Collaborative Consequences (Discipline Part 2) #26

Episode Number: #26

Take the quiz to find our if your kid is Highly Sensitive

Description: In this episode of the Whole Parent Podcast, Jon delves into the concept of collaborative consequences, explaining why this method is a powerful tool for effective parenting, especially for highly sensitive children. As a strong advocate for the abolition of punishment in parenting, discusses how to differentiate between punishment and consequences and introduces the idea of working with children to set boundaries collaboratively. Through personal anecdotes and practical advice, Jon illustrates how this approach fosters a child's growth, understanding, and self-discipline.

Timestamps:

• 00:00 - Introduction to the Whole Parent Podcast and the highly sensitive kid quiz
• 02:24 - Definition and importance of collaborative consequences
• 03:53 - Difference between punishment and consequences
• 05:27 - Why punishment is ineffective
• 06:48 - Explanation of consequences and their role in teaching
• 07:29 - Steps to implement collaborative consequences
• 11:58 - The importance of seeking a child's input
• 13:44 - The significance of a child's buy-in in the discipline process
• 16:10 - Long-term goals of using collaborative consequences
• 17:37 - Personal example: Collaborative consequences for cleaning up messes
• 26:18 - Personal example: Collaborative consequences for managing screen time
• 32:52 - Conclusion and final thoughts on collaborative consequences
• 33:09 - Call to action: Subscribe, rate, review, and join the email list

Key Takeaways:

1. Collaborative Consequences: Involve your child in setting boundaries and consequences to ensure they understand and agree with them, which increases their effectiveness.
2. Difference from Punishment: Unlike punishment, which is retributive and ineffective in the long-term, collaborative consequences focus on teaching and guiding children to make better decisions.
3. Child's Buy-In: When children have a say in their own discipline process, they are more likely to adhere to the agreed-upon boundaries and learn self-discipline.
4. Practical Examples: Jon shares real-life examples of implementing collaborative consequences in his household, providing a clear model for listeners to follow.

Resources Mentioned:

• Take the Highly Sensitive Kid Quiz
• How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen so Kids Will Talk

Recommendations for the Next Episode:

• Episode #11: Discipline Part 1

Calls to Action:

• Subscribe: Subscribe to the Whole Parent Podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
• Rate and Review: Leave a rating and review to help other parents find the podcast.
• Share: Share this episode with fellow parents who might benefit from learning about collaborative consequences.
• Email List: Join the email list to receive updates on new episodes and resources.

Contact Information:

• Email: podcast@wholeparentacademy.com
• Instagram: @wholeparent
• TikTok: @wholeparent

Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Whole Parent Podcast. We hope you found it insightful and helpful in your parenting journey. See you in the next episode!

Chapters

• 0:00 Collaborative Consequences Without Punishment
• 4:23 Definition and importance of collaborative consequences
• 5:42 Consequences and Punishment: Why consequences work and Punishment doesn't
• 16:27 Effective Discipline Through Collaboration
• 22:02 Collaborative Approach to Consequences
• 32:29 Effective Collaborative Consequences With Children
• 36:53 The Whole Parent Podcast Subscription Update

Transcript

Jon @wholeparent: 2:00

Hello and welcome to the whole parent podcast, so excited that you are here with me today. My name is John. I'm at whole parent on all of the social medias and if this is your first episode listening after you just took the now very viral at least as it compares to my platform highly sensitive kid quiz, I'm so glad that you're here because this episode is going to really, really help you. If you are just a regular, casual listener, if you don't know about the highly sensitive quiz I put out, this quiz is your child highly sensitive? Based on the last episode of the whole parent podcast about highly sensitive kids, and thousands and thousands of parents have taken this quiz and you know they have learned whether their child is highly sensitive and then gotten some information about how they can parent more effectively as the result, not only from that podcast, but also just in general. I'll be sending them more. So if you're, if you're looking forward to that, hey, I'm glad that you're here listening in, but if you have a highly sensitive child, I'll just tell you right now what we're talking about today is going to be absolute gold for you. You are in the right place and we are talking about consequences. And if you don't know me very well yet, you might not be as surprised that I am talking about consequences as probably a lot of other people on this platform are. Why? Because I am one of the biggest advocates for the total elimination of punishment in parenting. So I am a punishment. I can't say this strongly enough. I am a punishment abolitionist. I wish that punishment would go somewhere and never come back, and so when we're talking about consequences, today, we are specifically not talking about punishment, even though the way that most of us use that word, along with the word discipline, are usually used synonymously, right? We use those three words interchangeably. We say discipline, consequence, punishment. We say that those all three are the same thing. Well, they're not. Not according to me and not according to so many other amazing parenting authors and experts who have taught me this way of thinking about parenting, and so today, we're going to talk about consequences.

Jon @wholeparent: 4:24

We're specifically, though, talking about collaborative consequences. It is a subset of consequences. It is what I believe to be the cream of the crop of consequence parenting. So if you have a kid over the age of even like three or four, you can start to employ this, and I'll tell you I have an eight year old, almost almost eight year old, as well as a four yearyear-old and a two-year-old. Two-year-old we're not doing this yet. The four-year-old we're starting to do this. The eight-year-old we almost exclusively do this.

Jon @wholeparent: 4:55

We don't do a consequence that isn't collaborative at this point, and if we do, it's usually a response. It's my own issues, right, it's me being reactive, it's me not responding, it's me not doing my work, and then I leverage a consequence. Usually those could even be punishments, right, because I'm not immune to it in any way. Even though I'm super anti-punishment doesn't mean that I don't default to some of my old, ingrained childhood neural pathways and punish my kids. Occasionally I do. Usually, I just seek to repair that damage immediately.

Jon @wholeparent: 5:22

So the first thing that we have to understand is what, how, how are consequences and punishment different, and I'm not going to talk about discipline today. Discipline just means to teach, right? So as I'm using this word throughout this episode, you're going to hear me use the word discipline. You can just sub it for the word teach. That's easier for you. I'm not going to get into like why we do that ancient Greek and all this other stuff, but but yeah, just sub that so. So if I say you're disciplining your kids. We're just teaching our kids. That's all we're saying. We're teaching them for the longterm, we're helping them to learn and grow.

Jon @wholeparent: 5:52

So why is punishments an effective ineffective form of discipline, and consequences are an effective form of discipline? How are they different? Well, fundamentally, the way in which I define punishment is very different than the way in which I define consequences, and actually, in looking and researching this, I think I have a pretty solid leg to stand on. Punishment seems to be, according to dictionary definitions of the way that it's generally used in society, it's a term that refers to taking an action in retribution for someone's misbehavior. So if a person does something to harm someone else for example, if someone steals something, if someone breaks a law, or if a child does something problematic they push another kid down or they lie or do something else like that then a punishment is going to that perpetrator and saying I am going to harm you in some way and I know that a lot of you just like sharpen, take a breath, stick with me, we'll get there. I am going to harm you in some way in order to send you into a fear-based mind state. I'm going to send your brain into a reactive, fear-based mind state, so that you associate the bad thing that you did with the bad way that you feel right now. And the idea from classical conditioning is that if we do this enough, our child will stop doing that thing. That's problematic and they'll start or they will just stop. That's the goal of punishment, so it's a reactive or retributive thing.

Jon @wholeparent: 7:27

Here's the problem that all might sound effective. We talk about the ethics and morals, whatever later that might sound effective. What we know from research is that it's not. What we know from research is that punishment is an ineffective teacher, and I'm not going to get into why. Today that's me going on a whole anti-punishment rant that you guys can read about in my book in a couple months, or that you can go and listen to another episode where I do that.

Jon @wholeparent: 7:52

But just to boil it down into one sentence punishment sends your brain into a state where it does not want to learn anything, not long-term. It might learn don't do that thing around this person right now, but it's not an effective long-term teacher. And so because of that, punishment does not work. It doesn't work with adults. We know this. Criminal justice reform advocates have known this for years. It doesn't work with kids. It doesn't work with kids who come from traumatic backgrounds. The only kids who it seems to work on are the kids who would have learned the lesson without the punishment. That's the great secret of punishment it only seems like it works because the kids that would have learned the lesson anyway learn the lesson. So why is punishment ineffective? Because it works against the way that your child's brain is set up. Your child's brain is set up to protect them, to survive, to connect with you. Punishment interrupts that, disrupts that. It's a terrible teacher, and so that's why I'm anti-punishment.

Jon @wholeparent: 8:47

Well, what are consequences? Consequences are not retributive. Consequences are designed to create a boundary around a thing in order for your child to learn over time why that boundary consequence is in place. And I'm not. I don't mean to say that boundaries and consequences are, are totally the same thing. They're not. That's a whole nother episode about boundaries, but that's the fundamental difference between the consequence. So a consequence does not have to send your child into a reactive brain state where they're terrified or anything like that, or they're, you know, even even just feeling bad about themselves. Consequences don't have to do that, and so because of this, we get to deploy consequences in different ways, and I could have.

Jon @wholeparent: 9:28

I know I keep saying I'm going to have another episode, I'm not enough, they're upset. I guess there's going to be a lot of episodes of this podcast, but I will do another episode about a little acronym that I developed sometime in the future about deploying consequences with younger kids, like really young kids. But for kids four years old and up, I think we should be looking toward a total collaborative consequence model, especially, like I said, after they're eight years old. We should, this is all we should be using and that's very weird for me to say that, because I'm usually an advocate for, like you know, not making these grand statements about like, oh, this is, you know, this is the only way to do this or this is the only way you should be parenting. I really think that this is, that's how effective this is. I am such a believer that I think that basically, always with a child over the age of eight, definitely with teenagers, you should be exclusively using collaborative consequences.

Jon @wholeparent: 10:22

So we've defined what punishments are. We've said that consequences are not that. Well then, what are consequences? What are collaborative consequences? Consequences are outcomes of an action, and we can choose to work with our kids, or we can choose to deploy consequences in a way that we're not working with them, deploy consequences in a way that they that we're we're not working with them. Essentially, what a collaborative consequence is is when your child does something that you deem to be problematic in whatever way, and there's can be a lot of reasons why. Right, it's not good socially, it it hurts somebody else, it's hurts themselves. Right, they're doing something that could lead to further harm. Or it's against some value set that you have as a family and you want to instill that with them. Any of those things that they do that violate in some way the what's not okay part of you.

Jon @wholeparent: 13:04

The first thing that you want to do is actually approach your child with curiosity, not with an iron fist. So we're not going to nip it in the bud. We're going to wait for our child to calm down, because usually, when we stop our child from doing something, they're usually pretty reactive, and so I'm not saying that you shouldn't ever stop your child because it sends them into a reactive brain state and then they don't learn anything. What I'm saying is intentionally sending them into a reactive brain state and then trying to teach them while they're in that fight or flight limbic brain mode is ineffective. So instead, what you're going to do is you're going to wait until after the situation has neutralized, everything's calmed down, and you're going to approach your child usually an hour later or whatever with curiosity. You're going to say hey later, or whatever.

Jon @wholeparent: 13:48

With curiosity, you're going to say hey, so this thing just happened. What was that about? Help me understand. I want to know why you were taking out the baking soda and vinegar and pouring them all over the kitchen floor indiscriminately. Or I want to know why you took that toy from your little brother and put it somewhere where he couldn't get it, even though it's his. And what you'll receive back often is an immediate just like they get triggered again and then they go off. Then, okay, we got to wait longer. We got to have the conversation when we can have it in a calm way. Eventually, we're going to have this conversation in a way where your child is going to be able to identify for you why what happened happened. If they're able to, it might take some back and forth with you. This is going to be able to identify for you why what happened happened. If they're able to, it might take some back and forth with you. This is going to be a long process.

Jon @wholeparent: 14:35

Collaborative consequences are a long-term fix. They're not a short-term fix here. So that's what we're going to do and then, as a result, in the long term, we're going to set together a new boundary and a new consequence to go with that boundary, to prevent that thing from happening again. So how do we do that? How are we going to go about it? Step one we've already said we're going to, we're going to approach our child, we're going to wait until a moment when this consequence is actually going to be received well, and we're going to be able to have a actual conversation about this. Step two we're going to try and seek to understand what's going on here. Where is this coming from? How are we moving? How can we move forward? Step three and this is very, very important we are going to seek our child's input. This is where most parents just throw up their hands like, oh no, I'm definitely not doing this. But this is the joy of collaborative consequences. It's going to take some learning for you too, probably, but we are going to seek our child's input, not only on why that thing happened, but also on what we can do as a family between you parent, child to stop that thing from happening again.

Jon @wholeparent: 15:43

Let me explain why this can be so transformative. Number one, the first reason why this is so transformative and people will disagree with me on this, but I am very convinced of this your child, highly sensitive or not, but especially highly sensitive kids for those who are listening to this episode with a highly sensitive kid has a robust, nuanced and complicated inner world. They have a robust, nuanced and complicated inner world Whether they're two years old, four years old, eight years old, but the older they are, the more robust, nuanced and complicated their inner world will be. The truth is that many parents do not want to accept. Your child knows themselves and their inner world better than you do.

Jon @wholeparent: 16:27

Now, that is not to say that you don't know more than your child. It's not to say that you are not more ethical than your child, that you don't know more about the world than your child, that you don't know more about their brain, that you don't even know, at times, more about the triggers that lead to certain outbursts and activities. All of those things can be true At the same time. You are not a mind reader. Your child has thoughts that they do not voice to you. They have neural pathways that lead to outcomes that you are not privy to, that you do not understand. And because of all of this, because of this understanding, what you have to appreciate is that your child likely knows as well as you what types of negative motivations or boundaries could be put in place that would prevent them from doing the problematic thing again.

Jon @wholeparent: 17:28

Again, you don't understand always why they did a thing. Sometimes you will. Sometimes you'll have to explore that with them. Right, your child hurts your other child, or you know they have siblings. We talked about sibling conflict in a previous episode. That's another great episode to listen to. We will get into the. You'll see how collaborative discipline and collaborative consequences fit very well into the paradigm that I talk about with siblings as well. But as we, as we are, you know you might have any situation where one child hurts another child and they don't know that they're doing that because they're jealous or something like that. You might have to help them name that emotion. Your kids are not experts totally in emotional nuance, even though they have a nuanced, deep and very complicated inner world. You might have to help them do some of those things, but ultimately they will be able to identify what types of motivations will work better for them Not always, but often. So your child knows themselves as well, or better, at least as it relates to their inner world and their thought processes, as you do, and a lot of parents don't like that, but it's true. Your child has thoughts you don't know.

Jon @wholeparent: 18:38

Number two your child's buy-in in the process of discipline is actually more important than any of the consequences that you're going to deploy. Let me say that again your child's buy-in in the process of discipline and consequences is more important than any of the consequences that you would otherwise employ. What do I mean by that? If you think a certain consequence would be massively motivating to your child, but your child is staunchly opposed to that thing, and you're thinking to yourself well, yeah, I know they are. That's why it's going to work right, because they really don't like it. They're so against it that it's going to work in that way, your child's brain processes will then just associate those things negatively with you rather than with the action that you're trying to disincentivize. What do I mean by all that? What I mean is when you get your kids buy-in in the discipline process, in the collaborative consequences process, you are way more likely to get to the heart of the issue. Why? Simply because you have their buy-in. It's a brain hack. It's a brain hack. By involving them, by letting them become your co-teacher, your teacher assistant in their own learning, they are going to be way, way more likely to do that thing.

Jon @wholeparent: 19:54

And then, number three what's your long-term goal here? Right, like. What's your long-term goal of any consequence? It's behavior development. It's teaching your child to make better decisions going forward. You did this thing. It was not a good decision. Here's what happened as a result. Let's make better choices going forward, right. What better way to teach a child to be, in other words, self-disciplined, to leverage the proper remedies for whatever action that they take, than to let them start early?

Jon @wholeparent: 20:27

I have this quote up behind me. I talk about it all the time. It's an Alfie Kohn quote. It's children learn how to make decisions by making decisions, not by following directions. Same thing is true about discipline, right? Children learn to be disciplined not by being disciplined, but by practicing discipline themselves. And so collaborative consequences are this wonderful tool where you bring them behind the curtain and you actually allow them to speak into their own discipline process. So that is what collaborative consequences are. That's why they're massively effective. Number one, because they your child has this rich inner world and they're going to know how to speak into that world better. Number two, because by having agency in this process, they themselves are going to be more involved, more desiring of it to work. And number three, because your eventual goal is that you don't have to do this anymore, that your child's going to do this and take these steps on their own. So that's how we're going to get to that point.

Jon @wholeparent: 21:21

So now that we've kind of gone through what collaborative discipline is and why, or collaborative consequences are and why they're effective, I want to give you an example from my own life of two different times that we have deployed collaborative consequences. One is a very specific deploying of collaborative consequences. It was one specific iteration of this happening. Another one has to do with collaborative consequences associated just to a general like a general rule boundary that we have in our house but that was determined collaboratively, and I'll tell you exactly how we did both of these and it'll kind of give you a model of how you can walk through this and do this with your own kids. In the first one. I'll talk about the more general one first.

Jon @wholeparent: 22:03

What we were noticing is that our kids had a really, really hard time cleaning up after themselves, cleaning up messes, and it was just leading to a lot of kind of negative association for my wife and I, because we were just constantly cleaning, constantly cleaning up toys, constantly cleaning up the kitchen, constantly cleaning up cereal bowls and everything else. And the first couple of steps that we tried to take, I think, were good. Our kids were really young at the time. This is before we started deploying any of this type of stuff. We're just let's just get rid of some stuff, let's get rid of a lot Seven eighths of the toys and that really helped. But it didn't. It didn't go all the way. And especially as our kids got older our oldest got older it became very clear that like it wasn't going to be enough, like he had to contribute into the process.

Jon @wholeparent: 22:48

And now you guys are saying well, how is this related to consequences? Well, guys, the consequence of making a mess is that you have to clean it up. The consequences here are very simple. Right, this might sound heady and convoluted, but you know the consequences of every action. The consequence of cussing out your boss is that you get fired right. That's probably a bad example because it's a little bit too close to punishment, but I mean, like it, it is right. I guess the better example would be the punishment for not showing up to work is that you get fired right? Because because if you're not doing a job, nobody's going to pay you to not do that job. I hope maybe in maybe in the work, work from home world, you can just like not show up.

Jon @wholeparent: 23:25

I've heard of all these stories of people like having all these programs that move, all these mouses. They have like four computers lined up and the mouse moves on each one like every minute, and so then the they like work for four companies. They don't do anything. Anyway, this is a long diversion from our consequences. Those people need some consequences. They need to learn that. You know, or maybe that's a consequence of the company, right, the company has been trying to cut on labor, blah, blah, blah, and they're not giving good benefits and they're giving cheaper and cheaper wages, and so, and they don't want to, you know, provide any sort of support to their employees, and so the result is their employees. The consequence is that their employees don't want to work for them. And so they just kind of phone it in, they quiet, quit, or they, you know, fill out an application and then have no intention of ever actually doing anything for them. So, yeah, you could see how, when we get curious, all of a sudden the consequences thing it gets a little bit more convoluted, but it's simple, right? So in our example back to our example like, we're talking about parenting, we're not talking about the state of the American labor force.

Jon @wholeparent: 24:25

In our example of kids, when our kids were making messes and not cleaning them up, we were like, okay, we have to move to some sort of system here where our kids contributed some way. And so we pulled my son aside and we said, hey, what do we need to do to make sure the house is clean every evening before bed? Do we need to, like, have a timer that we set we clean up at the end of it? Should we, you know, before we move on to the next activity, we have to clean up the activity that we did before we, you know, leave the kitchen. We have to make sure that that's reasonably clean. Before we go play with friends, we got to make sure, like, what's going to work for you to help. And he thought about it and he came up with a solution At the end of the night. We're just going to clean every night, right, we'll just have a timer. It goes off half an hour before bedtime. We just spend the last half hour cleaning and then we'll go to bed. And we were like we don't think that's going to work. But rather than saying we don't think that's going to work, let's not do it, we said he has to be involved to clean up the toys. He's going to be pulling teeth. So instead we said give him the agency. Okay, that's how we're going to do it.

Jon @wholeparent: 25:34

So that night, at that time, friends could play. Usually friends can't play during the day, they can only play in the evening. We kind of saw this coming. He didn't. Timer goes off. I think it was actually the next night. The first night it was fine. The next night went off and it was like no, I really don't want to do this now. We're like hey, but we, we got to do this, but we can make a different choice for tomorrow. So we held the boundary, we held the consequence that he had established, but it became very. He did as fast as he possibly could Went and played with his friends. He was very upset about it, but he wasn't upset at us. He was upset that he had not foreseen this, and so we said okay.

Jon @wholeparent: 26:07

Next time we sat down, we said, okay, we, that did not work. So. So what are we going to do instead? How are we going to keep the house clean without doing it in the way that we did yesterday, because that didn't work? So this is the collaborative consequences process. We actually let him have buy-in.

Jon @wholeparent: 26:20

He said well, I want you to tell me when you think would be a good time to clean, because I can never predict. I don't do well with time. So, self-awareness, right. Like, not only are we teaching responsibility, not only are we teaching team values of making sure the house is clean, not only teaching holding boundaries, we're also teaching like, hey, know your limitations. He's like yeah, I don't do well with time, I don't want to watch. Like, when do you think we should clean up? And we're like yeah, so we should probably, before we move on to the next activity, just pick up what we're doing. And he's like okay, but what if there is the scenario where I want to come back to it? Okay, how many times per day. Do you think that'll happen? Oh, that probably only happened once a day. Okay, well, once a day we can leave something, but then if we're going to go on to the next thing and then we want to leave that too, we got to go clean up the first thing. We can't just have multiple things sitting out everywhere. I'm still using that. I'm still using that. I'm still using that. Okay, does that seem fair to you? Oh, yeah, seems totally fair.

Jon @wholeparent: 27:17

Next day comes playing with Legos. I'm still using these, but I want to go over here. I want to do this thing. We didn't hold an unrealistic boundary because he had made that call. No, I, I. There are going to be times when this happens and if that had happened, we would have adjusted right, like we wouldn't have just been like no, hammer down, we're absolutely no, no, and under no certain circumstances can we change this. We already have proven that we're willing to make some adjustments and changes.

Jon @wholeparent: 27:45

So he goes, gets his stuff, plays. It Turns out that he did want to do like a combined lego, magnet, tiles, giant thing, really cool, really fun. But when it's time to clean up all that, are you still using the legos? Yeah, I'm still using them. Okay, well, we gotta clean the magnet house because we gotta clean up one of these. Okay, I'll do the magnet house. We'll clean up the magnet house, leave the legos, goes on, does something else. Well, now he wants to do something in the basement and it's unrelated to upstairs, but he wants to leave that set up. It's going to be an obstacle course or whatever. Okay, well, remember, we're only allowed to leave one thing out at a time, thanks to himself. Okay, all right. All right, this seems fair, this is working. Goes upstairs, cleans up the Legos, comes back downstairs, does the obstacle course At the end of the night.

Jon @wholeparent: 28:26

That night, we had one thing that was left out. Whatever that thing was that he was still using that. We weren't necessarily that we had moved on to something else. He had one thing that's still left out. It was so much easier to be like hey, let's just real quick, go downstairs before you go to your friend's house and just mop this up, or we can do it when you get back. Okay, let's do it when we get back. Okay, he gets home.

Jon @wholeparent: 28:52

Remember, we said that we were going to do this. So we go down to the base and we do this. So this has become a consequence in our own home. When we make messes, we clean them up and mom and dad help. We're not just like sitting down and like letting our kids clean the whole house Mom and dad help but there is a consequence.

Jon @wholeparent: 29:11

It was designed collaboratively. The kid had input into it. How are we going to make this work? What's the consequence for not doing it? We can't move on to the next thing. How are we going to hold those boundaries? So this is something that's continually happened. So this wasn't one-off issue that we had. This was a continual problem and we set some boundaries and these kind of are like. You can see how boundaries and consequences were kind of like interchangeably using these of our. Like. You can see how boundaries and consequences were kind of like interchangeably using these. But the whole point here is that it was collaborative, that that in order we had to have a collaborative solution to the problem that looked forward rather than looking back and was seeking to be retributive. So so let's, let's go to the the next example. I want to give you one more example and then we're going to call it a day on collaborative consequences and we'll come back with another episode in the future more on on this topic, more on discipline, because I know that this has been a really good topic so far.

Jon @wholeparent: 30:02

The second scenario of, or example of, how we utilize a collaborative consequence had to do with TV screen time and we were having a really tough time transitioning away from screen time just really hard. And so we sat down with my son. It came time to be done with the TV one day and he screamed and he fought and he like threw the remote across the room or something. He huge meltdown and we said, okay, totally get it, it's okay to be upset, we'll talk about this later. Not like we'll talk about this later, but we'll talk about this later. Because he knows we do this collaborative consequences thing, we do this collaborative discipline thing. We'll talk about this later. So we go off, we leave and we come back later and we have this conversation.

Jon @wholeparent: 30:49

Hey, how are you feeling after it was time to turn off the TV? Oh man, I was so mad. I was so mad at you that you made me turn off my show. I really didn't want to turn it off. It was right at getting to the good part and I just didn't want to turn it off. And okay. Well, what do you think would help in the future for you to turn it off when it's time to turn off? Yeah, just let me do whatever I want all the time. That was the first thing that he said. Just let me do whatever I want all the time, then I'll be happy. Okay, well, we can't do that. That's not a solution. So what's an alternative? Give me a 10 minute warning next time. Okay, we'll give you a 10 minute warning next time.

Jon @wholeparent: 31:24

Two days later, same situation screaming, kicking, fighting after the 10 minute warning. So we give him the 10 minute warning. He's okay, yeah, that's fine, 10 minutes. Is up, still freaking out. So that didn't work. What do you think we should do next time? Give me a five minute warning, 10 minute warning, then a five minute warning, then then off. Okay.

Jon @wholeparent: 31:43

Next day, two days later, three days later, whatever 10 minute warning, five minute warning. Kid gets right off. Wow, that worked. Yeah, it worked. Okay. Well, what should we just do that every time? Yeah, let's do that every time.

Jon @wholeparent: 31:56

Lo and behold, a week later we've done it for a week. It's worked. It doesn't work. Totally loses it Freaks out, throwing, doing all this stuff. All right, so it stopped working.

Jon @wholeparent: 32:07

Sometimes, something works for a while, but then it stops working. So what do you think we should do if that happens again? Well, it won't happen again. I. If that happens again? Well, I won't happen again. I won't do that again, I promise. Yeah, we get it. We know that you don't think that you're going to do it again right now. We believe you, believe your kids, we believe you. We know that you're not doing this on purpose. We know that you're not trying to make our lives hard. We know that you don't want to do this.

Jon @wholeparent: 32:29

So what's the consequence, though? Should we maybe like not do it the next day? Should we like put the remote somewhere? What do we got to do? Well, if I do that, next time, I think I should have no TV for a month. A month, buddy. That's a long time. What if we just do like three days? No, not long enough, dad. A week he said it like it was like the end of the world. Okay, a week. Next time that happens, we'll do a week. He said it like it was like the end of the world. Okay, a week. Next time that happens, we'll do a week. We'll just take the remote away, we'll put it somewhere for a week. Cool, okay, let's do it. Three weeks go by, two weeks go by, not an issue, not one. He remembered I don't want to lose it for a week. I set that boundary. Then it happens Eventually, goes down some YouTube rabbit hole and just started a video after the five minute warning, freaks out, loses it, gets super mad, gets even more upset because he knows the consequence is coming Take the remote away.

Jon @wholeparent: 33:27

Hey, so what are we going to do about this? We did not like pull it away and hide it in that moment. That's it right. Like we didn't like yell anything, we just like let it be. And then the remote was gone. He's like where's the remote? The next day? And we're like hey, buddy, remember we said a week and I kid you not. This kid was like yeah, I thought that would happen. Okay, I'm cool with that. Where's my Legos, where's my blocks? Whatever goes off in place?

Jon @wholeparent: 33:51

Parents oftentimes call me a liar on the internet when I talk about stuff like this. They oftentimes call me a liar on the internet when I talk about stuff like this. Like no way, no way in hell, did your kid do that? Is that how it went down? That's exactly how it went down A hundred percent. The reason that it went down that way, though, is because he had so much buy-in in the process and, by the way, like so many parents get to that the first day, like, think about how much success we had before we ever had to run into that.

Jon @wholeparent: 34:19

We had like literally over a month and a half of like very few, like two or three meltdowns, and each time it was like let's reassess the process, and and maybe there was one or two interspersed in there where we didn't change the plan I'm not talking about those, because it's not necessarily relevant for this podcast episode, but, like those ones, usually it was like okay, but he hasn't eaten, but he didn't sleep last night, but like he just got hurt. Like there was other stuff going on, and we tried to be understanding of that, and this lashing out has nothing to do with, like, the addiction to the screen. It just has to do with, or the dopamine letdown, whatever. Like he, this is actually just like unrelated, and so we're understanding in those times. We're not like every single time he makes a mistake. We're like okay, what's the consequence going to be? Like it's not like that. Like you give your kids a lot of leeway, I think. But once you do have to do that and you have to set that down, we're consistent, we follow through and then we process, and that process literally led to my son being completely fine with a very significant consequence losing tv privileges for a week. Because he was the one who came up with it, he was the one who decided on it and then he was the one who was going to fulfill it. And when he got it back I think we only did six days we weren't like trying to get give it back, but like it's six days later. It was like this he's he's learned what he wanted to learn from this and and like we had something that we had to do and he it was going to be a lot easier for him to watch it. So we did it right. We weren't like super, super crazy about this, but we gave it back to him. We're like yeah, man, just like next time, a week again sound good. That seemed like a long time. Yeah, that's fine. And it didn't like we went like six months and every time he would just kind of okay, I got it, like it's cool.

Jon @wholeparent: 36:01

And a lot of punishment advocates come on here and they're like, yeah, but if you had just done that the first time, you would have like, eliminated all of them. No, because you don't understand. He had to be the one who learned how to set that boundary. How did this is what I want him to do as an adult. This is what most adults struggle to do. This is why they're obsessed with their phones. Right, like I am too. Like if I could set limits on my phone, like my son could set limits on the TV, my goodness, my life would be better, because that, again, is the ultimate goal. So this is why collaborative consequences are so transformative. This is why they work. And if you are sitting here right now and going, this is the way I want to parent, this is the podcast for you, because this is the type of stuff we talk about.

Jon @wholeparent: 36:36

If you have a highly sensitive kid, again, the imposition of just like top-down authority does not work with highly sensitive kids. It just does not. It will not work. You bring them in on the collaborative problem-solving process. They're going to tell you there's a whole inner world going on there. They're going to make it so much easier on you. So that's.

Jon @wholeparent: 36:53

This has been an episode of the whole parent podcast. I always am supposed to say something at the end here about subscribing to the podcast. Go to the show notes. You can look at all the chapters and stuff like that. We're trying to do a much better job with the show notes now, and by we I mean me. The whole parent is just me, all by myself and sometimes my wife who talks to me about it. But if you are interested in this, make sure that you're on the email list so that you can get email updates, not only about new podcasts but also about new stuff we have going on. You'll get like a link to that highly sensitive quiz and stuff like that those on the email list did or will, and yeah, you can just connect. It'll be a good time. But anyway, that's been this episode. Make sure you rate and review, subscribe on Apple and Spotify, otherwise I'll see you in the next one, take care.