My name is Nicholeen Peck and I am a parenting expert. In fact, I teach
something called self-government which teaches parents
and children how to master themselves, how to have government over their own
behaviors and their own thoughts. And I'm generally known as
a master in handling out of control behaviors.
And in this video, we're going to be talking all about how to help an angry
child calm down.
In this video, we're going to talk about anger and
understanding anger. We're also going to talk about some skills
that we all need to know in order to transition
our brain from being in that emotional place to that place where we can
actually think again so we're going to do a
little bit of work on the brain. And we're going to talk about how to
help somebody totally calm down and what type of correcting
skills and teaching skills we need for that.
And we're going to talk about a whole lot more.
So, what does anger look like? Anger actually can have a lot of different
faces depending on the personality of the person.
So, for some people there's the obvious like, "Argh!"
And they get mad and they stomp and they scream and they
hit. That's really aggressive, right? Anger. But anger can look like other things too.
In fact, sometimes your anger can look like a victim or
passive or just putting up a wall or shutting down. Like they look at you
but they don't look at you. They don't want you to see them. They're
hiding. They don't want to be part of a
conversation. They don't talk to you. That can all look like anger
too. Of course, crying can look like anger.
Pouting, complaining. There are many things that
people do when they're getting angry. And they start to just show some
of those emotional behaviors. So, that's what happens to us when we're
angry is we start going further back in our brain.
So, the front part of our brain, the prefrontal cortex,
that does all of the logical processing for the brain.
This part of the brain doesn't fully develop for a child until they're
between the ages of 18 and 26 years old. So,
this means that lots of times people have hit adulthood before they have
full development in their prefrontal cortex. But
this prefrontal cortex at any stage can learn to solve problems. You know, bit by
bit we get better at it. So, any age brain can learn to solve
problems. And we just get better at it as we get
older. There's something that happens to all of
us no matter the age when we get upset. When we allow
ourselves to engage in angry feelings and to invest in those...
Because anyone can feel angry in a minute but we need to know what to do
with it, right? And that's one of the things we're going
to get to teaching our children what to do with it
in this video. Which is so exciting. When we start to feel angry, it's important
for us to know what is happening in our brain. In fact,
this is important information your children should understand so that as
you help them, they know you truly are helping
them and not just trying to make their lives difficult by doing some sort of a
correction technique with them which they
oftentimes fight against. But if they knew what you were really doing, they
wouldn't push so hard against it. Which is you're helping them, right?
You're helping them try to stay in front brain
because as you get angry, you go to an emotional place in your brain which is
like in the middle. And then you let it fester there for a
little bit. The more and more emotional the you get,
the more and more back in your brain you go, okay? When you
are completely out of control, you are in back brain.
They call that the fight-or-flight part of the brain.
This is the place where a person literally can't think maybe more than
like 10% processing ability. So, this is the time
when they really need help on calming down.
Right? So, the parents have to be prepared for how to help a person immediately and
quickly go to front brain. And if they do happen to get
all the way back there to the fight or flight
back part of the brain, they can have something in place to help that child
transition from that place and get calm and get to
the front place. We're going to talk some about that in
this video. When we're correcting someone, the whole
goal of the correction is to help them go from emotional part of the brain
to logical part of the brain which means we have to appeal
to the front part of the brain. The best way to appeal to that front part of the
brain is to have already done some teaching
ahead of time. So, in the Teaching Self-Government
Parenting course, we talk about pre-teaching the children.
That's one of the five teaching styles that we use to correct troublesome
behaviors. So, pre-teaching is when you tell somebody ahead of time
what is going to happen. Well, some of the things that we pre-teach
in the teaching self-government parenting courses we teach four basic
skills to children. These 4 basic skills are
following instructions, accepting no answers, accepting
consequences and disagreeing appropriately. If the..
If a person learns all 4 of these skills, if they
master them each of them has a skill set attached to it. So
certain steps that they follow, if a person masters all of those 4 skill
sets, that takes care of 99% of their
behavioral problems. I'm talking adults or children. This is a
huge thing. So, we need to learn these skills.
And one of the skills we've got to know the most this is the top priority,
number 1 most important skill is following
instructions. To follow instructions you look at the person,
keep a calm face, voice and body. You say, "okay" or you ask to disagree
appropriately. Which is one of your other skill sets that you use.
And then you do the task immediately whatever it is you're being instructed
to do. And then you drop the subject. Those
5 steps are what we are going to try to get a person to do when they are
going out of control. So, especially when they
get clear back here in the fight-or-flight part of the brain.
Now, I want you to know when a person is that that part of the
brain at the very back, it can take up to 20 minutes
for them to get fully calm if they are allowed to get back there.
Now, if they're just at mid brain and they're just starting to get a little
bit mad, they still have more capacity to think.
Maybe 40% as opposed to 10 when they're clear
back here. So, you can really appeal to that front brain
by giving instruction. And there's a certain way
that we do that. So, what we do first when we notice there's a problem is we do
a correction. Now, these effective corrections
are a 7 step process that we go through with the child.
And we start out by describing a situation. During this 7-step
process, they get the opportunity to earn a negative consequence which we make
sure always is a good negative consequence that
brings about good character development and self-evaluation. Not just something
punitive or mean that the child should be told to do just
so that the parent can feel a little bit vindictive or help
the child learn the hard way from that lesson.
Everything we do is about teaching the child even though it is
very firm and they have to accept their consequences.
If a parent does some corrective teaching and the child chooses not to
accept that consequence. Remember those 4 basic skills? The
third one is accepting a consequence. If a person doesn't get the opportunity
to accept their consequences, they actually can't learn
self-government. And self-government is the means to
their own personal freedom and achieving the goals that they put
for themselves. So, this is a key skill that they need to learn. If
they don't accept the consequence that they earned when the parent does
the initial correction, then the parent knows they're probably
going further and further into back brain
and they need to do something called intensive teaching.
There's a type of a dialogue that we do in the teaching self-government
parenting course called the rule of 3.
This is an intensive teaching moment. It's one of the most complicated things
that we do learn in the teaching self-government
parenting course. But it definitely makes the difference for the child.
Helps appeal to that front brain. You go through a series of
pre-teaches and instructions and then corrections
in order to get the child to follow the 5 steps of following an instruction.
If a child gets to that place where they willingly follow the 5 steps
of following an instruction then you know that they're probably pretty calm
or really close to completely calm. So, that's the gauge that we use
for their calmness. Now, I want to talk to you about the magic
button for how to help them become calm. I told you I was going to tell you about
a magic button. I don't actually love to hook the word magic or trick or
anything like that to parenting because we shouldn't ever be tricking them.
In fact, they should know everything that we're doing before we even do it.
A good parent, a good teacher always prepares and pre-teaches the children. So,
we're going to call it a power button because really this is
the biggest power in helping another person choose
calmness. Because they do have to choose it. This power button
is the parent's own calmness. If the parents have mastered their own
calmness and they can maintain that calmness, that
connection, that feeling of love for the child
through the whole correction or through the whole intensive teaching
when that child is going completely out of control,
the child has nothing to fight against except for themselves. And when they
realize that, they stop power struggling with you and then
they start power struggling inside their own head
and trying to come forward. Then they can come to their own calmness.
They have to get rational. They have to be able to think before they get calm.
In an emotional state a person does not become
calm. In fact, calmness is the opposite of the emotional
state. So, the whole point is to get them to a place where they can think in the
front, so that they can evaluate what's going
on and be calm. And if the parent knows that's
possible and the parent has the words to say, the
skills to use and has mastered their own calmness, then
that child has a chance of mastering their calmness too. It truly
is powerful to see what a calm parent can do with an appropriate interaction
with a child who's out of control. And how quickly that out of control
child can choose not to go out of control anymore but to
choose calmness instead because it is more powerful.
I have a free gift for you. Just for watching this video
and talking about calmness with me, I want to give you my
Calm Parenting Toolkit for free. If you click the link below down in the
description to this video that says calm parenting toolkit,
it will take you to the toolkit for free. I hope you will use it.
You will master your calmness. And I also hope you'll subscribe to this channel.
There is so much here about calmness. I put out a video
every day that leads to more self-government, more connection
and more calmness in your family. Give this a thumbs up if you like it
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