As a professional psychologist and coach I'm helping parents all the time with control battles.
Today, I'm going to share with you the only thing your kids need to learn about control
and how to easily teach it.
I'm Dr. Paul Jenkins a professional psychologist. I've spent my entire career working with children
and families. This model is the one that I teach to parents in all of the programs that we have.
I'm going to share with you five easy steps to teach this model and I'm also going to give you
a free copy of it. In fact, grab the model right now so that you'll have a reference point. Just
pause the video come right back to it after you have the model in your hand. The URL is on
the screen drpauljenkins.com/stages. Now, let's get into how to teach this model.
As you look at the model that I've shared with you. Control gets put up against maturity. We're
going to start with control. So, step one, as you're teaching this to your kids define
control. It means control over your own life and it goes from zero at the bottom of that scale to
100 percent at the top. So, you can have all the control or none of the control or somewhere in
between and usually, it's somewhere in between. Because there's things that we don't control.
Your kids are going to be very receptive to this because they know that you control
certain things about their life but they want to control more. So, that's our first step we're just
going to define the control as control over your own life it goes from zero to a hundred percent
or somewhere in between. Now, step two is to define maturity. This may or may not be a word that your
kids know. I have taught this model to kids as young as four or five years old. Certainly 10 or 11
year olds can handle this and teenagers pick up on it just that quickly to understand what we mean by
maturity. Now, maturity technically means how grown up you are, right? So, we think about it typically in
age and you can ask your kids this, "Hey, when you're firstborn how much control do you have
over your own life?", "Oh, hardly any none", yeah and it's not exactly zero I mean you can make a big
noise and a big stink. But that's about it and somebody else has to control everything else,
right? Because when you're that young or that immature you don't get to have much control.
Now, what about when you're an adult. How much control do you have over your own life?
Now, as a parent, you've got some small print that you're reading around this because you know that
there's certain things you don't control. But when I ask kids this, "How much control do the adults
have? "Oh, 100%", yeah, we're gonna go with what they said for purposes of this conversation.
So that we established that diagonal line that's on our model here. When we're first starting
out we don't have much control at all. When we become more mature we have all the control and
in between, there's this line where we gradually increase in control as we increase in maturity.
That's why we want to use the model to help teach the kids the interaction between control and
maturity. Now, let's go to step three this is where it gets exciting. Because we're going to expand
the definition of maturity to be about stage not age and your kids are going to pick up on this.
I promise. Help them to see that it's not just about how old you are it's about how you behave and how
you make your decisions. So, we're going to break this into three stages. This again is consistent
with the model that I've shared with you. Stage 1, stage 2, and stage three, do you love those names?
I know I thought for a long time about what to name them. We found that people remember
them pretty well with those names. Stage one is the least mature. Stage one is all about being selfish
and self-centered, it's all about me... Stage one is demanding and manipulative, you're throwing
tantrums, you're yelling, and screaming, and fighting, and arguing, to get what you want. Do you get this?
Your kids will get it, okay. Describe stage one to them and you could even come up with some
examples together. What would that look like? You know if I asked you to do the dishes you'd say,
"No, I'm not gonna do the dishes. What do you think I am your slave? This is dumb you do them yourself",
and you can use those kinds of examples just to make it obvious this is stage one. Stage two,
we stop fighting and start cooperating. So, stage two if I ask you to do the dishes
what's going to happen? Okay, yeah I'll do them. Now, stage two sometimes involves negotiation
you know trying to cut a deal of some kind or working it out. But you're going for a win-win
kind of a solution we're going to cooperate at stage two, pretty simple. But we have to establish
stage not age, okay. So, we've got stage one, stage two, now what about stage three?
Over here on the other end of the maturity diagram. Stage three is where we are truly responsible.
Okay, we're taking care of business. At stage three we take initiative. Do you know what that means?
Ask your kids if they know what initiative means? Initiative is where you see what needs to be
done and you do it. I still remember I had this 13 year old girl in my office with her mom and
we're going over these stages. I followed the same steps that I'm sharing with you. We defined
control. We defined maturity. We expand the definition of maturity to include stage
not age so we're on step three right now. You're with me? I was right there with them
and I asked this girl this 13 year old girl I said, "How does mom know?", how does your mother
know that the dishes need to be done. How does she know that? Is she just like superpower brilliant?
And she rolled her eyes and she's like, "She can see it", and then the next question can you see it?
Of course, I can initiative is where you see what needs to be done and you do it. That
takes some maturity and immature people don't even try this because they're busy
avoiding or trying to get out of it or refusing to cooperate. See, stage three is all about initiative
seeing what needs to be done and doing it. Okay, so are you with me? We're expanding the definition
of maturity to include stage one, stage two, stage three, it's about stage not age. I've got two more
steps for you. Before we go to those two steps take just a moment to click that subscribe button. You
have found something here that is going to power up your parenting so use it. You click the button
I promise I'll bring you new videos every week to support you as a parent, deal? Here's step four tie
the two together and here's what I mean by that. We've already expanded the definition of maturity
to be stage one, stage two, stage three, it's about stage not age. The level of control or freedom that
you get to have depends on which stage you're in. That's how we tie the two together. We tie control
or freedom and just a note about that freedom and control are basically interchangeable terms. They
mean the same thing. If you have control over your life then you have freedom. Your kids are going to
get this because they don't feel like they have as much freedom as they want. They'll probably
tell you that. So, your freedom your control is tied to which stage you're in, that's step four.
Now, we've established that the more mature you are the more controller freedom that you get to have
and incidentally, freedom is not free. I think you know this because you're paying the bills. But kids
don't get that their experience doesn't support that yet and thank you to all of you veterans who
have fought for our freedom. Freedom isn't free it comes at a cost and the cost of personal freedom
is personal responsibility also known as maturity. The way that we've defined it here. So, the final
step that we want to take in teaching our kids everything that they need to know about control
is that there has to be 100 percent control. The only question is who's going to take it?
Is it going to be you? And by the way, at this point I like to very strongly voice my opinion when I'm
working with kids that I vote for them. I vote for them to be in control of their life. Somebody
has to be in control. If it's not them, then who? Well, parents are next in line. So, if kids are not
able to control their own life because of maturity issues because of stage then my strong preference
is that parents step in at that point. Because third in line is the state, the government, the
police, the courts, the division of child and family services, youth protection, and corrections. We don't
want them to step in. So, let your kids know too. When you're teaching this model to your kids
please voice your opinion and own this. Don't pretend own this opinion that you
want them to be in control of their own life. You're not there to take control. You're there
so that you can if they default, okay. If they're not mature enough to take control over their own
life. You're going to be there to pick up the control but our preference is that they get to
be in control of their own life. Hopefully, those five simple steps will make it easy for you to
teach your kids everything that they need to know about control and if you didn't get the model yet
go grab it drpauljenkins.com/stages. I'll put this right in your inbox. I'm on
your parenting team. I've got your back. Now, while you're thinking about this you might want to
queue up that next video five powerful secrets for teaching children responsibility. You're going to
recognize elements of that after our conversation here today. I'll see over at that video.