Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Hi, everybody. Welcome back to another conversation on the Parenting with Impact podcast. You have Diane and Elaine here for another fabulous, scintillating discussion.

Diane Dempster: It's the Diane and Elaine show!

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Well, not really. We have this amazing team behind us, along with all these fabulous coaches. But yes, sometimes it does feel like the Diane and Elaine show—though that's mostly because we've been doing this longer than anyone else.

Diane Dempster: So today, we want to talk about motivation—

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: That’s a fun topic!

Diane Dempster: Motivation is such a fun conversation, and so many parents begin by saying, "My kid is just not motivated."

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: How do I get my kids motivated to fill in the blank?

Diane Dempster: Or I spoke with a mom this morning, and she said, "I don't want to bribe my kid." That's a whole other issue. But there are so many different aspects to motivation.

We want to dispel some of the myths and talk about what’s really going on underneath it all before we get into problem-solving.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Before we get into problem-solving, actually, in the previous episode, we were talking about not getting stuck in information land.

There’s a really good tool here for you to use, so we promise we’ll get back to it. But first, we want to set the stage. And what was it you just said? A mom who said—

Diane Dempster: "I don't want to bribe my kid."

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Right. Motivation is a bit of a fraud because, somehow, we believe it has to do with will and intention. It’s really easy to take it personally if our kids aren’t motivated. There’s something about feeling like a child isn’t motivated that brings a lot of fear for many of us.

We start thinking, "What if they're lazy? What if they’re never going to get themselves together?" There’s a lot of underlying fear that we don’t really talk about when we're worried about a kid who doesn’t seem motivated.

Diane Dempster: And the reality is that as grown-ups, adults are more likely to have what they call intrinsic motivation—this kind of motivation where we do something because we want to do it, or because it feels like the right thing to do, or it aligns with our values.

Even as adults, though, intrinsic motivation isn’t always enough, and we’ll talk about that in a minute. It’s something you get as an adult, and our kids don’t naturally have that ability yet.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: They haven’t developmentally reached the point where they can tap into that motivation.

Diane Dempster: And with complex kids, it’s going to take longer. So, myth number one: These kids aren’t just going to want to do things because it’s the right thing to do.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: And that doesn’t mean they’re immoral or don’t have values. Let’s be honest—Diane and I are different because we love what we do, but a lot of people go to work for the extrinsic motivation of getting paid.

You’re not intrinsically going to work just because you value the importance of work. You’re going because you’re earning a paycheck and trying to support your family. So, there’s another value being honored there. That happens a lot with adults.

We really need to examine this idea. So, myth number one is that our kids are not immoral. It’s not a moral failure if they’re struggling to access motivation.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Myth number two, which I heard in what you just said, is that our kids should be ready to do this because of their age.

And very often, developmentally, our kids are not quite ready for that level of independent motivation that Diane was talking about.

Diane Dempster: Okay, so the third myth I want to talk about is that our kids shouldn’t need to be motivated to get something done—that we shouldn’t have to use an external motivator to help them get it done.

That’s kind of the flip side of it. Let’s talk about motivation, particularly with kids who have executive function challenges.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Well, I think this ties into the idea that if we have a strong value around work ethic, or carrying your weight, or doing the right thing—if we, as adults, have well-developed values around something, then when we don’t see our kids reflecting those values, we become afraid that it means something is wrong.

The truth is, they may have different values. That doesn’t mean they don’t care about people or aren’t morally good people. For example, I have a value around efficiency. I like to do things efficiently—get it done and get it done well. I don’t like to waste time.

My son also values efficiency, but it looks very different for a teenage boy than it does for me. For him, it expressed itself by saying, “You all work too hard. Why are you doing it that way? You can do it this way.”

Diane Dempster: And it's this value of ease coming out as a value of efficiency. So, if I’m weighing the value of ease versus the value of efficiency—anyway, we’ve gone down the rabbit hole! I think the bottom line is that just because they don’t yet have the intrinsic values we do doesn’t mean they won’t eventually develop them.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Or they may have different values that they’re honoring. And when we get really clear about what’s important to them—because they are separate, autonomous human beings—we can help motivate them based on what’s important to them, not what’s important to us.

I think that’s another gap we fall into as parents: we try to motivate them based on what would motivate us. We think, "I think it's important. I want to get it done. The way I work, I would get it done first, so I get the reward."

So, we think we should do it the same way because that’s what works for us. That’s another fallacy in the world of motivation: if something works for one person, especially with ADD or executive function challenges, it’s not necessarily going to work for everyone.

Diane Dempster: The other thing I want to mention is how critical motivation is for the brain to do anything, and this is true for everyone. But especially for people with ADHD or executive function challenges, there absolutely has to be motivation there.

If the motivation isn’t there, or if the motivation is stronger to do something else, it’s going to be virtually impossible to get them to act or take action without some sort of motivation in place.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Jeff Copper, who does Attention Talk Radio, and I like to spend a lot of time navel-gazing about attention, focus, action, and managing these issues. One of the things he talks about is that when we look at our kids and say, "He’s not motivated" or "She’s not motivated," it’s actually not true. They are highly motivated to be doing or not doing exactly what they’re doing or not doing.

They’re just not motivated to do what we want them to do, or what we think they should be doing, or even what they’re responsible for doing. My kid was highly motivated to play video games as an escape because the homework was overwhelming and they were freaked out.

My kid was highly motivated to talk to their friend late at night to help them because that seemed way more important than getting their homework done. So it’s not that they’re not motivated. They’re just motivated by something else, and we need to understand that.

Diane Dempster: We have to create a balance of motivation. So, if the motivation is over here at one level, we’ve got to figure out how to raise the motivation for the thing that we want.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Or that we think is important for them or that will serve them. I think about when you're talking about teenage kids and you start moving toward the college application process. We want it because they want it.

We know they want to go to college if you've got a kid who's interested in that path. And yet, parents get all stuck, thinking, "Well, they've got to do this." We get stuck on the fact that it's important to do it, instead of remembering to connect with their motivation and help them tap into it. Right now, we’re not going to talk about agendas.

Diane Dempster: No. There are a couple of different directions I want to take with that. So, one is just a quick reminder that motivation has to be time-sensitive.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Relevant, yeah.

Diane Dempster: My kid is in 10th grade and wants to be able to go to college. It’s not going to be motivating for him to focus on wanting to go to college and doing his homework in 10th grade. He needs something more time-sensitive.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: A little more immediate.

Diane Dempster: The other piece I want to spend a little more time on is that motivation alone isn’t enough. Again, this is what we were talking about earlier.

Just because they say they want it, if they’re still not doing it—if they sign the piece of paper that says, "Yes, I will do this, I agree to follow through, and I’m going to limit my screens"—don’t assume that if the behavior doesn’t change, it’s because they were feeding us some BS about being motivated or bought in. The reality is, it takes—

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: They may not have the executive function to actually execute what it is they’ve committed to. And we talked about this in the last episode that we did about—what were we talking about?

Diane Dempster: We were talking about not getting stuck in information land.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Yeah, not getting stuck in information land. And we talked about the example of my son taking out the trash. He didn’t have the executive function to remember it was Monday night, but he did have the executive function to independently get up, get out, and get the trash done—and he could do it well.

He still needed me to scaffold the reminder as we worked toward him coming up with a system that kept me out of it, but I had to be part of that system for a long time.

Diane Dempster: And then the analogy I always use is like, you could offer me a million dollars to speak French. But I don’t have the skill set, I’ve never taken a French class, and my brain isn’t in French land. It doesn’t matter how much money you offer me.

It takes motivation and executive function. So if you’ve put motivation in place—like I have parents all the time saying, “I took away everything.”

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: "I’ve got nothing left to take away." There’s that call.

Diane Dempster: Chances are the problem isn’t motivation. Chances are it’s something else. Most likely, it’s about executive function. Kids need support and accommodation, not just motivation. And that’s the problem.

We see the problem and we want to put motivation on either a reward or consequence. If the reward or consequence isn’t working, you need to dig deeper and ask, “Okay, what’s really going on here?”

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Right. So, we promised you a strategy. Are we ready to go into it?

Diane Dempster: We can.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Okay, so we have a concept that we teach, which we’ve borrowed, tweaked, and cultivated over the years. Parents love it, and other professionals love it too. We get positive feedback all the time. There’s a really good article on the website about it as well.

So, the acronym we teach is designed to help you find motivators for your kids, but let me say it differently: to help your kids find motivation for themselves.

Diane Dempster: That’s another thing. Let’s talk about that when we’re done with PINCH.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Well, do you want to talk about it first?

Diane Dempster: Okay, yeah, let’s do that. That’s a little bit easier.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Now we’re going to PINCH. Go for it.

Diane Dempster: The other piece of this is helping kids understand the role of motivation. And the story I love to tell is about my kid who was in second grade, working on math problems. It was one of those situations where something that should take 20 minutes, or maybe 10 to 15 minutes, ended up taking two hours.

So, we divided the homework over two nights. On night one, he got it done in 10 minutes. On night two, it took, I kid you not, two and a half hours to do the same number of problems. For me, it was mind-numbing, and I was banging my head against the wall. It was exhausting.

So, rinse and repeat. We sat down after finally getting through the two and a half hours, and I said, “Dude, what’s up? What was different?”

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: What was happening? What worked was you were committed to doing it. You went through the process. And what didn’t work?

Diane Dempster: Yeah, so what didn’t work was that he was like, “My show is on!” on the first night. So, he was really excited to get it done so he could—

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: There used to be this thing called appointment television. It was great.

Diane Dempster: Yeah, exactly. But it enabled me to teach him about the role of motivation. Wow, your brain was really motivated to get that stuff done quicker on the first night? Isn’t that interesting? I wonder what are some of the things that might motivate your brain?

Again, it makes it about his brain needing motivation, rather than him needing motivation. For my kiddo, and I think for a lot of our kids, if it’s about their brain needing to be motivated, and not about them personally, I think that third-person perspective often helps. And then I was able to engage him in a conversation about what motivates him.

So, for the next few nights—this is second grade, remember—it was like, “Okay, I’m going to give myself a bowl of ice cream after my homework because it’ll help my brain be motivated to get my homework done. I know there’s something at the end that keeps me moving forward.”

So, part of this is teaching our kids and then involving them in deciding what the motivation should be. There’s a whole other thing around consequences and agreements and things like that.

You definitely want to always involve your kids in setting the consequences and deciding what the rewards are. It’s just this reminder that you want to involve them in the process.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Collaboration is key. And right now, we’re talking about if you want to help your kid find motivation to do something, you want to focus on buy-in, agenda, agency—all that stuff. There are five key motivators for kids in our realm whose brains are impacted by executive function.

This works for everybody, but some people, like Diane, have what we call a “just get it done” button. So, she’s got this other motivation, which is that she’s motivated by checking it off the list or getting it done.

Diane Dempster: Well, that’s still one of the five technically, but yeah.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: I don’t know about that. It doesn’t tend to work for us neurodivergent folks. But if you’re one of those people who has to put it on the list to cross it off, it might be a good motivator for you. So, the five key motivators you can remember by the acronym PINCH: P-I-N-C-H. Pinch me, I’m dreaming I can get it done now.

Diane Dempster: I like that.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Yeah. So, you want to hear what they are?

Diane Dempster: Yes, do it.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: P stands for play. Also, creativity and humor are in this realm. So, kids who are motivated by the creativity of something, enjoying it, whether it’s putting a basketball hoop on top of the laundry basket to throw in hoops, or dancing or singing their way through their homework, or maybe bouncing basketballs to do their math problems.

Diane Dempster: It might be the kind of kid who loves to pick folders of different colors and has an organization system that's really fun, creative, and colorful. So, creativity comes into this.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Right, or they want to write it out—whatever works. So, play, creativity, and humor are all in that place. Humor can be really powerful; a lot of us use humor to engage with our kids around these issues.

I stands for interest. This is a kid who’s interested. And if you’ve ever heard yourself say, "He only does, or she only does, what she’s interested in and what she wants to do," that’s a kid who tends to be motivated by interest.

That could be school, a teacher, a subject, or even the social aspect of school. Like your son used to get to school early because that’s when his social time was.

It could be a lot of different things, but if you’re motivated by something being compelling or interesting to you, then that’s a really great motivator. N?

Diane Dempster: The third one is N, which stands for novelty—new and different.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Shiny object syndrome, [inaudible] steroids. My favorite example that people love when I talk about this is that, and this is not an exaggeration, I have three toothpastes and at least two or three different toothbrushes in my drawer in my sink because every night it’s like a roulette of which toothpaste am I going to choose? Am I in the mood for charcoal tonight, or do I want minty tonight? And that keeps it novel for me. It keeps it changing.

So even if I have a system that really, really works, I may get bored with it and need to change it up. I might need to create a new system because I like novelty. So if you were really motivated in the beginning [overlapping], but then that motivation may start waning about two-thirds or halfway through the semester, my son would come to me and say, "I’m done." And I’d say, "You made it a month longer than last year.

Way to go!" Because he’s a real novelty seeker, and he does much better when he moves into a higher level of learning where the classes are changing and the teachers are changing. And they change classes each semester. Some of those kids actually do better, even though it’s more executive function, because there’s more novelty going on.

Diane Dempster: So, C stands for a couple of things. It stands for competition, connection, and collaboration. So, it may be about competition with themselves, like, "I’m going to beat my last—"

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: "My personal record."

Diane Dempster: My kids, I would say, "See how fast you can get upstairs, get your shoes, and come back downstairs." So that would be a competition sort of thing with themselves. Or, a lot of times in schools, they’ll use timers or gamification as a way to kind of get these kids engaged and involved.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: And if you have an athlete, a lot of times kids are working towards their PR (personal record) for something, whatever they’re competing in.

Diane Dempster: You’ve got to be careful with competition, though, because if you have a kid who’s anxious, it may actually shut them down because they feel more pressure from competition. And so, a kid with anxiety might be more focused on collaboration, like working with other people.

There’s a lot of times in school environments when they’ll have kids work together to create a project or work.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Work in groups.

Diane Dempster: Working in groups, I mean, and modifying that and making that at home, it’s like, “Let’s work together.” I remember when I was a kid, my mom would write letters when I was doing my homework. We call it body doubling, but it’s like we were working together.

And it felt like this sort of connection and collaboration, even though we were working on parallel things. It was motivating because I didn’t like sitting in my room doing it all by myself. I really liked that connection piece of it.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Yeah, or study groups. It can show up in a lot of ways. So, connection and/or competition is what shows up in the "C". And then "H" is hurry up or urgency. It’s really interesting because what’s happening there is you’re relying on a different part of your brain to get it done. You’re relying on the amygdala to kind of click in, saying, “It’s last minute, I’ve got to get it done now.”

Now we’ve got some different hormones coursing through your brain, getting a little cortisol going. So, if you’ve ever had a kid who’s waited until the last minute to do anything, there’s often a chance that they’re using hurry up or urgency as a motivation to get it done.

And it can be really frustrating because you can see that if they had planned it out, they would have done a much better job. And that’s true. But by waiting until the last minute, they’ve got a different thing that’s activating the frontal lobe of their brain to get them to do the work that needs to be done.

And the maddening thing is, sometimes they do an equally good job at the last minute. So it’s really hard to teach them how to plan it out because they actually did well on it.

Diane Dempster: Right. Part of it is understanding the role that "hurry up" can play, and that urgency isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s often stressful, especially for us, as we watch our kids wait until the last minute.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: We’re feeling the stress of it.

Diane Dempster: Exactly.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: What I want to emphasize here is that we don’t want to demonize "hurry up" or urgency. It’s a very valuable tool. We just don’t want it to be the only tool in their toolbox.

We want to teach them all these other motivators so that they can use it selectively, rather than having it be the only thing that works for them.

Diane Dempster: The other side of "hurry up," which we didn’t really address, is fear-based motivation. Often what happens is that the motivation becomes, "I have to do this or I’ll get in trouble," or "I have to do this or I’ll lose my phone." There’s fear involved.

And again, it’s often the case that my child will only do something if I threaten to take away their phone. That means you’re using an urgent motivator. Once again, you’re activating the amygdala and triggering your child’s fears. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t work, but it’s not sustainable.

It’s exhausting. How many adults do you know who are constantly beating themselves up to get things done?

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: The problem is that it works, but it's not a healthy way of getting ourselves to do things.

Diane Dempster: And over time, it’s exhausting.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: It wears out your adrenals, and it can become a health issue. It can actually become unhealthy. So those are the five motivators: PINCH. We encourage, invite, and urge you to teach them to your kids.

No matter how old your kids are, you can start asking, "What do you think was the motivation for doing that?" You can share PINCH and get curious about what does and doesn’t motivate people.

My favorite motivation story is one where I needed my kids to go to the grocery store. We had a death in the family, and my oldest was 18. They didn’t want to go, and I didn’t blame them for not wanting to. But I needed them out of the house for a minute so we could have some adult conversation. So, my eldest looked at their siblings, paused, looked back at me, and I could tell they wanted to help me out.

They turned to their siblings and said, "Okay, everybody, superheroes to the grocery store!" Then they put on capes, tights, and shorts over the tights. They dressed up and made it fun, playful, creative, and novel, so they could get themselves out the door and go to the grocery store. They used whatever motivation was available, but did so consciously.

Diane Dempster: There’s so much in here. Take a minute before we wrap up to really reflect on all the different pieces we’ve discussed regarding motivation. Maybe listen to this again if you’d like to.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: PINCH is great, but what about the first half? What did we take away from the first part?

Diane Dempster: Exactly. The key point was understanding the role that motivation plays. Don’t just focus on the PINCH; focus on what role motivation serves. Jot down some notes for yourself and reflect on our conversation today. What were your "ahas" from what we discussed before we finish?

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Right. And as we wrap up, what’s motivating you to take that "aha" and put it into action? What do you want to do with it? Where do you want to take it? And maybe think about how you’ll set yourself up for success with that.

Diane Dempster: Thanks, everybody. Thanks, Elaine.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Always a pleasure. All right, go forth, find your motivation, help your kids find theirs, and know that we’re glad you’re motivated to tune into our podcast. We’ll see you on the next one. Take care, everybody.

 

Helpful Links:

• Parent Expectations: 2 Steps to Success 
• Parenting is Leadership Guide