TPP 305a: Stuart Shanker on What Self-Regulation Is, Why It Matters, and How to Help Our Children (and Ourselves) Do It Better
episode
Full-Tilt Parenting: Strategies, Insights, and Connection for Parents Raising Neurodivergent Children
41 min
2 speakers
6 chapters
transcribed 9 hours ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is the purpose of this episode and who is the guest?
Hey, it's Debbie. This month on Playback Fridays, we're revisiting conversations about self-regulation and co-regulation, two of the most powerful tools we have for changing the energy in our homes and creating more connection during the moments that feel the hardest. 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 Rieber. And welcome to the fall 2022 season of the podcast. I'm so excited to kick things off with a really just fantastic interview. For the first time on this show, I'm talking with Dr. Stuart Shanker, who I first learned about through my friend Seth Perler, as Stuart has been part of the TFOs Summit in years past.
I love Stuart's message and recently devoured his book Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child and You Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life. And so I wanted to talk with Stuart to go deeper into that. Book. In this episode, we talk about the difference between self-regulation and self-control and what stress behavior looks like versus misbehaving. Stuart also walks us through his five steps to self-reg and talks about the power of us as parents and caregivers and educators doing our own self-regulation work so we can support the kids around us. Dr. Stuart Schenker is a distinguished Research professor emeritus of philosophy and psychology, the founder and visionary of the Merit Center, and Self-Reg Global Inc.
He's also the author of the book we're talking about today, Self-Reg, as well as Self-Reg Schools, a Handbook for Educators, and his newest book, Reframed: Self-Reg for a Just Society. Thanks for being here. Thanks for listening. And now here is my conversation. Conversation with Stuart. Hey Stuart, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you very much, Debbie.
Feel like this is an overdue conversation. I was saying before we record that I probably first heard you speak through Seth Perler, who is a good friend. He's uh been on the show a lot talking about executive function. And so I've always really resonated with your message. I'd love if you could, you know, as a way to get into this, just take a few minutes and introduce yourself and your work to us in your own words.
Well, I ran a uh a very unusual kind of clinic at York University and in this clinic we had uh therapy on one side and uh neuroscience lab on the other. And what we would do is essentially we were working with kids. I love your expression, differently wired kids. That's what we were I've got two of my own and I wanted to understand them. And so we would do therapy and then have a look and see inside the brain what was going on, what was working, what wasn't working, and how could we tell? How could we tell if something was actually helping us? Yeah. So we ran that for seven years. And then the next part of the mandate was we had to, this is a very expensive project. It was a $10 million project. And the next part was we had to make what we had learned accessible, usable for all parents and all educators.
So we set up a an organization called the Merit Center and l encourage all of your listeners to go on our website because there's all kinds of stuff you can get for free. It's self dash reg dot ca. And our expectation we never advertised you anything. We were simply doing this as a service, but it exploded on us, as uh Seth can attest. right now we are literally all over the all over the globe. And it's because for a couple of reasons. Can I explain those? I won't just talk about the differently wired kid, but all kids. And we are seeing today an explosion, a literal explosion of stress-related problems. These might be physical, they might be mental health. And and it's obviously due to and it's been much harder on our own kids.
So it's obviously due to the very high stress levels that all of society is experiencing. But it's also due to a couple of other factors. One of them is what we call maladaptive ways of handling your stress. Maladaptive self-regulation.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the purpose of this episode and who is the guest?
0:00–6:53
2
How did Stuart Shanker’s early clinic work and why did it lead to the Merit Center?
6:53–13:16
3
Why are stress‑related problems exploding among children today?
13:16–21:26
4
How does the brain control stress and what role do oxytocin and cortisol play?
21:26–29:35
5
What are the five steps of the Self‑Reg process and how do they restore energy?
29:35–37:00
6
What’s the difference between misbehavior and stress behavior?
37:00–41:46
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Full-Tilt Parenting: Strategies, Insights, and Connection for Parents Raising Neurodivergent Children
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TPP 522: A Whole Child Approach to ADHD with Phil Boucher, M.D.
TPP 091a: A Conversation With Steve Silberman About His Book “Neurotribes”
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