729: How to Raise Kids Without Raising Your Voice, with Jon Fogel

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:00]:
Most of us aspire to lead well in every area of our lives, not just in the workplace. A key place for leadership with many of us is with our kids and the other young people in our lives. In this episode, how to raise kids without raising your voice. This is Coaching for Leaders episode 729. Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:42]:
Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I’m your host, Dave Stachowiak. Leaders aren’t born, they’re made. And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations. Often, the conversations we have on the show are about leadership in organizations. Once in a while though, it makes sense to take a little bit of a shift. And today, taking a little bit of a shift to leadership in another context, leadership at home. You know, so many of us, either our parents, have kids in our lives, have dear friends who have children. And we think a lot about leadership in the context, not just at work, but also in how do we do it in our families. And I know it’s a place that I probably entertain more doubt in leadership than any other place, and yet the most important leadership role I have as a parent. Today, I’m so glad to welcome Jon Fogel, who’s gonna help us to not just in a direction that will help us to lead well, yes, at home, but also so many principles here that help us lead in just about every context.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:36]:
Jon is a husband, a father of four, and a parenting educator. His goal is to teach how to parent more effectively with less stress and more success by combining modern neuroscience, developmental psychology, counseling, and positive gentle parenting wisdom. He is the author of Punishment Free Parenting: The Brain Based Way to Raise Kids Without Raising Your Voice. Jon, what a pleasure to have you here. Thanks for joining me.

Jon Fogel [00:02:02]:
It’s a pleasure to be here. Super excited to get into this conversation.

Dave Stachowiak [00:02:06]:
Me too. And in learning about you and diving into your work, I I came away with the sense, like, this wasn’t really your plan to be a parent educator or to write a book like this, was it?

Jon Fogel [00:02:18]:
No. No. Absolutely not. You know? I’ve I’ve kind of gone through a a bunch of different phases of my life, and I started actually in business and business management. And I kinda thought that that’s where I was gonna land. And then I went into ministry, and then I started getting interested in psychology. And all of these things coming together, you talked about leadership, just kind of led me to this moment of realizing, hey. You know what? One of the things that I am not doing the best that I could be doing and, specifically, that I was never trained to do this at all was parenting.

Jon Fogel [00:02:58]:
And as I did the research and as I uncovered things and I became a licensed foster parent and and kind of along the journey, I realized, you know what? Very few people are trained in how to do this in any effective way, and many of us are just doing the things that are really hurting us much more than they’re helping us. And so I I started to tell my friends about it, and then that became a social media following, and somebody told me that they thought I should write a book. And so I did, and here we are now many years later as thousands of parents have kind of taken these principles and totally transformed their family.

Dave Stachowiak [00:03:34]:
I love what you’re teaching and the messages that you have given to us to help us to be good parents and be good leaders in the home. And whenever the topic of parenting comes up, at some point, either in a book or talking with a friend, the word punishment does come up in conversation. I think it’s one of the things that a lot of us struggle with. And you write in the book, “for as long as any of us can remember, punishment has been a staple of parenting. Most people cannot begin to imagine a way of raising children effectively without correcting their problematic behavior with punishment. I know I couldn’t. It took me years. But one day, I found the missing puzzle piece. If I was going to truly embrace this new way of parenting, I had to ditch punishment for good.”

Dave Stachowiak [00:04:13]:
That begs the question, what changed?

Jon Fogel [00:04:22]:
You know, really, it all began with starting to question the base assumptions that all of us operate from. And and that that’s a a good discipline whether you’re in parenting or in business. If you just kinda keep doing the things that everybody’s always done, you’re going to continue to get the results that everybody have always gotten. And so for me, it was really going back to books like Tina Payne Bryson and Dan Siegel’s The Whole Brain Child and asking the question, well, if punishment is not as effective as I think, what if punishment is not as effective as I think that it is? Because I certainly was raised with punishment. That was definitely the way that I was brought up. And as I started to pull the threads apart and specifically as I started to learn about behavioral neuroscience and developmental psychology, what became very clear was that punishment was not working with a child. It was really working against the way children’s brains work. And I remember the first person who ever said this to me and put it in such clear terms was when I was in foster care training and we were learning about these kids who are deeply traumatized and went through so many things that that no child should ever have to go through.

Jon Fogel [00:05:40]:
And as a result, they they behaved in all these really problematic ways. And and the the ways that they behave far transcended what most parents have to deal with on a day to day basis. And we’re talking about pretty destructive patterns of violence, destroying property, lashing out in really, really harmful ways to themselves and others. And the foster care trainer said, if you’re gonna parent effectively, you can’t use punishment and seemed to sort of indicate in that conversation that punishment was not actually the way that anyone was learning any lessons, but was instead actually just a byproduct of old parenting methods and that most kids were learning and being disciplined effectively through the relationship with their caregiver. That that the punishment was actually in some way counterproductive to that end. But many people could just or many kids, I should say, could just overcome the deficits that punishment was offering to the relationship because they had a secure relationship with their parent that was grounded in a strong attachment. That punishment basically could be even if it was not effective, it was not hurting anyone to such an extent that they weren’t growing up to be well adjusted people. But with kids who didn’t have that secure foundation, kids who didn’t have that secure, loving relationship, punishment kind of showed its true colors.

Jon Fogel [00:07:03]:
And it was so ineffective that punishing these kids for doing all of these problematic things just made them do those things more. And that really hit me like a ton of bricks, and I went on a tear just studying and studying and reading. I probably read 50 books on discipline, but also on neuroscience. And like I said, behavioral neuroscience. And what became very evident was that punishment works against the way that naturally humans learn that it it it cuts against the way that we want to develop strong moral character. And I I was kind of left with this, well, then what do you do instead? And that was what the book became. I had to I had to come to terms with the reality that punishment was an ineffective tool that really spoke more to the dysregulation of the parent in those difficult parenting moments than any sort of efficacy with changing behavior or raising a child who is self disciplined.

Dave Stachowiak [00:08:03]:
You mentioned Tina Payne Bryson a moment ago. She’s been on the podcast before. I changed she changed my view of so many things around discipline. And you quote her in the book and say from her, “too often we forget that discipline really means to teach, not to punish. A disciple is a student, not a recipient of behavioral consequences.” And I think about that and her work and you expanding on what her and Daniel have done. And oftentimes, when we think about punishment, the aim in our brains is to teach kids a lesson. Yep.

Dave Stachowiak [00:08:40]:
Why is it that that doesn’t work?

Jon Fogel [00:08:43]:
Well, you know, the probably the simplest way that I can explain this is kind of one one, what’s going on in the brain when we punish a child? And to just kind of an experiential, how would we feel? Right? And so I’ll start with the experiential, which is whatever environment you’re in, whether it’s a marriage or in a work environment where you have a manager or all of us have had at least one boss in our life who who did not work with the way that we were trying to do things. I heard a quote the other day. Most people don’t quit their job. They quit their boss. And so when we just think of it from our own perspective, just as adults, and this is, I think, a really helpful tool for all of the parents out there. Consider that you were in a relationship with someone who treated you like most people treat their children. We realized very quickly why punishment doesn’t work. If you went to work and you did something and you made a mistake or you made an error in some way and somebody just laid into you and said that you’re bad for doing this.

Jon Fogel [00:09:48]:
Never do that again. Again. You’re you’re so wrong for this. And you know what? I’m gonna take away your lunch now. You don’t get a lunch period anymore. You don’t get to go out for lunch because you’ve made this mistake. And how terrible is it that you’ve made this mistake? I think all of us realize how degrading that would feel, and it would not encourage us to do better. It would encourage us to hide whenever we’ve made a mistake.

Jon Fogel [00:10:10]:
Right. It would encourage us to take those or quit our job, which by the way, your kid can’t quit you. Right? Like, they don’t have a way of leaving that scenario. And so when we realized very quickly that none of us would ever tolerate being treated the way that many people, maybe even most people treat their kids. And so just from a gut instinct level, why why is it that we feel that way? Why is it that we feel like, boy, punishment when I get punished for something? Even silly things like getting a speeding ticket. We know now that giving people speeding tickets does not actually lead to them slowing down. Right? There’s an immense amount of research about in this. We know that putting people in prison and, the more severe their prison sentences, that does not actually reduce reciditiveness.

Jon Fogel [00:11:00]:
Recidivism is the rates. And so because of this, we know punishment is an ineffective tool for adults. Why would we think that it’s an effective tool for children? What’s going on in in kids brains when we punish them? I mean, this is probably the simplest way of understanding from a neuroscience perspective, is that when human beings are- when we’re learning when we’re in our learning state, when we are in creative patterns, when we feel that sense of flow, or we’re really things are firing on all cylinders and we feel like, wow, I just I can’t wait to do the next task. That is when we are primarily in what’s called our prefrontal cortex, which is the largest part of our brain. It’s the part of our brain that makes us pretty uniquely human. Humans have more cortical neurons, meaning in their cortex, in their neocortex than any other animal. It’s what allows us to do things like have language, have this conversation right now. It’s why we were able to build the cities that we were able to build and do all the amazing things that humans have been able to do is because of our ability to critically think.

Jon Fogel [00:11:59]:
That part of our brain, when that part of our brain is primarily driving, we can learn incredible things very, very quickly. Humans have a capacity. It’s why when you fall in love with something, a new thing that you’re interested in, like for me, it was psychology several years ago. I could just read and read and read and never get tired of reading about it. And I was retaining it at such a high level. I could have taken tests on it and would have ace those tests. On the other hand, when we are punishing someone, we’re actually sending them into their fight or flight response. So we’re sending them into survival mode, a different part of their brain, deeper, more animalistic, called the limbic system.

Jon Fogel [00:12:39]:
And the limbic system is our emotion center, but it is also our fear center. And so we actually don’t learn well at all when we’re in our limbic system because the parts of our brain that are making those connections to learn things actually shut down in those moments. And so if you’re punishing a kid to teach them a lesson, what you’re actually doing in that moment is turning off the part of their brain that learns because punishment by definition is causing someone some degree of discomfort or harm in order to get them to essentially obey or be compliant to whatever you want them to do. And so when we do that, when we say, you know, hey, if you don’t do this, I’m going to do this to you. Or if you don’t stop this right now, here’s what I’m going to do in response. We’re actually terrifying our kids. And people say, oh, no, I’m not doing that. You don’t know what’s going on in your kid’s brain.

Jon Fogel [00:13:33]:
What’s going on in their brain in those moments is that they get nervous about your relationship with them. They get scared. And as soon as they get scared, the part of their brain that can do long term thinking, moral reasoning, That is their decision engine. What should I do versus what shouldn’t I do? All of that we know from brain scans and fMRI scans and EEGs that goes dark. And so you’re turning off the part of their brain that learns when you punish them. And this is the basic fundamental principle that I try and offer in punishment free parenting is that if you’re generally or exclusively relying on punishment, you are relying on one of the least effective tools that you could possibly rely on because you are making it harder for them to learn in the moments when you’re trying to, quote, teach them a lesson.

Dave Stachowiak [00:14:23]:
And you add in the book, quote, “if you parent in such a way that you become the primary incentive for your child to behave or make good choices, I have some tough love for you. You won’t always be there.” And it’s just like, there’s so much truth in that. And and there’s also this I think that leads to one of the misperceptions that a lot of folks have. And I’ve certainly struggled with over time as well too and still do a little bit is that if you don’t punish, you’re not holding your kids accountable. And I know you hear that language from people when you are teaching these lessons. When you hear that, where do you invite people to start thinking about that differently?

Jon Fogel [00:15:04]:
Yeah. This is probably the biggest critique that people who talk about this stuff in this way get, which is you’re just letting kids get away with everything. And the way that I respond to that is just by saying kind of reverting back to that. We’ll consider for a moment that you that you it’s it’s you. It’s not your child. Is the reason that you don’t go around stealing things, that you don’t go around punching people, that you don’t go around hurting people or, God forbid, murdering people because you’re afraid that you’ll get caught and punished for it? The answer is no. Obviously not. That’s an incredibly pessimistic view of the world.

Jon Fogel [00:15:45]:
Society is not built on the fact that, oh, well, if somebody does something you know, everybody is secretly just wanting to hurt each other, but they’re kept in line by police presence. It’s a myth that many of us we we know from hunter gatherer tribes and things looking anthropologists going back for tens of thousands of years. This is not what has kept people in line. And so when I say no punishment, people immediately go to, well, okay. So that means that you’re never gonna hold somebody accountable? No. It means that you are going to present them with the consequences of their own actions, not imposed consequences or punitive consequences or retributive consequences that you are imposing on them, but rather that you’re gonna direct their conscious attention to the thing that happened and then offer that to them. And that can be a painful experience in and of itself, but that actually works with the way that the brain works rather than against the way that the brain works.

Jon Fogel [00:16:43]:
So it’s not that your child will never experience sadness, or your child will never experience guilt or your child will never experience the consequences of their own actions. All of those can be really helpful and useful teaching tools. The problem comes when we say no. The consequence is going to be from me as the parent. And so a great example of this that I like to use is, like, cleaning up your toys. Right? A lot of people say, well, if I’m not gonna punish my kid, they’re never gonna clean their room. Okay. Well, what if we just said, hey.

Jon Fogel [00:17:15]:
We have to keep our room clean so that we can be able to play in it. And if your room’s not clean, I’m not gonna go in there and play in there with you. It doesn’t make me comfortable to be in that room when it’s so, so messy. Or you might step on your toys and they might get broken. There may be a logical consequence that we can impose here and say, hey. Anything that’s not we we have to get get the house clean every Friday or whatever day it is. Anything that’s not off the floor, you’re you’re you’re indicating to me this is not something that I care about. And so we can we can put those things in a bin, and we can put them down in the basement because it seems like we’re creating an environment where there’s too much stuff, and you can’t keep it tidy, and you can’t keep it organized.

Jon Fogel [00:17:58]:
None of these things are punitive. They’re also not letting your kid off the hook or not having any sort of boundaries with your kid. And so, really, what we have to remember is that it it doesn’t mean that there’s no place for consequences in your relationship with your child. It means that if the consequence is designed to make them uncomfortable or unhappy or, god forbid, feel pain, that those are the things, those are the places where we need to rethink our strategy because it’s not strategic. It’s not effective. And that’s the real thing. We we we have an entire chapter in the book, early in the book, on boundaries and holding boundaries. But the purpose of holding boundaries is actually so your child can have the freedom to make mistakes and learn from those mistakes, not so that you can constantly be in control of everything your child does.

Jon Fogel [00:18:50]:
Because as you said, you’re not always going to be there. And that’s not preparing your child for the real world out there. And that’s what people always come back to. Oh, I wanna prepare my child for the real world. Okay. Well, the real world is a place where they’re gonna have to face the consequences of their own actions. They’re probably not gonna be punished for not cleaning their room. They’re just gonna have a messy apartment, and then somebody’s gonna walk in and go, oh, you’re kind of a slob.

Jon Fogel [00:19:13]:
Well, that’s preparing them for that is not being punitive so that they hate it or or they hate you. It’s it’s actually allowing them to feel the the the actual lived outcomes of their actions.

Dave Stachowiak [00:19:25]:
It’s such it’s such a lovely shift in how we think about these things. And there’s so much nuance in, like, how we think about these, even the words we used used the word consequence a bit ago. And I think it’s interesting that consequence and punishment aren’t the same thing. But somehow, we’ve all used those words interchangeably, like, in society. It’s like like, punishment sounds bad, so we just change the word to consequence. But in practice, a lot of people are still using consequences as punishments effectively. When you think about that shift, what’s what’s different about it?

Jon Fogel [00:20:03]:
Yeah. So to me, a lot of it’s semantic difference. The truth is most parents use consequences euphemistically to mean punishment. In the same way that most parents use the word discipline, which I as you pointed out, means to teach. Right?

Jon Fogel [00:20:16]:
We teach with discipline. They will euphemistically use that as, you know, I I need to discipline my kid. Often means up to and then including I need to physically hurt my kid in order to teach them a lesson, which we know from modern neuroscience and longitudinal studies that go back over the last thirty years. This is basically the worst thing that you can do as far as a discipline technique. It’s totally unhelpful and only increases the likelihood that your child will do problematic things. But we kind of euphemistically use these words to mean punishment because we don’t like how it feels to say I’m gonna punish my child. Yeah. I think to me, the difference is consequences are all around us all the time.

Jon Fogel [00:21:00]:
They’re the natural outcomes of any action. And so I even say there are positive consequences and negative consequences. Pause it. You know, we might call those rewards. Like, I was really nice to this girl that I met in high school and thought she was cute, and I was really friendly with her. And I drove her home one day when she didn’t have a ride home from band after school, and the consequence of that was that I met my future wife. Awesome. It’s not a negative consequence, right, for me.

Jon Fogel [00:21:28]:
I I I look at that as the most positive consequence that has ever happened to me. On the contrary, I also have had many times where I’ve done things that were not great. I talk about, in one case, not studying when I was in college because I just kinda thought, oh, I’ll figure it out. I’ve never had a problem with this in the past. Consequences that of that was a a d on my first test, my junior year in world civilizations. There are consequences all around us. Punishment is when we are doing something that is beyond a simple consequence, a cause and an effect. Punishment is when we add to a child something that is designed to be, and I use this word a lot, retributive.

Jon Fogel [00:22:14]:
You did that. And so therefore or you failed to do this. Therefore, I am going to make you uncomfortable or in pain in some form of pain, whether social pain, relational pain, physical pain, all of these. We we again, we can say, oh, well, I was just grounding them. Sure. You were taking away an opportunity for them to connect with their peers. I’m not saying that there isn’t a place to say we gotta stay home tonight for x, y, and z reasons. But if it’s because they didn’t do what you wanted them to do and now you’re using that as a punishment, all they’re learning in those moments is, wow, I’m experiencing this pain, and I’m not linking that pain to the reason for it.

Jon Fogel [00:22:56]:
I’m linking that pain to the person who’s causing me to have that pain. And that’s the real big difference here. That’s why when I say even when we deploy consequences that are beyond natural consequences, there are times. Absolutely. I talk about in the book my my son drawing a a red Sharpie racetrack on a brand new deck that we had out out in the back of our yard.

Dave Stachowiak [00:23:19]:
Yeah.

Jon Fogel [00:23:19]:
The consequence of having a red Sharpie racetrack on the deck is a pretty great consequence for him. He looks at that as a net positive. Now I have a red race track on this deck. I like that. For me as the guy who just built the deck. It was pretty negative. I didn’t I did not want a red Sharpie racetrack on that deck. And so I employed what we call a logical consequence, which is saying, hey.

Jon Fogel [00:23:41]:
We have to set things right. We have to bring things back. We need to fix the problem that we’ve created. And sometimes children are not gonna see the problems that that they create as problems. They’re gonna see them as, hey. That’s what I wanted. Yeah. But you’re part of a family, and everybody else in the family is not a fan of the Red Racetrack right now.

Jon Fogel [00:24:03]:
And so that consequence looked like sitting with me, helping me sand it, sand down the deck until the red race Sharpie Racetrack was gone. He did some of the sanding. I don’t say that we should be making our kids do physical labor in order to punish them either. But but he had a part in it because he wanted to see I wanted him to see, hey. Look. This is the this is the actual consequences that you have to sand down the deck. How challenging is that? And then later down the road, I said, you know what? We were gonna have to sand the deck anyway. But I’m really glad that you were able to see this for what it is.

Jon Fogel [00:24:39]:
It wasn’t punitive. It was us fixing the problem together.

Dave Stachowiak [00:24:43]:
Mhmm.

Jon Fogel [00:24:44]:
And so that’s the big difference. A consequence is a way that your child hopefully will take away, oh, when I do x, the result is y, even if the parent has to impose to some extent a consequence. A punishment is when I do x, I will be hurt. I will be harmed. I will be in some way shamed, belittled, or experience some form of social, emotional, physical, or relational pain. And to me and I think that the science bears this out, and this is I I should have to keep saying that it’s not just my opinion. It’s it’s what the data leads us to. Those things are ineffective.

Jon Fogel [00:25:24]:
Those things are not interpreted by the child as a positive thing. I’ll give you one more example. I know that we probably have to move on from this. But the one example that I give over and over, and it just happened to me last week. Again, I’m in my other job means that sometimes I have conversations with entire families and kids in a confidential and therapeutic counseling environment. And I said, you know, how’s your week going? And this kid said, no. Not so good. And I said, oh, what’s going on? And the kid said, well, last week, I got in trouble.

Jon Fogel [00:26:01]:
And I said, oh, what happened? Well, then they described all the punishment that they had received. And I said, so why did that happen? They said, I don’t remember. And that is the perfect example. It’s not the only time this kid’s well, how old are they? They’re eight. But kids who are four, kids who are three, kids who are six, kids who are 14, they will often be so wrapped up in the punitive nature of what happened as a result that they don’t even remember what happened. And so I redirect to those parents. Right? Hey. I understand that you were trying to teach them that whatever behavior it was that caused them to, quote, unquote, be in trouble and receive these punishments.

Jon Fogel [00:26:42]:
I understand that your intention was to teach them that that was not a fruitful way to behave. How does not how does hearing I don’t even remember. How does that make you feel? All they remember is the broken relationship, and we know why that is. It’s because it turns off the part of their brain that retains memories in that way. They don’t link it in the same way because we actually shut down the part of that little girl’s brain that connects those those threads, that learns those those things. And so when we do that, it actually paradoxically does the exact opposite of what we were hoping it does.

Dave Stachowiak [00:27:14]:
You shared with me before this conversation that one of your favorite parts of the book is the part on reconciliation. And I think one of the hardest parts for parenting, at least for myself, is, like, going down a path, maybe veering it to punishment occasionally and then feeling really guilty about it or, like, okay. I screwed up as a parent. And Yeah. One of the things you say is that that’s actually one of the best opportunities to grow and to learn and to build your relationship, not only with yourself, but with your kids. What’s the opportunity there?

Jon Fogel [00:27:49]:
Yeah. Well, let’s start with why punishment doesn’t work for us either. You know, before we get into how we can repair, if punishing your kid is ineffective because it turns off their brain, punishing your yourself is no more effective. If you wanna get better at something, you can’t just be the world’s largest critic on yourself. You can’t shame yourself and hate yourself into change. It doesn’t work. And so the first step in becoming a punishment free parent, often for parents, once they’ve accepted intellectually, punishment doesn’t work. Actually, becoming a punishment free parent looks like learning to not punish themselves along with learning to not punish their kids.

Jon Fogel [00:28:36]:
And one of the ways that’s most effective to do that is to start employing what Carol Dweck called a growth mindset with relationship, not only to your own ventures out in the world, but also with within your relationships and saying, hey, look, either I win or I learn. There’s no win and lose. It’s win and learn. And when you start thinking in those terms, you realize, oh, my gosh. All of these times when I’ve yelled at my kid and I’ve punished them and I’ve done all these things that I’m not proud of as a parent. If I just go to my child and in those moments, apologize and seek to reconcile with them and say, hey. This is what I was feeling. There’s no excuse for that.

Jon Fogel [00:29:20]:
And I talk about how to apologize well. I give, like, a frame by frame, you know, this is exactly what you do. I call it cut the but so that parents often apologize. But really, those apologies are like Trojan horses. They’re just vehicles for another lecture. Hey. I’m sorry. But if you don’t clean up your room, I’m gonna really get pissed off.

Jon Fogel [00:29:37]:
And then I’m gonna, you know, give you this that and the other. That’s not in a real apology. Right? But renders the apology totally invalid. But instead, when we actually apologize well and when we take accountability for our actions and we do all these other things, what we’re doing with our child is actually building a relationship stronger than before because of this base principle, which is that repair makes things stronger. We all feel this when we watch a rom com. Right? When you go out and you watch 10 Things I Hate About You or, How to Lose a Guy in ten Days or some other movie with the number 10, it’s fundamentally about two people getting together in their twenties. Those movies always have a moment.

Jon Fogel [00:30:20]:
Sorry to ruin every single one of them for you from now on, but those movies at about two thirds to three quarters of the way through that movie, the couple is gonna have a huge falling out in every single one. Doesn’t matter what movie it is. They’re gonna have a huge falling out. And the reason is all of us intrinsically know that the relationship is going to be so much stronger when they finally get back together. That if the movie was just great and they just fell in love and their love story carried on to the very end and it was just never there was never anything hard, that the relationship would not would be fragile. It would not be built on strength. And so the same thing is true with your kid. Every time you punish your kid and this is not licensed to then go out and punish your kids so that you give opportunities for this.

Jon Fogel [00:31:03]:
But even if you try and do your absolute best, you’re still gonna screw up. You’re probably gonna screw up a lot more than you want to. Every single one of those moments is a moment that you have to just essentially mix cement into that relationship. But it depends on how you come back together. And how you do that effectively is to, number one, not punish yourself for screwing up. Number two, to learn how to apologize well. And number three, to reconcile in such a way where you’re gonna try and seek to do better going forward. And when you do that, it’s like I said, it’s mixing cement into that relationship.

Jon Fogel [00:31:37]:
Your kid is gonna feel more connected to you. And one of the things that we haven’t talked about yet that I think is actually probably the the the number one principle in the book beyond just don’t punish your kids. It’s it’s one thing to tell you what not to do. Okay, Jon. What do you do instead? The number one thing that we can do to raise really healthy, mature kids is be really healthy, mature adults around our kids and is to thrive in all areas of our lives and have our children see us doing that. Well, if you want a kid who grows up to not be so entitled, which is the thing that people always talk about, if you want a kid who grows up to apologize when they’re wrong, to not be so defensive about their mistakes, to be a good partner, to be a good spouse, to be a good employee, to be a good leader. You have to show them how. The number one way our kids learn, and we’ve known this for longer than we’ve understood the mechanism in the brain for why, but we have known for a long time that the number one way that kids learn is through what we call observational learning.

Jon Fogel [00:32:38]:
It’s not through anything that we teach them. It’s through what they observe us doing. And so if you want your kid to be a person who goes out and apologizes, you have to be a person who goes out and apologizes. If you want your kid to cut themselves some slack and not beat themselves up and tear themselves down every single time they make a mistake, when you make a mistake with them, you have to model what it looks like to say, hey. I was wrong. I made a mistake. It’s okay. It’s not the end of the world.

Jon Fogel [00:33:05]:
And I think that discipline in ourselves of being the type of person who we want our kid to become, That above all else is the way that we actually parent more effectively.

Dave Stachowiak [00:33:18]:
Jon Fogel is the author of Punishment Free Parenting: The Brain Based Way to Raise Kids Without Raising Your Voice. Jon, thank you so much for inspiring us with your work. I so appreciate it.

Jon Fogel [00:33:29]:
Dave, thank you so much for having me.

Dave Stachowiak [00:33:37]:
I’m not an Instagram user myself, but if you are, you should track down Jon on Instagram. I’ll have his profile linked up in the episode notes. I’ve seen a number of his videos, and they’re so helpful on reinforcing some of the key concepts we talked about in this conversation and more from his book. Thank you, Jon, for all those resources and several related episodes if this conversation was helpful to you. One of them is episode 310, how to reduce drama with kids. Tina Payne Bryson was my guest on that episode along with her colleague, Dan Siegel. I’ve been reading their books for a number of years. No Drama Discipline is the book that first got me introduced to her work, and I’m thinking about it for two reasons.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:16]:
One is because I was thinking about it last night in a conversation with our kids. The principles that her and Dan have been teaching for years have helped Devon and I both as parents in so many ways. The other reason I’m thinking about her is because she introduced me to Jon and his work. And so, great compliment to this conversation, episode 310 on no drama discipline. I’d also recommend episode 606, the way to get into better conversations about wealth. Kristin Keffeler was my guest on that episode, an expert in how families handle wealth and resources. And this is a very closely related topic to families and kids, and it is one of the dynamics that tends to come up in a lot of challenging conversations with families. Now I think it’s a helpful conversation to you certainly if you happen to have a family that has wealth or extended family that has access to wealth.

Dave Stachowiak [00:35:08]:
I think it’s also a very helpful conversation, and the way we approached it is, what are the dynamics that families with wealth tend to show up with and to bring into the workplace sometime? And most of us interact with people who have wealth in some capacity as leaders, either it’s the owner of the organization or top executives or other stakeholders. I think it’s a really helpful framework to be able to understand that world a little bit more, to have a little bit of empathy. And, of course, we talked about all the dynamics of that in that conversation. Episode 606 for that. And then finally, another closely related topic, episode 639, supporting return to work after maternity leave. Danna Greenberg was my guest on that episode. Absolutely an expert in the space. Helped us to look at it through the lens of if you’re a parent returning to the workplace after maternity leave, what are some practices for navigating that? But more of a focus of that conversation was if you’re the leader, the manager, the organization who’s supporting an employee who is going out on maternity leave, on maternity leave, returning, how do you actually support that process in a effective way that honors everyone? Speaking of things most of us have not ever received training on, that’s a topic most of us have not.

Dave Stachowiak [00:36:22]:
Oftentimes, when it comes up in our organizations, someone hands us an HR policy, says here’s the way it’s typically done logistically, yet we don’t really talk about the emotional, the planning, all of the things that are so critical to really support that transition well for families and for organizations. Episode 639, a key conversation there. All of those episodes, you can find on the coachingforleaders.com website. Now mostly, we’re not talking about parenting topics on this podcast, but I think it’s important to dive into some of the aspects I mentioned today on parenting. And sometimes we talk a little bit about personal finance on the show because so many aspects of leadership do cross so many different kinds of roles. And so parenting is one of the topics inside of our free membership resources, and there’s a number of episodes we’ve done over the years, including with Tina. Bonni and I have had a few conversations over the years. So lots more resources there, plus all the traditional topics that you would expect that we mostly focus on on the show.

Dave Stachowiak [00:37:21]:
Leadership, of course, vision, coaching skills, accountability. So many of the things that come up regularly. We have set up the free membership on the website so you can find exactly what’s relevant most to you right now. Set up your free membership by going over to coachingforleaders.com. Once you do, you’ll have full access to that entire library. You can search through the dozens and dozens of topic areas that’ll be relevant to you right now. And one of those things that have come up in the last week is someone asking me, one of our members saying, I have a stakeholder right now who’s a little bit skittish and is not trusting me and my team for a whole bunch of reasons. And he asked me, how do I actually work to restore my relationship with the stakeholder, make it better, have this person not feel quite as skittish around the work that myself and my team are trying to do to serve this person and support them? That was the topic of my most recent journal entry.

Dave Stachowiak [00:38:16]:
How to make your stakeholders shine, ways to approach those tough situations with stakeholders who maybe aren’t so trusting for all kinds of reasons, and what are some initial steps you can take that will help really rebuild or to build it for the first time, the relationship with a key stakeholder. That is part of Coaching for Leaders Plus. If you’d like to get access to all the additional benefits inside of Coaching for Leaders Plus, go over to coachingforleaders.plus. You will find a bunch more details there, including all of the details about my weekly weekly journal entries. Those are coming to you on email every single week if you’re a member of Coaching for Leaders plus. Coaching for Leaders is edited by Andrew Kroeger. Production support is provided by Sierra Priest. Next Monday, I’m glad to welcome my friend, Tom Henschel, back to the show, the host of the Look and Sound of Leadership podcast.

Dave Stachowiak [00:39:08]:
Tom and I are having a conversation about how to take initiative. Join me for that conversation with Tom, and I’ll see you back this coming Monday. Take care.