Reduce Power Struggles With Your 2e Kid

Do you feel stuck in negotiations and power struggles with your twice-exceptional kid? Are daily tasks a battle or a grind? Do you want to feel like you and your kid are on the same team instead of opposing forces? In this talk, Dr. Danika Maddocks will explain why power struggles are so common with twice-exceptional kids and she’ll help you approach these dynamics from a new perspective. She’ll share three powerful, practical strategies to prevent and defuse power struggles - plus real-life examples to help you apply these strategies to your particular family situation.

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Read the transcript here

Welcome everyone. We're so excited tonight to have Dr. Danica Madocks here to talk about reducing power struggles with your 2E kids. This was one of the top topics that you guys selected and last year's parent survey and actually Kelly we could put in the survey for this year too.

So in case you're not familiar with Real, we are a nonprofit and we strive to ensure that Silicon Valley twice exceptional students thrive at school by raising parent and educator awareness of an understanding of practical research-based strategies to address their needs successfully. If you're here, you probably know what twice exceptionality is, but we will just talk about how we see it. Twice exceptional students have both distinguishing strengths, high abilities or potential, and at the same time complex challenges such as autism, ADHD, dyslexia, anxiety, and others.

And we think of them as being green because the strengths and complex challenges are there at the same time, which can make them a challenge at school in order to support both of these sides simultaneously. Real has a lot of recordings of previous events, blog posts, white papers and a lot of information, all categorized for you by topic on our topic tool at Real2E.org. So please visit our website and learn about school selection, anxiety, and many other interesting topics.

We are wrapping up this school year's events. This is our last one for this year, but you can see the recordings on YouTube of all our previous events. We will continue to have our bimonthly parent support group which you can also register for on our website, and shortly we will be announcing our fall lineup.

Real is also part of this amazing new neurodiversity speaker series and tomorrow evening David Flink is going to be speaking about the power of mentorship. There have been many other fascinating speakers and more to come in the fall. You can visit Neurodiversity Speaker Series dot org to sign up for these talks.

And if you'd like additional resources and support, we do have a private Google group for Real members where people ask and answer each other's questions and ask about resources, of which you can sign up for. We also are on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and our previous recordings are all on YouTube. Real recently released a white paper that's available on our website, which is a model for schools with our 4 petals: developing connection, embracing flexibility, attending to strengths, and reframing behaviors.

This white paper includes stories of real students in the classroom and how these petals help support them as well as specific practical strategies. So we hope that you will download it and share it with educators in your life. We also have a free 46 page guide to twice exceptionality and IEPs for California, although most of it's applicable anywhere, which you can download on our website to get a lot of tips.

I know May is IEP season for many people, so hopefully you'll find this helpful. And we are so lucky to have Danica Maddox here today. I'll introduce her in a moment, but before we do that, I would love to ask you all, we're going to try something new that I haven't tried yet, so hopefully it works.

We want to ask you what power struggles you are facing right now. So you can go to Menti.com and type in this code to type in your responses and you can also use this QR code if you have your phone handy. They will appear on the screen live as you type them, so please go ahead and let's see some of your power struggles.

I'm gonna try it on my phone too. If anyone's having struggles, just let us know. Oh, I'm seeing some.

Welcome to everyone who's just joining us. We are working on this Menti word cloud. Give you guys another minute.

I see homework is a big one. Bedtime, video games is big. Getting them in the bath, yep, that's one in our house too. It's getting them in the bath and then getting them out of it.

Thank you all for typing these in. I love watching this grow live. This is really cool. Getting them to eat nutritious food, yes, also plus one.

Danica, feel free to chime in if you'd like. You know, this is great, it's great to see these. And if you'd like, would you like to start jumping in or do you want me to try the school ones?

I think, let's go, this is good. Why don't we jump in? This is really helpful and it's good because I use bedtime as an example, because the parents I work with usually the morning routine and the bedtime routine are common sources of power struggle. So there'll be some examples in the talk and then the principles would apply to kind of all of the things that I saw on there.

So, but that was really helpful to see what's on everyone's mind right now, I would say. So let me share my slides here. I'll put these into presentation mode.

Oh sure, yeah, go for it. If you like, I can do your quick intro before you start. Alright, so Dr. Danica Maddox is founder of the Gifted Learning Lab where she helps parents feel more confident raising their intense gifted and twice exceptional kids.

Danica has supported gifted and twice exceptional families for over 15 years as a teacher, researcher, therapist, and parent coach. Danica has a PhD in school psychology from the University of Texas at Austin and an MA in developmental psychology from San Francisco State University. As a former gifted kid who's raising an intense gifted preschooler, Danica is on a mission to make parents' lives easier so gifted and twice exceptional families can thrive. So we very much appreciate that.

Thank you, thanks for the intro, that's great. So as you all know, we're talking about reducing power struggles with your 2E kid. And they shouldn't be hard for you and us being like, it is hard for me, it can't be hard for you, you're grown up, you know, this kind of struggle.

And that a lot of times families find themselves in that power struggle where the parents are kind of the stand-in, and like as the parents we hold a lot of that anxiety and pressure from society and we can bring it to our interactions with our kids where we're afraid for them, kind of like you have to be able to do these things, society says this, and the kids like no I don't, that doesn't work for me. It's great and that's why I think the neurodiversity paradigm can be helpful because it can help us see like hey, society's expectations are unreasonable, they're not for us really, they're not a great fit, right, our brains work differently. We need something different and then you can be like a team fighting against neurotypical society instead of just kind of fighting against each other.

So for that kid and for any kid I think who's struggling with like an internal power struggle or feeling stuck on things or thinking like I should be able to do this, I think understanding their brain and how their brain works in a way that's not shaming, that's like all brains are different, here's what's cool about your brain, here's how your brain works best, can help reduce that over time. It's like not a quick fix, but I think it can give them a more compassionate framework than society is going to give them. Makes sense.

I really love that. I love being a team together against the society. Yeah, yeah.

So I think we are at the end. There are so many more questions. Well, okay, I'll do one more teenager one and then we'll wrap up. Sure.

My teenager doesn't have hobbies or pursue interests. She says she wants to learn to drive but doesn't pursue it or yoga, etc. You know, she's like, I'm not sure if this is about overwhelm or getting started or I think we had some other pre-submitted questions about motivation.

Yeah, yeah, I think, again, these are ones that it's like, it's hard to answer without knowing more information, but one idea that I haven't talked about that might be helpful is declarative language and I didn't put this link for the Real team, but there's like a declarative language handbook. Sure, what we can do, Google it, you can find it by Linda K Murphy and she's been interviewed on podcasts like the neurodiversity podcast and stuff too. Declarative language is just this idea of trying to use declarative language versus imperative language.

So imperative language tells the kid to do something, right, sort of like telling the kid what to do or asking them questions and kind of expecting a response. Whereas declarative language is more just like offering information or observations about the situation, the abilities or your own internal thing. And I like Linda K Murphy says, in declarative language, you focus on giving instead of getting.

So you focus on giving your kid all the information they need to kind of make their own decision about what they want to do versus focusing on trying to get them to do something. So if there's a concern like, oh, my kid, like she wants to learn to drive, but she doesn't pursue it or yoga or whatever, right, and you're even kinda wondering, like you have some ideas of what it could be, is it overwhelm, is it getting started. You could say something like, you know, I've heard you say you want to learn to drive and I can also see that like it's hard to get started, right, or like, and I'm wondering if there's any way that I could be helpful to you about that or like I'm available if you want that, right?

Or be like, oh, you want to learn to drive, there's so many parts to that it can feel overwhelming, there's lots of different steps and like I'm happy to give you more information if you want. Or, you know, this kind of offering, or even sometimes if you want to brainstorm with your kid, like your kid might know what it's about or maybe able to share some insights into like here's why I'm not, like I do want to drive and here's why I'm not. But if you say like hey I know you wanna learn to drive but you haven't what's going on it may be like leave me alone right, but if you're like hey I saw you like you said you want to learn to drive but I know that you haven't started and like I'm just really curious about like what's going on and if there's any way I could help, it's like an invitation and then your kid might be able to say like, oh, it's this thing or it's that thing and you might be able to work together.

So sometimes declarative language can be helpful. I think of it as just even like just dropping little descriptions, like you don't even have to have the conversation, then you could just be like I've been thinking about how you said you wanted to learn to drive. You might just say that like over breakfast, right, and just leave it and then let your kid maybe come back to you.

So, and just giving plenty of processing time for those types of things that can sometimes create, make it easier for our kids to talk to us, I think. I've been wondering about this reminds me a lot of when the kids were little and we were told to just leave things around the house. Yeah, yeah, exactly, just leave toys out and see what they, you know.

Exactly, yeah, and that concept is called like strewing in the home school and like the unschooling and, yeah, a lot of folks find that with their PDA kids, that's really helpful. This driving pamphlet. Yeah, right, where it's like, oh, here's this thing, yeah, exactly, right.

Or you could be like, oh man, I remember when I learned to drive, you know, and they were like, oh, like I could tell you stories if you want to hear. Kids love to hear the things we've messed up or that were hard for us, so you could start with that to normalize it too. Okay. So yeah.

Love it. Danica, thank you so much, that has had so many amazing practical tips. I really feel like I have tools to try tomorrow, so really appreciate it. I'm so glad, I'm glad to hear that, it's my pleasure, I was really excited to talk about it with you all.

Thank you, and I put all the links in the chat so you can get a hold of Danica and join her coaching group and get her slides. And we hope to see you at a future Real event. There's a neurodiversity speaker series tomorrow night, and so...