Robert Trout (00:01.566)
Hello and welcome to the Parent Problems Today podcast where we from the Parent Trainers team and often guests, we come together to talk through subjects that are very relevant for people with tweens, teens, young adults, and very often have issues or family systems conflicts or things that are stemming from mental health processes that are going on sometimes for the whole family and other times for one of the kids that the parents are trying to understand how to work with.
Today, you’re joined by Paul Arredondo and myself, Robert Trout, as your host. And we have an episode that we’re going to kind of just kind of flow with today because it’s a very broad topic, but it’s relevant to almost every family we’ve ever worked with. So today’s episode, we’re going to call Plans and Backup Plans. And we’re going to step into this in kind of a free flow way, just looking at kind of some of the scenarios we’ve run into.
and why this is such an important concept for families to hold on to. So I’m going to kick it off and talk about a reality check where very often for the parents, okay, so for every parent listening to this, one of the things that we notice that happens when mental health or behavioral health issues are coming into the family system is that parents start to seek solutions and
I’ve actually had parents call this like the magic pill, right? Like, you know, they take this and all the symptoms go away and everything goes back to normal. And if you’re not seeing the video this, I’m using air quotes here because it’s a little ironic because parents are very often seeking normality when in fact normality is something that changed and ebbed over a long period of time as the family changed, as kids got older.
neurological process developed, brain chemistry changed. And within that dynamic is where most mental health, behavioral health kind of issues started to develop slowly and incrementally over time. And it’s ironic because then we get to this place where now the parent sees it. And very often this is because of a crisis. It might be because the behavior escalated rapidly.
Robert Trout (02:25.492)
To the point that nobody can avoid the behavior that’s impacting everyone within the family system There’s so many causes for it but what I want you to hear is that one of the things we combat as Professionals who work with parents in these situations We have to be the one to lead the parent through the process of understanding that there isn’t a quick fix for this That isn’t going to be over and back to normal
just overnight. There’s no change, there’s no magic pill, there’s no magic formula of say this, do this, put that in place, and suddenly your life’s just gonna be easy for the next five years, 10 years, et cetera. So within that dynamic, we start looking at this concept that we’re looking at today of plans and backup plans. And we’re gonna be focusing a lot on the backup plans because that’s the mistake, the trap that parents fall into.
is because they come up with a plan, first of all, and that’s natural. Everyone starts seeking solutions to the pain, the feelings, emotions, struggle within the system. Parents are trying to solve for those situations they find themselves in. So very often this is them coming up with a plan. And here are some basic examples, and Paul, I’ll hand it to you to get some basic examples you’ve seen. But the most basic for me is always,
we put them in therapy. They’re seeing a therapist once a week or we took them to a psychiatrist and got them pills for, you know, whatever ADHD or something else. Or they’re going to go live with grandparents for a little while or they’re, you know, these are some basic things that we see families kind of contemplating and going through is solutions that they believe are going to. And again, I’m using this a little ironically, air quotes, fix it.
Paul, what else do you got like basic things you see families do that they’re like, oh, here’s plan number one.
Paul (04:29.35)
Yeah, excuse me. Well, I gosh parents are so intentional and have a deep desire to support their children and You know the way we see that happen could be everything from like setting up clear expectations and boundaries holding consequences Increasing consequences thinking it’s gonna get through to them
sitting them down and having a conversation and trying to paint clearly like how they’re being impacted and all the mistakes their child’s making and, you know, direct engagement, you know, and everything that we’ve talked about isn’t bad. You know, those interventions are in their own right appropriate. And we need to actually plan for, you know, these next steps, because oftentimes the things that we’ve mentioned thus far are
an initial laying down of creating change. And then your child is going to have a reaction. Right?
Robert Trout (05:26.185)
Yes.
Yes, yeah, and there’s the key that we want every parent listening to this to really latch onto is that the trap, the mental trap for the parent is, we’ll put them in therapy and this will get better. That thought, this will get better. That is the false, like, latched onto hope driven, like, it’s not driven by statistics, it’s not driven by science, it’s not driven by anything other than
I hope this person will help you so that I don’t have to deal with it or it doesn’t impact us as much or you you’ll stop feeling that way or whatever it might be the parent. Yeah. Yes. It’s like, this is very reactionary on both sides of the parent saying, I can’t do this, which we actually talked about as a positive parents realizing that you’re not equipped to handle this alone is a good thing.
Paul (06:08.886)
or I’ll stop feeling that way.
Paul (06:17.582)
Sure.
Paul (06:23.182)
Mm-hmm.
Robert Trout (06:26.888)
The problem is the trap of, well, this will fix it. This pill will fix it. This therapist, you moving over there will fix it. You, know, whatever it is, stronger boundaries, consequences that will fix it. What I want us to drive home right now on this podcast is no, it won’t. No, it won’t. It absolutely will not fix this because any new shift in behavior on your part,
Paul (06:27.63)
Certainly.
Paul (06:32.557)
Mm-hmm
Robert Trout (06:55.994)
invites reaction on their part. So in reality, any plan you create needs to be successful, needs to have steps not only one and two in place. We need the parent to have an understanding that steps three, four, five, six, seven are right behind it. It’s not a one and done. This is a process that’s opening.
for the whole family system and your relationship as a parent to this child. And because of that, it’s really important, so important for the parent to say, okay, and let me use one of these as example. Okay, you’re gonna go see this therapist. And that’s where I usually come in. It’s like, okay, in that scenario, what happens when they start refusing to go see that therapist? And the parent usually looks at me over Zoom and goes,
well, they’re they wouldn’t do that, right? Like, why would they do that? Because it happens all the time. Your kid’s going to push back in some way and very often refusing therapy is a strategic move either consciously or unconsciously within a mental or behavioral health process that’s happening. Because for example, if their process is leaning towards control and they know you want them to go to therapy,
Well, then they’re going to fight against that because that’s what you want, not what they want. They’re looking for an element of control within their life or over you or the family system or there’s so many options for that. But it’s important to recognize you made a plan that they’re going to go to therapy to get help, but it doesn’t actually mean that’s what’s going to happen. And very, very, very commonly we see that pushback or they start refusing to go or my
Personal favorite the kid who walks into the therapist office sits down in the chair crosses their arms and goes I’m not talking and they sit there without saying a word for that whole 45 minutes to an hour just to prove to you that you’re wasting your money and I see a lot of fights my god, so many fights where the parents are like, why am I paying for this? You’re just wasting money if you’re not gonna use it when it was the parent
Robert Trout (09:17.31)
who put that plan in place in the first place. It was not the kid asking for help. This was the parent eliciting a response to try to make a plan, hoping that would, again, hope, hoping that that would solve it. Paul, what would you add to those kind of dynamics?
Paul (09:35.278)
I think often, you know, plans are knee-jerk reactions. You know, and I think one of the things you started out this conversation with is being able to, in so many words, take a step back and objectively see what’s actually happening and what’s been happening. What’s the dynamic and how did it unfold? How did we get here? It didn’t all of a sudden happen. And I think the knee-jerk reaction to the creation of plans gets out ahead of the kid and that’s
Robert Trout (09:40.894)
Mm-hmm.
Paul (10:04.928)
as we’ve been saying, brings the biggest rejection, reaction, pushback, you know, when ultimately, you know, if you got to, if you’re trying to turn a ship, you got to start by slowing it down. You know, you got to actually like get in there and start to pump the brakes a little bit and go, okay, what is this? And let’s start actually just naming what’s happening first and creating space.
for everybody to understand the problem and the challenge and the barriers and what you’re all feeling. And ultimately, when we talk about making plan B and C and D, this is really what we’re talking about is setting up a plan where you’re really working to integrate your child into buy-in, creating the space for them to actually, eventually, as you said, Rob, maybe even ask for help.
Robert Trout (11:03.049)
Yes.
Paul (11:03.99)
be in the ownership of their own process. Like actually that’s the adult we hope they’re going to be becoming, right? Is that they can actually own and be accountable for the decisions they’re making. For maybe the impulsivity or the lack of organization or the rigidity or the falling into deep collapse, depression or addiction. know, them being able to see themselves is going to take a little bit of time.
Robert Trout (11:17.586)
Yes.
Paul (11:33.622)
So you can’t stop a fully gassed up engine and expect it to turn out OK.
Robert Trout (11:43.72)
Yeah. I mean, use using that metaphor, right? The boat is full speed ahead. And what a lot of parents do is they throw an iceberg in front of it and expect the ship just to stop. But that’s not how it works. And that’s exactly the same when it comes to mental health and behavioral processes for tweens, teens and young adults is their full speed ahead. And you try to stop them. You’re eliciting conflict. You’re eliciting a dramatic
confrontation or developing situation between yourself and them. And that’s where it does come down to, okay, hold on, a whole other conversation to this is make your plan, but then don’t even start plan one. Look at your plan, analyze your plan before you ever tell them that it’s coming because you can gather data and try to elicit their support for a plan within the direction you want to take things.
But if you throw a plan at a tween, teen or young adult and they go into this reactionary response and you’re starting to see all this, I guess the important part to this conversation is if you’re surprised that that didn’t work, that’s on you.
Plain and simple. If you’re listening to this, that’s on you, not on them. You tried to stop the ship by throwing the iceberg in front of it. And we all know from the story of the Titanic just how well that works out. And the reality is, is slowing down in the first place would have helped. But a lot of families that come to people like us to do the parent coaching and trainings and all that kind of work.
They’ve already tried to throw the iceberg. It’s crashed. The ship sank. They had to restart and go through these processes. That’s where this conversation I think should really head is plans are great. Are they functional? Not very often. Backup plans come from hindsight. They come from that place of saying, okay, we’re going to let them live with, you know, grandpa, gram.
Robert Trout (13:51.732)
mall for a year or it’s a couple months or we just going to take a break using that scenario, right? Creating space and distance. Well, heck, it’s happened over and over again where for in those situations, that kid gets kicked out of that house and uncle, grandparents, it doesn’t matter, whatever the scenario was, they might be so activated in their behaviors that the change of space doesn’t actually elicit a change in behavior.
And very, very often, so commonly in that scenario, we see that person get kicked out. Well, they can’t live here. We thought they could. We thought this would be simple, but they have to come back to you. And the surprise for us very often is the parent going, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, It’s only been a week. It’s only been two weeks. What are you talking about here? Because they don’t have a backup plan. That kid’s coming right back into the scenario and the parents might’ve gotten a breather for a week or two, or maybe a little longer if they got lucky.
But the point of this conversation is the reminder that by changing something upfront and starting plan one, that should automatically, automatically elicit the creation of backup plan two, three, four, and five for the scenarios that are so common after a reactionary behavior that’s going on for this kid.
You can’t be a, this will fix it. Go over here or take this or do that, whatever it is. That’s not the solution. It’s looking and saying, okay, we’re going to put them there and we are going to consciously expect them to make mistakes. We are going to expect the same behaviors to happen when they’re going to therapy. We’re going to expect the same reactions when they’re on meds.
We’re going to expect them to act the same way when they’re at their grandparents’ house for the summer. We’re going to act from this place of knowledge that what we witness as parents is going to continue. And we need to get ready on the larger scale with interventions and strategies and processes. But it’s that backup plan for it happening, quite honestly, just faster than you would expect it to happen. Thoughts on that?
Paul (16:15.426)
I like what you said there around intervention strategies and processes, right? I think there’s a lot to be said for parents resourcing, meaning that not only are they having conversations with co-parents, but they’re having conversations with extended family. They’re having conversations with hopefully maybe the therapist that their child is seeing, as well as I know we’re getting close to wrapping up the school year, but maybe a camp.
a school counselor or a coach or a teacher, instructor, mentor, somebody else in their life, maybe it’s a friend’s parent or one of their friend’s parents to ultimately round out your perception of what’s going on for them, first of all, and then ultimately create a little bit more of a container in the recognition that like some kids, when you start to
point out behavior patterns, they, as you said, Rob, express some version of control and they can do all manner of things, everything from running away, which often means running to their friend’s house, or shutting down and collapsing, or pushing back and getting bigger. And creating the plan to manage all three of those scenarios is part of the process, right?
I think it’s a rare child, teen, tween, young adult who can objectively step back and see themselves and move right into accountability and move right into responsibility and move right into actionable steps to create change for themselves. And the truth of it is, that any human, when change happens,
there’s a whole lot of discomfort. And we don’t like that. We just don’t like it. Nobody does, you know? And so being able to manage that discomfort, we need to even think about like, okay, what are the skills that I have to support them in processing their emotions? What are the skills that they have to self-regulate and take care of themselves? What are the skills that our family system has to contain this process?
Paul (18:39.432)
and really support them in cultivating the change that we would hope that they would step into. And so it’s a broad approach. And we talk about this in so many different ways when we engage families through trainings. And you can listen to many of these podcast episodes and understand how many different angles that we look at every single scenario from. That said, know, resourcing.
is something that helps to broaden the plan, to create safety, to ultimately help a child, help a teen, tween, young adult understand that they are responsible for themselves and they can’t deflect and blame. Eventually they’re gonna have to learn to take accountability. And ultimately that’s our job is to gift it to them. And how we do that and how we bring them to the table is so important.
And every family does it differently. You know, we don’t have a cookie cutter way of doing this. And that’s why, you know, direct conversation is the most effective when, you know, asking supportive folks like ourselves and other, you know, parent facilitators, parent trainers and facilitators out there. All that said, I’m going to take a step back and recognize again that we, when engaging parents, do a ton of assessment about
Where are your support systems? How robust are they? Who haven’t you resourced? And ultimately that becomes plan B, C, D, and E, because it takes a village. mean, that’s such a cliche and it is so true. And I think a lot of parents feel very isolated in their experience. certainly we’re not making this podcast just to talk to one family. yeah, so I’ll pause there.
Robert Trout (20:27.444)
No.
Paul (20:31.638)
Rob, you know, what do you want to add?
Robert Trout (20:33.886)
Well, I guess where, as we head towards kind of the end of this flow, I mean, the reality is, look at this from a practical standpoint. OK? Your kid is struggling. And if you listen to any professional, we’re going to say there’s no cookie cutter way to solve this. There’s no, like, do this and it will just stop.
it would magically get better. That just doesn’t exist. So on that practical level, we have to start looking at this and saying, OK, well, how do we start thinking longer than step one and two? When you look at it, Paul, you were just saying, resourcing yourself, your community, your family, figuring out what you have to work with is probably steps three, four, and five.
because someone else might have a really good idea, but you have to communicate. You have to reach out and build that support network for yourself because you have to take care of yourself in order to take care of your kid. That’s just reality. But now we’re looking at steps six, seven, eight, nine, and that’s where families are looking at this. And that’s really where we’re getting to the backup plans. It’s like if everything goes off the rails here, where is this headed that we can be supportive in the process of recognizing
what we as parents can and cannot facilitate or handle, you know, so our capacity, then you start looking at it from the, I’m gonna say standpoint of, okay, they refuse to go to that therapist. How do we turn it? And I’ll just give a quick example. I’ve had tremendous success with families where I give them this process of saying, okay, your kid says, I’m not gonna talk to that therapist. Okay, I hear you don’t like that therapist.
I would like you to find someone that you do enjoy working with. So let’s do this. You tell me what you’re looking for in a therapist and a coach and a supportive person in your life. What is it that you’re looking for? And have them elicit some kind of qualities that you’re looking for and say, okay, we’re going to reach out and we’re going to find two or three people that match some of those qualities. And we’re just going to have you, you’re going to interview them.
Robert Trout (22:55.986)
and you get to tell us which one you want to work with. You have to choose one of them, but you get to pick. And I can’t tell you the remarkable change in those scenarios alone in that backup plan of like, okay, they’re going to pick who they work with because it elicits that like they chose this. It wasn’t forced on them. They chose this person. And very often that’s enough of a switch to set it up. Okay.
There’s similar things with going to live with grandma, granddad, uncle, family, where the kid, you can set it up where it’s like, okay, well, if you come home, if you can’t figure out how to work with them, when you come home, living at home is going to look different. So you go ahead and build a picture for them understanding that they go there and they act the same and they can’t live there and they come back, it’s not going to be the same.
Because we do see a behavior shift where they go and they act out because they just want to come home where all their friends are, you know, they’re, you know, they know the game to play against you and it feels more comfortable. But if you can make home different in the beginning, the chances of them acting differently and behavior differently and setting things up differently somewhere else increases. And then from there going on to levels of like, I mean, we’ve, mean, in our lives, we’ve had kids that
have gone on to treatment for addiction, for example, and things like that, where it’s like, this person has proven that they can’t handle the structure of life at home, so now we have to look outside the home. And that’s okay, that happens. It’s a part of, especially addiction, we see that all over the place, having a space away from what you consider your real life is really healthy and allows the brain to reset itself, things like that.
But we’re really just talking about being ready for things to go sideways and not be struggling with, my god, I just thought it was over, versus if they can’t handle this, we still have a plan. We have a direction to go, a script to follow, language to use, boundaries set. Like, you’re ready for the long game because they’re only playing short.
Robert Trout (25:12.836)
That’s the prepared parent, the one that understands that mental health is going to be something that isn’t short in its intervention. And so many of our families, that’s what they really wanted. They just wanted to know what to do and say and build next to support the neurological process and the brain development and the behaviors to shift towards more of a young adult that’s functional and things like that.
They’re looking to be supportive as parents. So as a prepared parent, you always have it there that even if things are good after they were bad, now they’re good. Even now, there’s something in place that if something slips, you’re not going all the way back to square one, you’re moving it forward. You’re moving the process forward because you had the backup plan ready for when things shifted in this dynamic.
Paul (25:49.134)
you
Robert Trout (26:09.054)
Closing thoughts on any of that?
Paul (26:13.358)
I’m going to echo many previous podcasts and say that in order for this to be sustainable, you have to take care of yourself first, which is counterintuitive for any parent who’s hearing it for the first time. Your self-care and your resilience is going to be the key to supporting your child and creating the change for them. And the key for them feeling safe enough to create that change. Because if you’re not resilient, you’re probably expressing through irritability and frustration and impatience.
Robert Trout (26:16.855)
Thank
Paul (26:41.58)
So being able to slow yourself down and understand your impact and align it, truly align it with your intent to support your child and being a healthy adult as they age and develop is, it’s key. And so when we talk about plans, backup plans, I mean, it’s, there’s so much that we just kind of brushed over and talked about very quickly in this short period of time.
and to really dig into it and understand the nuance and how we can just blow up the idea of a home plan into a gosh, so much and how do you present the home plan is a whole conversation in itself to help your child understand its value and intent. So being able to take what we have spoke to today, I hope you
got some nuggets out of it. And if you’re really still wondering, how do I even take a first step, please reach out to us. Or reach out to another person in your community and create space for the conversation that I imagine is what you’re seeking. yeah, I’ll just pause there. Now you wrap it up.
Robert Trout (28:03.348)
Yep. Well said. I mean, that’s it. If you’re a parent and you’re listening to this and you’re like, well, we’re living plan one now, but I have no idea what to do when I’m going to say when this goes off the rails, call us, come do one of our trainings, do some coaching and build your plan so that you have steps six, seven, eight, nine in the books ready to go so that you’re not caught off guard. Because the truth is, is that when it comes to mental health,
Paul (28:29.336)
Yeah.
Robert Trout (28:31.794)
A lot of things are predictable. They are. Because we see the pattern, we can then be ready for the possible things that can happen. So build your plan. Come find us at parenttrainers.com and we can’t wait to support you.
Paul (28:35.224)
Certainly.
