001good evening and welcome I'm Abbie right I'm the director of student services and thank you for joining us tonight it is my honor to welcome James Martin he is the principal of Kyrene alta dania middle school he has been working in education for over 25 years with a background in school age programming physical education and school administration James is passionate about supporting middle school students and their parents as they navigate the ever-changing challenges associated with middle school and adolescence please welcome mr. Martin Thank You Abby all right welcome I get to talk to you guys tonight about two of my favorite topics one of them is middle school I'm kind of crazy that way and the other one is parenting two things that I'm really passionate about when I when I looked at this and
002I first saw that I was gonna be talking about how to create an incredible student experience I thought man that's a lot of pressure to use that word incredible but before we move on I want to answer this question because I always feel like it's important when anytime you speak to people they're always curious about who is this person and why should we listen to it which i think is an important and thing to answer for sure so the first thing I want to start with is to show you a little bit about my personal life my family this is me and my family right here my wife Kim and I have three lovely daughters and they are Kourtney who is on the right-hand side over here she is currently 24 years old she is
003getting her master's degree in nursing from the University of Arizona Meghan is on the far left she's our middle daughter and she is 22 years old and she works at desert financial credit union and then Peyton is our youngest in the middle there and Peyton is starting high school this year she's a freshman at Desert Vista High School so I can say we successfully raised three kids through middle school at least that that's where we are at this point and I'm really proud of the work we did as parents and I don't say that you know to brag but just to say getting through that stage of life is challenging and each one of our girls were really different so that's a little bit about my family right there in terms of my professional career
004I have worked in all kinds of capacities in education whether it was community education I taught in the classroom I've been an administrator at the middle school level for about 12 years now and I am one of those crazy people that loves middle school in fact probably not a week goes by if I meet someone and I tell them what what I do their first reaction is like oh always oh my gosh I'm so sorry like like I didn't choose to do this I absolutely chose to do this and I love what I do I want to talk a little bit about why I love what I do and this picture is 13 year old me right there I was I love skateboarding I hated school at that time I often joke that it's not
005really a joke I say that seventh grade was the worst year of my entire life it was probably also my parents worst year of their entire lives because of me and I'll share with you a little bit about why it was some of the highlights for me or lowlights I guess in seventh grade I I thought it was horrible that they would make you sit in school all day for seven or eight hours and work and then they would give you more work to do to take home and so my solution to that was just to go home and tell my parents oh no I don't have any homework and that worked for a little while until it didn't work and when the wheels came off the wheels came off really bad I still remember
006I was sitting or I was standing overlooking our front office it was actually elevated and you could see the front office and one of my friends nudged me with a laugh and said hey is that your mom walking into the office with mr. Mullen our who's our principal and I remember this sinking feeling of oh yes that is my mom walking into the office with the principal and I wonder what that's gonna be about and I found out later when they called me to the this and we proceeded to have a conversation about how they were considering holding me back in seventh grade the next day my mom spent the entire day with me sitting in the back of the classroom to ensure that I was on task and doing what I was supposed to
007do and subsequently I did figure it out and got with the program a little bit and I did pass seventh grade and move on to eighth grade but I share that just to say that if you would have told seventh or eighth grade me that I would someday be a middle school principal and someday be talking to parents about this I would have thought you're crazy in fact my principal about three years ago ran into my mom and somewhere and asked what I was up to and when she told him he just started laughing he thought it was hilarious so I share that just to say that I am oh I'm one of the rare people that did not have a great school experience it was I was not successful as I went through school
008by traditional measurements but it's what I love to do I love middle school kids I love all of them the disenfranchised ones the ones that are struggling and I love to talk to parents about how we can help them do be successful and have an incredible experience before we get started a few things I want to reiterate before I even delve into what we're gonna talk about first parenting is hard it's really hard it's even harder in middle school because and I don't need to tell you that their prefrontal cortexes are not developed and they're making all kinds of horrible decisions and you're trying to manage that and I am NOT gonna say anything out of judgment I want to be helpful and supportive next I don't have all the answers I'll try to point
009you in the right direction I'm gonna do some Q&A at the end but I don't have all those answers and there's no way we could cover all this in an hour if we could I'd be a millionaire and I'd be traveling around the country talking about that we'll have some resources on the website after we're done tonight so I know sometimes people want to take pictures and do that feel free to do that if you want to but there will be a PDF of the presentation on the website and finally I'm gonna talk to you about some things and you're gonna want to walk out of here tonight and you're you're gonna want to go home and start making changes do not do that take your time really be strategic about that other it will
010end badly for you if you go home and you start trying to change things right away so those are some things to remember before we get started now again I talked about middle school years how to create an incredible experience I want to talk about that word incredible because I feel like we have to ground ourselves in that word what does the word or what does incredible look like when we think about an incredible middle middle school experience I wonder what sorts of things come to your mind and I looked it up on Google just to see what it said so the definition is impossible to believe difficult to believe or extraordinarily extraordinary and the last one which is informal I thought is what most people think of amazingly good or beautiful so when you
011think about that incredible middle school experience for your children I wonder what that looks like for most people they're gonna think things like they're getting great grades they're measuring up to their potential they are they're developing extraordinary relationships with both their peers and the adults maybe there's some successes you think of in terms of athletics or other academic accomplishment but you have this view of what incredible looks like and I'm going to ask you to reframe that tonight that's the most important thing because the reality is what I just described for you is not going to be the typical middle school experience and I actually want to tell you you shouldn't want it too you should want middle school to be a little bumpy for your kids because that is where they're gonna grow how
012many of you have heard of Carol Dweck has anyone heard of Carol Dweck awesome Carol Dweck talks a lot about growth mindset she's a professor out of the University of Stanford a researcher writer does a lot of work and this is a quote from her in a growth mindset challenges are exciting rather than threatening so rather than thinking oh I'm going to reveal my weaknesses you say wow here's a chance to grow and I'm so excited that many of you recognized dr. Dweck and hopefully you've looked into some of her work or seen some of her videos but I want to challenge you to really look at the challenges the failures the struggles that your kids have as an incredible experience it's very backwards but it's critical in being able to guide them through that
013process because the reality is this this is important your reaction to the things they come in contact with are gonna set the tone for how they respond to that I was thinking the other day and I realized you know what parenting doesn't change much from the time they're a toddler to the time they're in middle school in this way I don't know how many of you remember when your kids were toddlers and they were just learning to walk and run and I love this picture because it illustrates that they're really excited and then they start to fall and they hit the ground and the first thing they do almost every time is look up at their parents and and they're checking in like should I be worried here this hurt really bad and I see
014parents usually react in one of two ways you have the parents that jump up and run over oh my gosh are you okay or you have the parents that that even on the inside sometimes you're like oh no I think that was a bad one you still have some kind of pre rehearsed response my wife and I who's here in the room tonight our our response was always boom and we would say in a really playful way and our daughters would often look at us and think I don't think that was funny and it doesn't feel good but we didn't overreact to that and almost every time it would de-escalate and they would get back on track so I want to encourage you to think about this visual as you're thinking about the different things
015that come your way with your children now this picture I almost don't even like showing it because it bothers me that over the last I don't know 10 years or so we've in education I think got into a little bit of an adversarial role with parents and we all have probably heard the term helicopter parenting and that gave way does anyone know what the new one is that everyone's talking about anyone lawnmower parenting so if you think about a helicopter parenting was this premise that parents are sort of hovering above kids and they're swooping in to rescue them and help them in situations lawnmower parenting they say is kind of a step further and it's really just kind of removing all the obstacles out of their way so we clear a path and I've never
016liked talking to parents about that because I always felt like it was combative it was adversarial and it didn't help us solve the problem because if I'm just telling people hey don't be a helicopter parent or don't be a lawnmower parent it fails to recognize some important things one I think all of that flows out of love for children I think people want their kids to be successful and that's what they're doing and they're doing what what they feel like is best to do that and I I've never in fact I've done presentations about this and I've never included these slides until this year because I came across a book recently that changed my paradigm in terms of the way I viewed that I don't know if anyone read the coddling in the American mind
017I don't know if that's familiar to anyone this book by Jonathan Hite and Greg luciana really deals with a culture of safety is amande they say that it's interfering with young people's social emotional and intellectual development it makes it harder for them to be autonomous adults who are able to navigate the bumpy road of life and they shared a concept that is really resonating with me and I'm sharing it with parents now on my campus and it's this that we want to prepare the child for the road not the road for the child and that's something that we can do collaboratively it's not saying hey don't be a helicopter parent or don't be a lawnmower parent it's saying hey our goal is to do this together and your kids are gonna come up to obstacles
018and we want them to be able to figure that out navigate it as an educator that doesn't mean I shirk my responsibility of responding to things it just says that it's okay for them to struggle a little bit and so tonight what I want to talk to you about more than anything else is how do we prepare them for the road rather than clearing that road for them how do we prepare them for the and so I want to start by telling you that every time we solve a problem for our children or remove an obstacle otherwise known as preparing them for the road we rob them of an opportunity to learn and grow and we don't want to do that I want you to think about these things these questions as you see your
019kid come in contact with struggles think about these things what's the worst thing that could happen here sometimes that answer might be pretty bad but many times I think it's a small thing that maybe they could learn from what could they learn from this experience what am I doing that they could be doing for themselves am i solving a problem they could solve on their own is this an opportunity to advocate for themselves and this is a big one I heard this years ago and this is stuck with me for a long time remember this the price tag for our mistakes is cheaper today than it will ever be for the rest of our lives I'll talk a little bit more about that later but this is critical it's critical for us to pause and
020remind ourselves of this because as we talked about you love your kids you want them to be successful and sometimes it seems like you could step in there and take care of that but by doing that we rob them of that opportunity to learn and grow so as an educator you can imagine I have lots of examples of parents preparing the road I see it all the time and more and more I've tried to be more bold with parents not in a confrontational way but just to encourage them but I want to give you some examples we see this every day at my school and I I implore our families not to do this and it's lesson but I still see it happening kids forget things in their parents bring it we see homework now
021we don't give it to the kids the parents drop it off and we just say okay thank you and we put it there and we put it in the teachers box but we're not gonna reinforce that I see weird stuff like the cross country kid forgot his shoes and I see dad running in in a suit and tie dropping these shoes off you know so that the son is ready for the country meet water bottles like we don't have drinking fountains I don't I don't always understand that one lunches all of these things are in a well-intentioned place but again we're robbing kids of that opportunity I'll see parents that I know are lying for their kids about tardies and absences to get those things excused that always makes me sad grades you know kind
022of advocating and trying to get their kid maybe a better grade athletic teams this is sadly probably the things that there's more energy about in school than anything else I've been an athletic director or coach parents get so into that and again it's all out of well-intentioned places but you know whether it's playing time or not making a team or any of those things those are things we see them advocate or step in for conflict with their peers conflict with adults family vacation I put this one up because it's it's a more benign one but it's one that I try to reinforce we'll have parents that are that advocate for their kids and say hey mr. Martin teachers Johnny's going on a trip to Hawaii for a week can you please make sure that he
023gets all of his work or whatever and what I've encouraged my staff to do is to flip that back and say you know we we feel like this is an opportunity for Johnny to reach out to his teachers and figure out what he needs to do to be successful if he's gone so again that's one of those things that I think sometimes people just aren't thinking about but we try to ship that responsibility over sleepovers this is one not school related but it's one that I like because one of our daughters really struggled with this she had a lot of anxiety about staying over at people's houses and she would say mom dad can I go sleep it so into this house and we'd say sure no problem and then we'd sit down and we'd
024say here's what's gonna happen tonight about two hours into this you're gonna call us and you're gonna say hey can you come pick me up and we're gonna say no okay so are you okay with that yes okay and then we'd go and we meet with the parent we'd say okay here's what's gonna happen in two hours she's gonna call us she's gonna go to you and say hey can I call my parents and see if they'll they'll pick me up we're not gonna pick her up or you okay with that and if the parent was okay with that then we would move forward and it happened over and over and over and over again but it got less and less and less and eventually she is a strong young woman who doesn't have those
025same kind of anxieties because we didn't reinforce it and we communicated to her by our actions you got this you can handle it we're not gonna rescue this is one of my favorite ones this is actually not my family but where it was said a child was camping with my sister's family in us we were just outside of Payson and the parents let my sister and her husband know in advance hey we're a little bit afraid that he is gonna get nervous and sometimes he gets a stomachache and other things and we said he'll be fine you know no problem well the second day I was talking to my brother-in-law and he said oh yeah his dad's on his way up right now and I was like what he said yeah he's not feeling good
026he's a little nervous his dad his dad drove from Phoenix to Payson to pick him up and I I was so sad for the boy because what his parents told him was you don't got this buddy will come up and save you from that and so I'm not trying to be mean spirited or anything like that it's all about that end game of preparing them for the road this is another fun one for me and my family years ago my wife actually one of her friends co-workers was driving kind of an older car it wasn't like a bad car or anything like that but it definitely wasn't her car and so my wife asked her hey what's going on with food with the car and and she said oh well we bought this for our
027child but it's a five-speed she can't drive a five-speed won't do it so she's driving the family car now and I'm driving this like here's what a bad parent I am I my wife and I went and bought a five-speed car for our kids and we said you're gonna learn how to drive a stick whether you like it or not because we want you to figure this out and our one daughter has I don't know that she thanks us she does make jokes about she she's the only person that she knows that knows how to drive a 5-speed which is I feel like her way of encouraging us but this is another example where the parent could have said hey we got you a car I mean it may not be exactly what you want
028you can let it sit there and walk but you're not driving our car you can you know we'll be happy to let you learn how to drive this car if you want so these are some examples of preparing for the road we could probably sit here all night and share those but I want to give you one that's an easy place to start and if you're not already doing this and I'm not gonna ask for a show of hands because I always I feel I don't want this to feel as if I'm confronting anyone but if you're not already doing this don't run home and do it tonight but start figuring out what you need to do if your kids are not waking themselves up in the morning and getting ready on their own I
029would encourage you to start there I would implore you to start there we started our kids early on second or third grade we got him alarm clocks and we got him waking themselves up and I talked to parents that thought are you crazy no we didn't put the alarm clock in the first day and say you're on your own and and walk out like we built that over time and since our daughters have thanked us the older ones that thanked us the youngest is 14 it's gonna be a while before we get any thanks but they all appreciated that and they're all really good at in fact I'll start by saying that we live very close to our three schools of elementary middle and high school we did that strategically we as educators knew that
030our schedules were fixed my wife's a teacher and so we wouldn't always have an opportunity to take kids and pick them up and different things so we thought we need to be really close to the schools and our oldest two daughters I don't think they ever up in or we're late for school ever and our last is actually probably the most responsible out of all of them and last year she's an eighth grader and I get a text at about nine o'clock and usually we're gone well before she got up and the text said dad I overslept I texted back bummer can you come get me I said no I'm at work what do I do I said you're smart you'll figure it out and she did she got herself ready she went to school
031and again I lived we lived two blocks from the school so it wasn't a huge deal for her to get herself to school we might have had the brainstorm a little more but I knew she had it in her this is the part that kind of makes me laugh and makes me sad a little bit at the same time so great kid never been in trouble for anything walks into the front office at like 9:30 and one of the secretaries who knows her you know and knows your parents are educators and everything else and we have a good relationship secretary says hey Peyton what why are you late today she starts bawling and crying and and the possible policy is that if you had an unexcused absence because she said are you gonna excuse this
032and I said no I I didn't sleep in you did I'm not gonna excuse it but what was funny was the school in a cup excusing the absence cuz she'd never been in trouble for for anything ever and I was a little bit sad like I kind of wanted her to get a lunch detention or whatever just to feel that or whatever but we got to talk later about something else which is good credit versus bad credit and I talked her about why do you think the school did that for you well I've never been in trouble I've never been late I said there you go so we still use that as a teaching lesson but I want to encourage you if you haven't started doing this please start soon I also put a physical
033or alarm clock up there because we're going to talk about technology a little bit later and I'm going to encourage you not to have cellphones and other things in your kids rooms at night get them an alarm clock and that's the way to do it alright next technology and screen time this is one of the most complicated things and ever-changing things that I have ever encountered in my time as an administrator or a parent I think about even there's ten years separating my oldest from my youngest that landscape has evolved so much in the last ten years it's incredible there's decisions that I've made as a parent that I look back on and I would do it differently as an educator at the same time I don't want to say anything out of judgment here
034I just want to encourage you with some things I want to talk about my evolution if you will first though I love technology I probably am gonna look a little bit like a hypocrite I have an Apple watch I have an iPhone I love technology I use it all the time however I want to share with you my story so I as a as an administrator was often looked at in my district as one of the people pushing this kind of innovation use of technology in the classroom having kids have phones out for educational purposes bringing their devices to school for allowing them to use it at lunch and passing periods and different things like that I was on committees I was doing PD in our district and all of it for me was about
035responsible digital citizenship so for example at three schools I was at we would let kids use phones at lunch and my purpose for doing that was twofold one I thought they need to responsibly manage this and learn how to do it and I feel like we can help them do that and the other thing I thought was if we give them an opportunity to use these things during lunch maybe they're more engaged in focused during the school day those that's what my thought was and I did that for years a few years ago we started getting some parent feedback and saying and I don't think this is such a good idea it was a small number I wouldn't say I was dismissive about it but I thought yeah you know I know some people feel
036differently about this but I feel really strongly about responsible digital citizenship and then all of a sudden I just started seeing the wheels come off in different places and realizing I think we got this wrong I realized I think we're not teaching responsible digital citizenship and I don't think that kids can really handle this in fact I started feeling like letting him use the phones at lunch was almost like giving a drug addict drugs in the middle of the day and then expecting them to like function well and and I don't say that like in with hyperbole I really am starting to think that's what goes on in a middle school brain and what was funny was some of my teachers came to me and I think about this I'm like the innovative guy pushing
037technology get phones out as much as you can for educational purposes that stuff I had two teachers asked to meet with me and they came in and they said we think we should just get rid of phones completely in your backpacks off during the day whatever we know and I said I'm with you let's do it and I think they had this whole spiel prepared like that they want to do it and I was like I think I was wrong I want to do this one of the things that changed my mind on this was the book the coddling of the American mind it deals a lot with technology and does anyone know who Sean Parker is by the way started Napster you remember that I mean that's how much technology evolves he was he
038was one of the early employees of Facebook he joined Facebook in the first year and there's a there's some quotes in the codling in the American mind he wasn't interviewed for that book but they took some excerpts out of an interview that he'd done and this is when I read this when some things started to crystallize for me this is him talking the thought process that went into building these applications Facebook being the first of them was all about how do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible and that means that we need to sort of give you a little bill for me and hit every once in a while because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever and that's gonna get you to contribute
039more content and that's going to get you more likes and comments it's a social validation feedback loop exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology and the next line was the one that really hit me god only knows what it's doing to our children's brains I a hundred percent agree with this and it is destroying our children I don't know that we have the data yet longitudinally to show it but here's what we do have we have some corollary data that I want you to see and again this is from the book the coddling in the American mind these are the adolescent depression rates kids aged 12 to 17 who had at least one major depressive episode in the past year
040look at what started happening in about 2011 just shooting right up and we see this all the time at school almost every social conflict that we see on our campus has some connection to social media whether it's snapchat Instagram snapchats the big one right now like with middle schoolers and high schoolers I cry see the most there but it's it's really all of them the other one and I always hate sharing this one because it's such a serious topic but I don't want to miss this one either this is suicide rates per hundred thousand so the numbers you know when you look and you look up on the left and see well it's you know six seven six kids per hundred thousand four girls about 13 14 15 four boys but realize what's happening is
041those rates are have about doubled in that length of time the other thing to notice is that males is higher than females a lot of people are surprised by that boys actually typically choose of suicide that are more successful and that's why those numbers are so much higher so these are successful suicides and again that's a sobering slide to look at it's not correlation does not equal causation I don't want to imply that it does but it is important that we recognize that there's something going on here and I believe it has a lot to do with screen time especially social media applications but also boys aren't necessarily using social media the same way sometimes boys are on fortnight and talking about things different ways so I think sometimes we look at social media and
042think well my boys not on snapchat you know as much as the girls are or whatever but they can get sucked into other things there as well so what do we do I remember going to my PTSO president last year and saying hey I really want to make some changes were we're thinking about doing this stuff I want to run it by you and her response was I agree with you and I she's someone who I collaborate with all the time and I have an enormous amount of respect for she said I agree with you but I don't know how we unring this Bell and it that hit me but I said me neither but I'm gonna try and so as a school here's some things that we've done first thing is we started really
043hard and fast on the district policy with phones so often in your backpack once the bell rings and they stay in there all day and I've even had a couple staff people that were kind of sneaking things because what the what our staff would do sometimes is they would reward kids by letting them listen to music if they finished a test early or finished an assignment and what some of our teachers started to realize is that kids were rushing through tasks just to get access to their cell phones and so we collectively put an end to that and that's been one of our commitments the other thing we did is we started a committee with parents and staff and we just started talking about it like I don't even know where to go I talked
044to a few people who do this work regularly and I said where where should we start they said read the book glow kids go from there anyone read that book by the way fantastic book it's incredibly informative and incredibly scary so when you I encourage you to read it but you'll have to put it down sometimes and and really rethink what you're doing as parents what can you do don't be in a hurry and by this I kind of mean two-fold one don't rush off tonight and take your kids phone away and shut things down or whatever don't be in a hurry there and also don't be in a hurry I don't know where your kids are in terms of development or age but they got lots of time and I'll tell you we had
045a we had a middle schooler who would come home and tell us all the way through middle school we heard that we had her earn that and she had to read seven Habits of Highly Effective teens and write us a paper on why we had her do that before she could have Instagram and then we met regularly and talked about that and we did eventually get give her that but when I say don't be in a hurry just there's there's still time for them to get those things down the road read glow kids I encourage you to do that no screens in the room at night and this is one of the things that I think I as a lover of tech I messed up because when my youngest was I don't even remember how
046old we bought her an iPad and she was a pretty responsible kid we at the time I was like well she can use her iPad as her alarm and you know and different things like that and I wish that we hadn't done some of those things because it made it harder to scale some of that back use parent controls if you're not doing that iPhones have some of that screen time stuff embedded in it there's lots of good applications out there I use one called our pact which allows me to control some things you can just do some research on that there's lots of options out there but if you're not doing that do it my daughter's a freshman her phones still shuts down at 10:30 every night and is basically a brick and she
047can't use it for anything she hates me sometimes for that but that's okay I love her too much to let that be an issue and consider a family contract there's lots of stuff online resources about that I'd look into that and finally this is a big one model the desired behavior kids think we're hypocrites and we often are a few years ago I remember my wife and my kids would confront me on how much I was on my phone and I was dismissive I'm just checking some emails from work or I rarely get on and do this and I did realize you know what I'm on it too much and I need to stop and so now even at dinner I always leave my phone in the kitchen somewhere so I'm not even tempted to
048do that when we go out to restaurants and things like that we're committed to putting our phones away and not having those things out but we we really need to model that desired behavior for our kids that's that's really important all right now I'm going to talk to you a little bit about some parenting stuff here that's more general and here's why I want to do this because I just laid some things on you that are gonna cause you to maybe rethink some things you're doing and you're gonna want to come home and start making some changes with your kids whether it's you know giving them more ownership letting them struggle letting them fail at things transferring power back to them putting some controls in for technology that maybe aren't there and here's what's not
049gonna happen when you start to make those changes your kids aren't gonna go oh thanks mom and dad this is awesome I'm so glad you're looking out for my future they're gonna freak out more than they already do as middle schoolers and I want to share this with you is anyone familiar with parenting with love and logic or teaching with love and logic those resources these are to me the most useful things that I've ever encountered in my career as an educator and as a parent but it wasn't always that way when my wife and I my wife and I actually got married 18 years ago my oldest will our oldest was six years old and Megan who was the youngest the time was four years old and it was hard becoming a parent instantly
050I didn't have kids or anything like that but I'd been in education I was pretty confident I you know for a while things were going really good and then we started struggling with with Megan and she wouldn't help she wouldn't go to bed and stay in her room and she would come out like all the time we tried all this stuff and nothing was working and finally I told my wife hey remember that book we got when we got married that I thought had a silly title and someone gave it to us and I thought we're not reading a book on parenting where is that book we need that book like because I don't know any other books right now so go we found that book we started reading it it was love and logic
051and I can honestly tell you that it changed our lives because we started to anticipate things that we're gonna happen as parents we felt empowered and prepared and not only did it change our lives I think it helped us develop two and then three responsible kids and so I want to share some things with you the first thing we're gonna talk about is putting an end to arguing back talk and begging and I'm gonna go through some of this stuff pretty quick because I do want to get some Q&A at the end I'm pretty sure all of us have this issue if you have kids at all you have this issue the first step is when those things happen just go brain-dead don't don't start to think about it too much because if you do
052you will get angry and you will argue next avoid lectures we're all really skilled at that they don't care and it's not gonna work in fact I heard this once and I try to remember this as much as possible and I am a world-class lecture I have really smart things to say to my kids but I've tried to say I'm gonna save words for happy times all right next step to step one brain-dead step to calmly repeat a one-liner this was one of the best things that happened to my wife and I and we still do some of these things today my favorite I love you too much to argue with you it's sometimes the girl I know with you and they'll say it back to you which is even more thrilling for me to
053know that I won that thanks for sharing well so-and-so has Instagram thanks for sharing and just keep repeating it over and over again maybe so that's another good one especially when they're comparing their parents are way better they get maybe so well I'm just gonna go live with especially if you're in a split family sometimes you'll get that threat I love you wherever you live like that's a good one just to to de-escalate that and then this is a good one but don't say this unless you absolutely mean it because I've we've never really used this one but I've heard that parents get a knock at the door at 6:00 a.m. okay I'm right I'm ready to argue about what we were talking about so if you do say that one just be prepared for
054it all right another thing we got to do is we got to teach responsibility they don't just learn it naturally so kids who are allowed to learn from small mistakes early in life are far less likely to make tragic mistakes later on so this is another one we're reframing that we're recalibrating that we're realizing that if they make mistakes it's good because now hopefully they won't make that mistake later on and again I told you earlier the price tag for our mistakes is cheaper today than it will ever be for the rest of our lives it's important though use empathy as you're going through this process and you're teaching them responsibility don't be sarcastic don't lecture empathy is a great way to hold them accountable but not lose their love and respect and this can
055be really really really hard but I'm gonna give you a framework to think about that I think will help you it helped us when you look at things that are happening try to determine is this an affordable or an unaffordable thing for them to go through let me give you some examples for getting their lunch totally important some parents at my school don't think so but I try to reinforce to them people can live for weeks without food and I'm pretty sure that your child is gonna be okay if they go a few hours they it might be uncomfortable but they're gonna be okay so that's an example of affordable unaffordable chatting with strangers online okay if they're online gaming and different things like that or chatting you can't go well I'm gonna see how
056this plays out like that's not one that's an affordable thing you're gonna have to step in and do that staying up too late another one totally affordable they're gonna learn that lesson but there's another one playing video games for hours we can't just let they're never gonna shut that off and it could possibly do some irreparable damage they're forgetting to do homework the consequence why because remember we talked about that long-term they're less likely someday to forget to do a project at work if they've learned that that's not something you will have control of at the end of their life hopefully hopefully when they have projects from work they're not still living with you I hope so more on teaching responsibilities this is an important one don't be afraid to delay consequences this was one
057of the most magical thing that that ever happened to my wife and I I told you that our daughter kept coming out of her room late at night and I'm talking she would come out six seven times and we would try everything we tried consequences we tried whatever and the most magical thing happened when we discovered delayed consequences because she'd come out and we'd say if you come out again the consequence will be this and okay you came out again and then you're like piling on you're grounded forever and you this is taken away or whatever and in love and logic we read something about delaying consequences and it was glorious I still remember we were sitting on the couch just wait we knew she was gonna come out we were like okay we got
058this tonight so she comes out stands up in the hallway and looks at us we did our whole thing you know where are you supposed to be right now wow I'm scared where are you supposed to be right now well I wanted it and we went through that net and then I said okay well you know what we're gonna have to do something about this I don't know what yet but don't worry we love you a lot we'll figure something good out we'll take care of it try not to worry about it well what are you gonna do I don't know everything we do doesn't work we're gonna have to think of something way better but it's gonna take us some time we love you a lot we'll figure it out try not to worry
059about it every time you say try not to worry about it makes me worry about it more maybe you want to go back to your room I don't know I won't think of something don't worry so it did not magically change overnight but over time this started working unless what we realized she was doing if she was doing the math she was standing in a room like ok I'm gonna be grounded for two days I can live with that I'm going out but when it became unknown she couldn't tip the scales at all and so we we were helping her with that I knew it worked one day this was awesome we were swimming one day and she came over she swam up I was laying on a raft and she said dad in a
060little while I'm gonna come tip you over on this raft try not to worry about it and she swam away to the other side of the pool and I I thought man I think we won that battle so that was a great thing that helped us setting enforceable limits all the time we we say things to our kids there is no way we can enforce at all and there's a there's in the love and logic or on the love and logic website they have something called enforceable versus unenforceable statement and turning your words to gold again I have links for this at the end but I want to show some of them to you an unenforceable statement don't roll your eyes at me we've all said silly things like that that there's no way we
061can really control and probably will actually make them roll their eyes more here's something you could say I do extra things for people who treat me with respect and you can control that I mean just just today are hard you kiss called ask my wife I think texted said hey can I have a friend over you know we let kids have friends over who clean up their rooms and their bathrooms she hadn't done it and I'm sure she's really angry in this right now but she's gonna think about that tonight and hopefully show cleaner room in the bathroom we'll see unenforced will stop spending all of your time playing video games you cannot enforce that enforceable I allow video games in this home as long as I think they aren't causing any problems and you're
062totally in control of that another one leave each other alone when they're in the back of the car and how many times have we said that in some scenario as a parent and we're frustrated this is a good one I charged two dollars a minute when I have to listen to kids argue you can set the dollar amount I don't know what the economy is in your in your home that's an arbitrary example but these are things and there's a whole list of them on there so I'd encourage you to go to their website look these up these are great things that that we were able to use as parents sharing control this is another big one give some of the control over to kids but you've got to have some rules with this number
063one rule only give choices that fit into your value system so I'm going to encourage you to give choices but really think about them carefully because they have to fit into what your value system is give most choices when things are going well this breaks down when you're already in conflict so try to do this almost proactively give choices before the child is resistant once they dig their heels in it will not work for each choice give two options that you like I'll give you some examples of these in a minute use care not to disguise breakfast choices this is hard because you know would you rather behave correctly or me drag you out of here by your neck like you can't you can't say things like that or or threaten to have things taken
064away or whatever actually give two choices that are that are decent choices that you're okay with and finally once you give the two choices if they don't choose quickly choose for them and don't let them go I'll do that you make the choice and you move forward if you go back on it and you let them make the choice this will not work long term you have to do that I use this we don't have to do this with our kids as much anymore I use it a ton at school with kids I'll give them two choices and then if they don't choose I go with the one I want and they try to score them out of that and I don't let them here are some examples now will you be wearing your coat
065or carrying it I see parents all the time arguing with their kids about your coat bringing a jacket whatever just say hey you want to carry your coat you want to wear it and then toss it to them and and walk out you want to leave now or in five minutes this is a good one not for little kids it's actually a joke in our family my whole family says this to each other now like the adults do you want to go now in five minutes so that everyone although they make fun of me I see them doing it with their own kids and with each other now and you can choose any amount of time there I think my wife does that with me sometimes by the way too because I talk too much
066so she has to tell me do you want to leave now or in five minutes do you want to do your chores now or in an hour this is a great one if you want tasks done ask them when they want to do it a lot of times I'll set the timer on the microwave I'll ask my daughter hey do you want to do this task hour in 30 minutes 30 minutes okay I'm set in the microwave timer and then I'll just walk away and she comes out once she hears the timer and she takes care of it doesn't always have a smile on her face but I don't have to argue with her so I'm fine with that are you going to turn the TV off now or in 15 minutes another good one
067and are you going to turn off your cell phone or just ignore it until after dinner again though with the cell phone stuff you have to model that don't forget that all right guiding kids to solve their own problems this is one of the last things that we're gonna talk about I talked to you a little bit before about providing a strong and Sisir dose of empathy sometimes this is hard to provide empathy because sometimes what they're going through is pretty silly and you almost want to laugh about it or sometimes you're frustrated with them it's hard to be empathetic or sometimes you want to lecture them and tell them everything they've done wrong start with empathy though and I'm sorry that's a bummer whatever whatever it is you choose to do lovingly and the
068problems out when they bring it to you and say what's going on and that stinks you're having you know I I failed a test that's a bummer what are you what are you gonna do to fix that this is critical get permission before you share any ideas and it is sometimes they'll say no I don't want me in this okay let me know if you change your mind and it almost always will come back to you and say that but get permission before provide a brief menu so you want to know what I've seen a couple people do or what worked for me provide a couple things and then walk through it with them to evaluate it you know what do you think would happen if you tried this those sorts of questions and then
069at the end let them learn from solving or not solving whatever happens at that point let them do the learning don't go back to them and say well I told you if you would have just done this or whatever you robbed them of that opportunity and finally remember this wise parents only step in when they are certain that their child has a problem that's too big or dangerous to solve on their own so when they bring you that problem don't react right away really try to think about this is this one too big for them to solve on their own and you'll find them I mean we've had we've had a few along the way where we have to step in and we have to navigate it but I will tell you the bulk of
070the problems that our kids brought to us were things that we could hand back over to them and as our older kids have come back to us they have thanked us for doing that in fact my my oldest daughter was a RA in college which was a tremendous experience for her and she would come to us and say oh my gosh you oh boy how responsible these people are that I that I have to work with or their parents are showing up and trying to talk to me about the problems that they're having or or whatever so your kids will thank you for this someday not in the middle of it but always try to think about that so that's really it I close with that slide just to remind you this is something I
071keep at the center of what we talk about every parent we have I start with this we're gonna put this up in our our conference room where we do our meetings that this is our goal we want to prepare the child for the road not the road for the child so that's it I do have some resources that will be up there for you on the website if you want to do that but I did we have a few minutes for questions if anyone has questions I'd be happy to answer any or try to so I don't know what if anyone does feel free to take pictures there any questions yes sir yeah if you look at the through that what are my thoughts on financial literacy allowances things like that the love and logic
072stuff is what we used they their principles were really about don't give kids they should do chores and other work around the house because they're part of the family so not connecting those things necessarily I mean maybe you want to give extra money for an extra job or whatever but so that's the first thing they separated those two things and then they said that give him money and we actually said and we found my wife found one of the envelopes and probably what two weeks ago there's something like that and what they said to write on it was because we love you spend it wisely and that we would we would give him that envelope and we we found one of those the other day and it was really neat to see that so you
073know really giving him the money and letting them manage it and that's hard cuz our oldest was she would save and our middle daughter like she would get something it would be like can we go to the store you know and she's she's still a little bit like that but she's learning she just actually bought her first house and some other stuff so transferring that over the other organization Dave Ramsey I don't know if you follow Dave Ramsey and Financial Peace University has a ton of stuff for kids that's another one that I would direct parents any other questions yes yeah yeah yes I've seen different things in different publications and I don't remember exactly usually it's about an hour to two hours a day but if you see the research right now it is
074ridiculous I mean it's like some kids the the averages are up like 8 9 10 11 hours a day because what's happening what's driving those averages up a lot is two things I think one is they're having their screens in the room and they're on all the time I remember that can be TVs whatever I mean so many parents have TVs in their kids room again we're horrible parents we've never done that my daughter hates us for that but that's okay I can live with that the other thing is school though we've really started to analyze that and I don't want a dr. Baca or anyone else to think that I'm saying get rid of computers at school or anything but we've really tried to analyze like what are the benefits in this given thing
075for screen time right then but usually it's about an hour to two out yes you know we you know what our staff it was her question was what is our policy when we're asking kids to put phones away but then the adults maybe aren't doing that and our staff I was so proud of them because they made that commitment on their own they just said that the teachers that really drove this said we want we feel like if we're gonna ask kids to do this that we need to do it too and there's some exceptions like our set you know we had someone who had a parent that was ill recently and he came to me and he said just you know if you ever walked in my room you see my phone and I
076you know I told my kids that I need to be on call and so we want to be reasonable about that but we even talked to our kids we told them that hey we're gonna model this too and put our phones away and it's been hard because I use my phone a lot for email and stuff as I'm bouncing around school but I am really careful now not to pull it out if I'm in a hallway or or or visible with kids stuff but that's a hard one again we have to model that behavior yes uh-huh yeah well I think that that's important that what you said at the end is the most critical thing right work we're trying to manage that because the last thing you want to do is just control all of
077it it's almost like in education we would call it scaffolding where we were putting those supports in place and we're we're taking those things away as necessary or fading those supports if you will because we ultimately want them to be able to manage that right like for me I don't know if this was right or wrong but going into our daughter's freshman year we did allow her to have snapchat and again we have parent controls and we have some other stuff and we really monitor that but when my wife and I talked about it we kind of made the decision what hey like someday she's gonna have this and so it's better maybe for us to kind of manage it or whatever but we didn't do it when she was in fifth grade you know
078like you have to figure that out and for every kid it's different and I think that I will say definitely there are more positive things for online experiences but what they will do the experts say is 60 to 90 minutes before shutting screens down because it starts to affect sleep so even even if it's a positive thing the screen time can mess with like melatonin levels and some other things I'm not a scientist but that's what I've heard and so I would I would guard against that but I think what you're doing in terms of watching her and letting her manage that responsibly until you have to step in is probably a wise thing all right one more minute yes yeah that is a more passive yeah and you know that's not something that that
079I'm a real expert in but they definitely you know what you're doing versus playing fortnight very day very different in terms of what's going on in the brain or whatever so yeah you definitely want to differentiate those things I think the big thing that they talk about is is that 60 to 90 minutes before bedtime you know really just trying to avoid it but you're exactly right all right well I think that's all we have time for thank you so much for letting me come tonight and talk to you and as I said they're gonna get those resources up on that website I would encourage you to find that the one at the top was the one thing I didn't address tonight if you've never watched the TED talk by Angela Duckworth called grit I
080do talk about that sometimes but that is an incredible thing to view and her book is awesome too but I hope you get out there and you're working hard to prepare your child for the road thanks for coming tonight appreciate it [Applause]