How to Talk to Kids About Anything

Special Guest: Jonathan B. Singer, PhD, LCSW

This podcast provides tips and scripts for talking to kids about suicide. What are the risk factors? What are the protective factors? And what should we say if a child seems that they are hopeless, helpless or have said that they are thinking about ending their life. This is an uncomfortable topic- but one that we should and need to discuss.

We’ve all heard the labels. Strong-willed, spirited, explosive, and highly sensitive. As parents of kids who have been marked as “difficult” we need an alternative road map to guide us where conventional parenting tools have failed. We need a way to calm the chaos. My next guest explains that there are five steps to calming the chaos, each step bringing us closer to family success even as emotions run high so that we can build a safe haven in our homes that support healthy kids.

The world today can feel overwhelming- complicated, overloaded, moving at the warp speed! What do kids need to thrive—so that they catch their breath before facing the next hurdle, cope gracefully with the ups and downs of life and bend not break? My next guests provide 10 essential, actionable strategies that we can use to raise kids who can. Who can roll with punches, connect, deal with frustration, bounce back and ultimately thrive. For this, we will be talking to my new friends, Catherine, Heather and Jennifer.

Special guests: Joanna Faber & Julie King. What do you do with a little kid who won’t brush his teeth? Screams in his car seat? Pinches the baby? Refuses to eat her vegetables? Throws books at the library and runs rampant in the restaurant? We’ve all been there. How many of us have seen the parent with the child at the supermarket who is throwing one big tantrum in the cereal aisle because s/he won’t buy the super sugar rainbowloops that he had to-- HAD TO-- have? How many of us have BEEN that parent with that child? No judgment- we are here to discuss it and get some strategies and scripts to all parents who have ever had some trouble with their young kids.

Many of you who are hungry for parenting and teaching knowledge probably know the blockbuster best-selling book, How to Listen So Kids will Listen and Listen so Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish. It’s a staple on my shelf. Well, Adele Faber has a daughter, Joanna Faber who not only grew up being the recipient of all the strategies Faber and Mazlish described in their mega-bestseller, but also wrote a follow up book with her childhood best friend, Julie King that takes a similar structure, using common challenges of young children and provides tool after tool to help anyone with children ages 2-7.

Joanna Faber and Julie King are the authors of How To Talk So Little Kids Will Listen: A Survival Guide to Life with Children Ages 2-7 (Scribner 2017). The book has been ranked #1 as a best-seller on Amazon, and is being translated into 17 languages world-wide. Joanna and Julie created the soon-to-be-released app Pocket Parent, a companion to their book, as well as the app Parenting Hero. Joanna and Julie lead workshops online and in person, consult privately and give lectures in the U.S. and internationally. Visit them at HowToTalkSoLittleKidsWillListen.com or on Facebook.

We live at a time when many parents, out of love, do so much for their kids—so much so that kids are not learning the skills they need in order to thrive. This is one of the reasons why I created one of my free bonuses for the How to Talk to Kids about Anything book launch—118 Skills to Teach Kids by Age 18—a checklist of 118 skills that allows you to ensure your children are ready to thrive on their own by the time they leave your home. You can access that bonus list and several more at DrRobynSilverman.com, under the tab “book.” Now—what about when you are NOT raised in a home where your parents are doing a lot for their kids—maybe because they can’t, maybe because they won’t, maybe their life situation dictates that the children need to be independent to survive. Yes, what is you are raised in a home where you wonder if you’ll have food on the table and anger and shame are the norm? How can we learn to show up for ourselves, strategize ways to succeed, hustle, learn and become? And then, how, as a parent, can we instill these lessons so they can live boldly- no matter where they started in life? I think we can all learn something from my next guest who created the life she wanted by discovering the strength she needed was within her all along.

Special Guest: Karen I. Wilson, PhD

Approximately 5% of school aged children have a learning disability and 13% of all public school students receive special education services. Another 15% are struggling due to an unidentified learning or attention issue. Struggles can look different in different children at different times of their childhood. Their struggles may be an issue with listening, concentrating, motivation, focus or other under-developed executive functioning skills. Children with learning disabilities not only cope with the disability itself but often misunderstanding of the disability. People may think that their lack of concentration is due to laziness, for example. They may believe that their impulsivity is linked to rudeness or feelings that their needs and wants are more important than other people’s needs and wants. So it’s not surprising that sometimes, with misunderstanding comes mislabeling. “That child is rude.” “So and so is a lazy child.” Mislabeling can linked to behavioral problems and can cause a lot of anxiety in children as they struggle to either prove someone wrong—or, prove others right as a self-fulfilling prophesy. Children with learning disabilities also must cope with teachers, administrators and parents jumping to an intervention that may not address the actual problem. How do we talk to kids and help kids who are struggling with learning disabilities so that they can reach tier potential and achieve their goals? For this, we turn to our guest, Dr. Karen Wilson.

I’m so excited today for this special podcast where Dr. Robert Melillo is interviewing me on my new book, How to Talk to Kids about Anything! It’s out now wherever books are sold and I hope you have yours—it’s currently #1 on Amazon in the School-Age Children Parenting Category—and that’s because of all of you. Thank you for your support- and please review it- those 5-Star reviews make a huge difference in the algorithm. So TODAY- I want to introduce Clinician, brain researcher, and Best-selling author, Dr. Melillo is one of the most respected specialists in childhood neurological disorders in American and has been helping children with learning disabilities, autism, ADHD, OCD, dyslexia and more for over 30 years. He’s the author of Disconnected Kids- and we interviewed him here on that very book, along with several others including Reconnected kids- and there’s even a TV show based on that one. We’re flipping the script again so here is my guest interviewer for How to Talk to Kids about Anything, so take it away, Dr. Robert Melillo!

We have a lot of TOUGH talks on this podcast. We’ve talked about sex, porn, suicide, bullying, neurodiversity, failure, death and so much more. It was always my aim to present you with the entire child development pie and invite amazing guests on the show, bestselling authors and top experts, who could dig deep, providing you with the deep slices of that pie so that you can have these conversations with your children and teens—and that they will come to us when they need someone to talk to as well. One thing I know for sure is that if we want our kids to talk to us about anything, we have to be willing to talk to our kids about everything.

Today’s guest in the hot seat is ME! Ha! Since my book comes out today, October 10th, and I couldn’t be more excited to share it with all of you. You’ve been part of my village and my community since 2017—we have been through a lot—and talked about some very intimate things—I will ask now, as I’ve never asked before, would you please go to wherever you get your books—Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Books a Million, Target, your local Indy Book store and order How to Talk to Kids about Anything right now. It’s been 6 years of work—interviews, researching, this podcast which I have never charged for- writing and editing-- and I know you will find it worth it and love it—and once you order it and receive the book, please give those 5 star reviews because that will get more people to know about it, buy it, use it, and make a difference with their kids. Would you do that now please? Thank you in advance!

And now for my amazing moderator for today, none other than, my husband, whose been through it all with me. So I hope the Dads will give a good listen to what he has to say, he’s been through it all with me. The good, the bad, the ugly and the utterly hilarious. Jason Silverman and I have been married for almost 25 years- he’s a brilliant marketer, the founder, Chief Executive Officer and president of Silverman Consulting and Systems Success Mastermind, he’s a business development coach, my partner in Powerful Words Character System, and my partner in life—so welcome to the How to Talk to Kids about Anything podcast, and now, I’ll flip to guest mode!

Special guests: Dr. William Stixrud and Ned Johnson. This episode of How to Talk to Kids about Anything focuses on effective communication tools that parents can use to best reach their children as they enter middle school and the teen years. How do we engage in respectful and effective dialogue, give constructive feedback, problem-solve and provide boundaries and still navigate the complex terrain of teenhood? Dr. Robyn Silverman interviews William Stixrud and Ned Johnson in this lively and fascinating exchange.

What to do when your child throws a tantrum? How to react when your child hits, punches, or bites? How do we help to co-regulate our child’s nervous system? And how do we head-off tantrums before they happen? As you know, we’ve entered a new way of helping our children through big emotions—moving far away from the ways our parents used to parent us and their parents used to parent our parents. Instead of pushing big feelings under the rug, hiding them in the closet or stuffing them down into our bodies like a batch of old brownies, as our understanding of developing brains has increased, today’s parents are looking for a new way to help their children understand their feelings and learn to process them. Who is leading the way for us today? Alyssa Blask Campbell is joining us for her second time today.