>>Dr. Amen: Hi, I’m Dr. Daniel Amen.
>>Tana: And I’m Tana Amen.
Welcome to Change Your Brain, Change Your Life.
>>Dr. Amen: You are not stuck with the brain you have.
You can make it better, we can prove it.
Today we’re going to talk about raising brain healthy children.
What are the things parents can do to really optimize the brain development of their kids
so that they can do better in school, have closer relationships, really set the stage
for them to have a meaningful life.
>>Tana: Well, and I love this because a lot of the tips are so practical when it comes
to getting your kids set up for success not just in your parenting skills as far as discipline
or, you know, teaching them structure but also with getting them to eat healthy and
think right and really getting their habits down.
So it’s very important.
>>Dr. Amen: So, the first step in raising brain healthy children is you really have
to define what kind of parents you want to be and what kind of child you want to raise.
You have to tell your frontal lobes what’s this all about.
They actually found that if parents eat dinner with their children, and we almost always
eat together, and they read to them at night, that that were really the seeds of road scholars.
>>Tana: That was the only common denominator where those two things between all of the
road scholars, they eat dinner together every night and their parents read to them.
So I thought that that was so interesting.
Now to speak to your point about deciding what kind of parents you want to be, Chloe
is a very strong kid and I remember at about four years old, she was just about five, I
broke down one day and started crying and went, ‘Parenting is not supposed to be this
hard,’ because I was struggling with her strength.
Now, I often say now that if I survived her strength it’s going to serve her well because
I’ve learned how to … >>Dr. Amen: So it’s either be ‘Leader
of the free world’ or ‘Leader of the gang.’
>>Tana: Right.
We’re trying to like figure out which one but she, I understand her better now but the
big part of it was understanding me better.
Deciding what kind of parent I want to be, what I figured out was that my intensity makes
me want to be very authoritarian, like very like, ‘This is how it’s going to be,’
and I’m going to rule the house with an iron fist.
I really started digging into this, like, what makes, you know, for good parenting what
makes, what helps to raise responsible children as opposed to me being a good parent.
What is my outcome?
What I’m trying to achieve is not to be her friend.
It’s not to be all of these other things or to be seen as this great parent.
I want to make sure that I do my job and turn out a responsible, loving, successful person.
That’s my job.
>>Dr. Amen: Independent.
>>Tana: Independent.
And so when I got it into my head I started to step back and go, “Okay.
So now let’s reverse engineer what’s that going to take.”
I want her to think for herself.
Me, being authoritarian means I’m thinking for her.
>>Dr. Amen: Right.
>>Tana: And so I had to figure that out and it was not easy.
I still constantly have to catch myself and like, back up and go okay, let go.
>>Dr. Amen: That your job in many ways is to be a good coach, to be curious, not furious.
>>Tana: Right.
>>Dr. Amen: Tana actually, she already did that time.
We’re going to talk about that in a minute.
So time was never the issue.
The issue was really around the battle.
>>Tana: Right and so here was the key for me and this changed everything.
I let go.
I mean I literally let go but what I mean by that is, I mean a lot of people who see
it from the outside will go, “Whoa, she’s not like doing anything.
She’s not parenting her.”
And that’s not really true.
What I did is I step back and I’ve decided that I was going to let Chloe pay consequences.
She was going to make her own choices.
>>Dr. Amen: And you aren’t going to rescue her.
>>Tana: The key is I was not going to rescue her from the consequences.
I would be very clear about what the consequences were going to be.
I would teach her.
I’d be a good coach.
I’d listen and if she didn’t follow through or whatever choice she made, good or bad,
those were her consequences to live with.
And the hardest part as a parent, hardest part, is that we want to rescue our kids when
they messed up.
We don’t want them to suffer the pain that we went through as kids and I had to figure
out and I did it and it was hell for her for the first couple of months because there was
no yelling, there was no discipline, there was no grounding, there was nothing.
It was her paying real life consequences.
>>Dr. Amen: So give them an example.
>>Tana: Homework battles are huge, right?
So homework battles are just a problem I hear all the time from parents and I would literally
sit down at the table, it would be this huge battle every night.
I’m telling her you’re doing your homework and you’re not moving until it’s done
and she’ll be screaming and it’s just this giant battle.
Finally when she was in second grade, I walked in one day and I said, “Are you going to
do your homework?”
Right there she looked at me a little funny.
She’s like, “What do you mean?”
She was waiting for me to sit down and make her do her homework and I said, “Well, are
you going to do your homework or not?
If you don’t want to do it, you don’t have to do it.”
And she was very suspicious and she said, “Ah, what do you mean I don’t have to
do it?”
I said, “I’m never going to make you do your homework again.”
And she looked at me very suspiciously at this point because that doesn’t make sense.
I said, “No honey.
I said.
I’ve been thinking about it.
We fight every night over doing your homework and I realized how silly I’m being by fighting
with you over your homework because it’s not my homework.
It’s your homework.”
>>Dr. Amen: Yeah you passed that grade.
>>Tana: “I already finished second grade.
They’re not my grades, they’re your grades and here’s the thing, I did my homework
and I did it well and I did well in school.
I don’t like getting in trouble at school.
I don’t like my teachers being upset with me.
That was my choice.
I get to reap the benefits from what I did but I’m not you and if you decide you don’t
want to do your homework, I’m okay with that and I love you so much that if you don’t
do any homework all year and you decide that you’d rather repeat second grade, I’m
okay with that too.
You’ll make new friends when your friends move on.”
Oh my gosh!
She was so mad she had steam coming out of her ears.
She’s like, “That’s ridiculous.
I’m going to do my homework.
I’m just not going to do it right this second.”
And she walked out the room.
She came back ten minutes later, did her homework by herself.
I’ve never ever asked her about homework again, sat with her to do homework.
Now I will help her.
All she has to do was ask but I don’t get on her case and asked her, “Did you do it?”
>>Dr. Amen: So know what kind of parent you want to be.
Do you want to be a parent that solves all your children’s problems?
In that way, basically making them incompetent to solve their own or do you want to raise
healthy, independent, social creatures that can have a happy life.
>>Tana: And let me be clear.
People will see me letting Chloe make mistakes and sometimes they’ll look at me like, “Why?
Why are you letting her do that?”
She’ll order bad food or she’ll do something and I give her a certain amount of freedom
because I don’t want her listening to my voice when she goes off to college.
That’s not going to help her.
She needs to be listening to her voice and whatever consequences happen from that, you
know, and there’s times where I’m, it’s like, cringing.
She’s trying to order, you know, pasta again for the third night in a row and I’m like,
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” because she know I’ve been teaching these kids since
she was little.
When she’s at home, she eats what’s at home and there aren’t, there is no junk
food.
When we’re out, she gets to order what she wants and it makes me cringed sometimes.
But what I reinforces the benefits and consequences of what’s going to happen when she eats
those foods and I leave it at that and I am the living example for her.
That’s the key.
I am the constant example.
>>Dr. Amen: And that’s where your biggest influence is going to be because if you are
bonded to your children, they pick your values.
If you’re not bonded, they pick the opposite value.
>>Tana: Your kids don’t do what you say.
They do what you do.
>>Dr. Amen: Ultimately that’s true.
>>Tana: And so when, this happened just last week.
It was just so beautiful.
So I went in to go wake Chloe up and she was not in her bed and I’m like, “Where is
she?”
She was downstairs.
She was already up, dressed, had set her alarm and she had her little running clothes on
and I’m like, “What are you doing up so early?”
She said, “You know, I decided that I’m going to go for a walk around our neighborhood
every morning before school so I’m getting up extra early.”
She said, “I made myself a healthy breakfast.”
She said, “I just feel so much better when I do this,” like it was all her idea.
It was such a huge shift.
It was great.
>>Dr. Amen: We’re going to do a lot more shows on parenting.
Raising brain healthy children is just critical.
It’s the next generation.
It starts by you living a brain healthy life and then really knowing what kind of parents
you want to be, what kind of child you want to raise.
So write us a comment on what are the things you do that you just feel really effective
with your kids.
What are the things you could do better?
Send us a video.
If you’re really struggling with your child, call our center.
See if, you know, bringing a child in for evaluation wouldn’t be in their best interest
and ultimately in yours and your marriage’s best interest because we know how hard that
tough kids can be on relationships.
Thanks for watching.