Fresh Take: Danielle Bettmann on Positive Discipline

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0:34Amy Wilson:Hello, everyone, and welcome to Fresh Take from What Fresh Hell? Laughing in the Face of Motherhood. This is Margaret. And this is Amy. Today, we are talking to Danielle Bettman. She is the host of the podcast Failing Motherhood. She is also a positive discipline certified parenting coach who helps parents find validation, support, and proven techniques to parent their strong-willed and neurodivergent kids. Danielle is also the mother of two girls. Welcome, Danielle. Thank you very much for having me. I'm so excited. So tell us a little bit first about the Positive Discipline Parenting Approach.

1:10What is it and who started it? Yeah, so Positive Discipline is originally created by Jane Nelson back in like the 60s. And essentially, it's just the idea of melding kind and firm. So if that resonates with you, which is kind of the most warm, authoritative, most research-proven design of parenting where you're able to be emotionally responsive, you're able to create a very healthy relationship built on trust, And you're able to have high standards and be able to stick to boundaries and not be like going back on your word or conforming to rewarding negative behavior with a lot of attention negatively and then relying on external motivators like punishments and rewards, which can work in the short term and backfire long term or backfire immediately if you have one of the sensitive kids.

2:07So essentially, it is melding kind and firm and being able to communicate at a higher level, like a hostage negotiator, essentially, like every parent wants to and doesn't know how to and your kid seems better at it than you. That's what positive discipline is.

2:25Amy Wilson:I think people have an idea that you can either be like a strict parent who gets your way, but doesn't go in for all of this new thinking about, oh, my gosh, the kids have to have a voice. Yep. Or you can be a nice parent. And that means that your kids are kind of wild children who never hear the word no. And so this is not that. It's somewhere that says, right, we can exist in this middle where we don't just have to be like, respect my authority and the kids have no voice, but you get results or you are nice, but then you have crazy out of control kids. Yes. Yes. Because I think gentle parenting is a big thing right now, but it's also very misunderstood and very misimplemented as in, you know, a huge new emphasis on emotions.

3:17And I want my kids to be able to have a voice and I want to be emotionally responsive. But then that comes at the detriment of my own mental health and sanity becoming a emotional punching bag. and now just having to kind of pick up the pieces after my child and just like figure it out and they set the tone and that just becomes either unsustainable or creating resentment at best, right? Long term. But then, yeah, we have the other side where it feels like, okay, well, they can't think they can get away with this and how dare they disrespect my authority? And it becomes these huge pendulums. So what we're trying to say is, yes, both things can be true.

3:56Your child is allowed to have a emotion and a reaction and a response to things. And they don't have to be super excited to clean up their toys. And at the same time, the what is non-negotiable, but the how is. And let's problem solve forward and make sure the cleaning gets done. So, Danielle, tell us about what led you to this work. What led you to be a parenting coach and then to say, OK, positive discipline is really the approach that interests me the most. I had my two girls back to back. They're 15 months apart. I don't professionally recommend it. We've done that, too. We've done it. We both agree.

4:34It's not maybe your best choice. No, no. It was a blur. And I was working at a Head Start and then an early Head Start classroom as a lead teacher in both. And then I moved into home visiting. So I was going in homes every single week with kind of my caseload of 20 families and essentially doing parent education and support, helping them to be able to rate their child's milestones and be able to read with them and do some simple activities to make sure that they're ready for school. And that's when I really realized that what happens in a classroom is great, but what's happening at home is what matters most.

5:07And parents love their kids and love is just not even scratching the surface of what parenting requires. That's what really kind of got me started on, well, how can I continue to do this while I have my own kids? But then my second daughter came out swinging. Well, actually, she refused to come out. And that just really set the tone for who she was as a person. And she was the one that I really credit to teaching me everything I know now and help families with. She was the one who had really high highs and low lows emotionally. And you just couldn't get her to change her mind. And looking at her sternly, didn't do anything, hurry up, doesn't even register.

5:45And that's what really set me spinning. And I ended up finding other parents that seemed to have a similar personality kiddo. And eventually I started doing some workshops locally and essentially going to families' homes and saying, how can I help? And now I'm working with families kind of all over the place. I ended up finding the Positive Discipline Parent Education Certification. And that was what really felt like, OK, this is putting even more words to what I'm already doing. That really helped me then to be able to communicate with families and be able to take two parents who are typically yin and yang and be able to bring them into this much more happy medium, being able to calm both their fears and being able to help them really just live cohabitably with a kid that has a lot of opinions and emotions.

6:31Amy Wilson:Talk a little bit about the definition of a strong willed kid. I think we kind of get it. But what is a strong willed kid? Yeah, absolutely. No, you're right. It's kind of like extra credit for the typical kid. They don't send you, you know, researching and Googling late at night and crying into your pillow at 3 a.m. But for those of us that, you know, you know, that's us. But what does that look like? So they typically have really high emotional mood swings where you can feel the palpable excitement and they have a huge heart and they can be so much fun to be around and so funny and creative thinkers and just huge imagination.

7:10and on the other side of the pendulum. They've never been more devastated and let down by certain things. And everything is a big deal. And it feels like things come crashing down so hard that you don't even know what just happened or what's going to set them off next. Sounds familiar, yes. You feel like you're five feet behind rather than a step ahead and feeling like you're setting the tone or being able to know what's going to go successfully as a family. So they're taking up a lot of your attention because they are maybe the loudest sibling. They are the ones feeling like everything is unfair, whining much more often.

7:47They just seem to have a lot of problems. And it's just really hard to get ahead of. So some siblings are being affected because it feels like they're getting crumbs or they can't afford to struggle because you've got to get ahead of this other kid. Maybe they're clingy, but then they're also saying, go away. But yet they are very smart. They are very articulate. and expressive. They are very perceptive and sensitive. So they're going to have some sensory aversions and some sensory preferences that are going to be creating some of these meltdowns and tantrums. And then it feels like they regress with their level of emotional coping skills for their age.

8:27They can maybe be even more aggressive at older ages, like six and seven and eight, that causes a lot of concern in parents because they should know better. Care routines are much more difficult to just get through. It feels like they turn into kind of an alter ego state when they're angry and their eyes glaze over and it's like no longer my kid. They can be very triggering for parents because it feels like it's very personal. They don't do this for dad or they don't do this for their teacher. They hold it together there and then it all comes crashing down when they get in the car and they're kicking the back of my seat because I didn't bring the right snack or whatever.

9:01Danielle, I wanted to ask you about that because you said before something that your clients, the parents, often when they come in, you've got a yin and a yang. You've got parents, one wants to be there, one doesn't. One thinks you're being too tough, and one thinks you're not being tough enough. Tell us about how I imagine that's something that perhaps is pre-existing, but is very much created by having this hard to handle kid in the house. So tell us about how that it can affect the parental dyad with each other and with the kid. You don't know what you don't know until you're parenting. So you could talk all day about how you think you want a parent or the parent you think you're going to be or the kids you think you're going to have, right?

9:38Until you're in it. And when you're parenting a kid like this, it absolutely exacerbates your stress management, lack of coping skills, your own insecurities. It exacerbates your anxieties as a parent. And it really just, it puts the things that you feel are very important value-wise, morally, how your kids treat other people. If those things are all of a sudden extremely compromised, that's going to send you spinning a little bit and have you lose any grounding you thought you had. And then now when another spouse is either questioning what you're doing or asking you what you're supposed to be doing and you don't know, or you're feeling really critiqued or criticized, or you're trying to co-teach another parent that isn't seeing these things on their newsfeed and they're coming in with their own fears around your child being able to thrive in the teen years, and then you're both overgeneralizing into the panic of what if they do this when they're 16, then you're going to start to eat away at each other because it's all you have.

10:40And that person is getting like the least filtered version of you. And those things are going to come out if you try to keep them from coming out on your kid, then it's going to eat away at some of that connection and that understanding in your relationship. And you're either going to double down or you're going to start to disengage one person or both. And that resentment creates kind of a wedge of divide between the two of you. And now you're not only feeling defeated, but now you're feeling even more lonely and isolated and misunderstood on your side of that equation. That's no good for anybody.

11:15Parenting is hard enough. We're talking to Danielle Bettman of the Failing Motherhood podcast, and we'll be right back.

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14:45Amy Wilson:Go to myskylight.com slash WFH for$30 off your 15-inch calendar. That is M-Y-S-K-Y-L-I-G-H-T dot com slash WFH. So the strong-willed kids, the traditional parenting approaches backfire. So why do they backfire, the more traditional approaches? The thing about really emotionally wired kids who are more sensitive, who, let's just say, you know, they're wired differently, which falls under the umbrella of neurodivergence. When they are three, four, five, you don't have enough information to know if they have ADHD yet. Most practitioners are going to be hesitant to slap a diagnosis on that, right?

15:31But they are more challenging. They're having more issues and they're struggling with things like impulse control or emotion regulation. and you at home clearly kind of figure out very quickly, I need more tools. And the pediatrician might tell you to put them in timeout or to ignore, you know, selectively ignore some of the behavior you don't want to see. The problem with that is when you do that with a strong-willed child, they see that as you being manipulative or dismissive, or they really just take every instance as you don't care, you don't get it, you're not listening to me. What's a big deal to me isn't clearly a big deal to you.

16:09So now this is very much a you versus me power struggle. And I am kind of only motivated by attention and control. So you ignoring me just sends me into more creative ways to create kind of a game of whack-a-mole where I'm going to continue to act out or it's just going to look a little bit different because I am not just going to go without that need getting met. You could bribe me with a trip to Disney World or threaten to take all my toys away. That's not really going to change my mind in the moment or help me connect the dots so that I don't do that behavior again in the future, tomorrow or the next day.

16:49So instead, it's only going to be more ammunition to this power struggle tug of war between the two of us. So the more you dig your heels in, the more I'm digging my heels in and we are in this together. and that's typically not the message that parents are trying to send. They're trying to teach lessons. They're trying to coach them on skills. They're trying to get them to be able to handle things and extend their patient's tolerance and things, but that's not what's happening. So instead, it becomes very much a me versus you and the parent gets more triggered and taking things more personally.

17:21The strong-willed child has more reasons to double down and they are then getting a lot of negative attention or feeling like they are in control and having a lot of power because we end up inadvertently giving them a lot of power when they can hijack a lot of moments throughout the day. So when we are trying to maybe do typical gentle parenting, we're trying to just tell them, hey, I understand, you know, it looks like you're mad. If you tell them what emotion they're feeling, you're still telling them what to do. And most neurodivergent kids have demand avoidance. They don't like being told what to do.

17:56So when you're trying to just be emotionally responsive, all of a sudden now they're even more mad. What just happened? And they just they're just spinning off. So there are things that you think you're doing the right thing or even you're just trying to hold your tongue and talk really nicely and gently. They hate that. And now it's just OK. Everything's backfiring. And I am putting so much energy and effort into my parenting.

18:21Amy Wilson:I have no help but to be exhausted and not really getting the right results at the end of all that effort. Digging down, authority, timeouts, yelling aren't working. And maybe the, I see you're angry. Thank you for sharing that with me. Is it working? No. So what's going to work for us with this strong willed child? Yes. One of the biggest paradigm shifts I teach my clients right away is to free yourself up to kind of tap into some of the frustration you are also understandably feeling in these moments and co commiserate by kind of jumping in and sharing that frustration, tapping into kind of meeting their energy a little bit, because we can't just stay over here and wait for them to come to us, we have to go to them and then kind of walk them back down and co regulate.

19:11But what that can look like is a little bit of, you know, some nonverbal slapping your knees, stomping your own foot, tightening your own wrists and being able to say like, oh, I know that. Why isn't it working? Come on blocks. Having a third enemy or a third person, third party, that's your common enemy brings you together. You can blame the clock. You can blame school. You can blame the calendar for it being a Monday morning. You can blame the blocks for not working or understanding what they wanted them to do. And why did they fall? That helps your child feel like not only are they not wrong or bad for feeling frustrated, but you're also being able to provide an outlet to process those emotions with you and not feel like they are trying to defend themselves and communicate to you what a big deal that tower of blocks was, while also then being mad at you for being mad at them about their emotional reaction.

20:11It doesn't mean that you can't just immediately then circle back into two things can be true. It's okay to be upset and it's not okay to be harmful or hurtful. But there's this step of mirroring their emotion to them. It's not you're yelling back. They're angry and now you're angry too. It's not that. It's almost like mirroring back to them like, oh, I get it. The coach made you sit because you threw your baseball glove. That it must, oh, it's so frustrating. So it's that. It's just letting them feel heard and not asserting any of your own opinion or agenda or next steps yet, because it will all not be heard without the prerequisite of I heard you and I get it.

20:52And we're so quick to kind of dismiss that and jump right into, well, you should have or I can't let you or, you know, here's what you need to do instead. That's just going to activate their defense mechanism. They're going to put a wall up and then they're just going to cover their ears and not really hear anything you have to say next. So then again, the problem does not get solved. So you have to hold your tongue, wait, and then either repeat back what they just said or put into words how they might be feeling because then that can help them use those words over time themselves because you're kind of coaching them, giving them that script.

21:25Or you're just being able to help them understand their own emotions in real time depending on their age. But it can be very generalized. You do not want to be around your brother right now. Or mornings are so hard. Why can't we just sleep all day? Why does it have to be a Monday? Or it doesn't mean that you even agree with them sometimes too. Like, ah, your sister's really getting on your nerves today. That can be so validating where the Navy SEAL hostage negotiation mentality, they say you have to first get the other person to basically say, yes, exactly. before you can move forward with any type of, but here's what needs to happen, or here's the next step, or here's what we can do about it.

22:11And making sure that you don't, you know, blow up the situation entirely.

22:16Amy Wilson:I think that sometimes we get stuck with one piece or the other, and we're not doing both. So it's, we've woken up from nap, everyone's a little cranky, maybe we've had a snack, we're going to the playground. yep my six-year-old daughter wants to wear her princess dress and her high heel princess shoes to the playground but she's not allowed to wear that to the playground either because it's 13 degrees outside or every time she goes in that it's a lot of frustration because then the dress is getting caught on stuff it's not a practical outfit she can't wear that to the playground yes so now she's in the full princess outfit rolling on the floor and screaming that she will not go to the playground unless she's dressed as a princess.

23:01Yes. Yes. That's where hopefully if you know how to do this, there is a window right before she falls on the ground rolling where you'd want to deploy this to try to prevent it before it starts.

23:15Amy Wilson:Okay. And sometimes we can't do that. There was no window, right? It was like in the moment you took your breath, it was gone. So that's okay. So we're in it. And then you're getting on the ground with her saying, oh, come on, mom. Why do we have to go to the park? I don't want to. I don't want to wear my princess dress. It's so pretty. It's so pretty. And I love it. And I don't want to change. I don't want to change, mom. You say, no, mommy. Princess dress. No pants. No shirt. Princess dress. And you're saying it very short and kind of emphatically. And there's some emotion behind it because you're trying to meet that emotion.