A Conversation with Tosha Schore about Addressing Aggression in Boys

Debbie: 

Hey Tosha, welcome to the podcast.

Tosha Schore:

Hi Debbie, thank you for inviting me on.

Debbie:

Yes, I said this to you before I hit record, but you are someone whose name I’ve seen. We’ve been in the same summits. We have mutual friends. I think of you as a colleague, yet we have never actually met and you haven’t been on the show before. So I just want to give you a hearty welcome to the Tilt Parenting podcast and community.

Tosha Schore:

Thank you.

Debbie:

Before we get into our topic for today, which I’m really looking forward to exploring with you, I would love if you kind of be on the formal bio, tell us a little bit about the work that you do in Parenting Voice Peacefully. And I guess really your why. I’m always curious to know, like, what is it about this work that drew you to it and that kind of keeps you going?

Tosha Schore:

I have two different ways that I got here. There are two different stories that I like to tell, because I think they illustrate two different pieces of my why. And one is I grew up pretty much with my mom in the 70s in the San Francisco Bay area. We were very much a part of the women’s movement and that protests and fighting for women’s rights and my world was women and girls and girl power and I felt very empowered and it was an exciting time. And I went to college and I studied women’s studies and fast forward a little bit, I ended up partnering up. I got pregnant and had a baby and when I was pregnant, well, before I had the baby when I was pregnant, I remember sort of laying on my couch and then all of sudden having this realization, what if I have a boy? Which is sort of like a weird thing, like, so what if I have a boy, right? But like, it just, I’m gonna be honest, it popped into my head, what if I have a boy? And so what do I do? I called my mom. I said, mom, know, what if I have a boy? And it was just silence on the other end of the line. And then she said, don’t worry, don’t worry, Tasha, we’ll figure it out. But it was this weird thing, like. We never thought of this as a possibility. Like our world was girls, it was women, and like we were just gonna continue that legacy. And there was a real separation of gender and a real binary of gender. So that’s kind of one piece that was kind of like, whoa, it sort of set me up for something to think about. 

And then fast forward after I had my three boys, I ended up having three of them. And one morning before, or after they had gone to school and I was just reading the paper, having some tea before I started my work, and I was reading the paper and it was just one horrible thing after the next, right? It was rape, it was terror, it was police brutality, it was just horror after horror and all by the hands of men. And I thought to myself, what is going on here? I have these three sweet boys. And the newspaper is just headline after headline of all these men committing these horrible acts against others. And I thought, like, I have to figure this out. And like, not in a Pollyanna kind of way, I know there’s like all sorts of isms that make life hard for boys and people in general, boys and boys of color and boys who have disabilities and whatnot. The bottom line is I just had this aha moment of, I want to connect the dots for parents. Like if we are parents of these sweet young boys, there must be something that we can do. If we can just shift the way that we parent our boys, perhaps we could create a more peaceful world. And so I made it my mission at Parenting Boys Peacefully to create a more peaceful world one sweet boy at a time. It felt like a way to make tangible something that felt crazy out of hand. It was something that I could do and I wanted to show other parents that they could do. It was sort of making the personal work political and the political work personal.

Debbie:

Thanks for sharing that. And I just have to insert that I had a very similar conversation when I was pregnant because I knew nothing about boys. Same with my mom, just like, I raised two girls. This is going to be a whole new experience for us. So anyway, I had this very similar, like, are you sure? When we saw the ultrasound, like, really? Can you double check that? But let’s pivot to what we’re going to be talking about today, which is aggression in boys. And I always like to kind of zoom out and start with kind of a baseline so we’re all on the same page. So how do you define aggression? What are we talking about here?

Tosha Schore:

Hmm, well, actually I let parents define it. So I don’t really feel like we have to have an official definition. It’s more like if you have a kid in your family who is acting towards you in a way that feels aggressive and that might look like hitting or spitting or kicking or scratching or calling really offensive names or pushing or breaking things, that all in my book counts as aggression.

Debbie:

Okay, that makes sense. And then, you know, I also always like to put things in context just because of the times that we’re living in. It’s a complicated time to be raising children because of so many factors, which we will not get into today. But I am wondering, in your work, are there any trends that you have noticed in terms of aggression in boys that can be kind of connected to outside influences or just kind of the state of the world right now.

Tosha Schore:

Absolutely. I do think that the acts of aggression are getting more violent in the sense that if we look in the bigger world, not as much in families. I feel like what I see in families is pretty much the same as what I’ve seen for the last 20 years. I think there’s some challenges like around tech that weren’t there before, but I don’t feel like, you know, the intensity of it is much more than it ever was. But I do feel like what we’re seeing in the world in terms of school shootings and like I said, acts of violence out in the world, I think those are getting more and more gruesome and common and almost more importantly than that in terms of how we address aggression is the intensity and the fear that we have as parents. I think we used to be less concerned. Maybe it’s the upside of like boys will be boys, which I hate, but it’s like there was more room for some wonky behaviors, if you will, without everybody completely flipping out and getting terrified that you were gonna be the next school shooter, or you were gonna land in juvie, right? 

Like, I have parents who come to me all the time. Those are their fears. They are fast forward, you know, they have jettisoned themselves years into the future and they are scared their kid’s gonna end up in jail or the bully at school or the rapist behind the dumpster. I mean, these are real fears that we have as parents when our young boys are struggling with aggression. We fast forward. We don’t look at our boy often and go like, you know, he’s a five-year-old. Like, he’s really upset that, you know, his sister got to do X and he did, or his sister got invited to the birthday party and he didn’t. We just see the five-year-old who took the remote and threw it at the TV and cracked the screen and we go like, my god What is gonna be if he’s like this at five? What’s he gonna be like when he’s 15? So I think the bigger the bigger change is actually in the level of terror about what the future is gonna hold.

Debbie:

And so that makes me wonder, you know, I’m thinking about parents of neurodivergent kids who maybe they’re quite young and don’t appear to recognize other kids’ feelings or react in a way that might be expected. And so a parent might think, gosh, am I raising a child who doesn’t have any empathy, right? Or, you know, we do tend to future cast and project our biggest fears on what is this going to look like down the road. So when parents have the fears you were just describing, do you see that as an overreaction because of the times that we’re living in? I’m just wondering, how do you meet parents, especially parents of young kids, when that’s what they come in with?

Tosha Schore:

Right, well, I don’t want to meet it with judgment. So like, I wouldn’t call it an overreaction because I feel like it would land for a parent as judgment, right? I mean, no, that’s not what you meant, but like, I want to be conscious of that if I’m working with a parent. I like to say to parents, as long, we have to start with your fears because as long as your child, feels that you’re scared of them or scared for them, it’s gonna be near impossible for them to change. Right, mean, just Debbie, if you think about you or me, right? If I’m scared for your future, if I’m going like, gosh, Debbie, like, I don’t know if you’re gonna have a successful podcast. Like, I mean, I don’t know if you can do that. Like, that’s a pretty hard thing to do. you know, you might try, you might completely flop. People might think you’re dumb, mean, like, you know, could go, I mean, you’re not like you’re saying this, but if that’s my energy that I’m coming to you with, it’s gonna make it really hard for you to succeed. You’re not gonna want me around because I’m getting in your way of your success. 

And so I meet parents where they are by saying, hey, I get it. I’ve had those fears. I work with parents all the time who have those fears. The fear is normal. We can have the fear, but we’ve got to work through it. Share that fear with me. Tell me all the things that you’re scared about. Allow yourself, allow your body to shake, sweat, sweat it, get scared so that you can come and meet your sweet boy where he is in that moment. So you can recognize this is my five year old who was really upset that he didn’t get to go to the party. His reaction is, in my opinion, like, way a way overreaction, a huge overreaction. It’s not appropriate, right? It’s not what we want. It’s not a good behavior per se, right? have air quotes if you can’t see me on the podcast, right? But it’s not who he is. And so where can we meet him? I think what we do when we have kids who are struggling is we do a lot of hoping and wishing and praying that things would be different. And then that gets in the way of us actually being able to make a plan. 

So I talk to parents often about, your kid is at a place where you ask him to turn off the remote and he calls you, you know, five expletives. Do we want to be here? No, not fun. Do we wish we were here? We were somewhere else? Absolutely. But it’s like we could stand here and say, hey, know, come over here, kiddo. Like, you don’t want to be acting like that. Like, that’s not very fun. And that’s not going to get you where you want to be in life. But it doesn’t work. Like, he doesn’t come towards us. So instead, like, we have to go all the way over to where he is in his scary, uncomfortable place and then slowly, hand in hand, kind of walk back towards where we want to go together.

Debbie:

Yeah, that’s great. So there is one question I wanted to touch base on before we move on, and that is kind of the way that society perceives aggression in boys. And I just want to give a shout out to Dr. John Duffy, who I had on the show recently about his book, Rescuing Our Sons. So that’s a nice one if you’re raising boys and listening to this show. Listen to that conversation too, because I think there are some nice kind of compliments there. But if you think about kind of boys like moving through the world with all of this judgment, think, and perceptions, and I’m thinking especially boys of color, neurodivergent kids, kids who already kind of have a lot of cards stacked against them in terms of how they may be responded to or seen in certain environments and communities. Can you talk about that and what they’re kind of up against?

Tosha Schore:

They’re up against being square pegs in a round hole a lot of the time. They, you know, people often ask me, why do I focus on boys? And I actually get kind of mean emails, angry emails, you know, it’s not fair, it’s sexist, it’s all kinds of things. But I’ve felt for years and years and years, I’ve been doing this for decades now, that boys need a place where their feelings are protected. And so I think what’s going on in the big picture is that as a society, a worldwide society, we are not willing or able for the most part to hold safe spaces for boys to show us how they really feel because we get scared or worried, or we don’t know how to protect ourselves if there’s aggression, right? Or if it’s a softer, quote unquote, feminine feeling, it makes us really uncomfortable. We think, we say, we want them to be softer. We want them to be, you know, men to be in touch with their emotions. But then if they are, if you see a man cry or if you have a male partner who cries, it’s like suddenly really uncomfortable. It’s like, my God, what’s going on here? So we don’t hold that space. And ultimately like that is how these boys are going to develop their emotional intelligence. They need to be able to release the stresses and the hurts and the upsets that they’ve amassed throughout their lives and release them so that they can think clearly about how they want to respond rather than just react. I mean, and I think they’re also perceived as the bad guy.

You know, going back to the story that I said at the beginning, I mean, I consider myself a feminist and I grew up in the world that I shared earlier. And one of the things that I had to reconcile was what is the role of men in this whole feminist movement? Because whether or not the intention was there, what I took away from it is that they were the bad guys. And there’s a piece of society, or not a piece of society, but there’s a way in which, and I think most societies right now, we have othered men and boys and pinned them as the bad guys. And so there’s just no wiggle room for them. There’s no room for them to make a mistake. we can’t, if we can’t make mistakes, we can’t grow. Right? I mean, I’ll just share a quick story. I mean, there was a kid who was in a school and did something that was definitely not appropriate, but was in middle school. And the school wanted the parent to either sign some sort of a paper about, you that was gonna go on his record or, and have him sit out of PE for the rest of the year on the bench and not participate, but they wouldn’t do anything about mending the relationship or repairing the relationship between this child and, you know, the child that was the sort of, for simplicity’s reasons, say the victim of this stupid, stupid thing that they did, right? And I kept saying to myself, like, if there’s no place for a 12 year old to make a mistake and learn from that mistake, then what kind of men are we putting out in the world? We have to, and we just keep pushing back and pushing back. And it’s like, it’s not in middle school and it’s not in elementary school. It’s for sure not in high school or college. It’s like, where is the space for them to mess up and for somebody to say, hey, that is not okay but I’m here with you. We’re gonna figure this out and we’re gonna get through it.

Debbie:

Yeah. I’m wondering if you see, even with parents who are doing their own work, who are really showing up for the child they have, who are very attuned to their child, do you notice in your work that despite this, still show up differently to their sons than they do their daughters? Like even if they’re trying to not reinforce harmful messaging about being a boy versus being a girl or reinforcing stereotypes. Do you find they show up differently?

Tosha Schore:

You know what, I don’t know if I can answer that question. I don’t actually know if I have insight into that exact question. What I will say is that I definitely see huge transformation in their boys’ behavior and the aggression becoming much less frequent and much less intense over time as they lean into connection-based tools and meeting them where they are and letting go of the fear and holding loving limits and being playful and all of these things. So I see transformation, but I don’t know that I can speak to your original question because I just don’t have that insight into families.

Debbie:

Yeah, yeah. it wasn’t one of, I just was thinking about it as you were talking about the way the school responded to this boy.

Tosha Schore:

What I will say is that people respond, mean, the world responds differently to boys and girls. That is for sure, right? You see, I’ve shared this example before. I remember one of my kids was playing soccer when he was younger and got cleated in the neck and was crying, which seems to me like an appropriate thing. I think that’s what I would be doing if I got cleated in the neck. That hurts. And the coach was like, you gotta buck up basically. You gotta get it together. If you wanna play the next game, suck it up and get back out here or you’re out the next game. And that is just not what we see with girls. Like with girls, the coach is like, hey, know, sit down for a second, take a breath, get yourself back together and come out when you’re ready or whatever. But I don’t know exactly what the words would be, being that I have three boys. But we treat, we being the teacher, we being the coach, we being the litigator, whatever, we treat boys differently than we treat girls. And I think to deny that is doing a disservice to our boys.

Debbie:

Yeah, yeah, agreed. So we know we talk about all the time that all behavior is communication, right? So what is a boy’s aggressive behavior communicating to parents?

Tosha Schore:

I think that most of the time aggression is fear in disguise. That’s what I see. It can also be frustration, right? Sometimes we have expectations that are misaligned with the ability of the child and it can be really frustrating. It’s like if you’ve got a kid who’s got a broken arm and he has to write an essay. Well, we don’t like push and force and insist that he pick up the pencil and write or tap the keyboard if he can’t, right? We get creative. We go, okay, well, how about you dictate it to me and I type it in or we use AI or whatever. But when it’s emotional, we forget. We don’t respond in that same way. And I think we need to. So I think it could be a mismatch, be frustration, right? That mismatch of I’m expecting something of you that you are showing me over and over again that you’re not able to do and I keep insisting and therefore you end up kind of flipping your lid and aggression can come out. And oftentimes it’s just, it’s fear. like, it could be perceived fear or real fear. It could be fear of being left out. It could be, it could be anything. It could be like your kid’s on the playground and they were afraid that another kid picked up a stick in the sandbox and was threatening them with it. And so they took a stick and whacked the other kid. Now, it’s not great, not appropriate, right? We don’t want them to whack the other kid, but you could see how they could be scared because somebody was wielding a stick in their face. And that was the response. So generally it’s about it’s about fear in disguise. Maybe it’s fear of not being able to succeed.

Debbie:

I watched an interview that you did with our mutual friend, Seth Perler. He’s probably the most frequent guest on this show in terms of repeat guests, executive function coach. you know, and knowing so many listeners are raising kids with executive function challenges, can you talk a little bit about the relationship between aggression and executive function?

Tosha Schore:

Well, I think that really aligns with what I was just saying about the misaligned expectations. I think that when we are asking a child to get their school bag together so that they’re ready to leave in the morning, and we don’t sort of monitor it, and the next morning we’re ready to go, and we realize the binder’s in the living room, and the pencil’s on the table, and the book’s on the bed, and all of the things, we get frustrated and often don’t respond in ways that we feel good about. But what would happen if we acknowledge that this child does have the executive function challenge and we met them where they were? And so I think one thing that can really work well with kids who have executive function challenging executive function, I’m having challenges, executive function challenges, is to start, it’s a scaffold. So it’s to start by doing things together. And oftentimes, like Seth talks a lot about creating systems, which is great. And I’ve talked to him a lot about what happens, because I get parents who come to me and they’re like, we set up all these systems, but they don’t work. Like my kid won’t do them or can’t do them. And so, when we’re talking about the brain, what I’ve noticed is that when we’re putting the cart, I get this wrong all the time, putting the cart ahead of the horse, is that how it goes? The other way, the backwards way? It just doesn’t work. Sometimes our kid isn’t ready for that plan yet. And first there are emotions that need to be released around being frustrated with school, feeling like it’s too hard, feeling like they’re behind, feeling like you love their sibling more than you love them, who knows what it’s about? But if our brain is overflowing with emotion about whatever that could be related to the topic or not, we’re not able to access our higher functions, right? We’re not able to access the prefrontal cortex. This is true of our kids. 

So if you’re asking your child to do something and they’re not able to do it, I would get curious. Not about sort of Sherlock homing it and being like, well, hmm, why did you, you know, did you not X or did you do Y? But are there feelings under there that are getting in the way? Like you don’t have to know the exact why, but what would happen if you just listened? What would happen if you just sat down and said, this is, this is hard. I’m sorry, this is so hard. And just took a break from trying to get them to do something because if in a way it’s a form of control.

Debbie:

Yeah, absolutely.  I think that, you know, always bringing it back to connection is such an important reminder. And I think one of the most powerful tools that we have is to focus on the core relationship. So I want to ask you a question that actually has come up multiple times in my community. And I’m sure that there are going to be listeners who relate to this as well. Let’s talk about aggressive words. So I have heard from lot of parents whose kids, even quite young, and I will just, I don’t know why I’m sharing this, but I called a neighbor, like an expletive that I learned in the back of the bus when I was in first grade when his family was over to our house for dinner. So I clearly had my own impulse control around language. I also got my mouth washed out with soap. So I never did that in front of my parents again. 

Tosha Schore:

We’re not doing that, by the way, listeners. We’re not washing kids’ mouths out with soap.

Debbie:

No, not what we’re doing. Absolutely. Thank you for that. But it can be embarrassing. It can be really confronting, especially if that language is directed at us as parents. And again, we’re talking about little kids. And I’m always thinking there’s a reason why they’re doing this. Don’t take this personally, kind of sharing different ideas about how to navigate that, but it’s really hard. So can you talk about aggressive language in children and how you would support parents in navigating that?

Tosha Schore:

Yeah, I mean, this is a huge topic. There’s so much to say about this. And I have so many funny stories I want to share. Gosh, where should I start? Yeah, definitely don’t take it personally. They’re just words. They’re just words. I think whether or not you’re out in public makes a difference. So out in public, my default is to go for play because if you imagine yourself out in public and you see like kind of friction between a parent and child, like if the child is having a big tantrum or cussing out their parent or whatever, and the parent is like fighting back and they’re at war, it makes you really uncomfortable. But if you see a child doing that and the parent is even, or even being silly, but notably is addressing the situation in a calm, adult-like manner, it’s much less uncomfortable for people who are watching. And the reality is that we have to remember this, is that most parents have had this kind of experience, neurodiverse child or neurotypical child. Most of us at some point in our life have had a very embarrassing situation with our child happen out in public. And so we need to think of ourselves as like a team, the team of parents walking around the world. Like one thing that you can do, I’ll get back to the humor in a second, but one thing that I always like to tell parents to do is if you see something like that going on, because you know that from experience that that parent is feeling so judged in that moment, like even if you just walk by and say like, I’ve so been there, right? Or, you need help? I’m happy to help if there’s anything I can do. Right? It makes such a difference because if that parent doesn’t feel judged in that moment, then their limbic system and their emotional brain isn’t going to get in the way of them being able to think clearly about how to respond appropriately. 

So in public, mean, could get, you know, a kid calls you stupid. It’s not a question from a client yesterday about this. Exact same question you just put out here. I suggested, well, can you get silly with the words, especially if they’re younger kids? But they call you stupid, and I’m just being pretty PG. I just want to say for the record, I’ve heard all the things. Stupid is a G word, but it’s what I’m going to say for the podcast. So you’re such a stupid mom or whatever. And you say, super mom? Thanks, you got a cape for me? No, you’re a stupid mom. I am such a super mom. I’m gonna put my, here’s my jacket, I’m gonna make it into a cape. Now, you have to know your kid and their developmental stage and you don’t wanna be mocking and there’s all sorts of nuances, but for podcast purposes, don’t worry that leaning into play is gonna cause more of the quote unquote bad behavior, it’s not. Because what we’re doing is we’re trying to get that hijacked brain back. We’re trying to show our kid, hey, I’m on your team. I’m with you here. I’m not going to war. I love you. I can see that sweet boy underneath this obnoxious behavior. Like, I’m not gonna get confused. And when they sense that energy, their limbic system will calm and they’ll come back to even. So play is a really good thing to do out in public.

Debbie:

Yeah, I love that. And what if a parent is, or what if a child is saying things more for shock value, not that they’re escalated in that moment and it kind of comes out of nowhere, but it’s still aggressive in what they’re saying, the words that they’re using. Is it the same reaction?

Tosha Schore:

Yeah, so I was just recently in this last year working with a family of a neurodiverse 11 year old. And he was doing this thing where he would call, you know, the F word and other things like to, don’t know what I can say in the podcast, but to his mother, just like out of the blue, they’d be playing cards and he would just say it, right? So I call those drive-bys, not, a response to, example, you know, I didn’t get what I wanted for dinner or I have to do homework and I don’t want to where there’s an obvious, like somebody is setting a limit or there is a demand of some sort and I am responding to that. But it’s just kind of like, hey, screw you or whatever, you know, kind of a thing. And I call those drive-bys and so from a brain perspective, I think in that situation, what’s going on is they’ve developed these grooves of a habit. And we know that those neurons that fire together, wire together, or wire together, fire together, or whichever way it goes, right? But if we do the same thing over and over again, then we just get in the habit of doing it. We don’t even think about it. It just happens. It’s a reaction, not a response. And so in those situations, what I like to do is create some sort of a change in what’s going on, but without shame. So with this mother, for example, what we did is we decided we were going to do an experiment for a week every time. I think we started with a day because a week felt too much. 

And I always say start with what feels possible, but we agreed that every time he called her that name, she was gonna stop whatever they were doing and say, hey, sweet boy, I know that you never mean to say anything to hurt my feelings, but that doesn’t feel good. I’m just gonna step away for a second and I’ll be right back. And then she would just stand up and go away and he would often want her to stay, right? But she said, I’ll be right back. And then she would come back and they would continue on and he would do it again and she would stop and just say, I know you don’t mean to hurt me. I know you would never say anything purposefully to hurt my feelings. So I’m gonna stop, I’m gonna just take a break. I’ll be back in just a moment. So it’s like not shaming. Oh, and I left a piece out, which is that, you know, at 11, everything is so dependent upon the kid and the age and the neurodiversity and all of these things. But at 11, she actually had a conversation with him beforehand that said that exact, and said that exact same thing. Hey, you know, I noticed you’ve developed this habit of calling me, effing blah, blah, blah. you know that’s not okay, like that’s clear to me. I know you don’t want to do anything to hurt my feelings. So I’m going to help you kind of get out of that habit. So I just want to let you know that every time that happens, I’m going to stop and just step out for a minute and then come back. So it’s not a surprise. And then she just does it. And it made a huge difference. Like the swearing, the calling her names after a week was way, way down. It wasn’t gone, but it was moving in the right direction. So, you know, we just, we just kept on with those types of experiments. But I think that’s more about interrupting behavior when it becomes a habit. It’s different than when it’s aggression in response to say a limit that they don’t want.

Debbie:

I really appreciate that. I think that disrupting that pattern is so important. 

Tosha Schore:

And without shame, like that’s really, really key. We forget that part.

Debbie:

Yes, which can be hard if you’re feeling personally aggrieved. And so that’s why, again, going back to what you talked about in the very beginning, addressing our own feelings about this stuff and what is it triggering in us is so important. So I want to ask one more kind of big question that I know many listeners are going to want to hear from you on, and then we’ll start to wrap up. But thinking about, I hear from so many parents and I bet you do too, going back to fear that you have a younger child who’s aggressive, maybe they have ADHD, maybe there’s impulse control, maybe they have more intense explosive behavior, which they’re developing asynchronously, right? So they’re getting much bigger, but their maturity is kind of a little delayed or behind. And so there can be some real fear like, this kid’s getting bigger than me and I don’t know how to navigate when he gets aggressive. So of course that could be a whole episode in and of itself, but do you have any kind of best practices or something you want to share with listeners for them to keep in mind if they’re in this situation?

Tosha Schore:

I want to share a quick story about a client that I had. He’s so amazing. He’s in my community. He’s an older man in his seventies. He has adult children, probably my age. And then he and his wife adopted a child out of the foster system. And when he came to me a couple of years ago, his son was, I think, 12 or 13. No, maybe even like 14, maybe even 14. And he said to me, Tasha, it’s either him or me. We cannot both live in this house. He was scared for his wife’s safety. This was a big kid, bigger than him, bigger than his wife, right? Strong. And he was scared. He would get aggressive. He would hit, kick, like it was hard. And what we did and what I would suggest people do if this is an issue is start with connection. So we tend to want to start with the limit. Like what do we do in the heat of the moment? And I dive deep into that. I am not afraid of that. But we can’t only do that. And it doesn’t work so well when we start there. So what I did with this dad, he, just, one of the things that’s so amazing to me about him is like he raised, he’s already raised these children in a very traditional, know, behaviorist manner. His kids who grew up and you know, they were quote unquote easy kids and they made it through and whatnot. And then he has a child that his traditional discipline strategies don’t work with and he’s having to do a complete 180 and he did it. He did it. 

And so I just kept saying, lean in to connection, show him every way that you can possibly think of that you love him, that you’re on his side, spend one on one time with him, just like. infuse connection into that relationship. They started playing catch after school. You he’d come home in a bad mood. He’d call his dad a name or whatever. I’m like, just ignore it for now. Just don’t go there. Invite him to play basketball. He did. They play basketball out front. you know, they would do all of these things together. They go on fishing trips. mean, they would do all of this fun stuff together. Complete turnaround. You talk about, you know, being sort of having very, what you call it, an uneven profile, right, an uneven profile. And so this child isn’t, I wouldn’t say, has that exceptional academic profile or anything like that. But what happened is that the dad was able to let go of the fact that he’s failing classes in high school or you know, not getting the job that he wishes he got or something like that and focusing in on the relationship. And it’s the same thing when there’s an uneven profile, right? It’s like, okay, we’re gonna let those other things go and we’re gonna focus in on the social emotional piece right now. Everything else we can deal with at another time. I always say, like the other stuff can all be taught later. The executive function skills, we can get to that in a little bit, but right now, like the relationship has to be like that number one thing.

So for parents in that situation, focus on that relationship. Think and make a list for yourself. All the things that you can do, you do with your child, that you laugh together, that you have that yummy feeling when you’re together. It could be anything. It could be reading a book together. It could be playing outside together. It could be anything. And just start with doing more of that because doing that alone is gonna lessen that feeling that he has of like, something’s wrong with me, I’m a bad kid, a lot of these kids struggle with feeling badly about themselves, right? This kind of puts a dent in that a little bit. And then we start dealing with like, what do we do in the heat of the moment? And that might be being on the other side of a door so that we can stay calm. If he gets upset about something and he’s coming after you. Well, you were in the bathroom and you closed the door. Yes, he’s going to bang on the door. I’d rather he bangs on the door than he bangs on you. Going back to what we said earlier. Yeah, I wish he wasn’t banging on the door. Yeah, I wish he wasn’t getting aggressive when you said or did whatever you did. But that’s your reality right now. So we can either hope or wish, pray it was different and not get anywhere or we could just go like, okay, this sucks. I wish it weren’t my life, but it is right now.

So I’m going to just make a plan and dive in. And when you do that, it is quite amazing how quickly things shift. Because on the other side of the door, you’re not afraid for your safety. When we’re afraid for our safety, it’s hard for us to stay calm. But if we can be in the other door, we can say, hey, I’m right here. We can, you know, we’re not gonna attack back. But kids, parents of kids who bite, oftentimes I’ll say, you know, notice the pattern, notice when it is, get that big coat on, wear your layers, right? Because if your kid bites you and it doesn’t hurt because you’ve got three layers of jacket on, you’re not gonna attack back because you’re not in pain. It’s just like, I have some teeth on the arm of my jacket. It’s like, whatever. Anyway, there’s so many, mean, talk about this all, I can talk about like the details of how to address aggression in a million different scenarios for 20 years. Like I love talking about it, there’s lots to say. But I think that’s probably enough for people to take away a little something that they can try, I hope.

Debbie:

Yeah, absolutely. I would love it if you want to take a few minutes to share with listeners what some of the resources that you have or how they can, if they’re raising boys and they want to learn more about your work, how do they connect with you?

Tosha Schore:

Absolutely. So I’m at parentingboyspeacefully.com and probably the best way to get into my world is to sign up for my free 10-day reconnect that’s on the site there. And that will just take you through, you know, 10 days of about 15 minutes total of something that I’m asking you to do. It’s kind of funny. I’ll make you laugh a little bit. You’ll work on building that connection with your sweet boy and you’ll probably notice that behaviors change just with that. And then from there, I have a membership community that we call ourselves Peacemakers, being that our mission is to create a more peaceful world once we’ve avoided time. I also have a course called Out with Aggression that I teach a couple of times a year. So you can keep your eyes out for that. And if you’re a professional, I offer an eight-week professional training. you’re, you know, feel like you’re not getting help. You’re not seeing the transformations in your clients’ families in the ways that you were hoping, and there’s some hard behaviors going on, and you’re not sure how to help. That might be a good option for you. I’m running it in May and June of 2025 when we’re recording this. So if you hear this before then and want to reach out, please do.

Debbie:

Awesome. Thank you. I love the emphasis on connection. That’s such a core part of the work that I do. yeah, I just really appreciate you reinforcing that so many times in this conversation. And listeners, I will have links to the resources that Tosha just shared as well as some of the other stuff that came up over the course of this conversation. And I just want to say thank you. It’s been such a pleasure to talk with you. I know we could have gone on, but I want to be respectful of your time. And listeners, go check out some of Tosha’s resources if you want to learn more. So thank you.

Tosha Schore:

Thank you, Debbie.