Podcast Episode 421: Why Yelling, Sticker Charts & Bribery Aren’t Working (And What To Try Instead) Transcripts

Please note: Transcripts for the No Guilt Mom Podcast were created using AI. As a result, there may be some minor errors.

JoAnn Crohn (00:00)

Welcome to the No Guilt Mom podcast. I’m your host JoAnn Crohn joined here by the brilliant and caffeinated Brie Tucker. Why? She’s literally bouncing up and down everybody bouncing up and down.

Brie Tucker (00:08)

Hello everybody how are you? ⁓

Just as we hit the record button, I’m like, and poor JoAnn, Bire just had caffeine.

JoAnn Crohn (00:18)

I did see you slamming a Dr. Pepper. Did Dr. Pepper have alot of caffeine?

Brie Tucker (00:21)

It doesn’t have a lot of caffeine, but the only caffeine I take is one coffee in the morning. So I am very sensitive to the caffeine. So if I have more, I’m like just bouncy.

JoAnn Crohn (00:34)

Caffeine’s supposed to be like really beneficial if you struggle with ADHD symptoms. It helps you focus and laser in on things.

Brie Tucker (00:41)

It does. I was getting to the sluggish part, recording this in the afternoon and I was getting sluggish. So I was like, I’m going to take a little swig of a soda because you know what? If I take a coffee after 12, forget it. 1 a.m. I am lying in bed cursing myself. But it’s coffee. I can drink a soda, but coffee is the hard one.

JoAnn Crohn (00:56)

Yeah, that’s how it works.

Interesting. Very interesting.

Brie Tucker (01:04)

In no way related to the episode.

JoAnn Crohn (01:06)

No way related. We just went off on our little squirrel path, which I mean, if you know and love us, we do all the time. What we are talking about is helping kids be more resilient and helping create connected families. And to do that today, we’re joined by Dr. Doug Bolton. He’s a clinical psychologist, educator, and the author of the book Untethered, creating connected families, schools, and communities to build a resilient generation.

For over 30 years, he’s been helping kids, families, and schools understand behavior and build resilience. And what we love about his work is that it takes the pressure off being a perfect parent and instead shows how connection and repair are truly what matter most. And Dr. Bolton is also the dad to three grown children. With that, let’s get on with the show.

Doug, you’ve written a book, Untethered, and in the book you describe certain tethers that keep us grounded. What are those tethers?

 Dr. Doug Bolton (02:04)

⁓ thank you for having me on. First of all, it’s wonderful to be with both of you and you’re delightful caffeinated as well. I just want to. You know, I think that the biggest tethers we have are to the communities that are most central to our lives. And the stronger and healthier those communities are, the stronger and healthier we become. And the more damaged or stressed those communities are.

 Dr. Doug Bolton (02:32)

the more stressed we become. So those are schools and families, I think primarily, but they can be teens. A lot of times each of us can point to a person whose relationship has really transformed us. And it doesn’t have to be someone at school or at home. The beautiful thing about relationship is that the power it has to transform not just our emotional lives, but we’re physically healthier. We’re more resilient. We’re more able to access the best parts of our brain when we’re connected in relationship. So I think they can come from anywhere. And I think one of the things I talk about in my book is the number of different places relationships showed up in my life that were transformative. And as a school, our work, I was the principal of a therapeutic school, and our work was really to create those experiences for students.

JoAnn Crohn (03:21)

Yeah, I used to be a teacher and the classroom community was one of the most important things, I think, in my students’ lives. I was in a Title I school and so many of them had really difficult home situations or insecure home situations in terms of financial means and everything. And so the school community became a lifeline of sorts. And also in that school community, kid behavior is a very, very interesting subject when it comes to the classroom. It’s an interesting subject when it comes to parenting as well. And in Untethered, you say we’ve misunderstood kids’ behavior. Tell me more about that. How have we misunderstood it?

 Dr. Doug Bolton (04:06)

Well, think historically we’ve understood behavior through a behavioral lens. And it was back in about the late 1920s, early 1930s that behaviorism really came to the forefront. And what it really said and what the people who were leading that charge said was, give me a child and I can shape them into anything by creating these rewards and incentives.

Brie Tucker (04:31)

wait, yeah, right around Pavlov’s dog, right? I did it with a dog. We did it with a dog.

JoAnn Crohn (04:36)

We can do it with kids! It’s exactly the same!

 Dr. Doug Bolton (04:39)

Kids’ are so very different than the rat brain or the bunny brain or the pigeon brain, right? Or the dog!

Brie Tucker (04:46)

We’re the dog brain let’s just be honest. Let’s just be honest.

 Dr. Doug Bolton (04:49)

And so this was our frame and it continues to be our frame, even though we can sit here and say, that’s just not true. The research that has debunked this is 70, 80 years old. They began to realize it and yet we still hang on to it. And I think there’s a couple of reasons why we still hang on to this. First of all, because that’s how we were raised.

Brie Tucker (05:12)

Yeah, it’s familiar.

 Dr. Doug Bolton (05:14)

Exactly. It’s familiar and we feel like, that was the key to my success was the fact that I was punished at the right times or incentivized by the right things.

JoAnn Crohn (05:24)

I can see how people think that, yes.

Brie Tucker (05:26)

I think I would say I survived it.

 Dr. Doug Bolton (05:29)

Well, I think that that’s right. I think that we survive, that we’re who we are in spite of, not because of that. Yeah. The other thing that happens when kids are struggling, I’ve shifted how I saw that through the lens of motivation. So the idea of behaviorism is, they just aren’t motivated to behave well, right? Yeah. And so we just need to change the motivator. So we are going to either get incentives or we’re going to get punishments. But, you know, I yell at my kids And I’m not motivated to yell at my kids. hope I’m not the only one here, but I’m not motivated to yell at my kids, right? Yeah. When I screw up, I’m not motivated to screw up. And so there’s something else going on. As I go into the research on this and the therapeutic school, all the kids at our school were identified for behavior problems. So we really needed to look into this and we prided ourselves on these behavioral methods. And what I realized was it wasn’t Kids were getting better, but it wasn’t because of our great point system or sticker charts. It was because when they struggled, they had people there who were connected to them in relationship and who were emotionally regulated. When they’re dysregulated, the work is to then, know, misbehavior is stress behavior. There’s a great book by Stuart Schenker about this. And what he talks about is when people are stressed is when we…misbehave. And when I think about my worst moments, it’s always connected to some stress. There are some days that I handle really hard things beautifully, right? And then there are other days when I really melt down. And I can blame my kids. anybody would be upset about that. But no, some days I handle that really well. And so it’s really about my own stress that I’m bringing into this and my difficulty managing that stress.

JoAnn Crohn (07:17)

It is really interesting what you said about, you know, the connections involved in kids behavior and also the emotionally regulated adults. I saw an example of this in the airport yesterday. I was coming back from visiting my cousin in Oregon and there was this cute little like six year old boy in front of me and he was wearing a Dallas Cowboys jacket. He had a little cowboy hat on and I was like just admiring him from the side and he put on his sunglasses. He was just in all of his feels, waiting right by his mom. And his grandpa came up to him and his grandpa said, what are you, a little music star going like this thing? And the boy I could see just deflated a little bit. Grandpa was poking fun at him. Boy deflated, took off his glasses, looked grandpa in the eye and was like How many times I told you stop that. And then the parents went at the boy and said, no, don’t be sassy like that. You need to respect your grandfather. And I was just like floored because the next thing that boy did started poking grandpa like that. Grandpa was like, stop it, stop it, stop it. I’m like, guys, guys, we can fix the whole situation.

JoAnn Crohn (08:35)

You can fix all his misbehaviors! I know what’s going on! So like, when you see these levels of like disconnection and stuff, what is your thoughts on it?

 Dr. Doug Bolton (08:45)

I love that story. In my book, I talk about the things that when we think about mental health issues, when we think about behavioral issues, when we think about resilience, I think it’s all the same work, that there are really three things that are involved. The first is when we struggle with mental health or any of the behavior, we need to be connected in relationship. It’s really hard to show up as our best self if we’re disconnected or if we can’t trust or feel safer on the people that we’re with the second is emotional regulation. We need to have the ability to navigate our physical and emotional regulation. And then the third factor is trauma. And what trauma does is it disrupts both our connections and trust in other people, but it also is wildly physically and emotionally dysregulating. then being embedded in a community, a belonging community that is connected and regulated helps us get through all of those things. It helps us learn how to regulate. It helps us learn how to attach. And so at the very core of this though, if we want kids to be regulated, we need to begin with attachment. And I think this is what you were getting at. One of the things, if we think about the last times we melted down, it’s almost always relational. It’s almost, you know, the, I call them the Holy Trinity of dysregulation. The things that dysregulate us are all relational. Feeling disempowered, right? We don’t have power in the relationship. devalued or feeling disconnected someone’s rejecting us.

JoAnn Crohn (10:12)

The little boy felt all three of those

 Dr. Doug Bolton (10:14)

⁓

That’s exactly right. And then he becomes, and that’s dysregulating for him. And then it’s interesting because some of the ways, and his poking, think, of course I wasn’t there, but as I think about that, I think, well, this is a way of trying to reconnect, right? This is a way of trying to figure out how do I, I’m only six years old. I’ve got all these feelings. I still want to be connected to my grandfather and I don’t quite know how to do it because I also feel great shame around him. So how do I navigate this?

Brie Tucker (10:44)

Well, and there’s also the fact of, let’s just be honest, we all want to belong. We all want to be loved. So there’s also that factor of like, no, right now, mom is mad at me. Maybe she doesn’t love me. Grandpa’s mad at me. Maybe he’s making fun of me. So they have that massive insecurity that comes in with that too.

 Dr. Doug Bolton (11:04)

Absolutely. And the tricky part is that when we are dysregulated, it can also impact our relationships. And so we get dysregulated and then we do things and say things that push other people away. And so that’s why I think they’re kind of the yin and yang of this, right? That they really work in tandem. And it’s really important for us when we’re dysregulated to figure out how can we reconnect at some level? How can we get regulated and then reconnect?

JoAnn Crohn (11:32)

That is a great, great question. And I want to explore that more right after this break. Right before the break, Doug, we were talking about being dysregulated. And when we’re dysregulated as adults, as caregivers, what can we do to get regulated again? How can we get in control of those emotions so we could show up as the best for our kids?

 Dr. Doug Bolton (11:54)

Yeah, so I got a lot of practice with this because I got dysregulated a lot, especially when my kids were younger.

Brie Tucker (12:03)

Yeah, yeah. Kids can have that big factor on dysregulating us. It’s not a fault. There’s a big correlation there. ⁓

JoAnn Crohn (12:11)

Over the weekend, I was around two six-year-olds and a four-year-old who were all playing together. And at one time they found whistles and they decided to all blow whistles at the same time, which caused all the adults to like go towards that dysregulation scale. mean, kids and like sensory stuff, it could cause us to explode.

 Dr. Doug Bolton (12:34)

Yeah. Exactly. First of all, there’s no shame in dysregulation. That’s one of the things that we had to realize first as a school is we all get dysregulated frequently. And the more we deny our dysregulation, the less we’re able to deal with it then, and the more likely we are to make mistakes. We make our worst mistakes as parents when we’re dysregulated. I’m right at the top of that list. One of the things that was hard was as I was reading all of this, I was realizing, oh my gosh, I know this stuff, but it’s still really hard. Yeah.

I do a lot of workshops and keynote addresses talking about this and it still creeps up on me from time to time. I’ve gotten better at it, but it still creeps up on me. And so I think that there are a couple of things that we can do. I think in advance, the first way in advance, we can have practices that will help us be regulated. And if we just take a look at exercise, diet and sleep, like everybody says, those are profound regulators having a mindfulness practice, having a gratitude practice at night, for instance. Some of these things kind of take our baseline of regulation and keep it more steady. The other thing that I found is that when I look back at the times that I’ve been dysregulated, it’s almost always predictable. I couldn’t see it in the moment, but it becomes predictable. yeah. If there are certain times that you get dysregulated, one of those times was whenever we would leave for a trip, I was always 15 minutes early, ready to go. And my wife was always 15 minutes late. And that 30 minutes, I would just begin to get dysregulated. And so I guess what I would say is the next thing is to know and to be able to notice. What does it show? How does it show up for you? Where do you carry this? Right? Where do you carry the energy? How do you generally show up in those moments? And so some people become passive aggressive. Some people yell.

Brie Tucker (14:32)

I liked to utilize all those tools, really.

for me, I’m going to think of sarcasm, a little bit of passive aggression and maybe one or two explosions, you know, throw it in for fun.

JoAnn Crohn (14:37)

I shut down and became very, very concrete with my word choices. Like, I will have no emotion and I will just like be like that because I’m like, if I don’t, I’m going to explode at you. And that’s not going to be a great situation either.

 Dr. Doug Bolton (14:57)

Well, and really what this does is it shows what happens to our brains because we end up going into it triggers our stress response when we’re feeling this out of control. And then we want to become controlling, right? Then all of a sudden, and that’s, think, why getting back to an earlier point, that’s why I think behaviorism is so common. That’s the other thing is it allows us to be in control. I’m going to take something away. I’m going to be in control. I’m going to make you go someplace, right?

In this way, I can be in control. And so our brains are desperately searching for control. But at a time when we lose some really important things, think about the last time you melted down, we lose the ability to listen. We become inflexible. We lose empathy. We can care deeply for our kids, but in that moment, right? It’s hard to access. Our memory isn’t as good in these moments. We lose language. Our language becomes very concrete as you were talking about, JoAnn, right?

And so all of these things are happening because really what this is, is our brain going into a stress response. It is going into our lower brain. And the goal at these moments for our brain is built to fight a physical danger. so language isn’t helpful when we’re running from a grizzly bear, right? Being flexible isn’t helpful. Maybe I’ll take a, maybe I should climb a tree. No, maybe I’ll do this, right? That’s not helpful.

Brie Tucker (16:21)

Thinking about all the possible options, not the best of that time

 Dr. Doug Bolton (16:25)

Having empathy for the grizzly bear isn’t helpful, right? You know, I hope it doesn’t get hurt, you know, so no, it’s really based on survival. so what we’ve got to do is we’ve got to quiet that, right? And so in the moment, one of the things that I found that I needed to do was to find a space, right? To be able to remove myself from the situation and find space. The other things that dysregulation does is it creates a false sense of urgency and it exaggerates the impact. So my child is disobeying. And so I need to stop it right now. They need to do this right now. And then what’s the next thing? Or else how are they ever going to keep a job if they can’t listen to their elders and that they can’t respect people, right? How are they going to boom, boom, boom? And so all of a sudden we begin to exaggerate the impact of this moment, right? And we have this urgency to fix it right now. And both of those are false.

But our brains act as if it’s true. And so what I need to do is I need to separate myself. I can remember my son and I, Matthew, I tell a lot of stories about him in the book, but we would get into some arguments. And what I realized was I could notice in myself, I’ve got to just leave and take a walk. That was my kind of regulation strategy. But I would leave mid-sentence because I didn’t have the words to say. And he was able to say after a couple of times of doing that, he said, That feels really bad when you do that. And so we came up with me being able to say, and it was kind of scripted, I don’t want to say something that I regret. I’m really upset. I do want to talk to you when I come back. Yeah. I like that. that way I was able to regulate and then he was able to know, okay, this isn’t, you know, because what I was doing for him was further dysregulating. was disconnecting. I was devaluing him. I was leaving him in the middle of an argument and I was disempowering him. He didn’t have any say as to whether or not I left or stayed. And so that would further dysregulate him. And so we found that bridge, but it took a while for us to find that bridge. But I think being able to say, to have a strategy for ourselves and then be able to, to model, you know, this is how I handle dysregulation is I notice it. And then I’m going to go and take care of this. Right. And then we’re going to come back and we’re going to have this conversation when we’re both accessing our full brain, not just the lower parts of our brain.

JoAnn Crohn (18:48)

Yeah. And I’m curious now what to do when you do lose it, when you don’t notice your dysregulation and you lose your temper on your kids. And we’re going to talk about that right after this. 

So Doug, in your book Untethered, you talk about the importance of repair, that ruptures are inevitable, but repair builds trust. So how can parents stop fearing their mistakes, like when they do become dysregulated with their kids, and use them to deepen connection?

 Dr. Doug Bolton (19:21)

Yeah, you know, it’s interesting and I learned this. I was lucky to be working in the school before I had my own kids.

Brie Tucker (19:29)

It does give you a little bit of like a little bit of padding that like you say, that’s, mean, you remember it all the time, but at least gives you some of the go-to tools that are in your reflexes almost, think.

 Dr. Doug Bolton (19:39)

I was able to really see just the power of relationship and the power of repair. I found it harder to repair with my own kids because I think I felt more shame with my own kids.

JoAnn Crohn (19:52)

I felt the same way. I was a teacher as well and I feel like it’s like 10 times harder with my kids than with my students.

Brie Tucker (19:58)

Did you ever feel like it was harder because you did this for a job and you felt like you should be better at it? Or do you feel like it was just harder because your emotions were so much more amplified with your own kids? I’m curious.

 Dr. Doug Bolton (20:11)

Yeah, me too. too. All right. And I think that triggers the shame. can, you know, I’m a psychologist. How can I be behaving this way? And that’s, that’s the piece that once I was able to let go of that shame, I was able to show up as a very different kind of parent and as a very different kind of psychologist in principle. The thing about repair, I think there are two things that I think about. The first is it gives us the opportunity to deepen relationships. That what we have are two people because when I get dysregulated, I’ve done and said something, we’re both coming to each other at some level, a little bit broken. And when we heal, we can heal together. And that allows us, I think, to strengthen our bond. What I find is, and I find this not just with myself, but with other adults, is we want to be right. We might be right about the issue, but very wrong about how we express it.

 Dr. Doug Bolton (21:03)

But what we do is we kind of hunker down and say, well, I was right. And anybody would have responded that way. And of course I yelled at you because you know, you were such a jerk to me, right? Or whatever. This is our opportunity to model. when we can model, first of all, taking responsibility, when we can model being able to listen, to have empathy for how my behavior impacted someone else, it’s going to help them in their relationships, in their relationships with peers, as they get older, they’re gonna have a model for how to do this. And I think that one of the things that I’ve noticed, really this is a teaching moment, right? Yet to me, whenever I lose it with kids, and it’s hard, sometimes there were times when I’d lose my temper as a principal too. Kids would say, Dr. Bolton, I think you need a break.

Brie Tucker (21:59)

Yes I do, I will be right back.

 Dr. Doug Bolton (22:02)

Absolutely right. But one of things that I found is that when I can begin with my apology, and there’s almost always some reason, even if I was treated incredibly poorly, even if I had every right in the world to be upset, there’s generally something that I’ve done that’s been problematic. When I can begin by saying, I really don’t appreciate how you spoke with me, and yet I can see why it was so important to you.

that you wanted to stay at the birthday party and that I probably didn’t give you enough time to let you know that we were leaving. And next time I’ll try and give you some more time before you leave the birthday party.

JoAnn Crohn (22:41)

Yeah, acknowledging that contribution is so effective, not only with kids, but with other adults too.

 Dr. Doug Bolton (22:47)

Exactly. It’s like, okay. And what I’ll do is I’ll say, okay, how did I contribute to this? And then I can lead it. When I lead it, then it’s amazing how quickly they can come back and say, no, dad, I shouldn’t have talked to you that way. You gave me plenty of time, whatever that is. I just didn’t want to leave the game. And then it’s a whole different conversation as opposed to what often I think what happens is as adults, we come in and we’d have the repair, but we expect our child to repair it with us. So now what are you going to say to make this right with daddy? Yeah.

Yeah. And so you’ve got to learn how to do this, but I’m going to make you do it. I don’t have to do it myself. And so, so this is where I think in many ways, what we’re doing is we’re helping them reconnect in that moment, but also giving them the experience and belief that when future conflicts come, those are also repairable and that they’ve got the skills to repair those, whether it be friends when they’re older, whether it be spouses.

whatever that may be, but this idea that, ⁓ this conflict doesn’t mean it’s the end of things, right? I don’t have to be afraid of bigger consequences of this.

JoAnn Crohn (23:58)

And it’s like a really hard thing too, to teach kids because I know a lot of parents, especially in sibling dynamics, there’s a lot of fights there and getting kids to apologize to one another is a hard, hard thing. And I think that by modeling as parents, when we are repairing ourselves, it is the best way to teach them. There was a situation this weekend with my two kids. My son accidentally dropped my daughter’s camera into the sand and her camera stopped working. He felt so much shame about it and was so overcome and had that fear. And she was of course mad that her camera’s broken again. But with him, as soon as we were able to get his emotions down, as soon as he was able to calm himself, eat some food, which always helps him, he was able to figure out, okay, I need to apologize for this. And it wasn’t me telling him, you need to go apologize.

It was more him being like, okay. What’s your contribution? How could you take the first step in this situation? he was able to do that without any prodding just because I’ve messed up so many times and I’ve shown him how to do.

 Dr. Doug Bolton (25:04)

Yeah, you’ve modeled that for him. And it doesn’t have to be a shaming moment. know, the other thing that I learned was repairing doesn’t necessarily mean apology. Yeah. Because a lot of times what you’ll get is, I’m sorry, I won’t do it again. Right?

JoAnn Crohn (25:32)

Yeah.

Brie Tucker (25:34)

And by the way, in that tone.

 Dr. Doug Bolton (25:37)

Exactly. And so there are a couple of things that I would do when my kids, especially when they were younger, would argue. When they were older, they were able to take care of it themselves. But I would separate them and I would just say, let me know when you’re ready to talk to the other one about this.

JoAnn Crohn (25:53)

Yeah, the emotional cool down period is.

 Dr. Doug Bolton (25:55)

So they’re learning to regulate. And then I would just say, when you’re ready, why don’t you go check and see if the other one’s ready? And I try and let them do that as independently as possible. And there are times that they needed more coaching and times that they didn’t. And then the other piece is kids would say, I’m not apologizing. I don’t feel bad about what I did. They deserved it. Right? And what I would say is, what would you do it differently though? And they’d almost always say, yeah, I would do it differently. And said, why don’t you say that? And so what they can say is,

I shouldn’t have been playing with your phone, with your camera, on the beach. And I’ll try not to do that again. Yeah. I try to be more careful next time. But almost always what they’ll do is they’ll still come back and say, I’m really sorry. We don’t have to get into the power struggle about, do you need to use the words, I’m sorry? Yeah.

Brie Tucker (26:46)

Well, the other thing that I love about that interaction that you’re talking about, about like just letting them have their time to get there, it gives them that experience. And to recall back that I can do this without my parent helping me. mean, and I’m not saying that we can’t help them out because you just said sometimes they need more help and sometimes they don’t. But if we never give them the opportunity to have those experiences where they figured it out for themselves then they end up moving forward and they continuously, there’s a good chance that they will go forward and go, yeah, but I can’t do this by myself. I always have to have somebody else there to help make it.

 Dr. Doug Bolton (27:23)

That’s right. what they’re doing when they’re on their own is getting regulated. Like I might say they need to go to their room, but not as a punishment. Do whatever you need to do in there, you know. But what they’re learning is I need to quiet myself with my nervous system down essentially so that I can be in my full brain and I can bring my best self to this. And it’s so interesting now when they argue because they’re 22 and 24, their arguments are so much better than my wife’s in mine.

I’m like, man, we can use some of their coaching.

JoAnn Crohn (27:55)

They do get so good at it. It’s unbelievable. giving them that practice from a young age. Well, Doug, we like to end every interview with the same optimistic way. What is something you look forward to that’s going on right now in your life?

 Dr. Doug Bolton (28:08)

It’s fun having my book out in the world. And so that’s been a new experience for me. And so I’ve got a couple of events coming up for that one in Milwaukee, one in Chicago. So that’s kind of fun. I’m going to be speaking at the Castles Conference in Minneapolis. That’s a social emotional learning conference for educators in Minneapolis in November. And I’ll be speaking with the Illinois School Board Association. I’ll be doing a featured presentation there because I love to talk about all of these things with people who are wanting to learn more and engage with me around it. So those are some of the things I’m really looking forward to.

JoAnn Crohn (28:47)

That is exciting. And I know all the No Guilt moms in our audience go and get John’s book. He is Dr. John Bolton and his book is called Untethered, Creating Connected Families, Schools and Communities to Raise a Resilient Generation. And thank you, Doug, so much for coming today on the podcast and sharing all of this great info with us.

 Dr. Doug Bolton (29:08)

I’m so grateful for this time. Thanks so much.

JoAnn Crohn (29:11)

And remember the best mom is a happy mom. Take care of you. We will talk to you later.

Brie Tucker (29:17)

Thanks for stopping by.

JoAnn Crohn (29:20)

If you’d like to support the show further, you could share episodes with your loved ones, leave a positive review or follow us on social media at No Guilt Mom. You could also show your love by visiting our amazing podcast sponsors. We have a link in the show notes.