022: How to Talk so Little Kids Will Listen: Author Interview!

Have you read the now-classic book How to Talk so Kids will Listen and Listen so Kids will Talk?  Ever wished there was a version that would help you with younger children who perhaps aren’t quite ready for a detailed problem-solving session? Well now there is!  Adele Faber is a co-author of the original book; Adele’s daughter Joanna and Joanna’s childhood friend Julie King have teamed up to write the new version of How to Talk so LITTLE Kids Will Listen, packed with examples of how real parents have used the information they’ve now been teaching for over 30 years. Join me for a chat with Julie King as we work to understand the power of acknowledging children’s feelings and some practical tools to help engage your younger children to cooperate with you. Update 5/10/17: An eagle-eyed listener noticed that Julie mentioned her 10-year-old son wanting to sit on the front seat of her car, while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends that children 12 and under should sit in the back seat.  Julie was recounting an episode that happened long before there were CDC recommendations on where children should sit in the car, so please don’t take this as an ‘OK’ to put your 12-and-under child in the front seat.  Thanks!   Reference Faber, J. & King, J. (2017). How to talk so little kids will listen. New York: Scribner.  (Affiliate link)   Read Full Transcript Transcript Jen:    [00:21] Welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. I’d like to welcome my guest today, Julie King, who is one half of the writing duo behind the new book, How to Talk so Little Kids Will Listen, and if that title sounds familiar, it’s because it’s part of what seems to have become a family of books around the classic How to Talk so Kids Will Listen and Listen so Kids will Talk by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish. Julie has been educating and supporting parents and professionals since 1995 and in addition to her work with individual parents and couples, she also leads How to Talk workshops and gives parent education presentations to schools, nonprofits, and parent groups. Julie received her AB from Princeton University and a JD from Yale Law School. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area and is the mother of three. Welcome Julie. Julie:  [01:13] Thank you. Jen:  [01:14] It actually does feel a little odd to welcome you when we’re in your own home. Julie was kind enough to invite me to her home today to have this conversation. So thanks so much for taking the time. Julie: [01:23] Oh my pleasure. Jen:   [01:24] So I wonder if you can tell me a little bit about the genesis of this book because it kind of runs in the family a bit, right? Julie: [01:30] Okay. So to tell you the whole story, I have to go back in time to when I was six months old. Jen:    [01:37] This is going to be a long story! Julie: [01:38] I’m not going to go through all the details, I promise, but when my parents moved into the house that they still live in when I was born, right before I was born and my mother didn’t know very many people in the neighborhood. I was six months old. She was looking out the kitchen window and she saw another mom with two little kids the same age as me and my brother and she invited that woman in. That was Adele favor and the two of them became very good friends. Joanna. Joanna was the baby and her brother Carl was the older boy and she and I went to nursery school together. Adele took these, what they call Child Guidance Workshops with Haim Ginott and used to call my mother daily and discuss what she was learning and they would talk about what they were going to try on Joanna and her older brother and her younger brother and me and my older brother and younger sister. Jen:    [02:27] So you were a Guinea pig for the original book? Julie:  [02:30] That’s right. I was a Guinea pig. Um, so she and I became very good friends. We went to school from nursery school all the way through high school together. And um, I was aware that her mother was writing these books as a teenager. I remember going to her house and seeing her mother and Elaime Mazlish writing on yellow legal pads on the kitchen table by hand, and in the eighties when the one of the books came out or was coming out. I got to copy edit the book and I think I found a coma out of place and I felt very proud of my contribution, but I never actually expected to be doing anything with the work until I had my own child and he was in preschool at the San Francisco JCC and they were looking for a more than one time event for parents. They used to bring people in to speak, but they wanted to do something that would be ongoing and I at the time was studying group facilitation and group development and of course I knew this material very well, having grown up with it. So I volunteered to lead a group which was originally scheduled as an eight week group and halfway through everybody said, well, we need another eight weeks to really learn this. At which point I panicked because I wasn’t quite sure what I would do. Well we turned it into an ongoing support group and that first group met for four and a half years. The other people heard about it and asked me to bring the workshop to private groups into nonprofits and that’s how I got into leading the groups originally and my friend Joanna, who is still a good friend of mine who still lives in New York, and I moved out to California…This will happen in New York originally. She started leading workshops in New York, so we would talk to each other about what we were doing and what we were discovering and quite a few years ago when I was still mostly working with parents of preschool-aged kids. People said to me, we love this book, but we need more examples, and so I said, I know what to do. I called Adele and I said, I have your next book for you. She’s written one for teens and she’s written ones for kids at school. I said, now you have to write one for little kids, and she said, more or less. I quote, Julie, I’m too tired. You have to write it. So I called Joanna and I said, Joanna, we have to write this book. So we’ve been collecting material for many years and working very hard for the past two years to really polish it up and create this book. Jen:    [04:49] Yeah. Awesome. I did a little comparison between the new book, which as we’re recording has not been released yet, but once, once you hear this interview, you will be able to get the book on Amazon and other bookstores. So I have an advanced copy and I did a little comparison between that and the classic How to Talk so Kids Will Listen and it seemed to me as though the overall concepts are quite similar. The certainly a big focus on handling emotions and engaging cooperation and praise. There’s a little less than the new book on encouraging autonomy, which surprised me a little bit, and you have a spanking new chapter on working with differently wired kids, which we’re going to talk more about in a little bit. I’m guessing that a fair number of my listeners have already read or maybe even own the original book. And maybe that was, you know, they bought it for their first child and maybe they have a toddler in tow now. And I’m wondering if you can help us understand what they would get out of this book that they wouldn’t necessarily get...