How to Get Your Toddler to LISTEN #29

Get the Autonomy Guide HERE

Episode Title: How To Get Your Toddler to LISTEN!

Episode Number: #29

Host: Jon @wholeparent

Timestamps:

• 0:00 - Introduction and Setting the Scene
• 0:38 - The Frustration of Kids who WON'T LISTEN!
• 2:40 - Why Toddlers Have Selective Hearing
• 7:17 - Understanding Toddler Development and Autonomy
• 16:18 - Effective Communication with Toddlers
• 22:24 - Tips for Improving Toddler Listening Skills
• 33:50 - Closing Thoughts and Call to Action

Key Takeaways:

• Toddlers often exhibit selective hearing due to their developmental stage of seeking autonomy.
• Consistent routines are crucial in helping toddlers feel secure and understand expectations.
• Effective communication with toddlers involves giving clear, positive instructions and allowing time for them to process.
• Saying "yes" as often as possible can foster a more cooperative relationship with your child.

Resources Mentioned:

• PDF on Autonomy-Seeking Activities for Toddlers
• How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk

What episode should you listen to next?

• Episode #22: Raising Emotionally Intelligent Kids
• Episode #1: How to Stop Yelling at Your Kids

Call to Action:

• Never miss an episode! CLICK HERE to subscribe.
• Share this episode with friends or on social media.
• Rate and review the podcast to help it grow.

Contact Information:

• Follow Jon @wholeparent on all social media platforms.
• Email: podcast@wholeparentacademy.com

Transcript

Jon @wholeparent: 0:00

Welcome to the Whole Parent Podcast. My name is John at Whole Parent on all the social medias, picture this with me, if you would. You can close your eyes, unless you're driving, then please don't close your eyes. It's the end of a long day. You've been at work, you've had to deal with some stressors. Maybe it was not a particularly stressful day, maybe it was. You finally finished whatever you were working on. You packed up. Maybe you got in your car to commute home. Maybe you work from home and you just need to go pick up your kid from daycare or from a parent's house or something like that. Maybe you made dinner. Maybe you had to pick it up on the way home. You're exhausted. You're finally to bedtime.

Jon @wholeparent: 0:38

If you're like me, sometimes you count down the hours to bedtime until you can have a break and you're just trying to get your three-year-old in their pajamas and instead of cooperating, they are just bouncing off the walls, running around the room, totally ignoring your repeated requests. Your voice gets a little louder, then it gets a little louder. Finally you're screaming at this tiny human and you're wondering in that moment. Did I make a horrible decision becoming a parent? I just want to sit down. I just want to be done. If that sounds familiar, you are not alone. You are just like thousands and thousands of parents who just don't understand why their toddler does not listen. In fact, listening challenges are basically the thing that made Whole Parent successful in the first place.

Jon @wholeparent: 1:32

I was going back and reviewing some old videos. I try and look at it with an analytical frame of mind and especially assess the videos that have been the most successful, not just in views, not just in engagement, comments, likes, but also the videos that have caused the most number of people, or the highest percentage of people who had not yet followed me, to watch that video and say you know what? I need help with this and I want to follow this person. And there is one video and I'm going to talk about exactly what I talked about in that video in this podcast episode but one video in particular that outperforms, as a percentage, the view to follow ratio by more than double the next best competitor. And in that video all I talked about was why toddlers do not listen and what we can do about it. Today we are tackling that exact topic. It's the topic that drives parents to social media to ask for questions. It drives them to Google and it drives them a little bit nuts.

Jon @wholeparent: 2:40

Why do so many parents of young children feel like their kid has totally selective hearing when it comes to them, and what can you do to solve that problem? We're going to talk about why that is, what's going on from a developmental perspective, what's going on in their brain and what we can do as parents to improve their listening skills. We're going to talk about tons of stuff in this episode, and so if you want to hear what I have learned from child psychologists, the practical strategies to move this forward, people from all disciplines dealing with early childhood education, parenting, child rearing so that you can finally get your kids to maybe listen to you once in a while, stay with us, okay. So, as I do on this podcast all the time, and, if you've never joined this podcast, if this is the first episode that you're ever hearing, this is a podcast that's really all about providing practical, brain-based, but the goal of this podcast is to provide parents with some actionable things that can make their life a little bit easier, make parenting a lot more effective, all while doing so in a way that's going to raise their kids to be flourishing for their whole lives.

Jon @wholeparent: 4:20

We parent for the long term, not the short term, and this is one of those places where, in this specific developmental time frame, we're going to say toddlers and when I say toddlers, what I mean is two, three and four. Some kids struggle with this when they're six, seven, eight, nine. There are different reasons for that. Some people say that their six-month-old doesn't listen, to which I respond that's par for the course, that's just what life is. But when your kid is two, three and four, there are some things that you can do. But in order to understand what you need to do, the first thing that you have to kind of take in understand is why it is that toddlers seem to have selective hearing where we are concerned, and so I'm going to talk about the brain, I'm going to talk about development, and I'm also going to talk about what we can do to try and improve that selective hearing so that they listen and respond a little bit more easily. So I'm going to give you some practical tips, but I'm also going to give you some neuroscience background. That's what I always do on this podcast.

Jon @wholeparent: 5:20

So if you're new, that's what we do, and if you like this podcast, please share it with everybody that you know we're really just starting out less than 30 episodes. Compare that with the thousands of social media videos. This is still a pretty small podcast, but it's growing and we're getting so many amazing people on. We've already had Tina Payne Bryson on, who is my personal favorite parenting guru author. She is the best selling author of books like no Drama, discipline and the Whole Brain Child, which is my personal favorite parenting book that has ever been written. We've had other experts on other psychologists. We've had other parenting influencers from social media, people with hundreds of thousands of followers, and I am actively seeking to get some really, really amazing people, the cutting-edge top leaders in the field, and so the best way that you can help me do that, so that we can together as a community, as the whole parent community, ask those tough questions, learn from these really big, experienced voices, is to share this podcast so it continues to grow, and to rate and review it.

Jon @wholeparent: 6:16

So if you're just listening to it for the first time, please listen to the end of the episode and then decide is this worth your time to rate, review and, of course, subscribe so that you can get all of the awesome brain-based tips and tricks that we talk about on a weekly basis, but the first thing that I want to talk about in this episode, specifically related to toddlers and selective hearing, is autonomy and specifically, that children who are two, three, four years old are in an autonomy-seeking or seeking, or independence seeking place developmentally. Why is this the case? Well, mammals in general I know now we're getting really broad not just talking about kids, we're talking about all mammals. Come on, john, this is a podcast about kids. Yes, mammals in general do most of their growing inside their mother's bodies. That's where, you know, one cell becomes two cells and I don't have to tell you how babies are made right, but most mammals do the overwhelming majority of their brain development in utero.

Jon @wholeparent: 7:17

Humans, as compared to other mammals, are born somewhat prematurely. What do we mean by this? What I mean is that, in order for our brains, which take up a massively disproportionate amount of our energy in comparison to other animals all other animals, not just mammals our brains take up up to 25 to 30% of all of the energy that we have as people in our body, the energy that we burn. 25 to 30% of that's taken up by our brain. That's because our brain is huge. It's disproportionately large compared. Why? Because it's disproportionately complex compared to other mammals. It's not. We don't have the biggest brain physically, but we do have the most cortical neurons, meaning the most neurons in our neocortex, which makes it so that this is why humans are way, far and beyond more intellectually able than any other species on planet Earth. Even our closest cousins don't even come close.

Jon @wholeparent: 8:14

Well, what this means is that actually, we have to be born gestationally earlier than other mammals, and this is because our brains, which are inside of our skulls, have to be able to fit through our mother's birth canal and, as any woman who has given birth will tell you, it is a tight fit, as it is, at nine months Especially, you have a really big baby. Maybe you're a little bit past. You know, my mom had, I think, one of my brothers like weeks and weeks after her due date. You have a really big baby, really big head. It is a tight fit, right. And you can imagine if we were born even later in our development, when other mammals tend to be born in their development. Giraffes, for example, can walk around hours after birth on those long spindly legs. If you've ever seen Bambi, bambi can walk around almost immediately, right? If we, as human beings, were born at that level of our development, we would never be able to fit through our mother's birth canal. So what does this mean? It means that humans are born prematurely in comparison to other mammals. We are, in other words, very, very dependent, because the development that still has to occur once we come out of the womb, once we're into the world, is far more than most other animals on planet Earth.

Jon @wholeparent: 9:33

So what does this mean? It means that for the first two years of your child's life, your child has almost no autonomy whatsoever. We've talked about this in other episodes, about bedtime and other things and learning, but what this means is, at two years old, three years old, four years old, your child can finally make decisions, can finally choose what they want to do. Of course, they still need your help for tons of stuff, but they can choose what they want to do. They can say yes, they can say no, they can decide what foods they like and what foods they don't like, what food, what they're going to eat, what they're not going to eat. They can decide for themselves at two, three, four years old and this is the first time that they've been allowed to do that and so, as you can imagine, when you get a new skill, when you get a new ability, you want to test it out. Just like when you get a new car, you want to drive it all the time. Just like when you get a new toy, you want to play with it all the time. Just like when you're in a new relationship, you want to spend all your time with that other person.

Jon @wholeparent: 10:25

When your kids develop an actual ability to have a sense of autonomy, all of a sudden they don't want to listen to anybody anymore. They want to seek out and do for themselves as much as possible. And what I've been trying to do in these episodes is not go super in depth on how to handle every single problem and instead create some PDFs that you can go to if you're interested and say oh, you know what? I have a two-year-old, three-year-old, four-year-old and I need to figure out how to give them some autonomy. So that's what I've done for this episode.

Jon @wholeparent: 10:54

So if you're looking for some tips, some tricks and some three or four autonomy seeking activities that you can engage in with your child, that you can have your child engage in more like that you can. That's safe for them. I created a PDF and it's linked in the show notes so that you can go and you can say you know, hey, I want to get this, I'll email it to you so that you have it forever. You don't have to like save the episode so you can keep coming back to the link. It'll be in your email so you can search it and you will have a PDF where it's just like okay, here's the three things that I can do. If you have a kid who's not yet two, three years old, great, get it ahead of time, know it now. If you have a kid who's older than two or three, get it and share it with a friend, because it's going to be, it's chock full of really good information.

Jon @wholeparent: 11:35

So so, number one, we have to understand, developmentally speaking, they. They need autonomy, they need places to go and things to do on their own where they feel like I am in charge and I can do, and it's my job. And if you know a two-year-old, three-year-old, especially one with older siblings, me do, I do, I do it my turn buckle their own seatbelt right. All of that stuff comes from the desire to be in control, not because kids are controlling, but because they've never had this before and they really, really want to exercise it and, by the way, that's really good Part of the way that they're going to learn interdependence, which is the goal. It's not independence or codependence, it's interdependence knowing how to do many things for yourself and also knowing how to seek help when you can't.

Jon @wholeparent: 12:24

In order to develop interdependence, they have to test those boundaries and autonomy seeking behaviors at this stage at which they're at. And so kids who are just constantly helicopter parented and you're not allowed to make any decisions and I'm just going to make, I'm still going to baby you like you're a little tiny baby at seven, eight, nine years old. They don't learn those autonomy seeking things when they're younger and then they start to act out those and then you know parents can still have a lot of control at that age. All of a sudden you have a 16 year old who's doing autonomy seeking things, and 16 year olds do that anyway, but if they haven't done any of it earlier on, you're in for it. So the more you can do this stuff early on, the better, and that's why I made the PDF so number one understanding how can we support our child's natural developmental need for autonomy. And, by the way.

Jon @wholeparent: 13:12

From a brain development perspective, this autonomy seeking behavior also occurs at one of the most emotional times of childhood, where they're going through the most neural pruning. So in the last episode we talked about neural pathways a lot. We create thousands, millions, trillions sometimes neural pathways and what happens over time is that the neural pathways that are unneeded are pruned off, and this is kind of like what happens in Inside Out. If you've seen Inside Out 1, I haven't seen Inside Out 2 yet. I'm sitting on the first week of July here and I feel like I'm a bad parenting influencer because I don't have thoughts on Inside Out 2 yet. But in Inside Out you see like the neural pathways of the memories, the core memories, being pruned and the memories that fall down into like the void and eventually are lost.

Jon @wholeparent: 13:57

Children's movies have a lot of deep insights, especially the Pixar ones, if you're willing to see them and look for them. Well, neural pruning is happening during this time and so the kids need to do the autonomy seeking thing to support that neural pruning that's happening, the building of new skills, the building of new developmental capacities, the learning that's happening, massive amounts of learning, but also the massive amounts of pruning that takes place. So autonomy is the first thing to realize when you're dealing with a kid who won't listen. Sometimes the selective hearing comes from I just don't want to listen to anybody right now because I'm really focused on doing my own thing. The thing is, if you give and offer your child opportunities to act out that autonomy the stuff that I'm going to talk about in that PDF then you like it's going to come out in one way or another, but you actually have an opportunity to guide that and show them. Here's some appropriate places for you to show autonomy and we're going to get into that too. So that's the first thing that I want to highlight.

Jon @wholeparent: 14:52

The second thing is that kids do have a way in which they understand language which is a little bit different than many people. Many parents, many adults understand. Kids understand language at a much lower level, much more base level than we think. Their neuro, their neocortex, is not processing nearly as quickly as ours, yet they just don't think as fast as we do as adults and a lot of times parents don't realize that and they don't take that into account, especially when they're at the end of a long day and we're just trying to get PJs on and they don't really think it through, and because of that, the listening thing can feel like my kid's not listening, when in reality, the way in which you're communicating is actually causing your kid to not be able to hear you. And so this is where I want to focus for the rest of this episode, and it's three things that you can do as a parent in your communication with your child, and it's three things that you can do as a parent in your communication with your child. Three things that you can change how you communicate with your child that will help them once they have those autonomy-seeking needs met, because that's kind of the first thing Help them to actually listen to you when it comes time. So the first thing is that you don't always have to communicate with words. What do I mean by that? One of the best ways that we can communicate with our kids, our expectations, is through routine. I'm going to say that again One of the best ways that we can communicate with our kids is not through words, it's through routines.

Jon @wholeparent: 16:18

Why? Because routines, the predictable routines of our child's day and life, these are the things that give them the freedom to then have autonomy inside of those things. But when a child develops a routine, they thrive. Why do they thrive? Because their brain is bad at predicting the future, and routines allow them to not have to predict the future. And so the best way that you can communicate to your child that it's time to put their pjs on Is to put their pjs on in the context of a broader routine, every single day the same way. So the easiest way to communicate with your kids actually is not anything and how you talk to them.

Jon @wholeparent: 16:57

The easiest way to communicate with your kids is to create routines that are consistent, where your child knows what's coming next, and then actually they can feel like they have some agency in the middle of it to say I know that I'm going to put on my PJs, but I want to have say over which PJs I put on. If the routine is inconsistent, then your child doesn't know which things they have say over and which things that are just going to happen, period. And so routines are the ultimate parenting hack. They absolutely set kids up to thrive. They allow kids to. People think that they're rigid, and then they cause kids to not have any freedom. It's the exact opposite. They actually cause kids to have more freedom. So that's number one.

Jon @wholeparent: 17:36

Before I get into number two and three, I want to pause really briefly and say a little bit about rating and reviewing the podcast, because I do that in every episode. So, yeah, you're going to have to listen to it. Okay, before I get into number two, number three, the other two things that you can do to communicate with your child better so that they can actually be in a position to listen to you, I want to give you something that I would like you to do for me, which is to go and rate and review this podcast. As I've been trying to highlight in each episode, the reason that I want you to rate and review this podcast is not because I need it for my own ego, to hear from people that they like the podcast. It's for three reasons, and I'm going to run through them much more quickly than I have in previous episodes, because I've gotten feedback that it's taken me too long to talk about this.

Jon @wholeparent: 18:18

Number one Whole Parent is a platform that, at this stage in its development, is basically entirely on me as the creator, so I make these episodes that come up with what we're going to talk about. I reach out to all my podcast guests and hosts. I respond to every single email myself. There is no one who works for Whole Parent other than me. I have hired somebody one time to put a bunch of my videos up on Facebook, because I don't know how to do that. Other than that, I have never hired anybody really to work to do anything for Whole Parent. It's just me, and occasionally my wife helps me with stuff and I really am appreciative to her.

Jon @wholeparent: 18:54

I don't want to belittle that in any way, but because it's just me, my time is it has to be divided among the things that make the most sense for whole parent and the podcast. Being new and being much smaller than my social platforms or my email list or things like that, the podcast a lot of times has to take a back seat, and I don't want that to be the case, because I actually think and I've gotten this feedback from many of you as well that the podcast actually is some of the best information that Whole Parent gives out, that like this platform produces, and so when people rate and review the podcast, it's basically telling me and it's telling my wife who's the other person who helps me manage my time in this way. Hey, this is something that you should be continuing to prioritize and make sure that you're getting an episode out every week. And you'll notice, I don't always get an episode out every week, and the reason for that is that other things take priority until this has grown to the extent where it needs to. And I know it's a chicken or an egg thing where, until I prioritize it, it's not going to be at the same level of those other things that I prioritize. But you can help me do that. You can say hey, john, we do think that you should be continuing to give a lot of your time and attention to this podcast. That's number one reason. Number two reason is that you actually, by doing this, help the podcast go out to more people.

Jon @wholeparent: 20:09

I can't control who this podcast goes out to. When it comes to searching something like parenting or evidence-based parenting or brain-based parenting or how to parent on Apple or Spotify, I can't control any of that. You control that when you rate this, especially when you give it five stars, and when this show has more ratings than other shows. That's a big factor in the algorithm of what gets listed, and so if you want this message to get out to more parents, not just you you don't want to just be the best parent on the block, because you're listening to whole parent, but you want your kids to have friends who are being raised in the same way, so that we can change our culture together and parent more effectively. As a whole, you can rate and review. It takes you almost no time and it does help do that to a level that you would not expect.

Jon @wholeparent: 20:56

Number three because of the nature of podcasts. Ratings are the way in which a guest can choose which podcast to go on. So I have a lot of followers on social media and so I can get in front of some really awesome people like Dr Tina Payne Bryson, who's already been on the podcast, and others other authors, other creators, other thinkers, researchers, child development experts. I can get in front of them oftentimes, but then to get them to come on the podcast, I have to be able to show them. Hey, look, lots of people like this thing, and there's no way for them to look up the public downloads on this or anything like that. That information is not available. I don't even have the full download numbers because it's just estimates. The platforms don't report back to my podcast host how many downloads they get. There's just an estimate based on number of clicks and things like that. And so because of that, it's really, really important that I have a ton of good reviews so that I can say to a person like Dr Shefali, who I'm trying to get on the podcast right now, I have some commitment that she would. She would be on. She's an amazing parenting educator, she's groundbreaking parenting author who wrote the Conscious Parent. I can say to her look a lot of parenting podcasts. They don't have that many reviews, but look at how many amazing reviews we have. And so we, this, this population of people, are really dedicated and committed. So that is that's the three reasons why you should rate and review this show, and now that I've given you those, I'm just going to encourage you to do that and let's talk about some other things that we can do to help your child to listen a little bit better.

Jon @wholeparent: 22:24

Okay, number two this is going to be a little bit counterintuitive and it does go with the autonomy seeking thing that goes back to that PDF that I created. This is really important. I want to really emphasize this. Toddlers do lots of stuff that's dangerous, and when our toddlers do things that are dangerous, we have to hold boundaries. I don't want you to become a permissive parent who says yes to absolutely everything, even when it's harmful to your child. Not at all, in fact. When you do that, your child is a lot less safe, for not just that reason, but because they don't know what's safe and what's not safe. You are the one who decides what's safe for your child and what's not safe. You are the one who decides what's safe for your child. That said, if you constantly say no to your child, they will constantly say no back to you. If you say yes to your child, they will say yes back to you. And so find ways with those autonomy seeking activities. But also when your child brings something to you, if it's not dangerous, if maybe they might get a bump or a scrape or a bruise, that's okay If it's not life-threatening or going to cause them serious harm, and it's not something that, like you, absolutely cannot say yes.

Jon @wholeparent: 23:25

To try and say yes as much as you can, because the more you say no, the more it is modeled to them that this is our relationship. It's similar to the sibling rivalry thing. Actually, you're creating neural pathways where, like you, are associated with being the person who says no, and so they're going to say no and it's an oppositional relationship. If your child feels like you're saying yes as much as you can, you can even say that. I say yes whenever I can, and I tell my kids that all the time. You, as soon as you become the person who says yes, even to you, know it's going to take a little longer to get in the car, but we can do this silly thing on the way, or you know, oh, yeah, I want to say yes to that. Any way that you can say yes, do it, because it creates a different dynamic between you and your child. No longer are you in this oppositional relationship where it's like I want to do this thing, no, you can't do it. Okay, put on your PJs. No, I'm not going to Now. It's a collaborative relationship, and another trick with this I should make an entire episode just about this but is the concept of a conditional yes, and so there are going to be some things that the answer is not yes right now, but the answer is yes in the future.

Jon @wholeparent: 24:27

Actually, one of the brain hacks that you can work with, one of the communication tips that you can work with with your kid, is to say yes and then provide the conditions under which the answer is yes. So give you an example my kids are really into sweets. Right now, it's just like every single time my in-laws come over, they just load them up on ice cream and in the next like four days, they're like can we get ice cream, can we get ice cream? Can we get ice cream? And I'm not saying ice cream's bad, right, like it's okay, but it's just like constant, right? So when my kids ask me, can I have ice cream, I'll say like, yes, you can have ice cream tomorrow. Or yes, you can have ice cream after dinner.

Jon @wholeparent: 25:00

And it might sound like, oh man, that's kind of being manipulative. Why did you say yes? And then the answer is really no. The answer is yes, you can have ice cream. I'm not saying no forever. I'm saying yes, you can. But here are the conditions under you're just going to say no, right? Like, can I run in the train tracks? Like no, the answer is no, the answer is always no. But there are other things where you can say, yeah, we can. But here are the conditions that need to be met in order for that to happen. So those are the first two. Number three this is also really important. I have so many of these. I'm realizing as I'm saying this, I'm like, oh, there's a fourth one too. I won't talk about that, I'm not going to confuse you. Number three, and this is the video that I made that had such a high rate of people who were like, yes, this, this is so helpful to me.

Jon @wholeparent: 25:48

The way in which you communicate things to your child matters a lot for them to be able to hear you and listen to you. So not just saying no less in a macro sense, but when you're actually communicating with your child, you have to understand that their brain does not understand things as quickly as you understand them, and so, because of that, you have to be intentional about how you communicate. So, for example, if your child is running at the pool something that we've been dealing with recently because we've been going to the pool a lot because it's been so hot in Chicago we going up, going to the pool, my kids are running. I could either say stop running, or I can choose a different way to communicate that same thing to my toddler. Why does that communication, why does stop running, not work? Let's start with that, and then it'll make sense what I'm going to say next Stop running.

Jon @wholeparent: 26:38

Assumes that your child automatically knows the alternative to not running. That is very obvious for adults. It is not obvious for kids that are that young. They don't directly know a alternative. And so sometimes, if you have a really great relationship with your child, you might say stop running. They might stop on a dime. Maybe they'll try and stop and they'll slip and fall, but ultimately they may just stop, but they are unlikely to then walk. Now with a seven-year-old you could totally just say stop running and it would work. Now I'm not saying that you should say stop running. I think what I'm going to offer you as an alternative is better in every case. But you, I think this, the what I'm going to offer you as an alternative, is better in every case, but you totally could say that to a seven year old and it would work.

Jon @wholeparent: 27:23

What doesn't work is doing that with a two year old who doesn't understand yet the alternative of a negative or doesn't know the absence of a thing like the. I don't want to sound like Terrence Howard trying to explain some like wacky mathematics thing here, but I guess, seeing that on like the Joe Rogan podcast, I'm not going to take the diversion. I'm not going to take the diversion. Your child can't understand the absence of a thing. Your child wants the alternative instead. So instead of saying stop running, you want to say instead walking, walk please, or something like that. There's two additional things with not just not saying the negative right which I'm not saying the negative, that's kind of saying the negative right. But other than giving them the alternative, there's two other reasons why this is really important and that you should frame your communication.

Jon @wholeparent: 28:02

Keep these things in mind as you're communicating with your toddler. Number one their brain works slower and that means that oftentimes, when you say stop running, what they're hearing first is someone's talking to me. What was it that they were saying? They were saying running. Then they work backwards to oh, and then they said stop. So, unlike you, who in a split second, a millisecond, is able to interpret Somebody's talking to me and I can go back to the beginning of their sentence and start there. When they hear you, they start often with the end of the sentence or they start with the verb and then they go backwards. And so when you say don't do this, a lot of times they hear do this first and then don't after, and so kids will keep on doing the thing.

Jon @wholeparent: 28:52

Now here's the other important point to this. So so, in other words, the easiest way to communicate with the toddler is just to tell them what you want them to do, instead of telling them what you don't want them to do. Tell them what you want them to do, because they're going to hear that and then they're going to go with whatever it is that you want them to do anyway, provided that they are not just trying to push back in, because they're feeling be able to. If you communicate everything in negative, abstract terms, that assume that they understand the alternative intrinsically. So that's number one reason why their brains work slow and how you should communicate.

Jon @wholeparent: 29:28

The second thing is that you have to pause between repeating your instruction. Let me say that again. You have to pause between repeating your instruction. Why your instruction? Let me say that, again, you have to pause between repeating your instruction. Why? Because, just because you, for example, if your partner screamed at you don't touch that when you're reaching for something on the stove, they could repeat it right again Don't touch that, don't touch that, don't touch that. And your brain, as an adult brain, would hear it three times. They would go. Oh, they're saying don't touch that, don't touch that, don't touch that. That's three separate sentences, they're just saying it repeatedly.

Jon @wholeparent: 30:01

Children's brains don't work that quickly and so when you repeat something over and over and over, they don't have time to cognitively interpret what you're saying. So so what happens is, by keeping talking and keeping the steady stream of verbal communication coming in, they have no time to process what you're saying. They're just taking it in. So just imagine it in the terms of, like you know, taking it in, understanding it and then acting like. These are three separate things.

Jon @wholeparent: 30:28

In adults, this takes one second. You hear something, you understand what it means and then you take appropriate action. Sometimes it's less than a second, but oftentimes it's one about a second. Right Half a second to hear it and interpret it. Another half second to change your, your actual body in order to accommodate that that instruction. Right One second. For a kid, that whole process might take a second and a half, two seconds. Well, that's twice as long as it does it takes for an adult. So they interpret what you, they hear what you say, and they can't start interpreting what you say because their brain is not at a point of development, yet where it can, to interpret as you're speaking. As adults we're doing kind of three things almost simultaneously. They're happening so quickly that it's almost simultaneous. We're interpreting what somebody's saying as they're saying it.

Jon @wholeparent: 31:15

Kids oftentimes have to hear what it is. Take a, have to hear what it is, take a beat, interpret what that is and then adjust their body to do that by action, or follow that instruction or choose not to follow the instruction. So when you repeat things over and over and over and over, you are actually turning off the part of their brain. And so this is actually what I was going to get to is the third one or is the fourth one? And so I'll give you the bonus. I'll give you the bonus because actually this kind of goes with what I'm saying here. The other thing is the way in which it said will be interpreted by different parts of their brain, depending on how you say it. What do I mean by that?

Jon @wholeparent: 31:47

If you're yelling at your kids, the part of their brain that actually can make decisions and change things is not going to be active. So if you're screaming at them, the best you can hope for often is for them to just freeze, and that is a helpful tool. When my kids run in towards the street, you don't think I scream at them. I scream at them, but my goal in that moment is not to teach them about the street or to get them to adjust their behavior in some way. I want them to freeze behavior in some way. I want them to freeze.

Jon @wholeparent: 32:20

So oftentimes parents will scream at a kid to do a thing, not knowing that they actually shut down the part of the kid's brain that can do the thing or that can interpret what they're saying. Instead, the kid just freezes and then the adult, who feels like they're being disrespected because the child is not doing what they're screaming at them to do, doubles down, doesn't even allow the child to process, screams again, then screams again and the entire situation spirals out of control. And then you have a puddle of a mess kid on the floor, panting and you know, in the fetal position. Because you've just yelled them into a puddle, because you didn't give them any opportunity to actually process and listen to anything that you've said. You've just created a situation out of nothing, and so understanding how you communicate also impacts how their brain is going to interpret those things.

Jon @wholeparent: 33:07

So all of these are tips, and I will say, too, the same thing with the neural pathways related to autonomy seeking behavior and being a yes parent who says yes as much as they can. Similarly with the yelling thing if your child hears you constantly yelling, they are going to learn how to tune out the speech patterns that are not yelling, and so the more you yell, the less likely your toddler is to listen to anything that you're saying when you're not yelling. So that's what I have for you today on the Whole Parent Podcast why kids don't listen, why this is a problem for so many parents out in the world, and some brain-based advice, some tips on how you can get your kid to listen a heck of a lot better. If this episode has helped you parent better, would you share it with a friend? Would you share it with 10 friends? Would you post it to your story?

Jon @wholeparent: 33:50

If you're on Instagram, would you make a TikTok video about it and tell people I love this whole parent podcast thing? And if you don't feel comfortable doing any of those things, if you're not really on social media or whatever, just go and rate and review the show, tell me. Tell me that you love it and I'll. Then I'll keep doing it because I really do appreciate all the amazing feedback that I get from you guys. Okay, until next time. This has been the whole parent podcast.