Justin Coulson was once a successful radio host, after realising that his family was at risk of falling a part he went back to studying and graduated with his psychology degree from the University of Queensland and his PhD in psychology from the university of Wollongong.
Rescu. was thrilled to sit with Justin, author of 21 days to a happier family.
We asked Justin to share his insights into parenting and how to understand children better.
Image credit: Justin Coulson
RESCU: How did you come around to be working on parenting issues?
Justin Coulson: So, in 2002, I was one of the best radio announcers in the country. I played a lot of today’s best music while you worked, and spending my days in the studio interviewing global superstars.
I was really good at what I did, but I would go home each day to my wife and two children, a three year old and newborn and I just had no idea how to be a father. My toddler was really testing me. Parents were struggling with their kids and I thought I knew all the answers then I had my own toddler and I had no idea and my approach, pretty typical for most dads. You do the whole super nanny thing that is not acceptable, you send them to time out or whatever and that’s what my approach was when she would not comply with my simple request.
I realised I had a problem and that I was going to hurt my family if I didn’t change what I was doing.
RESCU: You talk about how to raise your children without yelling at them. Let’s talk about that and some tips.
Justin Coulson: Let’s put this into an adult’s perspective for just a moment. If you’re in a relationship with another adult, and that person starts yelling at you, would you say that you’re inclined or disinclined to listen to them?
The usual response from most people is: I don’t like it when people yell at me. I get a very strong feeling that when someone is yelling at me that they are out of control and that they are not thinking about me or about our relationship at all. It’s all about them and their incapacity to actually function.
RESCU: Do you think that children feel the same way?
Justin Coulson: Unquestionable. When we yell at our children, it’s a tremendously disrespectful way to communicate with anybody.
Let’s think about it, the only reason you need to yell is either it’s an emergency or somebody can’t hear you. Most of the time, when our children won’t clean up their room, it’s not an emergency. I think what we actually got to do is, instead of blaming the children for being disobedient; we got to ask ourselves what we’re doing. Think about the balance of conversations we have with our children.
Our children don’t listen, because they know as soon as we call their name, it’s not because we’re going, ‘hey, let’s go down to the shops to get an ice cream’, it’s ‘hey, you haven’t cleaned your room’.
RESCU: What is your advice for engaging better with children so you’re not correcting or directing them too much?
Justin Coulson: First of all, the number one, anti-yelling strategy. And I think it’s disrespectful we do this all the time, we actually shout from one room to another. But it’s so much more respectful to walk to our child, and speak to them softly, calmly and kindly. It literally is that simple, just walk to your child and be in their space.
The second thing is, we need to consider the timing of what we’re asking. Because sometimes we do ask them to do things and timing is all wrong, or their develop mental capacity might be wrong.
We might say to our child: I want you to turn off the game and go and do your homework. It’s true that the child might be on the game for the last hour, but if they are right in the middle of a level and about to get a high score or they’re in a middle of a mission then our timing is actually a little bit rude.
Maybe we say, “Ok, we know you’ve got 15 minutes to go and I know you’ve got to finish the mission. When will you be done?’ We go and negotiate a time right then and there and then we go and set the oven timer and we make sure when that’s done, it’s game over. So we pick our timing, and we just need to be respectful of that, it’s just a nice thing to do.
RESCU: So what happens if you do that negotiation and the timing comes and the child is like, ‘No daddy, no mumma, I need five more minutes, I don’t want to’. How do you then navigate that?
Justin Coulson: The secret is always be calmer than your child, for one. Number two, the next thing that we do is calmly say, ‘I really understand you could play all night, or all day, or forever, for the rest of your life but we made an agreement and I expect that, that agreement is fulfilled’ and then you just stand there and don’t say anything else.
You just stand there and look at them and wait, and if you’re standing there for 15 or 20 seconds and they still haven’t acted, then you repeat yourself, quietly, in fact more softly the second time. ‘I just said something to you and you seem to be ignoring me, I don’t want to yell, I don’t want to threaten and anything bad to happen. What do you think we need to do right now’. And they get it and they’ll respond and if they don’t, the last straw is that, unfortunately, from time to time may need to resort to some sort of control technique but you don’t need to yell. You just calmly walk over and unplug the television and say, ‘We obviously need to talk about this another time when you’re calm. We made an agreement and you’re not fulfilling it’ and then you walk away because trying to have a conversation when it gets to that point, it’s not going to work.
But you’ve giving them multiple opportunities, you’ve given them four or five opportunities before that, when you’ve been very calm and not controlling at all to make good decisions and do the right thing. What you’ll usually find, except in the most unusual of circumstances, is that most children will respond to respectful discussions around timing and limits.
They might still whine and moan a little bit but with that first clear request, you’ll usually get the response you need. Usually. Once they become teenagers, it becomes more complicated, but usually you get the response that you need.
RESCU: What do you think of either throwing the dinner in the bin or taking a favourite toy away or cancelling a play date as a parenting technique?
Justin Coulson: Any of these kinds of strategies, we call them discipline. They’re not discipline, they’re punishment.
If you look up punishment in the dictionary, you will see its something that resolve ‘to hurt another person because we don’t like their behavior or what they’ve done’. When you look up discipline, it says, ‘to teach, to guide, to instruct’.
They need limits and they need love. But the way that we confide those limits is critical to raising resilient kids and raising children who go on to lead positive and productive lives. The best way to do this, is we teach them and we let them figure out what they want to do based on what we’ve taught them.
We stop trying to control them, because all that leads to is resistance and instead we teach them, we guide them and instruct them. We teach, we guide and we instruct them and then we say to them, ‘Now that I’ve taught you this, what do you think is the best thing to do next time this happens. How can we get this right in the future?’ With the younger children they obviously need more support around this kind of instruction.
Part Two: Insights into rewarding children
Justin Coulson’s 21 days to happier families is now available for purchase