Katherine Reynolds Lewis Interview. Ep 37

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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vandercamp. I'm a mother of four, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah Hart Hunger. I'm a mother of three, practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura, and this is episode thirty seven. We're going to be talking today with Catherine Reynolds Lewis, who is the author of a brand new book called The Good News about bad Behavior, about children and disciplines. We're looking forward to that. We're also looking forward to it because Catherine has been my long term accountability partner. She and I began checking in with each other weekly about five years ago that we both had long term speculative career projects we wanted to take on. She and I had gotten to know each other through sort of journalism circles, and I had read something she wrote for Fortune magazine about career coaches, and I emailed her saying, have you ever hired a career coach? How did it work out? She said, you know what, I don't need a coach. I just need somebody to make sure I do the stuff I'm supposed to be doing that I know I should be doing. So she and I decided to do that for each other. We'd be on checking in with each other weekly and so it's been really fun to watch her career journey and watch her finally bring this project, which started just as an idea to fruition. So we're looking forward to that in the body. That'll be the serious part of this episode. But we are going to start with total frivolity here because we are going to talk about hair. So Sarah, tell me about your hair. Hair yeah, And our discussion about this sparked the idea that we are going to in the future do an entire superficial things episode, So that'll be fun. But hair, yeah. So I've been getting my Hairjapanese straightened since two thousand and seven, and I do not hope to take Japanese. Well, the process did get developed in Japan. You know, people think of people from Japan with very very straight, silky hair. But actually they don't all have that kind of hair. So some enterprising Japanese person, probably from the Bland. There's two brands that do it. I think it's Licio and I don't know the other one, but Lisio is the one I use. They developed this method. It uses similar chemicals to a perm, so this is different from the Brazilian or keratin that's popular. My hesitance on the caraten is a it's not necessarily as long lasting and be the preparations. Some of them are thought to either form or contain from aldehyde, whereas the Japanese straightening process uses I think ammonium thiog whatever. That famous compound was in legally blonde, but it's a PERM compound and not a not something new. It's been used for years and years and years, but they just kind of change them so that you it takes forever. You apply this stuff and then you have to iron the hair straight, then you have to wash it all out, then you apply some other stuff to neutralize it. Then you wash that out, and then it takes for like five hours. But when you're done, your hair is frizz free until it grows out and it's straight. Some people don't like how straight it is. Like, if you want body, this is you have to either add it back or you know, you have to curl it or something. I don't really care about body. I just want smooth, straight hair that I can wear down without it being a mess and with basically no maintenance. So, because what would your hair look like if you didn't it, I mean, do you have curly sleeper? No? I don't. Actually it's like kind of wavy, but it's super frizzy and it's just you know, I had to let it grow out because I don't do this process pregnant. You know, there's no clear guidelines on doing it or not doing it, but I iron the side of not doing it while pregnant, and so I have to deal with my normal hair because I think I went like thirteen months between treatments and there's a lot of grow out within that time. And it's just you know, when I put it in a ponytail, I have like a halo of hair everywhere, and when I wear it down, it's just like in my like puffy. So I just love what this does to my hair. It makes it so low maintenance. Yeah, you know, I don't have to. I just literally like can let it dry wet, and it just looks straight and smooth and acceptable. I'm not going to say it looks like amazing every day, but it looks very polished and reasonable with literally zero effort except for that long block of time I have to spend doing it. Yeah, how often which literally takes five hours? Though, so I I, how often would you do it? Dump? Oh? If when not pregnant, usually every seven or eight months is fine. I mean, if you have super curly hair, you need it more often, but for me, I can get away with about seven or eight months. Okay. I find this fascinating because Sarah's got her wavy hair that she's trying to make straight, and I have incredibly straight hair that I'm trying to make wavy all the time. So you weren't going for frizzy. I mean, if I had one home perm back in the days of the herm, which it looked just about as you can imagine the home perm luked. But you know, I curl my hair pretty much every time I leave the house, like I you know, on days where I'm going somewhere, I will use my curling iron and just do a couple of waves around my face to give my hair a little bit of body, because otherwise do you have to do you have to dry your hair every day too. Well, if I curl it, then I don't have to write. I can just let it, you know, because usually I'm not leaving anywhere right at the beginning of the day. If I am, then I do have to dry. I dry my hair and then curl it, just because I can't curl wet hair right devvy More, it's more the hair neating to be dry in order to curl it aspect of it. But yeah, I began doing that, I think in high school, Like I started curling just to give it a little bit of body. And so now you know, whenever you see a photo of me, it's got a few waves around my face and that's what that is. I'm not sure how I would do that without sort of daily doing the curling. Yeah, it would be hard. Hard. There's not a jet. But it doesn't sound like it takes too long. At least on the days you can let an air dry and then just stick an iron. And yeah, I mean because I don't have to leave the house usually at a certain point, So you know, it's not not trying to compress the morning into whatever. I may have an appointment, say at eleven o'clock somewhere, so if I'm up at six in shower, like, the hair would have dried before then before I get around to actually doing it before going anywhere. But yeah, no. And I also I color my hair, which is probably obvious given the fact that it's blonde and all the photos unless you're like, yeah, that's true, most adults are not. But it looks natural. It looks right on you. It looks like I did. It's the funny part about it, right, Like it's the same shade as my three year old's hair, which is that's why it works. Yeah, people should like save whatever. I have not had to color my hair yet. I like have some like you know, I can find them gray hairs, and I'm just going to be sad when they become enough where I feel compelled to actually add color because it's going to be very hair to match the color. Plus that's more time and money and I'm just not ready to go down that road. Well, so I do it myself. This is the crazy aspect of it, is I actually color my own hair. Wow, also been doing that since high school. My technique has gotten a lot better because here's the thing, like I've done it so many times, like I have to do it every you know, eight weeks, six to eight weeks. So if you think of doing it five six times, well six seven times a year, you're good time. Kind of like going through beauty school there, I mean in terms of having, oh my goodness, what you have to what do you use? So it's lureal preference nine and a half A. The A stands for ash blonde. No, this is the ash coloring versus there's there's different tones and this is a key thing with hair color. And anyone who'd work at a salon would know this. And so when I talk about it with the salon people, they're always like, yeah, so it's the the ash coloring versus you know, whatever the other one is, which is not me. So I know the ash but it's nine and a half a light ash blonde, and you know, just it saves a lot of money because it's ten bucks for the drugs. Oh a lot, like a lot lot. Doing it seven times a year, that's seventy bucks. I would that would blow through that one. I'm impressed that you can get such a natural looking one at home, because I always thought that, like you could use kind of darker overdyes at home. But anyway, well, I mean we show like a beauty podcast. Now this may change because the various horrors of being close to forty. I was looking at what was growing in as I was examining our roots the other day, and there may be a few gray strands, strands that did not look brown on the growing in, so that seems like it would be easier to die blonde. I yes, well, yes, that's true, as they tend to get blonder. So we shall see how that develops. I may need to throw in the towel and get somebody who's a professional to do it, but for now I am cheap and proud, all right. So this brings us. Now that we're done with our friquality, we're going to go to our more portion and talk to Catherine. So we are delighted to welcome to the program today, Katherine Reynolds Lewis. Katherine is a journalist and mom and also the author of a brand new book called The Good News About Bad Behavior. So Catherine, welcome to the program. Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here. Yeah. Catherine was telling us that she listens to best of both worlds. Yes, I have been fascinated with work life balance and how we fit it all in for like at least fifteen years, which is the age of my firstborn. And I listen to every Tuesday morning while I'm walking my dog, so he gets an extra long walk that morning, right dependent if Sarah and I go on for a long time, he's getting quite an exercise, I guess. Yeah. So Catherine, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you wound up becoming a discipline excerpt. So my name, as you said, is Katherine Reynolds Lewis. And I have a new book book called The Good News about bad behavior, why kids are less disciplined than ever and what to do about it. And I'm a longtime journalist. I had started out in business journalism, and in two thousand and eight my bureau clothes, I was a national correspondent for new House News Service, writing about money and work. And at that point I had the choice between going back into a very phrenetic newsroom as the lowest person on the wrong and launching my own freelance writing practice, and I had built up a couple of side hustle gigs, so I figured I would give it a year and see how it went, and I found I really loved being independent, so I kept writing about workplace issues, careers, business, some family type stories. And then I realized, since I was on my own, I could just pursue whatever beat I wanted, so I reassigned myself to the parenting and education beat, and in twenty eleven really got interested in discipline. My own children were, coincidentally at that time six and nine or six and eight, so those kinds of issues were pretty front and center for me. And by the way, I'm based in the Washington, DC area and have kids who are now twenty five, fifth, fourteen, and eleven, and the twenty five year old is off launched fully independent. Yay. Yeah, it's wonderful. There's light at the end of the tunnel. There's light at the end of the tune. I know we talk about that a lot here. And you had wanted to write a book for a while, though, but you didn't know it was going to be this book per se. Right. I went independent partly for the work flexibility benefits, partly because journalism is such a tough industry right now that I figured it was better to have money coming in from multiple sources than just one employer. And also because I thought, oh, I can finally pursue this, you know, dream that I've had since I was twelve, to write a book. And Laura, you and I have really helped each other. You've helped me probably more than I've helped you. You've helped me too, And so I really wanted to write a book. And so I have this writing group that I'm part of, and you know, every year I would sort of say, this year, my goal is to get started on that book, and I just year after year just felt shamed that I hadn't done anything until you and I started checking in with these small incremental steps that we were going to take. And my memory is that over the course of a few months, I had a goal of spending two hours a week on reporting that would lead to the book, and you had a goal of writing two thousand words of fiction. I think something like that. Yeah, I love that, And you had written pretty much an entire novel the time it took me to write the magazine pitch that was like nine This was this was a structural problem with with Catherine's schedule to back up here, because I, yeah, really need we need our classic best of both worlds kind of walk through how you organize yourself and maybe what wasn't working before would be fascinating, right. So I had organized myself very well for the freelance writing, where I have a firm assignment and a deadline and I have money coming in, and that was working very well. I just kind of blocked out time in my schedule and at the time my kids were both still in One of them was in daycare, so the other one was in school, so I really had the full day, you know, seven or eight hours to work. But it was this you know, long term career development piece that I wasn't making a priority, and I have put it at the end of my schedule Friday afternoon, which is usually a quiet time, but I didn't realize that it's also the time when everything has to get wrapped up and I kind of have low energy. So Laura say, justin moving it to Monday morning, which turned out to be the perfect solution because my husband, Brian works from home on Mondays, so he drops off the kids. He really manages the whole morning, so I could just sit down as soon as I woke up do two hours of work on that book. Well at the time it was a magazine proposal, and then still have pretty much a full workday to get my paying work done. Yeah. So Catherine started doing this on Monday morning, working on her magazine pitch for this discipline story. Send it into mother Jones. Mother Jones took it. You wrote a story. What happened with that story? Oh? It went completely viral. It really amazed me, and it actually my editors at mother Jones were kind of amazed too, because it ended up being the most read story the magazine has ever published, and that is amazing. And it ran under the headline in the magazine of the end of Punishment, and online it ran as what if everything you knew about discipline was wrong? A total clickbait right there. Nice. So I have to thank them for packaging it and making it so appealing to click because today that's had nearly six million page views and it still keeps getting more. So that led me to an amazing literary agent, and he and I worked on a book proposal. I had written a book proposal, but it turned out that I had written a unsellable book proposal, so he helped me with making it more broad and appealing to a wider audience, and then we took it to publishers and had multiple bids and sold it last summer. Yeah, and so here it is. It's a long process, if anyone's wondering about the whole book publishing process takes a long time from idea showing there's a market for the idea, writing proposals, getting publishers to beIN on it, getting the book out, you know, many many years, right, It's like it's about five years now, right, since we started checking in. Yeah, yeah, that's right. And I think it's one of those things, sort of like parenting, where if you knew how hard it is, you might not go into it, but by the time, by the time you realize the commitment you've made, you're already in love with the child or the book idea, and you just persevere. Yeah, so tell us a little bit about the book. I mean, why is it that everything we know about discipline is wrong? Well, I got into the book project because of my own curiosity and challenges with not only my own children, but more so just everyone around me. I was a volunteer at the school, I was a Girl Scout leader. I coached my kids odesty, the my team, and in every one of those context, I saw kids who weren't cooperating with adults the way that I had cooperated when I was little. And really, most of the kids in my elementary and middle school, if an adult, even if they didn't know the adult, gave them some instruction, they would comply, and they might they might not actually follow through, but they'd at least pretend to be respectful. And I wasn't seeing that happen. So I just wanted to understand this just to make my own life more manageable, to make my home life better and these kids groups that I was leading more productive and cooperative. And it led me through this fascinating, huge pile of research that really shows not only have kids changed, but there's some very well founded, research backed methods for getting them to cooperate that aren't widely known. So the part about why kids have changed, there's really striking research that shows that anxiety, depression, substance addictions, and behavioral problems have gotten so big that one in two children will have one of those issues by the time they're eighteen, which that part absolutely floored me. I mean, thinking about that and my three young kids, it's like, Okay, well, the odds are against us from the start. I also was can you talk a little bit more about how they've changed with respect to mental illness, but also just even without those variables, because I thought that was one of the most striking parts of your book, and how you share the vignettes that really illustrated that. Right. It's the every educator that I spoke to who had been teaching for more than ten years said, yeah, there's just something different about kids now. They come into kindergarten and they can't keep their hands to themselves, they need a personal invitation to put their pencil down, and it's just different than it used to be. So there's three factors that have changed in the last twenty or thirty years, and we can't prove that any of them are the cause, because you can't randomly assign kids to grow up in a different time. But there's really powerful evidence that it's in the book that it's the decline in play, both outdoor play and unstructured play or less supervised play, the growth of media that not just so media, but just technology in general, and all of these things that turn our focus outwards and encourage children to look externally for validation and for a source of you know, who do I want to be? And then the lack of connection that we have just because of our busy lives and our far phone flung families and communities that are not as neighborhood centric or not as physically together as they used to be. And those three things are changing for kids and for us as well as adults. I mean, parents now actually spend more time with their children than in previous times in history, and yet we feel often so disconnected and phrenetic and stressed, and so sometimes we don't feel that we're present or we feel that we're not doing enough when we're taking on a bigger burden than get parents and previous generations. Was that addressing the question that you wanted me to answer. Yeah, Well it's interesting Catherine though, because I mean, and so I mean, there are these changes with you know, as you said, screens and connection and sort of independent play and stuff like that, but in terms of sort of the biggest misbehavior with kids like that, I mean, so adolescent crime for instance, is down. So how does that play into that. Well, there's some really interesting evidence, and I would point to Gene Tweeniet in San Diego that it's almost as if children are growing up slower now, and so some of the behaviors that kids got into in their teens, like early sexual activity, crime, you know, really getting into drugs and alcohol, they're delaying, and so children have sort of a prolonged childhood in terms of their sphere of influence, even just their independence Physically, children are much more likely now and tweens and teens are much more likely to just be home, you know, within sight of their parents, and not as engaged in the kinds of crime we're sexual acting out or risk taking that they used to, and yet they're doing things often through their cell phones or even just through that isolation that turn a lot of those problems inwards. So that's why we're seeing such an increase in anxiety and depression and self harm and suicidality because children don't have the freedom, or they don't feel a drive to go out and ride their bike around the neighborhood, and instead they may be sort of on their iPad looking at Instagram or feeling bad about themselves, and that turns some of those so instead of feeling powerful and having this scope of freedom, they're more inclined to just turn those things inward. So what is it that we get wrong about disciplining them? Because the title on the Mother Jones story is the end of punishment, and obviously a lot of what we think about a child dispondes these, you know, various punishments of various things for acting out, So what's wrong with that mindset? The basic problem is is that we need children to learn to self regulate, and there's so much evidence that children no longer can manage their thoughts, behavior and emotions the way that they could in past generations. And by the way, that's what I was referencing is when you talked about how they were timing kids to see how long they could sist still and the kids of today being markedly different from the kids of the seventies, I think it was, Oh my goodness, that was absolutely striking. So I guess yeah, to me, that sold me on, Okay, we need a solution to this, and that's kind of where the rest of your methods come from. So okay, keep going. But I just wanted to mention thank you, And that was what actually got me interested in what they called the century experiment in Russia, where the raw number of seconds that a child can stand still when told to do so by an adult has declined dramatically. It's about a quarter of what it was fifty years ago. So the basic paradox that we face as parents and educators and anyone who cares about children is that in order for children to learn self control, we cannot be controlling them all the time. So in order for them to learn to manage their emotions, learn to manage their behavior, they need to have this measure of freedom to make their own choices and to make their mistakes and learn from them. And as parents, and I know because I do this myself, we want them to get it right so often and we're on top of them trying to help them make those right choices that they lose that independence. And it can be as simple as this freedom to kind of run outside and play, play with a friend, maybe get in a fight and come back and deal with that themselves instead of us jumping in to try to help them manage it. And on the radical side, talk about the sort of cleansing weak approach, because this was also quite shocking to me, and I don't think I'm quite ready for it, especially given my kids' ages. And I'd love you to comment on how old your kids have to be for that to work. But tell our listeners about that, because yeah. So, in my quest to find out, you know, why kids don't what we want anymore and what can be done about it, I went to Vermont to Vicky Huffle, who's an author and parent educator there who wrote a book called Duct Tape Parenting, and she teaches the parents in her classes, whom I followed a few families. She teaches them do nothing, say nothing weak, where you do not correct, direct, reprimand punish, reward, bribe, or otherwise intervene with your kid's actions, and instead you can only the only tools you can use are noticing what they're doing, giving information, encouraging, and connecting with them. So you're sort of letting everything happen and follow as it will. And during that week you take note of, Okay, what can my children do independently? From now on? The things that they can do and will do are their domain, and that's really our role as parents is to constantly put you putting more in our children's sphere of influence and less in ours. By the time they're eighteen, they can launch. You also during that week, note what they can do but are not willing to do, so, for instance, tie their shoes or paying their backpack up, or things that they clearly can do but they are not yet doing as a habit. And then the third category is things they can't do and they won't do, and so you sort of just systematically try to move things from that you can do and won't into the can do and will category, or the can't do category into the will do category. So you're sort of constantly trying to increase your children's independence, their capability, and really you can start super young. I visited one family that had four year old twins and a seven year old boy. Twin girls and a boy, and they were, i mean, starting fires in the fireplace, They were folding laundry, they were packing their own lunches, and so many of these things that we do because it's faster and we all have busy lives, or we do because we want them to have this balanced, beautiful lunch for their lunch box. They could do and that would give them not only more control and that sense of autonomy that is so important for well being, but it would also take one more thing off of our shoulders, which I think is something especially important to your listeners, that it's one less task on our to do list if our child's doing it themselves. But what about issues of safety though, because I think that some of the discipline stems from concerns about safety. I mean you mentioned the four year old starting a fire. I mean I have a every year old who would leap into the fire if not restrained. At some points, I mean there are certain where does the safety factor come into this? Yes, absolutely, when there is a case of health or safety, the parent can just act unilaterally. But you try to make that the exception rather than the rule. And it really depends so much on your own child. I mean, truly, this family that I visited in Vermont, the things that they were doing, my kids couldn't have done at that age because they were just different kids. So you really have to also know your own children and be realistic about what will work for you and your life and your family. But as much as possible, just think about it from that perspective that you try. Your goal is not for everything to go perfectly, but to give them the chance to try new things, to take on more independence, and to have your home be that learning lab for mistakes where it's okay if they don't get it perfectly right or they make a mess. And while also yes, health and safety, so things like toothbrushing is something that kids are not going to see the immediate consequence of neglecting their teeth, So that's something where often parents have to find a way to be more interventional, or running out into the street, you know, in front of a car you can grab your kid and and pull them back. You can think of it in terms of things where you need to sort of create the consequences. So if it's teeth brushing, you can quietly say like, oh, you know, if we don't brush our teeth by this time, just so you know, we won't have time to do this, and then I mean you kind of use that example versus something like, oh, well your teeth will just rot. You know, kids are not going to be ready for that long term consequence. But you can use mutually agreed upon other consequences as kind of a placeholder exactly, I know, truly we as parents are our kids' prefrontal cortex. We are using, we are creating the executive function until they're ready to take over. And we all know that kids. I believe many people know that kids executive function their ability to plan and problem solve and make smart choices with the consequences in mind, It does not develop fully until really their twenties. So we're we're in charge of that, you know, and try to give it up little by little as they grow. You know. We really cool if we could study these methods and see if there's actually a neurological correlate to earlier development of that of that axis, I mean with like functional yes, And that's I think that's the next that's the next wave of science that I start talking about my book, where the scientists have sort of figured out what happens in kids' brains when they're disciplined or when they're acting out, and now they're trying to really look at what type of parenting influences those neural connections in a positive way. So what happens after the week of no nagging? I mean, what I do just want to introduce, like, you know, after you take food allergy and stuff out you introduced slowly right, well, then you really I think that the class after the class came back, the class of Vickiy Huffle's parenting class that I observed, they came back and they had been just this revelation of all these things their children were capable of that they really hadn't believed. So I think that week is like a cleanse. You know, you you have a new understanding of yourself and your children, and that lets you by agreement with you know, depending on your children's ages, you'll as a parent have more or less say in that agreement. So if you're very young child children, you may give them two choices. If you have tweens, you may leave it open for discussion. But you talk about what are the routines that our family needs, and what are what are the things that you need support with, and what are the things that you can do independently, and then just let them do all the things that they have shown they can do and will do, and that is no longer ever your job. The other parenting method I looked at was the Parent Encouragement program here in the DC area, and they say that anytime you do for a child, what they can do for themselves. You are robbing them of the opportunity to grow and be independent, and that's something that I hold very truth. Yeah, so, Catherine, I mean that's that's certainly when we're talking about, you know, things we can do with children. Maybe you know, discipline issues that stem from like not putting your shoes on or whatever you're going out the door in the morning, But what about stuff like fighting with siblings and the discipline issues that stem out of you know, children actually you know, hurting each other or being really mean to each other in the household. Do you know what comes from that? That is one of the hardest issues because as a parent, you just want your kids to get along and to be each other as champions, and it's really painful to watch them fight. And I have that experience myself all the time. So we teach I'm a certified parent educator with the Parent Encouragement Program, and we teach that children as much as possible, you want to let them work it out themselves. So think of them as sort of little bear cubs or puppy dogs that for them, a lot of times, the play is also the fighting is also play. So you want to first look at with a very neutral try to take your own emotion out of it and really say are they fighting because it's fun or because they're bored, or is there really an issue that's a conflict. So if they're just fighting to pass the time, which often children do, you can leave or put in earbuds so you don't have to hear it. You can if they're fighting over something that's a true conflict, you can comment on it, like I see one child, one toy and two children. That's a tough problem, and that helps them to frame it and work it out. And then the third step is if you really need to intervene, you can take with a toy away and say it looks like this toy's causing a problem. It's going to go into time out. So you're not taking either child's side. You're not trying to adjudicate, because once you come in and try to be the judge, then you just worsen the conflict because they both want to fleed their case with you. But as much as possible, be neutral, help the children frame the issue, and then you can always speak separately to the children about like what does that fight like for you? And what do you think you might do in the future. And this is the kind of coaching that I believe parents nowadays just need to do more of than certainly my parents did, because children need more of that help sorting through their own feelings and their choices about their interactions and siblings are the perfect place to really learn how to get along with another human being when you have conflicting goals. You mentioned a time out for the toy. Let's discuss timeouts in general. So timeouts are super controversial and I don't recommend them, but I also do recommend that you talk to your kids at a time that is not a heated moment, so they're not in the middle of a meltdown or a conflict, and ask them what helps them when they're having a tough time, and they may come up with time alone is helpful, or time in my room by myself helps me calm down. And so that's the case where it's a positive timeout that they've chosen. So if your child's having a meltdown or having a crisis and you're able to reach them that they can actually hear you, because often they can't. But if you're able to sort of put a hand on their shoulder, put a hand on their arm and they don't fling it off. You can say to them, which of the strategies that we brainstorm would help you right now? Do you want to hug? Do you want to go to your room? You know what would help you? If none of that works, yes, of course you can always sort of give your kid a big bear hug and say something like I love you too much to let you hurt yourself or hurt someone else. And that sort of pressure and hug from a parent can can serve the same purpose as a time out of helping the kids self regulate. In my book, I talk about, as you know, that touch and empathy are really powerful in helping children to gain control of their emotions and their behavior, so that parental connection is really vital. I will, for one, say that timeouts do not seem to be particularly effective with my children and usually lead to an escalation about being in the time out itself. So I was sort of happy to see your stance on that, and I have tried it a little bit, you know, sort of more just pausing and giving them space to deal with being bad, and also using the phrase work it out when they're fighting and I will say it is not perfect. It is completely work in progress, but it does seem to work better. And the more authoritarian model that you talk about in your book of Okay, that was bad, you get a time out, but you know what you talked about this too. You do open yourself up to judgment from others when things occur in a public place and you're not maybe doing people may expect you to be more authoritarian in certain situations when maybe you know that it would backfire, but you also feel judged from taking a more appearingly hands off position. How do you handle that? Well, it's definitely been a journey. I mean I had a whole process of learning to live with my child going to school well tangled hair because I had decided that was not a fight that I was going to have. And for me, what has helped is to really see this as a crisis. Our children are in crisis. There is a self regulation crisis across the country, and my child's independence, mental health and well being is more important than what those other parents think of me. And it's not easy and I definitely slip up, and certainly I want everyone to understand that the you know, there's a lot of imperfection in the book. I share a lot of my own parenting fails, and if something's working for you, I would not say, oh, you must stop doing timeouts or whatever, but just to think of it in the very long term that this moment of feeling judged and criticized silently by other parents is not going to matter in ten years. But your child handling that problem themselves, your relationship with your child, that is what's truly at stake, and that's the most important priority. That's awesome. I find that empowering. I'm going to keep that in my head. Right. Yeah, I had a little bin yet that. I mean my kids at the end of swim class. I sort of asked them to come to me, and instead they both jumped in to the deep end where there's a climbing wall and they can swim, like there was no imminent danger. But my thought was, oh, my god, Like, I look like such a bad mom because they're really not allowed to do that. They're breaking the pool rules. I should have calmly walked over and been like, you're breaking the rules, You're going to get in trouble with the pool. Instead I was like screaming at them, And then as I read your book in retrospect, it really was the authoritarian versus authoritative. My method didn't work, and it really did come from a place of oh my god, what is the pool people going to think? Like, it wasn't about you know, whether the kids were going to be safe. I knew they were fine, So it really I think that's it is a journey, and I'm just sharing that. But yeah, because I'm sure others have been through a similar thing, but you really have to think, like about your well being. If your kids are okay, then letting them work through a situation can may make everybody for adult regulation here because again a lot of the stuff comes out oh yeah, yeah, not that I would need that, but you're very angry because like your child has just willfully emptied the soft soap all over the house and you ask why, and the child says, I wanted to make a mess. That's just an example. That's never actually tell me, yes, I honestly example. Well, so, first of all, I think one of the messages I hope comes through in the book is that we parents should embrace our own imperfection. So if you lose it in that moment, it's okay, and you it's actually a great opportunity for you then to go to the child and say, I'm really sorry I lost it over this officer because it was something that I didn't want. But it's never a good reason to yell, and they're you're modeling to the child how do you recover from losing it and making a mistake, And you're also showing them how you calm down. But suppose you don't want to get to that state where you lose it. There's so many great strategies. Even something as simple as taking three deep breaths gives you a moment to think. It helps your body physiologically to self regulate, and then you can respond more easily. You can also do what I call the mumble and walk away technique. If you are standing there and you're like, okay, I know I'm not supposed to yell, but nothing else is coming into my head right now, you can pretend you heard something from the other room, or like I forgot something on the stove, and just say oh and walk away, And that can give you in the other room a moment to pull yourself together and decide, Okay, how am I going to handle the situation. And then the other thing I would definitely say is as much as possible, try to surround yourself with supportive, like minded parents who are going to judge you, who will accept that your children have messy hair and forget their you know, there's sweatshirts at the school, and try to not connect with the people who are so perfect and tightly controlled that are just going to make you feel bad about yourself. Well, And I think something to consider with that too is that children are all so different, and some kids are just easier to discipline than others. There are absolutely, you know, issues of you know, there are people who's and say like, maybe more often little girls, for instance, are just attentive in school. That's just they're more program that way or whatever. And then there's little boys who are acting up. And it can be little girls too. But I'm just experiencing this from the perspective of having three small boys that you know that you have to keep in mind, you know, from the perspective of not judging yourself or judging other parents, that it may be that this parent is doing the best they can with a child who is more mischievous, who is more rebellious, who is more whatever it is, and that's that's part of being gentle on ourselves and others as well. Absolutely, I love the way you put that. Yeah, well we Sarah, did you have anything else you wanted to ask? No, But I really, I'm sincerely just as people listen to this, if this resonates with them, I highly recommend checking out Catherine's book because I really did find it really thought provoking. In fact, I may use it for our parents, which we've started, because even if you don't use everything in it, there's just a lot of food for thought there and a lot of methods that are certainly worth the good news about bad behavior. We're releasing this episode, I believe April seventeen, which is the book is now on sale. Yeah, so you can go check that out and learn about how to help children learn to discipline themselves. So, Catherine, we end each episode with our love of the week, So something that's making our life better, more fun easier each week. So Sarah, you want to go ahead and start and we'll ask you last, Catherine, so you can you know? Sure? So I've experimented with various you know, one of the things we talk about fairly frequently. Is exercise just sort of one of those foundational things and being able to fit it in in a convenient and efficient fashion is very important to many of us with families and jobs. So I've been into kind of efficient online options. I've done bar three. I used the dia DM method for a little bit after having Genevieve my third, but I actually switched to Mama Strong, which was recommended by several of my readers. It is these fifteen minute workouts. It's two dollars a month, so low commitment there, and they're great. They're not super professionally recorded, but the instructor is super enthusiastic. I'm sore from my workout yesterday. They're fifteen minutes long. I'm finding now that really these sort of independent women starting their own little another one. For example, they're something called Yoga with Adrian. They're not big corporate machines, but they get the job done. They're very inexpensive. Yeah, so Mama Strong and now Yoga with Adrian. And if you have a favorite online yoga that you use, I'm looking for more suggestions and those over tis Sarah. You can comment on her blog, you can email us Instagram, any of that. We're looking for good online yoga resources, all right, So my love of the week is my keyboard. I have this Yamaha keyboard that I actually bought many years ago my first job out of college. I was a year long intern at USA Today and one of my first checks I earned from writing columns for them. I put the money into buying this keyboard because I missed playing the piano, and of course I didn't have a piano and access to it as a you know, person living in an apartment shared with five other people. Whatever. So I bought this keyboard, which it's seventy seven keys, so not the full eighty eight, but it's most you know, enough keys that you could play pretty much any piece, and they're weighted keyste so it feels more like actually playing the piano. And you know, I still use it to practice music now. I use it when I'm practicing singing, to accompany myself and my kids are learning the piano on it. I just sitting in my office and I'm thinking, wow, you know, that was probably one of the best three hundred bucks I've ever spent in my life. So love of the week this week for me Catherine, how about you. Oh gosh, this is hard. Can I make it something abstract? Sure? Okay, So yeah, my love of the week, I would say, is asking for help, because I have done that a lot in the process of writing and launching this book, and in particular this week, my parents. This is part of my own work life balance. My parents live with us, and they have just been amazingly helpful. My mom has cooked I think every meal, and my dad has dealt with my power trouble, and friends like you, Laura and other writing friends have been so supportive and helpful in getting the book out to people. So asking for help has just saved me this week. That's a good love of the week. In general, we should always ask for help, whether it comes for you know, the logistics of our life or you know, certainly in the issue of kid discipline, as we've been talking about in this episode. Well, thank you so much for coming on, Catherine. We really appreciate it. My pleasure was really a lot of fun. So that was a fascinating discussion with Catherine. But we're going to bring you our traditional Q and A to end this episode. We actually had someone ask how does podcast work? Behind the scenes? I've never done a podcast, and I'm curious to your process, and we are happy to share. We are definitely still novices. We are thirty seven episodes in, but there are many many people who've been doing this for a lot longer. So we can just kind of give you give you our process. Yeah, so we I mean the basic software. We use Zencaster to record, and the cool thing about the software is that it records the soundtracks on each of our computers separately, so it sounds like you're sort of in the studio recording. So we are nowhere near each other right now, Sarah, Yeah, we've never been well, you know, we've met each other, Yes, recorded a podcast together. She's in Florida. I'm in Pennsylvania. But we're talking through our computers to each other. We both have fairly high end mics that we use medium and I guess that's true. You can spend infinite amounts on my cur they're like one hundred dollar mics. They're not I mean, you can even on Amazon they're like five thousand dollar mics. And then I'm sure professional recording studios have like, you know, tends of thousand all. I don't know. Yeah, I'm sure, there's like entreaty on microphones is what you could do, but we each have those in our headphones and then Zencaster records and then when we're done, we ship it off. Yeah, so this was a big thing. We could have gone the entire do it yourself route, and a lot of people do. There's a lot of resources available that teach you how to process your own audio, you know, mix in an intro. We kind of decided that we don't have time for that and we would rather fix that by outsourcing that part of things. So Laura had some connections. Do you want to tell Oh? Yeah, so Phyllis. So Phyllis came to us through Hi Phyllis high Perlis, through Nancy who Hi Nancy who's been working with me on digital marketing for years and years and she knows a lot of wonderful usually women own businesses who are in the marketing space. So Phyllis and soud Advice at Sales came to us through that. So Sarah loads the files up on dropbox. Uh, Phyllis downloads them and works her magic to make it sound better, to take out background noise, to take out our pauses, to take out our you know, people working on that happened there something dumb. Yeah, all that good stuff. Although if we still are saying something dumb, it's because it was too much in the in the fabric to take out. So I'm not saying we've never said anything. Maybe with not I use some words that maybe were not the wisest but anyway, so yeah, and then and then she gets it sent up to the various places, to iTunes, to stitch er. We we have Libson is the host, right, is that where it's yes, l I B. S y n is like the most one of the most commonly used hosts for podcasts. So if you have done any podcasting, you've probably seen that as one option. Yeah. And as for the editorial content, I mean, that's just us coming up with stuff pretty much. Yeah. We usually, you know, we'll go down some rabbit trail and then think, ooh, that could be its own episode. Or sometimes we're inspired by a Q and A or some dilemma that's happened, or a guest will approach us that seems like a really great fit for our listeners, and then that's always really fun because that will drive the topic of the discussion as well. Yeah. So that's how we come up with it. We exchange notes beforehand so we know, you know what we're going to talk about, what we're going to ask our guests, and then we just roll with it. Yes, we always do take notes. I don't think either of us could do this without preparation. But the nice thing about that is that can be done flexibly on our own schedules. And you know, sometimes I kind of lead the charge and sometimes Floridas, like with this episode, since I just went back to work, she kind of put everything together, but we kind of share those duties. Yeah, so that's how it girks, and it's been pretty fun so far. I feel like we've grown in our podcasting roles definitely, since I have learned a lot. I mean, I've never interviewed anyone before and it's really fun, and now she's interviewed some pretty awesome people, so we've really enjoyed it. But yeah, please keep the questions coming and we would we'd love to have more of them. You can always email me al Vanderkam at yahoo dot com or post them on either of our blogs. Laura Vandercam dot Com is me the Shoe Boxes. The Shoe is s h U Sarah's initials box box dot com. We we'd love to hear from you. So this has been Best of Both Worlds Episode thirty seven. Tune in next week for more on making work in life fit together. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of Both Worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together. A