Teaching Humanity Remotely with Dr. Mindy Shaw – Podcast Ep 40

During podcast #40 in my series, the focus was on the 9^th question found in the Q&A section of my parenting book titled I LIKE HOW YOU SPEAK TO ME… A PARENT’S GUIDE FOR EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION WITH CHILDREN.  The book is absolutely designed as a “how to” for parents, family members or teachers who are looking for the best path to clear and successful communication with a child or children.  While this is technically my first parenting book, all of the children’s picture books that I created are parenting books in that they all touch upon social and emotional learning issues.

The way the parenting/communication guide is structured, there is an opening section that outlines my “10 Governing Principles” for communicating with children.  That’s followed by a middle section which is actually a short children’s picture book modeled after the 60+ other children’s stories that I’ve released in the past year that all serve to aid in social and emotional growth for children.  In this book, since it’s a book about communication, the picture book section is actually a model conversation that demonstrates exactly the kind of adult -child communication that I am recommending in the book.  The final section of the parenting book is a detailed Q&A section which presents the TEN MOST FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS FROM PARENTS (plus one bonus 11^thquestion), and it’s that Q&A section of that book that we have been covering in my recent podcasts. 

In this podcast #40, before getting into that 9^th question from the Q&A section, I did share how grateful and exciting I am about a new project that I am working on and that is the creation of a show that is intended to discuss the social-emotional issues in my books.  The reason I bring this up is not to discuss that project (yet) but just to offer the advice to not give up.  I spent 30 years teaching in a place that was never completely welcoming to me.  I had countless gratifying moments as a teacher and made many, many friends of my peers, my students and their parents, but still, I was a fish out of water in that school system. Now, I feel led to the perfect place for me, and because my current projects are such a perfect fit, it has the feeling of being effortless. I just wanted to share that and encourage you to follow your dreams as well and to do so by what I call “right action.”

Then we take a deeper dive into 8th question from that Q&A and that is… “Can you address internal versus external rewards and reinforcement?”  I love this question.  Parents shape their children’s world and their path, and once upon a time I had a negative connotation about manipulation.  At some point, that changed for me when I realized that we need to shape the behaviors we want from our children and prevent the behavior we don’t want.  This can be accomplished by a reward system, and a reward can be material or just encouragement.  The reward, however, will go away at some point, and what you really want to teach your child is that the action or the learning or the mastery of something in and of itself is the goal and the greatest reward.  As soon as possible, I encourage rewards to be eliminated so that the result IS the reward.

Don’t be afraid to talk candidly with your child about your value system and how the reward system is going to go.  If you always give a reward for an accomplishment, your child will grow up always expecting a reward for anything they do.  Again, I want the child’s experience in and of itself to be the reward.

The next podcast will focus on the 10th question in the Q&A section of the book about effective communication with children, so please stay tuned for that.  In the meantime, thanks for visiting and for listening.  You can hear Podcast 40 here:

https://learnwithmeremotely.podbean.com/e/teaching-humanity-remotely-with-dr-mindy-shaw-ep-40/

And you can find the parenting guide on Amazon right here:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08WJRX7JF