Jason McCoy
Difficult Conversations: What To Do If You ...
Difficult Conversations: What To Do If You Don't Know What To Do!
Jason McCoy
Difficult Conversations: Should I Help My ...
Difficult Conversations: Should I Help My Child or Let Them Figure It Out?
Jason McCoy
Difficult Conversations: Going to the Dentist, ...

Today we’ll take a look at some of the real anxiety producing experiences kids face. Sometimes it’s hard for adults to relate to why these would be scary…like getting a haircut, for example. When anyone faces the unknown, their brain doesn’t like it and will quickly attempt to fill in those blanks from their catalog of experiences.

Difficult Conversations: Going to the Dentist, Doctor, New School, etc...
Jason McCoy
How Do You Charge Your Batteries?

Sometimes I wish I had an indicator I could see that would give me a warning when I need to pause and recharge. As a parent, caregiver, teacher or whatever your role is with kids it can be easy to get burned out. I’d like to show you a tool I use for myself and the families I work with to help monitor this and to figure out what needs to happen to get back on track and those batteries fully charged again.

How Do You Charge Your Batteries?
Jason McCoy
Intensity Is The Enemy

Have you ever been called in to your boss’s office? What about the principals office, when you were a kid? Or how about someone you care about saying the dreaded words “we need to talk”?

How does that feel? How much are you able to listen?

This is how your kids feel when you try to parent or discipline using intensity.

Intensity Is The Enemy
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Label their goals

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Label their goals

When you label what your kids are after, you put a concrete definition on the next steps (implicitly or explicitly). “you really want my attention”, “you want him to hurt just like you do”, “you got mad when I said it’s time to stop the game”.

Maybe it seems kind of dumb to say this, because you think it. And you think they are thinking it. But what if they aren’t? What if it’s just a tangled ball of intensity and not much definition? By giving it some definition, you’re helping your kids make connections between how they feel and what they do, and THAT’S how you start to see behaviors change! This is literally the start of taking ownership.

Vomit in the hall, stepping on your dance partners toes and saying ouch! (and SOCKS!)

Vomit in the hall, stepping on your dance partners toes and saying ouch! (and SOCKS!)

In families, we build systems to help us survive. It’s like a kind of shorthand. If I yelled the word “SOCKS!”, everyone in my family knows that means someone left their socks in a place they shouldn’t. What happens next is that the kids prone to “pleasing” will come and find out if it’s their socks and the kids prone to independence will hide in hope that if no one sees them, they don’t exist at that moment. (guess whose socks it usually is!)