Hi, I'm Nicholeen Peck and I'm the mother of 4. Previous
foster parent of many troubled teens. In fact, for years,
I took youth ages 12 to 18 into my home and it was for treatment care. So, this
was high level foster care. So, guess what? Almost all of them went out of control
on a fairly routine basis. But I never lost my control. I was able
to maintain calmness. I want to share with you some
of my secrets for how I helped them get calm and how I maintained my
calmness at the same time. So, that's what we're going to talk about
in this video. What to do with out of control kids?
When a child has issues not being able to control themselves,
they actually feel pretty vulnerable. They oftentimes don't feel very
understood. So, it's super important that we
establish a good connection with them, have a good strong relationship
and let them know, "We're not trying to hurt you. We're not trying to fight with
you. We're not going to power struggle with
you." Do you know what a power struggle looks like?
I hope so. There's multiple different ways to power struggle and some of them
might be surprising to you. When you give a child whatever they want
when they go out of control, that's actually a power struggle.
It's called coddling. So, there's also the angry power struggles and the ones where
you don't talk to anybody. But you're still the loudest person in
the room. There are a lot of different ways that people power struggle.
If you know what those look like, then you don't have to engage in them.
The answer or the solution the type of parenting you want to have is what i
call assertive parenting, deliberate parenting. This is the type of
parenting where you make a plan for how you will parent the children and you
explain that plan in detail to them. There shouldn't be
any surprises in your parenting. If a person is going to learn self-government
which is always my goal, they need to start out by learning that
you are a safe person to teach them. And then you need to teach them the nuts
and bolts of everything you're going to do with your parenting.
So, what is self-government? Self-government is being able to
determine the cause and effect of any given situation
and possessing a knowledge of your own behavior so that you can control them.
So, how would you explain that to a child? So, you would look at that child or that
youth and you would say self-government is what we're going for.
That means you get to choose everything for
yourself. You get to be in charge of you. Now, we
have to still keep the roles in the right place. Ooh,
what are roles? That's another lesson. That's something else you're going to
have to teach your children. What is the role of parent? What is the
role of child? One is a teacher, one is a learner, right?
We've got to keep those in order otherwise there's dysfunction.
We always keep the parents exactly where they need to be
in the child's life so that the child feels security
in their role as learner as child. So, you say, "You get to make all of the
choices for yourself because we all choose everything anyway
for ourselves. The one thing that we need to remember about choices
is they come with consequences. So, when you make choices you're also
choosing consequences. And it's up to my role as a parent, my
job to make sure that we've got a system in
place that has consequences so that you can make the best types of choices.
So, you decide what type of person you want to be. How you want it to
feel. And then you learn the skills you need to move forward in that direction
that you want to go." The next final lesson that you want to
teach your children is "What is calmness?" Calmness is essential for
self-government. A person is not in control of themselves
if they are emotional or if they are power struggling with
another person. So, to solve problems in a self-covered way,
that means you have to be calm. That doesn't
just mean silent. That means you're totally
okay. So, we teach four skills to children. We teach them how to follow instructions,
accept no answers, accept consequences and disagree
appropriately. If a person learns the skill sets for
these 4 skills, that takes care of 99% of their
behavioral problems. And by the way, these skills are not just for children,
they're for adults too. When somebody cuts you off in traffic, you need the
skill how to accept and no answer because you didn't want them to do that.
It was like them telling you, "No, I'm going here." You've got to be able to look
at the person, keep a calm face, voice and body
say, okay or ask to disagree appropriately. And a gesture out the
window is not disagreeing appropriately. And then
drop the subject. So, of those 4 skills. In every single one of them,
there is the same step. Step number 2 in every single one of those 4 basic
skills is the same. It is have a calm face, voice
and body. When my children are really young, I teach them.
"What does it look like when you have a calm face?"
And then they'll show me. "What does it look like when your face is not calm?"
They show me. "What does it look like when your body
is not calm?" They start jumping around. "What does it look like when your body is
calm? What about your voice?" So, we do the same
exercise with our voice. So, that they really learn
what is calm, what is not calm. And then every time
they are not calm, I correct them and I point out "This is what you're doing.
it's not a calm voice. What you should be doing is this." And we
point them in the right direction that they should go so that they can
analyze. A person can't learn self-government unless they analyze
themselves. So, calmness is a key thing that we need
to understand and we need to analyze within ourselves.
So, we need to teach our children key things
--self-government, roles, calmness. And we've got to teach them
skills too. What skills do they need so that they can achieve their goals? If
they say, "Yeah, I want to be a calm self-governed person"
but they don't have any way to measure it, how do they even know if they got
there?" That's the beauty with skills. Skills
help us measure our progress so that we know where we're
going and if we're getting there in good time.
Those 4 basic skills are the perfect skills to start with for the family.
And your children are also going to get the opportunity to learn
your parenting skills as well. There should be no surprises in those skills.
Do you know that a lot of children go out of control because they have anxiety?
Because they feel like nobody's understanding them or listening to them?
Well, it's true. So, if you want your children to go out of control less
then after they have an understanding, give them the skills they need to be
understood. The skill disagree appropriately is a beautiful and
liberating skill that helps so many children choose not to go out of control.
But I know you're saying, "You don't know my child." That's true.
I don't know your child. Maybe your child rages, maybe your child has oppositional
defiance, maybe they've got ADHD, maybe they're on
the spectrum somehow. Maybe they have sensory issues or
something that they're dealing with with their processing
that really makes them lose control quickly because they have higher anxiety
or something like that. Well, a lot of my foster children had
similar issues oftentimes multiple issues on their file were listed adhd,
ocd, rad, all on the same file with the same
person. And we taught them these skills, it
worked. But we had to teach them something else too. So, when children are
older, we teach them something called the rule of 3.
When they're younger, we teach them something called the calm down place.
This is the teaching self-government choices map which is a useful thing for
part of the program that we teach. Now, you can see it has the light side
and the dark side. And that means when you're making good
decisions when you're not making good decisions. And over here are the skills
that we just talked about those 4 basic skills. Well, over here
are the steps that a parent goes through if the child is going completely
out of control or if they need to be corrected. So, the parent corrects them.
But then down here, you can see there's 2 boxes. One says
rule of 3 and one says calm down place. Calm down
places for the younger children and the rule of 3 is for the older
children. Now, what constitutes older and younger
kind of depends upon the developmental level of your child.
If your child is at about 6 or 7 year old developmental level and older,
then you can do something called the rule of 3. If your child
has a developmental level that's younger than that, you might want to consider
using the calm down place. The calm down place is simply a trigger spot for
calmness. In fact, it's this place that the child
knows ahead of time that they get to go to when they are not being calm. And then
there's a trigger phrase that I say before they go to the calm down
place. I say something to them like, "Porter you are not having a calm voice.
We need to go to the calm down place." And so then he knows,
"Oh, I need to go to calm down place." He knows that on the way to the calm down
place if he chooses to get calm which means he
does all 5 steps of following instructions.
That's our baseline how we know we're calm. If he does that,
then he won't even have to go to the calm down place and then we'll just do a
simple correction and fix the problem for him
and help him practice how to handle that situation better in the future.
If the child is older though and they start going out of control or power
struggling with you because crying is power struggling.
Yelling is power struggling. Pouting putting up a wall, not talking to you,
those are all power struggles. If they start power struggling with you,
hopefully you have your own calmness down.
And if not, hopefully you find my Calm Parenting Toolkit
which I think is mentioned below this video. You can go to that and there's a
free toolkit there for you that you could use. But if you
have your calmness under control, then you can help your
child get their calmness under control when they're going out of control
by using the rule of 3 which disengages their processing from the
emotional part of the brain and engages the prefrontal cortex the
part where they think in that logical center of the brain. So,
how does it work? We call it the rule of 3 because we do 3
things 3 times. It's really important that you
know what to say and that your children know what to say too.
If i just left it to my own creativity in my brain, I would say something
different every time. Which then makes my child more anxious
and they'll go out of control even more. So, in order to
keep things predictable which lowers anxiety for children,
there's a script that I decided to follow years ago when i was doing
treatment foster care for troubled teens. And that script is
what I call the rule of 3 where we do these
3 things 3 times. The 3 things that we do are talked
about in my course, the teaching self-government course. And they
are pre-teaching, giving instruction and correction. We do those things 3
times in a row. And with each one of those corrections, they earn a different
negative consequence that helps them be motivated to pull themselves together
and to get calm. When we help them think about the rule of 3, they stop
thinking about their emotions because they're
going through the script with you, the process with you.
And here's the thing they already know the process ahead of time anyway.
It's not a new thing. They have learned it long before I ever use it. Because one
of the hallmarks of self-government is that you teach every skill. You teach
every problem-solving technique to the child you even practice it before you
would ever use it. So,
those are the ways that we help children stop
from going out of control. If you want more on the same topic
then go to the video that's up here in the corner called
How Do Effective Parents Discipline Their Children?
And there's a lot more there that's going to help you with out of control
behaviors and self-government.
you