Episode 121: Raising Complex Kids with Grace & Ease with Elaine Taylor-Klaus
/For this week’s episode, we are going to talk more about raising complex kids. And to help me in this conversation, I am joined by Elaine Taylor-Klaus. She is the co-founder and CEO of ImpactParents.com, an online support resource for parents of complex kids in the world, serving parents on six continents and more than a hundred countries. She is the author of 2 books including The Essential Guide to Raising Complex Kids with ADHD, Anxiety, and More -- a typical parenting book for kids who are not so typical.
Here's a summary of our conversation:
Four phases of parenting
Why is "self-talk" considered a self-care strategy for parents
How to raise complex kids with grace and ease
The importance of "leaning into a relationship" as an integral part of parenting
If you want to learn more about this parenting approach, follow Elaine on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
Elaine is offering a free gift to everybody. (Yay!)
If you go to ImpactParents.com/guide, you can get extra stuff that’s not in her book and more comprehensive information as well.
TRANSCRIPT
Parenting is often lived in the extremes. It's either great joy or chaotic, overwhelmed. In one moment, you're nailing it and the next you're losing your cool. I want to help you find your way to the messy middle, to a place of balance. You see balance is a verb, not a state of being. It is a thing you do. Not a thing you are. It is an action, a process, a series of micro corrections that you make each and every day to keep yourself feeling centered. We are never truly balanced. We are engaged in the process of balancing.
Hello, I'm Dr. Laura Froyen and this is The Balanced Parent Podcast where overwhelmed, stressed out and disconnected parents go to find tools, mindset shifts and practices to help them stop yelling at the people they love and start connecting on a deeper level. All delivered with heaping doses of grace and compassion. Join me in conversations that will help you get clear on your goals and values and start showing up in your parenting, your relationships, your life with openhearted authenticity and balance. Let's go!
Laura: Hello everybody, this is Dr. Laura Froyen and on this episode of The Balanced Parent Podcast, we're going to be talking all about complex kids. Kids who maybe are a little bit more anxious deals with some ADHD. And in general, are just a little bit more complex than your average kid and we're also going to be talking about how these kids often have complex parents that's you and so I'm so excited for this conversation and to help me with this conversation, we have Elaine Taylor-Klaus and I'm so excited to have her. Elaine, welcome to the show, why don't you tell us a little bit more about who you are, who you serve, and what you do?
Elaine: Thank you, I am really excited to be here and to have a really interesting conversation with you. I am Elaine Taylor Klaus, I am the co-founder of ImpactParents.com and the creator of a Behavior Training Program for Parents called Sanity School. and I answer that question in different ways with different people. I think what I want to say today is I help parents stay sane while raising complex kids and my mission in the world is to change the medical model so that we are empowering parents to empower kids to live with and learn to navigate whatever complex issues that come to life with instead of seeing them as problems that need to be fixed.
Laura: Oh my God, I love that. So I think so often we view these kids and often ourselves from a deficit model right? And you're wanting to do that.
Elaine: we have to fix them. So I just reject that because they're fascinating and they're amazing and they're incredible and we have to help them find that full expression of themselves and that's up to us and often starts with us.
Laura: Say more about that starts with us.
Elaine: It's everything that we want for our kids, starts with how we are being with ourselves and in relationships with them. My 1st 10 years as a mom, I was kind of a neurotic mess and I was anxious and I was overwhelmed and I was trying to do everything everybody expected of me and I wanted to raise these three fabulous, perfect kids who were brilliant and they were going to be, you know, I was, I come from the achievement elite, so they were going to achieve and do all this stuff and they weren't hitting the markers and I wasn't hitting the markers and it wasn't, it wasn't going so well and on the outside, it looked fine, but on the inside, it felt like it was like a crumbling house of cards and a lot of that was because I was out of sync with myself in terms of what my values were, what my expectations were for my kids, I was trying to impose society's expectations on my kids instead of kind of meeting them where they are and saying, okay who are you and what do you need to develop and who are you and how are you different, what do you need?
When I discovered coaching actually for me that was the big shift, I really found a vehicle I guess before coaching it was yoga first and then coaching, I often see coaching as the verbalization of yoga, it shifted my way of being in the world and I started to relax and chill out and allow them to be who they were and help them be the best of who they were and that's what shifted the dynamic in my relationship with them and their ability to really, they reached their potential, which I think each of them in their own way are doing masterfully or magically, I think I was standing in their way for a long time because I was standing in my own way.
Laura: It makes so much sense, you know, Elaine, I think we all want to feel seen and accepted for who we are, and if we've come up in a world where we weren't and we start imposing those things on ourselves, it's, it's natural and normal to then turn around and impose it on others.
Elaine: And I thought I was doing the right thing.
Laura: Of course the best thing.
Elaine: Doing what was best for them, but it wasn't what was best for.
Laura: No, and I think it's incredibly brave to start acknowledging that that hey, I've been getting it wrong and now it's time to make some changes and I also think something that our listeners, I would feel really blessed to hear a little bit about Elaine, I know a lot of people listening right now are thinking that it's too late but they've already messed up their kids Or you know, if they're just discovering this now and their kids are, you know, 10, 11, 12, that it's too late, I heard you say the 1st 10 years of your parenting journey, which means your oldest was around 10 when I was.
Elaine: 12. 10 to 12 when things started to change.
Laura: Change. And so if it's okay with you, I would love to hear about that.
Elaine: I just have to process a little bit how I want to respond to it. It's a great framework for thinking about it. First of all, it's never, ever, ever, ever too late to improve your relationship with yourself and your kids ever. I don't care how old they are. We often say it impact parents, we work with parents and kids 3 to 33 I've been doing a huge amount of work in the pandemic with parents and young adults because, you know, young adults are living at home at times now when we didn't expect them to and it's creating a lot of friction and a lot of joy.
I mean, there's a lot of good that's coming out of it as well. So, parents of young adults are seeking help differently now than they were just fabulous. But it doesn't really matter how old your kid is because what I'm talking about, and I think the work that you do is about relationship, right? It's about how are we being in relationship when this is set before with ourselves and with our kids and it doesn't matter how old you are or they are, that it's never too late for that to change.
Well, now what I will say is that I have, I have three kids who are now, and 27. So my youngest was six, kind of when this whole world started shifting for them about 4-6, and my oldest, was you know, 10-12. And the difference in how they move through the world is noticeable, it does have to do with how we were as parents with the eldest versus the youngest. Now, some of that is probably the eldest versus the youngest, and you know, there's all these other dynamics at play.
Laura: It's never all our fault.
Elaine: It's not fault, but I will say my eldest, I think struggles with a lot more anxiety and a lot more self extinguishes in part because I wasn't supporting them earlier as well as I could have, I'm not beating myself up for that, it's just the reality and we've talked about it, they, and I have talked about it, but I did see a big difference with my youngest who is very much wired similarly to his older sibling, but his whole way of being in the world was different because he was so young when we started working with him differently, raising him differently.
Laura: So what are some of the things that you do differently? Can you detail some of the things that have changed for you?
Elaine: I shifted from this achievement model that says, here are the milestones you have to hit and I expect you to because you're smart and they're all wicked smart but that doesn't mean that school is what they do well or yeah they struggle, well one does but a couple do but if they struggle with executive function or you know or if they're dealing with their own issues of anxiety or depression or ADHD.
Like I had to stop fitting my kids into the square pegs that the world told me they were supposed to fit into and start looking at these beautiful star shaped circles shaped shaped crescent shapes that they were and that meant a lot of things. I mean for me I call it a coach approach.
I used skills from the world of coaching to communicate differently with my kids. I'm not their coach, I don't want to be their coach, I want to be their parent but I bring coaching skills to our communication and that changes how I empower them to take ownership of themselves to become more independent to have a sense of agency in their lives and that's I think probably the biggest shift was I stopped trying to make them behave the way everybody wanted them to and started helping them figure out what was important to them what how did they want to do what they want to learn.
You know I'm a big believer of not letting school get in the way of our kids education because it can do that, you know? And so I really wanted them to be lifelong learners and they all are, that doesn't mean they all did great in school.
Laura: Some of those expectations that I think are so deeply ingrained in our culture, that it's really hard to let them go, and that's where this self coaching comes in to where you have to be working with yourself as a coach. Can you talk a little bit about that about like how self coaching can help?
Elaine: My most recent book is called The Essential Guide to raising complex kids and at the end of every chapter, I had a section on self care because we believe that self care is integral as a parent with our entire methodology. Our model is circled in self care. I really believe that we got to take care of ourselves, we gotta keep our fuel tank full to be able to support our kids. I was working on the book and I was trying to get all these different concepts from staying in the school in the book and get it make it make sense to make it work.
It became real clear to me that how we talk to ourselves is a really powerful kind of self and we often think of self care as, you know, bubble baths and gloves and there's the doing of it, but there's this being of it, that's even more important. It's more foundational. And so I shifted the way I was talking about self care to talk about what are the messages I'm sending myself? How kind am I to myself and my beating myself up. And like I said, I did this yesterday, I did something like I'm such an idiot.
And then I said, no, I'm not an idiot, I just made a mistake and I literally said this to myself because we have to rewire those scripts that we have that say we're not worthy, we're not good enough, we're not deserving of love, like all of these things that happen to everyone in our childhood and the impostor syndrome that all of us have this human experience and part of caring for ourselves is parenting ourselves lovingly as we move into adulthood and and not beating ourselves up, but learning how to motivate ourselves by empowerment and positivity instead of by, you know, making us wrong and punishing ourselves. Which a lot of us do. I did for a long time.
Laura: I think you're so right. I think even as we are making changes into more respectful, conscious and connected parenting, we still use those same oppressive and coercive tools that we have stopped using on our kids. We still use them on ourselves, we still hit ourselves with the blame and shame.
Elaine: Because they stimulated whatever they got us to do stuff and it's not just because they work doesn't mean it's a great strategy.
Laura: You know, I was just talking with my members and my balancing new community to about this, about how important it is to be doing this self talk work, this inner work where we're changing our narratives and our scripts and not just because it's good for us and it is even if you didn't have kids, it would be good to be doing this work, but it's also the way we talk to ourselves impacts our mood and our energy and our tone of voice and our posture as we go in to holding a limit or a boundary with our kids, anything.
Elaine: Anything and everything. We do something called the tone of the home, and we talk about what we're contributing to creating the tone in our home and as parents often times, particularly when you've got complex kids, parents kind of relinquish the tone to their kids and they feel like they're walking on eggshells and the kids are floating or melting down or whatever it is, and it leaves parents feeling really powerless and I really believe that when we become conscious of that we can create the tone that we want in the home, and kids begin to respond to that, right? So you can shift your home from a yelling home to a calm home by shifting how you're approaching different dynamics.
Laura: Yes, 100%. Okay, so I feel like we're kind of talking and kind of nebulous kind of, I thought, yeah, conceptual things can we get it down into like some of the like the nitty gritty is okay, like what does this actually look like in the house, you know, like in a family?
Elaine: So here's what I would say, let's talk about what we call the four phases of parenting, Okay, It's still a little conceptual, but it's starting to get a little more practical and I think it's it's a really important framework for understanding that can we do that? Okay. What I'm about to share comes from years of working with and kind of observing what happens in family dynamics. So my business partner and I, Diana, were both practitioners, were both providers, but we're also kind of big picture thinkers, so we have this ability to kind of take the meta view and then come back and say, okay, how do we address it?
And so what we've identified is that there are really four phases in parenting that all parents go through or ideally go through, not all actually make it through, but what we're looking for. Okay, and the four phases, the phase one is a director to his collaborator, Rhea supporter Forest Champion. So Phase four is the director, we all start there, everybody starts there, that's that we're telling them what to do, how to do it and helping them find motivation to do it. We are the director, we hold the agency, it's our agenda right?
And we all start there, you have to you have babies right? The next stage is called collaboration, ideally the sooner we can begin to move into collaboration with our kids the better in different ways. You're not going to go 1234 as a parent, you're going to be dancing with your kids in different ways, depending on what the issues are. So you might have a kid who needs you to collaborate with them on getting their homework done but is ready for you to be supporting them while they hold the agenda in Phase three, because while they're getting their sports stuff together because they're motivated to do that.
So Phase two is collaboration where we begin to share the agenda with them, it's not ours, it's not theirs, it's shared. So we might be asking more questions here, reminding them of what's going on beginning to get their motivation and their buy in. Phase three is when they start taking ownership and now we move into a support role were like the roadies, you know, we're taking them to the mall, but they've scheduled their event with their friends to go to the mall were in support role and we want to be there because that means they're taking agency over their life and I don't care if it's social or school or whatever.
Any opportunity that they have to start taking more and more agency of their life is preparing them to become an adult And there's forest champion and very few of us get there before the kids are about 25 and because our kids, they need more collaboration and support if kids are doing well and and more independent, you'll be more in this phase in college. But let's say exams come, they may need you to move back into more of a support role while they're dealing with more stress and then they're ready for you to move back into that championing role championing is when you're kind of checking in and saying how's life, kid, how you doing, you know, way to go, anything you need help with.
So these are kind of the four phases and what we see a lot with parents is that parents tend to be in director mode and with complex kids, we tend to get stuck there and we don't really know how to keep moving, we're afraid our kids can't do whatever we're asking them to do. And then the kids hit puberty and they start saying back off mom or dad, I'm done and we, as parents go okay, you want to do it yourself fine, you do it yourself.
When we switch to phase four we just like you're on you do it and then they falter because they're not really ready to do it themselves and then we say, see I told you you couldn't do it yourself and we justify going back to phase one And taking control again where our kids need us to be probably 90% of the time is in phases two and 3 collaborate and then support, collaborate, support, take aim on one thing, let them take more leadership on it, let them become independent on it.
Next thing one at a time, it's like passing the baton one at a time, that's what I think what makes it real is to think in terms of, I've been talking about this in in business audiences lately lately, onboarding our kids to adulthood, that's our job as a parent is to prepare our kids to become independent and to become independent problem solvers and we can't do that if we don't bring them into the process of problem solving to collaborate with them so that they have a say they have a voice, they have a sense of ownership of what's going on. So I'll stop because I know that was a lot.
Laura: No, no, I love this and I think you're so right. I think we do get stuck in that director phase and because I would love to take a little detour for just a second and say, have you say a little bit more about what you mean by complex kids. I think that that's probably a way to refer to some kids that parents haven't heard before and I think we're used to hearing things like spirited or strong willed or Yeah, quirky out of the box, you know what do you mean by complex kids?
Elaine: By complex kids. I mean kids who struggle with some aspect of life we're learning we're both plain and simple. I have three complex kids. One kid with ADHD. And a bunch of learning disabilities and depression and anxiety I want and a lot of medical issues. So a lot of medical stuff any kind of chronic condition qualifies as complex as something that you have to learn to manage. Um I have another kid with ADHD. Dyslexia and anxiety.
Another kid with with depression and ADHD. You know like they've all got their stuff but at the end of the day it was how that impacted their ability to do what was expected of them or to function comfortably in life or at school or both. And you know these days with the pandemic everybody's complex. We are now parents and kids in complex times right? And so it's kind of the same thing and we've got to really be attentive to who are they and what do they need and how do we help them learn to navigate this challenge that they're facing in the world whether it's a personal challenge from inside of them or an external challenge from hybrid schooling or whatever.
Laura: Absolutely. Okay I was listening to this and they're realizing that they've been stuck in that kind of director place where they're telling their kids what's important they are. You know maybe being a little bit micromanage with their kids and they're realizing, Okay, so my kids, you know, five now we butt heads a lot. We have a lot of power struggles and this might be one of the reasons. So what would you recommend to that parent or caregiver who's in that place?
Elaine: Number one tool and moving into collaboration is to start asking questions, turn everything you can into a question instead of saying it's time to do your homework, you might say do you have homework tonight instead of saying you need to eat before such and such and you might say, do you feel like you might need a snack right now to begin to ask a question so that they're checking in and answering it.
They're thinking and processing and bonding because that will give them a sense of ownership. So that's probably the number one tool in collaboration phase is to really ask questions, start sentences with the word, but what do you want to do this evening? When do you want to do your homework? Giving them more choices? But for them to have some framework for it, stop using words like we, we have to do our homework and we don't have to do our work. They have to do homework. We are not doing calculus.
Laura: We don't hit in our family for younger kids. Yes, I think taking the collective we out of, oh my God, get it out.
Elaine: except for, here's one place where collective we I think is really powerful, which is we Taylor-Klaus stick together. Right? When you're communicating family values. Yes, of course. We support each other in our family, right? We go to each other's games and shows and whatever. That's where I think the collective we becomes really important because you want to create the sense of team in your family.
Laura: I think kids should have agency and say in those collective values to, I sit down with my girls and we talk about like, what do we want it to feel like to be in our family?
Elaine: Yeah. What's one of my favorite exercises I used to do is, you know, the 20 year look back, how do you want your family? So I do it with parents And then you can bring it to the kids looking back 20 years from now, what do you want your kids as adults to look back and remember about their childhood? You know, and for us, I remember my husband, I wrote it down for him. He wanted the kids to cook with him.
He wanted music in the house and he wanted the wrestling playing. You know, for me it was hiking and I can't remember at the moment because I'm on the spot with it. But dinner table conversations and something else. And when you look back on their childhood, that's what you'll see because we identified it and then we brought it to them and we said these are the things that are important to us. What do y'all think? And they were like, oh that that all sounds good.
Laura: I think that's beautiful. I also really like asking these questions and getting curious. I think it's so important not just for moving out of that director role and into that collaborator role for us, but for them they need the skill of being able to check in with themselves and listen to their body to hold themselves accountable to keep track of their assignments. And if they have trouble with those things and they can come to us and we can help them figure this out. But that sense of we're here to support it, support them.
Elaine: And never went to where we can teach our kids bar none is to ask for help. And if we can teach them to ask for help without shame, right or embarrassment or judgment. And we model that by doing it for ourselves by the way. Funny that. But if we can teach them to ask for the help they need without feeling bad about it. That will set them up for life better than anything, especially in the US we have such this notion that we're supposed to be independent and we're supposed to do it on our own and I don't know about you.
But I don't cut my own hair. You know, I don't do my own taxes like being God asking for help because it makes a difference for how open they will be to the help they need as they get older and can I share one more thing that just came up because I was just thinking if the number one skill moving into collaboration is asking questions and we often say is I love that you brought the word curious, we say get curious, not furious.
The number one skill in the support role is asking permission and I think of it as kind of like a veritable knock on the door because you wouldn't knock on a person's door and just open it up once kids are ready for you to be in a support role around something and usually that's gonna happen, middle school, high school, it's not happening that much in elementary school, in little ways it will, once they're ready for it, you want to stop assuming that it's your job and your responsibility to teach them everything you want them to learn and you want to start asking their permission effectively for you to teach them what you want them to learn to be able to say, I have a thought, would you like to hear it? I have an idea, can I share it with you once they say yes, they're controlling that dynamic and they're taking ownership of that information in a different way, they're gonna receive it differently and they'll be much more likely to use it.
Laura: Yes, I'm so glad that you mentioned this, this is so important, it's really important. It would have been really important for me growing up. That was not how it was done in my house growing up. I think that I would have a much better relationship with my dad now if it had been done that way, but it's really important for my oldest daughter, she's almost nine and I mean I just like just the other day we were out playing tennis and our cul de sac and I'm a good tennis player, I have, you know, thoughts on how she's playing and when I played with my dad as a kid, He had no problem telling me all the things I was doing wrong and all the ways I should be doing it right?
And I don't want that relationship with my daughter because I want to grow up and have her be, you know, 25, 30, and on the weekends when we see each other we can go play tennis, I can't do that with my dad now as much as I love him, like I will not go play tennis with him because that's a boundary that I have to do to protect our relationship now, but I don't want that with my daughter and so when we're doing things like that, I asked her, I have a thought a little tip, are you open to hearing it or do you not want any tips right now? And she'll just tell me, no, I don't want any tips. I just want to play and have fun.
And I'm like, okay, that's good, and that's it is, but at the same time it's hard because I grew up thinking that this is how you interact around sports or things with your parents, you know, This is that was my experience growing up. I think that this is we haven't gotten to talk about this a lot that a lot of us who are raising complex kids were complex or continue to be complex ourselves and it's hard to let go of the way we were directed instead of collaborated with, you know, Anyway, do you have thoughts on those things?
Elaine: So many? Yeah, I mean, I think that we have to be present to the kids, the parents we are and the kids were raising and that means unlearning some of the things that we learned growing up and unlearning sometimes some of the patterns we've already got with our kids to put new patterns into place. And if we always think about how is this contributing to their agency, to their independence, to their capacity to self manage or self regulate. If that's always in the back of our mind, then we're no longer trying to get them to perform a certain way, We're trying to empower them to learn how to be in the world, it's a different framework.
And so whether you're asking questions we're asking permission, we part of what we want to do is help our kids learn to take what lesson they have to learn from something instead of making sure they learn the lesson we think they should learn. That's what happens in that support role. So if we say go to your tennis example, you have to hold the racket like this instead of that for a backhand, you want to teach them that early, but then when they start playing with a backhand at some point and they're not doing it in a way.
Instead of saying you need to change your grip, you might say, well what is it about your grip? If you're asking permission, I have an idea, I want to offer, you might want to explore playing with different grips or have you thought about how your grip is impacting your hit, This is a really simple example, but instead of saying you need to hold it this way, you want to be saying, raising the question of the weird example, but the grip on the, on the racket and let them figure out what the answer is for them.
Laura: It's not a weird example, I think it's a great example because in the former when you just tell them what, change your making your robbing them of the opportunity to learn and experience for themselves. I talked about this with play with young children, I'm a little bit of a play enthusiast, but like when a baby is reaching for a toy and object that's just out of their reach and we go and we take it and we hand it to them, we rob them of the opportunity to find their movement and their will and their and their determination and their grit that we've taken away from them, and it's exactly the same.
Elaine: Right. And only when it comes to ideas, we feel like we're supposed to tell them. The interesting thing is that if we tell them they're much, much, much less likely to hold that information and use it than if they discover it for themselves.
Laura: Yes. And there's some dynamics with some children who if we tell them they will reject it. And just because just because we told them, yes, gosh, Elaine, this was such a great conversation. I so appreciate all of these things that we've been talking about. I wanted to just ask you one last question, this is from a listener, and if you don't mind, is that okay?
Okay, So she's got a four-year-old who has always been very sensitive, very emotionally ups and downs, and sometimes gets stuck in things where she asks her something, doesn't go exactly right? Like mom is on her right side, instead of her left side when they walk out the door, she kind of wants to redo the whole leaving process, like go back inside, take her socks and shoes off, put them back on and go back out the way that she wanted it to happen and if that doesn't happen then there's a big meltdown in tantra and I feel kind of curious about how you would approach this with this family from your model and framework.
Elaine: So two things come up. The first is to say that I'm not quick to say this, so I'm gonna, but I'm going to be direct, this is a kid you may wanna watch and have evaluated because that is not even for a four year old all the way going back to starting the process over. That's a flag for potential obsessive compulsive behaviors.
Laura: Yes, it certainly is raises anxiety flags for me too.
Elaine: So it is something I would watch and look at a lot of our kids are outside of the realm of typical and that's fine until it interrupts with their life, until it interferes with their life describing is something that potentially interferes because you can't leave the house unless you do it just right. That's an interference with.
Laura: Absolutely. And just for everybody listening, pursuing a diagnosis, gives your kids access to resources and support and gives you and your families access to the support you need to be able to support them. I know you mentioned earlier about moving outside of the medical model, but the medical model is the way the world works sometimes and so sometimes if you need access to resources and support it can use it and take it with a grain of salt and it does not need to come on board as part of any identities or you know.
Elaine: But I am a believer in letting diagnosis not a bus because then understand what you're dealing with and you can learn to manage it without a diagnosis. Your kids are going to make up that they're lazy, crazy or stupid. Yes, and that's not a very constructive approach. So that I would say I would absolutely encourage that that child be evaluated in terms of our framework. I might take aim.
So I know that when you're dealing with those kinds of repetitive behaviors, you actually wanna, you don't wanna over support, you want to accommodate a child, but not to a point where you're allowing it to interfere. So you might take aim on one aspect of that. Like you might take aim on being able to walk on both sides of the child and tackling that issue and not dealing with the socks and the shoes and the everything else.
But just saying to the kid, I think it would be really helpful for all of us if we could walk on both sides of what kinds of things could we do to create a way for you to be comfortable with that and really tackle one issue very, very specifically a specific place and time and work on supporting your child and being okay with that change and let and continue to sort of accommodate the rest of it as you get that one place addressed and then you move on to the next. In our work, we talked about taking aim because you can't do anything about mornings or getting out of the door or homework.
Those are big concepts with tons of steps in them, but if you can take aim on one thing at a time really specifically, and even if you can apply it to a particular time, you know, we can take aim on siblings not hitting each other at the breakfast table in the morning before school. Yes, the more specific you get, the easier it is to address it and to get some success with it and the success will breed more success.
Laura: Yes.
Elaine: But that's what I would say is taking one very little tactical part of it. You've got a sensory kids, so you might also look to have an occupational therapy evaluation because there's some sensory stuff going on, but begin to be aware that some kids have sensory issues and so we want to anticipate them and support them in it as they learned to navigate.
Laura: 100%. I love that you're talking about this really like specific and granular piece and I think parents, I talked about this with parents about getting really specific. They don't want to because they see, you know, the sibling squabbles as one issue sibling squabbles at the breakfast table before school and sibling squabbles at the breakfast table on the weekends and sibling squabbles while playing legos in the afternoons are all different.
Elaine: Why are they different? There's a million different reasons. Different.
Laura: Absolutely.
Elaine: And so you want to get to the underlying cause of the behavior. You want to figure out what's motivating the behavior and you can't do that if you're treating all three of those as if they're the same thing because they're not…
Laura: I also think to that kid's store the information about what is causing the behavior in different places. So if you say, you know, picking on your sister, this big global thing, they don't know where to go to to get the information for why that's happening. It's like being really, really specific tells them like which folder and file to go into to find the piece of information for like what's going on there and why it's happening.
Elaine: And then you can really help them change that behavior more specific. You get, the more you can help them adjust the behavior, the more broad you get, the harder it is and the more frustrated everybody's going to be.
Laura: Right and not even adjust the behavior, but adjust the circumstances so that the behavior isn't necessary.
Elaine: Sometimes we talk about in terms of sometimes it's about prevention and sometimes it's about management, right? And so there are definitely things that we, as parents could do better to prevent some of the upsets that happen in our homes. We know our kid doesn't like to rush and yet we're still rushing out the door every day, like we're setting ourselves up for failure.
So if we know like I remember with my kids sitting down and having one of these, I don't want another morning like this to you and we all sat down and like no, these mornings have got to change the solution they came up with, I never would have come up with because they wanted to get up half an hour earlier, I was all about but you gotta get your sleep and I like my sleep but I did not want to do it, but they all said no, we just need more time in the morning mom, you're not giving us enough time to put around and sure enough everybody got up earlier and the whole, it changed everything about mornings. We ended up being late for school because we were having interesting conversations instead of because everybody was yelling at each other right lovely. But it started with them coming up with a solution not me…
Laura: I think that we underestimate kids abilities to come up with really creative, lovely solutions all the time. Indeed. Okay, so Elaine this was a wonderful life giving conversation. I'm so glad to have gotten to meet you and talk with you. Will you tell our listeners where they can find you and connect with you?
Elaine: Absolutely. So so you can find me at impactparents.com and we were talking a little bit about the book so I'm happy to offer everybody a free gift if you go to ImpactParents.com/guide, there's a some extra supplemental stuff that's not in the book and it can give you information about the book as well.
But there's a piece about three things not to say to parents of complex kids. That's kind of funny and and as parenting this up in the pandemic supplement, if we're still in that when you hit that then it will be useful. So ImpactParents.com /guide. The book is called the Essential Guide to raising complex kids with ADHD. Anxiety and more and I wanted it to have like a whole bunch of titles you know ADHD. Anxiety, depression, autism blah blah blah but defeated by the publisher so…
Laura: I can understand more.
Elaine: Yeah I just thought it would be really funny if it got smaller and smaller print but you know it would have been harder to say. So but it's designed to be a typical parenting book for kids who aren't so typical and as a parent of complex kids I kept reading the parenting books and they kept making me feel like I was the worst parent in the world. And so I really wanted to write a book that every parent of a complex kid of any kid really can use and feel empowered as a parent and not like you're doing it wrong.
Laura: I love that. I think that so many of the parents that I am blessed to get to work with, feel so misunderstood by all of the other, the kind of common parenting advice and they hear their their friends at the park, they will just use timeouts or and those things aren't great for all kids, but they certainly don't work for these complex kids and parents who don't have one of these complex kids don't get it. You know, I have one and one who's not so complex, I have one and if I had just my younger one, I wouldn't get it either.
Elaine: Yeah. Well I remember parents used to say to me friends would say to me, you just need to if you would just if you would just yes, oh my gosh, it just makes you just crazy because if you would just understand what it's like in my house after five p.m. You would not say that to me right? But …
Laura: I agree.
Elaine: It's a process of learning to navigate it and manage it and it's our job as parents is to understand our kids well enough so that we can help them understand themselves well enough so that they can learn to become whoever they really want to be in the world.
Laura: Who they were meant to be…
Elaine: Who they were meant to be and that starts with us.
Laura: So good, thank you so much for that.
Elaine: I really enjoyed this conversation, Laura, thank you for having me.
Laura: Thank you so much for being here.
Okay, so thanks for listening today. Remember to subscribe to the podcast and if it was helpful, leave me a review that really helps others find the podcast and join us in this really important work of creating a parenthood that we don't have to escape from and creating a childhood for our kids that they don't have to recover from.
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All right. That's it for me today. I hope that you keep taking really good care of your kids and your family and each other and most importantly of yourself. And just to remember, balance is a verb and you're already doing it. You've got this