Parenting Expert Shares How to Nurture Confidence in Young Children

Hey there everybody, and welcome to today's webinar on the elementary years, Nurturing industry and self efficacy. I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. Today we're going to review the developmental tasks children accomplish at this stage. So we're talking about, you know, around 6 to around 11, examine how children's thinking patterns are different than that of both toddlers and adolescents. So reasoning that you you did with a child when they were a toddler is going to be different at this stage. And then obviously when they become adolescents, thankfully, their cog cognitive abilities develop even further. And we'll explore ways to assist children in enhancing their self esteem and self efficacy while supporting initiative and industry. So let's think about people. Piaget to begin with, Piaget proposed that at ages 4 to 7, the child is in what we call the intuitive thought substage. Children are beginning to be able to evaluate things on more than one characteristic. So before when a child would see an animal, it was an animal or it wasn't. Now they're able to evaluate it on more characteristics such as when we're looking at animals, what's a dog, what's a cat, what's a bird. Likewise, you know, they may also be able to separate them such as these are black cats and these are brown cats. The same thing that it we talk about with math, reading and, and school in general, they think about I'm doing learning. As they become older, they start being able to say I like going to school and learning math, I like reading. Instead of all or nothing, it is becoming a little bit more categorical and we want to encourage children to explore those things. So we don't have the all or nothing thinking that gets rooted in what's going on. For example, if they are talking about making friends with people, then looking at what types of people do you enjoy spending time with? Maybe you enjoy spending time with people who play football. You know, maybe you don't enjoy spending time with all children. Maybe you enjoy spending time with children who play football or T ball or do ballet or, or whatever it is. So helping them differentiate. Yeah, we're all different and that's okay. It is okay for me not to like everything that you do. It doesn't mean that you're unlikable. It doesn't mean that I'm unlikable. It means we like different things. So this is really the beginning of helping children get away from that all or none thinking and overgeneralization. At this age, children may be able to use inductive reasoning Drawing general conclusions from personal experiences and specific facts. And this is where it gets a little hazy. Again, because they have. They're drawing general conclusions from their personal experiences. Well, at 4 to 7, they don't have a lot of personal experiences. So excuse me. They may make incorrect assumptions about things based on a couple of experiences. Maybe they tried to interact with other children that play football. We'll just stick with that one for right now. And they found that they either weren't good at football or those children didn't accept them the way that they. In a way that they felt accepted. Okay, well, that doesn't mean that all people who play football are not going to like me. It doesn't mean that I'm bad at all sports. It means I may not be good at football or I may not get along with this particular team of football players. So helping people, helping children really step back and say, what is unique about this? Let's not lump everybody all together. Let's look at this. And this is also important with skills. We know that even in, in young grades, kindergarten a little bit, but definitely when we start getting into first grade, they start being graded based on their academic performance and understanding that most children are not the best at everything. So just because they're not, they're struggling in math, for example, doesn't mean that they can't do any of their schooling. It doesn't mean that they're bad at academics. It may mean they struggle with math. Likewise, just because somebody may not be good at academic type learning. Not everybody excels at book learning, but that's okay. And recognizing, helping them recognize that they are worthy, that they are lovable, that they are can exceed succeed as a person. Even if school is difficult. In the concrete operational stage, the child starts moving towards abstract and hypothetical thinking. But it's not yet fully developed. So children are looking at things and they're like, that person was mean to me. Therefore that person is mean. And we want to help them step back and think, why might this have happened? Why. Why might Tommy have been mean to you today? And exploring the abstract and the hypothetical, they are likely at this age, not going to come up with it easily on their own. Which is where caregivers, when we're being consistent, attentive and responsive, we're going to sit down with them and say, okay, I hear you had a bad day with Tommy and you've been friends. Why do you think Tommy was irritable with you today? Or why do you think Tommy took your toy or whatever it is and have the children, the child try to think about why today may have been different than other days. Likewise, if they have a bad first experience with somebody, we want to step back and encourage them to not just write somebody off right away or something off right away because they have a bad initial experience to look at it and say, well, what was, what did I not like about this? I think most of us have gone to doctors that we haven't liked before. If I said all doctors are ineffective and don't listen and blah, blah, blah, I am generalizing. So I need to step back and I need to think about in this situation, what was, what did I not like about this particular doctor and what do I need to look for in another one and not assume going in to see the next doctor that they're going to be just like the other three that I went to. We want to help children write down options and discuss reasoning. Now remember, we're trying to develop industry. We're trying to develop the belief that they can do things that they want to do. And you know, they may not be the best, but they, they can succeed at a lot of things. We want to help them recognize that they are good. Again, I'm going to keep coming back to this. They are good. They are lovable for who they are. They may want to do something that they are not really ever going to master. If they want to do ballet and they try ballet and they just can't get that pirouette to save their life, okay, well, maybe ballet is not the thing for you. It doesn't mean you're a failure. It means that ballet is going to be a struggle for you. If you like it, you can continue to do it, but you're probably not going to be a prima ballerina. Helping children think about what are other options are out there. If I can't do ballet, what else do I like doing? What else could I try that I would find, enjoy, enjoyable or fulfilling? And we get to this even in, in later life when we start thinking about picking a major for college. What are we good at? And sometimes we're just not going to be able to do everything we want to do. So we need to look at the options. What else could I do if I can't do this? For people who were raised in chaotic environments or by parents who were somewhat unhelpful, we also want to make consider when we're working with people in adults in session, helping them reparent that inner child, helping them reparent themselves. Chaotic environments may have made it Difficult for them to predict outcomes. So writing down options and discuss reasonings, everything just thought like a crapshoot. I didn't know if I was going to get support or not. I didn't know if I was going to get criticized or punished or not. So I just, I was paralyzed. We want to recognize that in our own parenting and work on developing as much consistency as possible so the child knows what to expect. And that goes back to that mnemonic for secure attachment, consistency, attentiveness, responsiveness, encouragement, and safety. We want to rule out fetal alcohol spectrum disorders. When people are exposed to alcohol. One of the characteristics of fetal alcohol spectrum disorders is the ability to talk a good game, talk a big talk, but the ability to move into this abstract and hypothetical thinking to predict outcomes. Oftentimes it ain't there. So if somebody has difficulty with other than concrete operational thinking, if they have difficulty predicting and abstracting in their thinking, it could be somewhat neurological, it could be somewhat developmental, and if so, okay, that's fine. We will find ways to help you manage that in your daily life so you can live your rich and meaningful life. We want to take a look at emotional dysregulation that interferes with decision making and children. I've said this so many times. Children are not born with dysregulation skills for the most part or with distress tolerance skills for the most part. They, when they get upset, they go into fight or flight and then they need the caregiver when they're an infant. When they're a young child, they need the caregiver to step in and help them learn how to downregulate. If the caregiver doesn't do that, then the child doesn't effectively learn how to downregulate. They may develop some skills, but they're not going to be nearly as effective in the long run, most likely because the skills they develop are based sort of on hit or miss. Well, I did this and it made me feel better for a minute. And that's where some of these bad, not bad habits, but reactions, our, our choices of our behaviors can get rewarded. And if they are not healthy choices, they may still be rewarded and they may still increase in that child. So if the child learns that, hey, when this happens, if I go to my room and go to sleep, I wake up and everything's better, then that may be one of their downregulation go tos. If the child learns, and I know you're gonna just kind of shudder when I say this, but if a child learns that substances or certain addictive activities like video games will help them feel better. They may withdraw into those things order to feel better. So we need to help them as caregivers, we need to help them develop those downregulation skills. Why? Because when we are in fight orf flight, we are not engaging our executive functioning, we're not engaging our reasoning or our wise mind. We are in survival mode. So a person who, who is in survival mode is not going to be spending a bunch of time doing abstract hypothetical thinking. It's going to be much more emotion focused. That's not where we want people to stay. We want people to recognize their emotions. I am feeling angry, I am feeling scared. Okay, where's that coming from? Identify what's going on down regulate so you can get into your wise mind, explore your options and act in a way that you think is going to serve you best. And that mnemonic is idea but it's important. Again, if somebody was raised in an environment where they were never taught these things, then in counseling, even if you're working with a 60 year old person, we need to help them develop these skills. We need to help them develop the ability to down regulate so they can start balancing out that autonomic nervous system so the sympathetic, the stress response is not overly powerful and just constantly taking over. We know we can't think clearly when that happens. When cops start training and they're, they're in, in the car, one of the things that their field training officers often do is encourage them to down regulate when they start running code. Because the first gut response when they turn on those sirens and start driving or riding at 100 miles an hour down the road, that stress response goes off that. So they start like swimming in adrenaline if you will. And if they get to the scene and they're still swimming in adrenaline, they not going to make good choices. They're not going to make good choices driving if they're swimming in adrenaline. So the fto, much like a parent with a young child, the FTO is responsible for helping the person learn how to effectively downregulate even when their stress response kicks in. And we need to help people develop reasoning and goal setting skills. Children even at this age can set goals. We what do you want? What do you need? Now at this age because they are so much younger, the rewards, the reinforcement needs to be a lot more frequent, the goals need to be a lot smaller. But we can sit down with our, our child or ourselves if we're reparenting and identify what is it, what's your goal? What is it that you want? Okay, that is 10. Let's say you're at one. So what is the first step you need to do in order to do that? Maybe you want to be the quarterback of a football team or you want to be valedictorian of your class. Okie dokie, that's over here. That's a 10. What do you need to do today? What's the first thing you need to do? And in a lot of cases the first thing you need to do is learn about what you need to do to get there. Now obviously a 7 year old is probably not thinking about being valedictorian. They may be thinking about a sports team, they may be thinking about, you know, clubs to join or friends to make. Maybe they're just thinking about what they're going to do this weekend. Well, we're going to set some goals there. If you want to be able to do this this weekend, what do you have to do all week? You have to do your chores, you have to do your homework, you have to go to school. You know, those are all things that we can help children set small goals so they can learn to manage their time and they can learn to do the things that they don't want to do, the things that suck. They don't want to do their math homework, but they want to go to Disney World this weekend. So they're going to do their math homework begrudgingly, but they'll get it done. Rewarding that, encouraging the child to, to reward that behavior when they do it as adults. When we're working with a young child, we can give them stickers, stars. We used to have, we had a token economy when my children were little and we had these little red ruby looking things, plastic things from the party store and they would earn rubies based on what they did. So some things had, they would only earn 1 Ruby for other things they may earn 3 Rubies for. And at the end of the week they were able to spend their rubies in order to do something that they wanted. We can do that with our adults as well. We can help them reparent themselves by helping them learn to delay gratification and set those goals. As we achieve our goals, guess what happens? We start feeling like hey, I can do that. That self efficacy develops, we start developing that sense of industry. It's like when I try to do something, I may not get it right the first time, but if I persevere I can do that most of the time. Sometimes you're going to have to switch gears sometimes. You're going to have to find an alternative because what you want to do is just not going to be for you. But that's okay. And continuing on with what we've been doing in the prior developmental stages, making sure to regularly separate the goodness of the child, the lovability of the child from what they do, from their capabilities. You may want your child to go out for T ball, but maybe they suck at T ball or they hate T ball. Okay, well, you know, I wanted you to do that, but that's not for you. It doesn't mean that you are unlovable. It doesn't mean that you can't do anything if you're not good at T ball. It just means maybe T ball's not the thing for you. Making sure that they can make that distinction. And I know I've said, repeated myself several times, but when I work with adults, so often the adults I'm working with internalize and overgeneralize everything. If I mess this up, then I am a failure. If this relationship fails, then I can never succeed in any relationships. And we need to sort of nip those cognitive distortions in the bud. Ages 7 to 11. They still struggle with deductive reasoning or using general principles to predict an event. Again, chaotic environments interfere, causing children to perceive the world as unpredictable and threatening. Each experience we have adds to what I call our experiential vault. And if the child's experiential vault is one of chaos and anxiety and uncertainty or even pain, then that's how they perceive the world. They expect things are going to be anxiety provoking, painful, distressful. They look at the world through a traumatized lens, helping them again step back and recognize that not. There are a lot of different options we need to not over generalize. Concrete operational thinking can also reinforce dichotomous thinking. Every time I throw the baseball, I or go up to bat, I'm not great at sports metaphors. Every time I go up to bat, I strike out. So the child may start thinking, well, if that's the case, then I must not be good at baseball. Well, you know what? I know enough to know that when you look at batting averages, even good players strike out a lot. So we want to help the child understand that this general principle doesn't necessarily. We don't want to overgeneralize. We want to help people embrace the concept of in general, but not always, even for good baseball players in general. When they go go up to go up to bat, they may strike out, and that's okay, but they don't always strike out. In general, when you take a test, you do really well, but not always. And looking for those exceptions, we'll talk more in a little while about the facts in this context at this time, or as many of you know, it fit. Cat, we want to help people recognize that if something does not conform to the principle, maybe they need to revise the principle. If all these people are not bad, okay, what's different about the good people and the bad people? If my friend Sarah is not always happy, well, most of us are not always happy. But if my friend Sarah is not always happy, what's different between the times when she is happy and the times that she's distressed? What can I learn from that? If when I interact with other children, if I'm a child, or when I interact with other adults, if I'm an adult, if they are accepting and warm and sometimes. But sometimes when I interact with other people, they are rejecting and aloof, what's different in those situations and looking for those exceptions, looking for what is the other variable besides me that may be contributing to what's going on right now? At this age, children are starting to be able to see, albeit not necessarily agree with, other people's perspectives. So up until now, they've really struggled with egocentrism and really struggled with taking other people's points of view, not because they didn't want to, but because they couldn't. They couldn't possibly fathom that there was another way to look at things or that somebody was seeing something differently. Their brains just didn't work that way. Because why? Well, when you try to take somebody else's perspective, you've got to hypothesize. You've got to get out of your own head and try to think. Hypothesize. What would that person be thinking? And. And I've mentioned this last two weeks ago, but I'll mention it again. With young children, you can put it back on them. If they're having difficulty thinking, what might this other person's perspective be? Flip it around and say, if you were in their shoes, what would your perspective be? Now, that's not always going to work, but it can help. Sometimes we want to help people in really start trying to take other people's perspectives. When they disagree, when they feel anxious, when they feel threatened, when they feel vulnerable, when they feel judged, criticized, rejected, whatever. Encourage them to try to take that other person's perspective. Why is it that that person may be Reacting with defensiveness. Why is it that person may be reacting to you in this particular way? Sometimes they are projecting onto you or transferring onto you their experiences with somebody similar to you. Okay, not everybody likes therapists. And I know I run into that sometimes when I'm working with new clients. They'll walk in, especially the ones that are involuntary, and they'll sit down and start telling me all the things they're not going to do. And I'm like, I didn't ask you to. You know, let's talk about what you are going to do. They expected me to act like everybody else. They expected me to have the same methods and expectations. Okay? So my perspective, instead of getting irritable, is to explore with them what they want, but also to take their perspective and recognize, hey, they're coming in, they don't want to be here. They may have been to counseling before and had a bad experience. And so I don't know where they're coming from. What is their experiential lens or experiential vault telling them about what to expect in this situation? I don't have to conform to that. I can act differently. I can be that alternate variable. I encourage people to identify three explanations for why something is happening. If your best friend you text them and they don't text you back right away, oh my gosh, that is earth shattering. And ages 7 to 11, they're already getting into some of that. What are three explanations for why your friend didn't text you back? Their battery's dead. They are doing something with their parents, they're asleep. You know, those are three very easy explanations. It the assumption that they're not texting you back because they don't like you or because they're dissing you. That is emotional reasoning. I'm afraid that you are rejecting me, but what facts do I have in this context at this time? The only fact I have is that I texted you and you didn't immediately text back. Even if you're in the middle of a conversation with somebody. I've had this happen before. And all of a sudden they like go dark or ghost or whatever you want to say. That can feel very rejecting, however, especially if it's somebody you've been talking to, somebody you're friends with, and all of a sudden they go dark. What are alternate explanations besides their being rude? Maybe their dog just threw up on the carpet or their kid needed something or their battery went dead. The battery going dead is a common, common thing and we can't rule that out. So before we jump to conclusions and assume that somebody is being rude or rejecting us, we need to evaluate what's going on. And children have difficulty because they. Their downregulation skills are a lot weaker than ours. They have a lot fewer experiences than we do. So everything feels like the end of the world. And I know that was a strong word, everything. But for a lot of kids, you know, everything feels like the end of the world all the time. We need to help them see that it's not. But. But we need to do it from their perspective, regaling them with stories of, oh, you know, this is no big deal. When, when you get to be my age or when you get to be a teenager, you won't even think about it. Well, that invalidates how they're feeling right now. So we need to take their perspective and say, all right, I can see where this might feel like the end of the world right now. Let's talk about what are some other explanations. Now, if they're feeling like it's the end of the world, guess what? They're in that stress response. We need to help them down, regulate, and then explore other explanations and act accordingly. As we do this, as children learn to basically master their emotions, as they learn to downregulate so they can get into their wise mind, it develops a strong sense of efficacy, capability. I won't be overwhelmed by, I won't be consumed by my emotions. I can feel anxious. It's a, and it'll be okay. I can feel nervous about something. I can do something that's outside of my comfort zone, and it won't consume me. It may not be super comfortable, but it won't consume me. They start developing that recognition that they do have control to a certain extent over their reactions to things, thinking errors. And I mentioned this earlier, we have our happy little fit cat. And I like cats, so, you know, I have my little cartoon fit cat, whatever. But facts in this context, at this time, children when they are this age are still engaging in a lot of all or nothing thinking. It's all good or it's all bad. You love me or you hate me. And this is when we need to help them step back and explore other explanations. Yes, I love you. I very much dislike the behavior. Okay, that's one of them. Or yes, I'm happy. But not always. Encouraging children to think about the variable C is what I call it. If it's not this or that, what else could it be? What's in the middle there that we're not paying attention to if it's not yellow or blue, it's green. Oh my gosh. Over generalization is often due to ineffective hypothesizing or poor reasoning. The child thinks that, you know, all people that have these characteristics are this way or all animals, all dogs are vicious. Well, we know that's not true. We know there are some very, very sweet dogs. But we also know there are some very not sweet dogs. And, and that's one I've had a hard time learning myself as, as I've gone through life because every dog I see I want to hug and love and pet us for backwards. And recognizing that not every dog is going to be okay with, with you getting in their space is. Was something that I had to learn. So overgeneralization. We do it as adults. Children do it because they don't have that many experiences. If the only interactions they've had with dogs have been negative, then guess what? They're going to assume that all dogs are scary or all dogs are dangerous. We need to help them have other experiences but also explore why. Why might this be going on that this dog is aggressive, for example, Mental filter. This is centration, focusing on only one aspect at a time. This person is angry, therefore they must be dangerous, they must be scary. I must run away and, or I am good at this thing over here and I'm going to focus on that. That's all about. This is the only thing I'm good at. And if I fail at that, I'm kind of screwed. We want to help them focus on multiple aspects. When something happens, mental filters can get in the way because a lot of times children will personalize and think it's all my fault this happened. Let's take a big bigger look at that. What else was going on in this situation that contributed to what was going on? Car accident. Heaven forbid a child is in the back and they're being ruckus and rowdy and whatever and parent is saying settle down, you know, sit in your seat. You're, you know, I can't focus. And then they get in a car accident. Okay, the child may blame themselves. They're focusing on that one thing. This is my fault because I didn't settle down. What else was going on? Maybe the care. Maybe the roads were wet. Maybe the caregiver was trying to change the knob on the, on the radio. What else was going on during this event that may have contributed to the accident? Besides you. Emotional reasoning is an inductive reasoning error. I feel therefore it is. No, it's not. I feel, therefore I am expecting it to be a certain way, but based on the facts in this context, at this time, we don't know if that's going to be true. When I go to the doctor, I hate needles. I really hate needles. And I go in focus, emotional reasoning, and I get tense and I get anxious because I'm like, this is going to hurt. I'm assuming it's going to hurt. I feel afraid, I feel anxious. Therefore I'm assuming that something bad's going to happen. That's an inductive reasoning error. When I go to my doctor, Most of the phlebotomists there are really good, and it doesn't hurt at all. There's one that, you know, I. Yeah, but I need to recognize that it's not all phlebotomists. It's not everybody that uses a needle. So getting anxious and assuming the worst is going to happen, assuming that it's going to hurt adds extra distress and makes me assume the worst. And then when it doesn't happen, I'm like, okay, I'm confused. I got that cognitive dissonance going on. We want to help children with their shoulds. I should have done this. And we're as caregivers, a lot of times we're bad about that. You should have cleaned your room if you wanted to go out this weekend. Well, shoulda, coulda, woulda, but didn't. So you didn't clean your room, therefore, you cannot go out this weekend. If you want to go out this weekend, you need to clean your room. Try to avoid using the word should because it sets up a weird dynamic in just about everybody's psyche. Children at this age may label with global, internal and stable attributions. Global meaning, it applies to everybody all the time. Internal, it has to do with that person. And stable, it's unchangeable. You're watching somebody walk down the street and they trip and fall. Global would be, this person is always klutzy. Internal. They have no sense of balance, and they never will have a sense of balance. They're just a klutz. Well, what else could it have been? Maybe there was a crack in the sidewalk that they tripped over. Okay, and let's go back to that mental filter. Maybe there was a crack in the sidewalk they weren't paying attention to because they were texting on their phone while they were walking. Well, so maybe it wasn't that they're clumsy, it's that they weren't paying attention. And that's very different. You can Change that. You can change whether you're paying attention or not. Personalization, thinking everything's my fault. The sky is blue. It's. I did that. It's a rainy day. I did that. It's important for children and adults to recognize how much power we actually have. Going back to what is the. What are the other things that contributed to this? Or what are some alternate explanations besides you, why this may have happened? And this can go for the good or for the bad. You can personalize things that are good. I can say, my kid's a genius and it's because of me. No, no, My. My kid's really smart, but he also worked his tail off and, you know, so, yes, I did have a part in it. He's got some of my genetics, but I certainly. It's not all about me. And then blaming. Children will very often look for a way to blame others for something bad that happens. And a lot of times, if they're not personalizing, they're blaming. So they're either taking it on themselves or they're blaming somebody else. And we need to recognize and encourage them to recognize what else may have happened. Maybe it wasn't all Susie's fault. What else was going on that contributed to the breakdown of this friend group in terms of biological needs, we want to make sure that children are as regulated as possible. What I mean by that is we don't want their stress response just constantly going off because they are poorly rested, because they are malnourished, because their circadian rhythms are out of whack. All of those things increase stress. All of those things impair a child's ability to engage their wise mind. All of those things can keep a child from persevering and feeling like they can actually accomplish something feeling capable because they. They're just in this survival mode now. Sometimes it's only a little bit turned on, so sometimes it's a lot turned on. Either way, it's still turned on, and it still has an impact on their reasoning and their perseverance in what they do. Medical care is something else. We need to make sure that they have access to going to the doctor when they're sick. And sometimes we need to advocate for them. With both of my children, I had to do a lot of advocacy with the doctors, and, you know, it turned out I was right. But unfortunately, you know, like I said, sometimes you've got to. Change your approach in a situation. If the situation is not meeting your needs, we need to make sure they have medical care. If they are Struggling in school. We want to have them evaluated for ADHD or for dyslexia, for hearing impairments, for vision. We want to make sure all those things are going well because if they have any of those, guess what, it's going to increase their stress, it's going to increase their cognitive load. Exercise is also important. Now the American Pediatric association or whatever it is, wants them to go out and get a lot of stink and exercise. But start, start low and go slow. With children. If they have been coming home from school and getting on computers or TV and not moving at all for, you know, most of their life, we were not going to expect them to go outside and play for three hours a day or something. That's going to be exhausting. We want to encourage them to start moving and then start increasing how much time that they are engaging in physical activity until they get up to like a good hour of physical activity a day. Exercise is good for stress relief. Low intensity exercise like going out and riding your bike or you know, playing catch with one of your friends, that actually helps reduce cortisol. It can help increase self esteem because just like when we set a cognitive goal and we achieve it, when we're doing things physically and we recognize, hey, I can do a pull up or hey, I can do a sit up, it helps increase our feelings of self efficacy. It help increase, helps increase our willingness to persevere and again, to get outside of that comfort zone, comfort zone a little bit. Exercise develop raises serotonin levels. It just, it does. There's no argument with science on that one. So getting exercise, getting oxygenation is really helpful for helping children modulate a lot of things in their life. Serotonin is not just mood, it's not just depression. Serotonin involves sleep. Serotonin's broken down to make melatonin to help people get to sleep. So we want to raise serotonin levels. So we got plenty to break down to get ready to go to sleep. Serotonin helps with heart rate and breathing and a whole bunch of other bodily functions. Raising serotonin levels can help people feel a little bit calmer. In my other videos, when we've talked about neurotransmitters, I always make a point of reminding you that when one goes up, all of his buddies are going to go along. We can't just pluck out one hormone or one neurotransmitter and alter it and think everything else is going to stay the same. So when serotonin goes up, dopamine goes up, norepinephrine goes up and so we start getting that feel good cocktail to start surging through the body. And exercise helps develop healthy movement habits. They say sitting is the new smoking. I don't really know what that means, but it is important to move. Why? Because it gets blood flowing more efficiently, it gets blood more oxygenated, it nourishes our brain and our tissues and helps us eliminate oxidative stress. There is a lot that's really good about movement and learning how to like movement. You don't have to love the gym, you don't have to like running. There are a lot of things you can do to exercise, to move that have nothing to do with the gym or running. Gardening. I was out yesterday cleaning up my fall guard or yeah, my summer garden, getting ready for my fall garden. And my heart rate was like 75% of my training zone for an hour and a half while I was out there pulling weeds and cleaning up debris and doing all that kind of stuff, I was in hog heaven. I loved it. So helping children find what is it that they like to do and encouraging them to do more of that. And you may have to experiment, even if that means just turning on the music really loud in their room and dancing it out. Cool. You know, dancing is good exercise. We need to help children feel safe both externally in their environment and internally in their own head. We need to help them know that they're safe from physical harm by reducing trauma from low grade chronic stress. That can be home stress. If caregivers are fighting or if siblings are having difficulty, or if a caregiver has an addiction or a mental illness that's uncontrolled. It's a lot of home stress. It's a lot of chaos. And that can make the child feel unsafe, which increases the stress response, that increases inflammation, and there's a whole cascade of problems. Likewise, the media can be very stressful, and I'm talking about everything from social media to the evening news. It can be very stressful for kids because in part it feels like it's happening right at their back door all the time, even if they're seeing the same story over and over again. With social media, it can be very overwhelming because they feel like people are constantly watching them, constantly judging them. We want. And when we talk about physical harm, the media a lot of times is replaying these videos of horrific events. We won't get specific about them. So the child may feel like, I'm not safe if I leave this house. It's not, not a safe place to Be because they haven't conceptualized, you know, this happened 2,000 miles away and it only happened once. I know you've seen it on the television 25 times, but it only happened once. We want to help them feel safe from bullying. And that is a hard, hard thing. Especially when, when the bullying is taking place at school and we want to keep them safe from drugs and alcohol. Educating kids, if they start using or if they experiment. Okay, let's talk about it. What was the benefit to you to trying that? What was your experience with it? Why do you think you are motivated to do that and educating them about the harms? Because sometimes kids don't understand what the harms are. A lot of times they may, but we want to reiterate, but we want to start out in a non confrontational way with saying something like, all right, you know, I don't agree with you using xyz, however, you know, I see that you felt the need to experiment and I'm wondering, you know, what you were thinking that led you to want to try that. What was your experience with it? What was the benefit? And then exploring, okay, those are the benefits. Let's look at the downsides. We want to help people feel safe from emotional abuse from others. Again, bullying. You have physical bullying in, in schools, but then you have emotional bullying that can happen in school or it can happen online, on Instagram or TikTok or wherever the kids are hanging out now. Oh my gosh, I feel so old. Anyway. And we want to help them protect themselves from bullying from their own internal critic. We want to help them learn how to deal with critical others. Recognizing everybody has a right to their opinion. It doesn't mean I'm a bad person. It doesn't mean I have to agree with them. Learning about criticism, learning how to manage criticism and let it roll off your back. And that is a very difficult thing to do. I personally try to imagine how dark it must be in somebody's mind if they are acting that negative. I try to explore what's the benefit to them of being highly critical of me. And sometimes there may be something to be criticized and I can learn from it, and other times not so much and I can just let it go. We want to help people address hypervigilance to verbal and non verbal behavior. So if a child or an adult has been bullied, has been excessively criticized before, we want to help them recognize based on the facts in this context at this time, are you safe? Is this person trying to bully you or criticize you or Are you feeling like they are? You know, let's step back and take a look. Your boss just gave you some feedback about something you did. Are they trying to be hypercritical? Are they trying to bully you? Or are they trying to help you improve your work? We want to help them. People learn how to protect themselves from emotional abuse of self. Teaching mindfulness. When they start telling themselves something, recognizing I hear myself saying, or I hear somebody else in my head saying, do I believe this? Because we can have, we can have a big old gallery of people just telling us all kinds of negative stuff and evaluating each of those statements based on the facts. In this context at this time, do I believe this? And if not, what am I going to do about it? Explore attributions. If I'm believing that I am stupid and I don't like that word but we'll use it, that's a global attribution. If I believe that I'm bad at math, that's a specific attribution and you know it's true. Internal I am bad at math and it has to do with the way I'm wired. It's an internal trait. External. I failed that math test because the teacher sucked. Stable. I'm never going to figure out how to do math versus changeable. If I buckle down, I can learn how to to do math. But it's very specific. It's not that I'm a failure as a person. It's not that I'm stupid. Overall, it's this one area and I need to look at the internal and external factors that are contributing to that. Encourage people to do self esteem exercises and do them with your children. Just regularly identify things that you like about them. When I was working in residential, everybody had an envelope on their door and other people were encouraged to go by and put little slips of paper in everybody else's envelope once a day. Identifying one thing that they appreciated about that person and that helps people become a little bit more aware of what other people's perspectives are. Introduce the concept of acceptance and commitment. Accept what is and who you are. This is the way it is right now and I don't have to like it, but I may not be able to change it. And this is who I am. Being authentic about who I am and, and how I fit into things. Yes, I'm a good person, but I can list off a bunch of things that I'm not good at. That's okay. I'm accepting myself for who I am, not what I can do. And commit your energies to becoming the best you that you can be, not the best other thing in terms of love and belonging and self esteem. In the toddler age and the really young age, we have children that are developing autonomy. They're learning new skills and right from wrong, they try things and they either get the behavior rewarded or punished. They're learning right from wrong. They're learning those guardrails. The child starts to assert opinions and desire to do it on on their own. So they're starting to take initiative and that's wonderful. But industry is the next step in industry is the ability to take initiative and then follow it through. I'm going to try to do this and I'm going to persevere. Initiative versus guilt. The child is learning to plan and achieve goals. They're developing social skills to initiate activities with others. And a sense of ambition and responsibility starts to develop when children are allowed to explore within limits and parents support their choices. And then both of those develop and build on to help the child develop a sense of industry and competence. Self efficacy and esteem are developed through learning, creating and accomplishing numerous new skills as they age and gaining that knowledge. And they're like, wow, this is so cool. Look what I can do now. Couldn't do it last week. I can evolve. I can grow. The social stage of development leads to self esteem and social confidence or if they aren't able to feel competent in what they're doing, feelings of inferiority or inadequacy. And this is why some people, especially those with undiagnosed mental health issues or dyslexia, may have feelings of inferiority or inadequacy if they're not able to keep up with their classmates. We need to understand what is going on with this child so we can support them in being as successful as possible. Children in elementary school are mastering new physical, interpersonal, emotional and cognitive skills. They're striving to develop a sense of competence. As caregivers, we can encourage risk taking within boundaries, know we want to keep those guard rails on. But within this realm, what would you like to do? We can help the child evaluate and learn from failures and experiences. What would if something happened and it was good, okay, tell me what was good about that? What made you really happy about what happened? They start learning what they like, what they don't like, what they're good at, what they're not good at, and the fact that omit it all, they are lovable for who they are. And we help the child begin to develop effective reasoning skills, deductive reasoning, starts with a general hypothesis and develops the conclusion about a single person or event. So I believe that all, all dogs are wonderful. They're just squeezy little puppies. That's my general hypothesis. So this dog out here must be squeezy and lovable. That may not be accurate. So I need to look at what, what do I know facts in this context at this time. What do I know about this dog out here compared with those other dogs that I've interacted with? Inductive reasoning starts with an observation and works up to a general hypothesis. That dog is growling and acting aggressive. They therefore dogs must be scary. That dog that I walk by every morning on the way to school is, you know, chases me and barks and acts. Acts the fool. So all dogs must be scary. I'm taking one experience and I'm generalizing it. So again, we need to help the child acquire additional experiences that may add more perspective to, to their reasoning. We need to help them build up their experiential vault. Are there any questions?