Addressing Specific Emotional Needs For Boys At Home and In School

Episode Transcription

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Hi everyone, welcome to the show, I am Dr. Nicole, and on today’s episode, we’re talking about boys, specifically the ways that we raise and educate boys and how some of the strategies that we use can lead to unintended negative consequences of anger and behavioral issues as boys grow up. We know from research studies and I’ve observed this anecdotally in my work for years that boys are disproportionately labeled as problems by parents and teachers. They’re too loud, they’re too active, they’re too inattentive, they’re too whatever else. And the real problem can be a mismatch between typical boy development and environmental expectations that we put on them. 

These are things that we need to understand so that we can address the specific needs of boys in more effective ways. So to help us more about this, I have invited Janet Alison on the show today. She is going to talk with us about how to address the big emotions of boys differently at home and at school and how unrealistic expectations and a disregard for the typical developmental process of boys can lead to over diagnosing of things like ADHD, can lead to increased disciplinary actions in schools, frustrated parents, and ultimately, angry boys. 

Let me tell you a bit about Janet. She’s the Founder of Boys Alive! and the co-host of the ON BOYS Parenting Podcast. With more than 20 years of experience coaching parents and mentoring teachers, and being the featured parenting expert on both radio and TV, Janet loves empowering parents with proven tools and strategies to raise boys to be confident, caring and capable adults. Janet, welcome to the show!

Janet Allison:

Thanks so much! Happy to be here!

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Such an exciting topic, you and I had a chance to talk briefly last week and I said yes, I’ve been wanting to cover this, let’s have this conversation, I think it’s going to resonate with so many of our listeners. I want to start out though — you focus on boys in your work. You advocate for boys, but you raised several daughters, right? Tell us —

Janet Allison: 

I know! I did! They’re grown, they’re in their 30’s and having amazing lives themselves, and I started out as a teacher and my first class was 10 boys and 2 girls and I had my elementary ed degree, nowhere in my training did anyone talk about “Boys are going to be slightly different in your classroom than girls are.” And this was granted in the early 90’s and we weren’t talking about boys back then. We were focused on girls and empowering girls, and everything was about girls. So I stepped into this classroom thinking, “I’ve got this, I’m so excited!” And oh my goodness, those boys had me puzzled, confused, angry, frustrated — all the things. Because they were so different than I expected them to be. I come in with these amazing lessons and kid A would be falling down in the back of the room, and they would just do crazy, creative things.

I got so curious about what is going on here? 

Fortunately, that school was on a farm property, so looking back now, of course, you know 25+ years of hindsight, looking back now is like “Yes! I got them outside!” First thing in the morning, we were moving, we were running, we were playing ball games and walking on tops of fences and that was the saving grace for all of us. But I got really curious about boys and brains and the differences in communication that we males and females, and today — I hope that our listeners will realize that we’re not just talking about little boys, we’re talking about men too, and communication in our relationships and the expectations that we have as females — how boys are going to communicate with us, and it’s just so very different. So we kind of know the code, then we can have deeper connections. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Yeah. Well I think even as you said, just coming into just being aware that there are differences can smooth the way, right? Because whether as a parent or a teacher or a therapist or whatever, when we’re suddenly caught off-guard or taken aback by it, there can be this sort of pushback or fear response, or we can anticipate that, you know what? Boys and girls are different in various ways and we can know that, it doesn’t throw us off as much. 

Janet Allison: 

Well, and we don’t take things as personally, and that’s a huge piece of this. Our boys are busy. I’ve had so many moms come to me and say, “I just want to have a deep and meaningful conversation with my son.” And it’s like, “Yeah, call your girlfriend”, because it’s likely not going to happen the way you’re imagining, the way a female would engage in that conversation. You might get little snippets on the fly, it might be right at bedtime when you’re exhausted and now he’s ready to talk. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Yeah, that awareness — so you parented girls. I have four kids, three of mine are boys and having been a teacher in special education prior to having kids, most of my students were boys, so you know — boys have been a big part of both my career as well as home life. And then my fourth child is a daughter. And no matter what we say about human beings being fundamentally all the same, and there are not that many differences — and in some ways, that may be true, but I’ll tell you, what you’re saying is a reality. I mean there is such a difference in terms of my three sons and how they respond to things and communicate and navigate the world and how my daughter does. It’s just how it is. 

Janet Allison: 

Well, and we naturally gravitate towards what’s familiar to us, what’s comfortable to us as women. And not all women, we’re talking broad generalizations here, but when you think about that and you overlay it into schools, where pretty much in any school, about 3/4 of the teachers are women, and then you look at a female teacher in the classroom, like I was with these boys, and all of a sudden, “Oh my gosh, he can’t sit still, you’d better have him tested for ADHD.” “Oh my gosh, he’s too rambunctious, we need to send him to you, Nicole, to special ed.” And my daughter’s also a special ed teacher and of course, most of her students are boys. Part of that is it’s this mismatch of female teachers not understanding boys, like I did not understand how these boys needed to learn. They needed to be active, they needed to be hands on. That wasn’t the way I was presenting the lessons. It was a lot of talking and “Tell me how you feel about that” and that is not where our boys live. So that expectation is a mismatch.  

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

I’m glad you raised that, because as I said, in the intro to the show, that’s something that I had anecdotally experienced for years, both as a teacher as well as a clinical psychologist and we’ve got studies now that are really showing that that is, in fact, true. Especially when we look at younger ages, sort of those preschool, through sort of middle, elementary ages where boys are very disproportionately either informally labeled as behavior problems or problematic, or are referred and given clinical diagnoses way more often than their female counterparts. It begs the question, and the studies are starting to show: Is this something truly going on with boys at that age, or are we looking at truly this mismatch between what has become the norm in typical schooling and parenting and the way that we approach that, and where boys are in their development and it sounds like you’re agreeing you’re saying yes, that’s been my experience.

Janet Allison: 

Absolutely, we know from studies of brand new infants that boys are about two weeks less mature than typical girls, at birth. So this developmental trajectory is different. Boys and girls go through all the steps from crawling to walking and talking. But a friend of mine adopted boy and girl twins, they’re 8 and a half now, but it was fascinating to watch them in their first year of life and even now that the girl always did the thing first. The boy was maybe two weeks or three weeks behind, but always that little bit of difference. And he’s developing and unfolding absolutely as he should be. 

But you bring that boy who typically also has fewer words and bring him into a preschool situation, into kindergarten, into first grade where the expectations have been pushed out. You know, in preschool, they need to sit and learn their letters. And a preschool boy is not interested at all in learning in that way. He’s learning a ton of things, but he’s learning in his body and his gross motor development. So we look at this, now first-grader who has had this  academic expectation pushed onto him and I told you this in our talk earlier: A mom came up to me and told me that her son had come home and said — first grade, 7 years old, “All the girls are perfect and I’m the bad one.” And that broke my heart and it really encapsulates what is going on for our boys right now. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Absolutely, and they pick up on the subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle messages of that and what I think we’ve seen — had I stayed in education, this would have been finishing my 23rd year of teaching. So you and I had a similar time when we started back in the schools. In the early 90’s, how I was taught to teach young kids, kindergarten, first, second grade has shifted so dramatically. What we were teaching in second grade back then is now what’s covered in kindergarten. 

The expectations, and not only that, but things like many states now requiring all-day, everyday kindergarten. And not in a developmentally appropriate way, how I designed an early childhood classroom back 23 years ago with lots of play and active things and child-directed activities, now looks more like what a second grade classroom would have looked like, where you sit at desks, you have worksheets, you have teacher-directed instructions. And I think what we’re talking about is a significant disadvantage that that creates for boys and their development and their brain-style and just how they’re wired right from the get go. 

Janet Allison: 

Aha. And then we wonder why we have such angry boys. Because if you are going somewhere everyday where you’re being told that you’re not okay, “Why can’t you hold a pencil? Why can’t you sit still? Why can’t you be quiet?” All of those things — you’re going to be frustrated, you’re going to be angry. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Let’s delve into that, because I think you’re right that parents and teachers by and large do struggle with boys and those feelings, exactly what you just identified — Boys feeling angry, boys having hyperactivity. Boys operating sort of outside this narrow norm that we want them to, or that we’re comfortable with, right? 

Janet Allison:

That’s it, right there. That we are comfortable with. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

That’s right. So what are some of the common mistakes that you see us making as parents, as teachers in understanding or working with our boys? 

Janet Allison: 

I think the biggest place where we can shift out of this dynamic is to recognize — and you touched on it, to recognize how physical boys are. A boy whose body is moving, his brain is active. If you tell a little boy to sit still, sit criss-cross applesauce — we’ve all done it. Sit still, listen and learn — we’ve all done it. And his brain turns off. So when his body is moving, and sometimes you’ll see boys who are wiggly in their seats or they’re kicking their foot or they’re playing with a squeeze ball — that’s keeping his brain active and engaged. So when we can recognize that, and for me, as that young teacher, it used to drive me crazy! Like why can’t you just sit still! Because then, they’re listening to me. But it’s not true. 

And parents may find this, when they’re reading to their boys, you may have experienced this. They’re crawling around on the floor, they’re rolling around, they’re playing legos and you’re trained to have that read-aloud moment with them and feeling like they aren’t hearing you, but they can tell you everything in the story because that movement then helps their ability to focus, to listen, and the other thing about when we allow our boys to be physical is it helps them find their words. 

So I was having dinner with a friend who has an 11 year-old boy, who all through dinner — I mean I’ve known him forever. All through dinner, quiet, quiet, quiet, never said anything unless you asked him a direct question. But she, brilliant mom that she is, has a mini-trampoline in her living room, right next to the dining room. He got on that trampoline after dinner and he started talking. It was beautiful, because his body was moving. So that when we can recognize that boys need to be physical, men need to be physical — if you want to talk with your husband, go for a walk, go outside, do something together. Throw a ball, wash dishes — many moms will tell me “My husband talks when we go for a drive in the car.” And that’s because there is activity. And the other part of that too is that he doesn’t have to make eye contact with you. So that’s another place where we, as females, oh my gosh — we love eye contact and it actually gives us a little dose of those feel-good hormones. Men don’t. Men and boys don’t really like that so much. 

So we, again, as females, as moms, as teachers are “Look at me when I’m talking to you!” We feel heard, we feel seen when we have that eye-contact, and he doesn’t want to look at us. Then we take it personally.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Yeah. Totally. I can think of so many times in my own life when that’s happened and also doing a lot of consultations and observations of kids — boys with their parents or boys in classroom settings boys that really ring true on what you just talked about. Again, we’re back to the “What I’m comfortable with as the adult versus what you’re doing or what you’re giving me, and my assumption then that because this is making me uncomfortable, there’s something wrong with you. 

Janet Allison:

Yes. I was in a situation where I was called into a classroom with the teacher, the boy’s parents, he was in third grade — so four adults, one boy. And the teacher kept telling him “Look at her in the eye when you’re talking to her.” And I just felt so sorry for that boy because he’s already in a heightened emotional state and now we’re putting this added layer on him. He’s in his primal brain. He’s running down the road, not present at all. So the way to counteract that is to be side by side. Do something together side by side. Sit next to him on the couch, side by side. You can still have physical contact, your arms can be touching or something, but that takes that pressure off and he can actually — I had a dad tell me once — he said, “You know, I tell me wife, when she wants me to look at her, I can look at her but I can’t hear what she’s saying. If she wants me to hear what she’s saying, I can’t look at her. So I tell her to choose one channel.” I thought that was just a brilliant encapsulation of — we can not have this expectation as women, as females for our males. And of course there are probably — and I know there are some men out there who have eye contact and some women who don’t love eye contact, so there’s that too, but in general, when you can apply this to your child, to your classroom of children, then it expands our range of how we can connect and communicate and that’s what life is all about. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Absolutely. I’m thinking too, as we’re talking about mistakes that we make — one of the things that I see a lot, particularly in the classroom setting, although certainly it can come up in families too, and I think you’ve alluded to it with the little boy, the example that you gave when he came home and said “All the girls are perfect, and I’m bad.” This focus on overt or covert comparisons. You know, “Look at your sister. Your sister does these things, why can’t you be like your sister?” Or in the classroom, it can even be in the form of these behavior systems and charts and clothes pins and clips that we move and all of that nonsense, I’ll call it nonsense, and most of my listeners who have been with me know why I believe that that’s nonsense. But I think to the point that we’re getting at about how that impacts boys, you’re constantly on the negative end of that comparative. Like, “Oh look, the girls are on green, me and my buddies are on yellow or red.” Or look, “I’m always on that.” That can create anger and really have a detrimental impact.  

Janet Allison: 

It creates anger, and then there is this way of — and this will be familiar to parents of boys who are like, “I don’t care. I don’t care about that. I don’t care about behavior. I am going to try and get on the yellow or the red.” That to me is just compensation. Somewhere in there he really does care, but he can’t let you know that. So that defensiveness comes up, and the barrier and the wall comes up. Part of this too, that we can not avoid talking about is the mixed messages that boys get about how to feel. How to express their feelings in the world. And the most common one is “Boys don’t cry.” I would love to think that we’re moving beyond that a little bit. But I’ll tell you a secret: I was interviewing someone for our podcast. A grown man with sons, and he actually said that he tells his boy not to cry. So I was being a good co-host and we just kind of went over that, but it was like — “Oh my gosh, we’re still saying this to our boys that it’s not okay to cry.”

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

If we’re not overtly saying it, often it comes across in thinly-veiled ways, right? Telling boys, “Come on, it’s not that big a deal, you can get over it, be strong.” We tell boys to be brave and be strong and while there may be some positives in that, the other piece of that though is if you express discomfort, if you express fear or sadness, if you cry, then that’s a bad thing. 

Janet Allison:

Well, and for our boys, what is acceptable is all of those things: Fear, sadness, embarrassment. It’s okay to express them as anger. So I can’t be embarrassed, but I can be angry. I can’t feel scared, but I can be angry. So that becomes the default for our boys, which is so sad.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

That’s a really profound and important point for people to understand that a lot of times what comes out as anger, it’s because boys have discovered that that’s a more acceptable way to accept what’s going on, as opposed to being vulnerable and expressing some of those other emotions that they may be shamed for or maybe told not to do. But anger, as much as we may complain about it, “Don’t hit, don’t yell, don’t be disrespectful” — somehow, there’s still this message that being an angry boy is better than being a sensitive or emotional boy. 

Janet Allison:

Yeah. So it’s our job as the adults to look at what is under the anger. You have to deal with the anger first if he is hurting himself or hurting someone or hurting property — absolutely, safety first. But then, it’s really important to start peeling back the layers. What’s going on underneath that anger? And the thing that is frustrating for females is we want to talk about it, to process out loud and “Tell me how you’re feeling.” Oftentimes, likely, he actually doesn’t know how he’s feeling. I was having a round with some parents one time, I’ll never forget this — years ago, but one dad was talking about how he was feeling, and another dad across the room, I could see this puzzled, vague look on his face, so I asked him and I said, “What’s going on for you?” And he said, “I actually don’t know what he was just talking about.” 

He had no ability, no education around emotional intelligence, emotional vocabulary. So we have to educate our boys early about feelings. How you can feel angry, but do you feel angry like a volcano ready to explode? Do you feel angry like a grumpy bear that’s just gotten woken up? Giving them pictures and imagery and really talking about it — and I think again, as females, we think,  “Oh, everybody knows this!” And our boys need help to have that emotional education. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

More concrete and tangible. Not just assuming they’re going to pick it up from interactions in the environment, but really tangibly focusing on that for them, giving them that skillset. 

Janet Allison:

Exactly. And the nuances. You can be frustrated in so many different ways and for so many different reasons — and I tell parents a lot of times when they’re little, just guess! Give them some options and one of them might be right, none of them might be right, but you’re giving them a range of feelings and also it is so important for the men in your children’s lives, boys and girls, to speak about their feelings. Because that — women, we can talk all day about how we feel, but for our boys to really, really hear it — for them to hear it from a man is 10 times more powerful than what we can say. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

I think that’s so true and it makes me think about how transformative it’s been for some of the boys that I have known and worked with when they finally get that first male teacher. Not all the time, but I can think of several situations in particular where the entire dynamic of their attitude and performance and everything in school just completely shifted from one year to the next, just having that male in the front of the room, having that male presence — that assumes that that’s a supportive, developmentally-appropriate, healthy male presence. That can have a profound impact. I think for so many boys, especially if they have some needs, their experience is typically with all women. Their mom tends to be their primary caregiver, they tend to have female general education teachers, female special education teachers. If they see a therapist of any sort, most of us tend to be women. Their lives are dominated by women, so I love what you’re saying about that male presence. And not only that, but men speaking about this and talking about their feelings, how critical that is. 

 Janet Allison:

Yeah! Making it okay! And it’s so sad, because often, that boy is not going to see a male teacher until middle school. He might have an elementary PE teacher, but likely, it’s going to be middle school before he has his first teacher. Can you imagine? Being a girl and not seeing a female teacher until middle school?

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Yeah. Absolutely. You were talking about the importance of — and we’ve shifted a bit into the “What can we do more effectively?” And you’re saying that giving boys education about this, giving them words, using visuals, those kinds of things. I think even before that, you said something really important about us recognizing what is underneath the anger. I think often parents and educators take at face value what kids are presenting outwardly. I think this goes for boys and girls, but particularly for boys. They see the anger and they stop digging. They say this is anger, as opposed to looking at what that anger is covering up. You said it so well. I was talking about the behavior charts and the clip systems. How many boys — and this is so true, will go “I don’t care. And now I am going to kind of make a game out of that. I am going to see how fast I can get to red.” And this drives teachers and parents crazy, particularly female teachers, because they’re like “Now you’re intentionally…” — But they are again missing that that boy would rather be the class clown or would rather be the one labeled as intentionally creating a problem than be dubbed “You are a problem.” You’re a problem because now I can at least say I am intentionally doing this, I’m trying to make a joke out of it or I am trying to annoy my teacher. But really, that’s a cover for “I don’t feel safe and secure and good about what’s going on here and this is just a diversion.” And many adults miss that. They don’t see that for what it is. 

Janet Allison:

Right. That’s so important and yeah, we address the anger because it’s big and it’s scary and it’s powerful. We just want it to stop. Let it go away. But part of that, as parents, is looking at — I know you’ve talked about this too, that you have to look at how you were parented. How was anger handled at your house? Were you shut down? Did you have an angry dad who yelled? How are your parenting with that in the back of your mind? Are you defaulting to that or maybe you’re going completely opposite and you’re caving? Because it’s really hard when you’ve got a boy who is angry, you tend to want to avoid that anger and those outbursts and that meltdown. So you give in, you cave. And you walk on eggshells and you’re shifting. I am working with one family now that changes everything to revolve around this boy and his anger. They might have plans for Sunday, but he’s not in a good place so we’re not going to do that. That doesn’t serve anybody. Everybody is frustrated. That doesn’t help the boy feel that security that you’re talking about — feel that my parents can handle my anger. My parents are here for me, they’ve got my back. 

Another mom that I think of a lot because she has twins, twin boys. Of course they’re boys, they get mad about stuff and one boy determined, with the mom, that it felt good for him to go and jump on the trampoline when he was angry. And she was helping him get those feelings out of his body and coaching him, which we need to do with our boys. And it went from this epic meltdown to her climbing into the trampoline and he just crumbled and melted in her arms and cried and cried and cried. 

That’s making me cry right now, but that to me is like — you were able, as a mom, to stand for him, even when he was so angry, you could stay in your self, in your calm, neutral, supportive self and he could express that anger. You could hold that anger and carry him through to a place where he could become regulated again. And then, that bonding moment, when she told me about that, we were both in tears because it was such a place where they could at last connect. And now he knows that when he says “I hate you mom, you want me to go away” that those are just words and she’s not going anywhere, and she loves him deeply and he knows it.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

The power of being able to be the calm in your child’s storm, your boys being able to know that you’ve got the situation, regardless of how out of control or challenging they might get, that you can stand their ground and continue to steer the ship in those moments — that is such a profound thing for parents to be able to do for all kids, particularly for boys, I think. 

Janet Allison:

Yeah. And it’s hard to get there. You need support to get there and it is this willingness to look at your own story around anger and likely, your parenting partner story around anger, and working through that so that you can be that calm center for his storm.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Absolutely. So the intentional modeling of communicating and looking at what’s going beneath this, giving them tools and words, being the calm in their storm — are there other things that are to-do’s or things that we should be thinking about when we are responding to or navigating these big emotions with our boys?

Janet Allison:

I want to emphasize — I ‘m not sure we’ve covered it so far. We’ve talked about eye-contact but the other piece is this place where we tend to over-talk as females. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Let’s be clear about that. 

Janet Allison:

Let’s be so clear! Because we as females — many females, again — broad generalization, we find great satisfaction in processing out loud, detail, after detail, after detail. And so when our boys are in their anger, we are there bringing words, bringing talk, reasoning, nagging, explaining. All of those things that it’s like, just throw some more fuel on the fire, because his brain is already off-circuit and all of your words are just making him more and more angry. So this is really the opportunity for you to be with them. It develops over time, so you get this dance that you have when he’s got big emotions. 

But again, the trampoline episode of like, he knows, “Okay, I can rely on mom.” She just sat with him quietly. There are no words needed. Your calmness, your energetic calm, and just like, you might just say, “I’m here. I’m going to fold some laundry. I’m here, I’m ready for hugs whenever you are. Have a moment.” There’s a picture that went viral recently of an actor, Justin Baldoni, he’s a great advocate for boys and men and developing their emotional intelligence. His daughter is flat on the floor in a grocery store, you can tell, just having the classic meltdown and dad is standing over her. Like a leg on either side of her body, in such a protective, “I got you”, stance and the grandpa was there standing at the head of her, and they’re so calm. And you can see all the people around in the grocery store. Nobody is watching, like they’re doing their thing. But that, to me is such a perfect image of “You can have these feelings, it is absolutely okay. And I got you.”

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

I love that. That’s such a powerful image. 

Janet Allison:

There’s no agenda. No standing over you, telling you it’s going to be okay and “Stop, don’t cry.” Just simply, “I got you. I’m here and I can hold the power of your feelings.”

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Ah. Beautiful and so profoundly important. If all parents and teachers could grasp just that with kids, imagine how much would shift in terms of so much of what we call behavior problems and yeah, such a powerful thing. And I think the piece about the talking — so true, especially not only true for boys in general, but especially if you have a boy who has some kind of neurodevelopmental or processing issue, which kids diagnosed with those kinds of issues, ADHD, Autism, learning disabilities, processing challenges do tend to be more predominantly male — they’ve got that challenge even more. So that ability to stay quiet, to say only what needs to be said, to communicate in that moment and then stop ourselves from continuing to, as you said, pour gasoline on the fire, I talk about it like a cup that’s already overflowing and we’re continuing to pour water into it — that’s something that we can control and manage on our end to stop ourselves from doing that. 

Janet Allison:

And it’s always fun to hear from moms of middle schoolers or high schoolers that will say their boys are like, “Mom, just tell me the one thing you want me to know. Stop with all the rest of it.” And this is all age-appropriately, developmentally in your own child, you might have a talk, or who does love to talk about it, but in that really emotional moment, quiet will serve you, will help you make that connection and then of course, come back to it later and help him interpret how he was feeling and then let’s make a plan. Let’s do something different. Because the thing I think we also forget as parents, we’re in the epic meltdown, grocery store, wherever, or that argument, slamming doors — we think, and maybe this is survival mechanisms, I don’t know — we think “It’s never going to happen again!” We think that’s the only time, and then we’re good to go. You go about your life and then all of a sudden, wham! Here it is again, a day later or a couple of days later. So it’s that place where as the adults can we recognize, yeah this is probably going to happen again. Let’s make a plan for when it does. Work with your son and you create a plan of what he needs when he’s got these big feelings in his body. Some kids might want to get really quiet and be alone. Some kids might need big physical expressions. How can you create a plan together that again, helps him feel secure, helps him recognize, “Oh, my parents, they get me. They see me, and I am not bad, and I’m not wrong for feeling these feelings.” 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

So important, such helpful insights and practical strategies. I want to make sure that people know where they can find out more about you and the work that you’re doing because you have some excellent resources available, going much more in-depth on the things we’ve touched on today. Where is the best place for people to find you?

Janet Allison:

Well, of course, there is the podcast On Boys. Find that anywhere you find your podcasts. I am at boysalive.com and if you go to boysalive.com/guide, there are 20+ strategies there for parenting during quarantine, these times that are heightened even more. And we have a really active Facebook group, so you can ask to join there and we’d love to have you join us. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Yeah. And I’ve checked out all those resources, they’re great. I want to highly encourage listeners to go and check out what Janet’s doing, check out the guide that she has and those resources. We’ll put all those links in the show notes. Janet, this was such a fun, wonderful and practical conversation, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today.

Janet Allison:

My pleasure! Thanks for inviting me!

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

And thanks to all of you for listening, we’ll see you back here next week for our next episode of The Better Behavior Show.