TPP 111: Katherine Reynolds Lewis Tells us the Good News About Bad Behavior
episode
Full-Tilt Parenting: Strategies, Insights, and Connection for Parents Raising Neurodivergent Children
37 min
2 speakers
4 chapters
transcribed 5 hours ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is the central premise of “The Good News About Bad Behavior”?
I would love for adults to stop seeing kids who are acting out as bad kids or being difficult or somehow a problem and instead look at it as an opportunity to strengthen that child's skills, whatever this skill at hand may be. And really it's good when kids misbehave because then it shows us how to help them. It's this red flag or signal to us that, oh, attention is needed here.
Welcome to Tilt Parenting, a podcast featuring interviews and conversations aimed at inspiring, informing, and supporting parents raising differently wired kids. I'm your host, Debbie Reaver, and today is an episode about bad behavior. Specifically, the good news about bad behavior. That's the name of a new book by journalist, author, speaker, and parent educator Katherine Reynolds Lewis. In this episode, Catherine and I talk about what our kids' behavior is telling us and how we as parents and teachers and other adults in kids' lives can best respond to it while encouraging our kids to develop into healthy adults. In researching and writing her book, Catherine connected with one of our favorite parenting thought leaders, Dr.
Ross Green, and reframed her own thinking about bad behavior as being a child's way of demonstrating lagging skills. Her book aims to to help parents navigate the tricky behavioral situations we face and to work with their children toward better solutions. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope it offers you some good food for thought. Here is my conversation with Catherine. Hey Katherine, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me on. Well, I'm so happy that I discovered you and your awesome new book via the interwebs. And uh just so happy that we're able to bring you on the show because I think your book and the message you're sharing through it is really gonna be an interesting one for our audience.
So before we get into that, I always start these conversations by asking people to just tell me a little bit about yourself, you know, your background and who you are as a writer and a parent.
Absolutely. So I'm a journalist. I started off in business journalism, gosh, twenty years ago, and really was very much focused on that until I had children. And then suddenly all these questions of parenting and education and instilling character and executive function started to be much more interesting to me. And um Um around I guess two thousand eight when The recession really hit and um newspapers were having trouble. I lost my job along with the other twenty-four people in my bureau here in Washington, DC area. So then I went freelance and really was able to write about whatever I wanted uh that I could get someone to pay me for. So then I started delving much more into education and parenting and trying to understand psychology and what was going on in my kids' brains.
And um through that I just sort of shifted my writing practice more and more to be writing about parenting subjects and child development. And then in Twenty fifteen I wrote an article for Mother Jones magazine about school discipline that went viral and that was really such a wonderful launching pad to write much more about child development and delve into the neuroscience of how our brains get wired the way they are, and eventually writing this book, The Good News About Bad Behavior, which came out in April twenty eighteen.
I love hearing stories like that because I think it's just so cool when work life and parenting life joins together. So what a great thing to be able to focus your professional energy and and time doing all this research, which you can then totally use in your own life.
Right. It's the definition of news you can use when I'm writing about discipline and at three thirty my kids tumble in the door and do something I don't like. Then I get to test my new knowledge.
Yes. That is a uh hazard of this business. We know I'm in the same situation with you know, getting to speak with so many parenting experts and then I get many opportunities to see where I'm screwing up and to practice the things that I'm learning.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the central premise of “The Good News About Bad Behavior”?
0:00–7:07
2
How did Katherine’s career shift lead her to write the book?
7:07–15:42
3
What did Katherine learn from Dr. Ross Greene’s model and how did it reshape her view of misbehavior?
15:42–31:13
4
How can parents shift their mindset to see misbehavior as a skill‑building opportunity?
31:13–37:52
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Full-Tilt Parenting: Strategies, Insights, and Connection for Parents Raising Neurodivergent Children
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TPP 521: A Conversation with Dr. Peter Gray About Restoring Childhood
TPP 253a: Advocate and Author Jonathan Mooney on Why Normal Sucks
TPP 520: Dr. Özgür Bolat on Why Rewards Backfire and the Real Science of Motivating Kids