Join Angie Austin as she welcomes author Jeff Schott to discuss his impactful book, The One Rule Home. This episode dives deep into understanding adolescent anger and the role the adolescent brain plays in emotional regulation. Jeff and Angie explore how traditional approaches to parenting may inadvertently contribute to family conflicts and how creating a culture of love can transform familial relationships.
welcome to the good news with angie austin now with the good news here’s angie
SPEAKER 01 :
Hey there, Angie Austin here with the good news. Talking to Jeff Schott, the author of The One Rule Home. Destroy the world’s influence in your kid’s life. We’ve talked to Jeff several times and we’ve invited him back because The One Rule Home really is all about love and the Lord. So let’s get rolling, Jeff. I want to talk to you today about anger and teens and kids, kids in general. Can you kind of give a brief overview of what we’re going to discuss? And then I’m going to give you a scenario of something that happened at the basketball court with my family this week.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, no problem. I think one of the challenges we have as parents of kids that are, let’s say, age 8 to 10, why are they getting angry? Why are they reacting? What we found is they begin to get frustrated with how we approach them. And our research found that around that time they start going, wait a minute, this isn’t fair. It’s safer for me if I hide things from my parents because of the way they react or what happens. And so when we tend to discover those things and we bring them up, they get angry because they’re going, wait a minute, no one takes away my parents’ cell phone or screen time when they get upset with me. And so there’s this perceived sense of fairness or right and wrong in our kids that we’re tripping over with the way we tend to approach them, the way we’ve been told traditionally to approach them. So that’s one element of anger. The second is the adolescent brain and the changes that happen in the adolescent brain where, you know, 18 months prior to puberty, adolescence actually begins. And when that begins, hormones begin to flow that lead to puberty, but it also kicks off development in the adolescent brain. And in the adolescent brain, what happens is synapses start to get formed in the back lobes of the brain, but the brain delivers a finite amount of electrical activity. So it has to take electrical activity from the front lobes and shift it to the back lobes And guess what’s in the front lobes of the adolescent brain? Emotional regulation, planning, and short-term memory. If you’re a parent out there, that should be dinging some bells. Wait a minute. You mean when my kids said they forgot to take the garbage out, they actually did?
SPEAKER 03 :
Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER 02 :
Why didn’t you take the garbage out? I asked you to 10 minutes ago. They say, I forgot. We don’t believe them. We think they’re ducking. They’re lazy. So we come at them from that angle and they get angry because they actually did forget because short term memory has been greatly impacted by the change in the adolescent brain. So this starts as early as eight and nine for girls and nine and ten for boys. And and then when we also look at emotional regulation, their emotional regulation decreases And so things that used to frustrate them, but they kept muddled by their mouth because they knew it would lead to bad things with us, their emotional regulation has decreased. And so things will come out of their mouth that they wouldn’t typically ever say before. And that’s why we go, what happened to my sweet kid? And what happened is the adolescent brain. And what we need to realize is the kids don’t understand this either. And they get really upset with themselves. They’re like, I shouldn’t be saying these things because it just leads to a problem with my parents. And I want to stay close to them, but I don’t know how. And I can’t stop myself from doing this. And they get more and more pressure and more and more frustrated with themselves, which makes them even more sensitive and more reactive to the things we say that are negative. OK, and we can get into this horrible cycle.
SPEAKER 01 :
OK, so let’s let’s do the finished overview now. And I want to give you the scenario. So where are we on our overview? Because I know we’re going to do three big questions.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah. And I think, you know, I think let’s just do the scenario and then we can go for.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, sounds good. So we’re going to talk about what causes anger, and we’ve got two things to discuss there, and then how we handle it. And, I mean, I could give you a bazillion scenarios because we took a family vacation and we took a teenage girl friend, you know, my daughter’s friend with us, that everyone’s friends with, everyone likes her in the family. And that had some interesting, you know, anger issues in there trying to keep her to… Hope wanted to keep her to herself and not let anyone else, you know, like paddleboard with her or, you know, my younger daughter to play a game with her. So that was a whole weekend of that. But just this week, we went to the basketball court at night. They built a new little park in our little small neighborhood. Um, and there’s a tiny, uh, park when they added a basketball court. So anyway, we all go over there and I’m like walking the dogs and in the court, cause it’s all fenced in and it’s my son. He’s 18. My daughter, she’s a really great basketball player on club. She’s traveling like four times this month to different cities for her, with her team. She’s going to be a freshman. And so she’s playing against him. And then my husband who normally he just rebounds the ball for my daughter and Several days a week, she does hundreds and hundreds of shots while he rebounds. Well, she wanted to play with her brother. Well, he’s maybe 180, and he’s 6’2″, and she’s 90 pounds and 5 feet. So as they’re playing, I can see he’s being what I believe to be too rough. But, you know, he… You know, in a big high school, like 3,000 kids, a lot of kids don’t make the team that would make the team at many other schools, right? So he didn’t make his team as he got older and like junior and senior year because you’ve got 10 kids and you’ve got, you know, 500 trying out or something. It’s unbelievable. Like for volleyball, how many girls try out for the 10, 12 spots? Yeah. It didn’t mean he wasn’t good. It just meant that he wasn’t going to play in college. Let’s put it that way, because most of these boys that made the team, a fair amount of them will play in college at a school of 3000. So anyway, he proceeds to be rough. And then she proceeds when he says she calls it trash talking. When he says something and she proceeds to remind him how he didn’t make the team. You know what I mean? So it starts to get really nasty. So I see him bodying her. And she is little. And I’m like, why does he feel the need to body her? Is it because he wants to show her he’s better? He wants to prove something? So then my husband decides… he’s going to jump in there and he says, Faith, that’s the littlest one, Faith, they’re going to trash talk you all over the court and I want it not to affect your game because they win when it affects your game. So you’ve got to get used to people like your brother being jerks and trash talking you. So you need to get used to it. Well, of course, but they’re brothers. She cannot take it. So she’s got to lash back. So then my husband jumps in, Jeff, And he’s 52. He’s extremely fit. He’s 6’6″, but he’s 52. And my son is 18. So they get in there and my son, my husband thinks I’m going to show him what it feels like when he beats up on his sister like this. And he bodies her when he, when she, you know, he’s trying to go to the basket, you know, and like, you know, it doesn’t knock her down, but he’s really physical with this little girl. So my husband’s like, well, I’m going to teach him not to do that to his sister. So we’re going to get into a physical game. Well, my husband forgets that now that my son is 62 and 180, that he actually probably is becoming stronger than my husband, you know. And so they are in this mashup trying to get in there. Somebody got an elbow to the head. Somebody has got something hit somebody’s glasses and my husband’s cheek got cut. It was a street ball. It was street ball. And neither of them were giving in, right? So then my son’s totally angry. And then by then my husband’s angry. And my son storms off and walks home. And I said to my husband, I’m like… This sure didn’t end well. We came here to have a good time, and all three of you got into it in this competitive game of basketball. And my husband says to me, I swear to you, Angie, I felt like I was literally going to have a heart attack. I needed to stop because my heart was racing so hard that I was going to have a heart attack. I’m like, so here we are, ready to break. The sister’s arm could get broken, and the dad’s lying on the court having a heart attack. So I talked to my son later. I’m like, does it need to come to this? And he was so angry. He walked home. I’m like, how do we keep our anger in check so that others aren’t harmed on the basketball court or wherever in life? And he and I had a really good discussion. And in fact, that night when he was going out, we all came back and he was getting ready to go out to the gym or whatever. And he says, you know, love you, mama. And he’s like, oh, nice to me, you know, because he and I can communicate because we don’t get into that kind of argument. I’m not saying we don’t argue. But Yeah, I don’t really know when it gets that heated and when the kids are yelling and they’re off their rocker. Like when we were on that vacation and my daughter, Hope, is like outside at a restaurant. We’re sitting at a cafe and she’s telling me off and other families are staring. And she’s delightful. I mean, she is a great kid. And she just couldn’t control herself that she was going to tell me the way it was. And then… At the next restaurant, she says to her friends, we’re outside again. Let’s just get our stuff in and just get out of here. Like she couldn’t stand to be around us. And so I was infuriated. So I don’t even know where to go with some of this stuff. I don’t think I’m very good at handling it except for the conversations I try to have with them soon after this happens.
SPEAKER 02 :
Okay. So this is great because one of the things we talk about in the One Rule Home is is building a culture of love as opposed to a culture of rules. We were not building that love. Rules tend to cause us to get frustrated, feel controlled, all of those things which tend to be unmotivational and don’t lead to closer, tighter relationships.
SPEAKER 03 :
No.
SPEAKER 02 :
And so there is a way to use love to manage these situations because love is faithful, love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It’s not easily angered. It doesn’t insist on its own ways. It always hopes, it always trusts, it always perseveres. Okay, 1 Corinthians 13, 4 through 8. And so in this situation, when we’re instilling a culture of love like it talks about in the One Rule Home, what we’re doing is we’re talking about love as an entire family, the different aspects of it, and how we can become more loving. And one of the things we really recommend families do to be loving with each other, because when we end up angry and saying mean things or yelling at each other, Or even retreating, you know, sometimes we’ve got the fight. We’ve got someone that goes fight or flight. They go fight. Some go flight. And we found in the research from kids that when parents flight and run away or move away, and especially moms, if they go to tears, that actually damages and hurts kids more than being yelled at. And so how do we avoid that? We do that by putting in place an agreement that we’re going to love each other and how we’re going to do that. is we’re going to empower everyone in the family to call a timeout. I like that. The second they start to get frustrated or someone starts to elevate to a level where we think it’s going to start becoming damaging to the relationship and are trusting each other and remaining close to each other, anyone can call a timeout. And that causes the interaction to stop. And then there’s three questions we recommend that… they go, each individual in the situation goes back and asks themselves, okay, what was upsetting me? How was I feeling? And why was I feeling that way? And so each person separates, they go through those questions and they come back and they share how they were feeling. And we found when we share those things, light bulbs go on and we are communicating at a deeper level. And we start to understand how our actions and words are impacting those around us. how they’re feeling. And it’s that loss of radar we’ve got in our culture where we don’t understand other people’s thoughts and feelings, and we’re only consumed with ours that’s leading to so much of the anxiety, the animosity that exists in society today, and it’s causing it in our homes too. So the timeout is a great proactive way to prevent damage from happening in our families.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, so the timeout. Is that the good time to have the discussion about this, or is it a timeout and you take a break and then all sit down and discuss this?
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, yeah, you take the timeout, and then whoever was involved in the timeout where it was going wrong, they go back, answer these three questions themselves, and then they come back together. And sometimes that can happen quickly. Sometimes it may have to happen the next day just because there’s an activity going on. But because we haven’t let the anger take over, we’re not going to bed angry. We’ve stepped in and prevented that. Now we can come back and talk calmly about it with the understanding of what was really going on inside of me and the other person. And we share that with each other. And so, no, this is something you come back 15 minutes, an hour later or twice. You know, depending on your schedule, it may be the next morning that you you sit down and say, hey, and it’s really vital that you circle because the learning doesn’t happen if you don’t circle and have that conversation.
SPEAKER 01 :
All right, Jeff, we’re almost out of time. Can you stick around for a little bit longer and we’ll continue to discuss?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes.
SPEAKER 01 :
OK. All right. Well, we’ll be right back with the good news. And we are speaking with Jeff Schott about the one rule home and that one room means one rule means a lot of love.
SPEAKER 05 :
Arc Thrift has the summer clothing and household items you need. With 5,000 new items on the floor every day in 35 locations across Colorado, Arc Thrift also needs your donations of houseware, small furniture, electronics, and kitchen items. Donate generously and check out their stores. They’re looking for small electronics like alarm clocks and radios and all types of home goods that could include lamps, side tables, blenders, food processors, and more. Clothing is always a need for families, and Arc Thrift knows how quickly kids grow out of their clothes every season. They have clothing for all ages and times of the year. For any large furniture, you can schedule an online pickup with Arc Thrift. And as long as there’s a large furniture pickup, you can give them up to 20 boxes or bags for free. Go to arcthrift.com to schedule your large furniture pickup and to find the nearest location to you. That’s arcthrift.com.
SPEAKER 03 :
Pine Bluffs, Wyoming is tuned to the mighty 670 KLT.
SPEAKER 01 :
Hey, continuing our conversation here on The Good News with Angie Austin and Jeff Schott today. The one rule home, you know, destroying the world’s influence in your kid’s life is what his book is about. And we’re talking about anger. In the first segment, we talked about this basketball playing with my husband, my tiny daughter and my big son. And, uh, how it got so heated in terms of the competitiveness, but then just the treatment I felt of, you know, my son being too rough with my daughter. And then my dad, my husband wanting to teach, you know, my son a lesson and it just, yeah, it got heated. Okay. So we talk about the timeout. Now I want to ask you, uh, Jeff, uh, What do you teach in the one rule home about the timeout? Okay, they’re in this game. Do we actually stop this game? What if they’re doing something you can’t necessarily stop? Do you say, we’re taking a timeout from this issue, but are they going to continue to play like that? How do you do the timeout if maybe you can’t stop doing what you’re doing?
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, like with the basketball game, you could stop. Everybody could take a time out and calm down and think through the questions and then come back and chat real quickly and then pick up playing again. Right. So it can happen quickly. But, you know, in most instances, when when we come to a culture where we’re agreeing, we want to love each other. We want to stop hurting each other. And everyone wants that. And when we make that commitment to to making love the one rule in our home. then it gets easier to implement things like, you know, in that situation, your husband, you may just call your husband on the side and call timeout just with him. And say, hey, I’ve seen this go the wrong direction. This is what’s going on. And prefer you not have a heart attack. Exactly. When it comes to addressing anger, though, obviously there can be triggers. where something, wounds in our past or negative core beliefs that we’ve adopted through life that we hold often unconsciously can be triggers for us. So all of a sudden you say something pretty simple and someone’s angry pretty quickly, right? In that situation, the timeout’s even more important. But what we need to realize is that when we’re addressing anger with our kids, if we will ask them questions and draw them out, they will begin to learn and grow and learn how to manage their emotions. What I’m seeing today so much of with kids is that parents are trying to protect them from feeling like failures and protect them from having bad situations, hard feelings, those types of things. And as a result, kids aren’t learning to manage their emotions like they once did. Like when I grew up, I went out and played games with the neighborhood kids with no adults. We had to resolve our own conflicts and make up our own guidelines for the game and all of those things. Kids don’t have that today. So what we’ve got to do in our homes is when they get angry, instead of saying this is wrong and trying to cut it off and coming down on them for their anger, we need to go, hey, let’s take a break and then come back and say, so what was going on inside? What were you feeling? Where does that feeling come from? Is it some sensitivity you have because of something you believe about yourself? Is it something coming from the past? Why is this so sensitive? And as they begin to process that, and then we can talk about in the context of love, we need to manage our emotions. Our feelings are our responsibility. We need to learn to manage our emotions so that when things bother us, when we start to get upset, we notice we’re getting there. We don’t have to yell. We can come and say, hey, I’m getting upset, Mom, because when you say things like that, it makes me feel like you don’t believe me and trust me. And we need to get our communication going. We can share why we’re upset and angry without yelling. And that will lead to a much healthier set of interactions and growth and learning for our kids.
SPEAKER 01 :
I agree. I absolutely agree. So as far as – I get the impression when we’re talking about – what’s causing them to get angry and then how we handle it. We’ve got a lot there on how we handle it. But in terms of what’s causing them to get angry, I feel like with my kids, and I’m sure it’s a much deeper than this, but a lot of it seems to be ego, the way that the little one and the older one go at each other. And he’ll still let her know he’s better at basketball. I mean, yes, she’s 90 pounds, you’re 180 or whatever. Yes, you’re better. But he wants to say that because she is on track to do something with her, you know, basketball, you know, school career. And so and then it just goes back and forth. And it seems like there’s a lot of ego in there and like really wanting to hurry. Like he heard me. No one can stop the hurt cycle of saying the mean things when they get going.
SPEAKER 02 :
Got it. And I think what we need to realize there is it’s not necessarily ego. What it is is the absence of ego. And what I mean by that is. In our research, what we found was that a vast majority of kids in our culture today are raised in such a way that they end up with negative core beliefs. And they get formed by age six. And so, like, I had a family here last summer, and we were working with their older kids, their 10- and 12-year-old and the parents. And I was shocked when their 5-year-old wanted to get involved and started doing the pain sheet and going through it. And she actually was able at age five easier than her parents to identify her negative core beliefs because she hadn’t learned to stuff them down in her unconscious. And so this little five year old had this negative core belief list of I’m unlovable. There’s something wrong with me. I’m a failure. I’m stupid. And those things led to the sensitivity that caused her to need to compete and point out her siblings’ weaknesses and problems.
SPEAKER 01 :
It’s fascinating.
SPEAKER 02 :
Because she was trying to find a way to feel better about herself unconsciously. And so this is also in the One Rule Homebook and why the way we parent is so vital. Because kids with negative core beliefs, what happens is positive things bounce off of them because it’s not consistent with how they feel about themselves deep inside. So positivity bounces off of them. When something negative comes along, it’s consistent with what they believe, so they add it, and their pool of negativity grows and grows. And this is what’s leading to the depression and anxiety and so many of the issues in adolescents’ lives today as the emotional regulation comes offline.
SPEAKER 01 :
So the positive stuff bounces off because their core beliefs that are formed at five or six, seven years old, that they believe the worst about themselves. So that’s why so many of these kids… say horrible things about each other because by saying something horrible to someone else, they believe they’re elevating themselves or they’re bringing that other person down to their horrible feeling level.
SPEAKER 02 :
Right, right. And so in the situation between your kids, your son is feeling he’s got some negative core beliefs and they’re tripping off because he wasn’t able to make it onto the high school team. He is trying to feel better about himself by competing with his sister. And the way he’s doing it is leading to tension and damage in the relationship. And he’s not even aware of any of that. And this is why the one rule home and understanding what’s really going on underneath our kids. And while the research we did is so important because we’ll look at it as bad behavior or being out of control ego wise, and we’ll try and squash it. Well, if they’re carrying negative core beliefs and we try and squash it, we’re just going to add to their negative core beliefs. and make the problem worse.
SPEAKER 01 :
You know, as I’m looking at some of my texts to him, because I was still at the basketball court and he was gone, I’m looking at what he said, exactly what you said. He was talking about the talking trash. I wouldn’t even start talking trash. As soon as I started going on the court, she started talking trash. That’s why I got so mad so easily and it became a competitive game. The reason why I threw the ball at her, oh, I forgot about that part, is because she makes all these crummy remarks about how I never made a JV team. She always states how you never made a team or you’ll never make it your trash. Um, and I said, he said, she thinks I’ll never make anything of myself. And I said, are you crazy? Like you run your own business. She already knows you’re a success. Like, you’re not, I mean, the sports are irrelevant now. Like you move on from that. He’s 18. He’s going to be a senior. I’m like, you’ve been running your business. We’re 13. We’re all so proud of you. We always talk about how well we’re doing. He says that she doesn’t believe in him and that he believes that he won’t make anything out of his life. And I’m like, where did that come from?
SPEAKER 02 :
Are you playing basketball? It’s the negative core beliefs. And so the answer to this problem between the two of them is to get them to get transparent with each other. We haven’t been trained as parents to be transparent emotionally with our kids. We’ve been actually discouraged from that. But when we begin to get transparent about our own weaknesses and struggles, it helps them begin to get transparent. And if you could facilitate a conversation between the two of them about anything how he’s feeling like she doesn’t believe in him, believes she’ll never make anything of himself. If he shared that with her, light bulbs would go on her head and she doesn’t want to make him feel that way. And at the same time, then she has got her own component of this that’s causing this dynamic, this toxic, non-loving dynamic between them that she needs to share with him. And once they understand each other, they’re going to be way more sensitive and stop saying those things to each other. We’ve got to work at a deeper level with our kids because remember in the first segment I talked about, you know, our first program, only 5% of thoughts and emotions are conscious. 95% are unconscious. And as parents, we’ve been trained to focus on only the 5%. One rule home in the book helps you start to look at and understand what’s going on underneath that’s causing the bad behavior so you can help them understand it And we can change the culture of our families and become the loving, safe place that God intends for us to be.
SPEAKER 01 :
Wow, deep stuff. All right, so in terms of all of your research, anything that you found out from these kids and talking to them that you’re sharing with parents that really stands out to you that would help us in general?
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, I really feel like our kids want to be close to us. Every single kid we talk to wants to be close to us and they want to succeed. And because of the way society and everything we’ve been taught, we tend to approach them like they want to mess up. That creates a lot of issues in the relationship between parents and kids and emotional distance that grows. And when that emotional distance grows, they need to replace it with something else. We are the anchor for them in their lives. We have more influence in the world when they’re born. And we can fritter it away if we’re not seeing how capable they are. One of the things I want to share is that John Adams, the founding of our country at age 13, was the secretary to basically the ambassador to Russia. And he would travel to Russia by himself, representing the ambassador to Russia on behalf of our country at age 13 years old. And we have so dumbed down what we believe kids are capable of today. And we approach them with a negative lens and it is costing us dearly. And it does lead to frustration and reactions and anger on their part when they know they can make good decisions. But we won’t believe that they’ll control themselves and make good decisions.
SPEAKER 01 :
Whew, good stuff. All right, I want to make sure that people know how to reach you and to find your book and everything you’re out and about with. And you mentioned working with families, which I know you do. Do you ever do that virtually over Skype or whatever or Zoom, I guess?
SPEAKER 02 :
Oh, yes. I have families and individual kids and marriages that I work with all across the country. Right now I have clients in Michigan, Florida. Alabama, California, Seattle. So the reality is we do work directly and we’re in the process of training more people to work with the family dynamic. And so if you go to our site, one rule home.com, you’ll find a schedule, a free console button. You’ll be talking to me. Or if you want to choose a different coach, you can talk to someone else on our team and, And you’ll get 345 minutes for us to talk about the situation in your family, to talk about where we’d recommend you start. Because you can start with the book. You can start with our really interactive online class that we’ll be opening up here and starting in about two weeks. Oh, excellent.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, give us the website, and we’ll talk more next time because we’re out of time.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, onerulehome.com.
SPEAKER 01 :
Oh, great stuff. Thank you so much. Just a wonderful wealth of information. Thanks, Jeff. Thank you, Angie.
SPEAKER 04 :
Thank you for listening to The Good News with Angie Austin on AM670 KLTT.
Join Angie Austin as she welcomes author Jeff Schott to discuss his impactful book, The One Rule Home. This episode dives deep into understanding adolescent anger and the role the adolescent brain plays in emotional regulation. Jeff and Angie explore how traditional approaches to parenting may inadvertently contribute to family conflicts and how creating a culture of love can transform familial relationships.
