Shifting From "How Do I Get My Child To..." to "How Do I Help My Child Successfully..."

0:00 So one of the things we do, we shift our question that we ask. How do I get the child to blank is going to be shifted to how do I help the child successfully do blank? How do I help the child successfully blank? How do I help the child successfully finish their homework? How do I help the child successfully stay in their seat through this project that we're doing at school? How do I help the s child successfully calm themselves down when disappointment happens because they go into a rage almost every time? And then with that question, then you contribute to the brainstorming. You ask the child to contribute to the brainstorming. Okay, so I'm in a school. This is actually kind of funny because I thought this was going to blow up in my face for sure.

0:47 Um, so I'm in a school and they had this classroom that to get from their classroom to the lunchroom, the quickest way in the school was to go through the the auditorium. So there was a door here and a door here. So they walk through the auditorium, but when you walk through the auditorium, there's these steps that go up on the auditorium and then there's a step that goes down. So this is, I think, kindergarten. It's been like six weeks or so. And at least every day you've got three or four that go up the steps on there and down the steps. And she's done everything. She's taken away re I mean she's done all her rewards and punishment. She knows what to do. And now she's just crumbled into a pile of I should have never been a teacher.

1:30 And so I said, "Well, you know, I'm in the school and I'm like, oh, let me help." So, I go in there to the class and I talk to the class and I go over the problem and I and I ask them, "Now, how could you as a group successfully go from your class to the cafeteria and walk straight on the bottom floor all the way across from one door to the next?" So, I define that and they start brainstorming and the teacher jumps in and she's brainstorming. They come up with a list of stuff and then they're going to vote on the ones that seemed reasonable. Now, what they threw out didn't seem reasonable to me and often it doesn't.

2:14 But here's where their idea. We're going to take a pillow from the safe place and put it on the step and one person would carry it and then when you come back from lunch, the person would pick it up, you know. And at first you're like, "Oh man." And I'm like, "Pillow on the You're kidding me, kids." I mean, I didn't say that out loud. Out loud. I'm like, "Okay, let's just, you know, we'll go with that." But in my head was like, "Oh no, this is bizarre."

2:45 So, I thought, "That's okay." In my head, I'm thinking, "Ah, when they vote, they'll knock that one out. We're good." Oh, no. They all voted. It was the pillow. And so, here we go. And then we add a whole another job to the job because that's the pillow carrier. And so now we got the job set up and I'm telling you they carried that pillow, put it on that step and went on to lunch and you know I heard from her like six months later and she says great idea.

3:18 So it wasn't necessarily a great idea. It was I changed the question. The kids got involved which is called shared power. they had a say so in it and that's what they came up with and no matter how much we want to judge them as just craziness it worked for that class. So that's why it's important that we change these fundamental choices that we make and the fundamental question that we