Crash Course: Kids Who Don’t Comply, Listen, or Care About Consequences
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So you have kids who don't listen all the time. They don't always do what you want them to do. They want to try to do it their way. They're stove touchers. I understand this is really frustrating when you have a strong-willed child because the more you push, the more they resist, the more you lecture, the more they tend to shut down. These are assertive, persistent kids who get a vision of what they want to do in their brains and then they go to carry it

out and they tend to tune everything else out. And one of the first things we go to is consequences because that's all we've been taught as parents is, well, you just need to give them a consequence and that will change their behavior. But it doesn't work. And I've seen this on Instagram and even on Thanksgiving day, we got email after email about this. So I thought I would record

special kind of crash course in understanding how we approach things, how strong will kids work, and I'm going to try to keep this around 20 minutes because of the holidays. So forgive me because I don't have it all scripted out, but I think you'll find this helpful, especially those of you who aren't as familiar with what we do. So

Welcome. This is Kirk Martin. I'm founder of Celebrate Calm. You can find us at Celebrate Calm. This is the Calm Parenting Podcast. So here's the thing about external consequences. They tend not to work at changing human behavior. Look, we have... There are consequences...

deadly consequences for eating too much and unhealthy, for drinking too much, for smoking, for speeding, and yet human beings do all of those things every single day. Why? Because we're usually trying to address that outward behavior that a child or adult is engaging in, but we're not getting to the underlying reason. There's an assumption when you give a consequence that behavior is driven by rational thinking. It's not.

Almost everything you and I do is irrational. It's driven by something that's emotional. There's usually something deeper going on. And so we react to the outward behavior, give an external consequence, and then wonder why it isn't motivating to our kids inside. Because you can't always consequence a child into doing something, right? Like if your child's not doing schoolwork or is kind of shut down, it's like, well, I'll just take away everything they own.

Your kids don't care because that doesn't change the fact you haven't given them tools to do their schoolwork differently. And you also haven't sparked the internal motivation. And so there are real limitations to this. And the other part of this is

When you have a strong-willed child, you have to understand that they value things different. The things that they value are very different than you do because we go in thinking, well, they just care about making good decisions and pleasing people and being a compliant person and caring about school and making their bed. No, they actually don't.

What they value more than anything else is their own agency, their autonomy, their independence. They want to touch the hot stove. It is part of the process. It is a good part of the process. It's just irritating and annoying for you as a parent. But you know, I talk bluntly and I don't do guilt or blame, but it's also annoying that you continue to try to change their very nature.

This is how they came out of the womb, is it not? And yet we continue to fall back on our

kind of ineffective, and sometimes it just becomes lazy. When I see the, well, if you give them a harsh enough consequence, no, it won't work. They will fight you harder, or they will just give up for right now, shut down, and you have nothing left. And we have to be honest that sometimes we're just trying to change kids' behavior for our own convenience.

because it just irritates us. I know as a dad sometimes, I just wanted my son to listen to me because it was just easier that way. I would just bark things out because that's what my dad did. That was what I was raised with.

And so I want you to know that just getting kids to behave and listen to me is not my ultimate goal. It is to teach kids to be responsible for themselves. And as long as I'm micromanaging and controlling their behavior...

I'm actually being responsible for my child's behavior because we all have control issues and we have anxiety. And so I encourage you to approach this in a different way. So the question becomes, well, do we just let kids get away with things? Absolutely not. This is not permissive parenting. This isn't just do whatever you want. Not at all.

So one concept we go through all the time, and I encourage you, listen to past episodes. There's an episode from August 4th on a child who won't accept responsibility. And it goes through the idea of ownership.

So I believe, we all believe very clearly in giving kids very clear boundaries and expectations. It's just that I create larger boundaries for the strong-willed child because I know they're going to push. It's in their DNA. And so ownership says this, hey, I'm going to create a big box for you to live in conceptually. I have very clear expectations, very clear boundaries.

This is what my objective is what I want you to do but within within my boundaries

I give you some space, some space to do things differently than I would do them as long as we accomplish the same goal. See, I'm not saying if you do your homework, if you get your chores done, if you get this done. No, it's getting done. I just relinquish control over how you accomplish it because with our kids, I want to make things a challenge.

Our kids love a challenge. They like doing things in a different way. See, when you give them a challenge, it does a couple things. Your kids are very big into needing brain stimulation. That's why they procrastinate. It's why they push people's buttons. It's why they pick on their siblings. It's why they argue with you. It's why they tap pencils and bounce their legs and they chew on things. That is all the need for brain stimulation in your kids. And when you make it a challenge,

Oh, you're stimulating the brain. They also like to do things differently than other people do it. So that's why you will tear, rip your hair out thinking, I just asked you to do simple things and you won't even do it. It's so easy. Let me show you how. Well, as soon as you show them how, they're like, well, I don't want to do that. That's duh. That's boring. That's stupid. So I give them some space to own it a little bit. Listen to that past episode. By the way,

The episode we recently did on why consequences don't work, that's October 2nd. I'm trying to keep this short and giving you some reference points here. So here's another thing I want you to think about is one of our big things is I like to give kids tools to succeed. See, consequences are, hey, if you don't stop doing that, you lose X, right?

In a sense, what we're doing is we're punishing a child for failing, but instead I come alongside and I give them tools to succeed. It's an example of a kid who's blurting out in class, hey, if you don't stop blurting out, you miss recess.

Well, they're just going to miss recess because we haven't given them any practical tools to help them with blurting out. And we assume they're just being rude, blurting out. That's not what's happening. These are kids with very busy brains. And so then they also have a lot of ideas, but they struggle with short-term memory. So they're afraid they're going to forget their ideas. So what do they do? They blurt out. And then we just say, hey, cut it out or else.

Instead, I go and I give them some talk tickets. I've been through that in podcasts before of something tangible, physical they can hold up instead of blurting out. It is a tool to create a success because then...

I get to say as a teacher, "Hey, nice job controlling yourself. You held up your talk ticket. Hey, go ahead and share your amazing off-topic idea because it's always going to be off-topic." And now I get to praise the child and affirm and say, "Hey, that was really good self-control that you just exhibited." So that whole idea of giving kids tools to succeed,

I would look up the August 7th episode on creating successes. It's really, really helpful. So we mentioned this before. So let me get to something, control issues, right?

You have to control your own control issues. You and I get very rigid. We grew up a certain way, and so we carry all of our baggage and just all of our life into parenthood and say, well, this is the way I did it as a kid. This is the way my parents did it. It's the way I prefer doing things in life, so just do it this way. And that makes total sense because that has helped you be successful.

but now you're imposing what you think is the right way, your way, on a child who will naturally resist that. And so you've got to control being so rigid. I believe 80% of power struggles with our kids

Begin with us as parents. That's not blame or guilt. It's just reality of how it happens. You have to control your own anxiety. You and I have anxiety about our child's future because we don't see them living up to their potential. And they're capable of so much more. So we lecture and we get on them and nitpick them and they tend to do the opposite. And I also want to give them space.

hugely important. If you are unfamiliar with us, go back through the past podcast. We talk about giving kids space to process their disappointment, space to make a decision. If you stand over a strong-willed child and demand that they do something, I will bet you $1,000 that almost every single time they will resist you even more. But if you give them a little space to figure it out themselves...

which is what we want in the long run anyway. We want kids being responsible for themselves, not being micromanaged. The strong-willed child is not going to grow up and have a corporate job where someone micromanages him or her all the time. So I want to raise them according to their nature, but I don't have to let them get away with things. I have very clear boundaries.

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Look, when I enforce my boundaries, enforce consequences, in our terminology, if you ever go through our programs, it's called I keep my promises. Hey, I promise you if X happens, if you choose X behavior, this will happen. Then when I go and do it,

I'm just keeping my promise to my child because that speaks of integrity. I don't do a lot of consequences because they don't work. But when I do, it's even. Matter of fact, there is no drama when I discipline. But the truth is I put so much more energy into giving kids ownership of their choices, giving them space, making it a challenge. And here's another one, creating successes. I want to purposefully, especially with younger kids,

Instead of always just waiting for them to do something wrong, one of our phrases is, whenever you say no to something inappropriate, always say yes to something appropriate because otherwise their whole child is going to be, no, no, stop that. Don't do that. Stop it. Stop it. Instead,

I work with their nature and I set them up for success. So more often than not, I'm saying, hey, that was a nice job with that. Hey, that's good progress. Remember, you praise for progress, not perfection because perfection doesn't exist, especially with these kids.

So listen to some of those past podcasts on creating successes. So here's the difference, right? Most of us were raised in kind of this very authoritarian mindset, right? Fear and intimidation that our parents use. That's what I grew up with and that's what I started to use with our son. As if that will motivate them to behave. But think about this when you're using that approach, right?

When I'm doing that, I am actually, in a way, being responsible for their behavior. I'm bringing so much energy to my fear and intimidation, to me getting on them, micromanaging and lecturing, that in a sense, I'm actually being responsible for their behavior for them. And think about this, then the child only learns to make good choices when

under fear or out of a threat of force. So they're not actually learning how to make good decisions. They're only learning to make these good choices to avoid being punished.

That's not good in the long run. Now, I understand why we want to do it because in the moment, guess what happens? Well, their outward behavior is usually better for a little while. That makes it more convenient for us. It allows us to lie to ourselves and say, "Hey, starting to behave more effectively." No, they're just doing it out of fear and out of punishment. That's not what I really want. And the other part of this is sometimes, "Well, I just need to shut down that behavior."

Well, you can shut it down, but now you have a child who either internalizes that anger and turns it inward on themselves, or you get a child who can't speak up, never learns how to speak up for themselves.

and moms listening, you know exactly what I mean. Many of you were shut down, and you never learned how to say no to men, to different people, to your friends, and you get walked on because you never learned how to speak up, and you didn't trust your voice. I don't want to shut kids down. I want to teach them how to control themselves. I want to teach them how to problem solve. Let me come back to that. So,

I tried the authoritarian approach. Many of us have. But then our society swung all the way over to where we talk really sweetly to our kids, and in some ways we excuse their behavior, and it sounds weak and condescending.

When you talk to a strong-willed child in that really sweet tone, honey, do you want to talk? You know what they're thinking? Why are you talking to me like this? I know I'm only four, but I'm four going on 14. They don't take it seriously. It creates instability. And the kids are like, wait, why is there not an adult in charge here? So where we come in, if you're new to us is,

Right in the middle there. Hey, I am the calm, authoritative leader. I'm patient. I listen. I'm not reactive. I can understand. But I'm also firm and I have very clear boundaries. I just, when I enforce them, I just don't get all emotional and I don't blame the child and I don't make it personal.

And so I keep my promises. I have integrity and I practice controlling myself first. And when I do that, here's the benefit. Here's what I'm really after with kids. It's not really changing their behavior outwardly.

It is giving them the tools to control themselves. See, the greatest discipline is not disciplining a child outwardly. It is them learning self-discipline, but they learn that by me modeling it. And when I slow my world down and in situations, instead of reacting, I can't believe that you lied to me. Why would you steal something? Why don't you ever listen to me?

See how that becomes? And after a while with the strong-willed child, all they internalize is, I'm a bad kid. I'm the black sheep of the family. My dad doesn't like me. Why can't I ever succeed? And they'll even rebel even harder, especially in the teen years, or they'll just shut down and internalize that something's wrong with them. But when I slow my world down and I can normalize this of like, of course, I'm

Totally get why you would stay up late. I get why you would steal that and take that. I'm not excusing it. I'm just normalizing it that that's what human beings have done since the beginning of time. Of course you didn't do that. And then I can show them how to do it a different way because discipline means to teach.

and I want to show them a different way to handle their behavior. And then when I do, I can say, oh, that was really cool how you handled that. Hey, I saw how your brother was picking on you, was provoking you, and you walked away. Fist bump. That shows me you're growing up. That shows me you're mature. And I can teach them. We've done whole podcasts. In fact, if you go to CelebrateCalm.com and look up under our podcast section,

There's a directory there, and we have it listed out, like the ones that are on stealing and lying, on big emotional meltdowns. There's podcasts there we list for dads specifically for all kinds of different issues. So go back and kind of binge listen to those over the holiday weekend. By the way, let your kids listen because you know what they're going to say. If you let them listen to this, they'll be like,

that guy's right. Like, who is this guy? That guy's describing exactly how it feels to be me. This is what's happening in our home. Ask them if that's true. You don't have to do some big groveling. I'm so sorry. I don't do that. I'm just like, hey, I didn't understand that. So what do you guys want to do moving forward? Because here's what I'm really after. Teaching and problem-solving.

For the guys out there, this is what we do, and the moms, but this is what we do in the corporate world, on the football field, everywhere we go. We encounter situations that are difficult. At the office, we're not throwing our hands up in the air and screaming and yelling at people and sending them, go to your cubicle. No, we're bringing them into a room and we're saying, hey, what we're doing isn't working. So I want to understand what's going on. What's the root of the problem? And then let's come up with a different strategy to make this work.

And then we break the huddle and we go and we execute our play and we problem solve. That's what I'm after. That has nothing to do with using fear intimidation, but it also has nothing to do with just letting kids do whatever they want to do. Not at all. So thank you for listening. I know I talked really fast in this because I wanted to get it under 20 minutes and try to fit in a lot. So

binge listen to the podcast if you happen to have our programs listen on the app share it with your spouse share it with your relatives we can send the programs to your child's teachers so they understand their brain like that ADHD university program all teachers should listen that they'll know exactly how to work with our kids let your kids listen to our podcast to our programs

because I think it will really help. If we can help you in any way, please let us know. We're at CelebrateCalm.com. We do have a huge sale going on. And if you ever need help financially, don't let that stop you. Reach out to us because we want to help everybody. I have enormous respect for parents who are working so hard to change themselves and understand these strong-willed kids. These kids have a great future ahead of them. So love you all. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye.