Do you want to know how to discipline a kid that doesn't listen? There is nothing more frustrating
than that for parents but there is hope. We're going to be talking about disciplining children
who don't want to pay attention to all of the parenting that we're using in this vide.
I'm Nicholeen Peck. I teach parenting, family communication, bonding, unity and self-government
all over the world and in this video we are attacking the topic of them not caring.
In this video I'm going to share with you 4 principles that you need to help them connect
with you and accept their corrections even if they don't want to. When I was a young mom and my oldest
child was three years old, my next child was only one year old, our family decided to do treatment
foster care for troubled teens. so we brought youth into our home between the ages of 12 and 18.
Now, I knew that I wasn't fully prepared for this but I went through a lot of training on teaching
them certain things that they needed for behavior modification. Shortly after beginning, I realized
I wanted to give them more than just behavior modification, I wanted to give them the skills they
needed to have a change of heart, the skills that they needed and the principles that they needed
to truly govern themselves. Here's the thing. Many of these children because they were high level
treatment children had some pretty bad habits and misbehaviors that we had to deal with and
one of those that was very common across the board was the I don't care. You can't make me. You can't
do anything to me type of an attitude and sure enough, I wasn't going to be hitting any of them
or anything like that. Legally I would have had a major problem, right, because they weren't even my
own children and of course that wasn't in my you know history, that wasn't something that I would do
to another person anyhow, but I had to prepare for how to help them even if they acted like
they didn't care. Now here's something you need to know. When somebody says I don't care, that's
actually code for why should I care, so remember that. So, they say they don't care, they're actually
listening, it's a power struggle. They're trying to take some of the power and authority away from you
by saying that statement. So, the first principle is don't be reactive to that then, okay? Don't take
it personally. Don't go oh, yeah? They don't care. I can't even help them, that would be the worst thing
that you could do. Just remember they're paying attention, even closer attention. They may say
things back to you but what they're really saying is convince me. Give me a truth that I can hold on
to, that I care about and I believe and that is something that we absolutely can do as parents.
Principle number two is you've got to prepare, okay? So, set it all up first. Your child is giving you a
cue. They're like you want a power struggle? I'll power struggle. I don't care. I'm not gonna listen.
I'm gonna ignore you. I'm not paying attention. They're saying you're not prepared so I got you,
okay? They're probably pretty strong-willed, they're pretty smart, they also read your emotions maybe
pretty well which is all the more reason we don't take it personally which was principle number one,
right? We don't want to have those emotions to yank around. We want to just stick to the facts and make
sure that we advocate for them through calmness and love in our tone but also firmness in our
structure, which is absolutely what we need. So, what types of things do we set up? Well in the teaching
self-government course, I teach parents how to set up that home culture or that environment
so that their children will learn self-mastery or self-government. So, it starts with skills. They
need to learn the skills for success. So, there's four basic skills no matter the age of the child.
Even if they're in their teens, they need these four basic skills which are following instructions,
accepting "no" answers and criticism, accepting consequences and disagreeing appropriately. Each
one of those four basic skills has a skill set attached to it and if a child or person, adult,
anyone, we all need these skills because they're principles, that means everyone needs it, right?
If a person learns the skill sets to those four basic skills, which actually have more principles
in those skill sets, that takes care of 99% of their behavioral problems. Another thing that we set up
ahead of time with the children is how we're going to correct things, how we're going to praise them,
how we're going to teach them, how we're going to correct them. They need to know all of those things
so that they can be successful. So then it's predictable. Once something becomes very deliberate,
very predictable, it's really hard to manipulate it and especially if it's based upon principle.
So, that's going to be really important as you're trying to help your child develop a little bit
of an interest in governing themselves. I have two more principles for you but before I get to those,
you are not going to want to miss the other videos that I have on this channel that relate
to this topic. There are others and there's more to come. Self-government requires a
lot of learning and understanding their skill development that needs to occur so don't miss
any of the videos. Hit the subscribe button now and you won't miss them. Principle number three
is consistent follow-through even if they ignore. Consistency teaches cause and effect.
For a person to learn self-government, they have to be an environment that honors the law of cause and
effect. So, when you are consistent in your praising, consistent in your correcting, consistent in your
teaching of the proper skills, then the person is going to be the most successful. Even if they
ignore you, carry on with the words. I think there's a lot of parents who fall into more of a
passive type of parenting where they wait for the child to give response on everything they do.
If you've got a strong-willed child who's taking over the authority in your home and throwing
everything upside down, creating dysfunction. you absolutely just need to stay your course.
So, learn the steps to doing an effective correction which is something I teach in
the teaching self-government course and then when a child needs a correction, just carry on.
Even if they won't listen to you, even if they say talk to the hand and they don't want to be part of
that correction, you just say the words and then you'll hold them accountable and if they don't
care, even if you do the correction if they're like not going to come back into alignment with you,
then that brings us to principle number four. Every family needs to have their stopping place.
So what is your stopping place? Where do things end? If you just keep upping the ante of negative
consequences for your child, then you basically are getting trapped into a power struggle and you
don't want to do that. So, you lay out all ahead of time, remember we're setting things up first,
and you say okay, well this is what happens. If you don't do these four basic skills, we will
correct you in this way and if you don't accept your consequences, which is one of those four
basic skills, and you are starting to go out of control or you are not listening to mom and dad,
you are you know ignoring in some way, then we will do something called the rule of three. The
rule of three is something that I teach, it's an intensive teaching. You do three things three times
and it is designed to bring a person out of the midbrain and back brain into the prefrontal cortex
so that they can start thinking clearly instead of just emotionally reacting and power struggling.
Sometimes even when you go all the way through the rule of three and the child gets the opportunity
to earn those three negative consequences that are part of that rule of three, they still choose
to stay out of instructional control but we stop there and then we go into a waiting pattern. So,
there's something that we do after we do the rule of three. We come to them and we pre-teach
that they are going to follow an instruction and then we give them an instruction and if they don't
do it, we correct again. They don't earn any more negative consequences, we just correct and we do
this about every 15 minutes just so that their brain has to still keep arguing if they choose
not to get calm. And usually when a person goes full back brain, they can get to front brain within
about 15 or 20 minutes. So, if you give yourself 15 to 20 minutes in between your interactions with
them when you're giving them an instruction yet again to get calm and take some calming breaths
or something, they have to reinvent their anger after every 15 or 20 minutes if they don't want to
calm down and they don't want to finally listen to you. This is actually very draining and they don't
usually enjoy having to reinvent their own anger again and again. So, usually over time, they will
just decide that they're going to be calm, they're going to listen to you and you can get yourself
back to a baseline where they will follow an instruction. I do know that there are oppositional
defiant children. Some of them clinically diagnosed. This sometimes can present a little bit more of a
difficulty to some parents just because of their habits and their processing and the way their
brain patterns are working but I want you to know that even if they have ADHD or ADD, if they have
RAD, if they have ODD, these are all people that I have worked with in my home doing treatment
foster care with them and these are the steps that I went through. Now, obviously this is very
you know surface, I can't go into everything here because my training takes a lot longer than this
but it gives you an idea of what types of things you need to put into place and I can promise you
because of years and years of experience and many thousands and thousands of parents who've
also utilized these same skills and principles in their home that it does work even for some of
those more extreme processing styles that somebody might have. Don't let it throw you off if it takes
longer for a person to come around to choosing to listen, to choosing to care and make sure that
you focus a lot on your tone, that is a bonus for you. Calmness is magic; calmness is power and you
need to make sure that you have it for yourself. If you would like more help with your calmness,
I have a free gift for you. It's called the Calm Parenting toolkit. In the description below, this
video, there is a link to the Calm Parenting toolkit. It might be called something like TSG Calm
toolkit or something like that. It's one of the top links. So, click that link now and take yourself
to the Calm Parenting toolkit and you can have it completely for free. It is a mini course, it will
be a great start for you to help you with some of those attitude problems and oppositional behaviors
that you might be dealing with at your house. Click the link below, we'll see you there.