Why Your Kid Isn't Testing You (Probably)

"He's testing me." "She's being dramatic." "He knows exactly what he's doing." Those are theories, and theories can be wrong. This week Rick and Madeline teach a skill that changes how you see your kid, describing exactly what they're doing, without labels or judgment. You'll learn how to pinpoint a behavior in a few countable words, how the video camera test tells you if you're describing what you see or what you assume, and why what happens before a behavior matters as much as what you do after. As a bonus, it's a lot easier to stay calm when you're describing instead of judging.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome back to the Starborn Parenting Podcast. I'm Rick Cabina.

SPEAKER_01 0:09

And I'm Madeline Jurgensen.

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Madeline, guess what? This is the cutest thing ever. My granddaughter, Drew, is taking swim lessons. And you know what she hates about swimming? Putting her head underneath the water. And I'm sure this is a very common thing. And I was talking to my daughter, Dylan, and I said, you know, what are they doing about this? And she says, Oh, they keep encouraging her. But guess what? This is the perfect opportunity for behavior science for the win. And what could you do if you were shaping up this behavior? Like if you had someone who's afraid to put their head all the way under the water, what might be one thing that you do?

SPEAKER_01 0:57

Small increments.

SPEAKER_00 0:58

And so a small increment could be dipping, you know, just to your chin. Okay, dip your chin in the water. Reward that behavior. Then what's another step? Maybe the mouth goes under and you have her blow bubbles. Blow some bubbles, and then you reward that behavior. And then you maybe go to the eyes, and the next thing you know, she's underwater. And this is the power of behavior science. And it's something that I, you know, just heard about this the other night. And I'm going to mention this to my daughter and see, can we try this? Because this is where when you have these kinds of little minor things, life can be so much better if you understand the science that can just completely eradicate that kind of problem.

SPEAKER_01 1:50

Mm-hmm. Yeah, and kids love to get those little wins along the way too. So it's like when she gets her chin underwater, like lots of praise, like finally gets her mouth on lots of praise, and like everybody's enjoying it so much more.

SPEAKER_00 2:02

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well, we're gonna talk about something that's important today. I mean, well, every time we talk about something, it's important. The content that we talked about last time was these behavior loops. And we introduced that concept of a behavior loop, and we mentioned that this behavior loop is something that occurs again and again. It feeds on itself, it's a behavior that just keeps happening. To take the example with Drew, if she likes to swim, and if she'd like to go underwater, like I can swim, I learned to swim when I was really young. I love going underwater and swimming. And you know, you do this behavior more and more because it is a behavior loop. And this is very important to understand all the components of it because if you get the big concept, that's fine. But understanding what happens in each one of these concepts can provide information to the parent that you can diagram what's happening, you can make theories as to why something is happening, and then if it's a behavior you want to happen more often, you can make that happen with rewards. And if it's a behavior that you want to have happen less often, then you can get another behavior and have that behavior compete with the other. So this is the topic that we're gonna talk about. The things that go inside a behavior loop.

SPEAKER_01 3:35

Which is involves behaviors that occur after it is the behavior itself, and then things that happen after and before the behavior. And I personally, as a behavior analyst, as I was w studying in the field and working with my own kids, having the idea that there's things before the behavior that occur that influence the behavior was really powerful because it's not like you're you're just cleaning up afterwards. It's not like it's like the behavior occurs and you're just always in response mode, putting out fires. It's like you can start looking at what's happening before the behavior so you can proactively start to change the behavior or view how to kind of like what levers you can pull that might affect the behavior from never actually occurring or increase in the behavior. It's just something you want to see.

SPEAKER_00 4:18

It's such an important topic for everything that you just said. I thought about a uh meltdown in IL6. You have a child that wanted something, parent says no, child has a meltdown. What are most people going to tell that parent? Oh, you should do this, you should do that, try this. That's all telling the parent what consequence that they should be doing. It's giving advice on what they should do after. But what's happening before? What if that child was really hungry? You know, what if that child didn't have a nap and was tired and cranky? Or you can go on and on and think about how maybe that consequence of saying, oh, you've lost screen time because you disrespected me or you threw a fit or whatever. Whereas it'd be so much more humane and so much more effective if you understood what's happening before that behavior.

unknown 5:25

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_01 5:26

Yeah, I always think about my daughter when she first started going into her own bed in her own place, like, and that's a separation from parents, and that can be challenging. And so we started after we putting her down to sleep, she would have all these behaviors of like very attention-seeking behaviors, like asking for more water, asking for this, just crying in general. And the way I explained this to my husband and we solved this was he was like, Okay, well, what were we doing before we put her into bed? Well, at the time we just moved to a new house. We were doing a bunch of like cleaning, organizing, like not really spending as much time with her. And so then, of course, like when we put her down, she's gonna do all these attention-seeking behaviors. So instead, the way I ascribed to my husband was that we're like filling her love bucket before we go to before she goes to bed. So it's like we got to fill her to the brim. So it's like we're reading books with her, we're giving her extra cuddles, we're like spending all this quality time, even if it's just like five, 10, 15, 20 minutes before she goes to bed, but it's like filling her bucket up. So when she goes to bed, she's like all filled up and she can go to sleep by herself. And she we didn't have any more of these attention-seeking behaviors. But it's like instead of looking at just the behaviors of what happens when she goes to bed, it's like, what can we do before that? And filling her love bucket was kind of our solution, and it's worked great.

SPEAKER_00 6:41

I love the the love bucket. The variables or well, the context is what you are describing. What are things that are happening before? And there's so much that we can think about in terms of behavior science. There are you mentioned you, your husband, but what else is there uh when you think about bedtime routines? Is something playing on the TV? Is there a game that is being played by another sibling? You know, who is around? What time is it? We're talking about five o'clock. All of these, you know, we could go on and make this list, but being able to describe the what happened before is really important because you shared a story that showed how understanding the beforehand and creating all of these different fun things that are happening can easily make that behavior go in a certain direction versus if you did it somewhere uh in a different way. Like let's say that Lucia was playing a puzzle and you just said, okay, time for bed. You take the puzzle away from her and then you put her in bed. That's a very different way that you're setting your child up for.

SPEAKER_01 8:07

Or if she starts crying in bed, we could be yelling at her. You know, it's like, quiet down, stop crying, you know, like, or shut the door, or, you know, yeah, there's many things that we could do to exaggerate exasperate the problem. Um there's a lot of levers you can pull during bedtime that either increase the behaviors or decrease them.

SPEAKER_00 8:26

Yeah. And that's I like the way you you say that lovers. In behavior science, there is a very big word that covers what happens before a behavior. And we'll just say it because parents might hear this. It's called an antecedent. And we can just talk about it as what happened before the behavior. But if you ever hear a behavior person say antecedent, that simply means what happened anti before what happened before the behavior. So that's a technical term, but let's just keep it at something that's easy to remember, which is what happened before the behavior. I think that once you have that down, and this seems simple on the one hand, like, okay, here are things that happened before the behavior, but then there's the actual behavior. And being able to figure out what is the behavior that I am going to work on, that's a science in and of itself. Like you and I can talk about research that we did where we looked at pinpointing behavior. And this is a term that when you when we when we say behavior, we mean anything a person says or does. When we use the word pinpoint, we're talking about using a very specific framework to describe that behavior. And these pinpoints are important because whatever behavior that you want to change, again, whether that behavior is going up, whether it's going down, or whether you want it to stay the same for a long time, you need to say, what is that behavior? And pinpointing is a skill and it's something that you have to learn. But once you learn it, you start seeing the world of behavior through these pinpoints.

SPEAKER_01 10:23

That's a really good point. And it's I think when you look at looking at the bedtime routine, there's a lot of behaviors that are happening all at once. Like she maybe is is crying for banana, she's maybe like asking to go to the bathroom, maybe she's getting out of the bed. And those are all specific individual behaviors, and looking at them individually can help figure out what is driving those behaviors and what can you do to either decrease or increase them. And so, you know, for instance, getting out of bed, you might we have her bed has a little kind of frame around it, so she can only go out one side, and that kind of deters her a little bit. Um and then, you know, asking for banana, maybe making sure she has a snack and she's full before she goes to bed. Or, you know, if she needs to go to the bathroom, it's like, did she go to the bathroom before she went to bed, or does she need to actually go? Yeah, so it's like it it really pinpointing, as you said, the exact behavior that you're looking at is crucial.

SPEAKER_00 11:20

Here's the pinpoint Leaves bed when lights go off. Mm-hmm. That pinpoint is just a description of a behavior that you want to count, that you might want to change. Are there instances where leaves bed when lights go out is bad or good? I mean, obviously, if you have a count and the let's say the count's five, okay, it might seem like leaves bed leaves bed uh when lights go out, that some of those counts could be things walking around the room, maybe coming and peeking on you, like what's mom and dad doing. But a a child that leaves bed when lights go out to use the bathroom, I don't want to punish that behavior. That's totally legitimate, and it's something that when we describe a behavior, understanding what it is is one thing. Okay, this is happening. Which way it goes, you know, that's a completely another thing.

SPEAKER_01 12:25

Right. Yeah, so you have a really good way to think about the behavior, which is kind of creating these two columns in your head. And there's like the column A, which is the describing, and then there's column B, which is kind of your theory, or you're guessing like what's happening. Can you explain a little bit more about that?

SPEAKER_00 12:42

Yeah, I love that way of thinking about it. If we are describing a behavior, then what the parent is going to do is just look at it and say, what is happening? Pure description, no judgment involved here. Whatever that behavior is that you're interested in, you want to describe it. Let's say that you have a child who you say, okay, it's time to go to bed, and what do they do? They throw themselves on the floor. We can put a pinpoint there, which would be drops body to floor. Four words that yourself, your husband, your mom, the babysitter, anybody who's out there can count that because you're describing the behavior, versus the other column is well, why is this happening? You're gonna have a theory, and the theory is going to come later when you have observational data, when you have evidence, versus, oh, you you see something and immediately you go to, well, I think this child's testing me. That's not helpful. If you have a child that's doing something and you immediately start ascribing a cause to that, then what you're doing is you're just saying, this is reality. I have just said my child's doing X because of this, and you could be wrong. And if you make those judgments and you say that this is why things are happening, in other words, you come up with a theory versus just describing that behavior, then all sorts of things could could happen. Like who wants to be in a situation where their child is disrespecting them? The goal is we want to keep the theory from influencing what's actually happening. And at this stage, you know, we talked about let's look at all the things that are happening before the behavior. That's important. This next stage is let's just figure out, well, what is the actual behavior? Again, we're describing all three of these things, and we wouldn't necessarily go in that order. We'd probably start with the behavior first. We would say, what is the actual behavior we're interested in changing? And being able to understand what the person's doing precisely and label it, that's what we want to do at this stage. And we you can have a theory in your head. We're humans and we're going to react. And if someone does something, we're gonna say, oh, this probably happened because of this. And sometimes you could be right with that theory, but if it's a behavior we want to change, what I'm saying is avoid putting things into column B theory and just work on the column A. There's a test, which is called uh either video camera test or just the camera test. And the idea with that test is if you put a video on a child, could you capture movement in action? Would it register on the camera? If the answer is yes, that is a behavior that you can work with. If the answer is no, if there's not motion, if that video camera is not picking up motion, that's probably something that you don't want to work with.

SPEAKER_01 16:17

Yeah, I think that's a really good way to think about it. It's it has to be some sort of action movement that we can see to really be able to notify whether or not that's a behavior. And and going back to what you were talking about with the being able to describe the behavior in itself instead of thinking like, oh, the kids dropped in the floor. Why are you doing this to me? Why is it so annoying? Like, why are you doing like, oh my God, it's so obnoxious. One thing that's helped for me as a parent is when you really start to dissect the behavior, is like, okay, what is the actual behavior I'm looking at, instead of starting to spiral into name calling the child or they're putting yourself on you, and it helps keep you kind of in that more prefrontal cortex area where you're where you're you're really analyzing the behavior and you don't start getting as aroused by it. You know, it's not like if you if you look at the behavior and really start to get, okay, what is the child actually doing? They're throwing their body on the floor. And even if you just say that to yourself, uh it helps you kind of stay grounded and you don't start flying off into why are they doing this? And they then you get upset and then you get frustrated and your blood pressure starts to boil. It's like if you start just by just being able to describe exactly what your child is doing, it really does help keep you focused and able to react in a more sane and calm manner. Like that's what I've experienced over the years.

SPEAKER_00 17:38

What you've just described is how you can be compassionate when you're in a situation when compassion is really hard to muster. I have been years ago, when I was a behavior analyst, my very first job, I was working at a facility for children that had traumatic brain injury. And one of the things that happened when some of these kids would have brain injury is they would do things that they typically wouldn't have done otherwise. And aggression, being extremely physically aggressive, was one of these behaviors. And I'll never forget, I was probably on the job maybe for four or five weeks, and this little mini riot broke out, and this little eight-year-old jumped on my back and he bit me. And I don't know if you've ever been bitten before, but being bitten has this visceral effect on you, where it's like a fight or flight type of a situation and your heart starts racing, you're like, okay, I gotta do something here. In that moment, being compassionate is very hard. However, if you're running this loop and saying, okay, this is a behavior that is happening, yeah, nobody likes being bit. Okay, no one likes that. But if you understand that I'm gonna count this behavior, and this is something that is bite staff, whatever that pinpoint is, bite staff during instruction, that's one thing. And understanding that, okay, we're gonna put a theory to this later. Right now, all we're doing is looking at what's happening, being compassionate in the moment is not easy, but looking at it as just a behavior is one step in that direction.

SPEAKER_01 19:35

Mm-hmm. And and anyone that's, I mean, we've been in the field for a while, so we've probably seen every behavior under the sun, biting, scratching, screening, everything. Like, you know, so nothing surprises us anymore. But once you've seen enough of these behaviors, especially big behaviors, what you've noticed is that they kind of, you know, they they peak, you know, they peak and they go back down. And if one of the reasons why it's so important for us to be able to stay calm in these situations is that we need to be ready to offer that compassion when the child comes back down on the other side. Because if you're still fuming or you're still angry, um, you're not able to give that compassion to the child once the behavior is kind of done. So yeah, it's like, yeah. I it's I've my daughter's had her freak outs. I've I've I've worked with kids that when they peak, it's like once you're there, you are the calm rock that they can come to and they can say they're sorry, you can you make mends and yeah. So the more we can help parents like stay grounded, I think this is better.

SPEAKER_00 20:29

When you when you get to a certain age, you become very reflective, especially myself. All of my children are grown, and now I have grandchildren. And I think back, like, wow, if I could have responded as I do to my grandchildren now, to my own kids, I would have been such a better father. And you can't beat yourself up over that because when you're in the moment and things are happening, you know, it's life. And the only way you can get better is to learn these techniques. And if you make a mistake, you're human, no judgment here. Try to do better. And one way you try to do better is understanding these behavior loops and why are these behaviors happening. And this would be a nice way to segue into the last part of the behavior loop, which is the after. So you have the behavior, something's gonna happen before it, which can be a signal or a trigger for the behavior, that specific behavior that we'll label with a pinpoint, and then you have what happens after. In the after are events which can turn into, again, another behavior science word is consequence. That word consequence means something very different when most people think about con If I said to you, uh, a child got a consequence. Consequence, what does that bring up? Like what's the first thing you think of when you hear that?

SPEAKER_01 22:04

People often refer that to negative things. Like something, something bad's happened to that kid.

SPEAKER_00 22:09

Yeah, let's give that kid a consequence. That is not at all what it means in behavior science. What it means is something that happens after, if it drives the behavior up for the future, or if it diminishes it in the future, then that consequence has an effect. And understanding that consequence, it could be what we call reward, it could be what we call relief, it could be what we call if it's going down on the punishment or a penalty. And we'll we'll talk, we we've already talked about reward, penalty, punishment, relief a little bit. We'll we'll talk more about in the future, but this consequence after the behavior happens can take on that role. But the thing that's important is that everything that happens after the behavior doesn't mean it's necessarily a consequence as we mean it in the behavior science term.

SPEAKER_01 23:09

Which is important to start looking at the behaviors that your kids have in this sort of pattern and then seeing it over time. Because as you said, not everything that happens after the behavior is a consequence, but you know, I don't know, if if every time the kid throws their dinner and then they get the dessert right afterwards because oh, the dinner's gone, and then the kid keeps throwing the dinner, it's like, okay, well, maybe they're throwing their dinner to get more dessert and get it faster.

SPEAKER_00 23:37

This happens. You see, children that seem like little mini tyrants, and they're just doing all these things, and parents are doing whatever they can to make that child happy. And here's the truth that child is not a tyrant, that child has just learned how this behavior works, and they don't even have to consciously know it. Like, let's say two-year-olds. A two-year-old doesn't have to put things together where, like, oh, if I yell and throw a fit, mom's gonna come and pick me up. They don't need to consciously verbalize that. This is the science of behavior, this is the whole behavior loop. Child hurt their leg, like they tripped. They then scream, mommy! Mommy comes and hugs the child. What's gonna happen in that behavior loop? In this circumstance, child gets hurt, the behavior is uh screams mommy when hurt, but the consequence is mom comes and consoles the child with hugs or whatever mom does. That's it. That is the behavior loop, and that's how all three of these things work together.

SPEAKER_01 24:53

Yeah, it just made me think about like as as a as parents, we also have to be conscious of what our own personal sort of triggers are to avoid going into the behavior loop. And this might be a whole nother podcast we could talk about, but things like um for me, it's like really loud noises. Like if my daughter just just screams, you know, or makes like a very loud sound with her mouse, like those be, I I I I've I can handle a lot with behaviors, but those for some reason it just really digs at me. And uh, so I have to be really careful that when she does one of these behaviors, I cannot react. Because if she knows that that's something that will get a reaction from me and get something that, you know, she wants sooner, she'll give it to them more often. And so whenever every now and then she pulls it out, she'll do these screams or like this really loud sound with their mouth. And I just have to be like, it doesn't affect me. It's super calm because I know if I react at all, it's gonna go in her little toolbox of like, this father's mama. So it's like I go into complete Zen mode. It's like mmm.

SPEAKER_00 26:00

This is so true. When I early on was a behavior analyst, I you know, I've done this as a parent too. Uh as a parent, you have one kid, they do the whole, you know, fart noise with the hand underneath the arm. I laugh at it. Guess what? That that fart noise is gonna happen and did happen a hundred times. And even if I only laugh the tenth time or the twentieth time, that attention was worth it. And I think back to uh early lesson when I was a behavior analyst, I was working, as I mentioned, with kids with traumatic brain injury, and you would just see extreme behaviors in one of the older children who was probably, I don't know, maybe 13 or 14 at the time, really knew how to use some verbal insults. And this young child or teenager insulted me and said something that was like a mom joke, but it was so clever and so funny, I laughed at it because I was like, it was funny. And that really was a mistake to do because then this uh this teenager would always uh say these different terrible things about my mom. And uh it wasn't necessarily to all the time make me upset, but to try to get attention, to try to get a laugh. And this is how the behavior can become shaped up, even though you wouldn't want to do that, but it could happen. You're part of the loop.

SPEAKER_01 27:42

Yeah, as a parent, so you have to be so careful about how we react to things. Yeah, my my daughter, when she when she was really little, she threw something out of the table and her grandparents were there, and she like she threw the item and then she went, put her hands in the air and went, woo! And then her grandparents thought it was layer. So they also did. They went, woo! So of course, like for the next two weeks, we had her throwing an item there and going, woohoohoo. Like, just like, uh, yeah, because we're part of it. We're part of it for sure.

SPEAKER_00 28:08

Yeah, we so are. Those consequences are critically important. And before they become a consequence, we just say what happens after the behavior. There are things that can happen after the behavior that just don't do anything. Just because something happens after, like let's say that a child gets cookie for something, doesn't necessarily mean, even though it happened after, and you think, well, oh yeah, my child loves cookies, and you know, we've used that as a reward before, uh, it might not serve as a reward. And or maybe there's a sound that could be made, or someone speaks in a language that you don't understand. There's a lot of things that could happen after. And if these things happen after, if they're not driving the behavior upward in the future or downward in the future, we don't call it a consequence. We just say, okay, this is something that happened after.

SPEAKER_01 29:02

Yeah, and that's good to keep in mind when you're looking at the behaviors, because if you're if you're trying out a program and you're trying to really change your child's behavior and you're not seeing a change, then go back to the drawing board and look to see what exactly you're doing for your consequences. Because as we said, if it's not driving the behavior up if you want it up, or driving it down if you want to go down, then you're then there's an issue with the consequence.

SPEAKER_00 29:25

Consequences, incredibly important. What happened? So what happens before the behavior, the behavior, what happens after, all of this matters. And we mentioned the term antecedent, we mentioned the term behavior, and we mentioned the term consequence. If you ever hear the term ABC, this is exactly what people are talking about. Antecedents, behavior, consequences, that can become a behavior loop. But we want to be very descriptive and we're just gonna say what happened before the behavior, the behavior, and what happens after the behavior. If you withhold judgment, if you withhold saying, oh yeah, that's definitely a consequence, oh yeah, that's definitely an antecedent, through time and through observation, yes, you might be able to establish that these are things that trigger a behavior. These are consequences that keep that behavior going. But it can take time to do that. Like sometimes you can be right, sometimes it might seem obvious, but depending on the behavior of concern and how you like what you want to do with it, if it's a high-stakes behavior that you really want to change, then there are ways that you can analyze that behavior through time with careful observation and figure out likely what's going on.

SPEAKER_01 30:44

Yeah, I think that goes well into what our takeaways are for this week. Really think about this week when you're looking at your child's behavior, like figure out what's happening before these behaviors, when they the these big behaviors that you're worried about or you want to see change, take some time and pay attention to what's going on immediately before that behavior and take note of that. And then try to then analyze more exactly like what they're doing when the behavior arrives. Look at it analytically, try not to get emotionally involved in it or add labels to it. Just be very clear about what exactly is the child doing in this given moment. Are they throwing, throw, throw pencil on the floor or you know, throw hands in in air and yell, or you know, it's like you are like, what are we doing here? And try to be very diligent about that and then looking at what exactly happens after that behavior occurs and try to plan this out in your head. You can even take a piece of paper, write it down, keep keep track of this. It can help you kind of see how this behavior changes over time, um, or you know, to take part of different types of antecedents that might be causing that behavior.

SPEAKER_00 31:49

Yeah. That is enough. As you start doing these homework assignments, you're gonna learn things. And let's just make that the challenge for the week. With that, I think that's the pod. So thank you all for joining us as we continue to learn how to use this behavior science to build better humans.

SPEAKER_01 32:16

Yeah, and if you like what you heard, please follow us, share us, and we'd love to grow our following and be able to get to more parents. But we'll catch you next week and uh have a good rest of your week.