Instead of saying we want to raise mature kids, which can sound like, oh, that's labor-intensive, it's like we want to raise joy-filled kids, but it's really the same thing.
It's like, how do you handle the big emotions and still be okay? Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Ann Wilson. And I'm Dave Wilson, and you can find us at familylifetoday.com or on our Family Life app. This is Family Life Today. I talk to a lot of moms and dads, but especially moms, and I think most of them would say, I want my home to be filled with joy.
Oh, I think every parent wants that. And I got to say this, I think you achieved that. Joy in our home? Yeah. I knew you'd be surprised. You are the most joy-filled, joy-giver I've ever been around in my life. That's nice.
I mean, it is. It's just like when you walk in the room. Now, as a grandma, Nani, you walk in, I mean, the grandkids, they know joy just came in. When they see me, it's not so much joy. But when they see you, it's joy. And I think every parent's hoping that their kids and their grandkids would say, my home, if it wasn't completely joy-filled, it was a sense of joy in that home. Well, I think we're all attracted to joy, and we all want to be around those people. And so we need to talk to two joy-givers.
They are sitting in the studio today. Dr. Marcus Warner and Chris Corsi are with us back again, written a book called The Four Habits of Raising Joy-Filled Kids. So first of all, I'll just say welcome back to Family Life Today. Thank you.
It's good to be back. Yeah, we appreciate it, Dave. Well, let me ask you this.
I'm going to just start right here, because you've written on this. We call you our brain guys because you study the brain and how that affects this whole thing. We did write a parenting book, and we never thought of joy being in the title. And even as I look at yours, I would think parents would be, oh, I want to raise mature kids or, you know, well-rounded kids.
Or responsible. And you say joy-filled. I know why, but I want you to tell our listeners, why do you start there? Well, we start with joy, because that's the fuel on which you're either going to live your life on fear or joy. And we want our kids to run on the fuel of joy, because if I have a joy-filled kid, that kid's going to treat life as an adventure, right? They're not going to be afraid of things that might cause them shame, because they can recover from shame.
They're not going to be afraid of things that are going to cause them anger or upset, because they know, you know what, I'm going to be okay if I feel that emotion. So it is maturity. But instead of saying we want to raise mature kids, which can sound like, oh, that's labor-intensive. It's like, we want to raise joy-filled kids, but it's really the same thing.
It's like, how do you handle the big emotions and still be okay? And it's in that garden where all that other good stuff can grow. So in a sense, joy is the soil, the nutrient-rich soil where a lot of good things are going to grow. So joy provides the strength, the capacity, and the context for all these other qualities that we want to see in our children. So it is in that garden of glad-to-be-together joy where we can really help our children learn all these character qualities that we want them to have. Some of our listeners might be thinking, I don't even have that in my own life.
How can I give that to my own kids or my spouse is really struggling or they're depressed and our home has none of that. Yeah. We actually start out our book talking about my wife, Jen. She just came from a very low joy family and community.
And so when I met her, it was a good day for her if she could get out of bed. So she struggled with depression and anxiety and so forth. And basically it was joy and kind of what Marcus and I talk about in our book that really changed Jen's life.
Now I'm watching this wonderful mother download and build joy with our sons. And I just think, wow, God, you've like breathed life into this woman that I am watching here and she's now building joy. How did she change?
Well, the first thing was just, she worked with Jim Wilder, who's a friend of Marcus and I and kind of a mentor. So she learned about joy. She learned the language and she learned that joy is relational. She learned that joy is when people are glad to be together, that neuroscientists say you're the sparkle in someone else's eyes. So she started to very proactively connect with other people who could be glad to be with her and joy grows as well as I can quiet myself. So in other words, if I'm exhausted, I'm not going to build joy. So she started to learn to rest, which is like the other side of the coin of joy. Cause let's face it, when we're tired, we just can't build joy. It's too much work.
It's too much of a climb. So basically building joy with her friends and her community, as well as learning to quiet, learning to rest, just profoundly changed her life to the point where she's now passing on joy to our two sons. And it's amazing to watch. Well, I do remember, and correct me if I'm wrong, cause you guys wrote the book, but the four habits of joy filled marriages based on the acrostic plan, right? The P and the N both sort of dealt with what you're talking about, Chris, the play and the nurture rhythms or rest in your life are critical. Yeah. You know, I mean, let's face it. We've all interacted with people. Maybe it was tickling or chasing with a bug people who didn't know when to stop.
Right. So part of building joy is we know when it's time to stop so people can rest and people who don't know when to stop, they just keep pushing and pushing and pushing. And so play is one of the best ways to build joy. Our brain is wired for that. And so play is a great way.
I love to play with my sons because you will hear laughter. You will see smiles on the faces that we're all just having a good time, but we also know when it's time to stop because energies levels are getting too high or someone's looking too tired or it's just not fun anymore. So we're going to pause. So part of joy is just knowing, Hey, it looks like you need a breather. I'm going to stop. I'm going to let you rest.
Well, it's interesting. After being with you guys a couple of years ago, Ann and I were in our basement. We have a little workout room.
It's terrible. I mean, you can't lift a dumbbell without hitting the ceiling. So you got to crouch down. It's just this terrible little room, no windows.
Anyway, it's the only place in our house where we can work it out. So we're down there working out together. And all of a sudden out of nowhere, she looks over at me and she goes, I think I can tackle you. I'm going to tackle you. I'm like, what?
I'm literally like, what are you talking about? And she's trying to play right away. I'm going to work out right.
Look at me. And she's like, what are you doing? Like, I promised you I can take you down. She is like down like two wrestlers, you know, and I'm like, you really think you're going to take me down? I know I can take you down. Let's go. And I'm like, okay, bring it on.
Yeah. It was the craziest moment. But Chris, what you just said, we are on the floor. She didn't take me down by the way, but we're on the floor laughing our heads off and there's endorphins. I don't know. You tell me what happened in our brain, but you just feel joyful. Oh, yeah.
And you know what? Joy, actually, you make a very important point. There are endorphins. So when babies see the face light up, mommy's face, daddy's face, grandma's face, whoever's face it is, there are opiates and endorphins that are released in the brain, which means baby feels wonderful because that face was glad to be with me. So for babies, they will get high energy.
So they'll swing their arms, they'll kick their feet, they'll they'll make some fun noises. And when they've had enough, they look away. And that looking away is, okay, let me catch my breath before we do this again. So Marcus and I really give this language in our book to help notice when baby looks away, that's your cue.
Take a deep breath. When baby's ready, she will look back at your face for more joy. That's part of the attuning. So when we talk about the infant stage of it, we're saying you start by attuning.
And part of the attuning is recognizing when they've had enough. And so we talk about doing joy workouts with your kids. And joy workouts is when you're playing with them and getting the joy energies high, then noticing when they've had enough and you stop and you rest together, but you're still together. You're still happy to be together, but we're resting together now.
Right. And then when they let you know, so you do this on their schedule when they're ready for more joy, you know, you go back. We talked a little bit last time about the four habits. Let's review because we spent a little bit on the A, but it's A, B, C, D. Tell us what they are. And I, and we've got to investigate a little bit more of this attuning thing. Sure. So attuning is A, B is build bounce, which is the idea of help them get back from upsetting emotions.
C is correct with care. So we do have to correct our kids. So, you know, there are paths they get on.
We don't want them to be on. So we do have to correct, but correct with care means do the attuning and the building bounce first and then correct. And then the last one is develop skills relationally. We want our kids to be highly skilled. We want them to have really good disciplines. We want them to be not afraid of new challenges.
So the best way to do that is by being relationally engaged with them in this skill building process. So that's the A, B, C, D. Marcus, you've been married how many years? 31. And you have how many kids? Two. And how old are they?
My eldest is 30 and my son is turning 21 next week. So you've developed this with Chris. Did you do this stuff as your kids were growing up? Well, I didn't know this language or vocabulary. I didn't even know the brain science. Yeah. So no, I didn't do it with this paradigm in my mind. Good.
We didn't either. So that's good to know. Yeah. No, a lot of these principles I was beginning to learn, but they hadn't formulated into a system yet.
So I did do a lot of these things, but not with the same kind of clarity and intentionality. I say to people all the time, this is the book I wish someone had given me when I first. Yeah, me too. But as a grandparents now, it's never too late. Right. And Chris, you have been doing this with your kids.
Yeah. You know, it's been a blessing for Jen and I, my wife, we have two sons who are nine and 11 and we were training a lot of these relational skills before we had children. So it's been fun.
You can know the theory, you know, I knew all this theory, but until I had children, I had no experience. And so it's been fun to learn. And one of the great things about all this material is, look, we tell people in the book, good parents, aren't the parents that do everything perfectly. Good parents are the people who get really good at repairing when they mess up. And so even though I train these skills, I still mess up all the time.
And I just, I've gotten really good at repairing when I do mess up. So we're returning to joy. So as you're talking about attuning, you even talk about it with infants. Like if your infant's crying, you have a sad face so that you're attuning to them.
I have a very vivid picture of my father with my daughter, his granddaughter, and she's an infant and she's crying and you know, he's got the magic touch where like, and grandpa could get her quiet and he picks her up and the first thing he does is he just sticks out his bottom lip and he goes, oh, you are so behoosed, such a sad story, you know, and he's just attuning with her, with his voice and with his face. And she doesn't know what he's saying, but then he starts after the attuning, he starts literally bouncing her, right. And then tickling her and gets her back to joy. And within, you know, 90 seconds, she's okay again. And so how does that work with a three-year-old or two-year-old that's screaming?
How do you attune? And they say like, I hate you, get out of here. Yeah. You know, I can remember vividly with my son during the twos and, you know, Marcus and I say in the book that during that window of time, the brain's amplifiers turned on. So anger becomes rage. And so I can remember trying to help my son when he was in a glorious meltdown. You know, part of it I tell parents is we have to remember who we are.
I'm the father here. So my job is to stay relationally anchored while he's losing it. And so I'm using my face, I'm using my voice, I'm comforting him. And so I might rub his back. If he lets me, you know, I might rub his back and go, you're really mad. And every now and then he would come over to look at my face. Really?
Yeah. He wanted to see my face. And then he would listen to my voice. Your relational brain is actually primarily nonverbal.
So it's not the words, but it's the voice tone that helps. So in that process, he's basically very angry. And I'm just trying to stay present and I'm validating, you are really mad. Wow. I can see it on your face. So there's no judgment.
No judgment. It's just a tune. Yeah. To their emotion. They don't get through them all.
They don't get the candy. And all of a sudden they're on the floor screaming their head off. Never are kids, but somebody likes us.
Yes. But you're a tuning even right there. Like you are mad.
Do you get on the floor too? I would get you get down to their level. You are really mad here. And you know what? There's more I want to tell you here, but I can't talk to you. And you're like this, we're going to have to take a deep breath and we're going to have to calm down. So I would take a deep breath.
And there's this thing called mere neurons in the brain. So when you see somebody do something, your brain responds accordingly. So I will do what I want my child to do.
So if I say, take a deep breath, I'm going to take a deep breath and I'm going to use my body language. So I'm going to calm down. I got a story to tell you, but I can't tell you that until we're done. And most young children, they want to know what that story is, but we're going to calm down before we even do that because I won't engage.
I won't try to converse or have a conversation about whatever it is. The meltdowns about where first thing we're going to do is we're going to get calm and we're going to get relational when we're calm and relational. Then we'll talk about what's going on.
And that's where it's a little different than what a lot of parents intuitively do is they just they want to use words. We're going to fix it. You better stop it. We're going to, you know, wait till you get it. Oh yeah.
Oh yeah. Just keep in mind, words don't help. It is their brain wants to see it and you will you show me what I should do right now. Directly related to that is before about age four or five, the brain cannot understand a negative command. Okay. This part I was like, what?
Oh, you see her her her reading your book. Wait, wait, wait, wait. We're not supposed to give a negative command. So explain that.
So like let's say your kids having a meltdown in the mall. You say, stop it. Do not do, you know, do not, you know, do that. What they hear is blah, blah, blah. Do that.
Right. Their brain doesn't know how to decipher the negative. So if you say, don't hit your sister, they're going to like, blah, blah, blah.
Hit your sister. So what they're actually relying on is they are reading your body language. They are trying to figure out, do they really want me to hit my sister?
No, it looks like they don't. It looks like they don't want me to hit my sister, but they're, they're interpreting your body language, not your words. And so we rely way too often on our words, especially with really young kids, to get them to change things. But if you stop and think about how hard it is for you to come up with a positive command and management, they're biting. Instead of saying, don't bite.
Yes. You're like, bite the shoe. No, you're like, let's be gentle with your sister. Let's be kind to your sister.
Let's do this. Or, uh, you know, they're reaching out for the stove. You're like, put your hands down by your side. You know, you, you, but if you stop and think about it, it's really hard for us to think about what would the positive command be? Think about how hard it is for their undeveloped brains to take your negative command and flip it around to a positive thing they were supposed to do.
But why can they, their first response is no. Well, we taught them that, right? Children internalize what they see and what they hear. And so a lot of the children will say and do things that they've seen in their environment. So keep that in mind. Children literally are sponges.
They will absorb whatever's in the environment, good, bad or ugly. And you will see that they will be responding like a parent or like somebody else in the family doing something. And you might think to yourself, where in the world did they learn that? And it's like, oh, wait a minute. Yeah. Yeah. And that's just it. You don't have to have done it to your kid. They just have to have seen you do it to someone and their brain will go, oh, that's how I'm supposed to act if that ever happens to me. This is fascinating.
It is. And it makes us as parents become the parents and not respond in a childish manner, which is pretty much what I used to do a lot. Especially when you have three kids five and under, you're tired, you're worn out. And so to have the maturity and maybe not the sleep deprivation that allows you to respond in a way that is conducive to joy.
Yeah. I mean, it takes a village to raise children, you know, because as parents, we are running on E for empty in many cases and the results aren't good. So having the support of family, friends, community that can walk with us and hold up our arms really goes a long way. And for parents to give themselves a little bit of grace that you're not going to do it perfectly. Let's just get good at repairing and returning to joy whenever we lose it. And if your children are already adults, even just sharing what you're learning and taking responsibility for where you messed up, how redemptive that is for children to hear, even if it was, you know, a long time ago, 20 years ago or whatever, hey, I've learned this and I realized I didn't do this very well. If I could do it all over again, I would have wanted to be able to do this. That's a good message for our children to hear that says, you know, we are the type of people that even when we mess up, we take responsibility for it. And you know what? We're going to learn from it.
We're going to, you know, learn how to parent better and how to pass on the good stuff, even with its grandchildren instead of children in that case. So we talked about attuning and the second one is building bounce. What's that? So building bounce is the idea that we are staying relationally engaged with our kids through their upsetting emotions until they recover.
I read something in, it was K.M. Island, Yurkovic's book, you know, How We Love, and they said something about married couples coming in and they would ask them the question, do you have any memories of someone staying relationally engaged and comforting you from an upsetting emotion? Couple after couple would come in and they could know not a single memory of anybody staying relationally engaged with them until they were comforted from an emotion. So what we're talking about with building bounce is when my kid is emotionally distressed as a parent, remaining relationally attuned to them and engaged with them and then walking them through the process of recovery. So that looks different in infants and children and adults. So in infants, I have to do all of it for them.
They have no capacity to recover. Infants up to what age? Three or four. Okay.
Okay. So we're talking about terrible twos too. In the terrible twos, they have no capacity to comfort themselves. So I have to do all of the work of walking them through how to comfort themselves. And so I need to stay relationally engaged with them until they bounce back. And they bounce back when they feel like their breathing gets more regulated again and they feel like they can go on with life and act like themselves. And to stay with them during that looks like?
To stay with them literally can mean sitting there until they get through this or at least being with them until you can sense that they have recovered enough to move forward to the next thing. Okay. So right away, I think this, cause this would be one of the way we parent our kids and now we're watching our kids parent and they're doing a little different and we're thinking, Hey, you should do it the way we did. We pick up your book.
Thank you for your book because we realized our kids are doing it much better than we did it. And one of them is this. One of them is, Hey, put them in the room, let them cry it out. Yeah. Not don't stay attuned. They need to get to sleep or whatever. This is the only way you do it. You put them in the room, you shut the door. They may cry for an hour or half or whatever you they'll figure it out. Leave. Do not go in there. And we read your books like, Nope, that's a really bad idea.
Tell us why. One of the things Marcus and I talk about in the book is when we put our children in the room all by themselves and just let them cry, their brain is learning something very unhelpful, which is I'm alone in my feelings and your survival circuit does not like being alone in your big feelings. So keep in mind the relational brain learns by example. So when we sit with them and we help them quiet. So at that example, we had a chair in our house and so whenever our sons are losing it, we would go sit with them and just quiet. We just quiet.
So we practiced it to teach them and show them this is what we do. So you would pick them up, take them to the chair. Go sit down and we're going to quiet. Oh, you held them.
Yeah. If they're small, if we would hold them, you know, maybe rub their back and tell they got a little older than they could go like, Hey buddy, you're losing your joy here. Why don't you go catch your breath and come back to the table when you're relational again? Like we just had the language for the stuff in our home. Like this is just what we do. They go to that chair. So you're not saying you're being an idiot.
Go to the chair by yourself. No, we didn't say that. We just, you know, this was, these were new habits because I didn't learn this. My family didn't do this stuff. So for me, we had to be very purposeful about it, but we showed them what we wanted them to do. So we did it with them and they could quiet.
And then as they got older, they knew, Hey, go, you know, get relational and then come back when you're ready. And usually it's just taking some deep breaths or maybe it's, you know, remembering some of the joyful moments from my day. I mean, it sounds beautiful to think that there's dad or mom with son or daughter.
It's a great picture of the heavenly father, but let me ask you this, cause you guys know the brain science so much better than almost all of us. Is it, is it also true that when you say, Hey, go to your room, cry it out or whatever, and nobody shows up, does their brain start to say, Oh, nobody's coming. I'm alone.
Nobody's ever going to show up. Is that true? It can be. Yeah.
You know, I mean, that was probably my parents' favorite punishment for me was go to your room. So, you know, and it depends on if you're four years old, three years old, four years old, or if you're 10 years old. Yeah. Right. So there's a difference in sending your 10 year old to the room and sending a three year old to the room.
Yeah. And so what we're talking about here really is, especially in those formative years, they have to have a really rock solid foundation of knowing I don't get abandoned in my emotions. Then you get into, we do what's called co-regulating in the child years between like five and 13. And that is I am helping them learn the steps and the processes so that they can begin comforting themselves and they can begin quieting themselves. And then the goal is by the time you're an adult, you're coaching them through it. And you're just kind of reminding them of the things that they already know where we run into problems where most of us run into problems is that we become adults and we haven't learned these skills ourselves.
Yeah. And so we're in the adult age of life, but we still need somebody else to comfort us when we get sad because we never learned how to do it. And so that's what we're talking about is a lot of us, the repair that we need in our own lives is learning how to bounce back from certain emotions. Like we're good with some, but we're not good with others.
Every listener just said, amen to that. And I think we develop coping mechanisms. It could be alcohol. It could be any sort of something to help us to cope. Well, I mean, uh, you said earlier when we're talking about fear-based parenting in your book, you say, one of the reasons we do that is unresolved pain in our own life. Yeah. And I'm like, Oh boy.
Cause that has to be dealt with, or you're never going to be the parent you want to be because you're just unable to get over your own brokenness. We're just scratching the surface. Aren't we? Well, and the good news is you don't have to be completely recovered to be a good parent. Yeah. That's good news.
Right. And the other good news I think is that sometimes people who come up from broken families end up being better parents than people who grew up in sort of mediocre families. And so some of those people actually become very good parents. And I think there's some hope there too, that you don't have to be fully recovered from all your stuff to do this, right?
You just need to develop these habits and these skills. But all the way, when you find that there are some things you just keep banging your head against, it's usually because there's an emotion you have not yet learned how to return to joy from. We've all heard the announcement on airplanes where they say in case of a loss of pressure, put your mask on first and then put the mask on your child. And I think what we've been hearing today from Marcus Warner and Chris Corsi is that for us to have joy filled kids, we have to be working on the pursuit of joy in our own lives. And as we've heard that joy is a fruit of the spirit.
When we draw closer to Jesus, when we stop and meditate on all that he's done for us, one of the things the Holy Spirit will bring to us in that moment is joy. And as we find ourselves growing in joy, then we can begin the process of helping our kids become joy filled kids. Marcus Warner and Chris Corsi have written a book called The Four Habits of Raising Joy Filled Kids. It's a book that we've got available in our Family Life Today Resource Center. And in fact, we'd love to send a copy of this book to you. We're asking listeners this week if you can help support the Ministry of Family Life Today, either as a one-time donor or as one of our monthly contributors to this ministry, we'd love to send you a copy of The Four Habits of Raising Joy Filled Kids as a way of saying thank you for your financial support.
And let me just say a word about where your money is actually going. You're going to help equip and train and encourage and disciple moms and dads, husbands and wives all across the country and around the world. There are hundreds of thousands of people every day who are connecting with us here at Family Life, looking for practical biblical help and hope for their marriage and their family. You're making that possible for them when you donate to this ministry. So can we encourage you to make a donation today to support the ongoing work of Family Life Today? And when you do request your copy of the book, The Four Habits of Raising Joy Filled Kids by Marcus Warner and Chris Corsi, we'd love to send it to you. You can donate online at familylifetoday.com or call 1-800-358-6329, 1-800-F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today to make your donation by phone. Now it's one thing for your elementary age kids, even for your toddlers, to be pointed in the direction of joy.
It's something else when you get to teenagers, right? Tomorrow, Marcus Warner and Chris Corsi will be here again to talk about how we can help our teens become more joy filled. And I hope you can tune in for that. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We will see you back tomorrow for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life, a crew ministry, helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.
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