Unlocking Gentle Parenting: Expert Strategies for Challenging Kids

Welcome to the Where Parents Talk podcast. We help grow better parents through science, evidence, and the lived experience of other parents.

Learn how to better navigate the mental and physical health of your tween teen or young adult through proven expert advice. Here's your host, Leanne Castellino.

Welcome to Where Parents Talk. My name is Leanne Castellino. Our guest today is a child and family clinical psychologist, researcher, and author. Dr.

Paul Sunseri is the executive director of New Horizons Child and Family Services and brings more than 40 years of experience in treating children with serious mental health challenges as well as their families. He has also developed Intensive Family Focused Therapy, a treatment approach for suicidal, depressed, or highly defiant children and adolescents.

His latest book is called Gentle Parenting how to Make It Work with Oppositional and defiant kids. Dr. Sunseri is also a father of four, and he joins us today from near Sacramento, California. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Well, thank you, Lianne. Thank you for having me on. I appreciate that.

I'd like to dive right in, if we could, and ask you what the impetus for your latest book, Gentle Parenting Reimagined, was.

Well, gentle parenting, maybe I should start off by defining it. Probably most of your audience knows what it is, but I'll just do a quick one.

So it's been around for about 10 years or so, and it's intended for parents who want to have a different kind of relationship with their kids than maybe previous generations had with their own. So it really emphasizes kids having a very strong, I'm sorry, parents having a very strong relationship with their kids and vice versa.

And it focuses more on having an emotional connection to your kids.

And the way gentle parenting works is if a child or a teen has some sort of a behavioral challenge, it's less about punishment and more about trying to lean in, understand, and collaborate. So that's what gentle parenting is.

I wrote the book because gentle parenting, while in theory is a great idea, like who doesn't want to be gentle with their kids? I think everybody can get behind that.

The problem is, how do you do that when you've got a challenging kid, a more difficult to parent kid, you know, a child who maybe tells you no way more often than they say yes, who appears stubborn and oppositional, and kids who are beyond that, kids who are maybe disrespectful, who yell at their parents, curse at their parents, you know, don't do their homework, don't help out around the house, argue with their brothers and sisters. So the purpose of the book was to teach people. Yeah, you can be A gentle parent.

But at the same time, if you've got a hard kid, you're probably going to need to develop a skill set that doesn't come naturally to most parents.

And all throughout the book, it talks about tools and techniques and strategies so that if you've got a hard kid, how you can do that and still remain gentle at the same time.

So it's interesting because you say, how do we do that? And I guess what I would add to that as a parent as well is how do we do that today specifically? Right.

With all the external factors and some of them internal as well, in terms of family dynamics, where you've got kids exposed to so many different things that a lot of parents might not be aware of. And when I say exposed, I mean, you know, exposed to behaviors that may not always be optimal.

And, you know, how does a parent go about navigating that piece a lot of the times that they're not even aware of?

Well, it's a great question. So I view family as medicine, right?

So when kids struggle and something is happening to them via some external source, whether that's a peer conflict, maybe it's being bullied online, maybe a kid at school died by suicide, just the things that are very difficult for most kids to be able to navigate in a successful way, I view family as their best resource.

So in a perfect world, and I'm not saying that all kids do this, but ideally, what you want is your child to be able to turn to you when they're distressed or if something is happening, you want them come to you and to open up so that you can then provide support or advice or, you know, just general affection. So I don't think that's always the case. I think a lot of the things that are happening to kids, it's.

It's well out of earshot of parents because it's probably happening online.

And that can lead to an entire conversation about the effects of screens that are and what's going on with kids relative to screens and their mental health.

But what I recommend that all parents do, and it's not always easy to do, but I think it's super important, particularly in this day and age where there is a mental health epidemic, kids being depressed, anxious and suicidal, is to really have a better understanding of technology and be able to figure out what is your kid doing when they're online. So if they're parked in their bedroom for four or five hours and they're reluctant to come out, they're on a screen, almost certainly.

But I would be curious about who they're talking to, what they're saying, what is being said to them.

And sometimes parents are more hands off with those devices because they can be a little bit difficult to understand, particularly if you're a little bit older.

But I see that as one of the most vital things, the parenting of the 21st century is figuring out these screens, getting good at understanding, you know, what's happening to your kid when they are parked in their bedroom.

And it sounds more and more like that's not an option today as a parent, right. To know what's going on with your kids in those screens. It really should be mandatory.

I agree with that. It's definitely necessity.

And sometimes with kids, particularly if there's conflict in the family, they don't always go to their parents and talk about their problems. Lots of times they don't.

But yes, I think if you want to understand what's going inside of their head and especially understand the influences that are affecting them from the external world, you got to figure out what they're saying online. And there's so many ways you can monitor a kid's device. Uses their tons of third party apps.

Most phones these days have some kind of parental monitoring software already installed. There's, there's ways that you can do it, but there is a bit of a learning curve.

As I said, you do have to figure out how to do this, but I do see it as essential.

We talked briefly about your deeply informed lens on this subject matter and I wonder what kind of trends have you observed in recent years that you know, pushed you towards writing Gentle parenting reimagined?

Well, I work with very, very challenging kids and that's all I've ever done.

I've been a practicing family therapist now for 40 years and my practice is devoted to kids who are highly oppositional, non compliant, disrespectful to their parents. And many of the kids I see in my practice, in addition to being those things, are also chronically suicidal. They, they think about suicide a lot.

Some of them have attempted suicide. Many of them engage in self harm behaviors. Cutting is the most common one.

And then I also work with kids who I describe as being anxious, avoidant, an anxious avoidant kid who has so much anxiety that they've more or less checked out of the world. So they have a lot of difficulty going to school. Many of the kids that I work with have not gone to school in weeks and sometimes months.

So that's the general population I see. And all of them are hard.

I Mean, all of them are very difficult for their parents because they don't know what to do about any of those things in most instances.

The kids that present at my clinic, obviously they have issues and problems, but they've got brothers and sisters most of the time at home and they generally don't have any problems or issues. They're by anybody's definition typical or normal. But there is something about kids.

Some kids come into the world being a lot more challenging and likely that's a temperamental difference. They biologically are different in some way, which explains why their siblings aren't the ones that present for treatment. But that's who I see.

And I believe that there is a large number of parents out there who are struggling with parenting their kids who are like this, but they tend to struggle in silence. There's just a tremendous amount of shame and embarrassment. They believe that somehow as parents, parents, they failed. Right.

That they've done something wrong. I love the expression. We judge the inside of our families by the outside of other people's families.

So we see other, other parents and their kids at barbecues and get togethers and those kids seem fine. So the parents I work with are the ones going, what happened to me? What happened to mine?

I recently joined a couple of Facebook groups of parents with oppositional kids and some of those groups have 35,000 members. So it happens and it happens a lot.

Wrote the book because I wanted to be able to help families, not just one by one, the ones that present in my clinic for treatment, but all of the other parents out there who are struggling, who need help beyond what maybe is a good match for their skill set and their kids needs or they've read other self help books that don't give them necessarily the concrete, you know, if your kid is being disrespectful and cursing at you, you can do X, Y and Z to change that behavior. And that's what I've gotten good at over the years because I've done it so many times with so many K. I know what works with kids and what doesn't.

So take us through that a little bit if you could. In terms of what about your reimagined approach to gentle parenting is different from the traditional view of gentle parenting?

Oh gosh, so many things. I'll just start with what does a traditional gentle parent do if a kid is, well, let's call it a tantrum.

So younger kids, we tend to use the term temper tantrums. Older kids, teenagers, we use the word dysregulation. But they're really the same thing. It's exactly the same behavior.

And adults throw temper tantrums sometimes too. It's identical.

So with gentle parenting, if you've got a seven or an eight year old who's just starting to melt down, maybe they're wanting permission to do something. You can't give them permission, so you're telling them no.

Or sometimes they're so tired or hungry or so overwhelmed by what's happening that they raise their voice and start to yell and get highly emotionally aroused.

Gentle parenting in its traditional form would be to lean in with that kid and to get close and to say, you know, I can see you're really upset right now. Tell me what's going on, how can I help you with this?

What can we do right now that would help you calm down rather than what's happening right in front of us? So that's what a gentle parent would do.

The problem is when you lean into a kid, you know, you talk to them, you interact with them, you try to soothe them, you look for alternatives while a kid is actively upset and angry. I learned a long time ago that that absolutely does not work with them. Right?

And that's the mistake that gentle parenting typically will make is far too much of that.

And it's actually the interaction that takes place between parents and their kids when they're dysregulated that actually keeps the dysregulation going. It's very counterintuitive. You know, a natural parental instinct would be to say, hey, hey, hey, come on, let's talk about this.

Everything's going to be okay. But I find that that backfires in most instances.

And really one of the first steps in getting kids not to tantrum or again, as a teenager, to become dysregulated, it's important you stop interacting with them when they're that upset. It's a very loving process.

You say, you know, I'm happy to help you, but I can't talk to you when you're yelling at me, or I can't help you if you interrupt me when I'm trying to talk with you. So take a little bit of space. I'm still here and available, but I'm only available to you once you calm down.

And then you do what I call disengagement. Disengagement is simply walking away. You don't go very far.

You're still around, and you're certainly still listening for what the kid is doing and paying attention to their safety. But you just refuse to interact or give that better self of you until they've calmed down. And every kid will calm down.

It's a natural biological process. You give them a little bit of time and space and they will eventually. No kid tantrums forever, right? No teenager is dysregulated forever.

So they will eventually settle down. And that's when you fully rein engage again. As I'm so happy that you've calmed down, you seem like you're in a better space.

Let's talk about what happened. Right. And now they're thinking again. They're not locked into the emotional parts of their brain. The frontal lobes are actively re engaged.

And that's when you can do your best change work with kids, but not during a tantrum. That's a time where you should turn away and only re engage once they've calmed down.

That is a big difference between what my book says and what the vast majority of books on gentle parenting say.

So along those lines, it strikes me that if those tools that you just mentioned have a chance of working well for the parent and for that relationship with their child, in that moment, the parent has to be pretty calm. So how.

What do you suggest to parents who might be in a highly emotional state themselves when this is happening to bring themselves and calm themselves down before they're ready to sort of help their kid re engage?

Well, one of the cool things about disengagement is it does give you time and space to calm down. Right? You're not talking anymore. You're not directly trying to impact what's unfolding right in front of you.

It gives parents a chance to think again. The other thing I tell parents is usually parents will get angry and upset when whatever the behavior is, they're not able to stop it or change it.

Parents don't light up immediately and go from 0 to 60 right away. Most parents start off by being pretty reasonable, I think, and by being calm.

But if you've had to ask a kid 10 times over and over again to do the same thing, eventually a lot of parents lose their patience and then they raise their voice. I strongly believe, and when I first tell this to parents, they don't believe me when I say it.

That there's never a reason to raise your voice with a child and you never have to do it.

If you learn strategies to change behavior, if you know how to get a kid to do something, the first or the second time you ask them, you won't have to ask them 10 times and you're not going to get frustrated. So it's a lot easier for parents to stay calm and well regulated themselves.

If you're able to solve the behavioral challenge almost immediately, there's no reason to get mad. Why would you get mad at your kid under those circumstances?

The other thing that I often encourage parents to do, particularly when they're learning these techniques and they're still trying to figure out behavior change, is they're going to be upset. Whatever's happening on the inside with them, whatever a degree of upset they're experiencing is, you can't let it show on the outside.

It's like you're an actor on stage. Whatever you're feeling here can't be expressed there. So being matter of fact is always the way to go.

So kids, when they become upset or oppositional, they get angry. So they become really elevated. They yell, they talk louder, they interrupt more. But parents need to stay down here. They need to go lower and slow.

And first of all, if you want your kid not to yell at you, you can't yell at them. Right. You have to maintain the moral authority, which is, in our family, we don't yell at people.

And I can see you're really mad right now, but I'm not yelling at you and I won't. This is not how we talk to each other. So parents have to set the standard for what that looks like.

But I know staying matter of fact with kids is always preferable to getting worked up. I mean, other professions know this too. Teachers don't yell at their students. I mean, hopefully they don't yell at their students.

My daughter is a high school teacher. She doesn't yell at them because she knows when you yell at a kid, they yell back. And that doesn't help anybody in any way.

So, yeah, it is hard for parents to stay well regulated. But again, whatever you're feeling on the inside, okay. But it just can't be displayed on the outside. And the kid eventually will calm down.

And eventually they're going to do what you ask them to do, particularly if you know how to get them to do things. So just your storm will pass too, just like theirs.

Let's talk about tools and tactics that perhaps are even more relevant when you're talking about tweens, teens, the adolescent phase of development where there's so much else going on with respect to, you know, the young mind and the development of, you know, physiologically, biologically, etc. Are there specific tools with respect to gentle parenting that work better in that phase of development?

Well, the way I look at behavior change, let's see if I can explain it in a way that makes sense to everybody is there are certain underlying behavior change principles that work with kids of any age.

Now the actual intervention or response with a teenager is probably going to be structured somewhat differently than how you would intervene with a five year old who's acting up in some way that you don't care for. But the same principles, the same ideas, I think of them as like laws of physics when it comes to behavior change.

They're really unchangeable depending upon again, they hold true for kids of every age. So if you learn those underlying principles that guides you through the developmental states.

So for example, what you might do with a non compliant 6 or 7 year old is what I would do with that kid is first of all, I would make it very clear in the nicest way possible that they need to do what I say, that that's just how it works with kids and parents. Parents do get to tell their kids to do so.

When a kid tells you no, usually the response is going to be something along the lines of it's not okay to tell me no when I ask you to empty the dishwasher. You don't have to like doing it. I wouldn't expect that you would.

But that's kind of how it works between parents and kids is we ask you to do things and you do those things. So telling me no is never going to be okay with a young kid. I probably give them some version of timeout.

And there's a version of timeout that I describe in my book that I learned many, many years ago is highly effective. It's also like the best kept secret that I know of when it comes to behavior change because most parents don't know that version of timeout.

I've never met a parent at the outset who has heard about it before, but it works really, really well. It works great with 6 sevens, eights, 10 and above kids actually.

So if a kid who's not wanting to empty the dishwasher, I just say I'm not going to ask you again, you know, you need to do it. So either please get started or I'm going to ask you to take a timeout until you're ready to do it.

And a timeout is just this brief amount of time in their bedroom, super brief. And they just, they, if they don't want to empty the dishwasher, they just stay in the room until they're ready to do it.

And every kid eventually will come out and do the dish. The Dishwasher.

What I would do with an older kid, same underlying principle is if they say, I don't know, they're not going to do a chore around the house. I would say, well, you know, chores need to be done. It's part of living in a family. It's just part of helping out.

Nobody likes sweeping the kitchen floor or taking out the trash, but it needs to be done. So I'd like you to do that, please. And if the kid tells me no, I would say we got a couple options here.

One is you can just do it the way you ask, which is kind of the easiest way possible. Or I could instead ask you to put your cell phone up on the counter and it just stays there until you do the chore.

And you can do it right then if that's what you want and get it right back. Or you can wait four or five hours and then do the tour and get your phone back. But I'll let you decide.

But you can see that it's the same underlying principle, which is you really do need to do what I'm asking you to do. And there's going to be some sort of a very simple cost that comes into effect until the thing is actually done.

That sounds so reasonable as you lay it out there, Dr. Sunseri. You know, and a lot of parents listening to or watching this interview will say, you know what, that seems like something I could do.

I wish I had known maybe earlier, but now I know and I can, you know, give it a try. You talked about the principles, you know, underlying and rooted in your book.

There's a lot of evidence based strategies there that, you know, underpins your work. Could you take us through some of them and the impact that they have on, on your book?

Well, the easiest one, just to go back to the earlier part of our conversation, is about temper tantrums. So again, the traditional gentle parenting leans into temper tantrums give kids lots and lots of attention.

But there are evidence based treatments for kids who have oppositional defiant disorder. They've been around for a long time.

There's various different versions of them and none of them advocate leaning into your child when they're having a temper tantru.

They all argue in the same way that I do that you should lean out and don't pay attention to the tantrum or the dysregulation and only re engage when the child does come. So that whole approach has probably 30, at least 30 years of evidence, research, evidence to back it up. Principles of behavior change.

How do you use some version of consequences to change behavior? All of these things, Pretty much everything that's in the book, I think, has some sort of a scientific backing.

And so this is not just stuff that I pulled out of the air or that I'm guessing at. There's a lot of folks who came before me who've done a lot of work on these things.

And I've used those strategies and interventions over and over and over again. And I know they work. I mean, I see the results of that every day with the families that I work with.

The other piece that you mentioned at the beginning of our interview is the idea that you believe family is medicine. And we talked about the fact that you develop intensive family focused therapy. Can you take us through what that is, first of all?

And how can it impact or influence gentle parenting?

So family intensive family focused therapy is a, as the name implies, it's a family based form of mental health care.

It argues from the premise that parents are actually the biggest agents of change in a family where you have a child with a serious mental health condition. And part of the problem with the mental health community, at least the way it exists currently, is family therapy is not given first consideration.

It is not a first line treatment simply because most parents don't know about it. A first line treatment, typically for kids who have a serious problem would be individual therapy.

So parents send their child to an individual therapist. And for kids who have milder conditions, that is perfectly appropriate and it works just fine. But those are not the kids that I work with.

All the kids that I work with have had individual therapy before. Some have been in individual therapy most of their childhood. So we tend to do individual work with kids.

But the problem is that the idea behind that is if there's something wrong with the kid, there's something going on inside of them that a therapist can talk to a kid about. And somehow magically that translates into different behavior in the home. It does not work like that.

If you want to impact a kid's functioning in the home is you have to go right to the source, which are the people who love them the most and the people who are there with them every day. That's why I do a family based form of mental health care. And this is also backed up by science.

There are about 40 years of research that clearly demonstrate that family based mental health care is highly effective. When a child has A serious, serious mental health condition. And there are multiple models of this. Mine just happens to be one of them.

But that's the idea is you go right to the source. And the second part of your question is how does that impact gentle parenting?

Is I, I think families, including with kids who are struggling, maybe especially with kids who are struggling, is you've got to be gentle and soft and kind and loving and warm. You know, kids don't misbehave every minute of every day. They just don't. It's just something that, that pops up here and there.

Some kids are harder pops up here and there a lot more often.

But in between those times when kids are doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing, you can be warm and loving and kind and, and funny with them.

That's, that's what they need is to know that there's a soft landing, that people who are there, who love them and when they do things that are not okay, parents obviously need to address that in a firm way. But still a loving way is still a kind way. You don't ever have to be harsh with your kid or again, speak to them in a sharp or unkind way.

That doesn't work and that's not what they need.

So yes, even when you're working with somebody who, I don't know, maybe has been in therapy forever, who's been in a psychiatric hospital four or five times because they're suicidal, we work with a lot of kids who either are potentially going to go to a residential treatment program, which is a place where kids live because their behavior problems are so severe, or they're coming out of a residential treatment program. Those are the kids that we work with because those are all individually delivered services. Again, as if there is something wrong with the child.

There really isn't. It's something wrong with the situation, the circumstances, they're in the context of what's going on.

So if you have a kid who's hurting themselves, there's not anything wrong with the kids. Something is going on in their environment that is deeply upsetting to them.

And in most instances it's a peer related issue of some kind, or they're connected to a peer group who themselves are engaging in self harm or they're online talking to people who are hurting themselves or they're on discord in a chat room with discord call servers that are also hurting themselves. That's a situation, that's a context, that's a circumstance. And a large part of our work is to change the situation.

So if, for example, they're spending eight or nine hours a day on a screen, which we know is not good for a kid's mental health, we vastly reduce the screen time into something that's considered a reasonably healthy range, which for most teenagers is about three, maybe four hours a day at the most. We also figure out, who are they talking to? What's their peer group like?

Are these kids that are high functioning and supportive and building the kid up? Generally not. It's usually kids who are struggling themselves and so we get in the way of that.

So, yes, individually based services are great for kids who aren't the kids that I work with and maybe aren't for many of the parents who are listening to us today day.

It's an important point because I guess when I listen to you describe that, like, how can a parent make that determination? You talked about kids who are clinically diagnosed with specific disorders that come to see you.

But how can a parent who is dealing with a defiant child and a child of any age group who can be defiant for a host of reasons, how does one make that determination as to whether this is just a phase? This is just that them going through something versus it actually requiring clinical intervention.

I think most parents intuitively understand when what's happening in their home is well beyond the typical range. Right.

So if you're battling your kid every day and everybody's raising their voice, not just once in a while, there's nothing wrong with that once in a while. But if every day feels to a parent like you're living in a war zone, that's not a phase, Right? It isn't. There's something clearly going on.

And what I would encourage parents to do in that situation is if they, they need professional help, that is, they want to find a therapist, you know, that whoever they find should be somebody who does some individual work. We do individual therapy and intensive family focused therapy, but that's not the only thing that we do.

So find a therapist who does some individual work, but also does a lot of family work.

Some therapists never see parents, they never even talk to parents, which I do not believe is the right way to go with a kid who is having serious problems.

You know, pull the parents into sessions, do some real family therapy, which is not just a quick update of 5 or 10 minutes to mom or dad, whoever brings the kid in.

It's get the kid and the parents together and let's start talking about the problems that are happening in this family and what we're all going to do. About it to make it better. So that's you. Parents know. They know when things are wrong. It's quantity and severity.

But they know when they've hit that mark, and that's the time to reach out for help.

Dr. Sunseri, what would you say is one message that you'd like readers of Gentle Parenting Reimagined to take from your book?

Well, for the parents out there that are struggling every day, the ones that are in the war zones, you don't have to live like this, that there are ways of changing your child's behavior. You can make things substantially better than they are.

And for families, again, that have maybe more moderate situations going on, the book is a good first step in changing all of that stuff. There's a chapter on just about everything that drives parents crazy.

I know how to get kids to do their homework, even if they're 20 missing assignments behind. I know how to get kids to do chores. I know how to get kids to be respectful and not fight with their siblings or fight with their parents.

I figured out all the various different ways you can get a kid up in the morning to an alarm clock and get them out the door on time for school. You can fix all of this stuff. And as hard as your kid is, there's always hope. There's always so much that can be done.

And if your child is more on the extreme end of the spectrum, you can't do this alone. You got to find a group of people who can help you.

Intensive Family Focused Therapy is a team model because I don't believe any one therapist can change all of this. There has to be sessions for parents, has to be sessions for the kid. There has to be family therapy.

So I work with the team and we all work in concert with each other because we all do something slightly different on the team. But there's always hope. You don't have to live like this. Things get so much better than they are now. Your child did not ask to be this way.

They don't wake up in the morning thinking how they're going to ruin your day. They just don't. They don't know why they do the things that they do. They just do. And so they need help.

And starts with the family is figuring out what's going on and how you can best help them.

Lots of very important insight. Dr. Paul Censori, clinical psychologist and author of Gentle Parenting Reimagined, really appreciate your time and your perspective today.

Thank you so much.

It's a pleasure being on with you. And you ask great questions, too. So thank you for those.

Thank you.

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