Hi, I'm Nicholeen Peck, parenting expert, author,
mother of 4, previous foster parent. And I love to talk about parenting. In this video,
we are going to talk about how to teach problem-solving skills to children.
When my own children were little babies, I did foster care... Treatment care (actually) for
troubled teens all between the ages of 12 and 18. And these teens had a myriad of things that they
were dealing with. It was my job to help them sort out what was going on with their bodies and brains
and try to touch their hearts so that they could make a change for the better for the long term.
This was called self-government. I decided that I was going to teach them cause and effect and
teach them to have a knowledge of what their own behaviors were so that they could control their
own behaviors for the long term. So, this became my goal --to touch the hearts of those children
by teaching them self-government. Today, what I'm going to explain to you is how I helped them
see things differently with their minds and how I helped them have a change of heart
even though they had troubling behaviors that were so ingrained. Teaching problem solving
is vital for learning self-government. In fact, all people need to learn problem-solving. But
children are in especially dire need of learning problem-solving skills because their prefrontal
cortex which is the part of the brain that does all the problem-solving is so incredibly small.
The great thing is when they're little, they have all these synapses firing so that they can learn
things at rapid rates and make great connections. So, even though their logical cognitive abilities
are minimal, they are able to connect a lot of pieces in the brain. Those connections
are what make it possible for us to teach them self-government and problem-solving even though
they oftentimes are very young. The process of self-government requires good analysis and then
action to be taken. So, there are multiple things that a person wants to analyze.
They need to analyze themselves --what is it that is going on inside themselves? Not only that but
who ought they to be? Which is very different than who they want to be. They know there's a
version of them that is probably best. But they don't act that way all the time. So, they need
to analyze themselves. The next thing that they analyze is situations. What's happening around
them? If you can talk to the children more in an analytical way about the situations, then they
have a better chance of solving their problems and not having repeat bad situations occur
in the future. Now, don't get me wrong. This does not mean turning into a counselor to my children
and trying to pull things out of them. "Well, why do you think that happened? Well, why this? Well,
why that?" No. Because their prefrontal cortexes are still developing, I help them do the analysis
by analyzing for them so that they can see the analysis. And notice it again in the future. So,
I might say something like, "Just now, you didn't keep a calm face, voice, and body when I gave
you a no answer about having another cookie. What you should have done was keep a calm face, voice,
and body say, okay and drop the subject." Now, that's going to be part of a correction step.
I don't have tons of time to go into corrections in this particular video. But there are other
places that you can learn corrections such as going to teachingselfgovernment.com
and getting the Teaching Self-Government parenting course or some of the other materials that are
there to help you learn self-government and teach it to your children too. The next thing
that we use to teach our children analysis is a problem-solving exercise that we call SODAS. Now,
that doesn't mean a drink. It's an acronym that stands for situations, options, disadvantages,
advantages, and solution. In our family, we have these sodas journals which are places where we
write our problem-solving exercises out. So, in the sodas journals, there's a place for the parent
to write the situation. Then there's a place for the child to list multiple options,
the disadvantages and advantages to each of those options, and decide upon a solution. Then
there's a place for the parents and the child to discuss together so that they can debrief
and learn from the problem-solving exercise that they went through. Now, sometimes we
use these problem-solving exercises as part of a negative consequence. But oftentimes, we use them
just to teach problem-solving and analysis to the child so that they can prepare for good behavior,
good interactions, and just a good, calm feeling for the future. Now, all of this analysis leads
to making a plan. A self-governed person has a plan. They don't just go minute by minute. They
know what could possibly come down the line and they prepare for how to handle that. Years ago, it
was back in 2009, our family was on a BBC program called The World's Strictest Parents. In fact,
if you click the link here in the video, you can watch that World's Strictest Parents video. When
we were in that program, they brought us what they said were the most difficult teens that they had.
But I knew that there was no problem I hadn't seen before because of the foster parenting
that I had done with all the troubled children that came to my house over the years. They tried
to psych me out and say, "No, these ones are really bad. This is the situation." And I said,
"You know what? There's nothing that's going to be a problem and I already know that."
Now, why did I feel so confident? Because I have a plan. That's why. If you have a plan and you know
how to handle every situation that might come your way, then you don't have to worry. Low anxiety,
high predictability, leads to confidence in parenting and with your children too.
So, they need to have a plan. You're going to help them analyze themselves, analyze their situations,
plan for what to do in those situations and have an overall plan for how to handle those problems
should they not turn out exactly like you decided in the first place. The second part of learning
problem solving is to have action. You have to take action on the plan, otherwise, you can't see
how you did and how you can improve. So, we want to improve all of our different communications
and our behaviors. That means we have to actually do something first. The action steps that I teach
my children to take are skills steps. We learn 4 basic skills --how to follow instructions,
accept no answers, accept consequences, and disagree appropriately. But we don't stop there.
Our children also learn all 5, of the parenting skills that we use to correct their behaviors
and to teach them what to do the right way in the first place. So, when they leave our home,
they have all the skills they need to parent their own family and to teach self-government
to everyone that they know. The next thing that we do as far as taking action is we have
meetings as a family. So, every week, we have multiple different meetings. One of those key
meetings is the family meeting. Every week, we get together as a family and we discuss
all the things that relate to the family that need to be talked over or planned out. We talk
about family schedules and family problems and family activities and projects that we want to
be working on. This is the time where we all unify together and see how we're doing at living
according to our plan. We analyze where we're at as a family. This helps us stay our course
and achieve the plan and the desired outcome that we wanted to in the first place. The other action
that we take in our family is open communication. We can talk about anything so long as it's done
with calmness. You see the stay calm here. So, calm communication, calm open communication
is one of the things that we do in order to make sure that we become the best versions of ourselves
and communicate effectively. All of these actions and these analysis steps are the recipe that you
need to teach your children and yourselves better problem-solving. For sure the most difficult out
of all these steps to learn is calmness. And that's because we develop habits of going
to that mid or back brain when we feel worried about a situation. But if you have the skills,
if you've done the planning, you're checking up with the family, you're taking deliberate action,
there's nothing you need to worry about. And you don't need to take things personally even when
someone is acting their very worst, we can always tell ourselves, "It's okay. I'm going to get calm
first then we'll talk about it." Don't ever talk about anything until you get calm. There are so
many more things about calmness that I would love to teach you. And because you stayed to the end
of this video, I have a gift for you. That gift is the Calm Parenting Toolkit. I'm going to give
it to you completely free. There's a link to it in the description to this video. So, click
the link called Calm Parenting Toolkit and get started on your calmness, your self-government,
your problem-solving success for you and for your children for the future.