Punishment Free Parenting with Jon Fogel {EP 206}

Robyn: Now, some of these topics I've covered a lot before on the podcast, and so I will make sure that those episodes get mentioned down in the show notes. But also this idea of, when do we hold a boundary? It's a topic I'm planning to tackle a bunch in some upcoming podcast episodes. We've been talking about this idea a lot in the club, and we've been talking about it through the lens of, when do we start to re strengthen our kids stress response systems? In fact, in February, our master class in the club is about this exactly, strengthening the stress response system after we've reduced stress. So after we've reduced stress, reduced demands, reduce expectations, right? What do we do next? How do we then strengthen the stress response system in order for healing to happen? So I want you to know we are about to tackle this even further on the podcast. So when I get to that part of the conversation with Jon, and it's the very end of the episode, know that we're going to talk about this more in depth, and more specifically for your families, for kids, where the idea of starting to kind of raise the bar might feel terrifying, right? The idea of what will happen if feels so so so scary, what kind of dysregulation is going to happen? Is that going to undo everything we've done? Is it going to undo all the felt safety we've built. Am I going to be able to deal with that dysregulation? Is that dysregulation that my child will have? Is that going to harm them? Is it going to harm me? Right? I know that these are these very, very complicated questions.    

Robyn: We don't do it justice in this episode, for sure, but I want you to know that we are going to be tackling this in the future here on the podcast as well as over in the club. So if you're a Club member, you can look forward to that coming up in February. But beyond this discussion about boundaries that Jon and I had at the very end, I enjoyed so much talking with Jon about big ideas and philosophies, not just about parenting, but about humaning. Jon is also a pastor, though his book is not faith based, in fact, beyond him telling us readers that he is a pastor. I don't think faith or religion is mentioned again in his book, but his experiences of as a pastor have given him this really unique experience and journey in the world of of helping parents make huge paradigm shifts that often involve a lot of belief deconstruction. All right, y'all, that's enough for me. Let's get going with this episode!    

Robyn: Jon, thank you so much for joining me here on The Baffling Behavior Show we just are meeting for the first time, and this is fantastic. Thank you.   

Jon Fugel: Yeah, no, your show is awesome. I've not been able to listen to that much of it yet, but everything that I've heard is so in line with the stuff that I talk about. I'm really excited to be here.  

Robyn: Well, I was thrilled to get that email from Tina Payne Bryson just saying, oh my gosh, you gotta read this guy's book. Also, it's coming out like now, right? I completely understand how big of a deal it is to bring a book into the world, so I'm so glad we were able to get this interview scheduled, and the day y'all are listening on is, it's the 28th, Tuesday, the 28th right? That your book comes into the world. Punishment-Free Parenting.   

Jon: Yes, Punishment-Free Parenting: The Brain-Based Way To Raise Kids Without Raising Your Voice!   

Robyn: Love this, love this. Well, because you and I are just getting to know each other, I'm just gonna ask you to tell me and my listeners what you want us to know about you.  

Jon: Well, you know, I think the main thing is that I am just basically a normal dad. I think a lot of people come into the parenting world and they write parenting books, and they're most of my favorite parenting books. Actually, all of my favorite parenting books are written by experts, psychologists and neuroscientists and people with long histories of working with children and patients. And the thing that sets my book or sets me apart differently, is that I'm more I take a more kind of journalistic approach to parenting in that it's I'm just a dad who's learning around along with the people who are reading the book. And so I think of myself as a person who just is very excited about parenting, but I also have enough academic training to know how to talk about these things in an effective way, which is kind of evidenced by the people like Tina Payne Bryson, who has been so kind to write the forward for my book and endorse it to kind of say, hey, even though this guy's just a dad, he's not a psychologist, this stuff in this book is very, very sound. It's it's backed by research. It's backed by neuroscience. And it kind of sets that apart, because if you're a person who doesn't have all of that lingo and all of those degrees and all that education, this book might be the book that finally hits home for you, or maybe somebody in your life who otherwise wouldn't be able to access or process or really engage with this type of material.   How did you come into the parenting world to speaking about parenting?   

Jon: Yeah, yeah, it's a great question. So first and foremost, I became a dad. Yeah. And so becoming a dad is definitely the best on the job training about parenting, but I became a dad at the same time as kind of four events were coalescing in my life, and all of them revolved around some relationship to parenting, and so I number one, we had our first child, and that is a deeply impactful experience in so many ways, but it's also a time when your brain literally changes, when you actually have all of this neural pruning and all of these neural pathway developments, and your brain actually gets more malleable, so you feel kind of out of sorts when you become a new parent. And I was experiencing that, and while my brain was in that really malleable state, three other things happened. The first being that I was in seminary, getting a master's degree, and I was taking classes in counseling and child psychology and processing trauma with people. And even though I didn't go on to get a degree in counseling, I was taking classes at the School of Professional counseling at the university. And so hearing about how to assess whether abuse was happening in a case, or how to process abuse with somebody, or how to encourage parents to parent more effectively, while my brain was in a state where it could receive and change was so deeply impactful.    

Jon: At the exact same time, my wife and I were actually in the process of becoming licensed foster parents, and so I was being trained to be a foster parent and to work with kids who had all of these challenges, all of this trauma in their past, and all of these behavioral difficulties that were manifesting as a result. And then while that was all happening, while both of those things were happening in the first year of my son's life, my dad was diagnosed with cancer and passed away. And so when all of that kind of came together, I would say was one kind of fateful training. Foster care training is before my dad passed away, but actually, actually was right after my dad passed away, I should say. And we're sitting in this foster care training, and the foster care trainer who had herself had fostered over 25 kids, or something like that. She said, you know, punishment is not going to work for the kids who are in your care. And that was really disorienting for me. I came from a family that that was really, really kind and empathetic, and I'm so grateful to my parents that they set me up in a way where I could even have these types of conversations and actually access these types of parts of my brain to reconsider and deconstruct, but absolutely utilized punishment.   

Jon: Absolutely utilized what they would kind of euphemistically call consequences or losing privileges, to modify my behavior, and so to hear that punishment wasn't gonna work with these kids, the kids who seemed to me like they were the ones who needed the most punishment. They needed the most strict, rigid guidelines and the most kind of authoritarian control was really, really like my, I don't wanna even say it was eye-opening. I just rejected. I was like this, this cannot be true. And as I kind of did the work of going and researching that, and there were some other things that at the same time I was deconstructing from, and I was pulling all of these threads apart, what came, what became very clear was that punishment is never effective, even for neurotypical kids, even for kids who don't have trauma, even for kids who don't have those kind of, all of those accurate initializations, ADHD, ODD, PDA, punishment is not effective for those kids, either. It's just that for kids who don't have sensitive nervous systems or vulnerable nervous systems, they can kind of, in the face of punishment, still learn, but if a kid has those things, they're not going to be able to learn.  

Jon: And so by learning how to parent the kids who are the most vulnerable, what I was actually learning was how to parent the most effectively. The Parenting had to be excellent. And so through all of that process, I just became this, like, avid, crazy researcher, where I was, like- I have ADHD, so I was kind of hyper-fixated, and I would spend all day just reading books about child psychology and parenting. And I went down the path of, like, reading academic texts, because I had been trained to do that in my master's degree program and and as a result, what I came to was this new vision of parenting, which was actually what was being expressed in research all over the world, but was so foreign to me just as a normal dad, because I didn't have training as a psychologist or a psychiatrist or anything like that. And so as a result, I start to just tell everybody I know about it, and I'm just very excited about it.   

Jon: So I started to tell my friends, and they were like, wow, this stuff that you're offering us really works. Maybe you should take this online. Then I don't know if you guys know about this thing that happened. It happened around me. It was called COVID, and everybody was locked in their houses, and the only connection that I had to the outside world was this little phone screen, and I jumped up on Tiktok and I said, like, here's how I'm parenting differently. And within a couple months, I had 200,000 followers, people just saying, hey, look the stuff that you're talking about. Nobody's saying this. Why is this so effective? And also, how is nobody having these conversations? And so it's kind of spiraled from there, and obviously now I've written a book that that kind of culminates and puts a lot of that together for just typical parents to access and and to kind of get those tips and tricks, but also to dig into that research in a really practical and accessible way. But, but that's how I landed here on this podcast, was that through that process, I became friends with a lot of the people who are doing that research, like Tina, and they said, wow, you know, it's really helpful to have somebody communicate this, not from the Ivory Tower, not from the academy, but as a dad who learned it yourself and then can speak to that experience of being a dad who just didn't have this information until recently.  

Robyn: There's so many pieces you said that I'm like, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I mean, I had a similar experience. As far as you know, early, early, early in my career. I'm working with kids who are out of control, in a way nobody taught me how to manage at all, like it was not what I was trained to deal with, and so I had to figure this out. And stumbled upon interpersonal neurobiology, Dr Siegel, Tina's work, all that kind of good stuff. And yeah, there is this moment where you're like, Whoa. Wait, if this applies to these kids who are so vulnerable and so sensitive and have much smaller bandwidth for what they can tolerate with parenting and relationally and stuff. Wait, I actually think this is, this is about humans, right? This isn't about trauma.    

Robyn: This isn't about sensitive nervous systems. It really requires- and in fact what I discovered was, if we stay focused on the trauma piece, when a lot of people kind of need you know that this is trauma informed parenting as a doorway in, because we're asking them to make such a huge change, and the idea that we're making this change because is because, you know, these kids are unique, can sometimes be a doorway in but what I have found is, if we don't go past that, right, like if we don't go to actually, this is nothing to do with trauma. This is actually changing everything we thought we understood about humans and behaviors in relation to everything, then ultimately we just end up in with another new set of behavior management tools that ultimately end up not working, because yeah. And so I yeah, as I read that part of your book, I was like, Oh yes, yes, yes. I love this. Like, yes. It's great for this kind of unique subset of kids that have some needs that are making everybody go, Oh my gosh. I have no idea what to do. But actually, what if we did this with all humans?  

Robyn: This is the question that I get asked probably more than any other question on social media. Is that people will come to me and they'll say, you know, hey, you know I'm talking about my book or whatever, and or my podcast, and they will ask me, Hey, is this stuff that you teach gonna work for my kid because my kid has ASD, has ADHD, has odd or PDA, or is highly sensitive, like, is it going to work for my kid, or is what you're offering actually just for, you know, normal kids, which I'm putting in air quotes for the people who can't see me, because there's, You know, I've yet to meet a normal kid, and what I have to respond with is like number one, I'm not a psychologist, so I can't diagnose your child with any of these things. But from everything that I understand, not only is this stuff going to work for your kid, if you have a neurotypical kid with secure attachment and who's pretty kind of resilient and has a lot going for them, they probably can be okay. Their outcomes are going to be fine. Their behaviors are going to be more or less tolerable without excellent parenting. That said, if you have one of these kids who has a more sensitive nervous system, not only is my book effective, I think that my book, and I'll just say all of the books that talk in this way, Tina's books, obviously fall into this category. I am not in any way, you know, trying to say that mine is above any of those. But this type of parenting works, not only especially well. It's essential, yes. So if you don't understand that, you wind up trying to default down this traditional parenting path, compliance driven models, behavior management, as you said, and you wind up just with an adversarial relationship with a kid who just will not be managed.  

Robyn: 100%. The other piece that I'm loving in this conversation so far is I feel really strongly that we actually, as a mental health community, really need to loosen the grip on how we feel about this information that we I kind of am, like, listen, as mental health professionals, I don't, we don't own the market on the type of information that parents need you know who have boots on the ground and who have a child in front of them who is doing all sorts of baffling things, right? That the more we can get this information out of the ivory tower, for example. And I have a parents, I have a program where I train professionals to work with parents. And it's a hybrid. It's a hybrid. Mean, that's probably not the right word, but it's a diverse program, and that there's a many, many, many mental health professionals in it, but there's many, many parents like, quote-unquote, just moms, just dads, who feel like they've kind of maybe come out of the, you know, absolute depths of despair, and now feel like they're ready to help other folks, and I am a huge proponent of us, like building these bridges, there aren't enough mental health professionals, and we're not reaching the right people. So we need you and folks like you to have this voice and who can take this complex information and offer it to folks in a way that makes sense, it's practical. They're like, Oh, I get this. So I love that part. 

Jon: No, I'm so appreciative to hear that, because there's a real imposter syndrome too that comes not not just with, you know, writing a book, but but with parenting differently. Yeah, of course, were you know? You know that how your parenting is in line, or, I hope that you know that how your parenting, if you're doing the things that you're listening to on the baffling behaviors podcast, that it's in line with the research, it's in line with what is the best available information for parents. But when you go to the park, and you are the only one parenting that way. When you go to your faith community or your family Christmas party or whatever, and you're the only one who's parenting that way, there's a real imposter syndrome of saying, Am I Is this all just wrong? Am I doing this wrong? Is there something wrong with me? Is there something wrong with my kid? And the answer to that is absolutely not.    

Jon: Parenting has always been difficult. It's difficult for everyone, but it is more it the parents who need this the most is it is often the most difficult for them as well. And so just because, you know, one of the big things I try and preach in the book is our outcomes there are about how we parent, not how our kid acts as a result. Don't get me wrong, I think that you're going to have much better relationship with your kid, which is going to lead to fewer outbursts, less explosive behavior. You know, less tantrums, more understanding and collaboration. But if you're judging yourself by my kid has X number of tantrums every week. Look at my friend. They don't have that. Well, you don't have the same kid. And it might be that you're avoiding 50% of the tantrums, and they're getting 125% of them, and they still have fewer than you. And so really shifting your mindset to I'm going to parent better. Yes, the outcomes are going to be better for my kid, but I can't compare myself to the rest of the world, because that's going to get you into a place where the imposter syndrome is just crushing.  

Robyn: I want to talk about your history, if it's okay, a little bit as a pastor, and how this has impacted the way that you do this work. Because as I was reading your book, I also was like, oh gosh, yes. I mean, in this work that I do with families, we are often asking people to deconstruct some pretty core beliefs that they have about the world. And so as I was reading your book, and I was like, Well, of course, somebody with your background comes into this work, this parenting work, and this, you know, brain-based parenting work with some pretty amazing skills to sit with people as they deconstruct something that isn't just what they believe, it's who they are.  

Jon: That's right. Yeah, totally well, and it's in it, like religion, a lot of this is built on these childhood factory default settings. It's something that I talk about a lot in the book. Our factory default parenting settings is just to kind of either reject out of hand and then swing to the opposite side of our parents, or to just do exactly what was done to us in the name of, well, you know, I turned out fine, so I should just do that, you know, again, and I try and address that in the book extensively. But the reason I don't often talk about my role as a pastor. I'm actually still a pastor. I do this as another I have two full time jobs a lot. Of the reason why I don't talk about that is because I don't mention religion in the book at all from the perspective of, hey, you know, if you're a Christian or whatever, your faith tradition background, these are the, here are the verses that you should use to justify or whatever. And a lot of books, a lot of really great books, have a lot of that content. And so I don't talk about that, but exactly what you just said, Robyn is the reason why I feel like the book became what it is, and I say it in the introduction, which is, I have walked with people as they have deconstructed some of the most harmful and detrimental and just frankly, wrong, untrue aspects of what they were raised to believe.    

Jon: And that work comes from being a pastor, but also being a chaplain in a non-religious Hospital, where really the people who I was dealing with at that hospital, they didn't have a faith community that they were a part of. If they did, I wouldn't have been called. They would have called their own faith leader, and so walking with people through those really, really complicated and difficult emotions, if you want to talk about the difference, I'll just put it this way, in the knowledge that the average parent has compared to the average psychologist, I actually think that that is a much smaller gap than the average church goer to a Bible scholar. So that might, you know that might be a weird way to put it, but wrap your head around the idea that most of the biblical scholarship community, the people who I read when I was in seminary, the people who are the leading experts in the world on religion and the Bible and the cognitive sciences of religion, these people so fundamentally disagree.    

Jon: And I'm talking you know, 95% of them believe something that is opposite to 95% of the people who are a part of their faith tradition, like diametrically opposed. First, and so bridging that gap for me early on, that was actually when I said I was deconstructing a lot of things, that was the process. For me, I was pulling apart those threads. And when you start pulling apart those threads, what you realize is, oh, actually, a lot of the stuff that we were taught growing up is just not grounded in reality. It's grounded in stories and narratives and feelings and experiences and inherited trauma and worldview. And because of that, I think it kind of uniquely equipped me like, like I say in the book, I have walked people through deconstruction like I have walked them through deconstruction on things that were harder to deconstruct than why you shouldn't punish your kids. And so because of that, I think when we got into here, it was like, oh, man, compared to, you know, this is what you believed about the Bible and you no longer do. Compared to that trying to convince somebody to stop yelling at their kids, which, by the way, every parent that I've ever known knows and wishes they didn't yell at their kids that I was offering them something that they already wanted to do, and so that was a much easier process. And I think that comes through in the book, not again, in content, but in tone.  

Robyn: I 100% agree that it came through clearly in tone. And I again, as somebody who is regularly helping people grieve so much of what I didn't know before, what could have been different if I'd known this before, and how that can and for some folks, I absolutely believe kind of impacts how challenging it can be to make these shifts, and so having that experience and also knowing so many of my listeners are in relationship with somebody who isn't buying it right isn't almost always people use the words on board. How do I get my spouse on board? How do I get my partner on board? How do I get my kids teacher on board? And so I do a lot of work, and I'm sure you do as well with helping those folks kind of navigate these pieces and invite the important people in their lives who they really depend on for support and parenting and in other relationships, even too, to try to bridge, you know, bridge some of those gaps. So I thought that piece about your background and the work that you do and and as a pastor, and how that relates, was just so, so very, very interesting. And for everyone listening, he's absolutely right that you know this didn't read like a religious book in any way. So anybody listening who you know might not want that. Please, please, please, don't let this conversation steer you away from that book, because it was phenomenal.   

Jon: Yeah, the exact sentence in the in the introduction, I know becausei did publish with, with a publishing house that often publishes Christian books. And the the exact sentence that they were kind of like, Are you sure you want to say this was when I said, you know, I also think that one of the things that uniquely equip me is that I'm a pastor. But before you throw the book across the room, yeah, explain what I mean by that. And they were like, Oh, we think that the majority of people are gonna, you know, be coming from a faith based background. And while that may be true, just on the statistics of the fact that, you know, the majority of people around this age come from some sort of faith tradition, what I've experienced is actually the opposite. Most people who are parenting this way have have already deconstructed other things in their life, some of which are often their childhood religious beliefs. And so you know, when I post ever that something about my church or the fact that I'm a pastor, it's probably only once every two or three months on my page, I will get a flood of DMS of people being like, wait, wait, wait, hang on, what are you what? How can you think this way? And the answer is, actually, if we allowed ourselves to think this way, I think most of the people who get advanced degrees in, you know, disciplines of biblical criticism would kind of come to the same conclusion. But many of us have those walls that we put up where we can't.  

Robyn: Yeah, part of your book, I don't remember how far it was. You wrote something that I wrote down, maybe word for word. I'm not sure if it was word for word, but you talked about how parenting with punishment and really relying on punishment, and even the worry that without punishment, kids aren't accountable, is this very pessimistic view of humanity, and I wanted to talk about that just a little bit, because I 100% agree. And as a former mental health therapist, that was something I also spent a lot of time deconstructing with people. Is that. Yeah, because of how they were parenting, they had learned, usually, you know, subtly and covertly, as opposed to overtly, that, like they were bad and without punishment, they would just be bad people, which is a real hard thing to get deconstruct when you're older. And so walking with people around, you know, through this idea of, like, what if that's not true?  

Jon: Well, and then just add, right? So, so that, you know, we've already kind of talked about religion, but a lot of that can come from, from a religious, you know, framework upbringing, depending on what that religious system was. Secondly, now you that's just kind of, that is Western thought for the last several 1000 years. I mean, we have, we have the these ancient Greek philosophers say, I think it was Plato who says, or Aristotle, maybe, who says, like, yeah, you know, if you don't, if you don't punish people, they're gonna just run amok and ruin everything. Yep, and, and this, this kind of prevailing narrative, like the kids these days, like, that's like a 3000 year old concept, kids these days, like the generations that's raising the kids, especially the generation that is now the grandparent generation, has been saying, kids these days for 3000 years, and actually, again, that's one of those places where knowing that and reading that stuff, most mental health counselors, therapists, psychologists are gonna go to stuff since the 90s, because that's when we started learning all of this stuff about the brain. Maybe they'll go all the way back to Freud, you know, 19th century. But I take stuff back, like, hey, look, we've been saying this stuff for 3000 years. In some cases like this is going to be hard to move past.    

Jon: But then add, because we're on The Baffling Behaviors Podcast, the fact that a lot of us were raised and we were ADHD, and so you have this, not only are you bad and do you need punishment, but when you fall short, you internalize that and you get demoralized. So it just kind of compounds, like, you know, I just recorded a podcast with the neurosciences yesterday where we were talking about the difference between depression and demoralization. And he's like, yeah, I have people all the time because what they were told as a kid, they're not actually clinically depressed. They're just demoralized because they're so sure, because their parents said so, or or alluded to it, that they were just that they're just a terrible person and that, I think, I think that is one of the most harmful myths that I try and deconstruct in the book, is that this idea that kids, that kids are trying to manipulate us, that they're trying to do things against us, we have this idea that our kids actually have a far greater, in some cases, developmental capacity for manipulation. For you know, they're just doing that to get my attention. That may be true, but they have no idea. They're not doing that intentionally to get your attention, that they're just really kids. Are just trying to get their needs met fundamentally and and that when we understand behaviors as communicating unmet needs, not just, you know the sign of an immoral, you know, eternal soul, or something weird like that, what we wind up getting is understanding that regulating co-regulating cooperation, these are going to be way more effective than punishment in the name of compliance.  

Robyn: I think imagining how moving away from punishment is so risky for some folks because of exactly this right? Because there's this moment where you're like, wait that if I step away from this belief, I have to almost rethink every thing that's right. I think it, it helps me at least. And I think you know, for our listeners who have someone in their life who they're feeling very frustrated by because they're having a hard time coming over to the side. Like it helps me have so much compassion for those folks when I think of it that way, that like these, like fundamental beliefs about ourselves and how the world works, and our parents and our I mean, these things like knit us together and kind of, oh yeah, you know, support our mental health. And so when we're considering untangling them, for some folks, it's just, it's really just too risky. They can't they can't risk it.  

Jon: That's super accurate. So I say it kind of break it down into three things. And I don't say this overtly in the book, but, but, but this is my this was my context, coming to the book, coming to writing the book. The first reason that people struggle to deconstruct punishment is because they have no alternative. And so it's, look, I either have this or nothing. And so okay, we can provide alternatives. You're providing alternatives on the podcast, I'm providing alternatives, there's a million books that provide alternatives, okay, but if we think that simply providing alternatives is automatically going to mean that people deconstruct that's not true, not at all. So the second piece is, if there is a better alternative, then it means that my primary caregivers didn't choose the better alternative for me, yes, and all of a sudden, the times when my parents intentionally hurt me, this is especially true for people who were raised with corporal punishment, which, by the way, most people were most in the United States.    

Jon: So for them now my primary caregiver, the person who I was attached to, maybe even securely attached to, yeah, the person who I depended on, yes, didn't have to hit me, and they chose to anyway, which just feels incredibly unjust. And so that's the next piece of that puzzle that you have to kind of pick apart. And then if, even if we get over that, we still then run into what I think is actually the biggest hurdle of all, which is people saying, If I adopt this new mindset of being a punishment free parent, of co-regulating with my kids doing all this stuff, what if I mess up? What if I default and I go to punishment in my, you know, most dysregulated moments? What if I come home from work? Marc Brackett was on my podcast. He wrote this book, 'Permission to Feel,' he's director for the Yale Center for emotional intelligence. He's like, I come home and I am so dysregulated, and I'm the director of the Yale Center for emotional intelligence, right? What if you fall short? And actually, when I was writing the book, one of the people who probably, apart from me and my wife, had the greatest individual impact on the book. I don't know this for sure, but it seemed like that was their big issue, and so I actually reworked drafts of the book and even wrote an additional chapter for the book that specifically addressed this is not a game of perfection.    

Jon: If you're a punishment free parent, it doesn't mean that you're never going to punish your kids again. It doesn't mean you're never going to yell at your kids again. It means that when you do those things, you recognize them as the ineffective tools that they are. You seek to do better. You reconcile and then over time, you slowly move away from that worldview and that mindset. And for this individual who was part of that process with me, they went from being like, I don't vibe this to being the biggest advocate, the biggest early reader. To be like, this is everything to me. And so if you have a person in your life who's like, I can't get on board with this, understand that you have to walk them through as we've talked you've talked about multiple times on the podcast, the stages of grief, right? Yeah, like, you have to walk people through the stages. You don't skip to acceptance. Similarly, the stages of grieving, the punishment that you have experienced and the punishment that you've done as a parent, you don't go from, oh, I, you know, I read this. I called the documentary effect, right? You watch a documentary, and then you go, I'm never gonna eat corn oil again. Like, that's not effective change, right?    

Jon: Effective change walks you through the stages of grief, of saying, Just be you did turn out fine. Your mom did love you, and she probably didn't know what we know now, yeah, that's okay, and you're gonna screw up. And that's the stuff where I go. I actually, I'm maybe delusions of grandeur here, but I actually think the really unique part of this book, the person that I wrote the book for, was not the parent who was already bought in that, like that. That was not the person who, I think those people will love the book, but it's the person who is either in a relationship with somebody, or who themselves, is going, I don't know. I don't know if this is for me, that's the person for whom this book was written.

Robyn: I agree. As I was reading it, I was thinking, this is a really great addition to kind of the library of someone who is most of the parents who find my book have a sense of like, I will try anything. They're desperate. They are raw. They're like this lady, sounds bananas, but I'll try it. And so I've got a little bit different kind of buy in with some folks where, like, the parts of your book that I loved so much was folks who are like, I'm not so sure. Help me see that this isn't just for special needs kids. Whatever special needs means, ADHD, kids with trauma histories, that offering something to those folks felt like such a gift. So thank you.  

Jon: And there's good news and bad news here. So, so the good news, I'll say the bad news when one partner starts to now, I'll start with the good news. Sorry, I'm gonna go back, the good news, when one partner changes, when one parent, when one secure attachment figure changes how they parent, when they say, I'm willing to try anything. I'm reading your book. I'm gonna I'm gonna read one of Tina's books. I'm gonna read John's book, whatever that one first parent when? When that for that child's world, when that one person does that work, so many strides over the period of, you know, the several months after that, so many strides, so many victories, so many behavior modifying. You know, internal changes, not not just like the behaviors been modified, but the child actually experiences acceptance all these things, and that one singular attachment, you know this from foster care training, right? That one singular attachment can completely change their life. The bad news is, the partner, who's later to the party sees the changes and goes, I don't think I need to change anything. Actually, little Jimmy's doing much better than he was doing last year. I don't why do I need to become a punishment-free parent?    

Jon: And so the good news in that is, if you're, if you never get your partner on board, your kid's going to be okay. That's It's all right. If you're you don't have to leave your spouse, you don't get divorced like your kid's going to be okay. That said, it's going to be harder for them often, because then there's the additional dynamic of, oh, man, you were right. And it's really hard for people to say that. And so again, that's why I wrote the book two and four, in many ways, because I was that person. My wife actually intuited this type of parenting, like she's got her own, you know, struggles to parenting, obviously, but, but in many ways, her intuition was secure attachment. This is how we got to do it. She understood it very quickly. Hormonally. She just, like, locked in and was like, I'm good, and I was the later one to the party. And coming to accept that meant that, you know, a lot of the behavior issues that we had been dealing with, my wife was able to handle those, and I could just kind of go, honey, he's, he's, he's beyond my help. How about you come over here and fix this? And because I had that crutch, for lack of a better term, of having a partner who was doing it the right way. I don't want to say right way, but you know what I mean? Like, I didn't have to do that. And so that's the good news, and the bad news. The good news is like, yeah, you know. And if they never come around, that's okay. The harder news is that's actually because they don't have to come around. You have to get a book that really walks them through it, because of handing them the book that feels like I'm willing to try anything. Well, they don't. They don't feel that way anymore, because the problem in their mind has already kind of been solved.  

Robyn: There's one more thing I really wanted to talk about that we haven't touched on yet. Do you have time? And it's okay to say, no, okay, okay. In my world of the families that I work with, there is a initial drive to really lower their kids stressors, and so it starts to possibly look like what we might call some permissiveness. When I work with families, we work really hard on the difference between the two, like, how do we lower the stressors in a way that isn't permissive, right? Right? But then there comes a point in time where it's time to start rebuilding our kids stress response system, and we have to start kind of raising the bar a little bit. And I thought that you touched on this in your book really beautifully. It is a slightly different paradigm, because you're, you know, it's not, you're not exactly talking about it this way, but that this way of parenting isn't permissive parenting. We can parent this way. We can parent, you know, in this punishment free way, while also still having really important boundaries and structure. And the research is super clear that we really need that. And so I would love to just hear you talk about that piece a little bit, balancing both. And if you want to how a lot of parenting kind of experts, social media experts have gotten really good at the lowering expectations. For our kids piece, yeah, and then we leave parents floundering with like this doesn't seem like quite enough. Now, what do I do?  

Jon: Yeah, no, I'm happy to talk about it. I mean, so this was what Tina wrote about extensively in the forward. Like this is, this was her whole point in the forward. Was that, hey, you know, when we wrote whole brain child, 12-14, years ago, whatever that was, we really did not have a fear of permissiveness, because we were moving people from authoritarian parenting, and we just thought there's no they're not going to swing this far. Here's what I'll say, that I kind of hit on the book. One of the really key things when I wrote this book back in 2022-2023 one of the big things that was happening in the research out of Harvard, other places, Oxford, that was that was coming out in this kind of child development space was that there was an alarm bell being sounded about the teen and adolescent mental health crisis, where they were saying, yes, there are some things here in the way that we parent young kids that seem to be contributing to thishigh rates, extremely high rates, unprecedented rates of anxiety and depression.    

Jon: And that actually, after the pandemic, we didn't see the rise in teen mental health crisis as much as we would have expected, which means that there's actually already a crisis happening for that population that like that was not any, I don't want to say more stressful, but, but it was not like that much more stressful than what they were already going through, and what what became very what a lot of researchers were saying at that time, something that I put in the book, kind of, I don't want to say, before anybody was talking about it, but before it was becoming part of the national conversation, or the lay person conversation, the average parent was that we were over protecting our kids in their in the Real World, we were actually preventing them from building confidence resilience by over protecting them. I talk about in the book, not letting them fall off the playground equipment. And the idea being, when you let your kid fall off the playground equipment, they fall off when they're pretty low to the ground, and then they might get a little bump.    

Jon: That's okay. They get back up. Peter Gray talks about this. They climb back up the ladder, they do it again, they do it again, they do it again, and then by the time they're 8, 9, 10, years old, they're not going to fall, they're going to be they're going to be able to play safely. Versus the parents who follow their kids, they're the helicopter parents. They don't let anything negative happen to their kid. And I talk about this in the in terms of physical injury on the playground, but this can be any type of injury. They're not going to let a, you know, a kid have a negative interaction with a peer. We're not going to, we're never playing with those people again. You know, they're not going to let a kid have a negative reaction with a teacher. I'm getting you out of their class right now. We're never going to that baseball team again. And because of that, we actually, we actually set kids up to be more anxious and depressed later in life.    

Jon: And since my book was written, then Jonathan Haidt obviously published, 'The Anxious Generation,' which a lot of people have read as like a kind of a criticism of phones and of social media. And yes, that is a big part of the book. But it was a two pronged approach in the book. One was the phones and social media. We can, we can argue whether, whether he was using corollary data and calling it causation, but he's making some pretty big assertions about phones that, then that, then now society. You know, education systems have made reforms to kind of go along with what he said. I mean, his book was like on Barack Obama's must read of 2024, but the other piece to that book, the part that was actually, in my opinion, more grounded in established research, was him saying, we're over protecting kids in the real world. We're not giving them the autonomy that they need, and they're and they're being they're becoming anxious and depressed as a result.    

Jon: And so I think that where our consciousness around this is becoming more but we absolutely cannot stop here. And permissiveness, what I'll say, is permissiveness is just trading your kind of peace of mind and mental health in the moment for your kids peace of mind and mental health in the future, like you're just saying, hey, I don't- I want to stay regulated, and your emotions are too big for me, so I'm just going to give you whatever you want. I want to stay regulated. I don't trust myself to parent you through the big, difficult thing. I don't have a, you know what I talk about, the step the step by step plan. I've, you know, the five step, whole parent method at the end of the book. I don't have that framework ready, and so I can't let you get dysregulated, because then I'm going to become triggered. So here's the screen, here's the sugar, here's the thing. Yes, sure. We'll get that stuffed animal. We'll get another one. We'll get another one. I can just return these later.    

Jon: And all of that, all you're doing is actually not allowing your child to go through the normal stress cycle of not getting the thing that they want. That's okay, being sad about it. It's okay. To be sad. I'm disappointed that we ain't good to go here. That's okay. Being disappointed is part of life. Here's the time when I was disappointed and that you're just trading your, you know, in the moment happiness, which, by the way, I will say, is the exact same thing that parents who use punishment are doing as well. They're belittling their kids emotions, they're yelling at them, they're punishing them to stop a behavior that's triggering to them. You're doing the same thing with permissiveness. You're just doing it in a different way, but they all come back to the same thing, which is, until you do your work and you're able to realize, hey, I have the confidence to let you have big feelings. I have the confidence that even if I get triggered and I do yell, I can repair until you do that, you're not going to set them up for lasting success. And the last thing I'll say about boundaries, I know that we're out of time, but the last thing I'll say about boundaries is this, kids who don't have boundaries, and this is a huge piece in the book, kids who don't have boundaries are more afraid of the world.    

Jon: So there is the I talk about it as, as having a fence around the backyard. A kid who has complete and total autonomy in the backyard is learning resilience, is learning confidence, is skill building, is, you know, all of these positive things. The kid who but, but the but the context is still, but I'm in a backyard with a fence. I can only get so hurt back here, I can only have so much of the of the harm. And my parents have allowed me to be back here, and so I trust them that they know that I'm going to be okay, even if I get a scrape, even if I get a bruise, even if me and my friend or my brother or my sister get into a fight, I'm still okay. If you remove that boundary, because you're always going to give in to your kid. If they complain enough, you will let them ride that bike without a helmet. If they complain enough, you will let them go play in the street. If they complain enough, you will let them, you know, play with fire, whatever the thing is to avoid the meltdown, what you're essentially telling them is, hey, you're actually responsible for your own safety. And kids intrinsically, inherently, evolutionarily, know, I am not good at making decisions where safety is concerned. And so they actually become more anxious, more overwhelmed, less autonomous, less independent, even when they're forced inappropriately into a level of independence that's not developmentally appropriate for them. And so that's what I'll say.    

Jon: The last piece about boundaries is actually, if you want your kid to be free, if you want them to have autonomy, if you want them to have independence, yes, you have to give them independence. That's the Jonathan Haidt piece. You can't shield them from everything, but you do have to shield them from some things, because if you don't, then they're actually just going to be timid and scared because they don't know where the boundary is. So it's very careful dance. And if you do this right, I think basically everything else in the book is going to fall together. But if you, if you fail to do this, you're going to wind up with a lot of the same issues, a lot of the same outcomes as your your parents, your friends, parents who utilized punishment.   

Robyn: When I got to that part in your book, I just had this moment of like, I really think me and you meeting in this way, and this in this time was exactly what needed to happen, because this thing you're talking about, of boundaries, expectations, al l this kind of stuff, and the guard rails has been more and more of a discussion in the community that I have, and I have several podcast episodes planned in the coming month or so to really look at this very specifically. And then, how do we do that? You know, for the parents who are tuning into this show, whose kids, you know, have such tragic, traumatic backgrounds or have such vulnerability in their nervous system that we are left with traumatized families from how dysregulated their kids are. And so it makes like oodles of sense that parents are having a hard time finding the spot of, when do I, you know, hold a boundary? When do I enforce a boundary? When do I, you know, lower the expectation, and what do those words even mean? So I really wanted to touch on that with you before we before we signed off today, because I think it's going to kind of set my, even my listeners, up for what's, what's coming in the next four to six weeks on the podcast. But also just wanted to kind of note it that that that is a part of your book, because it's not being addressed enough, and this how to balance both. Because, you're right, we've just swapped one for the other in many circumstances, and what we've lost in that is connection to ourselves as parents, and, you know, attunement to ourselves.  

Jon: I will say, I still do not, along with,Alfie Kohn, I still do not think that permissiveness is nearly the epidemic that punitive authoritarian parenting is. And so if you're ever asking yourself, like, am I too permissive? If you go through the day and you just take a note of every single interaction with your kid, and you're saying, No, you know, 15-25, times in a day, you may feel permissive, but that's probably not permissiveness. Permissiveness really is, is an inability to have the emotional tolerance to allow your child to experience anything other than happiness and joy and so that, that's why I always couch that, because I don't, I don't want parents to, like, you know, weaponize that and say, like, Oh, you're permissive. And I've heard this in my own, you know, circles of you know, Dad comes in, he's not maybe the gentle parent or the or the thoughtful, respectful parent, maybe he's more punishment for focused and mom is kind of doing this balancing act, and now it's but you're permissive.    

Jon: No, it is also acceptable to move the boundary when your kid makes a good case. It's acceptable to change the expectation when you realize, hey, here's a struggle. That's that's maybe not, you know? So, so that's, that's always mine, is, I want to make sure, also, parents know it's okay. And if you screw up, and this is with any of these things we've talked about, there's always an opportunity to repair, and actually, that repair might strengthen the relationship more than not messing up in the first place. So it's always okay to just do your best and pick up the pieces at the after, after you're all done.  

Robyn: I love that. This is how we're ending. I mean, some of the things you just said even about permissiveness and and how we can kind of relieve ourselves from being so terrified of it, while also leaning into and looking at, what does my kid need in this moment and moving forward, to start to rebuild some of that resiliency, where we kind of pause expectations so that they could really recover. I mean, it's almost as if the a lot of the kids I know are really recovering from an injury and so really decreasing the stressors and then starting to have to grapple with what's the right way to start, start increasing them. So I love what you just said. Right now is wonderful way for us to end.  

Jon: Well, Robyn, can I give one more piece of advice before we sign off? The kind of the last thing that I want to say here is, if you listen to this episode, which can totally happen when somebody like you and I get on a podcast and we start talking about this stuff, we're talking about research, and we're talking about neurons, and we're talking about if you get on leave this episode and go, Oh my god, parenting is so complicated, actually- and you can disagree with me and cut this part of the episode and or get on the, you know, the outro, until, actually, I don't agree with what he just said here. I actually think good parenting is really simple. It's just really hard.  

Robyn: 100% simple, but really hard.  

Jon: It's not that it's complicated, it's that it's hard, and our brains will often complicate it because we're afraid that it's hard, but it's actually very simple. So if you leave this going, oh my god, well, how am I supposed to balance this permissiveness and this punishment or this? No, if I'm not going to do punishment, what am I supposed to do instead? Or, oh my god, like, why am I having my have i deconstructed enough? Or have I done this? Or is my partner good enough? Or is this or my kid good enough? Do they have ADHD or what is wrong with them? Great parenting, really simple, way easier than people on social media make it seem, most people who see me in the grocery store doing punishment free parenting. The guy with 1.5 million followers on social media think that I look just like everybody else. They don't they. I am not doing things that are just like, oh my god, did you see what he did that was so thoughtful. It's simple. You just have to understand the basic tenets and have the bravery to engage it in a real way. It's hard. It's going to be challenging, but it is not challenging because it's complicated.  

Robyn: I do not disagree in any way. I don't disagree at all. I think there's very possibly some of my listeners feeling like ehhhh but, but so many of the folks listening to this show have, frankly, been traumatized by parenting. Their kids have been, you know, their behaviors have been so scary, and actually, they're not traumatized by their kids behaviors. They're traumatized by the fact that we don't help them, that they don't have the supports that they need, they don't have the mental health supports that they need, they don't have the supports at school, like we, as a culture, as a society, as a nation, as a world, have completely abandoned these parents and let them down. And if they had what they needed,  they would agree exactly with what you said, that this is hard and also simple, and so much of so for those of you listening who are like this guy doesn't understand me at all. That might be true, maybe, maybe, maybe, but also pause for a second go, Well, what if I had what I needed? What if I had what my community? What if my kids had their mental health needs met? What if I didn't have to, you know, be gaslit by professionals or the edge, you know? What if? What if? What if? What if? What if? How different would our parenting experience be? Those of us parenting kids with, you know, such severe behavioral special needs, and it'd be wildly different.   

Jon: Oh, it's the hardest thing we're ever going to do. Yeah, like, like, I don't want to just say it's hard. It's the hardest thing that any of us will ever do. It's just not nearly as complicated as most of us make it exactly,  

Robyn: Exactly. Well, Jon, I was just so glad that Tina dropped us an email and connected us and did it, you know, in this time period as we're getting ready for your book to come out in the world, because I know how important this immediate book release part is, and so I'm happy to get to be a part of that with you, and also happy to, you know, let all of my listeners know about you and your work. Do you want to tell us where they can find you easily on social media? 

Jon: Yeah, at @WHOLEPARENT, on all of the social medias I will be there and or you can just, you know, find if there's a possible way of searching people who are going to subscribe to this podcast as soon as I log off, then you can find me there too, because this has been fantastic. Thank you so much.    

Robyn: Thank you. Thank you everyone. I'll make sure all the information you need about Jon and where to buy his book and how to find him are down live links in the show notes you know how to find him. Thank you, Jon!