Dealing with Disrespectful Behaviour at Home, School and Beyond

This episode delves into the exhaustion that 'on-call parenting' can induce and how we might be reinforcing disrespect without realizing it. We'll be digging into the subject of teaching everyday respect to our children—a task that requires more than just stern talks about expectations. I underscore the power of leading by example and how everyday dialogues shape the foundations of respect in our kids. It's about showing them that respect is not rooted in fear but in mutual understanding. By weaving respect into the fabric of our daily lives, we not only prepare our children for the world but also open ourselves to the lessons they can teach us. 

Using my signature framework, The Language of Kindness, I tackle building connected and respectful relationships at home and beyond. This episode is an invitation to parents and guardians alike to reconsider the way we approach respect and the lasting impact it has on our little ones.

___

Get your quick and actionable tips, blog/podcast updates and curated children's book recommendations by joining Tara's Take the Newsletter HERE

You can also submit questions directly to me at info@taragratto.ca or by heading to our website HERE

------
The music for this podcast is written and produced by Jazlyn B with the guidance of Sabine Ndalamba

Note: This podcast is created for educational purposes only. Any references links, resources or content are not intended as a substitute for medical or professional mental health advice.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:49

It has been a bit since I've been here. There were a lot of things that happened and I took a slightly longer break than anticipated, but I think there's some valuable sort of things to share in this. I'm a person who is highly motivated, highly dedicated, highly focused, and it can be very, very hard for me to step back, but I'm also highly dedicated, highly motivated to my family, and one of the things that happened in the late fall is that we sold our house and we moved to a condo. It involved a renovation and it involved some school changes. It involved a lot of changes in general, actually. So one of the things I had to recognize is that there are things that I need to step back from in order to be able to focus on my family, and I think that is not always easy to do, especially when we have our extensive to-do list or the things that we feel passionate about or the things that society tells us that we should be dedicated to. So my podcast I've said this before is something that I do as a community service. I am not in any way paid for this. It's something that I enjoy doing and I have missed doing, but it is something that I do. I'm going to put air quotes for fun. So one of the things I had to step back from was being able to podcast. So I'm glad to be back and I'm hope that you're glad to have me back and let's start tackling some topics. So one of the things that I want to talk about today there's two topics that I want to tackle pretty soon. I asked on my Instagram stories last night, actually, which one I should do first, and I got a solid 50-50, 50-50 vote. One of the things I said is, hey, would you like me to talk about good old-fashioned respect, because it is something that I've been asked a lot about in my work and one of the things that I found is, parents are really struggling. Parents are really struggling with kids being disrespectful, that they're just not listening and they're not sort of being kind to adults and people who have a lot of life experience and world experience and that kind of thing. The other topic I said is, hey, shall I talk about perfectionism or should I talk about the things that are sort of contributing or maybe what I think causing kids to just not want to do stuff without being perfect at it right away? I don't want to try that because it's too hard, I don't want to do the thing because I'm not going to be good at it. So the idea of kids aren't willing to take as many risks with anything, whether it be artwork or a new sport or climbing something at the playground or whatever the case may be. So those are the two topics that I was asked or I've been reflecting on thinking about, and I asked in my stories and I got a solid we want both. So I definitely plan to do both. I just wasn't sure which one I was going to do first. I actually think I'm going to do respect first, because it is something that during my time away from podcasting I was still doing all the things that have to happen. One of those is extracurricular activities and another one of those is supporting kids in schools and what that looks like, this fear of parenting in general. I did an in-person parenting program at a local gym. To me it was really cool because it's the first time I've run my program in person. Even though it was a small group, I got a lot of great feedback. But the theme whether it's been in my virtual or in my one-on-ones or in my interactions in the world. The theme is that parents are pretty exhausted. One of the reasons they're exhausted is from what I call on-call parenting. That is where a kid says something and you respond immediately. One of the reasons you respond immediately is because you're afraid of how they're going to react if you don't Right. Are they going to freak out? Are they going to yell at you and all those things. One of the things that I like to boil that down to is my kindness model. I have the language of kindness. It's one of my foundational concepts kindness to self, kindness to others and kindness to the planet. We're going to focus on the second one, which is kindness to others. Now, quite often in this category, a lot of people will be like, okay, yeah, of course, be kind to other people. That's pretty status quo. One of the things that I like to say is what does kindness and calm look like? So that's a pause for reflections. Let's think about what does kindness and calm mean? That means when we're in our safe space, when we're just navigating the world together, when we're in our homes having conversations with our kids. What does that tone of voice look like? What did those interactions look like? One of the things I noticed even about myself. When my kids were younger. I used to be quite a sarcastic person. It was kind of my motive funniness, if you will. One of the things that I realized when my kids were younger is sarcasm is not super kind, it doesn't promote kindness, it definitely doesn't promote kind interactions. It's kind of like belittling. It was sort of an all-ah-ha moment for me to realize oh hey, wait a second. Is this the way I want us to engage? Is this the way I want us to talk to each other? So kindness and calm? Is this idea of how do we talk to the people that we are closest with? How do we navigate those conversations? And quite often, when we take a step back and in the last 20 years of working with people and almost four years of working more intensely one-on-one with clients, one of the first things that comes up is actually no, I'm a bit of a dormat and I allow my children to speak to me a bit like a dormat. And there's so many layers to this and there's something in a love to call unintentional reinforcement, this idea that there's a bunch of things that we do and we don't mean to create reactions or relationships around them. We're just trying to get through the day. We're just trying to problem solve. We're busy and we're overwhelmed and sometimes we just don't have the capacity for the negative reaction, for the pushback, for whatever the case may be. But one of the byproducts of that is we have kids who kind of believe that adults are there to service them and that respect is something that they don't understand. Now here's the Part B conversation. So we have kindness and calm and how are we talking to each other on the everyday? And when we really step back and reflect on that, a lot of people find, oh, how I'm talking in my home isn't actually super kind, a respectful. And so there we have one model of what does respect look like and where we really target it is not in conflict, because we already know that's an area that we have to focus on. We have to focus on in conflict and difficulty and how we're treating other people. What does that look like? Less often do we think about well, what? I think that when things are kind of OK, how are we talking in those moments? Or when they're sort of equal, what does that look like? What does that space look like? And then the part B is a lot of parents and people and educators right now are sort of rethinking children and child development and how we want to raise kids, and one of the sort of intentional concepts coming out of that is we want to do less punishment, less shame, less blame, less physicality right or no physicality and one of the sort of tricky pieces is in that is, when kids are operating in fear, they do things. Now what we've also learned is this is not a great way to do things and it has all kinds of implications in terms of trauma and in terms of actually really learning to develop and be an authentic human being, and what those long-term trajectories look like is not great. So what we say is okay, we need to be more intentional about how we're raising kids, but we're missing a big piece here. So if fear and blame and shame and all those things we're motivating kids to be quote, unquote respectful, if we really step back and think about that, we're like, oh wait a second, they actually listened to adults because they were afraid of them, not because they respected them. Those are two very different things and you can sort of think about that in terms of your own life. Right, do we resonate with the idea that we actually authentically respect someone that we fear? Probably not right. So if we're thinking about respect as a concept and we're like, okay, kids right now are really disrespectful and they really just don't listen, there is a missing piece here. There is a definite missing piece here. One is how are we talking in that calm, right, kindness in calm? And what are we modeling at home? The other piece is if we are not using shame, blame, fear or discipline models where kids fear adults, how are we teaching them what respect looks like? And this is, you know, if you look at some different cultures across the globe and historically, the idea of, like, what is the value of elders and what is that sort of place? And I like to talk a lot about this idea that adults and kids are not the same, right, if you look at our brains, of course they're not the same. Yet we talk to kids as if they are these mature little adults and they're not. They are not Brain development. I mean, the trajectory on that, we know, is at least 25 years. I know I've said it before, but this idea that children are smart, intelligence is one thing, but they are not wise, right. Adults are wise because you've had lots of life experience to go along with your learned experience. Kids are not wise and they have not learned much about life, so we can't assume that they know those things. Now for thinking about respect in this sort of realm, we have to think about okay, what are we modeling at home and what are we teaching kids about respect and our expectations around respect, and how are we showing and telling kids our expectations around respect? Right, so if we're not forcing respect which is not really actually the definition of respect, for not forcing kids to listen, to pay attention, to do what they're asked to do, all those things how are we teaching them that people have value, even people we don't necessarily like, and I talk a lot about this with kids who maybe don't like their teachers, for example. There are personality conflicts and not everyone is a great match, right? I'm sure we can all think of bosses that we've had to interact with that were not our favorite people, but we needed to interact with them because that is a valuable life skill, in my opinion. You need to be able to interact with people that you don't always get along with, and you need to be able to get through things. I'm currently in school. Right now I've gone back to school for my master's in counseling psychology to become a certified therapist, and there have been some very tricky elements of doing this right being thrown back into different kinds of group work and stuff like that. We all have to coexist with different personalities and how we work through that really is important. We can't just avoid it. So this goes back to the idea of respect. How do we respect right? How are we respectful Even when we maybe don't agree? How do we respectfully disagree? This is a skill we now need to teach. So this idea and I'm going to use sports as an example because I've seen this it's funny. I was thinking about this the other day. I know I have a podcast about not throwing kids into extracurriculars and I realized at hindsight I was like I should have been very specific about that. I should have been young kids and I think the general theme of the podcast was that we don't need to throw young children into lots of extracurriculars because they're still trying to navigate the world and build their personalities and quite simply, the sort of keyed model of extracurriculars has really influenced why kids do so much stuff. But there is an important value in extracurriculars for older kids right, sort of the 10 plus zone. That's a really important part of their life skills as they go up through the tween and early teen and on years. So it's not that extracurriculars are quote unquote bad, it's that they have a role to play in different developmental sort of areas. Anyways, so my kids are in sports and one of the things that I have noticed is a lack of respect to coaches, right, and I was having a conversation at a tournament recently with a couple of the coaches and they're like, yeah, they just don't listen, they don't pay attention, they just kind of are living in their own worlds which, depending on the style of coach, the age of the coach, in terms of, like, their world experience, the expectations really do vary. But the central theme regardless was hey, we're all having a bit of a hard time with getting these tween teens to be respectful and pay attention and sort of be on board, and the one of the things I said is we haven't taught them what respect looks like. Before you listen to coaches, because you were afraid they were going to make you do a thousand pushups or whatever. The case may be right, so there was a fear based model and now there's a less so and it's less socially acceptable to do some of these things, and that's a conversation for a different topic. I know people have lots of thoughts about that, but let's just like focus in on why kids aren't running over to listen at the time out. When it's at practice they're not fully engaged or whatever the case may be right. It's that whole lesson on what does respect look like and why is it important and how does it sort of help everyone? Right, how does when the coach calls you over for the time out, why does it matter that you run over? Why is that an important thing to do? And I know people are like well, that's quite obvious. I have a saying stay to the obvious until you know. A child knows. So I know we assume children are awesome and intelligent and amazing and they know so many things and they do, but we also assume they know way more than they do, especially about things that are no longer a given right, this idea of like why is it important to run over at a time out to listen to our coach? Why does listening to people that we may not agree with matter? What's the life skill in that Right? So when we're thinking about respect. There's sort of two avenues that I like to talk about. One is how are we modeling it in calm? What does that look like? So we often focus on sort of negative conversations and talking about like how we should speak to each other in conflict. But truly, how do we talk to each other in calm? Because that's where you can have the great lessons about respect, truly respect. And I like to call it kindness, because that sort of helps kids resonate with like kind. How can I be kind? Because you can be kind with people you don't agree with. Right, you can disagree with kindness. That is a very real thing. Kindness does not mean placating. Kindness does not mean people pleasing. Kindness is not being mean, being agreeable. It means how are you saying what you need to say without attacking, without the nasty right, without that? And then the part B is how are you building and fostering respect as a life skill and how are we teaching it? Because if it's not a fear-based society, if we're not using fear, which again isn't really respect. But it did garner attention from children to adults, right, when they were afraid of their teachers, coaches, parents, etc. They did do things quickly. So in the absence of that, how do we help them understand why that's valuable, why doing those things is valuable? And they're gonna tell you straight up it is not a one-time conversation, it is little, tiny conversations woven in right. It's tiny conversations woven and to help them understand what that looks like, with the layer of how it's had a lot of lived experiences. Some of those lived experiences shape them to be difficult. I think the shapes have to be difficult. It also shapes them to be sort of knowledgeable and worldly. And how do we learn from all those layers, from very difficult personalities to very interesting worldly personalities? Because everybody has something to offer and everybody has something we can learn from. But if we wanna truly teach respect as a value, we have to think about those moments where respect isn't happening and say, aha, why isn't it happening? Well, am I modeling it and am I actually actively teaching what respect could mean? So that's my take on teaching respect. I have a couple other layers to the conversation that I'm gonna build on, but I'm gonna start here with this little sort of conversation about how are we actively teaching kids about respect by modeling a teacher?