In this episode of Stress-Free IEPTM, Frances Shefter speaks with Ned Johnson, President and Tutor Geek of PrepMatters, a premier provider of academic tutoring services, test prep and educational planning for students in greater DC to online worldwide.
Frances Shefter is an Education Attorney and Advocate who is committed to helping her clients have a Stress-Free IEP experience. In each podcast, Frances interviews inspiring people to share information, educate you, empower you and help you get the knowledge you need.
VOICEOVER ( 00:00:00): Welcome to Stress-Free IEPTM. You do not need to do it all alone with your host Frances Shefter, Principal of Shefter Law, she streams a show live on Facebook on Tuesdays at noon Eastern, get more details and catch prior episodes at www.ShefterLaw.com. The Stress-Free IEPTM video podcast is also posted on YouTube and LinkedIn and you can listen to episodes through Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google podcasts, Stitcher and more. Now, here’s the host of Stress-Free IEPTM Frances Shefter.
FRANCES ( 00:00:38): Hello everybody and thank you for coming to our show. Welcome. Today’s guest is Ned Johnson, who is the president and computer tutor geek of PrepMatters which is an academic tutoring, educational planning and test prep company in DC. Ned, what do you mean by tutor geek? Tell us a little bit about that.
NED ( 00:01:03): That started years ago. I was invited to a business roundtable, all these business people and everyone was like CEO of this and blah blah blah and I’m just like holy smokes, I’m really I’m just a tutor and I’m pretty geeky and I just kind of hang out with kids. I decided long ago it was better to laugh at myself and sort of get other people to the punch. So so there so there we are.
FRANCES ( 00:01:23): So okay I love it. And I know we you know we were talking about some some specific areas that I know that we both know that parents need the help. Um And one of the things was control and so why is a sense of control, so important for motivation and stress tolerance?
NED ( 00:01:43): So so my writing partner is a guy named Bill Stixrud, he’s a clinical neuropsychologist and he and I wrote a book that came out in 2018 called the “Self Different Child The Science And Sense Of Giving Their Kids More Control Over Their Lives”. And this came out of our experiences. We’ve been lecturing for a while about team motivation, kind of looking at how do kids become intrinsically motivated. And somewhere along the line, Bill said, he said, I feel like maybe we should write some of this stuff down, that we should write a book about this. And he asked, he said, is there an organizing principle in your head about the advice that we give to kids and their parents? And so it feels to me, it seems to me like all the advice we’re giving is trying to help kids feel just a greater sense of control about their lives. And so we kind of did a deep dive on this and it turns out that a sense of control and I’ll talk about what exactly what I mean by that in a moment. But that a sense of control is good for everything. I mean it’s good for academic success and career success, it’s good for for happiness and for longevity, right? And if you have, if you have an elderly parent or grandparent who is in an assisted living facility and they have choices about what time do you eat, what time do these young people from school who want to come visit you do you want them on this day or that day, do you want to be more interactive and people live longer. And it’s because it gets, the second point is about a sense of control motivation, but also from a stress perspective that a low sense of control is about the most stressful thing that a human nervous system can experience. And so the opposite of sense control is feeling helpless or hopeless or powerless or overwhelmed to resign to a life that you don’t like. And so you know, Bill’s a clinical neuropsychologist, has been lecturing for 30 years about the effects of too much stress on developing brains. And so if we knew that this feeling of healthy sense of control was absolutely crucial to both intrinsic motivation and not just working hard, but kind of wanting to work hard and going after goals and building a life that I want to live and just to lower sense of stress and and all the bad effects. We all know, you know, the statistics on anxiety and depression, it sure seemed like the sense of control was a really important thing. And we talk about this really quickly in two domains. One is the subjective sense of autonomy that this is my life, I have say over it, I get my parents input but I’m not just being told what to do all the time in every facet of my life and the brain state that supports it, that when we’re in our right mind, the prefrontal cortex with all those executive functions right runs the show including regulating the amygdala, the stress system of our brain so that when something bad happens, you don’t freak out or panic and I can just run away or avoid what might be worthy, but kind of intense rather the prefrontal cortex jumps into line and and and we and we cope and it dampens down the stress response. We want both of these things, a sense of control and the brain state that feels like I’m in control even when or perhaps especially when things are kind of hard.
FRANCES ( 00:04:38): It’s so interesting you say that because I think back to, you know, my children are only five and eight and I remember a couple of years ago, I was just having that battle of going to sleep and eating. I remember their pediatrician said those are the only things they have control over. And I took a step back and went, oh, because you can’t force somebody to fall asleep and you can’t force food down a kid’s throat. And I’m like, that makes sense. And so my thought process as a parent just totally changed.
NED ( 00:05:10): Can I tell you about this? So I wrote years ago co wrote a book Conquering the SAT, all about stress and anxiety and at the time my daughter was two and we talked about this same idea of the sense of control and agency. And my wife had had this sort of pitched battle with our then two year old when she was trying to put her own pajamas on, right? And she’s trying to pull the bottoms of over pajamas, right? Well she has this very big bottom, she’s got a diaper on, her arms aren’t very long. And she’s like, I can’t see what’s going on back there. She’s frustrated. And my wife being a loving mom, says Katie, can I help? And she’s like, I do it. And my wife, the more stressed my daughter got by this isn’t working well, the more my wife kept offering advice which made my daughter just just just like apoplectic, I do it, right? And that sense of control. It is, it is such, it’s such a big deal and you’re right, you can’t, you can’t, you know, we can’t make people do other things against their will. We can make it so painful that they might agree to it. But that’s really not the path that any of us as educators and as parents want to be particularly with our children and really with anyone’s children.
FRANCES ( 00:06:18): Right? And that’s, you know, so that’s the new thing of we give our child a choice. Like I don’t want to brush my teeth. Okay here are your choices. If you choose not to brush your teeth, we’re gonna have to take all sweets and sugar out of your diet and what you eat because that’s what rots your teeth and you can just not have that and then, you know, you don’t have to brush your teeth or you can brush your teeth. Of course they always run to the bathroom because it may mean no more sugar.
NED ( 00:06:43): Funny. We have a story like that in our second book called “What Do You Say?” And the family has just a family rule that if you don’t brush your teeth today, you don’t get sweets tomorrow. Right? And so it is, it doesn’t become, you know, apocalyptic in a standoff, right? But you know, and you explain why, right? You know that you’re getting rid of the bad little germs on your teeth. You want to do bad things and if you don’t wanna brush your teeth fine, but tomorrow there’ll be no sweets, right? Or whatever, whatever you agree with as a family. I love, I love that, you know, or you know, do you want to brush your teeth before, you know, a story or after story? Do you want to before bath or after bath? You know, and the thing that’s important for folks to know is that they’re huge, huge individual differences, right? Some kids are just really easy going alright. And they kind of do what their parents ask of them or tell them to do and other kids, particularly if you have a kid who isn’t prone to throw a tantrum, to recognize that these that that’s a child simply child with a more sensitive stress response. So you know, particularly in your work Frances, you know, the folks who, you know, kids, many kids who end up with IEPs. You know, who are differently wired as Debbie Reber would say, you know, who have, who have ADHD or have, you know, autism spectrum disorder or anxieties or on and on and on. These are oftentimes kids who are just more sensitive and for whom a sense of control and those choices that you just articulated so well are even more important and it’s a challenging balance, right? If you have a kid where learning or school or regulation or anything is hard, and they kind of make messes and they blow up on us and it makes us stressed out. And it’s not always obvious that the kid who’s misbehaving may actually need, obviously need, structure and predictability in terms of discipline but may actually be craving more choices and more control, which will make them more easy going and how they interact with us or other people.
FRANCES ( 00:08:42): You know it makes so much sense, especially parenting younger children. Which is similar, you know, for teachers of, you know, like how do I get control of my class, well give them more control is always helpful. You have choices? Do we want to do playground before or after lunch or you know.
NED ( 00:9:00): Do you know, do you want to uh Sarah Moore, do you know this name? So she’s uh runs a website called Dandelion Parenting and she’s a peaceful parenting advocate. She’s got a book, an expert, rather she has a book that just came out called Peaceful Discipline, which is kind of a nice follow up to positive discipline if you know, a great work of Dr. Jane Nelson. Um, and so I was talking with parents and, and so I love the line that Jane Nelson talks about with discipline of being kind but firm and Sarah responded, she said, well, I, I love that too. She said the way that I think about, it’s a slight twist on that is kind but clear and being really clear. And so when you have that family rule, if you don’t brush your teeth, here’s what happens. You know, the those logical consequences are clearly articulated, particularly done in advance because when the kids start, if we, if we, when we drop the rule on a kid during the middle of a heated argument, they’re not learning, right? Because when they’re, you know, what does Sarah say, if you don’t feel emotionally safe, you can’t learn. Right? And so it’s a challenge for educators to give kids as much choice as they can work with the structure of the class. Um, but where, where it isn’t mayhem right? You know, So I think a big part of that is giving these choices in a way that’s really, it’s really projected, really, it’s planned out, you know, so guys, on Thursday we’re going to, um, and, and, and and the rules are particularly clear in advance and that way the learning is done, what’s, what’s Bill’s line, strike when the iron is cold, right? Where we impart these things when everyone’s, you know, we’re not doing this when everyone’s spun up, because then we’re probably not at our best and our kids probably aren’t either.
FRANCES ( 00:10:46): Right. You know, reminds me of when I was a teacher and the first week of school, one of the things we always did is talked with the children, what do you think good classroom rules are so that the children came up with the classroom rules, it wasn’t me giving them the rules, it was the kindergartners saying we shouldn’t do this and we shouldn’t do that. So that they felt that they were in, you know, in charge somewhat.
NED ( 00:11:10): And it’s interesting because a lot of parents who like that’s crazy, right? You know, and, and, and it’s really, you know, for a lot of parents, it just flies in the face of, you know, the adults can be in control and again, you’re, we’re not talking about neither of us is talking about having a four year old run the household, right, but, but, but the way that you’re doing that, I can just picture that conversation, right? You’re getting buy in right and they feel a sense of ownership right? That they are now holding themselves and even their classmates accountable to rules that they collectively agreed to. And I imagine that you’re very deftly navigated them towards the very outcomes that you already imagine because I’m sure you have, but rather than just saying here’s what it is. You know having that conversation um you know it’s just as powerful in parenting as it is in education. Yes.
FRANCES ( 00:12:03): And it’s interesting you said the buy in part because I use that a lot um with our older children with IEPs. Especially if they’re getting identified older and middle school and high school if they don’t have a buy in it doesn’t matter what we put on this piece of paper that child is not doing anything we say. And so often, you know the child’s included like well what do you want, what do you think will help, what type of schooling do you want? And then when they have that control they buy in a lot quicker.
NED ( 00:12:34): Oh it’s such a good point. There’s a story of Bill tells about again, Bill’s a clinical neuropsychologist so he’s having a lot of these conversations more from a learning end then from some of the legal issues that you’re so expert on. But you know when kids are leaving eighth grade or they’re switching schools, you know, do you want to repeat… what’s the story. He says, he said I did a lot of work with, you know, I used to do a lot of therapy and I’d be meeting with them, a 19 or 20 year old. And he said so where are you in school? And so I’m a freshman in college, but I should be a sophomore. My parents made me repeat second grade. And it’s like eight years later. They’re still pissed about it, right? He said when I would talk I would talk with a five year old and say listen, you know, it looks to me like some of the stuff and learning is harder for you than maybe it is for some other folks. So there’s a choice, you know, you can repeat, you can repeat kindergarten again and just and just give your brain a chance to mature more. And this will all be easier with a more grown up brain or you know, you can push forward and go into first grade. But I think that some of these things are gonna be hard for you. So let’s talk about the pros and cons, right? You know, if you if you go into first grade, you may you may really need the help of a tutor to stay on top of stuff. But if you’re if you repeat kindergarten right? You know, some of the kids may you know tease you for being you dummy, you have to repeat, you know, So so what do you think about this? And he said when with kindergartners he said when I would say it’s gonna be your call what you want to do and we’re your parents and I were going to support you. He said they think all summer about this and they weigh the pros and cons on it, right? Um the children are, because so much of motivation and frankly decision making is rooted in emotions right? You know uh Tony DiMasi right? You know people who have who have who have damage to the emotional parts of their brain, they can’t figure out what they want to do, what they want to have for breakfast, right? And so the I love the way you describe this when you ask is what what do you want to do? They figure out what they, what they want, what they feel and then you get to all the rationals. Okay what are the things we actually need to put in place here? What’s the help you need from me or from mom or from a tutor or from a from a teacher and it applies and the beautiful thing of course that these tools apply not just to kids you know who have who have 504 Plans or IEPs, but any kid right? You know they they’re gonna have challenges and we want them we want them to be open to our advice and our influence because we as parents, we have a lot to say in a lot of wisdom to share, including our own foolish uh childhood and when we, when we ask that in a way that we get their buy in and they don’t feel like they’re being forced, we don’t get that defensive reaction. And and we were actually talking prefrontal cortex to prefrontal cortex, it’s much better conversations.
FRANCES ( 00:15:13): I can imagine definitely. And that’s, I mean that’s, that’s one way parents can help kids is um, by giving them the choices and letting them buy in. Or do you have any other pointers on how parents can help kids that are, you know, having a little bit of difficulties with learning struggling.
NED ( 00:15:30): I mean, so generally, you know, we have a chapter in the Self Driven Child. The second chapter of the book has the title of, “I love you too much to fight with you about your homework”. Okay. And it was born out of experience that the Bill that happened and this will resonate with a lot of people I suppose where um, you know, he talked with parents that say I dread home. I dread dinner because after that it’s three hours of trying to get my kids to do their homework and on and on and on and Bill and I both used this, a therapeutic technique. I did this with a girl who was in ninth grade. Uh, and who was anyway, I was the umpteenth executive function coach. And so I asked this girl, I said if you don’t hand in your homework or something doesn’t go or you don’t put your time in, who’s most upset? And she said, well, my mom. I said, okay, so here’s the technique. Well after your mom who’s most have said my dad, okay, well after mom and after dad who’s most upset? Probably my teacher, probably my teacher. Yeah, okay. So after mom and your dad and your teacher, my therapist, you know then my brother, he’s always so annoying with the business. I said where are you on this list? And she said, I’m nowhere on this list. Right? And so she felt because when we as adults put all of her and put 80 units of energy trying to get kids to do 20. You know when we try 80 units trying to get them to work, they’ll do 20. When we get intense and go to 90 they go to 10. And so what we suggest in this chapter, “I love you too much to fight with you about your homework,” is that we take the position of thinking about ourselves as consultants. We’re learning consultants, were parenting consultants. And the implications of this are three things. One, we offer advice, we offer help, we’ll say let me help you with this and say would you like my help with that? Let me show you how to do this would be helpful if I walk through an example to see see how I approach it. Because when we when we give them that control again the stress, the stress response comes down to the prefrontal cortex, all those decision making problem solving, emotional flexibility tools come back online. The second thing, the one you’ve already mentioned is we let kids make their own decisions as much as they can because they have to have practice making decisions including suboptimal ones, right? Because it’s a tool and you don’t want a kid to go off to college with hopes and dreams, and a suitcase full of your money if they haven’t had experience making decisions, right? And the third is that we let kids as much as they can solve their own problems. And again, when they make bad decisions or things blow up or fight with the teacher, they get kicked off the soccer team or they don’t get invited to a play date and then and they’re super upset and we get, we react as well. Well I’ll call up Tommy’s mom, I’ll talk to the teacher and we want to ask ourselves respectfully respectfully, whose problem is it? And it feels like, what do you mean of course it’s my problem. I’m the parent. Well no, not really. This is a problem for your child that they’re upset is your problem, is a problem for you. But the problem of soccer or friend or D minus on math test, that’s their problem and we want to support them and help them figure out ways to solve that problem for themselves because and this goes back to the stress response, the way that we develop coping skills is to have an adverse experience and then be able to do something that makes it better. If someone else sweeps in and solves it for us, we never get the neurological wiring of coping. I’m forever a damsel in distress and looking to the sky for someone with a cape to save me. And so we get this idea of being a consultant so important and it’s particularly important for kids who are too easy for kids who are neurodiverse for kids who are learning, it’s hard for kids who are emotional, things are hard because they need a ton more support. Things are harder for them. Of course they need more support and that’s what you’re gonna do as a great educator, as a loving parent. But the how of it is so important because we want to do everything for them to have the growing sense that they can make important decisions about themselves, that they can, they can take advice or leave it right, that they can solve their own problems because if the kid who feels like their success is always about someone else. A client who who’s actually, who worked with one of my colleagues, as a college counselor during the middle of the college process and the kids said turned and said to his parents, he said, I worry that if I get into college it will be because of you and if I don’t get in it’ll be because of me. And what a lose lose situation, right? So this idea of being a parent consultant. I like it a lot because I think it frames things up really well. So we’re not we’re not just saying hey it’s all it’s your problem buddy, we’re saying it’s your problem. But how can I help?
FRANCES ( 00:19:59): I love that. And you know it brings me back thinking about IEPs and how this relates. And in social emotional behavior, it is so difficult sometimes to come up with appropriate goals that work and I’m thinking like that’s what the goals need to be, we’ll develop a list of coping skills, you know a list of five coping skills and then the next objective can be we’ll use the coping skills to teach our children how to develop. Not that oh they’ll use their flash pass, they’ll go to the counselor because that’s us solving the problem. Right.
NED ( 00:20:37): Right. Right. I mean Bill’s line is that you know that our job as parents and educators is to help kids learn, to develop the ability to run their own lives. Right? And so if you’ve got a kid you know who who’s ASD and so very sensitive to emotional context. Right? It may be that they need a hall pass so they can step out and walk around and go to all three water fountains and calm themselves down and come back right. And learning that is a really important tool because when they’re in situations, you know with fights with a friend, right? Or relationships going forward, they may say, Ned, I want to have this conversation but I’m really I’m reacting really strong to you. So I need to go, I need five minutes to walk around the block and then we’ll have this conversation. Actually I need this too, frankly often as well, right? And and you’re developing those coping skills, right? And it’s just I mean what is childhood and adolescence, but learning the tools, learning about yourself and the world and the tools to help you navigate the adult world that you’re ideally growing into.
FRANCES ( 00:21:37): Yeah that’s I know it brings me to when my husband and I like dealing with our children. As I said, they’re a little strong willed. And when I get get to that point of frustration that I like just can’t, I just say to my husband I’m like Seth, I’m tapping out, you know, he knows what that means and he steps in and he’ll do the same thing because it’s just when I get to that point and I know what I’m at that point, this is not going to end well. So if I step away, give you know the time to do it. And if my husband’s not there, take the 10 minutes I need to breathe to bring myself back down again and then interact.
NED ( 00:22:13):It’s so important, you know, and and I wish that, I my kids are 18 and almost 21 and I wish that I had known when I, the things that I think I know now when my kids were your age. Because invariably what happens when we make mistakes as parents, right? Our kids do something that, you know, is not what we wish for them to be doing, right? And we get upset. And then when we’re trying to discipline them when we’re upset, let’s go back to Sarah’s point, they can’t learn when they’re emotionally fraught. And if we’re emotionally fraught, they’ll be emotionally fraught because emotions are contagious, right? And so what I wish that I had done is modeled for them for myself, the idea of a time out. Now you go sit in the corner and think about this, kiddo, I need a time out for like three minutes because I’m about, I’m about to lose my cool and that’s not gonna help you. And it’s not helping me either. So give me about three minutes and I’ll go back and I’ll never forget this extra story that’s in our book, “What Do You Say?” Um I was having a conversation with my daughter about exercise and the reasons for why exercise, it was, it was a big conversation and we had this agreement. And she was not going along with what our agreement was and she was very frustrated with me and I was, I don’t know who got frustrated first, collectively we’re frustrated and I was about to blow my top and say something that would have been wildly unproductive. And I’m like, you know what? And I’m sort of tapped out and I didn’t do it in a particularly elegant way, I’m going for a run. This is where it gets great. So I like to run, but I don’t have a good sense of direction. I was like, oh man, and I got lost and my two mile run ended up being a 12 mile run, it was long, here’s the great thing. I come back all the venom in my, you know, all the energy was, my nervous system was just gone, gone because this is what exercise can do for you. And with my intense energy now gone, my daughter had equilibrated and came around to like, okay, maybe I’ll go to the exercise thing, whatever it was, we’d been talking about and she had gone off for 20 minutes of exercise when I got off a 12 mile run, right, because I wasn’t there. And so this time out is a big, is really valuable. Um you know, it gets to a point, you know that we have another point, we’re talking a little bit about is this idea of we describe the follow up chapter to the parent as a consultant is a chapter we call a non-anxious presence and we, we borrowed this idea of a non-anxious presence from a guy named Edward Freeman who was a Rabbi, who was a consultant. And he made the point that things go better when the people or person, person or people who are in charge are not overly emotional, right? So you have families who come to you and it’s a hot mess at school and this kid is not getting the support and parents are just kind of out of their minds. Like they’re frustrated, everyone’s frustrated upset and you because you know stuff and have walked this walk with lots of parents can sit there and say, well then, it’s a great point and I am really frustrated for how, you know what’s going on with your school and you can start downing and downing the energy, you know, for what it’s worth. I’ve gone through this a lot and I’m pretty confident that this is going to do that. I’m gonna be able to help you find some solutions they haven’t found yet. Um and so where you currently are feeling stuck with your kid at school, that’s not where we’re gonna, I would be really surprised if that’s where I ended up three months from here. So what I’ve tried to do as I talk is try to bring my own energy down right, in the same way that if you go to a doctor, like, oh right. You know the first thing you want to talk to where if they sit and say, yeah, this is hard. This is, these were not the results that you and I were hoping for. But I’m confident there are a lot of areas and there’s a lot of things we’re gonna do and I’m confident that we’re gonna, we’re really gonna be able to help you. Even though this is really hard. And the idea behind this is that all emotions are contagious, stress is wildly contagious. You can just walk into a room where something bad has gone down before. You have no idea and you can, you can, you smell it in people’s sweat, you can read it on their faces, you can feel it and you’re like, what’s going on? The great part is that calm is also contagious. Calm is contagious, turns out as a mantra of the Navy Seals. And so just as you described with your kiddo, right, when you’re like, I need to, and you step away and you calm yourself down and you come back in the situation with different energy. You can then become all of us as parents can then become a stress sponge, right? And pull the stress out of our kids so they can then think better. Um, now some people will say, if I may make a couple of suggestions that some folks are just finding this easier, right? And some people are just more excitable, right? I have to work with, I have to work really hard at this to walk that walk. But two things that, well three pieces of advice that we suggested. The first is that we take the long view because almost all of our fears about our kids are about the future, right? It’s not just that, you know, they didn’t get invited to this one party, but you worry that they won’t have any friends the rest of the year, right? This was their best friend. And how could they not invite them? Right, for kids who’s really struggling educationally, oh my gosh, my kid’s a D student. Are they going to have a D life? And it breaks your heart, right? But when we can have confidence that this is just, these are struggles that they’re going through now, for now. And, you know, there’s a reason why they call them growing pains, right? And if you can have confidence that despite these learning problems, or despite these behavioral issues, whatever the problems are, you can have confidence that these things can get better over time. It makes it a lot easier for our kids to believe that things will get better over time and to do the hard work that they need to to get get better in school or friends over time, as opposed to avoiding. The second thing is that, do everything you can as a parent to just treat your kids like their a joy creating organism, right? I mean you still have a little guys like, oh my God, it’s so good. Right? We don’t often have that energy with teens, especially if school is a mess, right? And we feel like we’re somehow bad parents, if we don’t put all of our energy to think that isn’t going well. Well, paradoxically, if you sort of set aside the thing that’s not going well and just remind yourself, I love this kid, you’re just the coolest human, school is kind of a total disaster, but you are a great person, right? And I love spending time with you. And when we change the energy that way, we’re back to the stress response, we’re back to the amygdala, right? It calms down the amygdala just to feel like I’m enjoying my parents love me just for me, not for the grades or whatever, the car I just crashed, right? And it makes it much more likely that kids can get back on the path that they want to be and we want them to be right and developing themselves. And the last thing in terms of being a non-anxious presence, is this. The way that I think about this is that if the inflows of stress into you as a person or you as a family or a school or community in this case the whole bloody country are not the world really with Covid, right? If those things are, those inflows of stress are not balanced by healthy outflows of stress, all kinds of bad things happen right? We’ve seen we’ve seen all the misbehavior and you know fights and whatnot at school and school boards right? And and domestic violence during Covid and and substance use and all of it just going through the roof. And these are predictable bad behaviors and bad outcomes when we have too much stress on us. And so if you don’t yet, don’t yet have either really good coping skills as you mentioned before Frances or have ways to really pull stress out of your nervous system, you simply can’t be as effective as you want to be. Right? So I may be one of the most well rested people in all of DC. I had a very difficult childhood, my father is an alcoholic, my mother’s institutionalized, I was for three months in a pediatric psychiatric hospital so I have a nervous system that’s wired to be depressed. I don’t like being depressed. So I if I’m, I sleep really well every night, I exercise every day, and I practice a type of meditation called transcendental meditation twice a day. And if I do those things I can handle anybody’s foolishness and if I don’t it’s a wreck. And so if you feel like you know to your point I’m tapping out but if you feel like you need to tap out every 10 minutes then you may want to think about what are some of the tools because chances are you’re just, you’re overreacting because you just have your’re up to here with everything, right? What we need to do is bring it down to here with everything. So you have a little bit, a little bit of bandwidth.
FRANCES ( 00:30:58): Yeah. So two things jump, actually three things jumped out at me. First of all the time out. I love that because we, like I as a teacher, we always use time out as a punishment. You did something wrong, you need time out. And that’s not what it is. It’s it’s you need to take three minutes to think about what just went on and then we’ll process it.
NED ( 00:31:21): Or even you deserve three minutes to not to not have this conversation because I can see you’re pretty upset about this too, you deserve three minutes. You know, five minutes just to step away from me and this conversation. And the kid who just threw, you know, a shoe at you so that so that you know, or whatever. And so it’s your point. If we teach this as you know, uh if we teach this as a tool for regaining our composure as opposed to a punishment, you go think about that. No kid ever went in the corner and thought the thoughts we want them to have ever. My teacher’s a jerk. My dad sucks, as opposed to in hindsight, I really should have been more thoughtful. Nobody in the history of childhood has ever done that.
FRANCES ( 00:32:02): That’s so true. And then you were bringing up about how families come to me and it’s so stressful. Um Which is how the name Stress-Free IEPTM came up. That’s kind of been my tagline for a long time now. And I think clients always ask me what should I do with the meeting? What can I say? What you know, what should I not do? And I always tell them you’re the parent, be the parent, say what you want, do what you want. It’s okay. That’s why you have me here. There’s nothing you can say as a parent in an IEP meeting that I can’t turn around and say what my client is trying to say is… And then I put it in the words that we needed to get the school to agree with us.
NED ( 00:32:51): I love that.
FRANCES ( 00:32:53): Yeah. It just. And I see I see the parents go, oh okay. And you know them get calm.
NED ( 00:33:00): Because you’ve taken away, you’ve taken away the fear, right? If I don’t say the right thing, I’m going to screw up my kid’s entire school experience, right? That’s intense, right? And they’re already stressed out. Probably because they’re asking for your help because things are already not going well. And I just I love that, that you say, look you don’t have to worry about this basically. And you’re, maybe not the words, but you don’t have to worry about this, I worry about it for you and I’ll make sure that we land this plane. I love
FRANCES ( 00:33:26): That, I take it. And then the third thing, which was a while ago, you were talking about homework and the struggles of homework. And that’s actually been a very hot topic lately at IEP meetings in the sense of the child coming home with homework and the parents are spending three hours on it. And most of the teachers, what has been brought up at the IEP meeting, most of the teachers will say uh 20 minutes, that’s all you need to spend on it because how is this healthy for a child after six hours in a classroom and then three hours with mom fighting and then they’re gonna go to bed and they’ve had no down time.
NED ( 00:34:04): It’s completely right. You know, I was giving a talk at a local public school here and uh mom came up to me to talk about our second book and she said, you know, I I bought the Self Driven Child, right at the start of Covid. And she said I pledge, when we have this chapter about a non-anxious presence, one of the goals is one of the… We have, every chapter ends with what to do tonight. And one of the things with what to do tonight is to try to make home feel like a safe base and she said I pledged at the start of Covid when everything was intense and Zoom school and she said I pledged that I was gonna make home be a safe base because everything in the world felt like you’re gonna die right? And she said it completely transformed my relationship with my son, right? And we want that because so many kids, you know their school’s hard and then they come home and they get laid on my mom and dad, said where do I ever catch a break? Where do I ever catch my breath? Right? And, this is really important for folks to know. The major manifestation of anxiety is avoidance, is avoidance. And so the more stressed out we make kids feel about this or that thing, the more they naturally want to avoid it and we spend all this energy trying to talk kids into doing things that they want to avoid. Um My daughter who is this really cool kids, super bright, autism spectrum disorder and literally diagnosed two months ago and she very subtle presentation of this and I will never forget that she was in like in 10th grade, so middle of Covid and she has this Latin assignment. Now my daughter has at least 20 IQ points and she’s a super sharp kid, so Latin for her is super easy because she just has the brain for it. And it’s important. My wife teaches Latin in another school. So my daughter comes up with, this is impossible, I can’t do this and blah blah blah blah, you know, and uh and and my wife and I are both looking at each other like really? Right? And my wife sadly, foolishly takes the bait and she starts trying to tell my daughter well of course you can and you know this and you’re so great at this, right? But that’s really invalidating, right? It really, like you shouldn’t be feeling the way that you feel or, well I can help you and I can do this and do that. Um and basically said, if only you’d be doing it this way, you wouldn’t be where the problem, that situation you feel yourself. And so as one can predict my daughter, it just made her more mad. And so I waited about 10 minutes and I came around later, I said what exactly is the sign? It’s really easy for me to act on because I don’t know anything about that. What’s this stuff about like stupid this and this and that? And I said, yeah, that does sound stupid and like, well tell me more, I just keep asking these questions and I just validate whatever she says. And then I finally get her buy in, I said can I make a suggestion? And she said yeah, I said what if we should make a cartoon out of this? And she said what? And I just come up with just the most cockamamie, just absurd suggestion. I mean no educated, I think it’s a good idea and she’s like oh that’s good and she goes off and she makes this crazy picture right? Um you know just basically sort of you know giving the finger to this whole project, so that she likes her teacher. And it calms her down and then about 15 minutes later she sits down and she does the homework in 10 minutes because she’s got the super fast brain and I thought, we could have spent an hour trying to talk her into it and it wouldn’t, it wouldn’t have worked. And so I encourage parents when they’re fighting with the kids about their homework, drop the rope, read this chapter, “I love you too much to fight you with about your homework” and say look, I’m not I couldn’t make you do your homework, what are we going to lie flat on the ground, go la la I wouldn’t duct tape, I couldn’t make you do your homework. And you know what, I’m not gonna try because it’s your work. It would be disrespectful of me to act like it’s my job to get you to do your homework. It’s your homework. And if you feel like there’s benefit to it, I’ll help you any way I can. And if you feel like it’s a colossal waste of your time and there’s no reason you want to do this, I get it because this is your education. And it completely changes the energy. It completely changed the energy because kids don’t want to go to school unprepared. It’s just that they’re up to here with homework and they’re so upset. And this is important as well for every kid. This is my take on it. Every kid who ever said this is stupid. Probably 10% of the time. It’s this is stupid, and probably 90% of the time is what they’re saying is, it makes me feel stupid. And so of course, you don’t want something that really is threatening to your ego because the kids were learning as hard all day long. They feel, I’m not saying all of them, but it’s so easy for them to feel that they’re dumb, that they’re less than, that they’re a source of frustration for, you know, for their teachers, right? And and and a force of source of derision for their, for their classmates, right? And when they get piled on at home by mom and dad. And so, so I encourage people to try this because you want to work with your kids, you don’t want to work on them, right? And we have to change our energy. We change our dance steps. And that helps kids change their dance steps, rather than trying to talk kids into doing things that they’re, that they’re so naturally frustrated by or fearful about doing. And, you know, again, Bill has spent a lifetime working with kids where learning is hard and motivation is hard and self regulation is hard and he said, I’ve walked this walk, he said I walked this walk with my own son. Um and it just works because the great part about all the advice, this stuff, it’s based on neuroscience, it’s based on how brains work, right? And we want we want to increase kids internal motivation and want to decrease their internal stress because we want kids to work hard, developing themselves in school, you know, because it’s important for the lives of trying to build,
FRANCES ( 00:40:02): It’s fascinating, it’s like I’m sitting here going, okay, wait, he gave me this and he gave me that and so much information, which is wonderful and I love it as a parent. Um do you have something um for the for the viewers, some kind of to help.
NED ( 00:40:19): help? Yeah, so I thank you for asking that. So I have two things I can actually, we have. Bill and I sat together and wrote um “Top 10 Tips” from “The Self Driven Child” and the “Top 10 Tips” from our second book called “What Do You Say”, which has a wonderful subtitle in my view: How To Talk With Kids To Build Motivation, Stress Tolerance And A Happy Home. Uh and so they’re both there, so we’ll share these with folks, you know, the books are robust that they have all these conversations and kind of, kind of what people would normally say what you mean to say, which might say instead. Um and so I think they’re, I mean there are a lot of other ways to, to spend $16 that won’t, that won’t be nearly as useful. But these these top tips are a great place to start, you can just put them on your mirror in your bathroom and remind yourself about some of these things because you know, parenting is hard. I mean parenting is hard, there’s just there’s just no way around it. And if the last, starting with Covid it’s the last coming up on three years now have not been the hardest time to parent. Probably the history of parenthood, I don’t know when would be because obviously the second war was hard and the great depression was hard, but has there ever been a time when literally the entire world was stressed out? So it’s so it’s hard and you know, your kids are much younger than my kids and particularly for parents who are trying to figure this out, right, give yourself some grace, give your kids some grace. It’s always been hard and and these last few years have been particularly tough. So they’re at least one thing on these tips that I will share because if you’re trying to do better what you may just need are some other tools in your parenting toolbox. So, so hopefully people will, will make some good use of this stuff because you want your kids to do well and you want them to be happy.
FRANCES ( 00:42:12): I love that we’re gonna put the link to that in the show notes definitely wherever you’re watching this. This is it’s been so awesome. And I’m like trying to remember everything and I’m definitely going to go get this and have my husband read them, because he’s not going to read a book. I’m not gonna read a book, you know, that’s a great book to read and it sits on the shelf with all the rest of the books.
NED ( 00:42:31): Well, I’ll tell you there’s something it’s kind of fun. The Self Driven Child is, I love every time we go to book talks, we’ll see people have like 40, like 140 little sticky notes in there. It’s long, but it’s pretty breezy getting through it. And the and the other thing I’ll say is The Self Driven Child has this kind of cliff notes. And at the end of every chapter, every chapter ends with one page thing that says, what to do tonight, what to do tonight, right? And and the reason that I like the “What Do You Say?” is we wrote this because our agent said, you know the itself that we’ve sold 150,000 books and sold a million copies of this book in China. Okay, the second book is all about the language of what do you say? Because you know, we use the language that we do, we inherited from our culture, from our parents, from the world around us, right? And sometimes it’s really effective and sometimes it’s really not effective, right? There’s a wonderful chapter in there about getting kids unstuck. It’s based on what’s called motivational interviewing and it’s just it’s so cool. And what that, what the book does is give you these tips will give you all the points that you want to know “What Do You Say?”does, it gives you a script of in this situation. Try this, literally try this conversation. Um and it’s just it’s so fun because I, you know, some of these I helped write. And some of these I picked up from Bill like, oh that’s so good and I literally have taken these things and applied them and watch people like their energy turn, it feels a little bit like what is it in Star Wars. Like these are not the George you’re looking for, these are not what you’re looking for? Right, we try this, right? You know, I had a, I had a mom read the book, “What Do You Say?” and she said does this work on husbands too? And I’m like, oh yeah, it does because this is this is you know, it’s it’s it’s human neuroscience and it’s human psychology. So absolutely start, I hope the tips are like a gateway drug to get you to the books because there’s a lot of, there’s good stuff in there.
FRANCES ( 00:44:32): That is awesome. Yes, definitely thank you so much. This has been so awesome having you on my show, I know I’ve learned a lot. I hope my listeners have learned a lot. Um we’re definitely gonna have your information in the show notes. Um, is there anybody else like any experts that you want to shout out to um that you think might be good guests on the show even?
NED ( 00:44:51): Yeah so, so there’s a woman named Debbie Reber who wrote a really cool book called um “Differently Wired” and she talks about her son who was, was very uh ASD in ways that were very disabling for, you know, for three schools in a year of his life. Very complicated, very complicated kid, wonderful book, wonderful research has written a bunch of books, but “Differently Wired” is my favorite book of hers. And there’s a woman named Janine Halloran who wrote a book called “Coping Skills For Kids” and a second book called “Coping Skills For Teens”. And they’re both just and they’re wonderful educators. They’re wonderful parents are wonderful people. I mean, you know, the list is enormous and they got all these things over on the bookshelf, but those are two people apparently kind of top of mind for me.
FRANCES ( 00:45:40): Awesome, thank you so much. I will definitely reach out to them and see if they want to be on the show. Thank you for being on the show and sharing all of your words of wisdom and I hope lots of people go get those top 10 tips because I think it’s really going to be helpful and change their lives.
NED ( 00:45:55): Thanks Frances. I love I love the work that you do because you know that again, parenting is not easy. Navigating kids through school isn’t either. And you know, for kids, for parents and kids where learning is hard. They just need more help. And boy are you a source of wisdom to them as they, to help parents help their kids go through this process of school. So thank you.
FRANCES ( 00:46:18): Thank you.
VOICEOVER ( 00:35:58): You’ve been listening to Stress-Free IEPTM. With your host Frances Shefter. Remember you do not need to do it all alone. You can reach Frances through ShefterLaw.com where prior episodes are also posted. Thank you for your positive reviews, comments and sharing the show with others through YouTube, LinkedIn, Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher and more.
Stress Free IEP™ with Frances Shefter and Ned Johnson
In this episode of Stress-Free IEPTM, Frances Shefter speaks with Ned Johnson, President and Tutor Geek of PrepMatters, a premier provider of academic tutoring services, test prep and educational planning for students in greater DC to online worldwide.
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Stress-Free IEPTM:
Frances Shefter is an Education Attorney and Advocate who is committed to helping her clients have a Stress-Free IEP experience. In each podcast, Frances interviews inspiring people to share information, educate you, empower you and help you get the knowledge you need.
Watch more episodes of Stress-FreeTM on YouTube.
Connect and learn more from your host, Frances Shefter:
VOICEOVER ( 00:00:00): Welcome to Stress-Free IEPTM. You do not need to do it all alone with your host Frances Shefter, Principal of Shefter Law, she streams a show live on Facebook on Tuesdays at noon Eastern, get more details and catch prior episodes at www.ShefterLaw.com. The Stress-Free IEPTM video podcast is also posted on YouTube and LinkedIn and you can listen to episodes through Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google podcasts, Stitcher and more. Now, here’s the host of Stress-Free IEPTM Frances Shefter.
FRANCES ( 00:00:38): Hello everybody and thank you for coming to our show. Welcome. Today’s guest is Ned Johnson, who is the president and computer tutor geek of PrepMatters which is an academic tutoring, educational planning and test prep company in DC. Ned, what do you mean by tutor geek? Tell us a little bit about that.
NED ( 00:01:03): That started years ago. I was invited to a business roundtable, all these business people and everyone was like CEO of this and blah blah blah and I’m just like holy smokes, I’m really I’m just a tutor and I’m pretty geeky and I just kind of hang out with kids. I decided long ago it was better to laugh at myself and sort of get other people to the punch. So so there so there we are.
FRANCES ( 00:01:23): So okay I love it. And I know we you know we were talking about some some specific areas that I know that we both know that parents need the help. Um And one of the things was control and so why is a sense of control, so important for motivation and stress tolerance?
NED ( 00:01:43): So so my writing partner is a guy named Bill Stixrud, he’s a clinical neuropsychologist and he and I wrote a book that came out in 2018 called the “Self Different Child The Science And Sense Of Giving Their Kids More Control Over Their Lives”. And this came out of our experiences. We’ve been lecturing for a while about team motivation, kind of looking at how do kids become intrinsically motivated. And somewhere along the line, Bill said, he said, I feel like maybe we should write some of this stuff down, that we should write a book about this. And he asked, he said, is there an organizing principle in your head about the advice that we give to kids and their parents? And so it feels to me, it seems to me like all the advice we’re giving is trying to help kids feel just a greater sense of control about their lives. And so we kind of did a deep dive on this and it turns out that a sense of control and I’ll talk about what exactly what I mean by that in a moment. But that a sense of control is good for everything. I mean it’s good for academic success and career success, it’s good for for happiness and for longevity, right? And if you have, if you have an elderly parent or grandparent who is in an assisted living facility and they have choices about what time do you eat, what time do these young people from school who want to come visit you do you want them on this day or that day, do you want to be more interactive and people live longer. And it’s because it gets, the second point is about a sense of control motivation, but also from a stress perspective that a low sense of control is about the most stressful thing that a human nervous system can experience. And so the opposite of sense control is feeling helpless or hopeless or powerless or overwhelmed to resign to a life that you don’t like. And so you know, Bill’s a clinical neuropsychologist, has been lecturing for 30 years about the effects of too much stress on developing brains. And so if we knew that this feeling of healthy sense of control was absolutely crucial to both intrinsic motivation and not just working hard, but kind of wanting to work hard and going after goals and building a life that I want to live and just to lower sense of stress and and all the bad effects. We all know, you know, the statistics on anxiety and depression, it sure seemed like the sense of control was a really important thing. And we talk about this really quickly in two domains. One is the subjective sense of autonomy that this is my life, I have say over it, I get my parents input but I’m not just being told what to do all the time in every facet of my life and the brain state that supports it, that when we’re in our right mind, the prefrontal cortex with all those executive functions right runs the show including regulating the amygdala, the stress system of our brain so that when something bad happens, you don’t freak out or panic and I can just run away or avoid what might be worthy, but kind of intense rather the prefrontal cortex jumps into line and and and we and we cope and it dampens down the stress response. We want both of these things, a sense of control and the brain state that feels like I’m in control even when or perhaps especially when things are kind of hard.
FRANCES ( 00:04:38): It’s so interesting you say that because I think back to, you know, my children are only five and eight and I remember a couple of years ago, I was just having that battle of going to sleep and eating. I remember their pediatrician said those are the only things they have control over. And I took a step back and went, oh, because you can’t force somebody to fall asleep and you can’t force food down a kid’s throat. And I’m like, that makes sense. And so my thought process as a parent just totally changed.
NED ( 00:05:10): Can I tell you about this? So I wrote years ago co wrote a book Conquering the SAT, all about stress and anxiety and at the time my daughter was two and we talked about this same idea of the sense of control and agency. And my wife had had this sort of pitched battle with our then two year old when she was trying to put her own pajamas on, right? And she’s trying to pull the bottoms of over pajamas, right? Well she has this very big bottom, she’s got a diaper on, her arms aren’t very long. And she’s like, I can’t see what’s going on back there. She’s frustrated. And my wife being a loving mom, says Katie, can I help? And she’s like, I do it. And my wife, the more stressed my daughter got by this isn’t working well, the more my wife kept offering advice which made my daughter just just just like apoplectic, I do it, right? And that sense of control. It is, it is such, it’s such a big deal and you’re right, you can’t, you can’t, you know, we can’t make people do other things against their will. We can make it so painful that they might agree to it. But that’s really not the path that any of us as educators and as parents want to be particularly with our children and really with anyone’s children.
FRANCES ( 00:06:18): Right? And that’s, you know, so that’s the new thing of we give our child a choice. Like I don’t want to brush my teeth. Okay here are your choices. If you choose not to brush your teeth, we’re gonna have to take all sweets and sugar out of your diet and what you eat because that’s what rots your teeth and you can just not have that and then, you know, you don’t have to brush your teeth or you can brush your teeth. Of course they always run to the bathroom because it may mean no more sugar.
NED ( 00:06:43): Funny. We have a story like that in our second book called “What Do You Say?” And the family has just a family rule that if you don’t brush your teeth today, you don’t get sweets tomorrow. Right? And so it is, it doesn’t become, you know, apocalyptic in a standoff, right? But you know, and you explain why, right? You know that you’re getting rid of the bad little germs on your teeth. You want to do bad things and if you don’t wanna brush your teeth fine, but tomorrow there’ll be no sweets, right? Or whatever, whatever you agree with as a family. I love, I love that, you know, or you know, do you want to brush your teeth before, you know, a story or after story? Do you want to before bath or after bath? You know, and the thing that’s important for folks to know is that they’re huge, huge individual differences, right? Some kids are just really easy going alright. And they kind of do what their parents ask of them or tell them to do and other kids, particularly if you have a kid who isn’t prone to throw a tantrum, to recognize that these that that’s a child simply child with a more sensitive stress response. So you know, particularly in your work Frances, you know, the folks who, you know, kids, many kids who end up with IEPs. You know, who are differently wired as Debbie Reber would say, you know, who have, who have ADHD or have, you know, autism spectrum disorder or anxieties or on and on and on. These are oftentimes kids who are just more sensitive and for whom a sense of control and those choices that you just articulated so well are even more important and it’s a challenging balance, right? If you have a kid where learning or school or regulation or anything is hard, and they kind of make messes and they blow up on us and it makes us stressed out. And it’s not always obvious that the kid who’s misbehaving may actually need, obviously need, structure and predictability in terms of discipline but may actually be craving more choices and more control, which will make them more easy going and how they interact with us or other people.
FRANCES ( 00:08:42): You know it makes so much sense, especially parenting younger children. Which is similar, you know, for teachers of, you know, like how do I get control of my class, well give them more control is always helpful. You have choices? Do we want to do playground before or after lunch or you know.
NED ( 00:9:00): Do you know, do you want to uh Sarah Moore, do you know this name? So she’s uh runs a website called Dandelion Parenting and she’s a peaceful parenting advocate. She’s got a book, an expert, rather she has a book that just came out called Peaceful Discipline, which is kind of a nice follow up to positive discipline if you know, a great work of Dr. Jane Nelson. Um, and so I was talking with parents and, and so I love the line that Jane Nelson talks about with discipline of being kind but firm and Sarah responded, she said, well, I, I love that too. She said the way that I think about, it’s a slight twist on that is kind but clear and being really clear. And so when you have that family rule, if you don’t brush your teeth, here’s what happens. You know, the those logical consequences are clearly articulated, particularly done in advance because when the kids start, if we, if we, when we drop the rule on a kid during the middle of a heated argument, they’re not learning, right? Because when they’re, you know, what does Sarah say, if you don’t feel emotionally safe, you can’t learn. Right? And so it’s a challenge for educators to give kids as much choice as they can work with the structure of the class. Um, but where, where it isn’t mayhem right? You know, So I think a big part of that is giving these choices in a way that’s really, it’s really projected, really, it’s planned out, you know, so guys, on Thursday we’re going to, um, and, and, and and the rules are particularly clear in advance and that way the learning is done, what’s, what’s Bill’s line, strike when the iron is cold, right? Where we impart these things when everyone’s, you know, we’re not doing this when everyone’s spun up, because then we’re probably not at our best and our kids probably aren’t either.
FRANCES ( 00:10:46): Right. You know, reminds me of when I was a teacher and the first week of school, one of the things we always did is talked with the children, what do you think good classroom rules are so that the children came up with the classroom rules, it wasn’t me giving them the rules, it was the kindergartners saying we shouldn’t do this and we shouldn’t do that. So that they felt that they were in, you know, in charge somewhat.
NED ( 00:11:10): And it’s interesting because a lot of parents who like that’s crazy, right? You know, and, and, and it’s really, you know, for a lot of parents, it just flies in the face of, you know, the adults can be in control and again, you’re, we’re not talking about neither of us is talking about having a four year old run the household, right, but, but, but the way that you’re doing that, I can just picture that conversation, right? You’re getting buy in right and they feel a sense of ownership right? That they are now holding themselves and even their classmates accountable to rules that they collectively agreed to. And I imagine that you’re very deftly navigated them towards the very outcomes that you already imagine because I’m sure you have, but rather than just saying here’s what it is. You know having that conversation um you know it’s just as powerful in parenting as it is in education. Yes.
FRANCES ( 00:12:03): And it’s interesting you said the buy in part because I use that a lot um with our older children with IEPs. Especially if they’re getting identified older and middle school and high school if they don’t have a buy in it doesn’t matter what we put on this piece of paper that child is not doing anything we say. And so often, you know the child’s included like well what do you want, what do you think will help, what type of schooling do you want? And then when they have that control they buy in a lot quicker.
NED ( 00:12:34): Oh it’s such a good point. There’s a story of Bill tells about again, Bill’s a clinical neuropsychologist so he’s having a lot of these conversations more from a learning end then from some of the legal issues that you’re so expert on. But you know when kids are leaving eighth grade or they’re switching schools, you know, do you want to repeat… what’s the story. He says, he said I did a lot of work with, you know, I used to do a lot of therapy and I’d be meeting with them, a 19 or 20 year old. And he said so where are you in school? And so I’m a freshman in college, but I should be a sophomore. My parents made me repeat second grade. And it’s like eight years later. They’re still pissed about it, right? He said when I would talk I would talk with a five year old and say listen, you know, it looks to me like some of the stuff and learning is harder for you than maybe it is for some other folks. So there’s a choice, you know, you can repeat, you can repeat kindergarten again and just and just give your brain a chance to mature more. And this will all be easier with a more grown up brain or you know, you can push forward and go into first grade. But I think that some of these things are gonna be hard for you. So let’s talk about the pros and cons, right? You know, if you if you go into first grade, you may you may really need the help of a tutor to stay on top of stuff. But if you’re if you repeat kindergarten right? You know, some of the kids may you know tease you for being you dummy, you have to repeat, you know, So so what do you think about this? And he said when with kindergartners he said when I would say it’s gonna be your call what you want to do and we’re your parents and I were going to support you. He said they think all summer about this and they weigh the pros and cons on it, right? Um the children are, because so much of motivation and frankly decision making is rooted in emotions right? You know uh Tony DiMasi right? You know people who have who have who have damage to the emotional parts of their brain, they can’t figure out what they want to do, what they want to have for breakfast, right? And so the I love the way you describe this when you ask is what what do you want to do? They figure out what they, what they want, what they feel and then you get to all the rationals. Okay what are the things we actually need to put in place here? What’s the help you need from me or from mom or from a tutor or from a from a teacher and it applies and the beautiful thing of course that these tools apply not just to kids you know who have who have 504 Plans or IEPs, but any kid right? You know they they’re gonna have challenges and we want them we want them to be open to our advice and our influence because we as parents, we have a lot to say in a lot of wisdom to share, including our own foolish uh childhood and when we, when we ask that in a way that we get their buy in and they don’t feel like they’re being forced, we don’t get that defensive reaction. And and we were actually talking prefrontal cortex to prefrontal cortex, it’s much better conversations.
FRANCES ( 00:15:13): I can imagine definitely. And that’s, I mean that’s, that’s one way parents can help kids is um, by giving them the choices and letting them buy in. Or do you have any other pointers on how parents can help kids that are, you know, having a little bit of difficulties with learning struggling.
NED ( 00:15:30): I mean, so generally, you know, we have a chapter in the Self Driven Child. The second chapter of the book has the title of, “I love you too much to fight with you about your homework”. Okay. And it was born out of experience that the Bill that happened and this will resonate with a lot of people I suppose where um, you know, he talked with parents that say I dread home. I dread dinner because after that it’s three hours of trying to get my kids to do their homework and on and on and on and Bill and I both used this, a therapeutic technique. I did this with a girl who was in ninth grade. Uh, and who was anyway, I was the umpteenth executive function coach. And so I asked this girl, I said if you don’t hand in your homework or something doesn’t go or you don’t put your time in, who’s most upset? And she said, well, my mom. I said, okay, so here’s the technique. Well after your mom who’s most have said my dad, okay, well after mom and after dad who’s most upset? Probably my teacher, probably my teacher. Yeah, okay. So after mom and your dad and your teacher, my therapist, you know then my brother, he’s always so annoying with the business. I said where are you on this list? And she said, I’m nowhere on this list. Right? And so she felt because when we as adults put all of her and put 80 units of energy trying to get kids to do 20. You know when we try 80 units trying to get them to work, they’ll do 20. When we get intense and go to 90 they go to 10. And so what we suggest in this chapter, “I love you too much to fight with you about your homework,” is that we take the position of thinking about ourselves as consultants. We’re learning consultants, were parenting consultants. And the implications of this are three things. One, we offer advice, we offer help, we’ll say let me help you with this and say would you like my help with that? Let me show you how to do this would be helpful if I walk through an example to see see how I approach it. Because when we when we give them that control again the stress, the stress response comes down to the prefrontal cortex, all those decision making problem solving, emotional flexibility tools come back online. The second thing, the one you’ve already mentioned is we let kids make their own decisions as much as they can because they have to have practice making decisions including suboptimal ones, right? Because it’s a tool and you don’t want a kid to go off to college with hopes and dreams, and a suitcase full of your money if they haven’t had experience making decisions, right? And the third is that we let kids as much as they can solve their own problems. And again, when they make bad decisions or things blow up or fight with the teacher, they get kicked off the soccer team or they don’t get invited to a play date and then and they’re super upset and we get, we react as well. Well I’ll call up Tommy’s mom, I’ll talk to the teacher and we want to ask ourselves respectfully respectfully, whose problem is it? And it feels like, what do you mean of course it’s my problem. I’m the parent. Well no, not really. This is a problem for your child that they’re upset is your problem, is a problem for you. But the problem of soccer or friend or D minus on math test, that’s their problem and we want to support them and help them figure out ways to solve that problem for themselves because and this goes back to the stress response, the way that we develop coping skills is to have an adverse experience and then be able to do something that makes it better. If someone else sweeps in and solves it for us, we never get the neurological wiring of coping. I’m forever a damsel in distress and looking to the sky for someone with a cape to save me. And so we get this idea of being a consultant so important and it’s particularly important for kids who are too easy for kids who are neurodiverse for kids who are learning, it’s hard for kids who are emotional, things are hard because they need a ton more support. Things are harder for them. Of course they need more support and that’s what you’re gonna do as a great educator, as a loving parent. But the how of it is so important because we want to do everything for them to have the growing sense that they can make important decisions about themselves, that they can, they can take advice or leave it right, that they can solve their own problems because if the kid who feels like their success is always about someone else. A client who who’s actually, who worked with one of my colleagues, as a college counselor during the middle of the college process and the kids said turned and said to his parents, he said, I worry that if I get into college it will be because of you and if I don’t get in it’ll be because of me. And what a lose lose situation, right? So this idea of being a parent consultant. I like it a lot because I think it frames things up really well. So we’re not we’re not just saying hey it’s all it’s your problem buddy, we’re saying it’s your problem. But how can I help?
FRANCES ( 00:19:59): I love that. And you know it brings me back thinking about IEPs and how this relates. And in social emotional behavior, it is so difficult sometimes to come up with appropriate goals that work and I’m thinking like that’s what the goals need to be, we’ll develop a list of coping skills, you know a list of five coping skills and then the next objective can be we’ll use the coping skills to teach our children how to develop. Not that oh they’ll use their flash pass, they’ll go to the counselor because that’s us solving the problem. Right.
NED ( 00:20:37): Right. Right. I mean Bill’s line is that you know that our job as parents and educators is to help kids learn, to develop the ability to run their own lives. Right? And so if you’ve got a kid you know who who’s ASD and so very sensitive to emotional context. Right? It may be that they need a hall pass so they can step out and walk around and go to all three water fountains and calm themselves down and come back right. And learning that is a really important tool because when they’re in situations, you know with fights with a friend, right? Or relationships going forward, they may say, Ned, I want to have this conversation but I’m really I’m reacting really strong to you. So I need to go, I need five minutes to walk around the block and then we’ll have this conversation. Actually I need this too, frankly often as well, right? And and you’re developing those coping skills, right? And it’s just I mean what is childhood and adolescence, but learning the tools, learning about yourself and the world and the tools to help you navigate the adult world that you’re ideally growing into.
FRANCES ( 00:21:37): Yeah that’s I know it brings me to when my husband and I like dealing with our children. As I said, they’re a little strong willed. And when I get get to that point of frustration that I like just can’t, I just say to my husband I’m like Seth, I’m tapping out, you know, he knows what that means and he steps in and he’ll do the same thing because it’s just when I get to that point and I know what I’m at that point, this is not going to end well. So if I step away, give you know the time to do it. And if my husband’s not there, take the 10 minutes I need to breathe to bring myself back down again and then interact.
NED ( 00:22:13):It’s so important, you know, and and I wish that, I my kids are 18 and almost 21 and I wish that I had known when I, the things that I think I know now when my kids were your age. Because invariably what happens when we make mistakes as parents, right? Our kids do something that, you know, is not what we wish for them to be doing, right? And we get upset. And then when we’re trying to discipline them when we’re upset, let’s go back to Sarah’s point, they can’t learn when they’re emotionally fraught. And if we’re emotionally fraught, they’ll be emotionally fraught because emotions are contagious, right? And so what I wish that I had done is modeled for them for myself, the idea of a time out. Now you go sit in the corner and think about this, kiddo, I need a time out for like three minutes because I’m about, I’m about to lose my cool and that’s not gonna help you. And it’s not helping me either. So give me about three minutes and I’ll go back and I’ll never forget this extra story that’s in our book, “What Do You Say?” Um I was having a conversation with my daughter about exercise and the reasons for why exercise, it was, it was a big conversation and we had this agreement. And she was not going along with what our agreement was and she was very frustrated with me and I was, I don’t know who got frustrated first, collectively we’re frustrated and I was about to blow my top and say something that would have been wildly unproductive. And I’m like, you know what? And I’m sort of tapped out and I didn’t do it in a particularly elegant way, I’m going for a run. This is where it gets great. So I like to run, but I don’t have a good sense of direction. I was like, oh man, and I got lost and my two mile run ended up being a 12 mile run, it was long, here’s the great thing. I come back all the venom in my, you know, all the energy was, my nervous system was just gone, gone because this is what exercise can do for you. And with my intense energy now gone, my daughter had equilibrated and came around to like, okay, maybe I’ll go to the exercise thing, whatever it was, we’d been talking about and she had gone off for 20 minutes of exercise when I got off a 12 mile run, right, because I wasn’t there. And so this time out is a big, is really valuable. Um you know, it gets to a point, you know that we have another point, we’re talking a little bit about is this idea of we describe the follow up chapter to the parent as a consultant is a chapter we call a non-anxious presence and we, we borrowed this idea of a non-anxious presence from a guy named Edward Freeman who was a Rabbi, who was a consultant. And he made the point that things go better when the people or person, person or people who are in charge are not overly emotional, right? So you have families who come to you and it’s a hot mess at school and this kid is not getting the support and parents are just kind of out of their minds. Like they’re frustrated, everyone’s frustrated upset and you because you know stuff and have walked this walk with lots of parents can sit there and say, well then, it’s a great point and I am really frustrated for how, you know what’s going on with your school and you can start downing and downing the energy, you know, for what it’s worth. I’ve gone through this a lot and I’m pretty confident that this is going to do that. I’m gonna be able to help you find some solutions they haven’t found yet. Um and so where you currently are feeling stuck with your kid at school, that’s not where we’re gonna, I would be really surprised if that’s where I ended up three months from here. So what I’ve tried to do as I talk is try to bring my own energy down right, in the same way that if you go to a doctor, like, oh right. You know the first thing you want to talk to where if they sit and say, yeah, this is hard. This is, these were not the results that you and I were hoping for. But I’m confident there are a lot of areas and there’s a lot of things we’re gonna do and I’m confident that we’re gonna, we’re really gonna be able to help you. Even though this is really hard. And the idea behind this is that all emotions are contagious, stress is wildly contagious. You can just walk into a room where something bad has gone down before. You have no idea and you can, you can, you smell it in people’s sweat, you can read it on their faces, you can feel it and you’re like, what’s going on? The great part is that calm is also contagious. Calm is contagious, turns out as a mantra of the Navy Seals. And so just as you described with your kiddo, right, when you’re like, I need to, and you step away and you calm yourself down and you come back in the situation with different energy. You can then become all of us as parents can then become a stress sponge, right? And pull the stress out of our kids so they can then think better. Um, now some people will say, if I may make a couple of suggestions that some folks are just finding this easier, right? And some people are just more excitable, right? I have to work with, I have to work really hard at this to walk that walk. But two things that, well three pieces of advice that we suggested. The first is that we take the long view because almost all of our fears about our kids are about the future, right? It’s not just that, you know, they didn’t get invited to this one party, but you worry that they won’t have any friends the rest of the year, right? This was their best friend. And how could they not invite them? Right, for kids who’s really struggling educationally, oh my gosh, my kid’s a D student. Are they going to have a D life? And it breaks your heart, right? But when we can have confidence that this is just, these are struggles that they’re going through now, for now. And, you know, there’s a reason why they call them growing pains, right? And if you can have confidence that despite these learning problems, or despite these behavioral issues, whatever the problems are, you can have confidence that these things can get better over time. It makes it a lot easier for our kids to believe that things will get better over time and to do the hard work that they need to to get get better in school or friends over time, as opposed to avoiding. The second thing is that, do everything you can as a parent to just treat your kids like their a joy creating organism, right? I mean you still have a little guys like, oh my God, it’s so good. Right? We don’t often have that energy with teens, especially if school is a mess, right? And we feel like we’re somehow bad parents, if we don’t put all of our energy to think that isn’t going well. Well, paradoxically, if you sort of set aside the thing that’s not going well and just remind yourself, I love this kid, you’re just the coolest human, school is kind of a total disaster, but you are a great person, right? And I love spending time with you. And when we change the energy that way, we’re back to the stress response, we’re back to the amygdala, right? It calms down the amygdala just to feel like I’m enjoying my parents love me just for me, not for the grades or whatever, the car I just crashed, right? And it makes it much more likely that kids can get back on the path that they want to be and we want them to be right and developing themselves. And the last thing in terms of being a non-anxious presence, is this. The way that I think about this is that if the inflows of stress into you as a person or you as a family or a school or community in this case the whole bloody country are not the world really with Covid, right? If those things are, those inflows of stress are not balanced by healthy outflows of stress, all kinds of bad things happen right? We’ve seen we’ve seen all the misbehavior and you know fights and whatnot at school and school boards right? And and domestic violence during Covid and and substance use and all of it just going through the roof. And these are predictable bad behaviors and bad outcomes when we have too much stress on us. And so if you don’t yet, don’t yet have either really good coping skills as you mentioned before Frances or have ways to really pull stress out of your nervous system, you simply can’t be as effective as you want to be. Right? So I may be one of the most well rested people in all of DC. I had a very difficult childhood, my father is an alcoholic, my mother’s institutionalized, I was for three months in a pediatric psychiatric hospital so I have a nervous system that’s wired to be depressed. I don’t like being depressed. So I if I’m, I sleep really well every night, I exercise every day, and I practice a type of meditation called transcendental meditation twice a day. And if I do those things I can handle anybody’s foolishness and if I don’t it’s a wreck. And so if you feel like you know to your point I’m tapping out but if you feel like you need to tap out every 10 minutes then you may want to think about what are some of the tools because chances are you’re just, you’re overreacting because you just have your’re up to here with everything, right? What we need to do is bring it down to here with everything. So you have a little bit, a little bit of bandwidth.
FRANCES ( 00:30:58): Yeah. So two things jump, actually three things jumped out at me. First of all the time out. I love that because we, like I as a teacher, we always use time out as a punishment. You did something wrong, you need time out. And that’s not what it is. It’s it’s you need to take three minutes to think about what just went on and then we’ll process it.
NED ( 00:31:21): Or even you deserve three minutes to not to not have this conversation because I can see you’re pretty upset about this too, you deserve three minutes. You know, five minutes just to step away from me and this conversation. And the kid who just threw, you know, a shoe at you so that so that you know, or whatever. And so it’s your point. If we teach this as you know, uh if we teach this as a tool for regaining our composure as opposed to a punishment, you go think about that. No kid ever went in the corner and thought the thoughts we want them to have ever. My teacher’s a jerk. My dad sucks, as opposed to in hindsight, I really should have been more thoughtful. Nobody in the history of childhood has ever done that.
FRANCES ( 00:32:02): That’s so true. And then you were bringing up about how families come to me and it’s so stressful. Um Which is how the name Stress-Free IEPTM came up. That’s kind of been my tagline for a long time now. And I think clients always ask me what should I do with the meeting? What can I say? What you know, what should I not do? And I always tell them you’re the parent, be the parent, say what you want, do what you want. It’s okay. That’s why you have me here. There’s nothing you can say as a parent in an IEP meeting that I can’t turn around and say what my client is trying to say is… And then I put it in the words that we needed to get the school to agree with us.
NED ( 00:32:51): I love that.
FRANCES ( 00:32:53): Yeah. It just. And I see I see the parents go, oh okay. And you know them get calm.
NED ( 00:33:00): Because you’ve taken away, you’ve taken away the fear, right? If I don’t say the right thing, I’m going to screw up my kid’s entire school experience, right? That’s intense, right? And they’re already stressed out. Probably because they’re asking for your help because things are already not going well. And I just I love that, that you say, look you don’t have to worry about this basically. And you’re, maybe not the words, but you don’t have to worry about this, I worry about it for you and I’ll make sure that we land this plane. I love
FRANCES ( 00:33:26): That, I take it. And then the third thing, which was a while ago, you were talking about homework and the struggles of homework. And that’s actually been a very hot topic lately at IEP meetings in the sense of the child coming home with homework and the parents are spending three hours on it. And most of the teachers, what has been brought up at the IEP meeting, most of the teachers will say uh 20 minutes, that’s all you need to spend on it because how is this healthy for a child after six hours in a classroom and then three hours with mom fighting and then they’re gonna go to bed and they’ve had no down time.
NED ( 00:34:04): It’s completely right. You know, I was giving a talk at a local public school here and uh mom came up to me to talk about our second book and she said, you know, I I bought the Self Driven Child, right at the start of Covid. And she said I pledge, when we have this chapter about a non-anxious presence, one of the goals is one of the… We have, every chapter ends with what to do tonight. And one of the things with what to do tonight is to try to make home feel like a safe base and she said I pledged at the start of Covid when everything was intense and Zoom school and she said I pledged that I was gonna make home be a safe base because everything in the world felt like you’re gonna die right? And she said it completely transformed my relationship with my son, right? And we want that because so many kids, you know their school’s hard and then they come home and they get laid on my mom and dad, said where do I ever catch a break? Where do I ever catch my breath? Right? And, this is really important for folks to know. The major manifestation of anxiety is avoidance, is avoidance. And so the more stressed out we make kids feel about this or that thing, the more they naturally want to avoid it and we spend all this energy trying to talk kids into doing things that they want to avoid. Um My daughter who is this really cool kids, super bright, autism spectrum disorder and literally diagnosed two months ago and she very subtle presentation of this and I will never forget that she was in like in 10th grade, so middle of Covid and she has this Latin assignment. Now my daughter has at least 20 IQ points and she’s a super sharp kid, so Latin for her is super easy because she just has the brain for it. And it’s important. My wife teaches Latin in another school. So my daughter comes up with, this is impossible, I can’t do this and blah blah blah blah, you know, and uh and and my wife and I are both looking at each other like really? Right? And my wife sadly, foolishly takes the bait and she starts trying to tell my daughter well of course you can and you know this and you’re so great at this, right? But that’s really invalidating, right? It really, like you shouldn’t be feeling the way that you feel or, well I can help you and I can do this and do that. Um and basically said, if only you’d be doing it this way, you wouldn’t be where the problem, that situation you feel yourself. And so as one can predict my daughter, it just made her more mad. And so I waited about 10 minutes and I came around later, I said what exactly is the sign? It’s really easy for me to act on because I don’t know anything about that. What’s this stuff about like stupid this and this and that? And I said, yeah, that does sound stupid and like, well tell me more, I just keep asking these questions and I just validate whatever she says. And then I finally get her buy in, I said can I make a suggestion? And she said yeah, I said what if we should make a cartoon out of this? And she said what? And I just come up with just the most cockamamie, just absurd suggestion. I mean no educated, I think it’s a good idea and she’s like oh that’s good and she goes off and she makes this crazy picture right? Um you know just basically sort of you know giving the finger to this whole project, so that she likes her teacher. And it calms her down and then about 15 minutes later she sits down and she does the homework in 10 minutes because she’s got the super fast brain and I thought, we could have spent an hour trying to talk her into it and it wouldn’t, it wouldn’t have worked. And so I encourage parents when they’re fighting with the kids about their homework, drop the rope, read this chapter, “I love you too much to fight you with about your homework” and say look, I’m not I couldn’t make you do your homework, what are we going to lie flat on the ground, go la la I wouldn’t duct tape, I couldn’t make you do your homework. And you know what, I’m not gonna try because it’s your work. It would be disrespectful of me to act like it’s my job to get you to do your homework. It’s your homework. And if you feel like there’s benefit to it, I’ll help you any way I can. And if you feel like it’s a colossal waste of your time and there’s no reason you want to do this, I get it because this is your education. And it completely changes the energy. It completely changed the energy because kids don’t want to go to school unprepared. It’s just that they’re up to here with homework and they’re so upset. And this is important as well for every kid. This is my take on it. Every kid who ever said this is stupid. Probably 10% of the time. It’s this is stupid, and probably 90% of the time is what they’re saying is, it makes me feel stupid. And so of course, you don’t want something that really is threatening to your ego because the kids were learning as hard all day long. They feel, I’m not saying all of them, but it’s so easy for them to feel that they’re dumb, that they’re less than, that they’re a source of frustration for, you know, for their teachers, right? And and and a force of source of derision for their, for their classmates, right? And when they get piled on at home by mom and dad. And so, so I encourage people to try this because you want to work with your kids, you don’t want to work on them, right? And we have to change our energy. We change our dance steps. And that helps kids change their dance steps, rather than trying to talk kids into doing things that they’re, that they’re so naturally frustrated by or fearful about doing. And, you know, again, Bill has spent a lifetime working with kids where learning is hard and motivation is hard and self regulation is hard and he said, I’ve walked this walk, he said I walked this walk with my own son. Um and it just works because the great part about all the advice, this stuff, it’s based on neuroscience, it’s based on how brains work, right? And we want we want to increase kids internal motivation and want to decrease their internal stress because we want kids to work hard, developing themselves in school, you know, because it’s important for the lives of trying to build,
FRANCES ( 00:40:02): It’s fascinating, it’s like I’m sitting here going, okay, wait, he gave me this and he gave me that and so much information, which is wonderful and I love it as a parent. Um do you have something um for the for the viewers, some kind of to help.
NED ( 00:40:19): help? Yeah, so I thank you for asking that. So I have two things I can actually, we have. Bill and I sat together and wrote um “Top 10 Tips” from “The Self Driven Child” and the “Top 10 Tips” from our second book called “What Do You Say”, which has a wonderful subtitle in my view: How To Talk With Kids To Build Motivation, Stress Tolerance And A Happy Home. Uh and so they’re both there, so we’ll share these with folks, you know, the books are robust that they have all these conversations and kind of, kind of what people would normally say what you mean to say, which might say instead. Um and so I think they’re, I mean there are a lot of other ways to, to spend $16 that won’t, that won’t be nearly as useful. But these these top tips are a great place to start, you can just put them on your mirror in your bathroom and remind yourself about some of these things because you know, parenting is hard. I mean parenting is hard, there’s just there’s just no way around it. And if the last, starting with Covid it’s the last coming up on three years now have not been the hardest time to parent. Probably the history of parenthood, I don’t know when would be because obviously the second war was hard and the great depression was hard, but has there ever been a time when literally the entire world was stressed out? So it’s so it’s hard and you know, your kids are much younger than my kids and particularly for parents who are trying to figure this out, right, give yourself some grace, give your kids some grace. It’s always been hard and and these last few years have been particularly tough. So they’re at least one thing on these tips that I will share because if you’re trying to do better what you may just need are some other tools in your parenting toolbox. So, so hopefully people will, will make some good use of this stuff because you want your kids to do well and you want them to be happy.
FRANCES ( 00:42:12): I love that we’re gonna put the link to that in the show notes definitely wherever you’re watching this. This is it’s been so awesome. And I’m like trying to remember everything and I’m definitely going to go get this and have my husband read them, because he’s not going to read a book. I’m not gonna read a book, you know, that’s a great book to read and it sits on the shelf with all the rest of the books.
NED ( 00:42:31): Well, I’ll tell you there’s something it’s kind of fun. The Self Driven Child is, I love every time we go to book talks, we’ll see people have like 40, like 140 little sticky notes in there. It’s long, but it’s pretty breezy getting through it. And the and the other thing I’ll say is The Self Driven Child has this kind of cliff notes. And at the end of every chapter, every chapter ends with one page thing that says, what to do tonight, what to do tonight, right? And and the reason that I like the “What Do You Say?” is we wrote this because our agent said, you know the itself that we’ve sold 150,000 books and sold a million copies of this book in China. Okay, the second book is all about the language of what do you say? Because you know, we use the language that we do, we inherited from our culture, from our parents, from the world around us, right? And sometimes it’s really effective and sometimes it’s really not effective, right? There’s a wonderful chapter in there about getting kids unstuck. It’s based on what’s called motivational interviewing and it’s just it’s so cool. And what that, what the book does is give you these tips will give you all the points that you want to know “What Do You Say?”does, it gives you a script of in this situation. Try this, literally try this conversation. Um and it’s just it’s so fun because I, you know, some of these I helped write. And some of these I picked up from Bill like, oh that’s so good and I literally have taken these things and applied them and watch people like their energy turn, it feels a little bit like what is it in Star Wars. Like these are not the George you’re looking for, these are not what you’re looking for? Right, we try this, right? You know, I had a, I had a mom read the book, “What Do You Say?” and she said does this work on husbands too? And I’m like, oh yeah, it does because this is this is you know, it’s it’s it’s human neuroscience and it’s human psychology. So absolutely start, I hope the tips are like a gateway drug to get you to the books because there’s a lot of, there’s good stuff in there.
FRANCES ( 00:44:32): That is awesome. Yes, definitely thank you so much. This has been so awesome having you on my show, I know I’ve learned a lot. I hope my listeners have learned a lot. Um we’re definitely gonna have your information in the show notes. Um, is there anybody else like any experts that you want to shout out to um that you think might be good guests on the show even?
NED ( 00:44:51): Yeah so, so there’s a woman named Debbie Reber who wrote a really cool book called um “Differently Wired” and she talks about her son who was, was very uh ASD in ways that were very disabling for, you know, for three schools in a year of his life. Very complicated, very complicated kid, wonderful book, wonderful research has written a bunch of books, but “Differently Wired” is my favorite book of hers. And there’s a woman named Janine Halloran who wrote a book called “Coping Skills For Kids” and a second book called “Coping Skills For Teens”. And they’re both just and they’re wonderful educators. They’re wonderful parents are wonderful people. I mean, you know, the list is enormous and they got all these things over on the bookshelf, but those are two people apparently kind of top of mind for me.
FRANCES ( 00:45:40): Awesome, thank you so much. I will definitely reach out to them and see if they want to be on the show. Thank you for being on the show and sharing all of your words of wisdom and I hope lots of people go get those top 10 tips because I think it’s really going to be helpful and change their lives.
NED ( 00:45:55): Thanks Frances. I love I love the work that you do because you know that again, parenting is not easy. Navigating kids through school isn’t either. And you know, for kids, for parents and kids where learning is hard. They just need more help. And boy are you a source of wisdom to them as they, to help parents help their kids go through this process of school. So thank you.
FRANCES ( 00:46:18): Thank you.
VOICEOVER ( 00:35:58): You’ve been listening to Stress-Free IEPTM. With your host Frances Shefter. Remember you do not need to do it all alone. You can reach Frances through ShefterLaw.com where prior episodes are also posted. Thank you for your positive reviews, comments and sharing the show with others through YouTube, LinkedIn, Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher and more.
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