The Type of Discipline Kids Want and Need

Episode Transcript

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Hi everyone, welcome to the show. I’m Dr. Nicole, and on today’s episode, we’re talking about discipline and our kids. Now the word discipline can bring up all kinds of thoughts and feelings for parents, often based on our own childhood experiences, our beliefs, maybe things we’ve read about kids and parenting. The reality is that all kids need discipline when we understand that discipline really means teaching and guiding, not punishment, spanking, whatever else we associate with the word. So how can we think about discipline in a developmentally supportive, appropriate, helpful way and shift our approach to discipline to really just be healthier for us and our kids? To help us answer those questions and more, I’ve invited Sarah Moore back on the show today. We first talked to Sarah, quite a while ago, many episodes back about the importance of play and fun with our kids. You all loved that episode with her, so I thought we’d have her back today to talk about her new book. Sarah is the founder of Dandelion Seeds Positive Parenting, and the author of Peaceful Discipline, Story Teaching, Brain Science and Better Behavior. She’s a public speaker, armchair neuroscientist, and most importantly, a mama. She’s a lifelong learner with training in child development, trauma, recovery, interpersonal neurobiology, and improv comedy. As a Certified Master Trainer in Conscious Parenting, she helps bring joy, ease and connection back to families around the globe. Sarah, so great to have you back. Welcome.

Sarah Moore

Thank you, it’s always a pleasure to chat with you.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

So I am going to have a start, actually, with a story that you tell at the beginning of your new book. I will say to all of you listening, I had the wonderful opportunity to see a version of Sarah’s book back when she was still working on it and was able to write an endorsement for her for that, and I’m such a fan of her work. But there’s a story, Sarah, that you tell at the start of that about what brought you to your current understanding of more peaceful parenting, the approach that you have today, and it’s actually a strain rooted in anger. And I think that will frame this up nicely. So I’d love to have you share that with people, just as some background about you and what brings you to this work.

Sarah Moore

I would be happy to. So, the short version of this story is that I was what society calls an “older” mom. I worked in corporate America for almost 20 years before having my first child. So by the time I had my child, most of my friends, their kids were already off at college or out in the world or whatever, so I really didn’t have a lot of resources close to me, where I could say, “I’ve got a baby, what do I do with it? I’m actually fairly clueless here.” And so I did what a lot of us do, which is to go to my pediatrician and I want to preface this by saying there are so many phenomenal pediatricians out there, I just happen to have an exception to that rule. But that being said, he had all the accolades on his wall, he was voted best doctor in our town at the time, I had all the reasons to think that he would be a phenomenal resource for us. In any case, I was chatting with him one time during my daughter’s, I think, four month well check, and he was in a fairly grouchy mood. I was thinking, “Hmm, that’s kind of odd, but whatever, I can give him the benefit of the doubt.” And he offhandedly said to me, “Oh, by the way, she’s four months old now. If she ever cries, don’t pick her up. She’s just manipulating you. You don’t need to respond to that anymore.” And I was stunned. I was tense. I was frozen. We proceed through the rest of the well check. Spoiler alert: We never went back to him again. I went home and I was so livid, because his advice went against everything my mama instincts were telling me to do. So I started researching child development, brain science, everything I possibly could. And lo and behold, all of the modern current research says pick up the baby, it’s only good for them, you’re not going to spoil them. They’re not manipulating you. They’re not even capable of manipulation. And at that point, I was angry, to your point, I thought, “How dare he give me such bad advice? And if he’s telling me, he’s probably telling every other parent he talks to as well, and all of these poor babies are potentially not getting picked up.” Now that hurts my heart. So I used that anger to fuel the foundation of Dandelion Seeds of Positive Parenting. I started researching and writing everything I could to help educate other parents about the importance of being responsive and having a connection-based relationship with the child, whether they are 4 months old, 4 years, 14 or 24, connection never expires. And that’s the foundation for everything I do today.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

I love that, connection never expires. It’s so true. As someone now who has kids in the older teen and young adult years, it’s so true, it’s as true now as it was when they were babies. So I love that. And I think your story highlights a few things to me. The first is just how much truly outdated and even bad advice there is out there for parents. I really empathize with parents, especially those with younger ones now. I think it has gotten more complicated and more confusing than ever before with social media and the internet, and you just do everything to try to figure out “What do we do with these little people? How do we be good parents?” It’s tough. But the other piece that I think the story really highlights, that I just want to hone in on at the outset of this conversation, is the importance of us as parents hearing our own voice and listening to our own instincts around things, even when well-credentialed professionals say stuff to us, because I meet with so many parents who whether it was the pediatrician and the psychologist or the psychiatrist or whoever it was, well-intentioned or not, doesn’t matter, lead them down a path of treatment, or diagnosis, or parenting strategy, or whatever that parents will tell me in hindsight they really felt was off at the time, like they just knew something about this isn’t right, or this doesn’t feel good, or this doesn’t seem to align with who my child is or who we are, and yet, we feel so compelled to ignore those instincts especially when someone with credentials or in a white coat is saying it. And so I just think, wow, what an important thing to spotlight and what a great model your story is for that.

Sarah Moore

Thank you.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Yeah, I think we just need to listen to those instincts. And I think that actually leads us well into the specific topic that you and I are talking about today, which is discipline. And wow, nowhere is there more conflicting advice around parenting than when we talked about the idea of discipline, and a place where parents, moms, especially I think, have a churning in their stomach, like maybe an instinct around something that they feel like no, but this is not what the books says to do. I mean, discipline is tough, isn’t it?

Sarah Moore

It is, it really is. And at the end of the day, when I was thinking about what to call my book, I know that discipline is an emotionally charged word. Maybe there’s something from our family of origin where discipline didn’t feel safe to us when we were growing up. Maybe there’s something to your point that we read or we heard from our best friend or our neighbor, that still just doesn’t feel the way we want parenting to feel. In fact, I sometimes joke that I almost wanted to call my book “Parenting That Doesn’t Make You Feel Like a Jerk.” Because really, at the end of the day, we want to feel good about our parenting. The reason I coupled peaceful with discipline is that it’s a reminder to all of us, self-included, that discipline is supposed to have a positive connotation. And when we can remind ourselves and our children and really use the word ‘peaceful’ as a litmus test to check in and say, “Is what I’m doing right now feeling peaceful within my own body as well as is it being perceived as peaceful by my child?”, that’s when we know we have an effective strategy, not one that harms either of us or the relationship.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

I love that, as a litmus test, just a way of checking in or not, that’s actually a great way to think about it. I think you blew a lot of people’s minds just now, combining the idea of peaceful with discipline, because you know, as I said in the intro, and the point you just made, a lot of us growing up did not have the experience of coupling the concept or the word discipline with anything that aligns with the word peaceful. So I’d love to just have you talk about where we went wrong with that. Historically we’ve had a punishment focus. I think when most parents here or even kids, for that matter, hear the word discipline, they think of things like taking stuff away or spanking or giving a lecture, being hard on the child, whatever. What to you is discipline? When we talk about that as a word, as an idea, what are we really talking about there?

Sarah Moore

Yeah, you hit the nail on the head at the beginning of the show here. It’s teaching. That discipline is simply teaching, We often make it so much more complicated than it’s intended to be. And when we think about how we learn, let’s look at the opposite of teaching, it’s learning. No matter our age, we learn best when we feel curious, when we feel physical and emotional safety, when we feel that our nervous system is in a place of being able to be receptive to what’s going on around us. And if there’s any sense of threat to any one of those things, our learning brain literally shuts off, we can’t learn. We know that our limbic system will take over and say, “I need to go into fight or flight mode because all I can do right now is work on self-preservation.” And if we look historically at that, not even talking about parenting, let’s talk about not that long ago, people were having to forage for their food much more than we have to today. I don’t forage at the grocery store, I just go to the grocery store and I pick up a box or whatever, and I’m happy. So looking at the people who not that long ago had to forage for food, the minute any sort of threat was detected, you stop foraging, and you either fight or you head for the hills. So when we apply that to learning and discipline and how we can set our children up to teach, they need to be in a place where they don’t feel they either need to retreat, or fight back ,or whatever. Peaceful discipline is really the only way that children can learn in the first place.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

No, that’s such an important concept. And we’ve touched on that with various people on the show over the years, because it’s so central to understanding why a lot of how we have approached things with kids has not been very effective. And I think I want to point out that a lot of this is newer understandings that we have that come out of the fields of neuroscience, of interpersonal biology, of our understanding of development and relationships that quite frankly, generations before now really didn’t have access to; these were not things we knew. So I don’t blame my parents, your parents, anybody’s parents. Previously, we didn’t understand this. And so the way that we used to think about it was, in order to teach kids things like self-control, things like following through, things like being responsible, not being a jerk, speaking kindly to people, to teach those things, we had to use a discipline technique that was rooted in punishment and consequence in order for them to learn that stuff. Now, what you’re saying is, we understand that actually that’s counterproductive to kids learning those things. And so we need some new approaches, right?

Sarah Moore

Exactly right. Yeah.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

And I think, nowhere is this more evident than for those of you who have kids that maybe you have been diagnosed with a neurodevelopmental issue, anxiety, a behavioral challenge, whatever it might be. Where we see this really start to come to the forefront is when we’re talking about discipline for these kids. I mean, this is appropriate, this is how we should be thinking about it for all kids, but especially for these kids with more sensitive nervous systems, with more challenges. When we start applying what have been the traditionally recommended disciplinary approaches, boy, do we run into problems quickly. And I have parent after a parent in the clinic going, “Look, I’ve done all the consequence charts and point systems. I’ve taken away all the things, I’ve done all of this, and actually we’re worse off.” And so It just requires, for all kids, but especially if you’ve got a kid with those sensitive nervous systems and brains that are taking a bit longer to kind of develop in those ways, these newer approaches that are rooted in neuroscience are really going to get us further.

Sarah Moore

They really are. And we’ve seen examples of parents genuinely doing the best they can with the information they have all around us. I’ll never forget, probably a year ago, I was shopping at one of the big box stores. I’ll just name it. It was Target. I’m a mom. I’m wearing my mama badge right now.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

That’s right. A Target shopper here. I feel it. Yeah.

Sarah Moore

I was standing in the greeting card aisle with my daughter, and there was another mom who came into the aisle and she was pushing her, I’m guessing three-year-old in the cart. And understandably, the three-year-old didn’t have a huge interest in picking up greeting cards. He was starting to get antsy. I imagine they’d been shopping for a while. He was probably tired or hungry or who knows what else was going on in his three-year-old world. But he was starting to act out and trying to climb out of the cart, and this mama was getting exasperated. And I heard her say, and bless her heart, she was doing what the book told her to do, she said, “If you don’t sit back down, I’m going to count to three.” And I was listening, and I’m thinking “Okay, and then what?” I paid attention. I heard her start counting. And sure enough, she made it all to three, he hadn’t changed his behavior one bit. She’s feeling lost. He’s feeling like, “Am I going to get in trouble or what’s going on?” I was watching both of them heighten their individual states of dysregulation. I said nothing other than a silent prayer that they had a peaceful resolution to whatever we’re going through. But I saw how this traditional parenting of threats, punishments consequences was backfiring for the both of them. And to your point, this is not shared to shame or blame anybody. We are all doing the best we can. I know for sure she got that from a book, and she was buying something she read. More power to her for trying something as opposed to punishing him on the spot. But I still saw the incredible need we have for things that work not only short term, what do you do when the three-year-old is standing up in the cart? But also long term, so that hopefully next time they’re out shopping, he remembers, oh, maybe I’ll keep my bottom down, and perhaps we’ll have an easier go of it.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

It’s a great example. And yeah, we know, she got that from a book because it’s still one of the top selling books in the parenting category. Many of you may have seen it or it’s on your shelf or whatever, which is such outdated advice. And it still is recommended by a lot of pediatricians, and to your point, I say the same thing, leaves both the child and the parent feeling really disempowered, really frustrated, and like, “Where do we go from here?” And so what we need to be doing is thinking about this in a different way that reduces the frustration and actually meets our goal of helping kids develop the skills they need to develop, because whatever side of the issue and whatever beliefs you have about all this, we all have the same goal. I’ve yet to meet a parent for whom the end result that’s desired is the same, right? Kids who are respectful, kids who know how to manage themselves appropriately in different situations, kids who are kind, kids who are able to take initiative and follow through. We all have the same goals. What you and I are talking about is just a newer way of understanding discipline that helps us get to those goals. And so you have this term “Peaceful Discipline”, and you sort of talk about discipline in this way as the kind of discipline children will ask for. Now, you’re going to have to unpack this for us because I think parents are going “Wait, I’m sorry, did you say kids will ask for this kind of discipline?” So talk us through what you mean by that.

Sarah Moore

Yeah, for sure. I intentionally did that because it feels so counterintuitive. Most of us were raised with this outdated notion of what discipline is. When we think about children and their bids for connection, we know that children want to do well for us every single moment of every single day. They want to feel peaceful with us, just like we genuinely want to feel peaceful with them. No parent or child wakes up, rolls out of bed and says, “Ah, fantastic. Whose day can I ruin today?” So we mutually want to do well for each other. And when we look at how our children make bids for our connection, it’s through things like, “Will you play with me? Will you read me a story? Will you spend time with me?” Every single time we can answer that with a yes, it increases the connection. And here’s the magic of peaceful discipline, being the type of discipline kids will ask for: These moments of play, and storytelling and reading are absolutely the keys to benevolent teaching for our children. And we have all sorts of missed opportunities, where, what do you know? There’s a character in a book who acts out, and yet we read the story and we move on, when really in this example, what a great opportunity for us to talk about with our child: “Why do you think the child did that? What do you think they’re feeling on this page? Let’s look and see if we can figure out what their expression on their face might mean”, we have so many opportunities through the things children are naturally asking us for every single day to use these as our discipline/teaching moments.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Yeah, you talk a lot in the book about the importance of storytelling. You just raised that a moment ago about stories. Talk about why you feel like storytelling is an important part of this process of teaching and learning these things, because I don’t think most people associate storytelling with discipline or with teaching our kids things, right? We think of that as “Oh, that’s in a separate category of fun or play or maybe language development, but we don’t often think about storytelling as connected to discipline. So connect those dots for us.

Sarah Moore

I’d be happy to. What it comes down to is something that we have learned about the brain. And again, this is not something our parents or grandparents could have known because the research was not available at that time. However, in this day and age, we know that our brain has this beautiful little part called the hippocampus. It is the brain’s storyteller. It is literally what helps us create every single memory we will ever have about every single experience we have in life. Now we’ve got two types of memory: We’ve got explicit memory. That’s the stuff I know I remember. I know I remember that story I told you about the moment at Target. And we have our implicit memory, which is the stuff that our body holds on to, but we don’t clearly remember, whatever it was. Well, the hippocampus helps tell stories about all of it. Now, storytelling, when we do it proactively or reactively with our children, we are going straight to our child’s hippocampus, and that’s their storage unit, so to speak. That’s where they’re going to remember, “I’ve got something I can visualize here.” And here’s something else really interesting related to brain science: When we or our children visualize something, the brain more or less doesn’t delineate between things we’ve visualized versus things that have actually happened in real life. We can speak directly to that part of the brain and talk about an example. For example, let me just keep going with the Target story. Let’s say that Mama decided to be playful about it, and rather than doing the 1, 2, 3 threatening and talking about consequences, what if she decided to do an in the moment story? Some people might call this playful parenting, this one could actually go either way. But what if she said, “Oh, sweetheart, what do you know? The glue is in aisle four.” And she either literally or just in their imagination, went over to aisle four, picked up the glue and pretended to rub some on the seat and rub some on his backside, and said “There. Remember, this is supposed to hold you in your seat.” And she could be playful and light hearted about it. Well, next time, she goes to the store, or perhaps even later in that same shopping session, he has an image of “Oh, glue on my bottom. That means I’m supposed to sit down in the cart.” That’s something his brain can work with. Now let’s pretend for a moment that he just giggles and thinks it is funny and he keeps standing up. I want to tell parents why this is still a win. Two seconds ago, you had a three-year-old and a parent who were really angry with each other and both escalating. Somehow, we have changed the story to one of play and lightheartedness. We’ve changed the whole trajectory of the rest of their day. So when we can simply create anchors in our children’s memories through stories, maybe it’s a story we’ve read in a book, maybe it’s something that we make up and we sit down on the couch and we tell a story together, maybe it’s something we read, or maybe it’s something that’s just impromptu, where maybe I’m the glue monster, I’ve created a character for myself in a kind of fun way to bring levity to the situation. These are things that stick in our children’s memories, because again, we’ve gone straight to that hippocampus. And that’s more relatable and more memorable for our children.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Beautiful example and explanation of that. And again for those of you who are raising kids who have some extra challenges, who have some neurological differences, this becomes even more important, this idea of anchoring things in repeatable stories. It makes it easier for kids to process, to hold on to, to revisit, there’s a reason why young kids want to read the same books over and over and over, right? It’s not just because they’re trying to be annoying or make us crazy with reading the same book. That’s actually developmentally important for them. And as kids get older, if they have some of those extra kinds of challenges, the repetition, the storytelling, to your point, it just anchors it, and then we can use it in those moments. So such a powerful thing. And I love how you already answered what I think is probably the major objection that parents have to the examples that you give, which is, “Well, that wouldn’t work for my kid, he wouldn’t sit back down.” And you’ve already addressed that by saying, “Well, wait a minute, this is already a win because we’ve shifted the emotions around this experience.” And I know that I find, and I’m sure you do, too, that one of the biggest challenges and frustrations for parents around discipline or anything else is: We know we need to keep ourselves calm and regulated in order to help our kids. But keeping ourselves calm and regulated is really hard. And what you just illustrated there with shifting the emotions around it, that’s a really powerful tool for shifting and managing our own feelings in the moment that would lead us then if we don’t shift them, to become really angry, really frustrated. So I love that it’s not only good for the kid, but it’s good for the adult too.

Sarah Moore

Oh, it really is. And the thing is laughter is a natural stress reliever. So it’s not like we even have to keep pushing our cart through the aisle angrily thinking, “Well now my child’s happier, but I’m still grouchy.” No, if we have taken part in it, we actually feel lighter too, and we don’t have any of that emotional baggage that we need to carry forward into the next altercation with a child, where both of us just end up exploding because we’ve been carrying around all the junk for so long. And one of the beautiful things that I love about story-teaching and playful parenting used in conjunction with one another, either/or, and I’ve got all sorts of examples in the book, we can use it proactively. If we are anticipating that a future situation might be tricky. We can use it in the moment, like the example I shared a moment ago. We can also use it retroactively to help our children make what’s called a coherent narrative out of a stressful situation. That’s basically just a fancy way to say, “Let’s process this in a way that is healing, and we’ll make sense of it so that we don’t need to carry it around as stress or trauma or anything like that. Because we’ve made sense of what’s happened to our life.”

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Let’s give people a couple of examples like we did, sort of in the moment examples, with Target. Let’s think proactive, let’s do it. Maybe it’s an example from the book or something with your own daughter or whatever. But let’s give people an example of how we might use this or think about this before the problem happens, because let’s face it, as parents, we know our kids, we can anticipate a good portion of the time when we might encounter a situation or our kids might be in a situation where there’s likely to be a hiccup, and issue, and dysregulation, or whatever. So let’s walk people through how we could have a situation where we could use this proactively.

Sarah Moore

Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I can think of two: One for younger kids, and one for older. Younger kids, an example from my real-life parenting journey, and it touches on what you mentioned a couple of minutes ago, why do kids like to read the same stories over, and over, and over? Well, when my daughter was about two years old, we picked up a book from the library about going potty on the toilet. And guess what she wanted to read 1000 times all day every day? And guess which mama was a little bit tired of reading about going potty? There are other topics that I would much rather be focusing on as an adult. And yet, she was reading it as if it were like the keys to the future. It was. One day when she was about two and a half years old, I hadn’t even thought about potty training yet. But she literally looked at me and she said “Mama, park, no pants, no diaper.” I remember thinking, “Well, that’s going to be a problem.” But I decided to trust her, with a great deal of trepidation. I will be perfectly honest about that, I was worried. But I went, “Well, okay.” So we went to the park, I put her in something I bought, you know whether they were Pullups or underwear or whatever. And we went, and she did fine. And she got home and she said, “Mama no more diapers.” I questioned it, I doubted it. Yet, within the next forever, I can count on one hand the number of times that she had an “accident”. She was done and she was ready. And all of that reading we had done taught her how to do it. So that was a really good example of how a story can be used proactively with little kids to help prepare them for some big milestone or whatever, and we didn’t have to go through any of the pains of typical potty training.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Yeah. I really think I want to pause there because I think it underlines a couple of important things: One is again, that repetition is important for them, even when we feel like “I cannot read this book one more time.” But also it underscores the importance of letting kids’ development unfold as it’s intended to unfold. Kids sort of know the reason we end up in power struggles over things like toilet training and feeding and whatever else, is because we often are trying to impose our timeline on them and they need to be developmentally ready. And then the trusting of that process, right, which is tough, and I get it, especially if you’re listening and you’re like, “My kid doesn’t do anything on a normal developmental time. It’s hard for me to trust, it takes a while”, but still trusting that all of the proactive things you’re doing, that you’re front-loading, that that is going to have an impact and come to fruition, but it’s hard for us to trust, like you said. It’s a lot of trepidation. It’s hard for us to just trust, but kids will do things when they’re developmentally ready.

Sarah Moore

You’re so right. And I love that you added that. And very briefly, an example for the parents and caregivers of older children who might be saying, “Well, that’s great when your child is two, but what about my child who’s 12, and maybe they’re going to their first get together with a whole bunch of friends?”, like maybe it’s a party or something, might be a birthday party, but the parents aren’t invited this time. And this is another major milestone, it’s going to be kind of anxiety-laden, perhaps for the parent as well as for the child. Yes, we want to be proactive and talk to them about what to expect and what it might look and feel like. But if we simply sit down with a child, and again, I’m talking about a 12-year-old who might not have a book readily available for this topic. What if you sit down and say “I remember the first time I went to a party where the parents weren’t invited,” just take a story from real life. “I remember that on one hand, I felt super excited and super empowered and independent. And on the other hand, I was a little bit nervous, especially when I got to the party and I found out it was boys and girls, and I didn’t expect that. And a couple of things happened that made me feel kind of uncomfortable. I want to tell you about them. Your party might not at all be like that, but I want you to know what to do if any of these things come up or if something else comes up, let’s talk through some plans of action.” And we don’t do this to create more anxiety in our child, we do this to help empower them so that when they are in the situation, they can go back subconsciously to the hippocampus in their brain and say, “I remember when I visualized from when my special big person told me about their story, and I know what to do in this situation, because we spelled it out clearly to one another.”

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Beautiful way of approaching that, and especially as our kids get into those preteen years where we have to find some sideways into these things, because having a direct conversation about them or just saying, “Are you nervous about this? What questions do you have?”, it’s going to be like, “No”, but you approached it with, “I want to share a story with you.” I love that. Let’s talk about the reactive end of things. “I’m going to throw out a scenario that, boy, I have heard about a lot in the last several weeks since school has started, from a lot of parents. Kid has a not so great day at school. Let’s say it’s an elementary age kid. Not so great day at school, teachers riding home with complaints, the kid’s like “Oh, these things happened.” How can we as parents, because the inclination, and even the expectation, spoken or unspoken, on the part of a lot of school personnel is that the parent is going to do something to discipline or punish that at home, right? Parents feel like “I’m supposed to do something about this.” And often they feel like they do something like “You had a bad day at school, I’m going to take your screen time away/now you have to do extra chores.” So, frame that up for us in the context of the approach you’re talking about. How could a parent — this would be reactive or retroactive, I guess, it already happened, the situation happened, the wheels fell off. How do we use this approach now on the back end to support our kids in their learning around this?

Sarah Moore

I love that example, that is so relatable because you’re right, it’s everywhere right now. So this is one where number one, you touched on it before: We’re going to have to first of all keep our own emotions in check, because by definition, we are making assumptions about what happened. Everything we have is based on the note from the teacher or the call from the other parents or whatever, and we have to pause and say, “I have a fraction of the story. I have one other person’s interpretation of the events, and my job is to get curious because I know there’s more to the story”, particularly if this is out of character for your child, or even if it isn’t, there’s still more to the story. So when we can approach our child with a lens of nonjudgement, curiosity and empathy, and create the emotional safety where we can sit together and start this story with an intro that might sound like “Oh my goodness, it sounds like you had a tough day today.” And then period. And the toughest thing we can do right now is zip it and let our child talk. Our child might clam up and say, “Yeah, I’m going to my room.” Our typical response might be, well I need to pursue you, I need to chase you into your room, whereas the child is probably more likely to shut down even more and everything will have backfired. So step one is really going to create emotional safety around the situation. Find a time when it feels right, when it feels like your child is at a place where they are willing to connect. Otherwise, the story-teaching can’t happen. So let’s pretend we’re going to fast forward to a point where the child is like, “Yeah, today was awful. What the teacher didn’t see is that before I pushed the kid down on the playground, first, that kid had been calling the new kid all sorts of names, and I was telling him to knock it off, and he wouldn’t. And then he started being really, really extra mean to that kid and started picking on them. And I was trying to stand up for that child. And eventually, things just got out of control, and you’re right, I got really mad and I pushed him.” Oh, my goodness, well, now I have a much different story than the story I received, which is your child pushed another child down on the playground or whatever. So okay, tell me what was going on for your child when you were observing this child being picked on by this other child? “How did you feel? What was happening for you?” In doing so, you are increasing your child’s emotional intelligence and their emotional vocabulary by helping them name their feelings. We are strengthening what’s called their executive function skills, because we’re helping them think through everybody’s perspective, we are helping them name what might have been going on for other people, we can help them with perspective taking, which by the way doesn’t typically fully develop until the teenage years. We can help them take the perspective of “How do you think the one who was picking on the other child was feeling? What do you think was going on for them?” That increases empathy again. And we start to develop a narrative for the child of the full story, where they can grow from it, they can heal from it. And then we can ask a beautiful open-ended question like, “Oh, my goodness,” well, first of all, we can validate. “Yeah, it makes perfect sense to me why you wanted to push that child. They were being terrible to the new kid. And yeah, look how strong you are. Look how great your character is that you want to stand up for others. Makes sense to me why you did what you did. And next time this happens, we already know that pushing the child down didn’t get you what you were hoping for, but what are some other ways that we can handle those big feelings when they come up?” and here, you can brainstorm with the child. And again, we talked about visualization and the power of the brain not being able to tell the difference between what really happened versus what we visualized. When we help our child visualize a different ending to that story, the next time that same situation comes up, they will already have the neural connections to tell them what to do instead. Will they do it perfectly every time? Of course, not. We’re raising humans. But they will be more likely to do it because they have a full story around it, based on what’s already happened.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

So important. Again, our goal is to give kids tools and skills to respond to whatever might come up in a healthy, appropriate way. A kid who gets in trouble at school for pushing somebody, and then they come home and we just punish them for it, is not achieving that goal. It’s not giving them any understanding of themselves, of other people or any tools to do things differently. So you just walked through a really beautiful example of how to fit so many things into one interaction, and ultimately, it leaves the parent and the child feeling so much better at the end of that. And to your point earlier on about when kids feel safe and heard and acknowledged and accepted, they are more likely to change their behavior and learn from that than when we punish them, shut them down, belittle them, or whatever. So, really, a great example. So many more examples. We can talk through so many more things to ask you about this. But as we wrap up, I just want to touch on the issue of parents saying “Okay, Sarah, Dr. Nicole, sounds great. Lovely. Oh, how beautiful to approach it in this way. But also this just sounds like a lot of time, a lot of energy, my kid’s got a lot of issues, this just feels really unrealistic to me. I just don’t have the time or the creativity or the energy for this.” What do you say to parents who are like it sounds great, but yeah, I don’t know if I can do it.”

Sarah Moore

I say I have all the grace and compassion and empathy for you because we know parenting can be emotionally exhausting. And when we look at this type of peaceful discipline, we have to remember that this happens one interaction at a time. This is one conversation that you have at lunchtime today. This is one book you read with your child. These are things that you weave into your everyday life that you’re already having. And the thing is this type of approach does become the gift that keeps on giving because using the example that we just went through a minute ago, the next time that child has a rough day at school, they are so much more likely, if you created emotional safety for them the first time, they’re so much likely more likely to be the one who comes in the door and says, “Today was awful, I need to talk to you about it.” And there, we have the opportunity for increased connection once again. And it just keeps snowballing in the very best way, and ultimately, that saves us so much time, so much energy and so much heartache because we’re not having to feel like a jerk in the discipline realm.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Love it. So good. Tell us where we can get the book because it’s out now: Peaceful Discipline: Story Teaching, Brain Science & Better Behavior. Where can we find it?

Sarah Moore

Thank you. It is on Amazon all over the world, and you can always go to my website dandelion-seeds.com, Nicole will have it up for you. I will have a link to it there as well. So thank you. And by the way, I’m a very real person here. So if people have questions, comments, or want to leave a review on Amazon, it’s all good. I welcome this because I am here to serve you, and if you have questions, I’ll do my best to answer them for anybody.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Fantastic. We’ll put the links to all of that in the show notes. Sarah, tell them where they can find you on social media because your Instagram is great and really just gives bite sized pieces that kind of are good reminders and practical tools for all the stuff we talked about today. So what’s your Instagram handle?

Sarah Moore

@DandelionSeedsPositiveLiving. Everywhere else I’m @DandelionSeedsPositiveParenting, but parenting wouldn’t fit on Instagram, so it’s positive living.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Got to love these social media channels and all the intricacies of it, right? Sarah, I’m so glad that you could come back and join us on the show again today. Excited for you to be releasing this book into the world, and most importantly excited for all the parents and professionals who are going to benefit from it. So please, all of you listening, go check out Sarah’s resources, get the book, you will love it, you will find it helpful. And thank you for doing the work that you do in the world. Sarah, thanks.

Sarah Moore

Thank you so much. I appreciate you.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

And thanks as always, to all of you for being here and for listening. We’ll catch you back here next time.