Welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me Kim John Payne and to our second reading from the Soul of Discipline book where we'll dig in a little bit to this whole question of disorientation versus disobedience and also to mention the care professionals training for discipline and guidance which is coming right up for if so if you're an educator, a care professional of any kind, a nurse, a doctor, a therapist, anyone who's interested in that professional work supporting parents, that is coming right up. It's in the show notes, give a click, take you right to the page. But let's just jump right into into this exploration of this key principle and I'll jump right into the text of the Soul of Discipline book again and as I did last time we'll be coming out of it and I'll give some more updated comments as well.
That's particularly for those of you who know the book a bit as well, that hopefully will be helpful. OK. Disobedient or disoriented.
How many times have we heard the expression, he's a lost soul. We can sense when this is the case in someone close to us such as a relative or a friend or even a public figure in the wider community who causes us concern. To be lost and have no one to help us find our way, it's the stuff of nightmares.
And no one likes to be disoriented and you know a few things in life are more unsettling. But children are particularly vulnerable when it comes to feeling lost and unsafe. We know there is too much coming at them all the time in today's frenetic world and few adults amongst us have had to cope with the incessant stream of images, impressions, ideas, attitudes, conflicting messages that modern kids must navigate.
We are quite frankly living in the midst of the undeclared war on childhood. Kids are exposed to too much, too soon, too sexy, too young and are forced to grow up too quickly. As a result, disorientation and heightened anxiety have become the new normal.
So it's no wonder what troubling behavior surfaces more and more often at home and at school. As parents we want to shield our children as much as possible to provide a safe haven for them from the unrelenting buzzing and booming and the fever pitch of modern life. In this climate disciplining a so-called disobedient child can be quite challenging.
We often feel like we're fumbling in the dark. We try so hard to say and do the right thing with the appropriate amount of energy and emphasis. We want to guide our children to teach them how to behave and how to, well, how to not behave.
Our ultimate goal is to prepare them to handle themselves well when they set sail into modern society's often difficult waters. So you can see echoes in that little opening part of that chapter of the Simplicity Parenting book and it's really, I think, super important. It's only become more and more the case that life is speeding up, that things in recent years right around our world have become so unpredictable and this is very disorienting for kids.
So that's the starting point for this, but I think that has only increased the need to understand disorientation versus disobedience. Setting the foundation, understanding disorientation. The way we perceive and approach misbehavior is the key to diffusing our children's difficult and sometimes explosive conduct.
A critical shift in our approach to parenting takes place when we begin to understand that there's no such thing as a disobedient child, only a disoriented one. We'll examine our misconception about disobedience. If we can see our kids' challenging behavior as an attempt to orient themselves within the frenetic, confusing world they struggle to navigate, we will shift from disciplinary and in chief or crisis management specialist to a governor, a gardener, or a guide.
The pinging principle. Children, tweens, and teens orient themselves in a number of ways. They may read, play creatively, listen to a story, spend time in nature, delve into a hobby, or simply decompress while hanging out with family.
These types of activities form a protective sheath between them and the hardness of the real world, the world out there. They become a membrane through which kids process and digest all the good, the bad, and the busy things that are happening in their lives. Engaging in these kinds of activities is not just a form of coping.
It's how kids build resiliency and a burgeoning sense of self-esteem. When they can find a more centered and peaceful place within, they can let go and regroup their inner resources. What they are building is a sense of knowing who and where they are in their lives.
When they do this, they feel safe and well-oriented. But when there's too much going on in their lives, children lose their bearings and become disoriented. This can trigger a reaction that often manifests in challenging behavior.
They push back against the world outside themselves. Unfortunately, the outside world they push back against tends to be those nearest and dearest to them. It is so important to understand that their naughtiness or disrespect is not simply misbehavior, but an attempt to come to some sort of balance in which they feel oriented and comfortable.
I call this the pinging principle. Just as a submarine navigator gets their bearings by sending out sonic pings that bounce off underwater objects and orient the ship to rocks or reefs, our children send out pings in the form of challenging behavior. It's almost like a submariner is getting their nautical bearings, and when our children ping, they're getting their emotional bearings.
They nag, disrupt, or cry, seeking a reaction that will help orient them. This is their way of figuring out where they stand and what we want from them. In other words, the interplay between our kids' behavior and our adult reaction serves as a navigational system for them.
Understanding this concept is a real game changer. To quote, when I recognized that my child was not just being naughty but actually feeling lost and pinging me, it changed everything, one parent of a young child told me. She went on, instead of just reacting to his behavior, I could now look for its source and understand it better.
Another dad with two young boys said, I tested this whole pinging idea. I watched every time my kids got antsy and fresh. Amazingly, just about every time it was because our life had gotten a bit wacko.
I don't take it personally anymore, is the next section. When kids misbehave, it's only natural for a parent to run through a dog-eared catalog of self-doubt and recrimination. Some of the most common inscriptions on our personal parenting wall of shame are, I wonder what I did wrong in raising them, or for the guilt-wracked amongst us who feel like untrained stand-ins, anyone else would deal with this better than me.
What, why and who am I to be doing this? The imposter syndrome is particularly onerous, isn't it? Like the Wizard of Oz who makes great proclamations but feels small and unworthy behind that screen, we may feel unprepared, incapable and lost just at a time when our kids need us to be strong and they need us to be oriented. Feeling unmoored, we take our children's behavior personally. In a flash, we can shift from self-doubt and self-recrimination to angry reactions punctuated by comments like, you will not speak to me that way ever, or do you do it right now, mister, or you'll have me to deal with, or throw in, if I had have spoken to my parents like that.
Oh, just about every parenting expert expands on how we must stay calm in the face of bad behavior. Yep, good advice, but how? How? Because unless we have a foothold on the how, the cycle of self-blame will lead us right back to taking it personally. That catapults us to as far from a calm parent as there can be.
When children are at their worst, we need to be at our best. Danny and Susan's story illustrates this well. This is a great story, by the way.
I met Susan at a parenting workshop I gave in Washington, D.C. She was struggling with a very defiant boy. Together we explored the difference between bad behavior and disorientation. It was a real aha moment for me when I began to see that my son Forrest's very difficult behavior was in fact a cry for orientation, she said.
Before we realized this, my husband Danny and I really struggled. We treated Forrest like a little adult, presuming that he had much more control over his behavior than he really did. We figured he knew what he was doing and that he was trying to wind us up.
That led to all kinds of conflict and ugly scenes. We figured he should know how to stop, and we told him so. It might seem kind of crazy to get involved in a power struggle with a four-year-old, but that's exactly where we were.
Danny was at his wit's end, too. He said, I got so exasperated. The more I insisted Forrest was making bad choices about his behavior, that he should be capable of controlling himself, the more out of control he got.
I can see now that his behavior wasn't bad. It was desperate. But back then I would get into these battles with him.
You can't believe how personal it got. But I felt he was disrespecting me as a person, and it really pushed my buttons. When Susan told Danny about the pinging principle, it made perfect sense to them both, but it upended their ingrained attitude towards their son and his behavior.
This new way of seeing the problem was scary and hopeful all at the same time, said Susan. But the one thing it did immediately was to shift us from taking Forrest's antics personally. You just can't take it personally anymore when your son has a meltdown, if you've found a place within yourself to ask, what does he need to orient himself? What can I do to help? In the few seconds we spend asking ourselves these questions, we move from being reactive and taking it too personally to seeing the underlying forces and staying much more centered to becoming the kind of parent that we always wanted to be.
I actually asked her to write that last part down, by the way. I thought it was so great. So she went away and wrote that down.
It was very kind of her. Forrest still has occasional meltdowns. He still pushes back.
But Susan and Danny are relieved and grateful that the length and intensity of the difficult behavior has diminished to such a degree that it's unrecognizable from before. Susan and Danny have undergone their own transformation, and as Danny puts it, it's like I'm me now, not some weird person arguing with a four-year-old. Does the pinging principle apply to when a child is being deliberately challenging? Well, the answer is yes.
Even when children misbehave on purpose, they still need guidance. Whether pinging behavior is conscious or unconscious, it's still a cry for help. And the last little story here, a woman we'll call Claire wrote to me about an experience she had when she was actually five years old.
Her mother had just returned to full-time work after being an ever-present stay-at-home mom. Little Claire decided to go on an adventure. She walked to an abandoned warehouse a few blocks from her home to explore all the good junk she imagined that she would find there.
What's worse, she took her three-year-old sister with her. She said, I knew very well it was against all the rules, but I did it anyway. A scary-looking guy discovered them coming out of the building.
He called, go home, girls, and they did just that, running all the way. The parents were shocked when Claire's younger sister spilled the whole story out that afternoon, and they watched the children closely for a long time afterwards, as we all would, right? Reflecting on her reactions, on her actions, Claire said, I'm not sure if I was doing this. And in doing it, I was directly relating to my mother going back to work.
But I suspect I was feeling the need for their attention. I guess it was natural for my parents to worry after my adventure and make sure we stayed in the yard. But I certainly would never have done something like that again.
The fact that Claire's parents were so attentive after their scare made her feel, as she said, safe again. Her willful disregard of the rules was quite clearly a call for attention and orientation. Now, just to sort of round off this reading, one of the things that happens when we understand our kids are pinging us is that a lot of parents since the writing of this book, countless parents actually have commented to me that they feel within their body things change.
And what I, you know, one of the things that I've noticed, and the things I've noticed for myself and others have spoken to me about, is that our eyes soften. I've mentioned that in previous podcasts, actually, about the eyes being the arms of the heart. Our posture rounds off a little bit.
We get the wondering gesture, the I wonder, because if we wonder, like, I wonder why you're so lost, my little darling. I wonder why you're pushing back so hard, you little rotter. You know, if we wonder, we are accessing a different part of our body, and we're certainly accessing a different part of our brain.
We move from the amygdala, the fight or flight brain, to aspects of our limbic system and our frontal lobes, our empathy brain. The wondering brain, the wondering brings us into a whole different part of our being. And honestly, if we wonder like this, even if we don't quite know what we don't figure it out, why they're being such little buggers, you know, or, you know, teenage, you know, pushback that we're getting, even if we don't figure it out, the fact that we wonder means our kids will pick it up.
Because when, and this is my last point to this for today, is that when our kids are angry and defiant, they're also at their most vulnerable. And when they're vulnerable, they're scanning us, they're looking at us, they're taking us in. And if we know that this is pinging, then our whole body language, our physiogamy, our facial language, it changes just that little bit, and they pick it up.
So this is the gorgeousness of this whole principle of understanding the difference between disorienting behavior, disoriented behavior, and disobedient behavior, and understanding that it's that we're being pinged. Okay, so quick reminder of the discipline and guidance training coming right on up. If you missed it, by the way, if you're listening to these podcasts after, you can just go right to our website, simplicityparenting.com and just go right onto the waitlist.
We'll let you know next time it comes up. They are live. I teach these courses myself, which is one of my favoritest things to do.
It's a real treat for me. Two times three hours on a Saturday, one lot of three hours on a Saturday, one lot of three hours on a Sunday. And the recordings are available, but it's live and in a Zoom format.
And the feedback over the years from these care professional trainings have been that people have been able to support the parents in their lives so, so much more. So if you're at all interested, just go right to the show notes. You'll see them right there or right to the simplicity parenting.com website and click on trainings.
Take it right there. Okay, bye-bye for now.
