Video Transcription:

Greetings it’s Dr. Cale again and this is day four and how to build those habits of success, how are we going to create the best year ever for your kids academically personally even in terms of responsibilities around the house. It all kind of comes together if you start paying attention to these core concepts.

Now, today we’re going to talk about a concept that has powerful ramifications. This concept is really at the core of how you deal with difficult challenging children, how you deal with the home, and a way to make sure that habits become automatic. It’s really about how do we get out of the business of trying to control our children and into a life where those routines become automatic.

Now, here’s the core idea that I’d like for you to focus on.

We do not control our children. Often, we end up speaking to them like we do have control: pick that up, put that away, leave your brother alone, cut that off, sit down, didn’t I say to put that away. We were talking to them as if when we speak they should jump and many of us think that that’s true and I am not here to suggest that our children shouldn’t listen to us or that your children shouldn’t listen to you.

They should and everything that we’re doing here everything in my practice all my products are designed to create a home where children respond in a respectful rapid way to the kinds of routines and structures and the requests that mom and dad make but we teach kids to listen not by pretending that we have control and all you’ve got to do is watch that three-year-old when he or she is standing up to mom and going no when you tell them to pick up their toys or to eat their broccoli or whatever the case may be. So we see it very early on that children start to assert their independence that your words dad is not going to control me so if we can appreciate that if we try to use our words to control our children we’ll end up over and over and over again in this word battle.

It almost becomes like the word diarrhea. It just flows over and over and over and then the older they get they’re talking back and all these words are getting exchanged wasted wasted wasted minutes and hours sometimes every day with words going back and forth and nothing getting done. So, here’s the second part of this. We don’t control our kids but we do control everything they care about just think about it there’s nothing in your home that you can’t control meaning you can lock it up, you can shut it down, you can turn it off, you can throw it in the trunk of the car, you can lock it in the closet, you can clear out a bedroom, you can take the door off the bedroom, you can do all sorts of things that do not involve trying to tell your child what to do.

Now, this is magical because see when you can control everything that your child cares about you now have leverage, you have a tremendous amount of leverage to be able to get things done and to motivate them to take care of those important things in life like getting their homework done, taking care of responsibilities around the house, picking up the room, vacuuming the carpet, taking out the trash, perhaps walking the dog.

Whatever those things are maybe even it’s going to be practicing the piano or taking care of some other uh responsibility that you have a recall on day two where I begin to sneak in this idea of work than play. If you can imagine then, if we have the rule at home that we take care of work and then we play and I focus on rather than trying to force you to do the work, I focus on controlling the play. Notice the difference of what happens when I’m trying to tell you, harp on you, yell at you, remind you, argue with you, negotiate with you about getting the work done. I’m trying to use my words to control my child and it usually doesn’t work very well at least for a lot of kids it doesn’t work very well.

Let’s try it the other way instead of trying to harp on them and push them and remind them to get their work done. Let’s say I focus on gaining impeccable control over everything that they care about: all the toys, all the goodies, all the electronics, their friends, the car. Nothing works unless I say so notice how empowering that is if I give up trying to control something, I can’t control my children instead I focus on controlling what’s within my control which is everything else in the house all the goodies and all that stuff and I just make sure that until the work is done no goodies get turned on.

Can you imagine how powerful that is? That’s one of the lifelong secrets that you want to learn to be able to manage the routines at home so your kids can thrive because the more that you stay in harmony with understanding this principle then you don’t end up nagging, yelling, reminding, prodding, screaming, yelling, negotiating, crying, demanding, threatening, fighting. All that stuff goes out the window because I focus instead on controlling the goodies and I make sure that I see that the work is done before they get to the goodies before they can play.

See, I can control that I can’t necessarily control them very well when you pay attention to this secret when you learn how to implement this simply on a day-to-day basis your whole life changes in that it gets easier and much simpler to manage the routines, more importantly, their life gets easier why because they can resist and fight you for a while but over and over again regardless of the diagnosis regardless how difficult oppositional strong-willed regardless of what’s going on with your child.

You’re going to see that they all eventually come around because they all want the goodies. It always works in my back-to-school secrets program. I talk a lot about how to implement this core concept to make sure that regardless of what you’ve experienced in the past you get out of that habit where you’re nagging, reminding, screaming, yelling. All that stuff and you get in the habit of controlling the goodies and just letting them resist your bed, letting them fight and struggling and throw a fit if they want to.

Meanwhile, we just want to focus on making sure that they don’t get to the goodies, they don’t get to the play until that work is done. This is core master this pay attention to it listen to this again really think about it because this is at the fundamental. This is the fundamental basis that shifts your life from one where it can be reeling out of control where to nurture all sorts of negative patterns with your kids where you’re harping at them when they aren’t doing what you want them to do.

They learn to harp back at you when you’re not doing what they want which will be fairly often of course and the older they get the uglier this gets because when you’re frustrated you get ugly with them, you raise your voice, you may be your your voice sounds ugly it sounds negative, you start to create an environment where there’s all this nagging and you hate the feel of it they hate the feel of it but then when they turn 10, 11, 12, 13 and somewhere in there it starts to come back at you oh and then it’s brutal because then they they become this teenager on hormones who’s now kind of out of control with this tool that you taught them which is I nag until I get what I want, I yell, I argue, I negotiate, I scream, I push that all comes back at you so we have to change that we have to make sure that we get out of that pattern and at the core of that change is shifting your focus from trying to use your words to control them to focus in your energy on the environment the goodies, the electronics, the car, the friends, the phone, all that is within your control.

If you’re willing to take a strong assertive position and understand that this is the one area that you can master impeccably with just a little bit of effort a little bit of time and a little attention so that’s at the core of how you make all this come together but summarize what we’ve talked about on these four videos.

I’ve talked about routines the importance of a morning routine afternoon and an evening routine. I talked about why consistency helps your children to thrive not only because it reduces anxiety but because it makes for this predictable life that energy and valuable intellectual resources are not wasted on small decisions that instead are left to the real learning and the opportunities to grow and enhance their brain in ways that matter.

Secondly, I’ve talked about why it’s important to start now not to take this as a concept that you can keep in the back of your mind you’ll talk about it for three weeks and the next thing you know it’s Thanksgiving and nothing’s happened.

Thirdly, I talked about why it’s important to be a model for success to make sure that you’re paying attention to all those areas we talked about so that we’re not modeling the very things we don’t want our children to do.

And Finally, I talked about why it is that we don’t control our kids and we need to focus on what we do have control over which is all the goodies all the aspects of the environment in the home which we can control and how that this gives us leverage to make everything come together. So, I hope you enjoyed these four videos it contains the most important lessons that you need to master to help your kids thrive.

If you’d like to learn more about how these lessons come together in a simple step-by-step system that contains all my most advanced strategies, check out backtoschoolsecrets.com (no longer active – instead Click Here). if you go there I’ve got a very special offer. if you follow this link at the end of the video which gives you a discount that’s not available to anyone else.

Again, this is Dr. Cale. I wish you the best this year. I appreciate your attention your interest in this if you have any questions you’ll see my emails there on the site please email me. I appreciate any feedback take care now.