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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So my grandfather was really, really close to, grew up in Tupelo, Mississippi at the beginning of the 20th century. And what he saw in his life is amazing, but he had all these like great grandfatherly sayings, these like pearls of wisdom he would impart. And one thing he would say to me all the time is he would say, you know what, Stuart, if you give a dog a name, eventually they'll answer to it.
If you give a dog a name, Eventually they'll answer to it. And what I realized with the kids we're talking about today is that if you treat a kid like they're lazy, unmotivated, don't care, aren't trying hard enough, we shouldn't be surprised when over time, guess what?
They start to look like and talk like and act like kids are lazy, unmotivated, don't care, aren't trying hard enough because if you give a dog a name, eventually they'll answer to it. And I want to be clear, us parents, you know, we would never set out to make our kids feel that way. Of course, teachers never, of course, try to make people feel that way.
But with every reward and consequence, again, comes the not so subtle message. Hey, if you tried harder, this would go better. It's unavoidable.
Yeah. Well, I mean, typically when people say to me, you know, nobody ever did this for me and I turned out okay, they're saying that with an edge because there's parts of them that maybe didn't turn out okay. And if you can get to that part with them, which is what do they wish was different about their life and their skills and how they operate, it opens up a lot of doors there.
My feeling about that is each generation – there's actually been research on this – each generation feels like the generation that comes after it has it easier, isn't learning the right skills, is a more spoiled generation than the previous one. If you go back hundreds of years, this happens. And look, the world changes, and we need to adapt with it.
I mean, look, when people say we wouldn't do this that way when I grew up, we used to think that corporal punishment, that actually injuring kids, hurting, traumatizing kids, that that was a good form of discipline, right? We learn things, okay? We learn that actually that causes harm. It doesn't help. And we need to change with the times. And you mentioned trauma.
Since we can image the brain, one of the clearest things we found is expose somebody to trauma or to chronic toxic stress in childhood. Guess what it does? It delays, it changes the brain. It delays skills. in those five areas we talked about before. It's one of the primary reasons for very challenging and concerning behavior.
Kids who have trauma histories, that trauma has gotten in their way of their skills. So if you want to be sort of really trauma sensitive, you really need to realize behavior is about skill, not will.
And then to make it worse, the outside world typically reacts in punitive ways, which what does that do? It adds stress. So it further gets in the way of skill development. It only escalates the behavior. And then when we have escalating behavior, we tend to up the ante on the discipline.
So it becomes this cycle of sort of chronic stress and punitive discipline that just keeps making matters worse and worse and worse. And the good news is we don't have to respond to that behavior punitively. We can respond in a different way, a way that I call relational discipline. Discipline that doesn't leverage power and control, but leverages relationship.
Because remember, the biggest predictor of helping somebody change, helping somebody build skills, is the degree of helping relationship. So we can respond with relational discipline.
Let's go. What do we do? You know, here's a simple way to think about things. And I always say to people, don't confuse simple with easy, okay? Yep. But simple is this. Pick any problem that you have with anybody, literally anybody in your life, okay? In other words, anything they're doing you don't want them to do or not doing you want them to do, anything. Okay.
And at the end of the day, you really only have three options for how to handle those. And just to be clear, we didn't create these in collaborative problem solving. We just put labels on them. Okay. We call them your three plans. Okay. Which is another word saying your options for how to handle a problem. You need a plan. What's your plan? Okay. Okay. There's only three. Okay.
We call them plan A, plan B, and plan C. So give me an example.
Yeah.
It could be as simple as a kid not getting out of bed on time to get to school. Let's use that one. Or it could be much, much, much more complicated than that.
So you've got three options, okay? Plan A is when you decide to impose your will To try to make the person do what you want them to do.
I'm going to impose my will. Now, there are different ways you can try to impose your will. If the kid's small enough, you could physically try to impose your will by getting them out of bed. But the other way we try to impose our will is, no surprise, rewards and consequences, right? Either way, you're sort of leveraging power and control to try to make somebody do what you want them to do. Okay.
That's one option. Okay. Plan A. Okay. Second option, call it plan B. That's our code for collaborative problem solving.
Showing 101–120 of 223 · page 6 of 12
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