Dr. Stuart Ablon
speaker
223 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Dr. Stuart Ablon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And I just want to be clear that it's not like I don't reach moments where I that that faith gets shaken because I get so upset, bothered, pissed off, etc. And both in my own life personally, but also my clinical life. And, you know, I just try to hold tight to that philosophy.
And when you were saying that, you know, a memory came up years ago in my practice of working with an adolescent who was really, really struggling. Okay. And his behavior was really obnoxious, too. Like what? Well, he just would be really disrespectful to his parents, to most adults, authority figures, and it seemed like he just didn't care. So it was so easy.
It was so frustrating because you sort of couldn't engage him much, and it seemed like he didn't care. And... I remember the day where his mom, who never lost hope, and she brought in, you know, he was a 15-year-old at the time, and he was a pretty rough kid. She brought in a picture of him asleep as a two-year-old. on the back seat of the car. And he was just the cutest little thing.
And it's giving me goosebumps right now just talking about it. And I saw this and I said to myself, like, that kid's in there somewhere. Like this hardened, tough kid who's really hard to access. There's this little adorable guy and things have gone wrong in the interim. But I got to believe that that kid who, you Everybody looked at this lovely, cute kid. He's in there. He wants to do well.
And how do we access that? And actually, sometimes I give parents that advice with little kids. I said, if you're losing faith, just watch them sleep for a little bit. Because they're really cute then and they can't be obnoxious when they're sleeping or difficult. And it'll restore a little bit of your faith and remind yourself kids do well if they can and then come back at it the next day.
Although we're going to get into specifics about exactly what to do. I want to be clear. This is not just about mindset. It's about shifting your mindset and then shifting what you do to match that new mindset.
Absolutely. So, you know, I gave you some sort of big categories that they fall in, problem-solving, flexibility, frustration tolerance. But I also told you there's 50 years of research that shows exactly where those skills are. And in essence, what we found is they're in five different areas.
And if we want to use fancy language just for a moment, they're what we call neurocognitive skills, which is a fancy way of saying thinking skills in essence. They're largely what happens in the prefrontal cortex of your brain. So there's five areas. One, language and communication skills.
Now, really easy to think about with a kid because, you know, like most two-year-olds are very poorly behaved, right? We call it the terrible twos. Not because they're evil little beings, but because they lack a lot of skills, including they're not great at knowing what's bothering them, using words to tell somebody what's bothering them, engaging in a back and forth to solve a problem.
Those are language and communication skills. Now, most four-year-olds are better than that, than two-year-olds at that. Most eight-year-olds better than five-year-olds. Most 20-year-olds better than 10-year-olds at that. But notice my language. Most. So you may be working with a 15-year-old who's got six-year-old language skills.
And let's be clear, this does not just apply to kids because you may be in marriage with a 45-year-old who really struggles to identify what's bothering them, communicate it to others, engage in the back and forth to problem solve. So that's one category, language and communication skills.
Well, that's what I would say. What do two-year-olds do when they're upset? They don't calmly express what's going on, right? They bite, they scream, they flop, they run, they hit, you know, they do all those things. And that's what they've sort of gotten their bag of tricks in their toolbox, right? So if they don't develop other skills, that's what they're going to resort to.
You know, there's a good analogy, a precedent that I like to remind myself of because I think we've made a ton of progress there. And I know this will resonate for you. Yeah. When you and I were in school, we didn't know much about learning disabilities. True. Right? So if you had dyslexia when you were our age growing up and you were struggling to read,
People didn't say, I wonder what she's having a hard time with. They thought that you were either lazy or dumb. And if they thought you were lazy, what would they do? They would try to motivate you to work harder to read, which, you know, the sad reality, the ironic reality is who's working harder than anybody else in the classroom to learn how to read? The kid to whom it's not coming naturally.
And honestly, I think we lost a lot of kids by sort of teaching them that we thought they weren't working hard enough when actually they were working overtime and what they were struggling with was skill, not will.
So what are the other four? Right. Okay. So the other has to do with attention and working memory skills. That's number two. Okay.
And it's a big category, but you know, attention skills are like, can you focus on something, not that's enthralling to you, but something that isn't that interesting or you don't exactly feel like focusing on right now, but can you sort of marshal enough attention to focus on it? And can you shift your attention from one thing to the next when needed?
And as a kid, by the way, you're told all the time, but even as an adult, we're told, stop paying attention to that, start paying attention to that.
Well, and this is a big misconception, for instance, about attentional issues as a whole. Okay. You know, people think that if somebody's diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, ADHD, it means they can't focus at all. It's just not true. What does it mean, Doc? Well, it means that they have a hard time focusing on things that are not intrinsically all that interesting to them.
In fact, most people diagnosed with ADHD will tell you they have the ability to hyper-focus, right? which is an incredible skill and strength on something they're super interested in. But it's when somebody says, well, could you pay attention to this now? That is really hard to focus your attention on, which by the way, for kids in school, there's a fair amount of school.
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