Book Club: Lessons from ‘How To Talk So Kids Will Listen, and Listen So Kids Will Talk’

Disclaimer: The following transcript has been autogenerated and may contain occasional errors or inaccuracies resulting from the automated transcription process.

Host (00:01):

Hi there. Welcome to Mental Health Professionals’ Network podcast series. MHPN’s aim is to promote and celebrate interdisciplinary, collaborative mental health care.

Dr Monica Moore (00:18):

Hello and welcome to the Book Club. I’m Monica Moore. I’m a GP, now working as a psychotherapist in the Sutherland Shire, and today we’ll be discussing How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk, which is a parenting book. But after reading it, I discovered that not only is it something that’s very useful for parents and grandparents, but it’s something that I’ve been dipping into and using through my clinical work, incorporating into motivational interviewing. It’s helped me in my relationships with friends and with other people. And so, I really think it’s a wonderful book for lots of different reasons, which is why I suggested that we talk about it today. And I’m delighted to have Paul Grinzi join me so that we can discuss this book. It’s the first time he’s read it, so thank you for joining us as we talk about this book with the long title. And from now on, I’ll say How to Talk, and the impact that it’s had on our lives and our clinical work. So, Paul, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Dr Paul Grinzi (01:21):

Thanks, Monica, and it’s wonderful to be part of this Book Club. Look, I’m also a GP by training and I’ve retained my GP clinical work alongside some medical education work. I have a special interest in both the medical education and also clinical work in terms of, I suppose, the realm of alcohol and other drugs, addiction sort of medicine work, which then goes into lots of mental health comorbidities and co-themes, as well as pain management and other themes. So, it ends up being quite a complex patient load, as well as what comes through the door, like every other GP in the nation does as well. So, that’s my background, and I’m really looking forward to sharing our thoughts around this book.

Dr Monica Moore (01:57):

Now, Paul, I’m going to ask you, how did you kind of morph into this sort of zone of work?

Dr Paul Grinzi (02:05):

It was actually, I was preparing for GDP training, and realised that I had experienced very little alcohol and other drug work in my hospital years and medical student years, and realised that it was going to be part of my general practice work, obviously. And the experience that I had as a hospital resident really frightened me. The management at that stage was, I could see, was quite poor. It was basically, get the patients out the door as quickly as possible and don’t kill them, but then don’t really treat them either. So, I thought I’d dive in the deep end and do a six month intensive addiction medicines term. It’s very early on in my GP training, expecting to basically get in, learn some skills and get out, and then just do real general practice. And I realised over that six months that it was real general practice, it was complex, it was continuous, it was the whole person care.

(02:53):

It wasn’t just a single organ. It was really the person, the society and the family and everything involved. And the thing about a lot of the patients that I was seeing came from, relatively, at a lower baseline, that you saw gains that you didn’t see in other areas of chronic disease. And so for me, it really inspired me to realise that addiction is often vilified and stigmatised, but really it informs most of society struggles in some way. And it certainly informed my appreciation of what I could be as a GP and a clinician, and then took that on and really enjoyed teaching it as well. So, it sort of informed a lot of my career choice through, ended up sort of just diving off the bridge and hoping that the water wasn’t too deep at the other end, and realising that I could actually swim and enjoy it, rather than trying to get out of the pool.

Dr Monica Moore (03:38):

Which is how we met, because I’m a GP who didn’t go into the drug and alcohol sphere, but I started learning how to do counselling when I was in general practice, and I really enjoyed it. And exactly like you said, you could see so many gains, not just for the person that I was working with, but also for their families, and their friends, and their workplace, and it’s such a lovely feeling to be able to do that. But do you remember how we met?

Dr Paul Grinzi (04:05):

Absolutely. I was part of, I suppose, not quite the organising committee, but part of a team behind a GP training conference. And all of us had to allocate ourselves to help out with the conference. So, chairing different sessions, and luckily, we got a bit of a choice. And so there was this unknown name, Monica, I’d never heard of her before, but the topic was of interest, it was about teaching motivational interviewing, which is something that I was doing. I thought, I’d love to see how someone else teaches this. So, I ran my workshop on presentation skills the day before, and this lovely person called Monica came up and introduced herself saying, hi, I think you’re sharing my meeting tomorrow, but thanks for your workshop. And then we swapped roles the next day, so, well, you weren’t sharing my meeting, but I was there observing you, and you observing me the next day. So, it was lovely dovetailing, both in terms of the education presentation side of things, but also the two topics of my interest, not so much the presentation skills, but the two topics of my interest around addiction medicine, and also motivational interviewing is obviously so co-related that it was a very welcome and interesting first meeting.

Dr Monica Moore (05:05):

And from my memory of it, you were presenting on death by PowerPoint and how not to do your PowerPoint. My one had already been submitted, and as I sat through your wonderful talk, I was thinking, oh no, I have bullet points. I don’t have enough photos. I think I’ve only got one video. It was very, very tense. And you’re right, I mean I am an unknown, and so it was my first time being there in that space. So, it was an interesting time for me to present, but I really enjoyed your comments, and I enjoyed the way that you really wanted to of work with it and say, why did I do this? And it was lovely to have someone who was as passionate about motivation interviewing and its purpose, which is actually to help people to make really good decisions about their own lives, but to evoke that problem solving from them rather than doing that traditional thing that we as GPs do, which is tell people what to do. And so, that was lovely.

Dr Paul Grinzi (06:15):

Actually, there’s parallels with this book actually. There’s so much ingrained culture and generational expectation, that with medical training, a lot of it’s come from paternalistic background, and it takes a lot of effort to undo that for yourself as well as generationally, trying to change that effort. And I suppose it’s same with thing with parenting. There’s lots of things that are ingrained in generations that have been probably proven not to work, but we keep falling into those mistakes, if we can call them mistakes, and then it’s hard. So, this book actually was quite challenging in that regard, in a similar way that learning different ways of consulting and working with our patients and clients also can be quite challenging, especially when it’s changing our model of how we’ve been taught.

Dr Monica Moore (06:54):

So it is, I mean, the book is by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish, and this is a school teacher and an art and drama teacher, and they wrote this book, which is actually a parenting book, but I have volunteered it as something that I think dovetails beautifully with motivational interviewing and learning the skills of motivational interviewing. Now, you say you found it challenging. What do you mean, you found it challenging?

Dr Paul Grinzi (07:23):

Look, I read this with different lenses throughout the different times. So, I’ve got young kids in primary school, and so certainly it’s aimed at me as an audience, as a parent. I’ve also got patients who are parents. So, I thought about it as how I could be helping my patient parents with their parenting. There’s also the inner child in all of us, and how we react to the world. And so, there’s a bit of self-analysis and a bit of reflection back on what you can take away for this yourself, in terms of self-development. And so, it’s a little bit jarring in terms of, when you look at each part separately, you think, oh, it makes sense, but when you’re trying to apply it in practice, you realise that you’re struggling with it. And so it’s that struggle that’s actually where the learning occurs, because if it was all easy, you wouldn’t learn much about it.

(08:05):

So, you need some sort of desirable amount of difficulty with this. And I think the book actually gets a nice balance, in that it’s not too difficult and too challenging, but it challenges you enough to push it. You’re thinking, so you’re considering things much more so than just reading through and thinking, oh, I got that, I got that, got that. And you sort of don’t absorb it as much. So, that was one aspect. The other aspect that I found quite challenging was, I do like, and I’ve been reading a number of, I suppose you could call them self-help books, but really to try and help inform some of my clinical judgments. A lot of this about habit change, and the Heath brothers have a number of series of books that look at how we think, and how we behave and interact with the world, and how we can modify that more purposefully.

(08:43):

There’s James Clear’s Atomic Habits book, which is I think is an excellent book in terms of habit change. And they’re all similar styles, in terms of they’ve got clear themes and they’ve got a structure that’s repeated throughout the chapters like this book. And they also will have little activities and things to think about. This one went a bit step further. It actually almost asked you to stop reading, go out for a week, practise this, and then come back, and then report back almost, to the book. And I wasn’t comfortable, not so much not doing the activity, I wanted to keep reading, so I did. So, I actually just kept reading and pretended I’d done the activity, or at least a little mini thought experiment without doing the real experiment, because I was keen to get through, which is a testament to itself, you want to keep reading the book. But I felt I was cheated. I felt like I didn’t do the task justice. If I’m setting up a workbook for my education, I prefer the participants to engage with the workbook as it’s designed, and not sort of skip over and get to the answer page at the end. And I felt like I was a bit cheating. I was sort of burning through the chapters to get to the next bit.

Dr Monica Moore (09:46):

You were reading it for Book Club.

Dr Paul Grinzi (09:49):

I was, there was a deadline.

Dr Monica Moore (09:50):

We’re in the Book Club, you were reading it for Book Club, there was a deadline.

Dr Paul Grinzi (09:53):

But even if it wasn’t for the deadline, I would’ve felt a bit of a tension between, do I do this properly, or do I get what I felt like the most out of it while I’ve got the energy and time to do so? Yeah, so the structure was a little bit challenging, just because it’s an easy read, then you’ve got a hard stop, easy read, hard stop, if you’re doing it as instructed. And so, it was just a little bit different from some of the structures that I’ve read in other books, that’s all.

Dr Monica Moore (10:17):

That’s right. And I think what you’re saying, about it being an easy read and a difficult application, is what I find when I’m teaching motivational interviewing. It looks really simple. Yeah, sure, these are the concepts, this is the spirit of motivational interviewing, this is what we’re trying to do. And then you go out there and your old habits sort of sneak in, and you find yourself behaving in ways where you go, that wasn’t motivational interviewing. So, it looks easy, but it’s actually really hard. And the people who do it well are like professional ballet dancers. They just look so effortless. And yet you go, like, they’re putting in. That’s what the training is all about. And so, what I liked about the book, and the crossover to motivational interviewing, is that it gave you some really concrete steps with discrete examples of how to do really good listening, how to treat people with respect, and how to collaborate in terms of problem solving in such a way that the person feels like they are contributing the solutions to their own problems, and also how to do affirmations in such a way that they help the person.

(11:33):

And so, I came up, when I was preparing for this, with lots of examples of this from my clinical work, but when you were reading through it, did you think of your patients, and how you use motivational interviewing, and how you were already doing these skills?

Dr Paul Grinzi (11:52):

It was interesting. There was different parts of the book that resonated a lot more personally as a parent. So, that’s where my brain went and I thought, okay, this is something I can learn from. And there were other areas I thought, well, I’m doing this well already. I’m not learning much from this, it’s more reinforcing what I’m doing. And so often my brain will then go, well, how can I apply this to others? And I realised there were some patients that, to use a term that’s probably not, I wouldn’t use this with the patient, but they’re acting in a much more childlike manner, a lot with their relationships. They haven’t got that maturity of communication, interpersonal skills that you see in other patients. So, I felt that, and this book, although it’s a parenting book, it’s very much not about that sort of dynamic of being a parent and being a child, immature.

(12:36):

It’s very much, can be very much interpersonal, or flattened hierarchy. It’s not necessarily the hierarchy, but as you’re saying, it’s very much about respect, and honouring the autonomy of the individual to learn for themselves, and rather than the number of traps we can fall into. And each chapter sort of goes through those traps, and then different ways of approaching it so that you can actually honour and foster that autonomy, and give people a sense of their own wellbeing and their own agency to make changes if necessary. Or, at least in terms of motivation, behaviour change without being told what to do, they can sort of come up with those solutions themselves. So, I did find I had a different brain for different chapters, depending on how I reacted to it. And as I said at the start, I think we’ve all got a bit of an inner child ourselves, and there was always times to reflect and go, okay, let’s turn the mirror back on myself, and how am I doing with this? Are there things that I do as the child in this story that may be unhelpful for others, that I could actually modify myself by using the book as my parent?

Dr Monica Moore (13:37):

Yes, yes. Yeah. Wasn’t it interesting? Because I had that as well, about looking at my behaviours from the child’s perspective. And when you say there are some patients, it’s not to be sort of judgmental, it’s more, I call it that we all have child parts, and we may have developed a behaviour at the time when we were a child that actually helped us to survive. And then we continue to use that behaviour as a form of getting our needs met. But it’s actually not helpful now that we are adults, but that creates problems in relationships. And having a book that defines if that’s what’s happening, then perhaps what we can do is that we can actually use these skills which apply across the ages, because this book was the first one, the second one that was written by these two colleagues, and the first one was Liberated Parents, Liberated Children. And then they wrote this one, and then they wrote one about learning at school for teachers.

(14:43):

And then Adele Faber’s daughter Joanna wrote one for tiny children, for preschoolers, which again uses the same concepts but adapts it for that age group. And then there’s another one for teens. So, it’s something that you can pick up and read, and then think about and go out and apply. But it’s difficult to apply, because we were parented ourselves. We’ve got all these habits that are ingrained in us and it’s really difficult to change. But then that’s the whole thing, we’re sort of doing motivational interviewing for ourselves. Why do I want to learn how to do this skill? And that’s because it’s actually going to help me, both in my parenting, and I felt really sad when I read it. I read it in about five years ago, and my kids were already grown up by then, and I thought, oh gee, I wish I’d known this when my kids were little.

Dr Paul Grinzi (15:39):

How did you find the book? How did you discover it?

Dr Monica Moore (15:42):

Well, there’s this woman called Gretchen Ruben, who’s actually a lawyer and a writer, not a clinician at all. And she’s got a podcast, which is all about her research in happiness, and how to be happy and creative, and live a good life. And so, she mentioned it in her podcast and said that it was one of the best parenting books that she’d ever read, and that it actually helped her in her relationships with other people as well, because it helped her to understand the dynamics, and to be able then to achieve things that she hadn’t been able to before, and to understand why. And so, I bought it and I read it, and the first time I read it, Paul, like you, I just said, oh God, I don’t have any children to practise on, so I’ll just read it and mourn the fact that I can’t practise it on my own children, and I’ll just have to practise on my grandchildren.

(16:37):

But at the same time, I was thinking, gee, this is quite transferable to motivational interviewing, because the first section is all about deep listening and how to listen, how to create an attentive space, but also the instructions about how to validate someone’s emotional experience by naming their emotion, and validating by going, yeah, no wonder you feel that way because X, Y, Z. You don’t have to agree with them, but you can say that you understand why they have that perspective, and how that helps the person to calm down, how children calm down when you do that. And I was in a shopping centre and watched a father do this to his toddler, who’d just dropped his ice cream on the ground, and he validated his son’s emotions. You’re so sad and you’re so angry, and you really wanted that ice cream. Yes. And you are just, oh, you’re so upset by this.

(17:36):

Yes, yes I am. He says, and so now what do you want to do? Which is the next step, the problem solving. And the kid said, see the puppies. And he held his father’s hand and walked off, and the father cleaned the mess up and put it in the bin, and off they went to see the puppies. And so, just to see that played out at the shopping centre, and I thought, I get that. I get it, that when one of my friends validates my emotion, instead of jumping straight into problem solving, I feel heard and understood, and I can solve my own problems. I can go, oh, yeah, I can do X, Y, Z. And so, I thought that that was a really lovely sort of introduction, and something that now I’ve incorporated into my motivational interviewing workshops, because people go, well, I’m listening, and then I just wait until they finish speaking, and then I tell them what to do.

Dr Paul Grinzi (18:31):

This is the bit that’s a skill to be learned, is giving yourself that space to be not waiting, but actually listening, and responding to what you’ve listened to rather than responding to what you think you need to say next. And it’s a subtle difference there, but it’s that mindset of actually actively listening and giving your participant, your partner in the conversation, the space and respect for what they’re actually saying. And it’s hard to maintain rage if someone’s acknowledging it the whole time, it’s easy if they’re ignoring it, rage or whatever other emotion, it’s hard to maintain that, basically you do normalise yourself back to a baseline. And even if it’s, I suppose happiness, as someone’s just saying, yes, you look fantastically happy, you can keep going with that, but you just exhaust yourself to some point you can do come back and you can engage.

(19:16):

So, what I found interesting with this book was the, I mean there’s certainly a structure, there’s a discussion, there are examples, there’s even cartoons to describe some of the examples. There are stories from parents that have submitted that reinforce the message. There’s a number of things, and every chapter’s got a little summary at the end and certain quotes you can use. So, it’s got a consistent structure throughout that. And I found one of the things that actually jarred with me most was some of the language, and I’m just a bit cautious with whether I would recommend this to a lot of parents, especially if those that are a bit more concrete in thinking or those that probably don’t, at the moment, appreciate the context where some of these things could be applied. I just wrote a couple of quotes down that I thought, oh, if you took that out of context, it could actually cause more problems.

(20:02):

So, there was things like “So there you have it, five skills and no bad feelings” as a summary of one of the chapters, saying, here you go. You’ve got five ways of, you’re basically furthering your conversation and no one will feel bad about this. And I thought, well, that’s a bit black and white. It’s promising a lot. And certainly, if you read that by on its own without really thinking about the whole book, and obviously the greyness of human nature, you could try those five things. And if they fail, well, this book’s a waste of time because there are bad feelings still occurring. There was also a part of a chapter talking at getting the kids to consider external sources of advice. So, they’re not relying and dependent on just their parents. They’re looking at the external world as sources of information as well. And so it said, seek external help.

(20:46):

So, basically they’re not dependent on us, but I thought you could misinterpret that as basically saying the parent’s not engaging or interested. They want you basically, ask your father or ask the aquarium master or the pet store owner or ask your dentist, don’t ask me, ask someone else. It could be misinterpreted. And I thought there was a few little statements in there that just had to be taken in context. And if you weren’t really, I suppose you were reading through this and just reading those lines by themselves, or without really reflecting on the bigger picture, you could possibly be misaligned and go down the wrong track. So, there was one phrase that actually really got my bristles up at the time, and it was actually, I’ve got the book right here because I don’t want to misquote what I’m going to criticise, but it was talking about self-esteem.

(21:33):

“So, are there alternatives? Are there ways to engage our children’s corporation without doing violence to their self-esteem?” And I thought that term “violence to self-esteem” was such a strong term. I didn’t feel it was necessary. It didn’t disengage me from that part of the chapter. It took me a while to come back to it, because I thought the word violence is quite strong, and I didn’t feel some of their examples were in any aspect violent in themselves. So, little words like that, while maybe pushing their message a bit further, there were times where I felt I actually disengaged because I didn’t resonate with the meaning or the style of the language itself. So, I’m just, be cautious of which patients, if I was to recommend this book, I might have to give them a bit of context or a bit more guidance, or we can read, not read together, but get them to come back and reflect on parts and debrief it rather than leave them to their own devices. Because I can feel that sometimes, that things might go a little bit astray compared to where the intention actually is from the authors or myself as recommending the book.

Dr Monica Moore (22:33):

One of the things about the book is that it’s quite dated, in the sense that it was written in the 1980s. And so, there’s been a lot of progress since then and perhaps they would not use that language now.

Dr Paul Grinzi (22:48):

But one of the good things about the book though, for me, is they’re very much evergreen. While there aren’t many examples that are really dating, I couldn’t tell what generation or what decade they were written in, apart from me if I read the introduction blurb about where it came from. And so, it really is an evergreen book. It’s not something that you buy this year and in five years time it’s like, well, there’s a waste of time now. It’s good at the time. These interpersonal skills are really sort of universal. So, I found that’s a nice thing to know about a book, or any resource, is has it got that evergreen quality to it, that it can continue on. It’s not time limited in itself. But you’re right, it could be just the language thing over the time since it’s been written.

Dr Monica Moore (23:26):

And I think it is a language thing, because look, I’ve been applying a lot of the skills that I learned from the book, and I’ve read it several times, and I reread it again this time, and I apply it at work. And so for me, I didn’t have the jarring, and it may well be that my life experience and my parenting experience and all that kind of stuff was more aligned to this, because you’ve got to bear in mind, my dad was a psychoanalyst, so this might well have a bearing on how I see these things. Okay, just a tiny bit. So, it wasn’t as jarring for me, but I have recommended it recently to someone, a really lovely lady who came in with lots of different things, pulling her in different directions and feeling overwhelmed. And one of the things was some issues with her daughter, her oldest daughter. And so, I recommended this as a parenting book, but it made her feel worse because she was trying to stay patient and do the listening and validate emotions, and she just didn’t have the resources to be able to do it. And so, it actually made her feel worse. And it’s a little bit like prescribing a drug and making someone feel worse with the side effects. This is very much a book that could actually do that. And so I agree with you in that sense.

Dr Paul Grinzi (24:48):

It would be nice, and I initially got this as a digital ebook, so I was going through, and I abandoned that once I got hold of the hard copy, because it is more of a workbook than just a read, and I prefer to turn pages rather than flick a screen. And I understand you’ve also listened to it as an audio book, so I’m interested to hear what your perspective of that is. But I found I would’ve loved if you could almost tear the book apart and look at a chapter at a time, as part of a clinical resource. So, you can pull out a chapter, let’s work through this, come back next time, we’ll talk about that. Rather than the book. As I said at the start, I felt I had, not had to, but I wanted to keep reading. And if I was drip fed a chapter at a time, I would then be forced to reflect on that chapter without having the next one enticing me to go forward. And so, as a clinical resource, it’d be nice to actually pull out parts of it. I probably feel that would be more, give more utility, and also less misdirection where it could go.

Dr Monica Moore (25:43):

Absolutely. And I think that because it was actually based on the courses that they did, in the sense that they initially attended these workshops by an Israeli psychologist, they thought it was fantastic. They started applying the skills and talking about it at the schools that they taught and telling other teachers. And then people, parents, started to say, could we please do a course? And so, they did. And so, they ran so many courses and people say, can you please now do a book? And so that’s where it comes from.

Dr Paul Grinzi (26:13):

And here we are.

Dr Monica Moore (26:13):

And so actually attending the courses would be the ideal. And actually, these courses are available. I looked online on the website, and of course there are heaps in the United States because the authors are American, but there are some here in Australia as well.

Dr Paul Grinzi (26:29):

So look, this is a Book Club. So, I’ve mentioned eBooks and physical books. Tell me about the audiobook experience. You’ve read, obviously read it physically. What’s that like?

Dr Monica Moore (26:38):

So, I read the book physically, and so I’ve read two books physically. I’ve read the one for primary school children and the one for teenagers, which is adapted, and has less writing and more cartoons, which I thought was interesting. But the one for toddlers I’d never read before. And so I thought, I’m going to listen to it as an audio book. And it’s Joanna, is the daughter. And one of the things I found is that as she was reading it, because she was actually speaking the words out loud and using tone, I thought, aha. So, that’s how you put the tonality into that statement, and that’s what you mean by it. And also connected with the humour of the book, because it’s quite funny, and it has lots and lots of comments from parents about, but what about this and what about that and what would you do in this situation?

(27:27):

And all the parents that attended the workshops. So, I think when I was listening to it, I thought, this was really good for the actual lines that they give you, to sort of say, say this and say it in this way, and you might get a good result. And you know what I had, even just yesterday, in terms of giving affirmations, because in motivational interviewing, we talk about using affirmations to help people connect to their own strengths. And in the book they talk about praising, describing what you see, people’s behaviour, and then giving a name for it that shows determination, or that shows organisation skills or whatever it is, so that the child builds a view of themselves as having these skills which they can then use in other situations. I was speaking to someone yesterday and she’s doing better, and so we’re starting to end therapy. And I ask, normally at the end, people, what do you think has being helpful?

(28:26):

And she said, Monica, when you pointed out to me that I’m stuck, but I’m a good problem solver, and so that you were sure that I would come up with good solutions, that’s not what my stuckness was. And that really reminded me, I am good at problem solving, and that was really helpful. So, just that kind of affirmation, rather than saying to someone, I’m proud of you. Because I’m proud of you, is really my opinion of another human being, and really that doesn’t matter, because it doesn’t tell them what the skill is, is that that’s really helpful in their lives. So, I keep mining this book for gold really, and finding more nuggets. That’s how I feel about it.

Dr Paul Grinzi (29:06):

And on that theme, I like the fact that the authors introduce a topic and then say, this is hard to do, it’s easy to read, hard to do, so go out, here’s some activities, do them in practice, and then they come back, you turn the page and say, that was hard, wasn’t it? This is why it’s hard, and here’s how to try and get around that. So, they do acknowledge that this, even things like labelling behaviours rather than the person, we often, it’s simple to say, but when you’re in the heat of the moment, it is actually hard to disengage from your automatic reaction and learn a different skill. And so, it was nice to have that acknowledgement from the authors to say, okay, well, it’s not just me that’s finding it hard. It is hard in general, with various aspects and other aspects, other chapters were, well, that wasn’t hard at all. I do that already. I think for anyone, there’s bits and pieces you’ll take out of it and it’ll be different for everyone. But I like the fact that they were certainly acknowledging, I suppose they’re reflecting on some of their own skills, they’re talking about that, but acknowledging some of the difficulties and some of the emotions that the reader would be going through in trying to take on the content of the book.

Dr Monica Moore (30:11):

Joanna, in the audio book, because obviously someone else is reading it, but Joanna wrote into the audio book that when she had her own children and they were toddlers, and they were having tantrums in the supermarket and she was yelling at them, and when she took them to playgroup, that she hoped no one would know that her mother was one of the authors of the book, because she was behaving so badly, and then someone found out. So, you know what I mean?

Dr Paul Grinzi (30:36):

Yeah.

Dr Monica Moore (30:36):

We’re human.

Dr Paul Grinzi (30:38):

Absolutely.

Dr Monica Moore (30:38):

We don’t have to get it right all the time.

Dr Paul Grinzi (30:40):

Absolutely.

Dr Monica Moore (30:40):

And that brings me to a question, as we’re getting towards the end of our discussion. If you could meet these authors, what would you tell them? Were there any questions, or any comments? I mean, you’ve already mentioned some of your thoughts on them, but what else would you say if you could meet them?

Dr Paul Grinzi (30:57):

Well, the first thing that comes to mind is, I’m putting my medical educator hat on here rather than my clinical or parenting hat on, is why did you structure it in the way you did? And there’s lots of other ways to structure these sort of activity books and things. So, I’m interested to see why they put cartoons in certain stages, and parental quotes, and less research evidence. It’s very much about anecdote and what seems to be common sense, but less so from a clinician’s point of view. Some of it was like, well, I’d like a bit more meat behind this, but I don’t know whether there’s actual research in this. So, it seemed to be, if I want to be derogatory about it, I could say it was just a pop culture book, and there’s no substance behind it. Although I think in applying it, you can see that actually it works.

(31:42):

So, the research, or the proof of the pudding’s in your own practice, and how it evolves from there. So, my first question would be basically looking at structure, and how they design that side of things, I suppose. I don’t know. They answer a lot of the questions themselves about their own processes, authors, and the newer edition, I think we’ve read the same edition, but the newer edition also has a fair few chapters at the end of the book talking about the next steps. So, their updates, how the decades have flown. There’s also a little chapter there from Joanna talking about this book and how she experienced things over time as the child of the authors. So, they do explore a little bit about what’s going on, their rationale behind it. So, I don’t think I’ve have any other specific questions off the top of mind.

Dr Monica Moore (32:25):

Yeah, I don’t know that I would ask them anything else either. I mean, I would just kind of go, gee, thanks for the book. And you know what? I’m one of those clinicians, I teach and I go, if you want to look at the research, feel free. I’m not going to talk about the research during the workshop because I want to make it practical, and skills-based, and fun. And so I’m not going to tell you about the research. And so I’m one of those clinicians that teaches without having a slide about the research and going into great depth. But for those who are interested in the research on attachment theory, I’d recommend Why Love Matters by Sue Gerhardt.

Dr Paul Grinzi (33:03):

Well, I won’t go into presentation skills again, apart from saying no one will read that slide anyway, so give it as a handout later on, or a link. I read this for the Book Club on your advice, and I was really appreciative to have the opportunity. I’ve got lots of books in my “books to read” pile and not as many “books read” pile. So, it was nice to get one of the “books to read” pile out of that pile into the “actually have read” pile. So, that was actually nice to have someone sort of push me in that way. But I also had the opportunity, at the same time I was reading this, I was reading, incidentally, not focused on this at all, but a different book. And it’s a book written by a Japanese author who, it’s now been translated, and I actually listened to the seven hour audiobook, which actually quite an engaging read, but it’s very much a discussion of what seems like a very early university, college aged student, and the philosopher who seems to be some sort of professorial older person, but they don’t give away too much.

(33:59):

And it’s an exploration of Adlerian psychology, which I’d never heard of before. I’m not sure if you have, but Adler was a contemporary of Jung and…

Dr Monica Moore (34:08):

Freud?

Dr Paul Grinzi (34:09):

Freud, yes. And look, it’s not quite a century old, but it’s quite old compared to how psychology has moved forward from those days. But lots of those themes came out in this book, because it’s very much themes about the individual. And the book’s called The Courage to Be Disliked, and it’s looking at, your task is to look after yourself. That’s your only task. You can’t do everyone else’s tasks for them. And things like not praising others, like our book we’re talking about tonight, talks about, has overlaps with that, lots of overlaps in terms of being mindful about your own approach and what you’re doing for yourself, acknowledging and respecting without necessarily building up people and putting them on pedestals, or pushing them down.

(34:53):

Lots of similar themes. So, I was interested with that book and how I’m wondering if, well, it probably did, informed how I read this book at the same time and vice versa, because the two, while they’re very, very different subjects, had themes that sort of correlated. And I certainly resonated with both of those. And they’re both presented in very different formats. As I said, one’s very much a whole discussion between two individuals that bring up the Adler in psychology framework, and then explores that all the way through from a critic. The student is a critic, basically, somewhat of a convert towards the end, but not completely. Whereas the other one seems to be the master of this, and understands it all and explains it in a very conversational way. Whereas our book tonight is very much instructional with lots of examples, and it’s less of a conversation, although as I said, it’s an easy read, like a conversation can be. But I just found that the two books themselves, although coincidentally I read them at similar times, informed each other, and it allowed me to sort of reflect on ways that, probably a little bit more deeply than I may have otherwise.

Dr Monica Moore (35:52):

Yes, it’s interesting, isn’t it, the books that you read at the same time and how they serendipitously align. And I’m going to read that book, so thank you for letting me know. And it’s the thing about the Book Club, isn’t it? You always pick up another book because someone else is reading something else at the same time, or has just finished reading. And so you get recommendations from other people, say, oh, you like that one? You will like this one. You know what I mean? Which is just absolutely fantastic. So look, we’re getting towards the end, and so I’m just wondering, from our conversation today, okay, what would you say is the thing that’s sort of staying with you? Not necessarily a light bulb moment, but just something that you’ve enjoyed, or that, sort of about having to read this book, or having to remove it from your pile, but also the chat.

Dr Paul Grinzi (36:43):

A clear thing that I’ve taken away from the book that’s helped, both from my clinical perspective as well as my home parenting perspective, is if you give people the opportunity to problem solve, they’ll come up with solutions. If you don’t give them the opportunity, there’s no chance of solutions coming from them, because there’s no opportunity for it. So, the framework of listening and allowing the space and the respect for someone to come up with their own opportunities, own solutions around some problems, that for me is an important thing to keep it in front of mind. Whether I’m working as a clinician or working as a parent, or as a peer with others, it’s really that active listening and actively sitting on my hands, and listening properly, and allowing someone, acknowledging how they’re feeling, acknowledging where they’re up to, maybe reflecting back on some things that they may want to incorporate, but then allowing them to come up with those solutions. And coming back to the Adlerian stuff, your task is your task, problem solving is their task, and you can help with that, but you can’t make them drink.

Dr Monica Moore (37:44):

But not only that, okay, that when they solve their own problem, not only is it not your problem to solve, and so it’s not your burden to carry, but it’s also something that lightens their burden because someone’s listened. And so they’ve created a listening space that allows them to problem solve, and then they come up with a solution to their own problems, and they just glow with like, oh my God, I’ve got a solution to this problem that I’ve been stuck with. And I find that a lot. I do some mentoring of GPs, and I find that a lot, because I don’t know what they should do, and they come up with it themselves. And I agree. And the thing that’s come up with me for, that’s really an interesting point is that I’m far less critical of what I read than you are. And I don’t know whether it’s because of my upbringing or whatever it is, but when you highlighted the points where you sort of thought, some of the language in this could be really triggering, it’s going to help me to be mindful of who I recommend this book to in future.

(38:49):

So, that’s been really helpful and I’m really glad that you did. So, it’s great. So, it’s time to wrap up this episode of the Book Club, and you’ve been listening to Monica Moore and Paul Grinzi, and we hope you’ve enjoyed the discussion of How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk by Faber and Mazlish, and we’d love to hear from you. So, let us know your thoughts, not only about this episode, but anything else you’d like us to feature in future episodes of the Book Club. And for any information of what we discussed in this episode, you can check the show notes and be sure to listen to the other episodes of the Book Club. Thanks for listening. So, it’s goodbye from me, Monica.

Dr Paul Grinzi (39:31):

Thanks Monica, and goodbye from me, Paul.

Dr Monica Moore (39:32):

Bye.

Host (39:34):

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