Do you want to teach your child how to stop interrupting you?
Well, you're not alone, that is a really annoying behavior but there
are ways to very easily and calmly handle the situation. I'm Nicholeen Peck and I
teach parenting, family communication and relationship building all through the lens
of self-government and in this video today, we're going to be talking about interrupting.
In this video, I'm going to be sharing with you some key skills that you can use to teach your
child what to do instead of just interrupting you and how to prepare them for when it's
okay to interrupt and when it's not. So, let's talk about interrupting right now.
When you have children who want attention right now and you are in the middle of something else
and they come to you and they're like mom or dad, dad. help me with that dad or you don't care about
me, these are all things that can interrupt the flow of life and they can feel like they are
emotionally hijacking a situation that before that was very calm. This can be difficult. There are some
key skills that we can teach our children so they can use those instead of just jumping straight
to interruptions. I'm a pretty busy mom. I write books, I run an international organization, I run
teaching self-government which is the parenting company. I also homeschool my children, I speak
all over different places. There's a lot of things that happen in my life so of course I am going to
be busy all the time, right? There's not a moment that I don't have something to do which means
there's not a moment that I would feel okay being interrupted or is there? I had to decide
on my own how to allow myself to be okay with interruptions. At the end of this video, I'm going
to be sharing some bonus content for you so that you can prepare yourself to be interrupted but
let's switch gears and talk about how to prepare the children to either not interrupt you at all
because it's super important that you don't get interrupted during that time or how to interrupt
you the right way. Years ago when I started doing foster care, I started teaching my foster
children four basic skills. I realized these four basic skills actually took care of 99% of their
behavioral problems. Those four basic skills are following instructions, accepting "no" answers and
criticism, accepting consequences and disagreeing appropriately. I'd like to focus on two of those
four basic skills right now because in order to teach your child how to not interrupt you or how
to interrupt you appropriately, they need two of these skills. They need accepting "no" answers
and they need disagreeing appropriately. So, when mom or dad is busy with something, maybe they're
on a Zoom call or a phone call or something that maybe has to do with business, those are things
that we have a hard time being interrupted in, then the parent can tell the child ahead of time, hey
I'm going to be on the Zoom call. It's going to take probably about an hour
or maybe an hour and a half so I need to not be interrupted during that time.
This is a "no" answer. This means that you need to listen to what I'm saying,
keep a calm face, voice and body about it and then say okay or you can disagree appropriately with me
if you need to but then drop the subject, meaning don't think about interrupting me during this time
at all. So, you pre-teach them ahead of time how long something is going to take, that decreases the
anxiety. This is good for them. If they get their anxiety level lowered because they know about
what time you'll be done, this helps them make it through but then also if they know I can accept
a "no" answer, drop the subject, drop the subject, right? They need to be able to drop that subject
and know how to tell themselves to do that and then hopefully they can hold off that craving to
interrupt you when they just want to know if they can have some more macaroni and cheese or an apple
or something like that that they might need. So, what do you do if they do need to talk to you? So,
there was a rule that I had my children definitely could interrupt me but I wanted them to know how
to do it. So, I taught my children that they could come to me and they could rest their arm on my arm
and they could say excuse me, mom and that if they came to me in that way to talk to me or
to interrupt me that, I would always stop what I was doing and I would look at them and I would say
oh, it looks like you need to talk to me. I am happy to talk to you.
It's probably going to be a minute or two before we can have this conversation or what is it that
you need and then I would go back to the other person I was talking to and say just one moment,
I'm going to talk to so and so about something. They're being very polite at interrupting me
in such a good way right now that I want to definitely listen to what they're telling me.
And so then I would go and talk to them. Now I told them I said if you're going to interrupt me,
make sure that it's important, okay, and now keeping in mind for a child, having a snack
is important, okay? Getting a drink of water is important, going to the bathroom for certain ages
of children could be very important, play time with a friend is not going to be as important,
okay? So they needed to know what are the levels of importance and I helped them draw those lines
and talk about priorities versus non-priorities and just things we wanted to do. So anyway,
that's how I trained them and then what they would do is they would come, they would put their
hand on my arm and then they would say excuse me, mom and I would address them and they would
say may I disagree appropriately about something or may I talk to you about something and I would
say yes and this is when they used the skill disagreeing appropriately. Before I tell you the
steps to disagreeing appropriately which are very useful for children, click that subscribe button.
There are so many videos on this channel that relate to self mastery for you and your children,
you're not going to want to miss out. Disagreeing appropriately is done like this. You look at the
person, you keep a calm face, voice and body then you say that you understand their point of view
which in an interruption case might be mom, I know you're talking to somebody else right now
but then you share your point of view. But I have something i need to share with you and then they
listen to what you have to say then you listen to their decision, you say okay and drop the subject.
So, maybe you told the child that they needed to clean their room while you were on the phone with
somebody but they feel like they need to talk to you about that because there's a problem in the
room then they would come to you, put their hand on your arm, say excuse me mom, you would look at them
and then they would say mom, I know you're talking to somebody right now but I need to
talk to you about cleaning my room. You told me to clean the room but what I've noticed is that
there actually is a problem in the room that needs your attention and they might then explain to you
what that is and hopefully it was one of those important things that they needed to talk to you
about if they had to interrupt you. But regardless, a parent needs to be ready in their heart and mind
to listen to that disagreement patiently, no matter what it is. That doesn't mean we agree with them
every single time. Now I have a bonus for you. How do you prepare to be patient in those
circumstances? You know how I talked about you pre-teaching them for success and telling them I'm
going to be on this Zoom call for one hour or I have two phone calls to make to some people, at the
bank and the doctor's office, whatever it is that you're telling them that you need to do, you're
preparing them so they know how long it will take. Well you need to prepare you too. You've got a plan
ahead of time that when they interrupt, you you are going to be okay. You are not going to take it as
an attack or that they don't care or that they're trying to make your life hard. All those thoughts
if you catered to those in your head would just lead to frustration and probably an emotional blow
up. Instead, what you need to do is tell yourself they're little. I'm their leader, they need me.
It's okay if they interrupt me. I'm gonna make sure that I take my time to listen to what they have to
say and I am going to trust that whatever I was involved in, I could get right back to no matter
what. I'm a praying person and so sometimes when I've been writing books and I really don't want
someone to interrupt my flow, I honestly when they come and put their hand on my arm, I will
close my eyes and say a quick prayer and ask a god to help me remember what I was thinking of
when I come back and then I go talk to them. I put first things first. They are first and if they're
being respectful when they need to talk to you, we need to respectfully listen as well. This means
sometimes that we have to do a little bit of our own heart work, working on being calm ourselves. I
have something. I would like to give you that could definitely help with that, it's called the calm
parenting toolkit. The calm parenting toolkit has 10 lessons that you can have for free right now
if you click the link that is below this video. So, in the description below this video there's a link
that says teachselfgov.com/toolkit. If you click on that link right now, then you can have
the call parenting toolkit for free and start on the road to self mastery for you and your children.
Your relationships will never be the same, I promise. Improvement is just around the corner.