Teaching Impulse Control With Screens, Teens, Toddlers & Teachers II #575

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How can you teach your kids impulse control and delayed gratification with their video games and screens? How can we help kids who blurt out in the classroom? Is it too early to teach when they're toddlers or too late when they're teens? Buckle up for 10 more creative, important ways to teach your kids self-control on today's episode of the Comparenting Podcast. So welcome, this is Kirk Martin. You can find our final few days of the Black Friday and March sale. And if you want an ad free option for the podcast, it's at celebratecom.com. Quick shout out to Lindsay, a 10-year-old girl who listened to several of the downloadable programs, including Casey Straight Talk for Kids and told her mom, I'd like to be as strong-willed as Casey. And her mom peels pretty strongly that she can match Casey's energy. And she mentioned the power struggles with Lindsay have been cut in half because I'm not reacting. And Lindsay is now being responsible for her morning routine, homework, and food prep by herself. And the mom said, it's awesome to see the sparkle back in her eyes as she shines with this independence. Proud of you, mom, and keep being awesome, Lindsay, and be more strong-willed than Casey. So look, I love when kids listen to our stuff and when they take ownership and they understand how their brains work. And I emailed with the mom a bit. I said, so how is she doing all that stuff by herself? And the mom said, it's like you said, she won't do it the way I want her to do it. But now I'm controlling my own anxiety, my own control issues, and she's really stepping up in all these different areas. I love that. So in the last episode, we covered the first 12 ideas to improve impulse control and delay gratification. So if you haven't listened, go back to that one. So number 13, use the choice ball with younger kids. This one skews a little bit younger because our kids tend not to respond to auditory commands and lectures. I like using visual, visuals like turning off lights, using music to get kids moving. But I also like experiential lessons to reinforce key concepts. So get a really soft, squishy ball and you could write the word choice in it on it. Whenever your child is about to make a choice or even throw a tantrum, have a meltdown or argue or wine or try to get out of taking responsibility, you can toss or hand the choice ball to your child and say, hey, Evan, I want you to throw the ball up in the air and catch it three times while you think about the choice you're going to make. By the way, I know some of you won't do this and you don't have to. It's not like the greatest idea ever. But you know what you could begin doing? You and your spouse start throwing the ball back and forth as you're thinking about decisions. Your kids are like, what are you doing? You're like, well, we're trying to slow our world down and we want we we're reinforcing. We don't have to make that choice right now. We have power over our decision. See, that would be really cool. And you could use one or several of the following phrases as you explain this concept to your child. I'm giving you control of this situation. The ball is in your court. You are responsible for how you respond. You are responsible for your attitude. Your choice is affect your outcome. The decision is out of my hands. You have the power to control the outcome. And over time, you can use fewer prompts and simply hand the ball to your child. What you're doing is physically handing over responsibility for behaviors, attitudes and actions to your child. And your child will begin to realize just how much control they have over their lives. It's helpful for us as parents because you're symbolically showing you're not responsible for your child's actions. The act of throwing the ball in the air three times teaches them that they do not have to make the choice immediately. They can take five seconds and think about it. You're giving them a tactile object to manipulate, which is both calming and stimulating at the same time. We did this in our home with all the camp kids and you notice some of them like squeezing it really tightly like they were wrestling with their choice inside. Sometimes feeling the ball in their hands will break the negative cycle and kind of redirect them. And I know some of the kids are going to be so upset they're going to throw the ball at you. And that's why I want it to be soft and you can use anything tactile. You could use Kleenex and as always use your own wisdom. Some kids won't even participate and that's okay. Model it yourself. Number 14, implement the 24-hour cart roll with teens and tweens. So look, your kids today, they've got access to a lot of things. Like they can go right online and purchase things immediately. And so in order to kind of combat that impulsive spending online or downloading things, you implement a tradition. Any non-essential purchases must sit in the digital shopping cart for eight hours or 12 hours or 24 hours before hitting buy. See, this allows your child's emotional brain to cool off and the logical brain to take over. And you could add this as an incentive. Hey, son or daughter, I know you really want this. If you wait 12 hours or if you wait 24 hours before making this purchase, I will pay for X percentage. Maybe it's 10%, maybe it's 20% of the purchase price. That way there's an even bigger incentive to wait. Do you have to do it that way? Absolutely not. But I like getting some early wins and your kids knowing, okay, I really wanted that. I waited overnight and then I bought it and it was 15% cheaper because my parents subsidized it because I waited. I kind of like that. Number 15, write it, don't send it. I've used this throughout my life. I will get frustrated or triggered or really want to make my point. Usually not with the best intentions to swipe my claims to the contrary. What I've learned to do is just do a brain dump of all my thoughts and frustrations, writing myself an email and then not sending it. Teach your older kids to do this. In the heat of a social media argument or a frustrating text thread, teach them to write their response in their Notes app or a draft folder first. They can vent all the vitriol they want, but they must wait an hour or overnight before deciding if it's actually worth sending, which it rarely is. Number 16, collaborative risk assessment. When your teen or tween wants to do something potentially impulsive like staying out past curfew or going to a party, don't just say no. Ask, hey, what's your exit plan if things don't go well or if things feel off? See, by making them verbalize the risks and solutions, you are forcing their prefrontal cortex to engage in future thinking. Casey and I always had a safe out for him in his teenage years. He would just go to a bathroom and text me. Three minutes later, when he was back with his friends, I would call him and he'd answer in front of his friends and ask, why are you making me come home? See, it made me the bad guy until he got the confidence to call his friends idiots and leave stupid situations on his own. 17, physical exercise. This is often very overlooked. It is a fantastic way to improve impulse control for two reasons. One, the intense physical exercise works off or even satisfies in a positive way. Some of that impulsive need for a dopamine hit or brain stimulation. Second, climbing, hiking, lifting weights. It takes time and effort and it emphasizes the satisfaction that comes from doing something hard over time. A kid who likes to rock climb or go to a climbing gym has to really focus on his or her steps and footholds and handholds to get to that objective. It takes lots of steps and so your delaying gratification but the payoff is amazing. It's training the brain. I think that's why our hikes are so therapeutic. It could take an hour, two, three hours or more to get to an alpine lake or sometimes like last summer, six hours to get to a mountain peak with spectacular views. See, the anticipation propels you forward and then you're tired afterward. It's harder to be an impulsive when you're tired. So, and this, I promise this will help more than you can imagine. If you follow us on Instagram, you know that hard hikes with elevation are kind of my therapy. Casey will often text and say, hey, I'm heading off to ski the past a few times and he does a lot of backcountry skiing away from people on chair lifts, which forces him to climb up 2,000 or 5,000 feet in a day on his skis. And my response is usually something like, yay for your wife, you won't be a jerk later. And I'm only half kidding. He and I both work off our anxiety and jerkiness with physical intensity. Number 18, and this is directly related to this about leading your kids. So I just did this PDA parent program for kids with pathological demand avoidance. And it struck me that virtually no one mentions the importance of intense sensory exercise for our kids. So I'm just going to include part of that script here because I think it's immensely important. And I want you to have options. Our PDA and our ADHD kids and so many of our kids, they need intense physical and sensory activity to help calm their nervous system, reduce anxiety and give relief when feeling frustrated or overwhelmed. Look, it's really hard to breathe or think your way from extreme frustration to being calm. It's never worked for me for intense kids. This requires intense activity. That's kind of a sensory diet. Jumping on a trampoline, climbing trees, going through an obstacle course, chopping wood, digging holes, carrying heavy things like bags of mulch are incredibly helpful. Anything outside is helpful because fresh air changes moods. Look, we have 1500 kids in our home over the course of a decade. Every time I mentioned going outside, they would resist and complain. So we just had to lead and make it fun. So be a kid again. Put aside your practicality. If your kids, look, if you let your kids get dirty and muddy and messy and even be a little mischievous, they'll play outside. And once you get your kids outside, they'll often stay longer. But too many of us give up when we encounter the initial resistance. Don't just expect it. Kicking balls, throwing stones in a creek, building forts, riding bikes. Look, at one point I allowed kids to throw water balloons at me from the deck just to get them outside. We even did some egg throws that didn't end well, but that's part of the process of experimenting. Every night after dinner, go for a 15 minute walk and invite your kids. If they join you, you will have great conversations. If they don't, and this assumes they're old enough to stay home alone, then you or you and your spouse just enjoyed a 15 minute walk together outside. If you make this a routine part of your family life and DNA, it will help immensely. You need it as well for your own mental health. So this may rub you the wrong way and grunt counter to what other people recommend, but I don't think it's healthy to let kids decompress solely by looking at screens indoors. No one on the planet has spent two hours scrolling through social media and got up feeling inspired and energized and happy. So we have to make a concerted effort to get our kids outside being physical, but they're not going to want to. I mean, who would when you're comfortable sitting and doing something that demands nothing of you? But think about this. Activities that demand nothing of you also give you nothing. No feeling of satisfaction, pride or achievement. You cannot push bribed, convince or threaten your kids to get them to do physical things outside. And this falls under that important principle that you must lead your kids through discomfort, even if they have PDA, especially if they have PDA. That ultimately builds resilience, competence. I did this and confidence. Oh, I can do this in the future. You can make outdoor exercise more fun. Hey, we're going to ride our bikes to get pizza, build a fort by the stream and hide candy bars in there. See if you can find some hidden treasure I hid on this hike. Casey loved construction sites as a younger kid, so we'd ride our bikes to watch while having a snack. When Casey was in middle school, he had a couple of friends who would come over. We played this game where they did a version of Ding Dong Ditch and I had to chase them down in the neighborhood. They absolutely loved it because it was an adult giving them intense emotional engagement while throwing them on the ground. At one point, I asked Casey to design a workout routine for me. That gave him some ownership. Now he felt in charge, but what it really did was get him to the gym with me. Lifting weights works off a lot of stress, so ask your kids to do this for you. No matter what you do, your child will most likely resist why make excuses cry and more. But here's the calculation I made in my head and heart when Casey was digging in. I knew he would feel much better physically, emotionally and mentally after he did an activity. But his prefrontal cortex wasn't fully developed. He couldn't override his short-term discomfort and overwhelm by himself. So I was the bridge for him, which is steady, calm, reassuring confidence. You're the adult. You have a lifetime of experience and love for your child that says you are mature enough to endure the discomfort of his resistance because you know it will be good for your child. Did it always work splendidly? No. Sometimes it was ugly at first. Sometimes it was just okay. But I can say the majority of the time when I put my head down and look straight ahead and let him through his discomfort along with those camp kids, they were glad. Sometimes they'd even thank me for leading them. Practice it. It's a very loving and compassion act on behalf of your child. It builds muscle memory in your child and inside of you for the next time. You're going to feel proud of yourself for enduring the short-term discomfort of doing something sacrificial for your child, not to them. It gets easier over time and it builds in your child a sense of confidence and pride. Okay, make that a priority. How can we use screens to teach this and apply it to the classroom? 19. Teach self-control and delayed gratification with screens. So we did this quite often and it paid off really well. You could say something like this to your kids. Hey, this afternoon, I'm giving you 45 minutes to play your video games or be on screens. If you turn off your video games three minutes early today, you will earn an additional 10 minutes tomorrow. Adjust the time ratio for your particular child to create a success. So the calculation for your child is, hey, if I sacrifice three minutes, if I give up three minutes of game time tonight, I get 10 more minutes tomorrow night. Now, that seems reasonable to me. Now, some kids will refuse at first. That's their choice. Some will do it. Some will negotiate and say, hey, I stopped six minutes early so you owe me an extra 20 minutes tomorrow. And if they're smart enough to do that and exercise that kind of delayed gratification, I'd probably honor that. And then put fine print on your boundaries for your little attorneys. When Casey got older, I'd encourage him to turn off his video games, say after three matches instead of four. And sometimes there would be a reward like going to get something to eat that he loved. You can modify this however you want. We were also pretty ruthless when it came to turning off screens. We did not want to spend a decade of our life arguing and negotiating and being frustrated over screens. So we'd say, hey, here's how it works. Being on screens is not in the Bill of Rights. It's a privilege. And we're not going to fight like other people over this. You have complete control over the amount you play in this regard. When we say you have 45 minutes, that means 45 minutes, not 46, not 48, not 68, 45. So set a timer or alarm for 40 minutes and then begin to save it and wind down by 45 minutes. If you need our help or want us to remind you, we'll do that at first because we want to give you tools to succeed. But if we come into the room after 45 minutes and the screen is not off, or if you even try to negotiate or whine, then you choose to lose your screens for the next three days. And we'll have more fun outside anyway. Again, adjust that however you want. Over time, did we give him some flexibility if he was in the middle of an important game, or if he had a chance to set some personal record? Of course, but we refuse to make this a source of daily conflict. Casey learned how to control his time on screens as an ADHD and PDA kid, and that helped him earn extra playing time. Why? Because we knew he, we could trust him. By the way, I may not have said this before, but let me throw this in here right now. One of the things that we taught him, and I think it's really important is this. When he was first getting, got his first phone, instant messaging was a big deal. And so he would start getting instant messages from all of his friends. And I remember exactly where we were. We were in Nashville, Tennessee. And I remember saying, Casey, you are not obligated to reply in their moment right away to your friends. And he's like, but dad, they just messaged me. I need to, I was like, they just intruded on your time, or they just decided that they were going to message you right now. But that doesn't obligate you to respond right away. And I encouraged him, hey, why don't you wait an hour? Why don't you wait a couple hours? Why don't you wait overnight? You know what? He took to that. He did that. And to this day, it irritates me sometimes because he won't respond to me all the time. But to this day, he exercises really good self-control over his time and over his screens. Again, it's an idea. Use it if you want. Apply it in different ways. Okay, number 20, give kids tools in the classroom to help with impulse control. So some kids struggle with blurting out in the classroom. And so this is what we teach teachers. The teacher creates these little talk tickets and every day says, hey, you've got this amazing brain filled with interesting ideas that you want to blur it out and share. But that's disruptive in my class. So every time you want to blur it out, instead, I want you to hold up one of your talk tickets and I'll either say, hey, good job redeem one of your three tickets and share your amazing off topic idea. It's always going to be off topic. Or I believe you can wait until after class. See, now your child has something tangible in their hand, something they can do. Remember this principle, instead of just being told what not to do or telling your kids to stop doing this, always give your kids something appropriate they can do. So when your child gets down to one ticket left for the day, they have to start making choices about what's important enough to share with the class. And it gives the teacher the opportunity to say, you know what was cool back in math class, you really wanted to blur it out. You actually started to talk, but then you caught yourself. You held up your talk ticket. That is self control, my friend. Very well done. See, we're giving a child tools to exercise restraint and we're praising for progress. Number 21, teach your kids to prioritize what's really important. This is a little bit tangential, but I think it fits here. Part of self control is learning to say no to things that are not important. That means prioritizing and that PDA program. By the way, if you're interested, celebrate calm.com slash PDA, you'll find, I think we've got about six or seven episodes up right now. So check that out. But we talk about prioritizing being a superpower in life because our kids are especially good at discerning what is arbitrary and what's unnecessary so that they can focus their energy on more meaningful internal pursuits. Casey describes his experience with PDA as I minimize external demands that are unnecessary so I can maximize internal demands that are more meaningful. So I think teaching your kids how to make these choices and how to prioritize is a really important form of self control rather than just doing everything that everybody expects of you. Number 22, praise your kids for their effort and progress. Let them know, hey, you're doing way better than before. We can trust you more now because you aren't constantly complaining or negotiating. I noticed you're much more patient. That shows me you're growing up. Maybe they earn more time or greater privileges. You've probably heard our story of how Casey would come home early before curfew to demonstrate that in his words, I wanted to show you that I could control myself so you don't have to. His goal was to earn a later curfew and he did how? By controlling himself, not his parents. Great email from a son who listened to the programs and they problem solved this. I love this idea. Child said, whenever I lost a match in Fortnite or got stuck on a level, I used to get gamer rage. I'd throw my controller and yell and then my mom would take my console away for a week. I really wanted to play in a Saturday tournament with my friends so I had to learn how to control this. My strategy was to pretend my anger was a loading bar on the video game. So if I got the 90%, I had to put the controller down and drink a glass of ice water before the bar hit 100%. The cold water kind of shocked my brain out of being mad. This tween said, I made it through the whole week without losing my cool once. I got to play in the tournament and I actually played better because I wasn't tilted the whole time. I love this. Let your kids listen to this podcast, all the episodes, most of them, and say, what are you going to do differently? Let them listen to the downloadable programs and come up with their own ideas because they're just really good at this stuff. So I would make a list of maybe five of the 22 ideas and begin making them part of your daily life and then add a few more. I promise you will not regret this. Keep modeling and teaching your kids these life skills. It is worth it even if it's a pain in the moment. That in itself is modeling this for your kids. So endure the short term pain for a long term gain. Thank you for working so hard. Reach out to Casey if you need help. C-A-S-E-Y. Celebratecalm.com. Love you all. Respect you very much.