bumper stickers. Is they don't tread on me, and so people, most people, don't like to be told what to do, but curiously, we feel pretty justified. Until I just I remember, years ago, at a conversation work, I had a former colleague who was much more controlling, and I am all about self determination, there in cleaning for with people who work with me and a colleague of mine. And I was, I was, I was frustrated with my controlling colleague, and kind of vent into it to a work friend, and he said, he said, Well, he said, Ned, you're simply interested in what in being effective. And for me, I mean, I look, I'm a test prep geek. I help kids prepare for, you know, college admissions exams, right? But I have neither carrot nor stick. I don't write the recommendation, right? I don't give them a grade. I can't take away their self, and I got nothing right, but I'm constantly trying to figure out, what's the language that I can use, what's the approach that I can use. I think the question I hear a lot from parents is, i. You know, I have a kid who isn't motivated, and I need to, I need to tell them what to do otherwise they wouldn't do it. I need to tell them what to do otherwise the homework wouldn't get done. I need to tell them to practice their piano. Otherwise the piano wouldn't get practiced. And so I think a lot of parents are at a loss of what to do when they're when they when they see their kids as having no motivation. So this is really important. What oftentimes looks like a complete lack of motivation is actually anxiety. So two things, if a kid, if a person, doesn't want something, you can't make them what they don't want, and you can't make them not want what they do want. But I would suspect that like 90% of the people who are saying this, actually have kids who care deeply about doing well, particularly in school, because for school, for kids, school is their work. Kids don't want to go to school and feel like they're dopes. They don't want to feel like they're dumb. They don't want to feel like they're behind everyone else, because it's really, really stressful. But what a lot of times happens is kids affect, you know, an air of stupid. Who cares about this anyway? And what a lot of times, when they're saying this is stupid, is what they're really inside thinking, it makes me feel stupid. And the more that we lean on kids, you got to do this homework, you got to do this, you got to do this, we increase the stress. And this is important. The major manifestation of anxiety is avoidance. Is avoidance. So the more crucial we tell kids that this is, the more stressed they are, the more that they avoid it. There's a great line in a book called The explosive child where they say their mantra is, kids do well, if they can. And I wholeheartedly agree with that. That's exactly right. And that, and we, a lot of our thinking, including the collaborative problem solving, absolutely, comes from Ross green, where, where he, you know, he was working with kids where, say, Listen, you know, if you don't do this, because I'm going to nail you to the wall, and they'd walk downstairs and get the hammer and nails and say, Let's do it. And curious. And you know, this is a pediatrician that a lot of times children, you know, teens, but especially children who look like they're really poorly behaving and they're having meltdowns about everything. This is important almost always those are simply children who have a more sensitive stress response, and we tend to come down on them harder when their tolerance for being told what to do is even that much lower. And so for kids who seems not to be motivated in school, couple things. One, there is nothing like natural consequences, right? We tend to inflict logical consequences on this parents. Natural consequences are what we want. So if a kid doesn't study and bombs the test and gets a crappy grade, right? They come, oh, that's so unfair. I study like crazy, and Mr. Johnson put things on the news it was gonna be on this. And you're thinking, study, buddy, dude, you were like, like, six hours on your phone after four hours of watching football. Give me a break, right? And part of this is also taking the long view and letting kids struggle through and suffer through and learn from natural consequences, rather than our jumping and doing it. Our son, Matthew was just, he's just the best human I just, he's just the best, but he's 8080, and so everything was kind of done last minute. So we got this email from his teachers. Math teacher, Dear Mr. Mrs. Johnson, I've been noticing the Matthews showing up at school with his homework undone. He seems to be really stressed. By Can you please make sure that he gets his homework done at school, or, sorry, gets his homework done at home? And I'm like, Dear Mr. C, what you're seeing is the natural ramification of a boy who procrastinates Matthews. You may or may not know his ADHD, we've made it really clear that this is his homework and it's his responsibility to do it, but we've offered, you know, we've offered help in any possible way we can. I as, you know, as an as a teacher, so I certainly know fifth grade math pretty well, but we're simply not going to chase him around the house and act like it's our job to get him to do his homework, because that will make him weaker, not stronger, because I think that someone other than Him is responsible for his work, right? That being said, it, you know, this is our first run through. You know, with a middle school aged boy, you have a lot of experience. If you have specific suggestions for him or for us, we'd love to hear them, and we'll be happy to incorporate them, but until then, we're going to let him keep working his way through Him, knowing that he actually likes math and he's experiencing this, this stress, and I think this will be part of his learning process. Sincerely, Mr. Mrs. Johnson, and so I'm convinced that he was doing this because Matthew would get great grades on the exams, right, but we get like, Zippy on the homework, because it wasn't he was doing it the last possible moment, but the teacher was trying to make it feel like Matthew's homework was our responsibility, and he probably feared that we were going to act like Matthew's homework was his responsibility. When the reality was Matthew's homework was Matthew's responsibility, and it's and it's it's worked out great. I think it's tricky though, because as parents, a lot of times I feel like we know what's best for our kids. With my kids, for example, I have two kids that are self motivated with homework. They do their homework. I don't have to nudge them. It gets done. I have one kid, however, where she has homework and it's it's most often not done. She'll get zeros back from the teacher. The music's playing a lot at home, she's dancing. She's She wants to watch TV. She wants to do anything but do her homework. And for myself, it's hard for me to watch this, because I want her to do her homework. I want I know it's best for her to practice her math. What grade is she? In fairness to her, she's going into the third grade. So last year we gave her a pass. There were a lot of homework assignments that weren't done, but it was hard for me to it's hard to know how to tread that line. Yes, yep. My son, at some point, my lovely wife, who she's a very fine educator, teaches Latin at a low local school, she said something effective when Matthew was in full flower, you know, adult ADHD middle school. And she said, it kills me to watch him waste so much time and supportive spouse that I am. I said, don't watch. And so, right, okay, I'm assuming So is she the youngest of the three? She's the youngest of the three, but I, I did ignore it last year. I didn't want her to see our disappointment when we get back zeros from school for her home for her missed homework assignments, a lot of it too. I felt bad that the teacher might view us as not being respectful to her, not encouraging her more to do her homework. But I'm really trying hard to tread that line where I encourage her to do what she should be doing in school without her seeing any disappointment from us. Yeah. So a couple thoughts. I mean, one, you as a pediatrician, know that there are developmental guidelines, and some people are in front of them, and some people were put behind them, right? And so just because the kids behind now, we fear that she'll always be behind, right? What I would say that for all of your listeners is the second chapter of our book has the title of, I love you too much to fight with about your homework, because Bill was asked, I don't know, in the 80s, to write an article about how to help parents kids with homework, because parents say, oh my gosh, I dread dinner time, because after that, it's three hours of chase my kid around the house trying to get the homework course. And what would happen is parents put 80 units of energy in to try to get a kid to do 20, and they get stressed out because it's zero and whatever. They go to 90, the kid goes to 10, and it doesn't change until we change our energy. And so what we suggest is this idea, Listen, can I love you too much to fight you about this? I could, I could make you do this stuff. What we tend to do, we think we can. We make it so painful that the kid finally gets in but then, if you go back to self determination theory, they sacrificed their autonomy in order to hold on to relatedness with us. Because if we're so mad at them all the time, they can't risk a third grader can't risk having the disapproval of mom or dad. It's too it's existentially threatened, right? A teenager can say, you know, I'm out of here. People not to take this to an extreme example, but there's so many stories where you see very successful, high achieving adults, like the Williams sisters, Whitney, Houston, the Jackson Five, where you see them as so accomplished, but then you learn that their parents were really pushy to the point where it severely affected their relationship when they became adults. And who wants that? I'd much rather have a close relationship with my kids a million times over. Yep. So the through line, I think, on here is where, where you could you mentioned before about expectations that, you know, clean your room once a week, whatever it happens to be. Say, listen, you know. So let's talk about expectations for schoolwork. My understanding is, is that your teacher gives you homework to do every night, and with the idea that you know that you're going to get something out. I mean, start with, what do you understand about homework? Do you understand why? Why your teacher gives it to you? Do you feel like you get anything out of it? You ask all these open ended questions, and then say, you know, did you do want to do your homework? And she's probably going to say, well, yes, and no, it's so boring and so irritating. So yeah. And then you you validate. So, yeah, I get that that's kind of annoying. You'd rather be off playing with your friends, right? But you may not want to do homework, but, but do you want to get it done? I mean, does it matter to you if you show up with your homework done or not done? All these open ended questions? Yeah, but it's so annoying, then you offer help. Say, well, would it would it help? I mean, I get that that's kind of true. You don't like doing it. Would it help if I sat with you for half an hour just so you can get this done? Then you can go off and play, right? So we take force off the table. Say, I'm not going to be responsible for getting you to do this, but I'll have office hours. I'll check your work, right? I'll bake you cookies. We'll listen to music, right? We can go and play and then come and do this, you know. And you just, you just keep offering suggestions or way to help them get it, get her to help her get it done. You send them the message that you're there for them if they need it. That's 100% right. That's 100% right, you know. And I did this with my kids all the way along, and say, you know, would you want some Do you want some help with this? And almost always, they'd say, no. But everyone said, why can you look over this? This does not make any sense to me at all. And so it's that again, it's that authoritative thing, where you know, where they know that you're, you're no they know that you're paying. Attention. You know that you're, you're a resource. They know that you care about them. You know, getting done whatever matters to them. But they don't have the sense that you're making them do this, because then, I mean, it gets turned around so backwards. And we need children. We need children to understand that they get out of like, what they put into it. And so probably, if you know, if you're if your daughter cares at all about this teacher, she probably doesn't feel great about getting to zero. She probably feels guilty that she forgot to do it or didn't do it. She probably feels that you are disappointed in her, and she worries about that. She probably feels that her older siblings are so much better at this, and they're on top of it, and they get it done without a problem. Why is it so hard for her? My guess is, there's a whole bunch of stuff that's going on inside of that, right? And I, you know, in some ways, I could give a fig. Do you know this, by the way, do you know how much homework in elementary school contributes to learning 00, precisely zero. So it's really hard for me to get to get whipped up, as many people want to do, parents in school, teachers and everyone's well intended about homework, knowing that it contributes so little to learn, but their kids may never get into an Ivy League school if they don't get started on Mandarin and Spanish and algebra before Middle School. Isn't that right? 100% the way people think. And so look, I'm a guy who helps people get into college. I want every child to be as educated as he or she can be, because it's good for them and their lives and their futures, and it's good for your families, and it's good for schools, and it's good for community. It's good for the whole bloody country. I'm so grateful that you had 84 years of your life, I'm teasing you to become a pediatrician to help people in all the ways that you do. You spend a lot of time learning, and thank goodness you did this, because you help people every darn day. You're too kind. Thank you. But, and I mean it, I mean my kids have had such a run of medical things, and I'm so grateful for people who know stuff that I don't know, but I will tell you that the approach that most people fall into, where we tend to be controlling and we don't support autonomy. And initially it looks great, and kids are they dutifully fall in line, but the long term outcomes on this are really a disaster. When you looked at in the early odds, before we even had iPhones, right, young people were five to eight times more likely to endorse symptoms and anxiety and depression than people were during the Great Depression during the Second World War, during Vietnam. And so it's simply this that the effects of stress hormones on developing brains is terrible, and it leads to the mental health outcomes that that we do not want for children. I mean, at this point, 40% of girls test positive for anxiety sometime in high school. And it's not that you can't address anxiety, but from our perspective, the major work should be not in in treating mental health, but to vent in preventing the development of mental health disorders. And I walk this walk with my ADHD and and and autistic my ADHD son and autistic daughter. And we have this idea that we either could support our kids in ways they're not controlling, or they can be excellent if they need to, if they're going to be excellent, we have to ride them all the time. And it is, it is. It is just not true. And if you haven't read the book, pick it up, because arrogantly, arrogantly, the science is on our side. You know, the science supports this. I mean, half this research, it wasn't even done with humans, who has done the rodents that this need for a sense of control is wired in every human being. And we were reading the research on a clinician pediatrician who worked on the need for autonomy in two year olds, like, What the what are the first full sentences? Not, not, not the boss of me, my daughter, I do it right, that need. It's these are foundational human needs, to feel competent, to feel relatedness, to feel a sense of autonomy. This is so well said, such wonderful reminders. I encourage everybody listening to pick up both of his books, the self driven child. And what do you say? How to Talk to your kids, to build motivation, stress tolerance and a happy home. And ultimately, what I love is that the foundation you know, what I gathered from your books, is how important it is to have a good relationship with your children. So I really appreciate all of your reminders and all of your research and so thank you so much for all that you do. Oh, you're welcome. I will leave people with this. This is a friend of ours who wrote a book on making good decisions, born of Sheila Olson, who's a neuroscientist, was at Hopkins, just stunningly, just stunning human being. And there's a statistic in her book this is going to make people cry or throw a book across the room. And it's this, if your children leave your household at the end of high school, by that time, they will, on average, they will have spent. With you 90% of all the time they will ever spend with you in their lives. Sad, pause, sad, right? So the relationship that we have with our children going forward, and frankly, how much time they want to spend that is coming back. A lot of that probably has to say with how we treat them early on, and from our perspective, we want to treat kids respectfully. We want them to feel that we love them unconditionally, that we trust them, that we support them, and we know that they're capable. Because we want them to go off in the world feeling trusted and feeling that they are capable to build and run successful lives and check in with us from time to time and tell us all about how great it is, and ideally even ask for some advice, but then, but to have the sense of what they need to run their own lives that it's already within them, it's amazing. Thank you so much. I couldn't agree with you more. I really am someone who believes that true wealth and life really is your relationships, and at the very top of that is your relationships with your, you know, with your with your close family, specifically your children, your spouse, your parents. So thank you so much for giving advice on how to make that happen. So I love all your work, and I really appreciate all of your time. Well, thank you, and thank you for this opportunity to chat with you. It's been terrific. Thank you for listening, and I hope you enjoyed this week's episode of Ask Dr Jessica. Also, if you could take a moment and leave a five star review, wherever it is, you listen to podcasts, I would greatly appreciate it. It really makes a difference to help this podcast grow. You can also follow me on Instagram at ask Dr Jessica. See you next Monday. You.