Transcript of the Podcast:

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Thanks a lot everybody for being here. This is one of our podcasts and we’re going to be talking about a really important topic today about how hard to push your kids. This is for parents and helping you with when are you helping your kids or maybe is pushing your kids something that hurts your kids? And I am really happy to have Mr. Dwayne Flees here today from Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Senior Master Laura Sanborn from Cave Creek, Arizona here. Thanks a lot for being here, guys.

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

Thanks, sir.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Thank you, sir.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

All right. And just to introduce me, here some of my qualifications. Senior Master Sanborn has been doing this for decades and decades, so has Mr. Flees, so we’re really excited to have our team here today again to be part of this. So, let’s talk a little bit about the overall subject about how hard to push your kids. We get a lot of parents that are struggling with this and they might say something like when their kids are challenged with they’re coming to karate class, going to school, doing an activity, or maybe something that they’re challenged with at home, having them do their chores that they say, “Well, I don’t want to push my kids.” You guys have heard this statement a bunch of times, haven’t you?

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

Yes, sir.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Oh, constantly. Yeah, “I don’t want to force my kid to do something. He doesn’t want to come today and I don’t want to force him because we just want him to enjoy it.” Yes, all kinds of just versions of that.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Yeah, there’s versions of I think a struggle for parents with how much when a child objects. And when is a child’s objection something that needs to be valued? And that’s certainly a reasonable consideration, and we’re here to kind of help you with that and to help you decide number one, whether when you need to make a decision to push your kid and not to push your kid. And some parents want to make the decision or they say statements to us like, “Well, I don’t think we should ever push our kid.” Well, let’s talk about that a little bit and make some decisions about that today. Let’s think about a bell curve of activities that we may have. Let me draw… Use a different color here, so it’s a little bit easier to see.

So, we have a bell curve of activities and a bell curve of skills and things that we want our kid to develop. On one end, this would be like zero skills that your kid would develop. This would be a kid that maybe the parents didn’t help motivate them, didn’t have them do any extra work, any extra activities. Maybe they didn’t even graduate school. So, these would be very low-skilled kids that didn’t have any parent support. I was just watching a TED Talk that showed some statistics about kids that didn’t have both parents in their families and the statistics that happened there. One parent has a really tough job, so it’s hard for them to support their kid doing a lot of things and so the kids don’t develop very many skills.

So, this is one end of the spectrum where the parents aren’t pushing their kid very much, and therefore, the kid wouldn’t develop very much because the only choices the kid’s going to make are things that they think of. And the other end of the spectrum, you might be thinking about when somebody says, “I don’t want to force my kid,” maybe for everybody listening to imagine somebody that is getting their kid up at 5:00 in the morning. I guess my thought would be something like they’re taking Olympic gymnastics in a Russian gymnastics camp back in the Cold War where they would get those kids when they’re three years old if they showed some talent, and they would put them in the gymnastics camp at 5:00 in the morning and they would sleep in the camp, and maybe they’d get some school, but their main goal was to go to the Olympics.

So, that would be forcing the kid in a massive way. Probably nobody on the call is doing anything like that. Nothing against gymnastics at all. We love that too. But imagine during the Cold War, somebody that was identified as talented and they would put them in that kind of environment and just beat them to death until they either were a gold medalist or they were run into the ground in that kind of environment.

Well, in this end of the spectrum, probably too much, and this is way too little. I think you can imagine where parents not supporting their kids very much, parents or the environment pushing their kids too much. This one ends up potentially having trauma because they were pushed too hard. This, in modern times or in our times, might be a parent that really wants them to do an activity and yells at them and yells at them and yells at them. And we have this idea, maybe in your minds, if you imagine a situation like that, somebody who wanted their kid to play a sport that they play football, and they wanted them to play that sport so bad the kid didn’t really care about it. And they yelled at him and yelled at him and yelled at him. And the kid might even be successful in it, but they were kind of traumatized by that experience in their life and they don’t want to repeat that. Okay, sure. That turns into trauma.

And too little pushing, I might make the case that that could turn into trauma too, because now, that child hasn’t developed very many skills or they may be weaker in certain areas because they haven’t experienced many things. The parent hasn’t gotten them to experience certain things. I know people who haven’t had their kids drive until they’re 18, 19, 20 years old, which is okay, but they’re worried about them being on the road because of their safety. Which again, is okay, it’s your choice as a parent. But now, when they drive and they’re 20 years old, they may be really tentative and worried and nervous about driving. Do you guys have any other examples? I’m trying to come up with some examples as we think of one end of the extreme or the other.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Well, on the too little one for me, a lot of times it strikes me when they ask a three-year-old, “Well, do you want to do this?” Well, it depends on the day when you’re talking to a three-year-old. Actually, for any kid, it depends on the day. So, they won’t push at all because the kid didn’t get a snack today or missed a nap today. And so, they’re like, “Oh, well he doesn’t really want to do it.” Whatever the activity is, they’re not looking at the value of whatever the activity is. They’re looking at, “Oh, well my three-year-old said no, he doesn’t want to do it, so I’m not going to force him to do it.” That kid will probably, I would think, learn to just manipulate forever and never have to do anything. Not realizing that the not doing anything at all is detrimental.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Yeah, it’s the fallacy of choice. I think in here, there’s no parent choice. The parent isn’t choosing anything, so there’s zero choice by the parent. The parent’s abdicating their choice completely. The choice is, “Whatever, I am not going to make any decision.” Whereas here the choice is the choice by the kid. So, there’s zero choice on this end of the spectrum, on the high end by the kid. The kid has no say so whatsoever. There’s no conversation at all. And in this case, the kid is the only one that’s choosing anything. And both of those extremes can be problematic. The kid is controlling everything in the environment. So, how would the child know at three years old whether something is good or bad for them?

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

Right. We’ve had parents that told us, “Well, we’re not going to come in to our first lesson we scheduled with you because we ask our three-year-old and they said they didn’t want to go to karate.” I’m like, “Well, they don’t even know what karate is. They haven’t even seen what we do or anything. How can they-“

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Yeah, and you guys are saying this as martial arts instructors from that point of view. I would also say it from the point of view of what of let’s say it’s swimming class? And the parent says, “Well, my child didn’t want to go to swimming class”? Well, I live in Arizona and we have tons and tons and tons of kids that drown. Kids can drown, and I think the statistic recently was pointed out in three inches of water or less. And there are swimming pools all around Arizona. People can swim most of the year round and young kids die all the time because they haven’t learned how to swim and they haven’t learned water safety. It happens in Michigan where Mr. Flees is too.

So, parents still say that about swimming class. What’s the value there if a child learns to swim? And by the way, they could drown as an adult as well. So, we’re teaching them skills that have value. So, there in what you’re talking about is lying a question, is there a value to this? So, let’s talk about the next thing, and we’re going to come back to this bell curve. One dimension, we said we want to help parents out with the choice, how hard to push my kid? And one thing that we can look at is whether something’s not difficult, one dimension is not difficult. Is it difficult to learn how to swim? A little bit, yeah. It’s difficult, especially if you haven’t learned how to swim.

And especially if you’re like two or three or four years old, they teach kids to swim very young ages. We teach martial arts to kids that are three years old and up. Kids learn how to play complicated sports at that age. There’s difficulty. You can learn how to play golf. I’m not very good at golf and I’m 57. Kids can learn how to play golf, that’s difficult.

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

[inaudible 00:11:03].

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

There’s things that aren’t that difficult, like learning how to play video games. They’re designed to be addictive and they’re designed to be easy for kids to pick up. So, those things aren’t difficult. Those are easy things to learn. I’m not saying good or bad, I’m just saying easy or hard. Easy or hard. Not difficult or difficult. Mr. Flees, you were going to say something there?

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

Yeah, like learning multiple languages at the same time. Little kids can learn two or three languages if both their parents speak it, including English. And they’re able to switch between the two or three with no effort at all because they’ve learned it at a young age.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Yeah, that’s right. So, there’s certain things that are time dependent. At younger ages, certain things are less difficult than they are at older ages. And that goes for quite a few things, including what we do as martial arts. So, difficult and not difficult is one dimension of choice. But there’s another one, there’s value. So, high value and low value or zero value. So, if something doesn’t have any value, maybe it’s just fun. For example, eating ice cream, I suppose somebody might need to get an influx of calories in. There might be an argument for eating ice cream. It’s easy and it has low value. Not difficult. Ice cream might be over here. Eating ice cream. Very, very little value. It probably has negative value, but we’ll call it zero and it’s not difficult.

Playing video games. There’s maybe a little bit of value to that. Maybe there’s a little bit of positive value. Zero is here. We’re saying stuff is positive above this, but there’s a little value for most video games for kids, not very difficult. It might be up here. There may be some value to that. I’m not trying to be negative about video games. There’s a lot of arguments about hand-eye coordination about it. There’s some value, so maybe that’s here. For most parents, like in Arizona and I really think everywhere, we use the example of swimming, that’s more difficult and it’s higher value, so maybe that gets us a mark here. What we do in martial arts, I would probably put that at high value. In fact, I’d probably put swimming at a little higher value because I would say that’s probably-

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

That’s something that’s going to save your life.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Yeah, it’s going to save your life. It’s very high value. Multiple languages for somebody older like me, it might be over here. It might be over here in difficulty. For somebody like you pointed out, or a three-year-old, maybe it’s easier to pick up and it might be high value. And these aren’t scientifically-matched numbers. I’m just throwing things in here. But martial arts, we think it is difficult because you have to do it a lot longer. Once you learn swimming, you’ve picked it up. Martial arts, you keep doing it and learning for 30 years. So, I would call that more difficult than a lot of other things. And we feel like it’s very high value, maybe it’s up here, higher value.

And then, there’s a lot of other things in the middle. School, is that difficult or not difficult? It depends. Pretty much everybody goes to school, for the most part. I mean some people have more challenges than others. And it’s very high value here. So, there’s value and difficulty. There’s a lot of things that are not difficult, like playtime, and that has value. People need to have playtime, but it’s not difficult. Again, this doesn’t mean it has zero value or negative value, it’s just down here. It’s not going to be as high value as going to school or learning. What are some other examples that we put on this graph? And there’s stuff in here, stuff in all kinds of other areas here, of course.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Yeah, I was thinking going to church, which for a lot of families is a very high value, and it’s not that difficult for the kids. They just sometimes don’t want to go.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Yeah, that’s a really good point. That’s a great example because for a three or four-year-old when they’re listening to a sermon and they’re having to sit there quietly when they’re supposed to be quiet, that might be high value for a… And that’s a great example because a parent is going to decide that’s a very, very important high-value activity for the kid. That’s going to be here. For the parent, it might not be difficult at all because it may be fulfilling and interesting and valuable to go there. It might be a wonderful time of the week to go. They may enjoy it very much. But for the kid it may be very high value from the parent’s point of view. From the kid’s point of view, it may not be high value at all. They may be like, “Why do I have to sit here this whole time? I can’t play with my phone. I can’t play with the video game. I can’t do other stuff. I’m supposed to listen to this stuff.”

And you may have a lot of trouble as a parent to motivate your kid to go to church. And for some of you guys, you have a great program for your kids and they’re motivated to go, so don’t take any of that the wrong way, but just imagine that’s the example that we’re using. So, this would be a case where a parent’s going to decide, “I have a very high value for my kid, I have a very big reason for my kid to want to go, but it may be difficult for them to go. And at the same time it’s not difficult for me to go because I value it and I enjoy it and I think it’s a really important and fulfilling time. It’s best time of the week for me.” So, I think that was a great example and we can-

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

[inaudible 00:17:15].

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Go ahead.

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

I think also too for the parents, they know that for their kid they have to help them develop good habits to continue going, so they want to require their kids or force or make their kids go, so they create good habits so they last a lifetime.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Yeah, that’s exactly right. And the same thing with lots of other things. So, swimming was another example. Martial arts is a good example because those are developmental activities. School’s another example. I mean the parent doesn’t have to do anything. They don’t have to go to school. The kid or… Let me take that back. If maybe as an adult you’re going to college, you might enjoy that. That might be something that you’re making a choice to go to. But for a child, I mean in fact in the United States, school is free and compulsory. By law, you’re supposed to go. And so that’s always an interesting one to me. Because we compare a forcing your kid…. We say to parents, “Well, we don’t want to force our kids to go to do something that has high value.” Well, what about school? You essentially force your kids to go to school. Why? Because it has high value.

You literally have to go by law. And is it easy? No, it’s difficult. It’s somewhere up here in the difficult range and it has high value at least if your kids probably with your kids, you’re trying to push them to do more difficult classes. If your kids come to you in high school and say, “Oh, I want to take the easiest possible classes, so I can just get As and not have to do anything,” you’re not going to be very happy with that. You’re going to push them to do harder classes. You’re going to feel like that’s not very good. And you’re probably going to push them to do classes that’ll get them into college, or get a scholarship, or take AP classes, or some special classes. You wouldn’t be happy if your kid said, “Oh, I have no problem getting Cs or barely getting by and just passing.” That would complete their requirement, but it wouldn’t make you very happy.

So, we don’t think that’s pushing. We think that’s normal. Why? Because it has value for our child. So, this is the place we want to mostly be in, high value. But here’s the secret. If anything’s difficult, things that are difficult are always going to have a process like this, they’re always going to have a process. They may or may not be interested. Your kids may or may not be interested in doing them. At the beginning, a lot of times they’ll be interested in doing it. Most of the kids that come to martial arts want to do it at the beginning and most of them want to do it all throughout. Or the kids that want to start swimming, they want to start swimming at the beginning. If you wanted to take your kids to church, they probably want to go because it was a new experience and neat experience.

Almost all things that are difficult, including for us adults, we want to start, but during the process of starting, if it’s difficult, if there’s growth involved, there’s always going to be a spot where we want to quit. If there’s growth involved 100% of the time, if it’s valuable, if there’s growth, if it’s hard, if you’re getting benefit from it, there’s going to be a point where you want to quit. For all of the people listening, if you’ve ever accomplished anything valuable, there’s a spot where it’s hard and you feel like quitting. So, for people that get through that spot, it’s because your parents taught you the skill of getting through the spot. So, we’re talking about all these activities, but the real skill is learning to keep going to persevere-

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

Right. That makes me think of-

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

… through the spot. Go ahead, guys.

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

That makes me think of bootcamp, when I went to bootcamp. It was terrible and definitely all of us thought at some point, “Man, all I have to do is go ring the bell and I can go to the Zulu company and wait until my eight weeks are up and just go home and go back to my life.” But those of us that didn’t do that, we were far more successful and happy. I never ran into any of the other guys that quit, but I’m certain there was a time at least that they felt bad about doing that, I could imagine.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

When we learn how not to quit is when we’re a kid. We don’t learn how not to quit without our parents helping us through these times and creating some of these difficult experiences, so that we’ve experienced this growth time and we’ve experienced feeling like we wanted to quit and our parents helping us through that. Nobody gets through that by themself. Nobody gets experienced by themself. Any other comments you guys had? And I wanted to wrap up with a couple other things.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Just on the opposite end of that, parents teach their kids to quit also.

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

Right.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

When you put them in activities that finish and are always done, and then they don’t have to go back, and they don’t have to… “I don’t want to go.” “Okay. Well, you don’t have to.” So, if you constantly do that with your kid every time they say, “I don’t want to do something,” and you say, “Oh, okay. Well, then you don’t have to,” the kids learn to quit and it’s part of learning not to go through something and persevere. It’s the opposite of that.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Yeah, they’re learning that if something gets difficult they ring the bell.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Yes.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Mr. Flees’ example. And that’s why when we’re teaching class, one of the things our instructors will do is if a child says, “Hey, I’m tired. Can I sit down?” The answer’s supposed to be… Our instructors are trained to say, they’re supposed to say, “It’s good that you’re tired. Let’s keep going.” That’s what the instructors are supposed to say. If they say, “Hey, I’m tired.” “Great, I’m glad you’re tired. Let’s keep going.” Because they get used to the idea of being tired and continuing to work. If we get used to the idea of every time we’re tired, or we’re pushed, or we’re stressed that we stop, then we’re going to be one of the people that when we get to this point, we think that that’s what we have to do. So, we’re partway through college and we’re in the hard classes. I call home and I say, “It’s too hard. I got to go.”

We’re in bootcamp like Mr. Fleas was when we say, “It’s too hard. I got to ring the bell.” We’re at a job that is difficult and we are having trouble paying the bills and we go, “Oh, it’s really hard. I go to move back home with my parents because it’s too hard.” We want to build skills so that when it’s hard we go, “I’m used to that feeling of it being hard,” and I move through it. That’s the most important skill. These are things that we do. This is the skill that we’re trying to build.

So, let’s talk about the last thing. The last thing is, back to the bell curve that we talked about a minute ago, and the bell curve that we talked about a minute ago was about, and people listening are familiar, I’m sure with a bell curve, and people that have learned to not do much or too much now, these guys that have been pushed too hard, they are probably sensitive to if they get to a point that something’s challenging, “Ugh, I was challenged too much. My parents did that to me and now I’ve got some trauma from that.” That’s a pretty unusual case that’s why it’s pretty far in the bell curve. That’s the, “I grew up in Russia during the Cold War and they found me, and I had pretty good flexibility, so they threw me in gymnastics camp when I was three years old and I woke up at 5:00 in the morning and went to bed at midnight every night.” Think about that on one end of the spectrum.

What I want to imagine though is right in the middle. Imagine for a moment being right in the middle. And right in the middle, who are these people? These people are people that in United States, at least, some people will be listening to this outside of the country, but in the United States these are people that go to school, graduate high school. A lot of people or most of the people we’re talking to are have a goal to go to college or have a goal to do college, or go to college, or get a job and work. And in the United States, they would get an average job. So, whatever the average is in America. There’s probably some other things we could list.

The divorce rate in America is about 50%, so that means about [inaudible 00:27:06] half the time. So, this deals with relationships too. My question for the people listening is do we want to be in this side of the bell curve where we learn to persevere, to get more excellence, to get more success and get more things because we learn to get through more obstacles. This is exactly the skill that we need to learn so that we end up over here. Not over here, where we were pushed too hard and we have trauma from it, but over here where when something became hard, instead of just graduating high school, maybe for some of these people they decide to get their PhD or they became an MD. That’s not the only thing. Education isn’t the only thing to measure.

But let me use those as an example. You probably get rejected a bunch if you’re getting your MD. You go take the test and those people get rejected a couple of times before they get in, and you got to do a bunch of things. Or maybe they decided to be people that are professional athletes that got rejected all the time, and they have to fail a lot and they lose a lot of games. Pick a higher level skill. They all had things that they did that are going to invite failure, yet, they were able to get through failure on this end of the curve. What other examples can you guys think of or things that you might say around this?

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Authors, they get rejected all the time-

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

That’s a great example.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

… and still keep trying

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

Or actors too. [inaudible 00:29:00].

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Go ahead. Go ahead.

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

A lot of times we don’t hear the story of the actors that are on the current movies, what they had to go through to get where they were or where they are now. We just see them as celebrities that have big houses and cool cars, and they’re on the awesome beach somewhere.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Right? Well, Harrison Ford was a good example. He was a carpenter and he was older before he got the job in Star Wars. There’s examples and examples and examples. You’re right. I’ll give you another one. Mr. Flees, business owner. That is a lot of challenges. Master Sanborn, you’re a business owner too, even though you and I worked together. But business owners. People that are lawyers. People that do higher level… If you’re going to be in a more advanced version of your life, you’re going to have challenges and failures. Senior Master Sanborn, how many times did you have to test to get to sixth degree?

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Do we have to go there?

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Okay, a bunch of times.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

It took seven tries, sir.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Yeah, you had a bunch of challenges to get to… You’re a senior master now, seventh degree. And you’ve passed the first time when you became a seventh degree, but to get to sixth degree was a challenge.

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Yeah, it was hard. That was over and over again.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Yeah, and a lot of people did that and they gave up. To get success, to get things happening that are more positive in your life… So, the question for parents, I think at this point for me and for us to ask you is when are you helping or hurting kids? Hurting kids is if it’s so much that you’re choosing things that are not providing value to them. When you’re providing value maybe to yourself because you really wanted them to be the football star, and that had nothing to do with value for them and their future. Very few people get to be football professional athletes. And that was the whole focus of their life at that point. I have nothing against football. My son played football. So, I use that as the example on purpose.

Is the activity that you’re doing have value to them and the skills that they’re going to develop in the future? That’s the choice you make. That’s whether you’re helping the child or hurting them, your child. If you’re making these decisions and you’re listening to this on the upper side of the bell curve, do you want them to be more than average? That’s usually what we’re trying to strive for when we’re doing this type of work. We want them to work and be more successful in average. And to do that, they’ve got to be able to get through, perseverance. So, they need your help, they need you to push them, they need you to push them a lot in a lot of different areas that have high value. Last thoughts, guys?

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

You mentioned divorce there in a middle of the bell curve. Relationships, if you don’t learn to work your way through that, you’re never going to be successful anyway in any way. And that perseverance, again, every relationship has its ups and downs and hard parts and difficult parts, and if you don’t learn to work through that, it goes downhill from there.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

And that includes work relationships too and friendships and other things. It’s not just personal ones. It’s everybody. Work ones, we have ours with our students. So, you have to work through challenges and not when you have a challenge or somebody’s mad at you or somebody’s sad about something you did or somebody thinks you did something wrong, you can get through that. You can get through that. So, that’s a great example. Thank you. Mr. Flees, anything else to add?

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

No, I don’t think so. This all makes sense and definitely will be helpful when we talk to parents, and hopefully, some parents will watch this and those that have questions, they can reach out to us.

Dr. Greg Moody, Chief Master Instructor:

Yeah, and this is just a start. Exactly right. Please talk to our staff, and we can expand on this. We’ve got quite a few other written pieces of material that go along with this as well. So, thanks everybody for listening. I really appreciate all the time that you spent listening to our podcast here and reading our materials, and the other stuff that we did. How hard to push your kids? Push them as hard as reasonable for them when you’re doing positive activities in their life. We really appreciate you guys being here, Senior Master Sanborn and Mr. Flees, as always. So, thanks a lot to everybody. And I will wrap it up here for today. Thanks a lot.

Mr. Dwayne Flees:

[inaudible 00:34:01].

Sr. Master Laura Sanborn:

Yeah, thank you, sir.