36. Breaking Parenting Cycles: Emotional Regulation for Parents and Kids with Jon Fogel

How do you handle tantrums, big emotions, and discipline without yelling or punishment?

In this episode of More Than Milestones, I sit down with parenting researcher & author Jon Fogel to break down what is actually happening in your child’s brain during meltdowns and why so many of us feel triggered in those moments. We talk about the difference between punishment and consequences, why traditional discipline often backfires, and what to do instead.

Jon shares practical, research-backed tools to help you regulate your own emotions so you can respond instead of react. We also dive into why some kids feel harder to parent, how to break generational parenting cycles, and how to support emotional regulation in a way that actually sticks.

If you have ever felt overwhelmed, reactive, or unsure how to handle your child’s behavior without yelling, this episode will give you clarity, tools, and a new perspective.

This episode will help you:

• Understand the difference between punishment and consequences
• Learn why kids’ brains struggle during meltdowns
• Regulate your own emotions in high stress moments
• Respond to tantrums without yelling or shame
• Break generational parenting patterns with practical tools
  
  

Connect with Jon Fogel:
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/wholeparent/ 

Website - https://www.wholeparentacademy.com/

Books: Punishment-Free Parenting & Set My Feelings Free (OUT APRIL 28TH) - https://www.wholeparentacademy.com/copy-of-book-2 

The Whole Parent Podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-whole-parent-podcast/id1726080800 

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Transcript

KC Rickerd (00:00)
Hello and welcome back to another episode of More Than Milestones. I am very, very excited today to be joined with John Fogel, who is a parenting researcher working on his PhD in developmental psychology. He's a bestselling author and he is a founder of The Parent Lab. John, thank you so much for being here. We're gonna dig into a lot of really good topics all about parenting today, but tell us a little bit about you first.

Jon Fogel (00:23)
Yeah, so I'm a dad of four, so I got four little tiny humans running around. I've been through the toddler stage four times. so, yeah, I talk about parenting on the internet. I mean, it's not glamorous, but it is what it is. And ⁓ it's led me to do some amazing things and get into the research on these things and behavioral neuroscience and develop, like you mentioned, psychology. And now I...

I got a new children's book coming out which is super exciting with my wife. She is the co-author and illustrator of the book. Although everywhere it says that I'm the author, she definitely helps with some of these rhymes. She definitely like, you know, lock these in. But the book is all about tools and so it's the idea is that you read it with your kid and you can go through these emotional regulation tools so that you, when you're in middle of a meltdown, you have all these things that you can do with your kid that aren't screaming at them and locking them in a closet somewhere. So, you know, yeah.

Now I'm adding children's book creator and author to the laundry list, but I mean really I'm a dad. That's what it comes down to.

KC Rickerd (01:31)
That's amazing. And back to the like, it's not glamorous. It might not be glamorous to talk about parenting on the internet, but I think it's so necessary and so important and also a game changer for our generation. But.

Jon Fogel (01:39)
Mm.

Yeah,

yeah, think so much of it is that we don't have a lot of good examples of what alternatives are, right? All of us grew up, and I'm not saying all of us had the same parenting, obviously not. I had great parents in many ways. I don't think that it's very easy to do and talk about the things that I talk about if I didn't have parents who allowed for me to disagree with them and allowed for me to have different opinions and things.

KC Rickerd (02:11)
Mm.

Jon Fogel (02:14)
I think my parents did a pretty good job, but I think basically everybody had some version of punishments, rewards, as the kind of guiding behavioral modification tools, and then what are we supposed to do except for what was done to us, or to totally reject that and just be in the dark. And so I do think it's necessary. I do kind of hate that I talk about parenting on the internet sometimes because I'm like, ⁓ every single video I just feel like I make people feel judged, but.

I mean, I hope that is not the case because I am the first audience for everything that I say. I need this stuff as much as anyone, probably more than most people. The reason why I can teach it is because I was the student who needed to learn it.

KC Rickerd (02:58)
Mm-hmm, 100%. I also think too that there, at least maybe it's the way I've curated my algorithm, but I feel like there is also this swing and part of what we're gonna touch on today too is I think for some of us when we grew up in a similar time where there was punishments and there was rewards and there was very specific.

consequences versus natural, you know, all of that sort of stuff. I feel like when I first entered parenting and then social media kind of was like exploding at the same time with parenting influencers, it almost was like too much at first, right? Like it was like scripts and it was like, felt, it got to the point that I felt like I couldn't even.

do what felt natural in the moment because I was like, but what if I say the wrong thing? And what if they're in therapy for 30 years later and I traumatize them? it almost got to the point that it paralyzed me, but then finding accounts like yours where it's like, there's the middle ground, right? You don't have to be perfect every single time. You don't have to have the script every single time. You can still lean into your natural parenting instincts while also.

Jon Fogel (03:39)
Right.

KC Rickerd (04:01)
maybe changing things from how you grew up or breaking that cycle or reflecting on the way you handled that and coming back for an apology. So it's been interesting to see, like how old are your kids? Did you feel that pendulum?

Jon Fogel (04:15)
I did a little bit. mean, I'm like a researcher by nature. So when I have a problem, I'm that person who gets hyperfixated and I go down the rabbit holes. just to give you an example of this,

When I was 24, My wife was pregnant. I worked for Sears, Sears is now out of business, but Sears Roebuck & Co., you know, I was going into the office, and

KC Rickerd (04:34)
Yeah.

Jon Fogel (04:38)
At started to get into, I've been doing this religion thing my whole life. My parents raised me in a religious framework. And I started finding incongruence with how I was raised what I believed what I was hearing. And so most people kind of fix that incongruence by listening to a podcast episode or a good influencer out there who tell me about how I'm

misunderstanding the historical context of my religion or the Bible or spirituality or something. I went to seminary. that's how I solved that problem was I got a master's degree in the Bible, right? So the way in which I solve problems is by becoming the expert. And so I had a kid who was I didn't know what to do with him. And at the same time, I had also become a licensed foster parent.

KC Rickerd (05:22)
Yeah.

Jon Fogel (05:30)
So I have this toddler who's very challenging, highly sensitive, just a ton of behavioral stuff, really good kid, really brilliant kid, but I didn't know what to do. And everything that I reached for in my parenting toolkit was just punishments, screaming, rewards, that was it. that's all I had. And it became very clear, even just through the practical foster care training, that like, ⁓ that stuff is not ideal. That stuff does not work well. And so...

I kind of went down that same path. didn't immediately go back and get my PhD in developmental psychology. I'm doing that now. basically was like, I know how to study. I have access, because of my university, to all of these academic resources. can just learn this stuff. And so I didn't actually experience it.

as like going on and going to the social media and going where is the advice? Like I actually got all the advice from the academic world, from developmental psychologists who were writing books. And then I showed up on social media one day and I was like, look, there's lots of people who talk about this here. It was like arriving at a party where everybody likes the same stuff. Like I just.

KC Rickerd (06:27)
Love it.

Mm-hmm.

But is everybody

speaking the same language though? Or is there kind of translations off of, like somebody speaking with a little bit of an accent of how they translated it.

Jon Fogel (06:42)
Yeah, I mean...

Yeah, what was funny was that it was actually very similar to my experience of the Bible, a lot of people talked with a lot of authority about things they had no real idea about. And they would say things that were kind of abstractly kind of right. They'd be like, well, there's no... When a child is having a meltdown, their brain doesn't work at all. And I was like, there's kind of some granule of truth.

KC Rickerd (06:57)
you

Like half truth, yeah.

Jon Fogel (07:16)
In that, yeah, there are parts of their brain that shut down when they're in a meltdown. I wrote a book called Punishment-Free Parenting, so I'm not out here trying to say, traditional parenting is the best way. But lot of the gentle parenting advice, reason why it feels so impossible to follow is because impossible to follow. It's not actually grounded in anything. It's just I kind of sort of understand this thing and then I just.

Yapped about it on the internet and then I got famous so when I came into it I was like I'm not gonna say anything until I'm already an expert and so I got that expertise and then one of my early things was I Connected with all of these professionals parenting authors and stuff and I was like hey if I ever say anything wrong You tell me and I'll pull it down and so for the first year. I was just making content

maybe 10 % of the time somebody would be like, okay you're half right about that and I would take down the video and make a correction so by the time I actually wrote punishment free parenting I knew what I was talking about and I gave that book to some of the kind of preeminent voices in child development before it came out and I was like Not just I want your endorsement. But am I right? do I need to rewrite this? do I need to?

KC Rickerd (08:14)
Mm.

Yeah.

Jon Fogel (08:34)
throw this book out and they were like, no. And in fact, you're talking about this in a way that only a person who came to it in this way could talk about it. And so it's kind of nice that you're just like a dad.

Who's talking about this and I was like, ⁓ okay, but is everything right though? And they were like, yeah, everything's right. So I was like, okay, okay, okay that I can put it out. So I didn't really have the same experience, but I think now I've noticed that the advice on the internet has gotten better than it was five years ago. Like five years ago was a lot of painting with a broad brush and just kind of like whatever. Now it tends to be people are a little bit more grounded in what they're saying.

KC Rickerd (08:45)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Jon Fogel (09:15)
There's still those moments where I'm like, yeah, we're missing half of this, but it's less and less.

KC Rickerd (09:21)
Yeah,

when I was a first-time parent, my oldest is definitely my more sensitive kid, right? And so the advice that I was seeing...

that at that point was very one size fits all. it didn't matter if a child was neurodivergent. We were like, ⁓ you know, this is, this is the approach to all of them. for her, if she is having a moment and I am in any way speaking, we're done. We are shutting down. I just need to be,

when I was trying so hard to be like, see you, I see you in this, I see you're having a hard time, in hindsight, I'm like, I would have screamed at me, I would have been like, leave me alone, I get overstimulated too, and so I feel like, we have come a long way in terms of at least admitting that one size is not the answer.

Jon Fogel (10:01)
Mm-hmm.

KC Rickerd (10:12)
But I think that was definitely a complicating factor for me too and just navigating all of it, you know, trying to figure all of it out and knowing how I wanted to approach it, but it not going the way that it looked like it should have been going or it was going for everyone else, you know?

Jon Fogel (10:25)
I tend to ascribe a little bit more to the one size, like there is a right way to do these things. My thing is but you're never going to do having a challenging kid forced me to be a great parent. most of the parenting advice from old school, know, 90s parenting, it works on kids who

have independent play and they aren't neurodivergent and they aren't highly sensitive and they're not being overwhelmed by a world of AI and social media and everything else. the new world that we're a part of requires excellent parenting. And so what's funny to me is a lot of the advice that's given online

It's grounded in what works for their kid, but their kid is not all kids. And what's interesting is that when you actually get into the research, you find out that the hardest kid to parent, which is like the neurodivergent, highly sensitive, explosive, ODD, you know, take all the acronyms and put it in one kid, right? that kid would just require excellent parenting.

KC Rickerd (11:17)
you

Jon Fogel (11:35)
If you gave that same parenting to all of the other kids they would thrive the problem is most of us rely on strategies that only work on kids who don't require excellent parenting and I have one of those I have one who I can just kind of phone it in and not really be present and not really do all of the emotional regulation and not really do all this and he's just like okay, but I'm still regulated he can be hungry and

Meltdown over everything all the time and I'm like, this is so weird If I had if you had been my first kid, I would have thought my next kid was broken Instead I had I had a tricky one first and then by the time he came along I was like, man, you are way more tolerant of bad parenting

KC Rickerd (12:18)
Yeah.

But do you ever feel like, and this is just a genuine question, because my husband and I were just talking about this the other day. Do you ever feel with your one that felt a little easier, that the expectation is almost unfair? with mine, that

Jon Fogel (12:29)
Mm-hmm.

KC Rickerd (12:34)
feels a little easier, more go with the flow. if I say go do, please go do X, Y, Z, it's done. She's back. How can I help? And not to say that the oldest is not like that now, but that has taken time. But what I find is that our expectation of the more chill one, when she happens to be having a day where she's not herself and she's not happy and she's not feeling great and she's sassing off or just not acting like herself, we are, we tend to be so much more like

you don't act like, why are are you doing? Don't act like that. Where her feelings actually are totally valid and she's allowed to be a kid too. She's allowed to talk back too. She's allowed to test those boundaries. But when she does it, we really have to check ourselves on not being like, you don't do that. And instead being like, I see you in this moment. Okay. you're working through it. did you notice that with your, your differences too?

Jon Fogel (13:03)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

⁓

absolutely. So it's interesting because the next book I'm writing is about siblings because of that exact dynamic. Because I don't think we have enough books about siblings. think so often,

KC Rickerd (13:29)
Interesting. Yeah.

Jon Fogel (13:34)
we think if I write a book about parenting one kid or like your kid, then it can be applied to each individual kid. But what we don't see is the intersectionality of actually you're not the same parent to each kid. And there are places where you just hold your kid to that higher expectation.

KC Rickerd (13:47)
Mm-hmm.

Jon Fogel (13:52)
this is the plug for the way that I teach to parent. I didn't come up with this stuff. I literally am just applying things that other people have all it is. most of the smartest people in the world about parenting are terrible at talking to parents.

in the same way that most of the people who are really, really smart ancient texts of the Bible or the Quran or whatever, do not have social Because if they did, they wouldn't be doing what they do. They are gifted in a different way.

So, none of the stuff that I'm saying is new.

It's all just recycled and I try my absolute best to give credit where credit is due whenever possible. I don't try and take credit for any of it. But the stuff that I'm talking about like my nine year old is so easy now. he was the really, really hard kid. And so you asked earlier, how old are my kids? My kids are nine, almost six, four and 18 months. And when I think about my nine year old, I'm like, man.

this kid at three, this kid at four, this kid at what was I even going to

so I find that my highest expectations are actually for him now. Because I used to have no expectations for him. But now that he's grown so much, even was my tricky one, he's not anymore. And so I find myself going into the birth order problems more than like the roles problems where I'm like, come on dude, you're way smarter than this action that you just did.

You're way smarter than what you're doing right now. And that's not fair because he's also impulsive and a nine-year-old little boy who does crazy stuff.

KC Rickerd (15:28)
yet.

yeah, the birth order thing is a whole other conversation in and of itself that truly fascinates me. And even with my oldest, who is definitely my more sensitive kid, there are so many times where I catch myself being like, you know better or you're older.

Jon Fogel (15:38)
Yes.

Mm-hmm.

KC Rickerd (15:51)
but you're still only eight. So no, you probably don't know better or you might've had a momentary lapse in judgment even if you did know

Jon Fogel (15:53)
that?

I get in trouble with my wife when I say this. This is one place where we disagree sometimes. ⁓ Which is actually kind of rare, because most of the time me and my wife are completely on the same page with parenting. Not always. But usually when we're not on the same page, one of us knows that we're wrong.

one of the examples chores. I'm like, kids should do chores because it's healthy, developmentally, and there's all this research into chores are really good for kids. It's not about I'm lazy and I don't want to clean up. No, it's literally harder to do with a kid, but it's important for them. And my wife is like, I know that's true. And also, I'm not doing that. So like.

KC Rickerd (16:38)
Listen,

I'm with her I get it like yes I know it's important but when I have the dishes in the sink and it needs to get unloaded and we have homework and dinner needs to get done I don't want your help right now, even though I know I should take it Yeah

Jon Fogel (16:43)
100%.

I don't want your help, Exactly. Like I know

how important this is for your development and also go on the couch, right? So, yeah, they're usually when we disagree, one of us knows that we're right and she's usually the right one. That's I just picked the one singular example where I'm right, of course, because I'm the

KC Rickerd (16:54)
Exactly.

Yeah. Well, you pick the example

that all the other moms understand because we're all there. We all get it.

Jon Fogel (17:06)
There you go, there you go. You got it, you nailed it. Yeah, that's why I picked that one. Not because it makes me look good. But

one of the ways in which we disagree sometimes, and actually we don't know kind of who's right, is where I go, look, there's no way to actually treat your oldest like you treat your other kids. No parent have I ever can do that effectively.

And she's like, that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. I think if you try, you wind up making the kid feel ⁓ am I being treated differently here, but everybody's pretending I'm not? So instead what I do is I go, with great power comes great responsibility, vice versa, right? If I'm gonna hold you to this high standard, then I'm also gonna, like if you ask me to use your tablet, and your six-year-old little brother was like,

I want to use my mama. I want to do this my four-year-old little brother is like I want to do this I'd be like no it's not time for that. I'm making that call for you if he asked me I'm like Look don't make my life hard. Don't do this in front of them, but you do you go do you and It's like whoa wait, so you give him all these like privileges I'm like no literally I have to because it would be so unfair if I didn't give him privileges when I expect so much of him So that's how I counteract that and my wife is like no you should just treat him more

Fairly, and I'm like, I don't think it's possible. with the birth order thing, I don't know if I can ever break myself of that, I'm only as old as a parent as you, and so that's another thing that I say to them all the time is I go, yeah man, I only have nine years of parenting experience, and you've been here for all of it. So when you're so much better at regulating my little brother than me, I'm like, you're right, because you helped me learn that.

KC Rickerd (18:26)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

And

Jon Fogel (18:47)
I can't lie to him. I don't know how to regulate a nine-year-old from experience. I know how to do it from the research, but I don't know how to do it from experience until I learn it with him. And so I literally say to him all the time, like, okay, how am I doing? And I thought about bringing him on my podcast and sitting him down and being like, time to tell the world. How am I failing?

KC Rickerd (19:08)
Yeah, yeah.

Jon Fogel (19:11)
And you just let him kind of go nuts and say it. the thing is, he's so kind that he would just be like, you just do your best, And I'd be like, ugh, you're the worst.

KC Rickerd (19:20)
Yeah.

It's so true though, because even, you know, there was that trend a little bit ago that was like, you know, realizing that yes, I'm a mom and I'm a wife, but I'm also just a 37 year old woman living life for the first time too and figuring this all out. And I never really thought about the context of Audrey, but yeah, like the parent that I am to her.

Jon Fogel (19:34)
Mm-hmm.

KC Rickerd (19:44)
I had no idea what I was doing. thinking of yourself as a first time parent to second or third or whatever, you know, the things you learn, the things I cared about that by my third, I was like, I'm not worried about that. I got bigger fish to fry, you know? ⁓ But yeah, I definitely, I definitely can see that. And my husband and I,

Jon Fogel (19:53)
That's right.

KC Rickerd (20:03)
We had a moment with our oldest in the way that we handle her. She was having trouble, I knew she was working the angle of not wanting to go to school for whatever reason. She wasn't feeling well, but nothing specific wasn't feeling well. And.

My husband just happened to be home from work today because he's working overnight tonight. So normally I'm handling the school, drama with her, which comes up every once in a while. I manage it with her. And there are times where she ends up staying home, but because he was here, it was line in the sand, not happening. And she was escalating and he was escalating right alongside her as they love to do together. And there are so many times with them that I find myself.

Jon Fogel (20:30)
Right.

KC Rickerd (20:41)
trying to just diffuse and mediate because they just, they really butt heads, you know? there's all of these complicating factors to parenting, obviously. Even the fact that my oldest two were our girls and my third was a boy and now like, he's my boy, like he's my baby boy. But I can't help but kind of treat him different even though I really don't want to, you know? So anyway,

Jon Fogel (21:03)
Sure.

the truth is the hardest part of parenting for most men, not to call it your husband, but the hardest part of parenting for most men is regulating their own emotions.

KC Rickerd (21:12)
please.

Mm.

Jon Fogel (21:18)
Women have had to regulate their own emotions in order to not the same leniency given to women as men. And so they find themselves, far more, for lack of better term, at kind of decentering themselves and just doing what's best.

KC Rickerd (21:30)
one.

Mm.

Jon Fogel (21:44)
for someone else. And that's a horrible reality that we live in that society, And it's so funny because all you hear from the Manosphere is like women are so emotional, women are so emotional. It's like they're not out here with podcasts, Mike, screaming about the male loneliness epidemic, right? we're pretty emotional, ⁓ but we have not been taught how to regulate our emotions. And so a kid comes along and they press on

KC Rickerd (22:06)
Yeah.

Jon Fogel (22:10)
all of these deep-seated triggers. as one of my good friends, he's a psychologist, didn't come up with it, but he says there's no time in the mind. time is a construct for our prefrontal cortex This is why young kids have no sense of time whatsoever. It's gonna be five minutes, they react like it's gonna be an eternity.

Time is very weird with brains. And one of the ways in which it's weird is that we know that our limbic system, the part of our brain that's responsible both for memory and emotion, and encoding that memory, does not experience time at all. None. Which means that when our kid does something that we did when we were a kid, we are just as likely to act in the way in which our parents acted.

as anything else. when I said I don't want to go to school today, that was met with hostility. That was met with you don't get to make that choice. My dad used to literally say to me, I feel sick every day when I wake up in the morning. Just go to school. I like what? For like 10 years, thought just grownups just felt sick when they woke up in the morning every day.

KC Rickerd (23:13)
It's so true though.

Jon Fogel (23:16)
Like, and,

but, but like, hear all these internal messages, and so then your kid says, I don't want to go to school today. And you're actually not even reacting to that kid. there's literal neuroscience to back this up. The memory centers of your brain fire and you start unconsciously reacting to that. And so you're not actually thinking ⁓ what's the best way to handle this situation You're thinking this is a threat.

KC Rickerd (23:28)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Jon Fogel (23:40)
The last time this happened was in 1997. But to your brain, it was yesterday. To your limbic system, it was just now. And you find yourself getting flooded because that's how it was encoded in you. And so are not practiced at this. And it's not their fault, per se, but those are the moments when

KC Rickerd (23:44)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Jon Fogel (24:04)
My wife doesn't deescalate me. She literally just sends me off. She's just like, all right, red card, you're gone. You're gone. Right? See ya.

KC Rickerd (24:09)
That's what I have to do too. Yeah, I'm like, you're out, you're

done. You're not part of this conversation anymore. Get other room. Like, yeah.

Jon Fogel (24:14)
Right. And it's not disres...

it's... and then that feels disrespectful. Like, ⁓ you're... you're banning me? and then you feel, you know, punished for having emotions. Like, I'm not allowed to have emotions. Right? So, so a lot of this is just like layers of humans doing human stuff. And then we don't know how to react in the moment. And so this is why one of my fundamental things that I teach parents is when you feel the heat, you take a beat. every time.

KC Rickerd (24:18)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mm.

Yeah.

Jon Fogel (24:41)
Your brain can only get escalated for 40 seconds without you reinforcing that loop. So if you can just pause, when your kid says something that just drives you up the wall, or your partner, or whatever, you can just pause for 40 seconds, 95 % of the time, you're going to come back to that in a completely different mindset. And I think most of us take that break. We don't take that moment. And again,

part of that's because we've been taught these parenting myths, like, if you don't respond and react in the moment, they're never gonna learn their lesson, instead of saying, actually, most good learning happens after the fact anyway. you know, my whole children's book is about deescalating. But ultimately, it comes from a place of realizing that, I needed these tools because in these moments, I go.

KC Rickerd (25:17)
you

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Jon Fogel (25:34)
I did a workshop early on in the membership, which is the parent lab, I was like, okay, so how do you get your partner on board? Because so often this is parents struggles. And it's not always the wife who's like trying to do the gentle parenting and then the husband who is, but most often.

it is that dynamic where it's like, how do I get this person on board? And it starts by deconstructing some of those fundamental parenting myths.

KC Rickerd (26:31)
Well, I would love for us to talk about consequences, punishment-free parenting. we've talked about the emotional regulation piece a little bit, but punishment versus consequences versus natural consequences, can you break down, when you're saying

Jon Fogel (26:33)
Yeah. Yes. Yes.

Mm-hmm.

KC Rickerd (26:47)
parenting or punishment-free parenting. What do mean by that?

Jon Fogel (26:49)
Yeah,

It's a great question. So I define punishment pretty narrowly. I don't define it so narrowly that none of us are punishing our kids. I define punishment and sound cliche here. But how we define punishment is

KC Rickerd (27:02)
Mm.

Jon Fogel (27:05)
it's a retributive action taken in order to incentivize good behavior or disincentivize bad behavior. So the key word here is retributive. And so any action that we take that is in retribution is a punishment. If our goal is to make somebody feel bad for doing something or make them sorry that they did something,

then we are engaging in punishment. And basically all punishments rely on pain. And what's really interesting is that many parents are like, I would never cause my kid pain. And it's like, yeah, but until you understand how pain is processed in the brain, you don't know when you're causing your kid pain. So let me give you an example. If you hit your kid, you know that you're causing pain because the cingulate cortex in their brain lights up, their pain sensor.

But if you tell your child, I don't even want to talk to you right now, I'm so frustrated, go sit in the corner. The anterior cigulate cortex lights up. They experience that as pain. When a child told that they're grounded and they can't go to their friend's birthday party or something like that, that they wanted to go to.

That child experiences that as pain. When you take away a treasured object from a child, that child experiences that as pain when it's done in a retributive way. Because kids can naturally sense when it's retributive.

Kids are not always the brightest. However, there are some ways in which your kid is brilliantly smart, basically from six months on. And one of those ways is being attuned to their caregiver's emotions and specifically

to their sense of how they're feeling them. And this is very fundamentally evolutionary behaviors, right? They know that their saving grace on this planet is that you are taking care of them. You're feeding them, you're housing them, you're making sure that they have what they need. And so when you take retributive action, when you enact retribution on your kid, they feel that.

very deeply. And what it does is it just sends them into their fight or flight response, which then shuts down the part of their brain that can think morally or that practices impulse control or executive functioning or any of the things that you're really looking for them to do. Right. The reason that we punish our kids is usually because their prefrontal cortex is not working the way in which we hope it was working. Right. They do something that was impulsive and we go that wasn't good or they punch their brother in the face because

they weren't thinking about the long-term implications of that. Or they weren't thinking about how somebody else would feel if they got punched in the face. And so we're mad at them because their prefrontal cortex didn't work well. Again, 90 % of the time, 95 % of the time. so we try, instead of teaching them in a way that grows their brain and teaches them, we actually send them further into their dysregulation, which may stop the behavior in the moment.

KC Rickerd (29:58)
Yeah.

Mm.

Jon Fogel (30:24)
cause them to stop doing what we don't like. But why they stopped doing it is almost never encoded correctly. so many surveys, you can look them up, kids being ⁓ interviewed about why they were, and we're gonna use physical corporal punishment here, but why they were spanked, right? And the kid will be like, I was spanked because my mom doesn't like the color green. And you're like,

KC Rickerd (30:26)
Yeah.

Jon Fogel (30:49)
What are you talking about? that doesn't make any sense. But then their four year old brain, they colored on the wall with a green marker. And now my mom didn't like that it was green was the message that they took away because their brain was just grasping at that moment. Instead of responding with a consequence of we need to clean this off the wall or we need to ⁓

KC Rickerd (31:06)
Yeah.

Jon Fogel (31:15)
We can only use markers at the table now because we've lost our privileges of using them here because this is what happened. all of those are not retributive. They're trying to prevent future harm. And so those are consequences. And in the book I talk about, I have an entire chapter on consequences early in my book, my book for adults, Punishment-Free Parenting, where I talk about the difference exactly as you put between logical consequences and natural consequences. Natural consequences are just

Most of the time that your kid does something that you don't want them to do, there's a consequence for that action that you don't have to really, your only job in that moment is to direct their attention to that. So a great example is your kid's playing in the sandbox with another kid and they take the truck away and that kid gets mad and tries to take the truck back and then they push and they shove and then that kid doesn't want to play with them anymore. A lot of parents are like, I need to add a consequence so that they learn to share. When in reality,

KC Rickerd (31:52)
you

Jon Fogel (32:12)
you have to just sit them down for two minutes, hopefully after couple minutes, and go, hey, you were having a lot of fun playing with that kid. And now you're not playing with them anymore. Why? ⁓ because, the truck, right? ⁓ so when you took the truck from them, they didn't like it and they stopped playing. Natural consequence. The problem is, not everything

has a natural consequence. If it has a natural consequence, let the natural consequence ride. It's one of the greatest teachers. Mistakes and repair, one of the best teachers that we have in parenting. Occasionally, the natural consequence is not sufficient because it's not a consequence to the child. So a great example of this kid decides to make pancakes in the kitchen. And they get out the flour.

and the flour goes everywhere all over the kitchen except for in the bowl that they're trying to put it in. And then I go, when you try to make pancakes alone, the natural consequence is you make a big mess. And they're like, great, let's leave it. So now all of a sudden you have a situation where they're perfectly content to have that consequence be the consequence, the cause and effect. So now you gotta go, okay, well, what is the logical consequence here? Because I don't wanna be retributive, I don't wanna say,

KC Rickerd (33:17)
Yeah.

Jon Fogel (33:34)
You know, go sit in the corner, I hate you, you're dumb, no tablet for the next week. All of that stuff is just gonna cause them to say, I don't understand, my mom doesn't like baking or whatever, right? they're not gonna really internalize that well. Instead, you have to find a consequence that is, and this is the exact acronym that I used in the book, it's WRAP, W-R-A-P.

KC Rickerd (33:50)
Hmm.

Jon Fogel (33:57)
Is the consequence warranted? In other words, does the natural consequence take care of itself? If the answer is no, then you use a logical consequence. Are you in a reasonable state of mind? No consequence that you give while escalated is a consequence. If you give the consequence while you're losing your mind or while you're flooded, it's always going to feel retributive to your child, so it automatically becomes a punishment. So number one, is it warranted? Are you reasonable? Is your kid reasonable? That's the other piece, right? If your kid's screaming and melting down,

They're not reasonable. They're not going to receive any positive. Is the consequence A, associated? So is it a direct cause and effect with what they did, right? If cleaning up the flower on the floor is an associated consequence to making flower mess on the floor, and is it proportional? If you say to your kid, you have to clean the kitchen for the next month every day by yourself, that's not proportional. If it's, okay, you just have to pick up,

KC Rickerd (34:32)
Thank

Jon Fogel (34:56)
one spoonful of flour and then I'll do the rest for you, that's also not proportional. So it has to be proportional because ⁓ consequence that's not, strong enough, the kid goes, well, this is not really a problem, I can just do this whenever I want. it only takes me 10 seconds to clean it up, I don't care, even if it takes my mom 10 minutes. Or if it's too extreme, then the kid, again, receives that as a punishment. They're being so,

KC Rickerd (35:00)
you

Mm.

Jon Fogel (35:21)
Ridiculous about this. What do you mean? I'm grounded for six months and Parents do that stuff all the time. So that's how you know, right? So you start with saying I don't want to be retributive which means that I need to do this in an effective way and Then you can go down that does the consequence take care of itself if the answer is no Then is it warranted? Yes. Am I reasonable? Hopefully if not wait, are they reasonable? Hopefully if not wait, is it associated and is it proportional?

KC Rickerd (35:26)
Yeah.

Jon Fogel (35:51)
This is the kind of advice that I give but it's it's so grounded because you have to understand how kids brains work to understand why a disassociated consequence They just like miss the internalization So this is why a kid who's hit for every problem They actually do internalize the association of what that means what that means is when I when I have a problem I can hit to solve it That's the associated response to that

KC Rickerd (36:13)
Mm.

Jon Fogel (36:16)
this is kind of where things go down that path. ⁓

KC Rickerd (36:19)
Yeah.

But now even back to the rap acronym, I love that so much. But that in and of itself takes quite a bit of regulation on a parent art, right? in order to even like take yourself out of it in the moment and be like, okay, I'm not, I'm not calm enough to handle this right now. I need a minute and I'm gonna come back

Jon Fogel (36:29)
That's right. That's right.

KC Rickerd (36:40)
In terms of regulation for parents and for children, obviously your book is all about that for children, but definitely more than likely beneficial for the parent that is also reading it to them and just that slowing down, that reminder. What is the root of regulation for a parent who really struggles and is like, that sounds incredible. I want to be able to do that. How can I start to regulate myself as the parent and approach consequences that way?

Jon Fogel (37:07)
Yeah,

if I have to give the three minute response, it's most parents, and I kind of alluded to this earlier with how women have been forced to regulate their emotions because of society, but even for most moms.

they don't always know that they're doing that. The problem that I find with most parents, I do this workshop once in a while called How to Stop Yelling at Your Kids, where this is exactly what we're talking about, just how to regulate in those moments. What I find is that most parents believe that they go zero to 60. They go, I didn't feel dysregulated and then now all of a sudden I do. And what really is happening is that they're climbing a mountain.

And they taught themselves because their emotions were so overwhelming to their parents. Basically, I have an entire chapter of Punishment-Free Parenting called Emotions Are Your Superpowers, where it talks about why adults were taught, historically, it's the only part of the book where I talk about history. But historically, why adults were taught not to feel any of their feelings.

And what happens when you teach somebody to not feel any of their feelings is that they're able to adequately repress and bottle up their feelings until they're not. And so basically we are creating these pressure chambers for parents where there's no relief valve. They don't even know that they're getting escalated. They don't even know that their heart rate's going up. They don't even know that they're being flooded by sympathetic nervous hormones like adrenaline and cortisol.

But they are, and then by the time they get to that point, they've flown off the edge. So that's why I say, when you feel the heat, you have to take a beat. Actually, in those moments, you've already, climbed that mountain at that point. And really, you're in survival mode of just don't make this worse. And 99 % of the time that you raise your voice and start yelling.

KC Rickerd (39:03)
Yeah.

Jon Fogel (39:14)
even if you get the compliance behavior that you're looking for in that moment, you've made the situation worse because you've removed the opportunity to actually teach that child to regulate their feelings in a way that they're gonna be able to do without you screaming at them. And you've taught them that they should wait for you to scream. There's so many things going on. But really in a nutshell, most of us don't know how to feel our in an effective way. And

KC Rickerd (39:28)
Yeah.

Jon Fogel (39:40)
We've gotten to this point in society, if the pendulum is swung too far, it's that we think like, ⁓ our feelings are so important that I should just go into my feelings and just go into depressive episodes for weeks at a time because I'm feeling my feelings no, feeling your feelings means allowing the feeling to come and allowing the feeling to go. And you need strategies for that. I think this is the prevalence of talk therapy. I have some issues with the prevalence of talk therapy, namely in that

Many people treat therapists as if supposed to have ⁓ a bi-weekly therapy appointment for the rest of my life, and even if I'm seeing no improvement, I'm like, no, either your therapist is helping you navigate things, either they're working themselves out of a job, or they're not working themselves out of a job. And if they're not working themselves out of job, find a new therapist, right? I'm not saying that there won't be a decade here of work to be done.

But if you're not seeing improvements, if your life's getting worse and not you probably should pause and figure out whether or not this is effective. But I think most of us need to get those tools to work through our emotions. And really, this is a hard truth. Neuroplasticity says we all can change. We all can grow. We all can learn secure attachment. We all can learn to regulate our emotions. We all can learn these tools.

KC Rickerd (40:50)
you

Jon Fogel (41:04)
However, there is probably a much, harder road for us because we're trying to do it at 37 or 35 or even 25 after our brain is much more firmly established than had we learned these tools at seven. And so most parents don't want to hear me say what I'm about to say, but it's the reason why I wrote

set my feelings free with my wife was because I am going to keep teaching parents how to regulate their emotions, but I hope that my kids won't have to do that work. I hope that my kids will not have to learn how to do this at 37. So for the parent who goes,

Well, I just want to learn how, like, it would be so much better, John, if I didn't just punish my kids and scream at them all the time or take things away from them or just fold, right? The permissive parents among us, we don't know what to do, so we just cave and we just give our kid, the fifth popsicle or whatever. I wish I wasn't like that. And I'm like, yeah, so let's do work. And most of my work in the parent lab. I'm working with parents through that stuff. But, it's slow work.

KC Rickerd (42:03)
and

Yeah.

Jon Fogel (42:15)
And it

takes years to rewire your brain to be non-reactive that said, you can do this with a seven-year-old. It doesn't take years. It takes a couple of months, and you teach them how to regulate their emotions. And then as they grow, they learn how to apply those same tools in new ways. And then they're not doing this work. So if you're like, man, I wish I didn't have to climb this mountain, my response to that is, I know.

And I don't want your kid to. that's actually why I wrote the book. That's why I wrote Set My Feelings Free because I don't want your kid to have to redo this. I know how hard it is to do what we're talking about. I still screw up at least as often as I don't. I wrote a book with the subtitle, How to Raise Kids Without Raising Your Voice and I still yell at my kids at least once a week. it used to be once a day or

KC Rickerd (42:54)
Mm.

Yeah.

Jon Fogel (43:05)
once an hour, but it's less, but I'm not fixed. I'm probably still going to yell at my kids every once in while for the rest of my life. But my goal is for my kids to not be that way, for them to have better tools to know when they're climbing the mountain and to be able to get off that lift before it gets too late.

KC Rickerd (43:24)
Yeah.

And I think ultimately for for all of us that are in any way trying to break cycles or gentle parent or, you know, set our kids up for a different experience than we've had as adults in that ability to regulate like that. That's what we want. We want the tools. And I know for me, at least like I'm a big fan of lay it out for me, make it as easy as possible. So let's talk about your Let's talk about it. It's a perfect it's the perfect time. Tell us

Jon Fogel (43:47)
Yeah.

KC Rickerd (43:50)
Tell us about it.

Jon Fogel (43:51)
Yeah. so basically after I wrote punishment free parenting, after I the first it didn't have any real practical tools. It was mostly just like, this is why you shouldn't punish your kids. And this is why you should hold boundaries. And this is why it's good to feel your feelings.

and this is the history behind And all of that was important and most of that got kept in the book in some form or fashion. But at the very end, I wrote these six chapters, the last six chapters of the book. One of them is how to repair with your kids when you screw up. That was really essential. And then I wrote these five short chapters that were what to do every time your kids having these big emotions. what specifically, step by step.

And I call it step by step, five step whole parent method at the back of the book. And the response was, this five step are you kidding me? This is the best part of this book. I love the book, I vibed it, man, tell people to read this part first. And I was like, yeah, but I put it at the back so that

You'd have all the context and they're like, I don't need context, I need these steps. So now I tell people all the time, if you're only gonna read one part of the book, read the last five chapters. the problem was, all of these tools were focused around parents. Because my parenting paradigm is usually, you can work with the adult brain and hopefully the adult learns to parent more effectively and then the kid will come along. It's almost never the kid's problem. It's always the adult's problem.

KC Rickerd (45:01)
Yeah.

Jon Fogel (45:22)
Problem being, kids still have underdeveloped brains. And so there is only so much, as you mentioned at the beginning, of talking about your feelings that's gonna help a kid move through. Most regulation strategies we know from OT is a multidisciplinary approach. So from OT, from psychologists who specialize in ADHD and ODD and PDA and autism and ASD, just all of that, Like from...

Behavioral researchers from BCBAs all of these people say no actually there are these tools these neurological like neuro and anatomical behavior tools my sister-in-law's a PhD Behavioral neuroscientist there's like only like under a couple dozen of those in the world So this is like a totally different discipline, right? This isn't psychology. This is like behavioral neuroscience. and there was

KC Rickerd (45:59)
Mm-hmm.

Jon Fogel (46:15)
very, very few tools out there. occasionally there's an Instagram video that goes viral. It's like, tell your kid to smell the flowers and blow out the candles. But why? Not really explained. And also, no tool for a kid. That's still the parent talking to the kid. That's not the kid knowing to do that in the moment. So we have this idea, what if we took

KC Rickerd (46:30)
Mm.

Mm.

Jon Fogel (46:42)
a famous song, like a nursery rhyme that kids know, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. And we rewrote the words so that kids could sing this song of how to do these emotional regulation games.

My wife's this brilliant artist and I'm like, you wanna illustrate this? Let's just do this. And so we pitched it, we got picked up by an amazing publisher Beaming Books, who does these amazing, beautiful children's books, And we rewrote all the lyrics to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to be these emotional regulation games. And the idea is each one of the games,

walks a kid through, think five, different kids in the book. It's a diverse cast, boys, girls, different cultures, different races, different abilities, And each of these kids has a common experience that kids go through. Like somebody doesn't share the truck in the sandbox, a little sibling knocks down the tower that they're using, or they're scared, one of the kids,

It's actually my son in the book, is scared in his bed at night. ⁓ And we were like, okay, these are things most kids experience. And we name the feeling that they're having, and then we give them a practical tool So the picture shows them the situation so that they can encode that in their memory. And then we name the feeling, and then we tell them exactly what to do.

Here's the visual cue. Here's the story. Remember, here's what we do. Here's the song that goes with it because we know that songs can be accessed by the brain when it's melting down.

in ways that spoken words can't be. Very interesting. Another thing that I learned from counseling adults actually was I had all these dementia patients and if I could sing to them, they could totally understand and be totally lucid. And then if I talked to them, they couldn't be. So I was like, I wonder if you could do that with a kid too. Sing to a kid, they're actually totally able to understand what you're saying. So we made the book singable, we gave them these tools, and we go one by one.

KC Rickerd (48:19)
Yeah.

Jon Fogel (48:44)
One of them is the color game where this girl who's disappointed that she can't go outside and play in the pool because it's pouring rain, lightning and thunder, she goes around her house searching for different colors. And we know that this is an integrating tool from cognitive behavioral therapy. It's a grounding technique. It brings the sensory perception back online where when you're looking for these colors and you're naming them as you go, the brain regulates itself. This is a tool that I've used with literally tens of thousands of parents.

KC Rickerd (49:10)
Mm.

Jon Fogel (49:14)
And so there's that one. There's one about imagination, using imagination to overcome fear. We know again, from the science, that when you activate imagination, you can actually override your fear sensing because fear in kids comes from the same place as imagination. They're imagining the fears so we can imagine something in that stead.

and fix that. So literally every single one of them is these neuroanatomical tools that you can go. But it's written as a song and it's illustrated beautifully so that you're not just pulling out, this book because their kid's having a meltdown. Actually, what I want parents to do is read it to their kid every night before bed.

right before bed your kids ⁓ Limbic system is firing their memory systems are on online They're gonna encode the information in the book into their working memory They're gonna organize that information the second that they fall asleep their hippocampus is gonna organize the information and then During the day when they're having the meltdown you start the song right, but hurting others I resist this is one of the lines in the book I say this to my my almost six-year-old

and he will grab his fists and pull them to his chest. And he knows because it's been encoded into his memory that this is how when I'm angry, I can stop before my anger makes me pop. We have the words that are locked in. And so the idea is this book becomes this tool. And it already received this stellar recommendation and review from the school library journal where school library journal was like,

KC Rickerd (50:30)
Mm.

Jon Fogel (50:49)
This should be in every school library because these kids need to learn these tools because these are how the teachers are going to be able to manage classroom behaviors and these are again. neuroscientific tools. I didn't make them up these come from cognitive behavioral therapy They come from behavioral neuroscience.

KC Rickerd (50:59)
Yeah.

Jon Fogel (51:06)
And what I was blown away by was we have lots of books to help kids name their feelings. We have lots of books that affirm that kids have feelings, but it has not been, at least in my experience, it has not been since Fred Rogers of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood that we actually have somebody who's teaching their kids to manage those feelings.

KC Rickerd (51:14)
Mm-hmm.

Jon Fogel (51:27)
We just say, your feelings are valid, your feelings are valid, your feelings are valid. But when they get trapped in a cyclone of their emotions and they can't get out of them, we can say they're valid until we're blue in the face. That kid is trapped. And so I looked at that. I looked at Mr. Rogers. A lot of people don't know this. Mr. Rogers and his show, the reason that he did that was because the three greatest behavioral psychologists

in the world at the time. had just started a lab for understanding kids behavior in Pittsburgh. And that was where the show was recorded. And he found out about that at the University of Pittsburgh. And every single script for Mr. Rogers was approved by the three leading behavioral psychologists in the world. And so the reason why we have all these tools and the reason why I'm so

KC Rickerd (52:14)
Wow.

Jon Fogel (52:18)
attached to that and I'm like, I'm gonna do what he did. Because literally, the reason why that show was so magical, in many ways, the reason that a generation of kids can navigate their own feelings in ways that their parents never could is because of those tools. And so we've just done that, we've updated it. Like I said, my wife illustrated it.

It will totally change your kid's experience of tantrums forever.

KC Rickerd (52:41)
It sounds like it, that's amazing. again, it all in a bite-sized spot that fits into your life that you can build into your routine, build into their brain is just incredible. where can people get it?

Jon Fogel (52:53)
So it is available on April 28th, You can go on to bookshop.org if you want to support your local bookstore, or you can also find it on the big ones, Amazon, Barnes and Noble. It is available, allegedly, wherever books are sold. And I just encourage you to get a copy and tell your kids' school library to get a copy. School Library Journal had a great write-up for it. Tell your public library to get a copy.

because not just because I want to sell lots of books, of course, I don't get very much money for these books. The reason why we did this is because we desperately, need these tools out in the world much more than anything else

And if you want your kid to not have to the same struggles that you did, which by the way, basically every parent I know says that. I want my kids to have better than I had. Get them the book, read them the book every night. Your kid's gonna become obsessed with it, especially if you sing it and they're gonna be able to manage their emotions during the day a heck of a lot better.

KC Rickerd (53:31)
Mm-hmm.

I love it. It's amazing. And we will link to all of those options in the episode notes for you guys too. And then tell everyone where they can find you as well, like website, Instagram, social media, if they just want more of your content as well.

Jon Fogel (54:02)
More of the content, yeah, so I also wrote another book, it's called Punishment-Free Parenting, that's for grownups. Your kid's not gonna ask you to read that one at bedtime but you can find that book wherever books are sold, and also at WholeParent, that's W-H-O-L-E-P-A-R-E-N-T, on YouTube and on ⁓ TikTok and on Substack and on Instagram and on Facebook.

Basically all of the different places. I have a podcast called the Whole Parent Podcast that you can find there as well. If you're interested in the parent lab, wholeparentacademy.com, that is where you can find information about the parent lab, which is my online community where people can get coaching from me and a course library of 20 plus courses just kind of how to parent more effectively.

KC Rickerd (54:48)
it my gosh well this was amazing and so insightful and I'm so excited for your book to be out in the world I actually might grab a copy for my office because I have little ones coming and there's big feelings sometimes at physical therapy so thank you so much thank you so much for being here and we'll get all this linked in the episode notes and yeah we will see you guys next time on another episode of more than milestones

Jon Fogel (55:00)
Absolutely.

Thanks KC.