Do you want to know 10 parenting tips to calm down any child in a minute instead of say,
a hot second, I'm Nicholeen Peck and I teach parenting all over the world,
through the lens of the principle self government and I have some tips that will be truly life
changing, and make it so that you will be able to help your children calm down quicker.
So in this video, we're going to understand self government because that is important
for understanding how to calm down your child in a minute. And then I'm going to be sharing with you
tips that you can use to help your child get calm. When a person is self governed, then that
person recognizes that we are constantly a work in progress. If you want to get to a point where you
can calm your child down quickly, you're probably going to have to do a little pre work ahead of
time, that could take a little bit more work initially, but then you'll get to a time where
everything happens faster. So I'm going to help you learn all the things that you need to be
able to do that upfront work and to do the quick calm down work when the time arises. But first,
let's talk about self government. So that is my tip number one is understanding self government.
So what is self government? Self government is a foundational principle of freedom and then every
free society has used. Self government is when a person understands the cause and effects of
any given situation, and possesses the knowledge of their own behavior so that they can control
them. So what that means is that each person takes personal responsibility for themselves. That means
nobody else can control me, I have to choose to control me. So now this throws our original
question on its head just a little bit. Can I calm down a person in one minute? No. Can I do things
to help them choose to be common one minute? Yes, I can do that. But I have to recognize it
is always their choice. I cannot force calmness. People who try to force calmness are the ones who
end up getting their children taken away sometimes because they get a little bit too aggressive.
I've always wondered why people do that. Why don't we get aggressive to try to force calmness, that
doesn't make any sense. So a truly self governed parent is calm and connected to their children,
while they're helping them learn the skills they need to have that calmness in the first place. So
understanding cause and effect as a parent and as a child and making sure everyone understands
that principle and the direction that you're headed as a group.
Tip number two, don't react. You can't take things personally and help a person be calm.
So if you know that some of their negative behavior is something that really gets under
your skin, it makes you feel uncomfortable and makes you feel frustrated and patient or annoyed,
you've got to conquer that you cannot decide to take that personally. In fact, you may need a
skill that I teach called accepting a "no" answer. When a person accepts a "no" answer, they look at
the person or the situation. In your case, you'd be looking at the child, you'd be keeping a calm
face, voice and body about it, then you would say okay, this is what's happening. And then you drop
the subject, meaning you don't keep thinking about that feeling that you're having again and again.
So you might say I'm feeling frustrated because of this situation. But that's okay to feel frustrated
for a second because I'm going to choose not to now. So okay, let it go. let's move on, then then
I start directing myself in a new direction. That's what a really good self governed person
does. They don't get caught up in those emotions and take things personally. Tip number three,
ahead of time, teach them how you will handle the situation. In my teaching self government program,
we teach four basic skills to children. Those four basic skills are following instructions,
accepting "no" answers, accepting consequences, and disagreeing appropriately. These children's
books each teach one of the four basic skills to children. So this one teaches following
instructions, accepting "no" answers, accepting consequences, and disagreeing appropriately.
When a person learns those four basic skills, it actually takes care of 99%
of their behavioral problems, but I don't stop at just the skill that they are going to need. I also
teach them the skills that I'm going to need and that I'm going to use to solve problems to.
In my teaching self government parenting course, I actually give people charts that they can use
so that their children can see what comes next when they might be having an interaction
with their parents. So they know oh, first Mom's going to do a pre teach then she's going to give
an instruction. If I follow the instruction, this will happen. If I don't follow the instruction this
will happen, they know exactly what occurs and if at that point, I still am having a hard time,
then this is what mom or dad will do. So parents who prepare their children ahead of time,
decrease anxiety in the child and make it so that the child is ready for a correction
or a praise or something like that in the moment when they need it.
So if your child is starting to go out of control, but you've already taught them,
these are the words that I'm going to say as soon as you start having a problem, then that child
will be triggered to get to calmness instead of trigger to go completely out of control,
because they don't know what you're trying to do to them with the creative language. Many
parents try to be creative and their corrections are calming techniques and in the end that just
distracts a child and makes it so that they get more anxious. So the best thing you could do is
be predictable. I learned this while working with a lot of troubled teens who had ADHD, OCD, ODD,
RAD, FAS, stuff like that. things where they had higher levels of anxiety, I realized we had to
be predictable all the time, I'm going to share with you the rest of my tips. But before I do,
click that subscribe button. When you subscribe to this channel, you will have access to
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sometimes. I know it can be hard when children go out of control. So learn the skills you need,
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Number four, roleplay practice ahead of time. Not only will you tell the children,
these are the skills I'm going to use and share with them the words but actually practice it out.
Do some staged or cue practice, where everyone in the family gets the opportunity to see what
an interaction is going to be like. This helps them know that in the moment, when you're
correcting them are helping them get to a place of calmness, you're not trying to control them,
you're just following through with something that family had already decided to do. This eliminates
some of that power struggle mentality that a child might have. Soon, you're just living a part of the
relationship and they're living a part of the relationship and you're having an interaction
that they've already had before. So it doesn't seem as contentious and suddenly it's easier to
get calm. Now I know there's multiple reasons that a person might choose not to be calm.
It's not just with contention, sometimes they might have anxiety, or something like that. But
if you've planned ahead of time, and you've even roleplayed what to do, and even what
to think during those times of anxiety, then that child can fare much better. Number five,
have a calm plan for you and for them. If you have decided ahead of time what your comb plan
is when a person is not being calm, then it's so much easier to just fall right into it
So for my young children, I always had a calm down place. And sometimes even for my older foster
children, they had to calm down place because they might have needed one. But we had to calm down
place and it was a place that you were gonna go to just to be calm, and you were going to stay there
just until you got calm whether it was two seconds or two minutes. Definitely not two hours, though,
because at that point, they probably need a little bit more help. It's not a place that you put someone
to sit as a negative consequence, like a timeout is just a straight a trigger spot for calmness.
And you're going to practice ahead of time through roleplay how to use this calm down place
effectively. I'm also going to teach my children the words that they need so they can recognize
the words to trigger them to calmness to. So a calm down place and calm words. Maybe you're out
and about somewhere though, and you don't have that calm down place. You can always assign new
calm down places when you're out and about with the children. Number six, describe, don't react.
If you want to get your child calm and keep them calm, then you go through your calm plan that you
have created. And I'm going to give you some tips on a calm plan at the end of this. So we're going
to give you something you can use to make a really great calm plan. Let's say you've been through
your calm plan, and now they've gotten calm and you're going to address a situation. Well we know
some children will all of a sudden escalate again, and they will not stay calm. So what do you do to
help them stay calm? Well, you describe instead of react. If you emotionally react to a situation,
they are going to keep emotionally reacting to you. So then that's going to create a power
struggle every time. There's a way that I teach where I describe. I use a timestamp statement that
helps a person know that they are going to start a description instead of a reaction and it's just
something I do to help myself stop from reacting. Number seven, hit the heart with a rationale.
So after you've described what happened, then you need to tell them why that's not good. So
once your child has gotten calm, and then you've described to help them hopefully get calm again,
you need to still finish that teaching, right. Some children as soon as you say
you know you need to not do this because it's disrespectful. ah, they go out of control again,
but if they're in the have enough hearing good rationale statements that matter to them,
instead of things that just matter matter to you, they actually will stay calmer while you're doing
the teaching. After you give them a rationale that hits the heart, then you've got to do
some teaching. So step number eight is to remind them what they should have done, and maybe even
practice it again. So this leads me to step number nine, which is to practice things the right way.
We should definitely have more experience doing things the right way than the wrong way in order
to make it so in the future, we choose to be calm quicker, and not have the same problem
that we had before. Number 10, this is kind of our big one and that is consequences. All right,
so we need to have good consistent consequences. If the parent is not consistent in their teaching,
and with their consequences, that increases anxiety. And that makes it
so the child goes more out of control. What types of consequences are going to be effective for you?
Most people use synthetic consequences because they are the quickest way to do teaching.
Natural consequences are worth mentioning, but they oftentimes take a long time to kick in.
And sometimes natural consequences can be cruel, where synthetic consequences can be very merciful.
Such as for synthetic consequence, a person might earn an extra chore, as opposed to getting all
their clothing taken away or something like that. So they wouldn't have clothes to wear
or maybe a phone taken away. Instead, we use an extra chore because this improves character
development because of working because work is the antidote for a sick character. It also allows the
child to accept something so it's not about a battle between you and them. But they have to
recognize this is about me and me, and I've got to accept it, I've got to do something,
it serves other people and as quick repentance too. So we use chores a lot, actually. But there
are other consequences that we use for something called the rule of three. And in the rule of
three, this is a situation where if a person has gone completely out of control, they have three
negative consequences that they can use. Now, the rule of three can take up to 10 minutes to do, I
don't recommend you ever taking any longer than 10 minutes. If so, your tolerance is might be too high.
So this is another part of consequences is making sure that we keep our tolerances low. If we're
going to consistently teach, consistently correct, we've got to make sure our tolerances are low. And
when our tolerances are low, this means that if a person is truly going to keep escalating,
we will use our intensive teaching skill, which we call the rule of three. Now the rule of three is
not necessarily for the tiniest of children, it's for children probably ages about six and older.
You can use it younger and modify it a little bit. But that's going to probably you'll probably need
a little bit more direction there. In fact, I do full training on the rule of three skill on my
teaching self government website. Now I promised you a gift and I'd like to give that to you now.
So in the description below this video, there is a link to my calm parenting toolkit.
It is a 10 lesson class that is a great beginner to learning self government.
In this class, you will learn 10 tools that you can utilize to stay calm when someone else isn't
and how to help them become calm without losing your calmness at the same time. These 10 skills
and 10 tips are going to build upon what we have already talked about in this video. So click on
teachselfgov.com/toolkit now to get your free version of the teaching self government calm
parenting toolkit. I'll see you there.