In this eye-opening episode, Angie Austin welcomes repeat author Jeff Schott to explore the multifaceted causes behind children’s bad behavior. Unraveling the complex web of adolescent brain changes, unconscious thoughts, and negative core beliefs, Jeff sheds light on the importance of understanding what’s beneath the surface of our children’s actions. Together, they discuss research findings and personal anecdotes that reveal how parents can support their kids through a deeper understanding of their struggles.
00:01:09 What’s Really Causing Bad Behavior in Kids?
00:04:48 Stages of Child Development and Parenting Stories
00:08:20 Formation and Impact of Negative Core Beliefs
00:15:51 Dealing with Parenting Dynamics and Communication
00:26:47 COVID’s Effect on Kids and Parenting Solutions
SPEAKER 02 :
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SPEAKER 04 :
Hey there, friend. Angie Austin here with The Good News. Always happy to have a repeat author on the program. Jeff Schott is joining us, and his book this time is What’s Really Causing My Kids’ Bad Behavior? Big question mark. Hey, Jeff. Welcome back.
SPEAKER 06 :
It’s great to be back, Angie.
SPEAKER 04 :
Oh, well, don’t we all want to know what’s causing my kids’ bad behavior? And I keep trying to explain to my husband, because we have three teenagers, that it’s like fireworks are going off in their brains. Like, their brains are not like our brains right now, so we can’t expect the same behavior out of them and, you know, reasoning and being rational that we expect them to, you know, show to us. And my husband gets so fired up, and I’m like… Imagine having fireworks in your brain. So what is really causing our kids bad behavior?
SPEAKER 06 :
You know, that is one of the things that can cause bad behavior is the changes in the adolescent brain and the shift in electrical activity. But, you know, when we look at what issues below the behavior, what we see are, you know, five major things that can really lead to bad behavior that parents haven’t really been trained to think about, look at, or to understand. And one of those is just unconscious to conscious thoughts. Only 5% of our kids’ thoughts are conscious. And so oftentimes they don’t know why they’re misbehaving either. And so they’re just as frustrated with themselves as we are with them, according to the research we did with 3,000 kids. Another reason is fight or flight responses, regulation issues, which we’re seeing a ton of since COVID. And then stored trauma in the amygdala can be another source. Unresolved issues in the relationship between us and our kids from our kids’ perspective. Yes. We get our perspective resolved, but often we don’t ever hear the kids’ unresolved issues with us. And that can cause behavior issues. And the last and maybe the most significant is negative core beliefs. So there’s a lot of different reasons that can be driving our kids’ bad behavior. And if we’re just targeting that behavior… Guess what? They’re frustrated, we’re frustrated, and it seems like they can’t change or they won’t change. The truth is we’re not helping them understand what’s really going on underneath the behavior.
SPEAKER 04 :
Okay, so what do we do?
SPEAKER 06 :
Well, that’s a great question. I think what we need to do is we need to stop and look at how we learn. Maybe that’s the first thing, is do we, when we hear something on Sunday mornings, in a sermon, immediately change it overnight? If so, we’d all be doing so much better, wouldn’t we? And so a lot of what we’ve been trained to think as parents isn’t realistic. that we expect we tell our kids something they should be able to change instantaneously and never have it happen again. Can we do that ourselves as adults? And so one of the lessons I’ve learned is we need to think about farming or raising a garden. We plant the seeds, we water the seeds, and sometime down the road we harvest. And that’s one of the key principles we need to do. The other is we need to start changing the nature of our relationship and not focus so much on the behavior as to helping our kids understand themselves, what’s going on inside. And that’s why this book is so important. Through this, parents can start to get a handle on maybe this is what’s actually going on underneath in my kid. Maybe they’re dealing with some fight or flight issues. Maybe they’ve got negative core beliefs. Understanding that brings compassion, and compassion rebuilds the relationship.
SPEAKER 04 :
Okay. All right. You know, in terms of my own kids, they’re in such different stages right now. I was just talking to a friend about this who has kids the same age, 15, 17, 19, where the 19-year-old’s really starting to understand how to communicate, in particular with his dad because he’s Italian and he’s got a fiery temper. And I’ve really worked with the kids on understanding how to interact with their father in a way that doesn’t make the flame go higher and higher with each one taking one step up the ladder, getting angrier and angrier. And I understand that something happened in your own life that had an impact on your understanding about the struggles many kids have, because I’m seeing that. it differs just by a few years in their teenage years, how they struggle and how they handle things from, it was not good for my son three years ago, like sophomore, maybe year. And now freshman in college, he’s doing so well. It’s like a whole different kid. So what happened in your life?
SPEAKER 06 :
Well, you know, actually it’s funny, you know, I’ve got a lot of different stories of what happened in my life, but to tie it to what you’re talking about with your son, that happened with me when I got out of the home too. The second I was at college, my grades went from B’s and C’s to almost straight A’s. I graduated summa cum laude. Wow. And it was getting away from the pressure, the constant pressure from my mom related to my grades, which kicked off my negative core beliefs that I wasn’t good enough, that I was stupid. And that pressure just made me feel more of that negativity, which those negative core beliefs just ate me alive. And once I was out and on my own and the pressure wasn’t there, I wasn’t also getting the oppositional adolescent brain response to the pressure. Boom, I figured it out. And, man, you know, first semester was a 3.18. After that, almost a 4.0 the rest of the way through college. Wow.
SPEAKER 04 :
Interesting. You know, with my kid, because he’s still living at home, like I would say halftime while he’s in college, because it’s about an hour away from here. You know, sometimes he’s at a friend’s house, but, you know, he’s still at home per se. But it just seemed like it was age for him. You know, like just his brain calming down so that he could control his own temper when he’s having a discussion, I say in, you know, air quotes, with my husband. Because that’s where I really watch, you know, his behavior. He and I have only gotten… into a pretty heated argument one time. And boy, did mommy learn because I slammed down a pan on the stove. I guess I didn’t realize the top of the stove is glass, but it’s like a tempered glass, right? And so it shattered and it took us almost a year to get the order the right piece to replace it. So every time I cooked, I was reminded of my temper. And I have never lost my temper like that again because it was such a visual reminder to me of like, are you kidding me? Really? You slam down a cast iron skillet and ruin the stove and it’s going to cost like over $1,000 to fix it because you have a bad temper. And so he and I really don’t argue like that. But I’ve seen such a change in him just as he’s gotten older. It’s interesting to me, though, with your grades, how the pressure at home led you to getting better grades in college without that same kind of pressure. That, to me, is very interesting. All right. So you talk about in the book. Well, you know what? Instead of me asking you a ton of questions, first of all, talk about some of the most important things that you teach us in the book.
SPEAKER 06 :
Well, you know, I think this whole thing about core beliefs is central because negative core beliefs psychologically have been proven to be formed by age six. And I had a hard time believing that.
SPEAKER 04 :
That’s crazy.
SPEAKER 06 :
Until I had a family in for a family intensive. Okay. And I was working with the older kids in the family and the parents. But the five-year-old’s like, I want to do this too. And I’m like, can she even do this? And so she filled out the pain word sheet, and I had her nine-year-old brother help her understand each of the pain words she didn’t understand. And she highlighted, I sat down and talked with her, and I’m like, wow, she’s got that. She knows why that. She’s got reasons behind everything. And then she wanted to do the core beliefs exercise, and it was easiest for her because they hadn’t gone unconscious yet. And so she’s like at age five. I’m ugly, I’m stupid, no one will care for me, I’m not good enough, I’m a failure. She could almost lift the negative core beliefs that were operating within her instantaneously, and it stunned me. And it confirmed that these core beliefs are set by age six. And so these negative core beliefs, the way they operate is… Everything we do, one of the articles I read said, you know, every thought we have, every relationship, everything we do is consulted off of these core beliefs in the basement of our mind unconsciously. And so it literally alters the way we see relationships, the way we respond to things. And so we’re finding the average kid we work with has between 13 and 19 negative core beliefs and only two or three positive. And so when something positive comes their way, it gets bounced off the negative core beliefs, and that’s what they believe about themselves. So they dismiss it. They minimize the positive. They don’t even hear the positive we say to them, and they get focused on the negative. And then adolescence hits, and that negativity can explode because of emotional regulation diminishing. And so that’s where we see a lot of the negative behavior coming from because once they hit a certain level of negativity, they can’t take any more. So they get defensive. They tune us out. They escape onto their screens. They react and get angry when we try and address something negative because they just have maxed out. They can’t handle any more.
SPEAKER 04 :
Now, these negative core beliefs that you say are developed by the time they’re six, give me some examples of those and, you know, how that they, you know, last into, you know, teen years and adulthood that negatively impact us and maybe even how we fix that. But give me some examples of some of the negative core beliefs.
SPEAKER 06 :
Yeah, like, so I was working with this mother and daughter. And this mother had been amazingly successful, had a ton of good relationships as an adult and this daughter. And the mom, though, had encountered a lot of significant abuse. She’d actually seen her dad throw a pot of scalding hot water on her mom. And her mom ended up in a hospital. That’s the type of home she grew up in. So she swore she was going to raise her kids differently and protect them and not let any of the negative things happen to her kids like she did. And so once they both got their negative core beliefs down, they were stunned because As I had the mom share with the daughter, then the daughter shared with the mom. The mom, literally, I saw her just crashing emotionally. So I sent the daughter off to go have some fun, and I talked to the mom. She’s like, I don’t get it. How did this happen? Every single one of our core beliefs, negative core beliefs, are the same. Only one is different, and I didn’t parent the way my parents parented me. And so negative core beliefs can be, I’m not good enough, I’m ugly, I’m a failure, no one will care for me, no one will listen to me. And so a great example, no one to listen to me is a very common one we see when we’re working with kids and with parents. And so that will cause them to respond in one of two ways. They’ll go silent and not talk and not open up and not answer questions other than with very short answers. Or they’ll go the other way where they keep repeating themselves and talking and talking and repeating, trying to make sure that they feel heard because they have this core belief that no one will listen to me. And so these core beliefs are really powerful.
SPEAKER 04 :
I’ll say. Well, you write that 80% of kids fear being honest with their parents. So I want to address that. And I think about, you know, all three of my kids, the one that I wouldn’t think would lie to me over the summer, like was like lying like crazy. And I’m like, she’s teaching a Bible study to like younger athletes. She goes to youth group every week. She goes to Young Life. She, you know, she… can’t wrap my head around it and I it was so easy to catch her and I’m like what are you doing like what’s going on with you like this isn’t even you who are you and then my two of my kids tell me like their secrets per se but only me so then I’m in that predicament Jeff where I want my husband to know what’s going on but I also want my kids to continue to keep coming to me and with, you know, info. And so I kind of weigh it like, is this something that my husband needs to know or not? Right. Because he’ll get so mad if he thinks I’ve kept a secret. So a couple of times I’ve kind of let it in on something and said, hey, you know, this is going on or, you know, so-and-so, you know, is dating this person. And, you know, this one’s grown up. He’s 19. And so but he’s kind of shy about it right now because his sister’s teased him. But, you know, that’s where he’s going tonight to a movie, this, that and the other. And so he mentioned it to me. But, you know, keep it on the down low. up to and then the next morning like at breakfast oh how was your date last night and I’m cringing right one time something happened where my son had done something and maybe it was the windshield that was cracked and then he paid to get it fixed or this that and the other one of the girls knew and I knew then the girl told dad but I hadn’t told dad and my husband was furious that I hadn’t told him well then the next time when I let the cat out of the bag my son came to me he goes we’re done We are over. I am through with you. Like I defied him and I’m like, we’re done. Oh, my goodness. Jeff, stick around. We have to take a break. OK, I got carried away. I will be right back with the good news.
SPEAKER 05 :
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SPEAKER 01 :
Manitou Springs is listening to the Mighty 670 KLT.
SPEAKER 04 :
Thank you for watching. So if I tell him, then the kid thinks I’ve like gone behind their back, right? So my son, when something got out to my husband, and I do weigh it because I want them to know I’m the trusted. I want them to know they can trust me. I want them to keep coming to me because they really will tell me just about anything. So then my son, as I told you, came to me and goes, we’re done. We are through. I am done with you. And I was like, because I’d let the cat out of the bag about something. And his dad like just blatantly said, oh, your mom told me blah, blah, blah. And it was like a breakup, you know, like he was done with me. Never tell me a secret again. And I was so bummed because I want them to come with me. And it’s such a slippery slope because there’s two parents, right? But they only want to tell me.
SPEAKER 06 :
Right. Well, you’re dealing with not a great dynamic there.
SPEAKER 04 :
I know. I know.
SPEAKER 06 :
I’ve seen this dynamic with families before. And one of the things I might recommend you and your husband check out and consider doing is our Leading with Love cohort because it’s actually a place where we can get parents united on the same course and same vision. for parenting. In fact, we see that conflicts over parenting style is more common than conflicts over finances in marriages, but it’s not asked in those surveys. And so I think parenting differences, different philosophies, may be a larger cause of divorce than finances. So I share that with you. But to answer your question related to this fear that kids have, 80% of kids We saw in our research with 3,000 kids feared being open and honest with their parents, and they feared everything from sharing their feelings with their parents to they definitely feared sharing what the parents were doing and saying that were hurting them. And very few kids share that because they don’t feel like they’re going to be heard. We talked about that a minute ago. And they definitely fear sharing their failures. because of the way we tend to react and respond. And so obviously in your home, you’ve got one parent that reacts and gets upset. And so the kids don’t feel safe with them. So they won’t share their failures and these things with that parent. It’s why we see such a need for a different type of parenting that looks to target below the behavior to understand what’s going on inside our kid and to help them understand. Cause we found they most often don’t understand because only 5% of thoughts and emotions are conscious. 95% are unconscious. So if your kid keeps repeating the same thing over and over again, despite everything you’ve talked to them about or done, the reality is there’s something going on unconsciously with them that they don’t understand and what we found from with working with so many kids and families. is that the parents getting frustrated, what they don’t realize is the kid is getting frustrated with themselves because they can’t seem to make a change. And they know it’s a fly in the ointment in the relationship with the parent. And so they’re getting more and more frustrated with themselves, which alone heightens them, which then makes them more sensitive, which makes them more reactive.
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, when you talk about leading with love or parenting with love, explain that.
SPEAKER 06 :
Yeah. Leading with love is our, you know, it’s based upon the one-rule-home book that you and I talked about previously, right? Where the one rule is love, and Jesus used that one rule with the disciples in his last teaching time. This is it. Love one another. This is love. One will lay down his life for another. And the challenge is we’ve lost how does love work practically in our homes? How do we use love to set boundaries as opposed to things that break the relationship or cause more hurt and frustration in the family and destroy the positive culture of our family? How do we use love? to help our kids feel safe so they open up with us and we can help them dive in.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yes, how do we?
SPEAKER 06 :
Delve into those unconscious things, okay? And so that’s what the Leading with Love cohort is all about, and you can find out more about that on our site, OneRuleHome.com. The cool thing is right now you can get this book, What’s Really Causing My Kids Bad Behavior, and our Child Concern Index assessment for free. We’ll give them to you for free because they partner together to give you a deep dive into what’s going on with your kid, to give you insights and ideas because we found when parents begin to understand what’s going on underneath with their kid and they’re not just focused on the behavior, empathy and compassion begin to flow, relationships start to get restored, and things actually begin to change. We can gain compliance through a lot of the strategies that we hear from parenting experts. We can gain compliance, but that’s not heart change. And what I’m looking for with my kids and with the families that we work with is heart change that lasts forever, that doesn’t disappear when they walk out our door and go to college and they go off the deep end because we’re not there to force them to comply anymore. We need heart change.
SPEAKER 04 :
Oh, my goodness. I think about a friend of mine this week, just a totally different parenting style. You know, we both have seniors. I’ve got the three teens, as you know, and their parenting styles, you know, she and her husband, it’s just it’s so difficult because she wanted to. react to the disrespect and the disobeying and the breaking the rules and the not going to school and the sneaking out and announcing where they were going to go to college, announcing trips they were going to take with friends, but still being a minor. And so she was just going to disconnect the phone. And then her husband said, do not do that because it’ll make everything more difficult for you and me. And his path is the path of least resistance. And her path is the path of I’m setting boundaries. I’m the parent. I will set the rules, blah, blah, blah. And they’re the antithesis of each other. And they’re wonderful people, but completely different parenting styles. And I see just the chaos that it’s causing. And I am thankful that even though it sounds like my husband and I are on different pages because the kids come to me with everything, I’m a little less scary than he is. We actually do come to agreement, you know, like when he was just recently thinking of a punishment per se or a boundary that he was going to take away homecoming. And I said, no, I won’t take away homecoming. I’ll take away the trip on fall break. I’ll take away a phone. I’ll take away sleepovers. I’ll take away, I’ll ground them, but I don’t want to take away homecoming. These are core memories for them as kids. They already have really big plans. That’s too painful of a punishment for me to take away from them. Or like if we were going to be at Disneyland, for instance, my husband used to say, we’re not going to Disneyland tomorrow. And I’m like, uh-uh, I’m not punishing the entire family. We’re here. And so if you want to keep that kid at home and you guys just go to the pool today or whatever, that’s fine. But the whole family is not going to be punished. So he and I, he likes the big punishments that he doesn’t always follow through on. But they’re like grandiose and they sound really great and wonderful. wow I’m really coming down I’m taking your phone I’m taking homecoming I’m taking your car you know and I’m more realistic like okay well let’s take the car for three days you know like because we’ll actually do that not come up with this you know giant cloud dilemma of 18 punishments that we’ll never follow through on so I’ll sit down with him and tell him no I will not do such and such And we might really have to hammer it out, but we ultimately will be on the same page. Even though I might seem a little bit more lax and he might seem a little more strict, to be honest with you, he’s not going to follow through with all those grandiose punishments anyway. And I hate idle threats. Idle threats are so useless to me. Like, you will not leave the house for seven years! And they’re out the next day, right? So why even say that? So ultimately, we do hammer out a common…
SPEAKER 06 :
ground and he and i do come to agreement and after seeing what you know my friends are going through with completely different parenting styles i’m thankful that even though he and i might have slightly different that we hammer it out and come we meet in the middle yep yep that’s important the challenge i’ve seen is you know we get so focused on those consequences and that’s what we found in the research causes kids to fear opening up with parents and they don’t get vulnerable, they don’t allow us to dig in below the surface with them to help them become conscious of what’s really driving the lying or really driving the disrespect or really driving the lack of motivation with homework and grace. And so we’re really championing going a completely different direction that allows our kids so we can dive in below. And that’s what this book’s all about, is helping parents understand what’s causing the bad behavior underneath. Because, you know, fight or flight, what we’ve seen since COVID has been crazy. Like I had a girl in our office and we have this pile of stuffed animals and blankets that they can grab to hold over themselves when they’re talking about something hard. And, you know, a thump happened back behind us, and it wasn’t that loud. It didn’t even bother me. She dove headfirst off of the chair like a soldier diving into a foxhole into that pile because of that thump. And so what we’re seeing since COVID, because of all the fear that they lived in and under in schools and everything for over two years, a lot of them have regulation issues. They’re going into fight or flight responses a lot easier. And fight or flight, you know, when you look at the behavior outcomes of that, it can lead to just crazy things like, I’m just going to run through a list really quick, increased sensitivity to light and sound, experiencing sleep problems and daytime fatigue, chronic attention and concentration problems. In fact, a lot of the kids that we’ve worked with Their concentration problems go away, and they’re off the ADD and ADHD medicine because it wasn’t ADD. It was fight or flight. Wow. Appetite changes and cravings, so they crave the sugar. They crave the crap, and if you try and get in the way of it, it causes issues. It comes from this. Skin and intestinal issues comes from this. Increased sensitivity to others’ emotions comes from this. Our kid, we get emotional. They go all unhinged on us. That’s not necessarily the adolescent brain. That can be regulation, fight or flight issues. And we’re seeing it in kids as young as nine years old due to COVID. And we’re seeing a ton of it since COVID. COVID was horrible. When you start considering, you know, you can punish your kid for reacting. You can come. But what if it’s fight or flight?
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes.
SPEAKER 06 :
Punishing them, which is just driving them further into fight or flight. Yes. I like to start looking below that and the consequences.
SPEAKER 04 :
our band-aid well and i like to take you know like a you know a time out when things get really heated um you know between one of the kids and their dad and i just just because they both need a moment to they can calm the whole discussion down and we’ve got about two minutes left you talk about a two-way resolution process can you explain that
SPEAKER 06 :
Well, what we’ve seen is there’s lots of kids’ behavior issues or disrespect from parents derives from unresolved issues from their side of the ledger. We’ll resolve issues from our side of the ledger and get them to apologize and maybe apply a consequence, okay, to resolve an issue. But oftentimes the kids’ frustration with how we approach them, how we talk to them, never gets addressed, and they don’t get it resolved. And so when they don’t feel heard and listened to, it drives that core belief one, but two, it makes them want to tune us out. It makes them stop wanting to engage with us. And so unresolved issues can lead to a whole nother set of bad behavior where they seem disrespectful. Like they tune us out, like they, they don’t respond or they don’t answer questions or they react and they’re reacting because they’ve got hurt that hasn’t been resolved with us.
SPEAKER 04 :
Wow, this is such great information. If you’re just joining us, I want to make sure that you know all about Jeff Schott’s book. He’s got several books. And I really want to have you back, Jeff. I think you have such common sense ideas. And like you said, you’ve worked with thousands of kids and you’ve worked with families and you’ve done a lot of research. So you really know what’s going on with these kids. What’s really causing my kids bad behavior, Jeff Schott, and that’s S-C-H-A-D-T. Do you have a good website for us, Jeff?
SPEAKER 06 :
Yeah, OneRuleHome.com, and the book is also available in all three formats on Amazon.
SPEAKER 04 :
And people can also contact you to work with them remotely with the kids or the family, right?
SPEAKER 06 :
Yeah, you can get on the site, do the CCI, and get this book for free, all of that for free. They can schedule a call with me or one of the other coaches we’ve trained for free. We’ll sit and talk with you about your situation for free as well at OneRuleHome.com. Awesome. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you, Angie.
SPEAKER 03 :
Thank you for listening to The Good News with Angie Austin on AM670 KLTT.
