Hello, and welcome back to this Simplicity Parenting podcast with me, Kim John Payne. This week, a little bit of a special edition. You know, here at Simplicity Parenting Institute, there's a whole team that stands behind what we do.
You know, you hear from me each week in this podcast, but we have all kinds of help with tech in our organization with outreach, with training, all kinds of things going on, which is just thrilling. It's wonderful to see how this movement has grown and grown and grown to meet the needs that we're asked to meet and support parents, particularly at this time. We have, we always run a series of training programs.
In fact, we've got over a thousand Simplicity Parenting coaches and group leaders around the world, very much a grassroots movement, very much just meeting the needs in communities all around the planet. And we run courses for care professionals who are helping parents in all kinds of different ways, teachers, nurses, doctors, therapists, and so on. And this podcast is a really special one.
When we were recording it for our care professionals training, it occurred to the team, to David and Sarah and I, gosh, this is so appropriate to be able to put out to you, our podcast listeners. In some ways, it's skewed towards care professionals, at least that's what we thought. But when we listened to it, we thought, you know what? This is really appropriate for parents as well.
So hope you enjoy it. And it's a two-part series this week and next week. And for anyone who's struggling with a child that is not doing so well, this, or you know of someone who might need support with it, particularly with that, those kinds of issues that just need that extra kind of support.
I hope this podcast will be useful to you. In fact, I'm almost sure it will be. Okay, here we go.
Welcome to this special conversation, how to help parents navigate a world that pathologizes their children. I'm David Levin with the Simplicity Parenting Institute. And I'm here today with Kim John Payne, author of Simplicity Parenting, and Sarah Jeffries, licensed marriage and family therapist and certified Simplicity Parenting group leader.
Hi, Kim, Sarah, good to be with you. Hi. Hi, David.
It's really, it's nice to see you. Hi, Sarah. Hi, David and Kim.
Our conversation today is primarily for care professionals, therapists, school counselors, social workers, teachers, people who work with children and families in a professional capacity. But it's also for parents of children who are working with a professional of some kind, and even adults who are doing that work themselves. So Kim, to get started, the title of this conversation is how to help parents navigate a world that pathologizes their children.
So what do you mean by a world that pathologizes their children first, and then why do parents need help navigating it? You know, we're living in a world where we're coming out of a long tradition, where we tend to label kids, where we, and every clinician knows this, right? You know, where we label our kids, where there's a well-meaning, very well-meaning attempt to actually understand. And I think rather than, rather than pathologize and limit a child with a label, at Simplicity Parenting, what we're trying to do is name and know. And naming and knowing is really different from pathologizing and limiting.
And naming and knowing a behavior, and naming and knowing, and really sensing, what is this child trying to bring to the world? And how are they bringing it in their own individual, albeit quirky way? But how are they bringing it to the world? And how can we set up the environment outside them, the family systems? How can we help parents, as clinicians, build a world around these children that enables them to be the beautiful kids they are, but at the same time, have them be able to navigate and be in the world at the same time, rather than pretending to be someone they're not? And that's, that's what we've been doing with the Simplicity Parenting movement over a good number of years now. And I'd say that gets to the core of it, really. Sure, but say a little more about sort of the world, the situation that parents need help navigating.
A little more about the sort of the natural pressures in the world against that approach. Well, I've got to say, no one means it. But when you get, when you have a parent come to you, and they're carrying a label, their child has been given this label, it tends to start to narrow down the, each label comes with its own specific treatment protocol, usually.
So the label leads to the protocol. And that's not altogether a bad thing in itself. But how can, rather than label protocol, be switched to knowing the gesture of something, and then working, rather than just leading it to like a bullet pointed protocol, to actually seeing what kind of environment does this child need to be able to be in the world in a really healthy way, get to the end of the day, you know, be sleeping, going to sleep at night and feeling pretty good about the world.
Now when parents come to us as counselors, therapists, and so on, usually, and Sarah, you'd be able to say more about this as well, of course, usually they're coming with a narrowing down, like a real kind of, well, like, again, that sort of pathologizing of a child, really, it's pretty narrow. And the reason that I think navigating is such a good word is that it's not that one just turns away from the standard diagnoses and the DSM-5 and so on, it's all there, and it's all very helpful. But how do we open the aperture wider than that? How do we actually see the whole child in their whole environment? And that's where we can work strategically, pretty much, with a parent.
And when you start doing that with a parent, you just see them relax, because that's the child they know. That's the child that they held in their arms when they were just a few minutes old. You see the parents say, okay, so this counselor, therapist, really wants to help my child and me and is going to open this up and free this up.
And that feeling of freedom and of knowing is something that's almost palpable when you speak with parents in this way. Yeah. So, Sarah, I know you have your own experience of this, too.
Jump in there, if you would, your own perspective and your experience with this. Yeah, I would agree with Kim's thoughts. As a clinician and a parent myself, I can see how the pathology paradigm really shapes the way that I interpret information.
It shapes the way that I interpret behaviors. It determines what sort of questions I ask and how I ask them. It really is the lens that we look through as clinicians and as parents that brings us to a place of asking what is wrong with my child or this child instead of asking what can help my child or this child.
It really is a paradigm that assumes that there's only one right or healthy way of being and that any divergence from that is wrong. And so parents can come to us feeling like their child is bad or broken instead of seeing that their child has a unique struggle or challenge. I really do appreciate Kim's thoughts on how we also need to look at how the child is part of and affected by the environment around them and their relationships and the family structure.
Yeah, yeah. That makes a lot of sense. So I've heard you both talk about behaviorism as being a part of this problem we're talking about.
So what is behaviorism in this context, if you would? And what problems does that lens cause? Maybe Sarah, you can talk about that in terms of the behavioristic approaches you've encountered and some of the damage, frankly, that can do. Can you say a little more about that? Yeah. So behaviorism uses this pathology paradigm lens.
It labels behaviors as good or bad instead of seeing that all behaviors serve a function and are a type of communication. This insistence on replacing behaviors with a more desirable or more normal behavior by using rewards or punishments really ignores behavior as a communication and gets in the way of connection. It ignores that behavior can be a stress response to things in stimulating the environment.
It ignores that it could be maybe dysregulation rather than just willful disobedience. Behaviorism, whether it's positive or negative, really punishes the child if they do not or if they cannot comply. I really think that it's through connection and relationship that children feel safe and they can co-regulate and learn to self-regulate.
As a child therapist myself, I know that the relationship the child has with a trusted adult is paramount to them helping them overcome any challenges that comes their way. And I feel like behaviorism sometimes is the wedge between parents and children. Yeah, to add to that, Sarah, you know, one of the things that you've heard me say often is that I don't believe in disobedient kids.
I've never met a disobedient kid and I've been a school counselor and I've met some right little rotters, I can tell you, some little buggers. But I don't believe in disobedience. What I see over and over is disorientation and I don't mean that as semantics.
A child is disoriented. And if that's a beginning point to when we're helping a parent to understand that a child is disoriented, that behavior is just communication, then a couple of magic things happen because then we get into what I think of as the wonder of wondering, like, hmm, I wonder what is disorienting my child as opposed to labeling and pathologizing. And so it opens possibilities without letting go of the fact that there's stuff that's not going so well.
Otherwise, they're not coming to us. So stuff is not going well, but it opens that wondering as opposed to closing it down. And the moment you stop pulling on a knot, you never undo a knot by pulling on it, you open, you open space, you open it, you open it out until you can see the shape of it.
Because if you pull on a knot, you can never really see the shape of it. If you open it out, you go, oh, so that's what's going on. So it's that kind of gesture that we're trying to very much inculcate.
And the other aspect of behaviorism is that it's transactional rather than relational. It's all transactional. You eventually have a kid doing something not because it's right, but because it's advantageous.
Because it's punishments and rewards, privileges, removal of privileges. So you end up with kids becoming expert negotiators where everything is up for negotiation. And in that sense, what we're talking about out of the simplicity parenting approach is that we're talking about a relational approach where you connect before you direct.
And we're talking about building relationship in a wider lens. So again, relational versus transactional. Yeah, that's great.
So you sort of touched on this even to that answer, but this pathologizing behaviorism approach is the norm. And as you say, it's well-intentioned, but it's clearly causing some real problems. So what is the alternative? How can providers help parents navigate all this? Sarah, do you want to give some leading thoughts? And maybe I could follow up if I may.
Sarah, to you? Yeah. So oftentimes in my practice, families come in with a child who has many labels. They feel lost and unable to help their child.
They're sidelined by the experts who know the labels but don't know their individual child. And then they're given maybe behavioral interventions that when they fail, the blame is placed on the parent who implemented them or the child themselves. Never behaviorism itself.
The simplicity parenting approach puts parents back in connection with their child. It gives them the power of understanding that they can make small changes in their environment, in their family life to help their children. It allows parents to feel empowered again and encourages them by understanding that there is no such thing as a disobedient child, just a disoriented one.
And that they do have the ability to reorient their child. I see this as making such a difference in helping the parents that I work with reconnect with their children and learn strategies to stay connected during maybe the more difficult parts of being a parent. And I'd add to that, Sarah, a couple of things, just two things.
One is that the changes that we bring is small and doable. Because of that, just really working and refining in on rather than having a list of things that a parent needs to do to fix things. Although there's very few therapists who would actually do that.
But it stands behind us. It's there. It's in our training, that way of dealing with it.
As opposed to having that doability and listening in carefully to think, OK, there's some really important things to do here. But they may be out of reach for this parent right now. What can we do out of these five major pathways of simplicity parenting? Where is it that we could have a beginning point where a parent would get to the end of the day, be tidying up around the lounge room, whatever they're doing, putting those last things away in the kitchen and thinking, you know what, that was OK today.
That really feels OK. Because it's small and it's doable. The second thing I wanted to add to that is that one of the things that we work with a lot is this principle of the quirk spectrum, whole new spectrum, is that every child has their quirks.
I'm not denying that in any way. It's what makes them lovable and infuriating. And it just makes them who they are.
That's their quirk. When we add too muchness and a feeling of overwhelm to that quirk, that quirk develops, Sarah, what you and I have often spoken about as a soul fever. There is almost like an exaggeration and exacerbation of their natural tendency of their quirk.
And so the busy child starts to become, and it is busy, it's so lovely, but they start to become agitated. And even if the overwhelm goes on, then they become hyperactive. The child who just likes things orderly, often in quite a quirky, weird way, but it is orderly to them, although you look at their bedrooms and you think, man, that doesn't look orderly to me.
But it is in their own way. You know, overwhelm starts to actually have them become quite stubborn and a little bit stuck in insistence. That's the problematic behavior.
But the so-called disorder heads towards obsessive, compulsive. And so it goes. I'm not denying there's not ODD, ADD, PDD, OCD.
There's CD. There's no shortage of Ds, lots of Ds, lots of Ds. For me, there's no denying that those things actually, in some ways, okay, let's just even agree that they might exist and you might be able to describe them and so on.
But what we're striving to do more is to say, you know what, the same thing that's causing a child's behavior to become an obstacle for them, when you calm the situation down, when you give loving limits, those kind boundaries, when you calm what's going on for them around in their environment, the same thing that is their problematic behavior and even a so-called disorder is actually their gift and their genius. The very busy child or the child that's very exacting, that's their quirk. When the environment is calm for them, that's the child you can turn to to get clarification of something that you might have missed.
They're really adding something to the family. The very, very busy child is just the mover and shaker. The child who might be, just to use these examples I used before, who is getting stuck in the looping, so-called obsessive compulsive behavior, that child, when they have a calm, a calmer, more centered, more confident parent and a calmer, more centered environment, that's the child that notices patterns.
Because they've moved out of amygdala hijack, out of fight or flight, and now those quirks can now be available because the child doesn't feel they're in survival mode anymore. They're just not. And now they can move from that inwardly, I've got to get through each day, people around me aren't understanding me, that's not what I meant, why is everyone looking at me like that, that kind of feeling, to being able to be valued.
Really genuinely valued within their classroom and within the family. And valued more often. There are going to be times when it wobbles on back to being problematic.
But that's what we're working with. Quirk, disorder, so-called disorder, and genius. So that's it for the first part of this, I hope, really interesting podcast on the issues around pathologizing and seeing the whole child.
Certainly an intense interest of ours at the Simplicity Parenting Institute. Don't forget if you'd like to speak to me personally, it's just one of the things I love to do most of all. So if you'd like some support for your specific hopes and dreams for your parenting, go right to the Simplicity Parenting website, you'll see a request to consult with Kim, click right on that.
And I'd be just delighted to hear from you. Okay, that's it for now. Bye bye.
