Podcast #30: Don’t Worry So Much About Teaching the Lesson

Hello, and welcome back to Pause and Connect. This is episode 30: Don’t Worry So Much About Teaching the Lesson. Read on for how to teach lessons to kids.

It’s been way too long since I recorded my last episode! I started a school psychology grad school program in the fall, and it’s so time consuming. But it’s also so incredible, and I wish you could be with me in each class. I’m learning so much more about what I talk about here on Pause and Connect, and it’s just incredible how the research shows time and time again how effective connection is in parenting. 

To be clear about this podcast, I am not currently a psychologist. The information I share is based on years of my own messing up as a parent, and how therapy and my own research led me to the solution of connection and attachment in my parenting. My connection/attachment approach made 90% of our problems disappear, and gave our entire family the tools to handle the other 10%. When people try the things I talk about on my podcast, in my courses, and on social media, they always tell me it helps. I have so much confidence in what I speak about, and as I work toward my graduate degree, I am finding even more evidence to back it up. But again, I am not currently a psychologist.

How to Teach Lessons to Kids

Today, we’re going to talk about how to teach lessons to kids. We have this belief in our society — and it’s a good belief — that parents are responsible for teaching our kids important life lessons.

But I wonder if we sometimes go too far in our zeal to teach lessons. Do we need to manufacture lessons? Is the moment of our children’s meltdown the best time to teach lessons to kids? Do we even need to teach lessons in direct language every time? Basically, are your lectures the ONLY way your child can learn a lesson?

These are important questions to ask ourselves.

So let’s get into it.

But first, an Arrested Development reference. Have you watched Arrested Development? It’s a hilarious show about a family that just cannot function. The adults are unable to follow through on anything, they don’t listen to anyone, they’re incredibly impulsive, and they’re constantly getting themselves into these huge problems in funny ways.

There are often these moments, though, where it shows the adults functioning really well. For example, one episode shows them leaving notes for each other to tell them they missed a phone call or something. Of course, because it’s a comedy, their notes are really not that helpful. But the point is, they always leave a note.

And then the show flashes back to show us WHY they always leave a note. When they were children, their father was upset that there was no milk in the house, and wanted to teach his kids that they should have left a note that they were out of milk.

So he called up an old employee to help teach the lesson. The important thing to note here is that the old employee had a prosthetic arm. That will feature again in a minute.

So the kids are young, and they’re driving along with their dad. The dad turns around to chastise the kids and says, “You know, we’re out of milk. And I could have gotten it earlier if someone would have left a note.”

When he turns back around, there’s a man (it’s the old employee with the prosthetic arm) walking across the street and the dad ends up hitting him with his car because he had taken his eyes off the road to tell his kids they should have left a note. The man’s arm falls off and sits on the windshield. The kids are screaming, and the dad turns around and says, “WHY!? If someone had left a note, this innocent man would still have his arm!”

And the kids grow up and always remember to leave notes, because they were so traumatized by this lesson their dad taught them.

It’s so funny in the show, but it’s ridiculous as a way to teach lessons to kids, right?

We don’t need to manufacture lessons to teach our kids. We definitely DON’T need to traumatize our kids in order to teach a lesson. And while this is a ridiculously extreme example, think for a minute about how you might be trying to teach lessons to your kids. And is it helpful?

Manufactured Lessons Are Unnecessary

For example, when my daughter was in 6th grade, she had to carry a heavy instrument home from the bus stop every day. She was little and the instrument hurt her back. I worked from home, and could easily have stopped work to meet her at the bus stop to help her carry the instrument, but I thought to myself, “She needs to learn grit. Life is hard, and this is a great way for her to build muscles and grit.”

And as lessons go, that’s not the most terrible. But it also wasn’t really necessary. She was carrying that instrument all over school every day. Muscles were being built. Grit was being built all day long. The lesson was already happening, and she was excelling in hauling that thing around with her all day.

So I really didn’t need to add to that lesson, did I? Showing up for her at the end of the day to provide some relief would have been a kind, compassionate thing to do — and since we’re on the subject of lessons, I actually would have taught her a few different lessons: that it’s okay to accept help, that her mom will take time for her, that it’s fun to walk together and recount the day.

Eventually, I realized this and let go of my tough-it-out approach, and started meeting her at the bus stop. And we had a fun time walking together. It built our relationship.

Now, it also wouldn’t have been the end of the world if I continued to require her to carry her instrument home. It wasn’t child abuse. But the lesson I *thought* I was teaching — that lesson of grit — it was manufactured. And it wasn’t necessary. 

So let’s talk more about these lessons that we think we have to teach our kids, and just try and examine them from a more connected approach. Here are some helpful tips on how to teach lessons to kids.

Timing Is Everything

First of all, timing is really critical when we want to teach lessons to kids. A lot of times, we try to teach our kids a lesson in the middle of their meltdown or sorrow. 

For example, maybe our kid leaves their bike out in the rain and the chain gets rusted. They’re sad and upset, and we might choose that moment to tell them, “See? This is why I tell you to bring your bike in every night.” 

Or maybe they hit their sibling and while they’re still fired up, we start piling on punishments. We send them to their room, and they yell at us about it, so we take away screen time, and they fall apart about that, so we tell them no more playdates for a week.

The problem with this approach is that our kids are not experiencing regulated emotions in these moments. The lessons we’re hoping they’ll learn from our chastisement just aren’t going to sink in. Instead, their frustration might increase, they might feel shame, they might feel out of control.

And what happens to us? We don’t see the lesson being learned, because they’re yelling back at us or crying harder, and WE feel more frustration, more out of control, and panicky. 

Downstairs/Upstairs Brain from The Whole Brain Child

Dr. Siegel and Dr. Bryson, the authors of The Whole Brain Child, have a really good way of explaining what is going on in our brains when this is happening. And they have videos on this too — look up upstairs/downstairs brain Dr. Siegel Dr. Bryson for some visuals.

But here’s what’s happening. The downstairs brain includes the brainstem, and it’s responsible for automatic actions. It doesn’t think things through. It’s super helpful in a lot of situations. If you touch a hot stove, the downstairs brain doesn’t go through a logical curiosity and problem solving situation — it just yanks your hand away and saves you. But it’s probably also the part of the brain that caused your child to hit their sibling, right? In the moment, they were upset and they reacted.

The upstairs brain is the cerebral cortex and it’s the thinking brain. It thinks logically, thinks of what others might be feeling. It problem solves. 

When the two parts of the brain are communicating well, your child has the presence of mind to NOT hit their sibling or to NOT fight back with you. But when they aren’t communicating well, the downstairs brain takes over and the huge emotional outbursts happen. The upstairs brain is NOT in charge; there is no logic happening.

So when you try and reason with your child or tell your child why what they’re doing is wrong, it’s just not going to work. The downstairs brain, or the emotional brain, is running the show. This isn’t the way to teach lessons to kids.

One thing you can do to get those two parts of the brain communicating again is to connect emotionally with your child. Your child’s emotional brain is in charge, so bring your own helpful emotions. Bring your calm over to them and share it.

Give them a hug. Crouch down below them. Put your hand on their shoulder. Use a calm tone and calm words. Validate their emotions. “You’re really sad you left your bike out in the rain, aren’t you?” “You were really upset at your sibling, weren’t you?”

This helps your child’s upstairs and downstairs brains start communicating again. Once they’re calm, they can think logically again. They can realize their actions weren’t helpful. They can realize they hurt somebody. And they can be ready for problem solving.

I talk about this more in episode 17: You Should Use Hugs in Your Discipline. Here’s How. I’ll link to it in the show notes

So, with that brain understanding, the first thing we can do is let go of the need to teach the lesson IN THE MOMENT. 

The lesson will NOT sink in. Give your child the best chance at success by connecting with them in their meltdown and waiting to teach the lesson.

And the bonus here is that when you connect with your child, it calms YOUR brain down too. You begin to be able to think logically again, because you’re helping YOUR upstairs and downstairs brain get back together.

Connection is just so freaking effective here. Use it instead of trying to teach a lesson while your child is dysregulated. 

Have Trust in Your Child

The next thing we can do is to trust our kids. Do they even need us to point out what they did was wrong?

Do they need us to tell them they shouldn’t leave their bike out, for example? 

They probably already figured out they messed up. Telling them, “This is why you shouldn’t leave your bike out” isn’t really helpful, is it? Even if we waited until after their upstairs and downstairs brain started communicating again, it’s not the most ideal way to teach the lesson.

We can trust that our kids are smart. They can connect the dots, and they can figure a lot of things out on their own.

In the bike example, once they’re calm, we might go to problem solving instead of telling them what they did wrong. We could say, “I wonder how we can solve the rust problem.” And then also, “I wonder what can be done so this doesn’t happen again.”

Your child can come up with solutions. They definitely can.

And approaching them with curiosity — How can we avoid this? How can we solve this? — is going to do an even better job at teaching the lesson than if you explicitly tell them they shouldn’t leave their bike out again. Right?

Of course, sometimes, you have to be explicit. “We don’t hit in our family,” for example. With serious offenses that harm another person, you will want to make sure your child clearly understands the expectations. But even this can be done cooperatively, especially after you’ve taken the time to calm the downstairs brain by connecting with your child.

“We don’t hit in our family, do we? What can we do to help your sibling feel better?”

And then, “How can I help you the next time you want to hit?”

Even with all this, your child isn’t going to be perfect at not hitting after this. They may even leave their bike out in the rain again. Think of this as slowly teaching skills.

Some kids will learn their lesson with the bike immediately. Others will repeat it. But when you connect and help calm the emotional part of their brain, when you trust your child to problem solve, your child is working on important skills — they’re learning how to calm their emotions and they’re learning how to problem solve.

None of this is wasted, even if your child leaves the bike out in the rain the next day. You repeat the process, and they work on those skills. It’s like they’re working a muscle and it’s getting stronger each time they work it out.

You Don’t Have all the Answers

The next thing we can keep in mind is that WE don’t have all the answers!

We really don’t! Our kids have answers too. So when we have the mindset that we are responsible for bestowing all of life’s lessons on our kids, we can get into the mode of thinking we know everything.

But we don’t! And we don’t have to know everything. We can trust the process of learning, instead of thinking we have to teach a lesson whenever our kids mess up.

It’s okay for us to ask our kids for their ideas and we can learn from them. We can face the truth that we don’t know everything, and we can sit in that place of not knowing, and slowly learn our own lessons.

Our kids are going to mess up. We’re going to mess up. We don’t always have to have the answers on how to fix it. Sometimes, we can take it one step at a time.

I think there’s a real pressure on parents to know what to do in the moment, especially if eyes are watching you, right? We really do feel like we have to know how to handle everything that our kids throw at us. But I’ve said it before, and it’s so cliche, but I’m still going to say it again: You weren’t given a handbook on your child. You weren’t told how to handle every single situation. Nobody can even tell you that. 

So when your kid really throws you for a loop, and you feel that external and internal pressure to do the right thing and teach the right lesson in this moment, take a deep breath.

Remind yourself that you don’t have to have the answers right now. You don’t have to solve everything right this second, and you don’t have to impart some wise lesson to your child in the moment. In fact, when you don’t know what to do or say, you won’t be able to impart a wise lesson, right? Because you don’t know what to do or say! So work on feeling okay with that.

You don’t have all the answers, and you’re not supposed to. 

Then, when your kiddo is doing something that is just really stumping you, give your kid a hug, sit down on the floor, do a yoga pose, sing at the top of your lungs, stick your head in the freezer to cool off, hold your child’s hand, say a prayer, say a mantra… basically do whatever you feel your body needs to do to catch a breath and remind yourself that you don’t have to know the answers right now.

Reset, give yourself grace, and take it moment by moment.

Teach Strategies

The next thing we can do in this process of how to teach lessons to kids is set ourselves up for success more often. This is not something you want to even be thinking about in those stressful moments we were just talking about. In stressful moments, you work on calming, connecting, and resetting.

Then, in calm moments, you can set yourself and your child up for success more often and teach strategies for the things they’re lacking. 

In a calm moment when you’re not feeling any external or internal pressure, let yourself think about the areas where your child struggles. Do they hit their sibling? Is it hard for them to not yell at their teacher? Do they withdraw when they mess up? Think about one thing that tends to be a common problem for your child and your family.

Remind yourself that kids do well when they can, so if your child seems to constantly be making mistakes in this area, they probably are lacking some skills.

If they could handle their emotions and not hit their sibling, they would. If they could talk to you and apologize when they mess up instead of withdrawing and ignoring you, they would. 

Then think about what’s getting in the way. Think about timing, setting, and necessary skills. Do you notice a pattern in timing – do they tend to hit their sibling more often in the late afternoon? Do you notice a pattern in setting – do they tend to get along with peers during playdates at home but not during school? Think about skills – do they have the skills necessary for speaking calmly when they’re upset? Do they have an emotional vocabulary?

These are just some areas where your mind can go. The idea is to try and identify what’s going on that’s leading your child to struggle.

Once you’ve made that identification, you can begin to think of solutions. And in calm moments, you can teach those solutions. 

So if you figure out that your child yells at their teacher when they feel rushed, you can work with your child on better phrases to use. You can work with the teacher or the school psychologist or counselor on supports to use in the classroom.

Again, this is just an example, but do you see what we’re doing here? We’re looking at the situation in a calm moment, and we’re thinking about the skills that can be taught to the child and the things that adults can do to help the child.

Change the Environment

This goes right into the next tip, which is to change your child’s environment. Sometimes, the environment is just not conducive to your child being able to handle their emotions. 

This goes for everyone. As an adult, I really struggle when I’m trying to do something while there’s a lot of noise. I can’t have a conversation, cook a meal, work, or anything. So if I want to be successful at those things, I need to move away from noise or turn off the radio or whatever. 

I can’t always change my environment though, but being aware of this challenge helps me to make better choices when I just have to be in a noisy place. So I won’t try and talk about deep things, for example, because I can’t process my thoughts well in a noisy environment, but I can listen to someone else’s thoughts, so I can have a nice conversation with someone who needs to be heard. I won’t try to write an essay in a noisy environment, but I can sit back and watch kids playing. 

You see what I mean? I work to control my environment when I can, and when I can’t, I control what I choose to do in that environment.

How can you and your child do this? 

Let’s say that when you stopped to think about your child’s challenges, you realized that your child isn’t emotionally mature enough to handle their body when they feel frustrated in the late afternoon. That’s when they tend to hit their sibling when they get frustrated.

With this knowledge, you can think about rearranging your schedule so that you or another adult can be in the same room when the siblings are playing together. Then, when they get upset and seem like they’re going to hit their sibling, you can be near and talk them through their emotions. Or if you can’t rearrange your schedule, maybe you can rearrange your kids’ schedules so that one is doing homework while the other plays. 

You can also teach your child to recognize how their environment affects them, so that they can eventually begin making these choices on their own.

Tell them, “You seem to get frustrated with your sibling in the afternoons. That’s okay. We all have times of the day that feel better. I have a hard time not getting frustrated at bedtime. Do you think it would be a good idea to pick a different afternoon activity?”

And then you can brainstorm. Then your child is empowered. Your child recognizes they struggle in this setting at this time, and they can either choose to change their environment — play alone in their room, for example — or change what they do in their environment. They could do a craft instead of play a cooperative game, for example.

And going back to what we were talking about earlier, you can teach them to use calming skills and appropriate language to advocate for themselves. They won’t be able to use these all the time with their afternoon frustrations, but understanding their environment combined with skills can help them to have more presence of mind more often.

And that’s what we’re working towards here: being in control of emotions more often.

Not all the time, because that’s impossible, even for adults! But the more often we can feel success with this, the better we’ll get.

The bottom line in how to teach lessons to kids is that emotions are very real and they have a huge impact on our kids’ ability to handle themselves. We don’t need to preach to them in order to teach lessons. When we understand their emotions better, we have the ability to trust our kids more, teach strategies, and look at their environments with new eyes.