TPP 458: Dr. Emily Kline on How Motivational Interviewing Helps Kids Get Unstuck
episode
Full-Tilt Parenting: Strategies, Insights, and Connection for Parents Raising Neurodivergent Children
39 min
1 speaker
3 chapters
transcribed 8 hours ago
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is motivational interviewing and why is it useful for parents?
I'm Debbie Rieber, and this is Full Tilt Parenting, a podcast for anyone who is raising or supporting neurodivergent kids. Today I'm being joined by clinical psychologist Dr. Emily Klein for a deep dive into motivational interviewing. This is an approach to communication that helps parents move from fixing and convincing to connecting and collaborating. We're going to talk about how to have hard conversations, think hygiene responsive. Disability, independence, school in a way that respects our kids' autonomy and actually opens up the door to change. Emily brings nearly 20 years of experience working with families. She's taught at Boston University and Harvard Medical School, and she's the author of The School of Hard Talks.
She shares practical, compassionate insights that any parent navigating the teen and young adult years will find incredibly useful. So here's my conversation with Dr. Emily Klein. Hey Emily, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you. I'm thrilled
to be here. I'm thrilled that you accepted my invitation. You're like, who is this person who invited me to come and talk about this? But I really appreciate that you said yes to my invitation. Anytime. So we are going to be talking about motivational interviewing today. And I'm really excited about it. As we were talking before I hit record, I think it is such a powerful tool for listeners of the show to have in their toolbox. And it's something we've kind of talked around before in shows. I really want to just kind of explore it with you today. I would love if you want to tell us a little bit about your story in terms of how you became a researcher and a thought leader in this space.
Absolutely. So flattered by that description. But I am by training a clinical psychologist And I've worked in all kinds of settings across my career. I ended up kind of specializing for many years. in working with teenagers and sort of transition age young adults who were experiencing a first episode of a more serious mental illness. So that could be like a more serious problem with addiction, an episode of bipolar disorder, or a first episode of psychosis. that kind of engaged my interest in developmental psychology and working with kids, but also in working with families because I think it's one of the trickiest situations around as kids get older. They have more autonomy, they need more autonomy, but they're struggling, right?
So you have to engage with their parents as well. So I worked for a long time with these families of adolescents who were really Swimming in the deep end and trying to stay afloat. through mental health crises. And just found that incredibly interesting. And then I had my own kids and I started to realize what was good and what was bad advice essentially. To some extent I think I had been a little overconfident in some things and underconfident in others and started to really Philosophically explore more for myself as a parent and also with the families I was working with, these issues of control and the ways in which we do and don't control our children's behaviors, personalities, choices, destinies.
So that's sort of where I'm coming from philosophically in terms of my day to day. I've always worked with families. Right now I work in primary care pediatrics, working with families who maybe have a question about, you know, is this behavior normal? Is this something to worry about? Can you treat this? Or I've worked in research settings, I've led studies, and I've worked in more serious mental illness clinics as well.
Wow. Such a fascinating background. And I know that there are listeners who have kids who either have or are currently navigating those more serious mental health challenges. So swimming in the deep end, I think, is such a accurate description of that, what a heavy and scary thing that is to experience. I also just want to mention thinking about what parents do and don't control. control about our kids, right? And what I've learned the hard way, and with lots of my own research of my case study of one, I have a almost 21-year-old kiddo now is that I just have like no control over anything as much as I have tried.
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Chapters
3 chaptersSpeakers
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