Parenting Is Hard. Here’s What Helps in Our House.

This episode is for the parents, or really anybody who is responsible for kids. Today's episode, I'm going to share with you on how we train, teach my own kids, our own kids, how to communicate. I have 2 kids. My son is 8. My daughter is 6 right now. And if anybody has kids in these ages, you know, it is, it is a handful. So I thought it might be helpful for me to share with you as somebody who talks about communication, what we do in our own home. Hope you enjoy. Welcome to the Jefferson Fisher Podcast, where I'm on a mission to make your next conversation the one that changes everything. If you enjoy learning these tips, I'm going to ask that wherever you're listening, you find and click the button subscribe. It tells wherever you're listening that this is good content. I also want to let you know that my workbook for the next conversation is— the Next Conversation Workbook is officially out. You can find the links down in the show notes. Practical exercises for arguing less and talking more. This episode is sponsored by Cozy Earth. I love Cozy Earth for a good reason. Everything that I have that is from Cozy Earth is absolutely, yes, cozy, comfortable, and it is top-tier products from pants to shirts to bedsheets to bath towels. Everything that they have is comfortable and you know that it's good quality. Their customer service is fantastic for anything that has to do with like sleeping or trying it out. It's always like 90 days, 100 days. Anytime they have something that you go, I don't know if this is not going to fit, their customer service handles it beautifully. And I'm not saying that just because they're a sponsor. I've liked Cozy Earth way before that, and I'm just blessed and happy that I get to talk about them now, which is really cool. So you can go to cozyearth.com/jefferson, use the code Jefferson, and get up to 20% off. That's cozyearth.com/jefferson, use the code Jefferson, and get 20% off. And now let's get to the episode. I get the question a lot, you know, what do you do for your kids, Jefferson? You talk about communication, you give all this communication advice. What about you? What, when your own home? If there's something that I can teach you and share and give some value about what we do in our home, it's this 5 things that I want to share with you. Yeah, it's 2 more than 3, right? Usually I give 3, there's a 5. And I'm going to tell you right now, I talked to my wife Sierra before making this episode and say, hey, I want to share with my community, what do we do? You know, I have some ideas, I want to get your thoughts. So this is the culmination of the things that we try to do, and I want to give the disclaimer, although I think it's, uh, unsaid: we're not the perfect parents. We don't have it all together. We're absolutely trying to figure it out. So I'm not saying at all of what I'm about to tell you is the gospel, that it's some gold standard. I'm sure there are some clinical psychologists, some childhood behavioral scientists that go, actually, you know, that could do. Maybe so. And I could certainly be wrong. And this is what works for me anyway. So take this for a grain of salt. You always, as always, you can try it. So let's just get into it. Number 1, if you want to teach your children to be a better communicator, this is what you have to do. Number 1, you have to model recovery. You got to start with you. Think about how you argue and communicate right now. It has to do with your own childhood, how you raise your voice, how you sound. Even the way you sound comes from your own parents. My sister, when I call her on the phone, I swear it sounds like my mom. Sometimes I have to double-check of like, is the mom just answering your phone? It's because we sound just like our parents. Even my behaviors— if you watch my very first episode, I have my parents on. I look and sound just like them. Hello, that's congratulations. Genes be genin. All right. So you know that how you communicate comes from your parents. And so you have to make the decision right now. Is this the path that I want to teach mine? Do I want my children to sound like my parents, how my parents talk to me? If you don't like how that happened and if you feel like that had a negative impact on you, you get to decide to do something different. You get to decide to break the cycle. And isn't that something to celebrate that you get to make that decision for your children. So first, it begins with you. How do we do that? We model repair. You have to be able to model repair. What does that sound like? That means we want our kids to see us fail because there are times when we are tired and they are. My son, 6. My daughter— excuse me, my son is 8. My daughter is 6. Sometimes they fight like cats and dogs. At the worst time too. And it'll be when Sierra and I are exhausted. We're tired. It's at the end of the long day and everybody, you know, their battery is low. So what do you do when I say something or she says something that we know we didn't get it right? We responded ugly. We yelled. We were short. You have to be first to apologize and apologize fast, real fast. The quicker you apologize, the quicker that repair and that recovery happens. I'm willing to bet that some of you listening right now never heard one of your parents apologize. I know a lot of guys who never heard their parent apologize. My dad, one of them said, I don't think I ever heard my dad apologize to me. That's big. You got to be able to model repair. So when I say something wrong, and I say something that I know, like, oh God, I can't believe I just said that, I'm very quick to say, hey, Daddy shouldn't have said that. Hey, I messed up. I should have said that kinder. Daddy could have said that kinder, couldn't he? Hey, I could have said that better. I shouldn't have said that. That's what it sounds like. I look them in the eye, and if I can, I get them on eye level, and I say, hey, Daddy shouldn't have said that. I'm sorry. You forgive me? And they forgive me because they're, of course, my kids. But it's important for them to say, hey, Daddy messed up. I messed up. That right there, I'm breaking cycles. You can break cycles when you get down on their level and say, I mess up too. Hey, do you know that Mom and Dad, we mess up too? Yeah, that was a time I messed up. I could have said that better. That's modeling recovery. That's modeling repair. Apologize when you make mistakes. Before we keep going, I want to take a moment to tell you about Mill. Food waste is definitely a problem in everybody's kitchen, especially a bigger family. What, you got more food, more things in the trash, more smells, more times you've taken out the trash? And who takes out the trash? Well, we both do, but it's kind of my, my job. I'll tell you what's made a big difference in the way our kitchen runs is Mill. Right? It is a composter that looks as clean as can be. It's pretty, this thing. Um, it looks like a trash can. I'm looking at it like right there. And what it does is you put banana peels, eggshells, bread, anything that you can just scrape off a plate that you might put somewhere, you can just put it in the middle. And then overnight it turns into shelf-stable grounds. My kids love it. They think it's magic. It's really cool. And at first Sierra and I thought it was going to be like really smelly and gross and be like, I don't know about this, we'll try it out. It's awesome. It's never been any kind of smell. We've used stuff for outside, we've used stuff for, um, for our potted plants, and we can just give some away. It's just compost. That's pretty awesome. It's incredible. So if you're somebody who cares about food waste and you want ways to improve the way your kitchen runs and probably less time taken out of the trash, you need to go try out Mill. You can go to mill.com and get up to $75 off and a 90-day risk-free trial when you use code Jefferson. So go to mill.com/Jefferson, use the code Jefferson, and get up to $75 off plus a 90-day free risk trial. And now back to the episode. Number 2, when it comes to making your child a better communicator, you have to, have to, have to teach them regulation, how to regulate their emotions, because how you teach them now is how they're going to regulate themselves when they're teenagers and when they're in college and when they're no longer in your home. So what we do, and Sierra in particular has been great about this, especially with our daughter— our daughter gets really worked up when she burns. She burns hot— that we get her to breathe. It's in through her nose. So what my— Sierra will do if we know that my daughter Ruby is getting worked up Sierra will tap her nose just like this. She'll tap her nose 3 times. And what she knows now, since we've done this, is to breathe. That means 3 breaths. And, and what Sierra used to do, and will still sometimes do, she, she would go get on her level and tap her nose. And now my daughter, she knows when she's getting worked up on something, she will like, she'll touch her nose just for a moment to kind of breathe. And that's what we're going to teach them, because you have to have first that breath. You know, I talk a lot about breath as us as adults. It all starts with as kids. So same for my son. If I know that he's getting worked up, breath. We got to be able to breathe. And tears are okay. Tears are welcome. Tears— I will gladly let them cry and get them all out. And I thought my son is actually the crier. He's, he's big emotions. He feels big emotions. He cries when he's happy. He cries when he's sad. It's really precious and a blessing. And even him, we have to kind of sometimes, hey, I need you to breathe. So if you want to have a child that is a good communicator, he's not gonna— she, he or she's not gonna be able to do it without knowing how to regulate their emotions and using breath to slow themselves down and have clarity, right? To, to have that prefrontal cortex come back into play, you have to have the breath. So use breath to inject that emotional regulation. Number 3, what we try to do, and this might be a little controversial, we let them argue. I let my kids argue. How they argue here is how they're going to argue out there. I'd much rather be able to see and monitor and control and influence how they speak now because I know they're going to argue on the playground. They're going to argue when they're in college or high school. So wouldn't you rather be able to influence positively how they communicate and argue and handle conflict now than just hope they figure it out later? Because the world will teach them. If you don't teach them in your own house, the world will do it for them. And that's not something I'm willing to do. What we try to do is say Hey, look, house rules, guys. When Jed and Ruby start to just yah-yah at each other, they just make up— they just— kids just make up reasons to be mad at each other for no reason. They just make them up, just decide, um, that over the dumbest of things, silliest of things, um, you know, it could be, I got toys all over this place, you don't believe me? I mean, like, I got— you don't even know, uh, I got, I got toys all over this place, all over this floor right now. But it could be any kind of anything, go, okay, we know they're going to be arguing with each other. How can we as parents create an environment that is safe for them to argue? Because if you don't create that environment here, the world will create that for them. That's not a risk that I'm willing to take. So I want to have some positive influence. How do we do that? We let them argue, meaning we let them have it out. Now, we do have exceptions to it. That means there's no personal attacks, there's no name-calling. They can't call each other names. Two, they cannot yell at each other. Three, they cannot hit each other, get physical with each other whatsoever. That is an absolute— that's an absolute rule breaker right there. So we really try to get those three elements involved: no personal attacks, no name-calling, no yelling, no hitting. Right now, what does that, what does that do for us? It allows them practice because if they're able to argue their position to each other, it goes better. We get to kind of get involved a little bit into the discussion, not to where we're taking sides, but almost kind of curating an experience for them of saying, now this is how I want to model for my children, how do you handle conflict? Okay, here we have an issue. So sometimes we just let them do it. Other times, once they've kind of hit a hard spot and they don't know where to go, I will come in and say, all right, let's, let's pause. What do we got? All right, my son Jet, you, your position is what? Ruby, your position is what? Okay, and here's the issue between the two of you. What's, what's the big issue between the two of you? And they get to advocate of like, well, I wanted to do this, she wanted to do that. So here's where it really boils down. All right. And Sierra does a great job of this too. We say, all right, now that we've gotten to argue, let's talk about perspective. So that's where I think a lot of kids— I think personally I'm very proud of. I think that is a big a big leg up for my children in terms of communicating out of the real world. Because what I try to do is say, you think of the moment now, I want you to think of the moment after. Think of the second moment. Think of the moment after the conversation. What does that— how does that— what does that sound like? It sounds like this. I will tell, for example, I will tell my son, I said, what do you think she is feeling right now? Or for My daughter, I'll say, what do you think he's feeling right now? And she'll tell me, why do you think he would feel that? And so I'm trying to like get the layer underneath. Okay. And if he does what you want, what will you get? And will it feel as good as you think it will when you get it? And usually they say no, no, probably not. Why not? Because I wasn't nice. There we go. Now, how do we get it in a way that we might be able to not share, but figure out a solution. What's the solution? So I start using words like, what's the solution, rather than stop it right now. Hey, you give it to her. You go over here. Stop touching each other. Like, that's typical, right? That, hey, just don't look at each other. Now, don't get me wrong, we definitely used that before in the car on the way to church. And you're like, just don't look at each other, okay? You don't exist. Just look out the window. All right, that's— so I'm not saying this is all the time. But when it comes to actual arguments, this is our default, is trying to say, okay, let's think about the moment after. So we ask questions that are perspective. What do you think she's feeling? And what do you think she's wanting? Why do you think she's wanting that? If you say this, how is she going to respond to that? And then I try to put them in the place. If you were in her shoes, what would you be thinking? If you were in his shoes, what would you be thinking? And what I'm doing is trying to just break up the, the rock, the catalyst of saying, I want you to get outside of your own head, detach for a moment. And what are they thinking? What are they afraid of? What are they concerned about? What are they upset about? Now, I am not at all advocating whatsoever for trying to say, I want my kids to be people pleasers where all they do is think about everybody else. That is not it. All right. That is not it, because I'm about to go into advocacy. So if I will take my son and say, okay, if you say that to her, how's she going to feel? And he might say, she'll feel bad. And I say, how is that going to make you feel? Not good. Okay, then let's play it out. If you say what you want to say, is that going to be something that works in your favor, or is that going to be something that hurts your relationship, hurts our relationship? Okay, then what's something we could do different? What's a way that you could say this a little bit differently? Think of another way to say that sentence. You know, think of another way. Say, okay, that sounds good, let's try that. And then he'll try that. So we'll kind of time out and I'll say— and Sierra will do this— let's just say, hey, I want you to look at her. I'll say this to my son, look at her, what is she feeling right now? She feels sad. Or I might do this with my daughter, okay, what is he feeling? Right now? And what do you need him to understand? What do you think he's wanting you to hear? I'm telling you, this sounds— might sound cheesy to people. That's okay. This is real and this is what works. And what you're going to find is that this is the kind of stuff that makes or breaks relationships as adults. And so if I can model that right now and get them to think outside of their own wants and needs, and this is mine, and he has my toy, even though they picked it up and haven't played with it for 2 months, but her brother just happened to pick it up and all of a sudden she wants it. You have to have that kind of conversation. Might sound cheesy, might sound dumb, but listen to me, it works. Before we keep going, I want to take a moment to tell you about Our Place. I have a question: when's the last time you actually thought about what you cook with? What kind of chemicals are they made out of? Do you know? Most nonstick pans out there still use stuff like Teflon and PFAs that we know are now called forever chemicals and are not great for you. Well, that's where Our Place comes in. What they create are things that are not only really pretty, they're high-performance cookware, and they're also toxin-free. Let me tell you, I love these things. They make something called the Always Pan. What I call it is my pan at the house. That's what we call it. And even when we were doing a short move, I couldn't find my pan and I went through every single box in the house so I could find my pan. It's called an Always Pan. They also have the beautiful pots. They come in really cool colors, but I absolutely love it. It has upgraded my kitchen game to where eggs do not— you know, that good slide you get when you make eggs in the morning? That's, that's what I like about it. They also come out with this thing called the Wonder Oven, and it's this like small, perfect, nontoxic air fryer and toaster. That not only do we like, but my daughter really likes it. She thought, and we're still going to be thinking this way, that it's her own little oven. And so she, she loves it. We bought her some little oven mitts and an apron, so she loves it. Cooking feels simple, cleaner, and honestly just more fun when you have Our Place. So stop cooking with toxic cookware and upgrade to Our Place today. You can go to fromourplace.com/jefferson and use code Jefferson for 10% off site Y. That's fromourplace.com/Jefferson. Plus you get a 100-day risk-free trial with free shipping and returns. That's fromourplace.com/Jefferson. Use code Jefferson. You're not going to regret it. Now back to the episode. Number 4, advocacy. We are big, very big on it. You can't just tell me because or say I don't want to. That doesn't fly. Not in this family. You have to advocate for what you want. So let's say my son doesn't want to get up from his Legos and it's time for dinner. This happens pretty often. And he's like, no, no, I don't. I don't want to. And he wants to just finish this one piece that he's been really wanting to do. And I'll say, he'll just, I don't want to. I'll say, you need to, you need to tell me why. Well, I just don't want to. I say, almost always will break it down. And say, I need you to ask me for what you need. Teach your kids to ask you for what they need. So I'll say, no, I need you to tell me, what do you need right now? That's our emphasis. What do you need? And every time he'll say something different. I need— I just need to finish this piece. And I say, okay, and if I give you— if I allow you that need, what do you think I need right now? You need me to eat. Yeah, I need you to eat food. As a parent, We do this pretty often. We'll put this in terms of, hey, as a parent, what do you think I'm wanting to do right now? What if I'm your parent and I'm responsible for you? What do you think a good move is? Allowing you to just not eat food and eat junk and eat— the other day it was, they made some fudge, and so they thought that was just dinner. If I just do that, is that a good parent decision or a bad parent decision? I get them involved in the decision-making process, but I want to hone in on advocacy. I— we make sure that they advocate for what they need. That means I'm asking them, I'm telling them, I want you to tell me what you need. Ask for what you need right now. That doesn't mean I can give it. The answer might still be no, but I'm walking you through the process. Instead of just stomping your feet and throwing a fit, ask, verbalize what you need to just advocate their position. I don't allow the 'because I just want to.' That's not enough. I need you to advocate. And so we make it as a team effort between the two of us that when our son or our daughter wants something, asking for something, we say, okay, I need you to state your position. Tell me not just why, what is the need here that you're wanting? Now, I might end up saying no, but I need to walk you through that that process. It's not just because I want it, just because I want, because I, it's just something I want. I need you to explain it. So advocacy, advocating, that is a huge part of being a good communicator. I want to add another piece of advocacy in here, and that is we also, there's not every time, but we're pretty big on getting the buy-in on them on punishment, meaning we will say, what should we do? All right, as your parent, what should we, what should we do here? There's got to be a punishment, or there's got to be a solution. You've broken this rule, you've done this, what should be our response? And often the things that they will come up with, we'll know, are actually much harder for them than the things we would have chosen and we get to kind of have a compromise or a buy-in. But that's, it's actually very beneficial to say, okay, hey, as, hey, I'm your parent, you know you did wrong. What should we do here? My son will often come up to me sometimes when they're, I can hear a spat and I'm going upstairs and he'll come up to me and go, we argued about this. She said this, I shouldn't have said that. And then she yelled and I'm like, all right, so what do we, what do we, what are we going to do differently? Being able to have their buy-in into that there's, there's consequences for things. So what's the consequence is usually the question that we ask. What should be the consequence? And not just let them out of saying nothing. Well, nothing, we should just let them go. Now, you could follow all of this advice that I just shared, and I have to tell you, none of it matters if you don't follow it. You could do all these little bitty things and read all these techniques and read all these books. But the biggest book they'll ever read is you. You're the one that they're going to see the techniques from. How you talk, how you treat your wife, how you treat your husband, how you treat the people in your life. You're the tape. You're the training tape for them. They will do as you do, and your voice will become their inner monologue. So the question is, what are you going to teach them? What are you going to be for them? What are they watching when they see you communicate? Because that's exactly how they'll communicate more than any of these techniques. So in our home, in our house, Sierra and I with our two children, my son again is 8, my daughter is 6. How do we make sure that they are the best communicators that they can possibly be before we put them out into the world? How do we train them? Number 1, we model recovery, meaning if we want them to learn how to apologize, we have to be the ones they see it from first. That means I'm going to say things like, I should have said that kinder. I should have said that better. Dad didn't say that very nice, Teddy. Can I try that again? Let me apologize. I'm sorry. I want to apologize. Do you forgive me? Model recovery. They need to hear you apologize. It goes a long way. Number 2, we regulate. That means we teach them how to breathe when things get tight and they get overwhelmed and they feel those emotions. They need to breathe. It doesn't get any easier as you get older, but if you teach them now how, how they regulate as a child is how they're going to regulate as adults, regulate emotions. 3, we teach them that it's okay to argue. We allow argument within safe parameters because again, if we don't have influence on how they argue with each other in the home, the world's going to teach them how to argue and handle conflict in the future. And I don't know about you, but I don't think the world is all that great of a place to learn how to handle conflict. Do you? Number 4, we train advocacy. We teach our kids to advocate for their position, meaning I want to make sure you tell me what you need. What are you asking for? It's not just because you want it. Or why? Because you don't want to. I need you to use words to advocate for your position. And 5, we train perspective. We teach perspective. We want them to understand that their words have impact. Think of the moment after they say what they say. Think of the moment after the words. What is somebody feeling? What are the— when you say something, what's going to be the effect on the other person. We get them to think outside of themselves, to detach from the moment. Rather than trying to think of just one lane, we want them to see the future and the impact and the ripple effect of their words. Now, you might be listening and say, Jefferson, this all just sounds too good to be true. Well, some of it is, some of it isn't. We don't always hit the mark. We probably get, I don't know, 65% of it right, I feel like, and that's probably a pretty high margin in my book. And you, you try to teach these things and the rest is just a circus. You know, of course there are times when we don't always hit the mark. That's a time you get to offer recovery. And there are times when we feel really good about what we've been able to teach them and how they're talking to one another, and we want them to be best friends, but we also want them to be individual people. It is a huge burden, responsibility, and one that I will always just continue to be blown away by. And something makes me think a lot about my parents, you know, how, how they, how they handled things when I was a kid, and me and my siblings. And I can tell you that if there's something that I can pass on, some insight that I can give you, is that if you don't become a safe place for your kids to talk to, they'll find someone else to share it with, and you might lose that relationship. Do your best to be a safe place for your kids to come to you about things, and not just any things, the hard things. When my son was, I think he was 5, he came to me and he had his hand over his shirt.. And he looked really ashamed and sheepish. And I said, what's, what's going on? He goes, I did something bad. I said, okay, what, what happened? And he pulled down his hand and showed, showed me a big hole in his nice, like, little red polo shirt. I said, what happened? He goes, and he just almost looked in pain. He goes, I cut it. I said, you cut it with what? Scissors. Well, what made you want to cut them with scissors? He just— and that's what he said. He goes, I just wanted to see if it would cut. And I said, that was my moment, really, right there. And you're gonna have a moment, and you've already had those moments, and you'll have those moments in the future to choose to do something different where some that you might experience in the past, that's where you get yelled at for spilling the milk. Like, that's where I could have just— how could you? What is— I could have said the worst possible phrase, and that is, what is wrong with you? And instead I said, and what did we learn? And he took a big sigh and goes, it definitely cuts it. And I started to laugh. I said, yeah, you're, you're right. What do you think we should do? Just not do that again. I say, that's probably a good rule. Let's not do that again. And I had to think in time of what's the value there of, let's even in financial sense, the cost of a shirt, a child's shirt versus the cost of them thinking that I'm not a safe place to go to, that they can't tell dad. Gah, that like, uh, that gives me chills and makes me want to cry. It's— that cost is way too high to not be the person that they want to go to when they've messed up, because they will. And it's, it's all— the mess-ups are only going to get bigger. And if they don't feel like they can come to you because you're going to explode, you're going to get mad, you're going to yell and you're going to say, what is wrong with you? What are you thinking? They're not going to come to you. They're going to go somewhere else. They're going to talk to someone else. And I don't know about you, but I, I never want that to be me. So when you can— doesn't mean it's always perfect— do your best to be a safe space. For people to come to. And so what is— how do you do that practically? That means when they come to you, even small, with things that they've done wrong, you need to make sure you say, hey, thank you for coming to me with this. I'm so glad that you told me. Hey, thank you for sharing that with me. Hey, that was really big courage for you to share this with me. I'm so proud of you for telling me that that is something that we really work on. Because I've seen, I've seen the opposite effect of not feeling like you can go to your parents with things. You, and you want to feel like you can go to your parents with things, right? Same way with telling the truth. We have this saying in our house that lies make you sick, and that's the best way we could kind of illustrate that. If you, if you don't tell the truth and you keep a lie in, then eventually it's not going to feel good on you. It's going to grow and it's going to make you sick. And it's instilling this mentality of, I would much rather you— I mean, I had this discussion with my son 3 nights ago over brushing his teeth. I would rather you tell me, I don't want to brush my teeth, and have that conversation than lie to me and tell me you did brush your teeth just because you didn't want to. And that's been a process. And so much of it I see myself too, of when I chose not to say the truthful thing because I didn't want to face the reality of saying or facing the consequences of the impact on other people. And this is a lesson that I would much rather instill, and it gives me a sense of pride to be able to share these lessons with them now rather than be with them through the struggle when they're older. I'll be with them either way, but I'm hoping that some seeds we plant now will reap a lot of helpful things for them in the future. So that's how we do it. Like I said, you try to do these things and everything else is just an absolute circus. So as always, you can try that and follow me.