Welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kemp John Payne. This week and in a couple of weeks to come, I'm going to be doing some readings from the book The Soul of Discipline that have come more sharply into focus for me over the last couple of months, maybe even a year or so, that I think might be really helpful for many of us. If you've come across the book, it'll be to refresh.
If you haven't, then that's great, it'll be new. But I also don't want to just read, I want to give some comments that sort of catch up the content of the book with contemporary times. You know, you read, you write a book and then the years roll on and all sorts of stuff happens and life changes and the world changes and this is a bit of a chance to sort of do a bit of catch up for us all as well.
Look, before we begin, I also want to let you know that we've got one of these care professional trainings coming up in the coming weeks. And this one is for discipline and guidance. And if you're a care professional, it really does, boy, does it ever help to actually be able to help parents through some of the real trigger situations in family life, help bring greater ease and sort of leadership really into family life and feel good about it.
And if you're a teacher, an educator, a care professional, you'll see there's a link in the show notes right below. And if you're interested, click on that and you can see more information, more about that at the end of the podcast. But I just thought I'd give a quick heads up.
Now, to begin, I wanted to set a bit of an overview in this reading from the Soul of Discipline book that I wrote. And let's just jump right in. And then I'll be pulling out of the text occasionally just to give, like I mentioned, those comments that are a little bit behind the scenes.
This is just sort of like moving behind the curtain a bit of the writing of this book. OK, so this is right at the beginning, the introduction to the book. Although I've been a school and family counselor for more than 30 years, I've never met a genuinely disobedient child or disobedient teen.
What I have encountered are myriad disoriented kids. When we do not provide our children with a well-defined boundaries, they react and become difficult and defiant. They feel unsafe and unsettled, and we become frustrated and confused.
Inevitably, our children and teens sense our disorientation, which increases theirs, and a truly unhealthy, self-perpetuating cycle is activated. As the imperfect parent of two teenagers, I'm all too aware of the feeling of freefall we as parents experience when challenging discipline situations arise. We grasp at any solid handhold to break our spiral of emotional descent.
And although some parents think we can find solid ground in the advice of experts who tell us to choose a parenting style and stick to it, I have my doubts about how well this works. Anything that we stick to can become stuck. We cannot effectively enforce a rigid discipline method on our kids because they are constantly growing and changing, and their emotional needs shift with equal frequency.
Since the publication of my book, Simplicity Parenting, and the worldwide movement that it spawned, the value of slowing down and simplifying family life has been affirmed by countless parents. The same idea applies to dealing with disciplinary issues. For instance, when our tween or teenager exclaims, don't treat me like a little kid.
We may well be off base, and our son or daughter or teen may be right. He, she, they may also be wrong. We may be directing our child appropriately at that moment.
It's complicated stuff. How does any parent know if he, she, they are on the right track? Now, in these podcasts and in this book, this is exactly what we'll explore. In my view, it's critical when we discipline kids that we hold them emotionally when things are too complicated and unclear.
At other times, when they're doing well, we can relax our firm, caring embrace and apply a lighter touch. Now, you may be intuitively recognizing this as a way of being present in your child's life. We'll explore how your intuition can become practical, a practical and creative tool that can be used in a kind and firm way to provide your child, tween or teen, with the support they need when difficulties arise.
The three phases. Okay, so here's, here's where we come out of that broad based introduction to the book. And now I'm going to just overview the three phases, which picks up on that thing of, you can't just use one parenting and one discipline style for, for the entirety of 18 years.
Okay, so back into the text. Using my underlying philosophy of discipline is a three-tiered governor, gardener, guide approach. Three phases of parental involvement that build on each other.
Three roles which can be used appropriately to calibrate how you respond to any and every discipline situation. Now, here's a quick overview of the three phases. The governor.
Now, this is the early years. Helping a child feel safe, control impulses and learn to follow directions by showing them who's in leadership. This builds healthy foundations for the gardener.
Now, the gardener cultivates the flowering of the tween years and encourages a child to see that they are a part of a family in which everyone depends on one another. The parent still is in charge, but now reaches out to a tween to hear how they see things. What they may be planning, what's going wrong, what's coming up.
But in those years, which spans from about eight and a half through to about 12, 13, this naturally leads to the guide. The guide oversees the teen years. So we as a guide know the terrain.
As a parental guide, we listen to a teen as they plan together for the best path to achieve their goals, hopes and dreams. The governor, gardener, guide roles are an excellent way to adapt your discipline approach as a child grows. But you can also look at them from another angle as a three step process of supporting your child's specific needs rather than their age related developmental stage.
These stages can be described as base, the governor principle. This involves building a foundations that are broad and deep. The intention is to help a child of any age be able to control impulses, follow direction and accept boundaries.
Children that are taught to direct their will and their willpower so that it is effective rather than causing trouble. If this base is in place, then the middle ground, there's another way to look at it, the middle ground or the gardener principle. When the foundations of impulse control in the governor years are established, kids will become team players and we can help them do that.
They can make their plans while taking other family members into consideration. The intention is to help your child develop empathy, understand the feelings of others and to strengthen their social abilities. Now, if we put that in place in the middle years, in the middle childhood years of the tweens, again, eight and a half, nine through to about 13, if this is in place, then the top tier, the top tier, which is the guide principle, when a child or a young person has to learn to accept, when they've learned to accept boundaries and they appreciate that others in the family have needs, then they can build a path to healthy decisions.
This is the time to encourage and guide their choices. So what we're doing will avoid doing this is giving you, and it gives sort of basically sensible advice that builds a family situation in which we can end up giving children too many choices and it avoids that, too many freedoms that they just can't handle at that age. And a parent intuitively feels that this kind of situation, it's just off base.
You feel this is this is not right. And it sets you and your child up for a fall. Everyone feels frustrated and your discipline is precarious and unstable.
Let me pause there for a minute. What I'm basically saying is that we're in this section, early section of the book, is that is that we're calibrating our discipline according to the developmental stage, according to what a young person's brain capacity, their ability to understand cause and effect, their ability will be very, very, very sort of just just young when they're young. But then that ability to understand and have a little more empathy and social and social understanding, that's the middle years, that's the tween years.
And we can build on that. And then the final step is that when that's in place, then we can we can move into those guide based years with with confidence that, you know, I've coached my kids up over the years to withhold their impulses and respect boundaries. Number one.
Number two, to understand that they live in a family ecosystem. And number three, the these these latter years, the teenage years, then the decisions that they're making can be directed a little bit more. But but it's it's way easier to teach kids, for example, to know they're a part of a family ecosystem when they're nine years old, because if we wait until they're 13, 14, 15, it's just so much harder.
So it's putting in place the building blocks because I just simply don't buy into this thing that the teenage years have to be nightmarish and teenagers are horrible and not at all. Not at all. But what we need to do is put these building blocks in place.
Now, some of you who are parents of teenagers will be asking, well, you know, is is is this is this all too late? And we'll come back to that because the answer is absolutely not. You can use this threefold model of governor, gardener, guide in the teenage years if there's been certain stages that that have been missed a little. All right.
Now that's the by way of introduction to this whole piece of the governor, the gardener, the guide, why that is is is so effective because we're growing with kids as they grow and and how that builds the foundation to to have a happy tweenage years and a and a perfectly fine with all the squalls, of course, but a but but a healthy teenage years. OK, so I wonder, I said earlier, I'd remind us about the care professionals course. The format, by the way, is is live.
I teach it personally. It's a live online via via Zoom. It's it's two times three hours on a Saturday and Sunday.
And we record. So that's available, too. And the care professionals course we've got coming right on up is the discipline and guidance training.
OK, that's it for now. Hope that was helpful. Bye bye.
