What’s the real goal? What’s your real role?

In this episode, Kaity and Adriane  dive deep into the real goals and roles of adults in empowering young minds. 

Explore how embracing a growth mindset and creating relationship-driven learning environments can significantly impact child development and emotional well-being. Through engaging analogies and reflective exercises, you’ll also learn practical strategies to shift from a control-based approach to a mentorship role that fosters autonomy and resilience in children. 

Tune in to discover how you can help you better support the young people in your life and create environments that “kindle.”

Relevant links:

• Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
• The Dot by Peter H. Reynolds 
• Make teaching fun again… The 3 Shifts
• Giving Children More Control. A Conversation with Bill Stixrud
• Building Healthy Brains. A Conversation with Ned Johnson
• The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives by William Stixrud PhD and Ned Johnson
• The Self-Driven Child website
• The Case for the Self-Driven Child by Gareth Cook for Scientific American
• Raising Human Beings: Creating a Collaborative Partnership with Your Child by Ross W. Greene Ph.D.
• Dr. Ross Greene’s website

Transcript

Hi, it's me, Kaity, and me, Adriane, and you're listening to KindlED, a podcast where we dig into the science behind building relationships and environments that help kids unlock their full potential and become empowered learners. Together, we'll discover evidence-based tools and methods that will empower you to kindle the curiosity, motivation, and well-being of the young people in your life.

Hi, Kaity, how’s it going?

So good! How are you?

Good. So how’s your week going?

It has been good—some wild times at the Broadbent household. My 10-year-old has really been struggling in math. Not just struggling with math concepts, but really struggling with himself and his perception of himself as a learner. That has been interesting but also really difficult to watch, and it’s been surprisingly emotionally difficult for me as a mom to watch him struggle.

I don’t know, like, I’m getting so triggered by his struggle. I feel like we’ve built this whole family culture, and Prenda too, around this idea of growth mindset—that it’s okay to make mistakes. And it’s like, how have you been bathing in this culture and you still have a lot of reservations about yourself as a learner? He doesn’t want to be wrong because it makes him feel stupid. He’s usually such a positive kid, but he’s really started using some negative language about himself. When I grew up, I was very negative about myself, and I don’t want him to feel those things. To hear him say that is really tough—I can feel my chest getting tight. I have to take some deep breaths; I’m getting really emotionally worked up when I see this.

Oh man, what are some of the things he’s saying?

Like, "I can’t learn anything," "I’m stupid," "I’m bad at math." Just a lot of that negative talk. I have to stop him and say, "Think about your words. You’re teaching your brain what to think by choosing those thoughts. We need to be careful—let’s use different language. Let’s say things like, 'This is hard for me, and that’s okay,'" giving him some growth mindset affirmations. But it’s like all the work on it hasn’t settled in yet. He’ll have these little breakthrough moments, though. I had a conversation with him yesterday. The weather is really beautiful here right now in Arizona, and we were just outside in our backyard having a little sit-down chat. He kind of opened up to me a little bit about some of his feelings, and I was able to be really transparent with him as a parent. I said, "Here are my hopes for you as a person who loves you and is raising you. I don’t want you to get stuck in these feelings because they’re not helping you move past them; they’re not helping you progress." We had a really good conversation. I don’t think our problems are over. I think later today, when I ask, "Hey, how’s math?" he’s still going to be grumbly. Actually, even after this conversation, I was cooking and I said, "Everett, come help me. I was tripling a recipe or something, so it involved adding fractions, and that’s what he’s doing in math. I invited him to come help me, and he just didn’t want to do it at all. So it’s just fits and starts. I can see the understanding is there. I’m aware in those moments when I’m feeling super tense about it that that is not maybe the right time to engage because I’m just going to transfer a lot of that tension.

Yes, that’s exactly what we’re going to dive into today, so I’m so happy that you brought that story up and made it real. You know, the two of us listen to and read all these things—we have all the head knowledge, but we’re still here too. So I can’t wait!

Yes, I cannot wait to dive in—to just taking a bird’s eye view and really looking at what the goal is here. What is the goal of our role as adults in our kids' lives?

Absolutely. Yes, that’s totally such a good question. I think that it’s hard because life goes so fast, right? We’re so distracted; there are so many things we’re paying attention to, and it’s really hard to just find some time to pause and reflect on what your real goal is and what your real role is, right? And that even rhymes, so that’s fantastic. I don’t know why I like it when things rhyme so much—it’s like something weird about my brain.

Mnemonic?

Yes, it helps it stick.

Yes, it does, it does.

Okay, so what we’d like to do today is actually help you, our listeners, find this little bubble of time to reflect on what your real goal is. This might be your goal as a parent, your goal as a classroom teacher, your goal as an administrator, your goal as a soccer coach—any way that you interact with young kids, anything that we’re saying today, just totally take it and put it in your perspective and your situation.

Alright, so we’re going to start this kind of reflective process. So if you’re listening, you might want to go grab a piece of paper and jot your thoughts down as we do this. I would invite you to really take the next few minutes very seriously. The more you dig in here, the more transformative this whole KindlED process will be, and you’re going to find such amazing power in yourself to be consistent and steady and to really become the kind of person that all of the young people in your life desperately need you to be.

And if you don’t have a piece of paper because you might be on a treadmill, you might be for a walk, pull your phone out and just open up Notes. This is a really awesome exercise to really write it down and reflect.

I love that. That’s such a good idea. Okay, so whenever someone asks me to close my eyes, I never do it, so I feel weird about inviting everyone to close their eyes. But imagine with me—eyes open, eyes closed—do not close your eyes if you’re driving or something. Imagine that it’s 30 years into the future or 20 years into the future, and you are visiting—it could be your child, it could be a student of yours, it could be any child that is important in your life. You’re visiting them, and you’re walking up to their house. They have their own adult life now, right? You run into their neighbor, and you say, "Hey, I’m so-and-so’s mom," or teacher, or anything—whatever you are to them. This neighbor says, "Oh wow, nice to meet you. I’m so happy that I get to live next door to [whoever the child is]." And then they’re going to say some things to you, and this is where you get to use your imagination. You’re going to create this future, this goal of what this person is going to tell you about this child or this learner. They’re going to say something like, "I’m so glad that I live next door to this person because they’re always so [fill in some adjectives]." How would you want them to describe this child in their adult life? What are they like? Pause the podcast and think about that if you want to, or you can just kind of keep listening.

Then they say, "I can tell that your child really cares about [fill in the blank—what that child really cares about]."

And then they’re going to say, "I can always count on them to [fill in the blank]."

Okay, so adjectives, what they care about, and what they can be counted on for—those are your three categories. While you think about that, Adriane and I are just going to answer this for ourselves. Adriane, can you do it from the perspective of a parent, and I’ll do it from the perspective of an educator?

Absolutely. Okay, so if I complete that phrase, I would say this would be my son’s neighbor. I would love for them to say, "I’m so glad I live next door to your son. He’s always respectful, willing to help, he’s kind, he’s super fun to talk to, and I can tell that he really cares about people. I can always count on him to be there for me if I need anything."

I love that. Really cool adjectives. I love that you pulled out responsibility and fun, right? It wasn’t just like, "He’s a Nobel Peace Prize winner," or "He got straight A’s in school." You’ve really captured who he is.

Exactly. Okay, so here’s mine. It’s from the perspective of an educator. "I’m so glad that I live next door to your student—we’ll call them Jake. They’re always so interesting and compassionate." I guess this isn’t really an adjective, but they’re a very good listener and question-asker. We need to invent adjectives that mean those things!

I’ll put that on my to-do list.

Yes, please do. I’m curious, but what I’m trying to get at is that when they talk to this neighbor—maybe "open-minded," maybe that’s more accurate—or "inquisitive," like they’re really interested in that other person’s perspective, right? So, if we keep going, I can tell that they really care about their community, our country, and the work that they do every day. The reason I put that in there is because I think that as an educator, one of my main roles is to help equip them to be successful, contributing members of society. That’s going to entail some sort of skill, and I want all of my students to have identified a skill—a way that they’re going to participate in the world that is super meaningful to them. I want them to fall in love with a problem in the world and dedicate their lives to increasing their skill, intellect, and knowledge around that thing so that they can solve that problem in the world.

Can you be my child’s educator?

All this reflective time is so good. I hope that you took some time to fill that out, and now we’re going to move on to another exercise. So here’s the next one. Think of a person in your life—this could be a teacher, a family member, an author, or someone from history—who has been the most positive or influential person in your life. Do you have that person in mind? This is the person who put you on the path toward where you are now as an adult.

That’s a good question.

Okay, so I have a few that I can think of, like, immediately.

Then we’re going to ask, how did this person make you feel, and what did they do for you? That feeling—as soon as I asked that question, you’re going to have this feeling attached to that. Name what that feeling is. You can even hop over to another tab on your phone and look up a feelings wheel or something to find a very specific feeling that comes to mind. Then you’re going to try to focus so much on that feeling that you can actually feel it in your body. Connect where that feeling is—it could be in your chest, your arms, your hands, your face, your legs.

I love this invitation so much because it’s incredibly important that we stop to feel our feelings. There are a few different reasons for this, but imagine you get a cut on your finger and you’re feeling pain. That’s information from your nervous system going to your brain that there’s a problem, and what your brain wants is for you to take care of that finger. It wants a band-aid; it wants you to know that something is wrong down here. If you just ignore it, it will get worse—your body will turn up the pain signal until you pay attention to it. Our feelings are the same way. When we don’t stop to feel our feelings and bring attention to them, it’s like we’re telling our brain, "I know this feeling is there," but we’re ignoring the information we could be receiving fully. When we feel it in our body, that’s a way that we can let our brain know that we’ve really internalized that there was some information there for us.

I know too that they’ve shown with functional MRIs that different parts of the brain literally light up when you’re moving your body. There’s such a brain-body connection that’s really important versus just saying, "Oh, I’m feeling this way," but to really feel in your body where that feeling is super important.

Absolutely. Okay, so do you have a person in mind, Kaity?

Yeah, I totally do. Mine’s an author. He wrote a book called Man’s Search for Meaning. His name is Viktor Frankl, and he was a Holocaust survivor. He was also a psychologist. In the book, he talks about how when he was in concentration camps, he really figured out how to hold on to hope and how to choose his attitude and response regardless of his situation. I just remember reading this as a 20-something-year-old, and it was such a different message than I was getting anywhere else. It gave me this feeling of profound responsibility and ownership of my own brain, feelings, thoughts, and actions. I guess I would label that as determined. I just felt this determination to be super responsible for my own perspective on my life. When I feel that determination again, I really feel it in my chest. It’s a very motivating, exciting feeling with a lot of energy behind it.

For me, it was during my middle school years—a pretty pivotal time in my life. It’s really a family—my best friend, her name happened to be the same as mine, and we even spelled our names the same way, so we were Adriane Squared. Her whole family just took us in, and her sister was really impactful and influential because I wanted to be like her. She was just cool and creative and popular, and she made me feel really special. Her parents had this incredible ability to make me feel included and part of their family, even though I wasn’t born and raised in their family. When I think of the feeling attached to that, I’d say respected, probably, and thankful—extremely thankful that they allowed me into their home and family. A lot of their family values, I see that I carry them on as an adult today.

Okay, so now we’re going to take out the camera of our minds and take a picture of that feeling. We’ll come back to that feeling later. Now we’re going to imagine someone in our life who has made us feel judged, criticized, or not good enough. Anytime they walk into the room or you get a text from them, you kind of get a pit in your stomach. It’s not a good feeling. Adriane and I will just keep our people in our heads—we don’t need to publicly identify who they are or anything, but you can imagine someone, past or present, and hold on to that. Do the same thing—bring some awareness to your body, really think about how this person affects you. Take a picture with your mind camera of that feeling, label it, and put it on the shelf.

Now, we’re going to juxtapose that by imagining that you’re at a party where you feel relaxed and calm. You’re with all your favorite people, eating your favorite food, laughing, bringing up funny memories. You love what you’re wearing, you feel really confident and happy, and then suddenly the judgmental person you just imagined a minute ago shows up at this party. I want you to feel the shift between the relaxed, comfortable feeling and then just the presence of that person evoking that pit-in-your-stomach feeling. It’s interesting if you can really do that in your mind—how the environment—you’re still at the party, still with your friends, still all those good things—but that one relationship being in that picture now really takes over how you’re feeling in your body. It just shifts you into a different state. Adriane, what’s happening here when we go from this calm to this more alerted, agitated, nervous state?

Well, it shows how important it is for us to connect our feelings to our bodies, right? Especially if you’re really visualizing this and you could physically feel the shift in your body, that’s good—that means you have a mind-body connection, which is what we want to get to. What’s basically happening is we have this beautiful thing called a nervous system, and it runs all throughout our body. We have this vagus nerve that looks like a tree. It runs from our brainstem all the way down to our extremities, hearts, and all the different organs in our body. We have different pathways, I guess you can call them. We have a sympathetic nervous system and a parasympathetic nervous system. Our sympathetic system is mobilized—that is the activate mode. If you feel this shift in your body and feel anxious, angry, or more intense feelings, you’re probably shifting into the sympathetic mode. We also have the parasympathetic system—that’s the rest and digest system. When we’re in the social engagement system, we’re feeling good in our bodies. Then that person walks in, and we shift—we shift into that sympathetic mode, or we could shift into freeze mode. But that is basically our stress response, and that is our brain trying to keep us safe. It’s telling us we’re in danger. Even though you may not actually be in danger, that person may not even come over to you or talk to you or do anything, but your brain is telling you that you are in danger.

That’s really interesting, and that’s what our brains are designed to do, right? They’re designed to protect us—they developed based on our need for survival, right? So if we encounter anything alarming to us, it’s going to put us on the defensive. Something that I think is not well known is that everyone’s heard of fight or flight mode, and usually, the examples used when we talk about fight or flight are extreme—like, if there’s a mountain lion in the room or something really terrible happens to you. It’s this big thing, but actually, they’ve shown that this stress response is activated a lot by pretty subtle things. You can activate the stress response by just something being new or novel, if something’s unpredictable, if you feel like you don’t have control over something, or if your social competence is being called into question or you feel judged or like a relationship might be disconnected or someone might be mad at you. All of those things—it’s not a saber-toothed lion, it’s not child abuse, it’s not this extreme thing—but it is still triggering the same stress response, which does a variety of things in our brains, which we’ll talk about more later. We’re not going to go into all the details now, but stay tuned for more information on that.

Yes, and I did mention the word trauma, so I wanted to define that a little bit. Trauma is really just neurological stress—it is stress to the brain. When cortisol is produced, it inhibits your brain’s ability to regulate and access higher levels of brain development. Basically, it decreases internal safety. If you’re constantly in this state of fight or flight, or if you’re a parent and you have a toddler who has lots of tantrums, or you have a school-age child that you’re homeschooling and they’re not doing what you want, and you’re constantly in these power struggles with the child, you’re getting stuck in that sympathetic nervous system, which can cause trauma to the brain.

Yes, absolutely. We need to just be more and more aware of our own internal states if we’re going to become very effective role models, mentors, or examples—a support, really—to young people who don’t have fully developed neurological systems and prefrontal cortexes... cortices... prefrontal cortexes? I don’t know, but I like "prefrontal cortexes"!

So funny. Okay, that was a lot of brain stuff that we’re going to dig into—that was just a preview of all of this good learning we’re going to dig into. The main takeaway is that you have two systems—a parasympathetic system, which calms you down, and a sympathetic nervous system that activates you. It doesn’t take much to activate that stress response, causing chemical changes in the brain that are really hard to work through.

What’s incredible is that the first stepping stone to help us with this regulation process and help our kids with this regulation process is self-awareness, which is what you’re doing right now—just learning about these things.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay, we’re ready for our last reflective practice.

Can’t wait.

Okay, so think about a time in your life when you loved learning or a time that you felt like a really effective learner or really satisfied with your learning. Focus on the next few minutes on learning and education. It might not be in a formal setting; it might just be something informal—something that happened outside of school that was really effective. Find that memory in your mind, and then ask yourself a few questions: What were the conditions that allowed that to happen? Adriane, do you have any thoughts about this?

Yes, so I always loved learning, and I loved school. I was definitely a people pleaser, a teacher’s pet—not to put labels on myself—but I really got a lot of attention and love and connection. I think that’s the big piece of why it was so effective and why I was so satisfied, because I had these really incredible relationships not only with my teachers but also with my peers.

That’s awesome, so you felt like that was a really healthy environment for you. What about you? Do you have something in mind?

Yes. I had a time in my life when I loved learning. I’m not an artist by any means—my art skills were capped in the third grade, I think. I don’t think you could tell much of a difference now. I mean, that’s a very fixed mindset thing to say. Maybe I’ll reframe that: I have not chosen to focus on developing my art skills since about third grade.

I used to say the same thing. I used to say that my art skills stopped at fifth grade, so that’s so funny you said that. But go ahead, sorry.

So it’s funny that this experience was in an art class. I had this teacher who, when he walked into the room, you could just tell that he thought well of every single one of the kids in his class. Everyone was his favorite person. He was so kind, and you could just tell that he trusted everyone to do their best and be on their best behavior. He gave us a ton of autonomy. Do you want to sit on that desk? Yeah, sit on the desk. Okay. If you’re handling yourself well, if you’re showing me that you can handle that level of autonomy, why not? Maybe it came with the territory of being an art teacher—being really comfortable with creativity and having more than one right way to be. But I just felt like his confidence in everyone made it so I felt confident in myself. In art, I did not feel confident in myself at all, so having that support as a mentor really helped me. Instead of feeling like, in a normal art class without that, I would have just been like, "Oh, I’m not even going to try; I can’t even put pencil to paper," he always saw the good in what I was doing, even though it probably was not very good. He was so encouraging, and that really helped me have a good experience in that class. I was able to take that into other areas of my life.

Yes, that reminds me of that book, The Dot. The school starts with the dot, and then it expands.

Yes, I think it’s called The Dot. You draw a dot, and then it kind of expands, yes.

Yes, it reminds me of that, though—how you can start out, because you said, "Even though my work wasn’t great," but to him, it was because that’s what art is, right?

Right.

That’s super powerful.

Yes, and I think there’s something to be said for—I mean, part of this question is, what were the conditions that led to that being possible? I think that being in an art class where there weren’t really strict regulations or standards—it wasn’t like math or reading where there’s no standardized test for art—because of the environment around art, it allowed him to say, "Yes, that’s great," and not sit there and say, "Actually, your line needs to be like this in order to hit the standard." Because there was that flexibility, I think that’s part of what enabled that learning experience to be so healthy for me.

I don’t know if this is true for you, but I’m brought back to art classes where we didn’t even have desks—I mean, we had chairs, but we had big tables and natural light. The environment of the art room was very different from the traditional classroom as well. I know that’s not true for everyone, but for me, I was like, "Oh yeah, I definitely have some incredible learning experiences in art class because of the physical environment as well."

So if you’re listening to this, your example and the conditions that enabled your learning are going to be totally different. The goal here is just to collect these conditions so that when we move forward to choosing a school for our child, creating a homeschool plan, or organizing a culture in a classroom, we can have these conditions at the ready. Whatever we create, we can check against these conditions that we know to be effective.

Okay, so we’ve spent some good time reflecting on these buckets of feelings, thoughts, and memories, so I’m going to sum that up for us. Right now, we should have a picture of the kind of person we want the young people in our lives to become. We should have a picture of who we want to be and who we don’t want to be. We want to be a person that helps encourage kids to stay in their parasympathetic nervous system and not cause that stress response, which we’ll talk about so much more later—but that’s something we kind of touched on today. Then, the conditions that supported you in your most successful learning experience.

The reason we did all of this, again, is to help us reset our sights, our goal. It’s so easy to think my role as a parent is to make sure my kids get into college, that they bring home straight A’s, or that they become a classical music aficionado or pianist or something like that. We get really focused on our role as kind of an enforcer, and we do that out of love, out of good intention because we want our kids to be successful. But without stepping back and really evaluating what success looks like, we’re going to end up making some decisions here in the short term that might not actually support that end goal. You heard Adriane and me joking about how the neighbor is not going to say, "They always got straight A’s," or "I really like that your son went to Yale," or anything like that. They’re really going to be focused on who that person is.

Just going back to the story about my son, when I’m getting so worried about his fourth-grade math performance and I’m definitely in my sympathetic nervous system, feeling agitated and with my chest tight, I’m feeling very concerned. I can think, "Wait, I have this vision and picture of what success looks like, and it does not actually require him as a 10-year-old to have all of his math facts memorized right now." If that happens in six months or in a year, we haven’t let go of that future vision—that future vision is not in danger. That helps me as a parent calm my nervous system down and interact with him in a way that more closely approximates the way my art teacher interacted with me—with a deep sense of confidence and encouragement instead of scarcity or fear. My art teacher was never saying, "Oh, I’m really worried you’re not going to get this shading technique down by third quarter, and we’ve really got to make sure you have that skill, or else you’ll never develop it in your life, and I’m very concerned." That would feel weird if an art teacher came to you and said that, but that’s essentially what we’re doing to a lot of kids. We’re really worried that they don’t have this skill because we need them to do X, Y, and Z in the future, and we feel like if they don’t hit this now, that future is at risk. That puts us into this cycle—this nervous system cycle—where our stress response is activated, the child’s stress response is activated, and we go round and round in these yucky circles that disconnect us and don’t make it possible for us to provide the learning conditions we’ve identified as beneficial.

All of these things—all these little pictures that we’ve identified—collapse into this big environment that’s full of requirements. What are the requirements for learning? What are the methods for learning? What are the expectations? What is the relationship that I’m bringing into this environment? If we think about all those things intentionally, the likelihood that we’ll be able to create empowering learning environments—and I’m including relationships in that word, "environment"—goes way up. It gets way better if we’re coming at this from a powerful, encouraging way.

Yes, it’s basically to help the young people in our lives become who we described in question number one. We need to stop and go, "Okay, how do we do this?" Most likely, we need to create the same conditions, environment, and culture that helped us become who we are, like in question two, or who we want to be. That means that we need to become the kind of person who inspired us or changed our life trajectory because we can do that for the children in our lives.

Totally. Something that’s important to note here is that if these exercises were really hard for you—if you don’t have a person, if you didn’t have a successful, motivating, encouraging learning experience anywhere—think about what you would have wanted. What did you want the adults in your life to be for you? What kind of learning experience would have helped you? You can just create that in this area.

That’s really good—you can use that as a guide, definitely.

What do you think—what’s stopping us from creating these relationships and environments? What’s really getting in our way?

I don’t think it’s just one thing, obviously. It’s going to be different for each unique person, but honestly, I really think it’s ignorance—not being aware of these types of things or that we’re treating kids in ways we wouldn’t want to be treated. Fear, comparison to others—I mean, you know, social media is that whenever you want to feel good about yourself. Unrealistic expectations—there’s an expectation gap of not realizing that kids are not little adults. They don’t have little adult brains; they are growing and learning as they become older. Societal norms are a big part of that too, I think. Culturally, if you go into some of these other cultures—I recently read a book about hunting and gathering cultures. It’s incredible because a lot of the things we’re talking about and want to get to are just baked into their cultures already. Somewhere along the lines—I don’t know if it’s industrialism or what—in our society, we’ve kind of gotten away from these environments and relationships that really help children’s brains grow in a psychologically and emotionally healthy way.

Yes, I cannot agree with more of that. There are so many things baked into our culture—these expectations that fly in the face of allowing us to really step into this new role of being an inspiring, caring relationship. If you think about a teacher, teachers have curriculum schedules, and they have to do grades, and there are standards, and they have to stick to all this stuff, which makes it almost impossible to step in—unless you’re an art teacher—to step in and really be this. It seems like becoming this person requires a little bit of flexibility because if you’re not fitting into the box, what you need is someone to say, "And that’s okay, and here’s how we can move you forward." That path might look different, but that’s really hard to do within our traditional education system currently.

Then, I think about this from the parental standpoint. Again, parents feel like they have to make sure their kids are getting good grades, getting into college, and keeping them safe physically. That makes it hard to be a person who is able to give more autonomy and to design and help learners develop more than one path. It’s like the definition of the hat we all wear is not actually getting us to the goal that I think most of us just defined in those exercises.

Yes, it really boils down to this need to have control too and not realizing where that’s coming from, which is a state of internal unsafety—not feeling safe in your brain.

Okay, Adriane, what are some helpful frameworks that we can give to listeners to help make the shift from a more control-based role towards a more support, mentorship, relationship-driven role?

There are some really great analogies that hone in on this so you can really understand what we’re talking about here. The first one is a gardener versus a carpenter. Think of a carpenter—the carpenter has all of its tools and supplies, and they’re trying to frame this house to look a very specific way. A carpenter parent thinks that a child can be molded. Then we have a gardener—the gardener plants the seeds, gives the soil nutrients, waters the seeds, and really just helps them grow into whatever that flower, vegetable, or whatever you’re growing is going to look like. The gardener is less concerned about who the child will become and instead provides a protected space to really explore within boundaries. Sometimes when people hear about this role as a parent, they think, "Oh, do I just let my child do whatever they want or give them autonomy?" No, there are still boundaries in place. There’s still a framework. One of my favorite analogies—kind of going off a little bit—is to think of a puzzle. When you start a puzzle, you usually start with the edges, right? You do all the flat sides, and then inside, sometimes you’ll put all the pieces around and start putting the pieces together. It’s the same kind of concept. We want to put that border around, but then the kids in our lives get to move those pieces around inside and make their own choices and decisions about what their path is going to look like.

Yes, and to add to that, if you think about a different kind of seed—The gardener doesn’t get to decide what the plant grows into, right? You plant a tomato seed, it’s going to become a tomato. If you plant an orange tree, it’s going to become an orange. The amazing work that happens to take that seed from seed to fruit—the gardener is really just providing that environment. Depending on what the seed is, it might need more support. If you think about a pea seed that needs to grow on a lattice to be successful, the gardener is going to provide that lattice, that structure, in order for that specific seed to be able to flourish. Does that mean that every seed in the garden needs a lattice? No, right? It depends on that individual seed and what they need. The gardener is there to really hone in on what that individual seed needs. When you think of the carpenter—the carpenter is deciding what the thing is going to become. It’s a house, a table, or a chair. The wood they’re carving something out of doesn’t have any choices—there’s no life in it. I love this analogy because there is life in our kids. There’s life in our students. They have unique individual passions that are going to drive them throughout their lives. It’s really on us to create that environment for them to grow into that rather than to define it for them.

Yes. Can you think of any other frameworks?

Yes, okay, so this is one of my favorite ones. Think of yourself going from being a train conductor, keeping everybody on track and making sure we’re hitting all of the right schedules, to being a tour guide. If you’re a tour guide, you have a client who wants to go to a specific place, and your job is to help them get there. That might look different for every one of your clients. You’re not going to put them all on a train or an airplane—some of them are going to take boats, some of them are going to walk, some of them are going to be renting mopeds. The way to get there and the way they want to experience that learning have a high degree of variability. Your job is not to make everyone the same; your job is to help everyone get where they need to go.

Yes, totally. It’s just kind of like the consultant versus the manager too. I really like that one.

Yes, talk more about that one.

The manager is responsible for controlling the activities, dealings, and all that they’re doing for that other person, but a consultant provides expert advice and guidance. Yes, we’re still there to support our child, but we’re also helping them increase their stress tolerance by giving them the space to be able to bloom and be who they want to be and who they are created to be. It really helps us help them access their full potential.

That’s what all of this is about, right?

Absolutely. Speaking of the consultant role, that idea comes from a book called The Self-Driven Child. Spoiler alert: We will be interviewing the authors of The Self-Driven Child in an upcoming episode.

So exciting!

We’re really excited to learn from them.

That book is my favorite!

Yes, I’m super excited to have them on. They actually play a pretty big role in how and why my kids are educated the way they are now.

Okay, so we’re going to wrap up today. We’ve covered so much and went really deep. I would encourage you to go back, re-listen to the prompts, write them down if you didn’t have a chance to, and reflect on our role in our children’s lives.

Now it’s time for our question segment. We had a listener write in this question. This is from Becky: "It seems like it takes my daughter forever to do a day’s assignment. She takes many brain breaks. How can I motivate her to go along and get it done?"

Yes, I love this question. So many of us are in such a similar situation, and I think that no matter where you are, you’re going to be able to learn from Becky’s question here. The first thing I do whenever I’m in a situation like this is just like we practiced today. I’m going to turn inward and really focus on how I’m feeling in my body. If this situation—Becky, it’s tricky because you’re not here. If you were here, we’d really dig into how you’re feeling—your authentic feeling. So we have to kind of invent how you might be feeling. We might be wrong, but if I were in this situation or something similar, I would probably feel a little frustrated, a little impatient. I can feel myself getting to the end of my rope, I’ll say. I can feel that in my body. In this moment, when I’m sitting there and I can see that she’s taking more brain breaks or she’s not getting something done and I feel like, "I just wish we could get this over with," I’m going to just stop and feel that in my body. I actually like to do something where I thank my nervous system for helping protect me. So if I’m feeling frustrated or impatient, I’m going to focus on that feeling, find it in my body, take some deep breaths, and say, "Thanks for helping me stay safe. Thanks, frustration. Thanks, impatience. I see that you’re trying to protect me." Just doing that is going to help me get out of my sympathetic nervous system and back into a calm state where I can interact with my child in a way that won’t trigger their stress response. It always starts with you. What would you do next, Adriane?

Yes, yes. So what I would do next—find that calm in your body, and if you can’t, maybe don’t do it right away. Just take a little time. A really great way to find calm in your body too is to move it. As we’ve seen, movement really sparks and lights up different parts of the brain, and then we can access our frontal lobe and really start asking these reflective questions. Ask yourself, "How am I seeing my child? What am I believing about my child in this moment?" Because your interpretation of events basically causes your feelings. Another example—if I apply this to my child, I homeschool him. We use private teachers, but sometimes I get to be the teacher. To be the winner—the same thing happens: he’ll just walk away, just walk right away from the table. So I start to feel it in my body. "Okay, this is feeling anxious. Why am I anxious? Because I’m working and I only have so much time, and I can’t sit here all day long while he takes all these brain breaks." I start to realize all these thoughts and things that I have, and I start believing these things about him. I try not to apply labels, but I’m sure somewhere deep in my subconscious I do. Right? Like manipulative or whatever these other mindsets about my child that have probably been developed from childhood or other situations in my life that I start feeling and believing about him. So I just stop and go, "Okay, what am I believing about him in this moment?" Then, I try to get to a place where I just feel neutral. I then take deep breaths. If I can’t calm down, I’ll go over to the sink and try to trigger that vagus nerve, get into that parasympathetic mode. I’ll put cold water on my hands, or I’ll involve him as well. We’ll grab a ball and throw it at each other. I take the brain breaks with him, and then we can co-regulate our nervous systems together. Sometimes that’s all it takes to get them back to the table. Just having this awareness and being aware of what I’m thinking about and believing about him in that situation helps me regulate so much.

I love that. Just to add quickly, when kids are in this kind of distracted state, one of the main functions of your prefrontal cortex—which is the front part of your brain, your thinking brain, the part that enables you to pay attention and stay goal-directed—can become disconnected. Perhaps something in the course of your day has caused that little bit of disconnection. Taking that brain break with your child and really focusing on connection can actually help reconnect their brain to the prefrontal cortex, which will help them stay engaged and focused. Sometimes when our kids are avoiding things, they’re really looking for connection. Maybe there’s something she’s getting out—maybe she’s getting a little connection from you when you’re redirecting her and trying to help her stay focused. Instead, if we just took that brain break and dove really deep into the connection, the brain’s need for that would be satiated and we could prolong that focus a lot more.

Yes, I definitely see that. Also, because my child is gifted and very divergent, he has asynchronous development in the brain. There are parts of his brain that are way more developed than other kids his age, and then there are parts of his brain that are underdeveloped, like executive function. Just being mindful of your individual child’s unique development, not just based on what other kids her age could or should be doing at that time. We get into those "you should be able to..." tracks when clearly the behavior is demonstrating the development. So if she’s needing all these brain breaks, that’s not necessarily a problem—she’s just showing you where she’s at developmentally.

The right thing to do there is to, instead of sitting in judgment or saying, "This is a problem," just accept that that’s where we’re at on the journey. That’s really hard to do.

Just as Kaity was saying that, I was thinking, "But what if I don’t want to accept?" But this is part of the journey—it takes a while to get to that point.

Absolutely, absolutely. Okay, so the next thing—so we’ve done "How am I doing inside with my nervous system?" Then, the second thing we’re going to look at is how you’re seeing your child—that’s the second step. Then, the third question you’re going to ask yourself is, "What is my child needing?" Going back to our gardening analogies, if you are a gardener and you walk by a plant and you see that its leaves are yellowed or crunchy, you’re not going to get mad at the plant, right? You don’t label the plant as lazy or making your life difficult or anything like that. We just don’t do that with plants, right? But we do that with our kids, interestingly enough. Realizing that all behavior is information—get curious about why she needs these brain breaks and try to figure out what is the root cause of that behavior, what is being communicated—that’s the third step to this process. Anything to add there, Adriane?

An analogy that I use in my parent coaching is "root to bloom." Think about those roots beneath the surface and what they need in order for the flower to bloom. Figure out what’s happening beneath the surface. I was just talking to a mom this morning who’s very insightful, knows that she wants to figure out what’s happening beneath the surface, and she’s not just trying to stop the behaviors. But she was just like, "I can’t figure out what is happening." So maybe try to have some conversations whenever the child is calm and has that social engagement system online. Ask questions. You can do it through play; you can do it with stuffed animals or role-playing. Really try to get to the root cause of those behaviors so you can water that soil and give the soil the nutrients it needs in order to bloom.

I love that. Okay, so the fourth step in this process is something we call collaborative problem-solving. It would be easy to draw a lot of conclusions based on what we’re seeing, but we really want to engage the child in solving this problem. This framework comes from a book called Raising Human Beings by Ross Greene—highly recommend it. If I get to my calm, neutral state, and I’m seeing my child with curiosity, and I’ve worked through those labels, and I’ve spent some time thinking about what the root cause might be—I have some ideas, but now we’re going to go check those. Those are kind of hypotheses, and we’re going to go check them now with the child. I would say something like, "Hey, [child], I noticed that..." That’s your intro phrase. It’s not judgmental; it’s curious, and it’s very neutral. "I noticed that when we’re working, you’re taking a lot of brain breaks, and it’s taking us a long time to get through our work. What’s going on for you?" is your next question. So, "I noticed that..." describe what you’re seeing in a non-judgmental way, and then, "What’s going on for you?" Invite them to tell you, "Oh, I need those brain breaks because I just feel..." They’re going to give you all this information about what’s going on with them. If they’re little, if they’re really little, you can give them some ideas, and they can pick one, essentially.

We’ll grab the whiteboard and just pull that out, and they’ll throw out ideas, and I just jot them down on the whiteboard. If it’s a younger child, you can always use pictures or something like that so they can still feel in control of those choices and options.

That’s awesome. After they’ve expressed their needs, you’re going to share your own needs, like, "Thank you for sharing that with me. That’s really helpful for me to know. Here’s the thing: I only have..." Going back to Adriane’s example, "I only have this hour to be with you because I have these other things to do," or whatever your need is—why you can’t take all day to do the work. Or it could be something super positive, like, "I want to go play, so I would like to get the work done. How can we make a plan together to get both of our needs met?" They have these needs that they’ve just described; you have a valid adult need or constraint—something that needs to happen. Both of these things are valid—everyone has needs, and everyone’s needs are valid and important. When we come at situations in a more judgmental way, what we’re essentially saying is, "My adult need trumps your kid need." That’s not empowering to the child; it’s almost disrespectful, honestly. You would never do that to your best friend. You would always want both sides of the conversation, or both people’s perspectives, on the table. So we try to do that with kids, even if they’re little—it’s the most respectful thing you can do.

Which is really hard because, as an adult, it’s really easy to do that. You do control the schedule; you control all the things. There are lots of things we can do to motivate, control, or subtly manipulate kids into doing what we want because we’re bigger than them and we control everything.

And it’s so ingrained.

It’s so ingrained, yes.

Because we were manipulated in this way as children.

Yes.

But how powerful is it for a child to know, "Wow, my parent or teacher is really interested in what’s going on for me. They want to listen to me, understand me, and I’m going to be a powerful part of this plan to solve this problem in our community or family." That’s super empowering for them. So you make a plan, and then as part of that plan, you make a plan to check in on the plan. It’s like a meta-plan. It’s, "Okay, this is our plan, and how will we know if it’s working?" We’re going to have this little conversation in a week to see if it’s going well. If it’s not going well, you can make a new plan, and it’s just kind of continuing this collaborative problem-solving process that is respectful, engaging, and empowering to everyone.

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And simple. Both of your needs are met, which is really empowering, and we can stay out of that sympathetic nervous system we keep talking about.

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Another really practical tip or tool is to tap into play. That’s always my tool that I pull out of my toolbox—play. Depending on the age, just recently I couldn’t get my 6-year-old into the bath, so I started speaking in this scientist’s voice and really tapping into this playful character and saying funny things—things that mom wouldn’t normally say. My 13-year-old, 13, even was so excited and was kind of getting into it too. So play really can work for all ages, especially if it becomes a norm in your family. If she’s starting to get to the point where she doesn’t want to do the work anymore or maybe her brain is just getting tired—because our brains can get tired every 18 to 27 minutes—we really should be taking breaks.

That’s true!

It’s just our culture—that’s not something we typically do, especially in American culture, taking breaks and giving our brains and bodies a chance to rest. So you can tap into play even when you’re doing the lessons. That can make it more fun and really help strengthen that connection and bond that you have as well.

I love it! Okay, well, thanks for that question, Becky. We hope that we were helpful.

That’s it for today! We hope that you’ve enjoyed this episode. In the next episode, we’ll be talking with Bill Stixrud and Ned Johnson, the authors of The Self-Driven Child, which is one of our absolute favorite books. It’s foundational reading for anyone who’s interacting with young people, in my opinion. Go grab a copy, check it out.

Yes, it’s so good!

You can also check out the KindlED Resource Hub at prenda.com/kindled, where we have an awesome blog post that goes through the highlights if you don’t have time to read the whole book before we go.

Don’t forget to subscribe to KindlED wherever you get your podcasts, leave us a review, rate us, or share your favorite episode on social media, and don’t forget to tag us @PrendaLearn. For more KindlED content, like Kaity just said, head over to prenda.com/kindled. Don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter. Lastly, remember to submit questions or challenges you’re having to us via email. Every episode, we’ll pick a question to dive into, and Kaity and I will do our best to coach you through whatever you’re struggling with. We’d also love to hear your stories about how you have been able to empower the young people you support, so be sure to send us your questions, your stories, and really anything else that you want to share with us to podcast@prenda.com.

That’s P-R-E-N-D-A dot com. Thanks for listening, and remember to keep kindling!