[00:00:00] Nicholeen Peck: Then both of them together in unison, they both go, “Calm, calm, calm. You’re always so calm. It makes me so mad that you’re so calm.” Now, they’re trying reverse psychology on me, right? Then I say, “It seems to me that you want to tell me something about calmness. I want to know what that is. We need to choose to be calm first, then we can talk about it.” Then, finally, they just went, “Okay.”

[music]

[00:00:30] Gretchen Roe: Welcome, everybody. I’m so delighted to be back with a live episode of The Demme Learning Show and to have my dear friend, Nicholeen Peck, here. We’re on opposite coasts right now. She’s in Idaho, I’m in North Carolina, but I’m so delighted to have you here to have this conversation with you. I’ve been waiting all summer to have this conversation.

[00:00:50] Nicholeen: Me too.

[00:00:51] Gretchen: Let’s get started. I’m going to let you introduce yourself. You’re going to tell me, from parenting to now, how we got to here.

[00:01:02] Nicholeen: Oh, wow. Okay. Yes, that’s a story. I’ll try to keep it as short as possible because let me tell you what, my life is a story. Anyway, sometimes I wonder how I’m living the life that I’m actually living. By the way, Gretchen, you’re just one of my happy people. I just love being with you. I’m so appreciative of the invitation to be here with you today.

Anyways, okay, so I have four children. They’re all grown, and they’re all adults, and I’m a grandma. I have six grandbabies, and one literally just got born last week. Number six, that was number six. He just came, so cute. I homeschooled all my children, so that was something that I did, but I also did therapeutic treatment care for troubled teens for a lot of years.

When I was a young mom, I worked and worked to try to just get at home more. I was a career woman, and I was like, “I wanted to get away from that.” I was more the breadwinner than my husband. He was, but it was like my money was helpful. I was like, “No, I actually want to go home and be with the babes, because I know that’s going to be so short-term and I just want to be part of that,” and so I worked and worked to do that.

Then, no sooner do I get home, we build a new house, and my husband declares to me that he is going to go back to school. He had been laid off from his work, and he’s going to go back to school. He’s going to switch careers, and I’m like– At that point, I was like, “Well, I guess we’re going to do something else, but I still wanted to stay at home.” I did therapeutic treatment care for troubled teens at that time. I had been a counselor at a funeral home before I came home. We decided to take troubled teens in.

[00:02:58] Gretchen: I can’t imagine making that decision, though, Nicholeen. What in your heart said, “Oh, yes, I could do that”? [laughs]

[00:03:06] Nicholeen: Well, here’s the thing. At the funeral home, I happened to go in one night. I wasn’t really working there much anymore. I still had a key to go pick up some paychecks. Occasionally, I would go into a funeral or something if someone requested me to come in, but I wasn’t usually there. I happened to go in one night, and there was this group of women that were sitting in there talking. They were out of viewing that night, but they were on the wrong side of the building. I happened to listen to them talking.

I had been praying about what to do. I’m a prayerful person. I’d been praying like, “Lord, what do I do, because my husband’s now changing, and what are we going to do? I don’t want to have to go back to work right now.” I heard them talking about this place that they were doing foster care with. All of a sudden, it was like a lightning bolt. There’s your answer. That’s what you are supposed to do. It felt so good. I was like, I go home. I’m like, “Hon, how about this? How about we take in troubled teens?” He’s like, “Huh, okay.” We talked about it.

[00:04:13] Gretchen: Now, how many children did you have? Did you have four children at home?

[00:04:16] Nicholeen: I did not have four at the time, no. In fact, we only had two at the time. They were babies. It was high-maintenance stage. It was like there was a baby and a toddler, right? I’m potty-training one and the other one. I’m still holding in arms. It’s young. It seemed like, “Wow, we’re at a busy stage anyway. We’re going to now take in teenagers that act like toddlers. That should be interesting.”

Anyway, we didn’t want to take in young children. By the way, the therapeutic care paid more. I did need more money at the time. I took it on a job. Even though I did care about the children and I wanted the best for all the children that came, I had to think of it as a job. It was really interesting when I called the place to ask them if I could maybe look at doing this. She’s like, “Well, why do you want to do it?” I said, “Well, truthfully, I want to do it for employment, and I want to have it be a job.”

She said, “That is the best reason to do this, because a lot of people do this because they want to save the kids. These kids are very different, and it is a job.” She’s like, “I’m glad you want it to be a job. We will have a conversation.” I was like, “Okay.” I knew what I was getting into. Anyway, behaviorally and stuff, it was something that I felt I was up for the challenge with. Anyway, we went for it. We got some additional training and certifications and stuff like that to take in this level of children.

We did it for a while. They came to our home really hardened, really, I’m going to say, dark. They had sometimes lots of abuse in their lives. There was a lot of neurodiversity. Almost all of them were neurodiverse. They had witnessed some really traumatic things. One of them had found her father dead. There was just a lot of stuff. Some of them had drug-dealing parents and just all these things. We had to help them with a lot of addictions, habits, behaviors, things.

People started noticing that these children would come to our house in this really bleak state. Then, in just a matter of time, maybe a couple of months, they would be like, “They’re different. They feel different. They look different. They’re acting different. What is happening over there?” They would say, “Well, what are you doing?” I’m like, “Well, I’m just teaching them how to govern themselves. No one’s taught them those skills before.”

That’s what I decided. I wanted them to have something more than just behavior modification, though. I wanted them to have heart change for life. I wanted them to see themselves as a different version of themselves so that they would have a higher bar for their lives. Anyway, so then people started saying, “Well, I don’t think it’s just treatment children that need that. I think that my child needs that. I think I need that.”

Then people started asking me to come to their churches and their support groups and their PTA groups and stuff like that. I ended up speaking. I thought it would be super short-lived. Then the BBC, out of the blue, contacted my family and asked us to be on a program called The World’s Strictest Parents. At first, you have to know, I said no. I’m like, “That is dangerous. I used to be in TV production. I know what happens on the cutting room floor. I’m not going to trust that. They’re going to make us look terrible.”

Then we started feeling really strongly, and I prayed about it that we were supposed to do it. I was like, “Oh, dear, here we go.” We did this thing and two troubled teens, both ages 17, came to stay in our house for eight days after two days of tantrums, literal toddler tantrums, stomping, screaming, sometimes the girl was doing, and them not getting their way and realizing that we had a firm structure that we were going to stick to, but we also weren’t going to battle them because that was not something that we did.

We weren’t aggressive. We weren’t battle-minded, but we also weren’t permissive softies. They had to toe the line. They realized I just have to take responsibility for myself and get calm. Actually, the whole time when they would have these fits, I would always say to them, “It seems to me that you want to tell me something. I want to know what that is, but we need to choose to be calm first. Then we can talk about it.” There was a point where they actually got so mad about me saying “calm,” because they’re used to power struggling.

I wouldn’t power-struggle with them. This was after they’d run away five times. They came back because there’s nowhere to go. Anyway, they came back. They were like, “Okay, we’re ready to be calm.” They knew that was the gauge, like, “Okay, I have to be calm, or she’s not going to talk to me about all these things that are bugging me.” They said, “I’m ready to be calm.” I said, “Okay,” and then you see us go downstairs. In the program, unfortunately, which you can watch on my website, teachingselfgovernment.com, you can see it on the book.

[00:09:27] Gretchen: I have. I have to say I walked away from that, and it lived rent-free in my head for about two weeks because I thought you were calm in the face of a situation that I’m not sure many adults would have been calm in, even with a depth and breadth of training. Obviously, you have quite a gift. [laughs]

[00:09:55] Nicholeen: Well, you should know. I’m going to finish my story, but then I got to tell you about my actual nature, which is not just the calm nature. Anyway, we go downstairs, and they’re screaming. They say they’re going to be calm, then we go down there, and they’re like, “Your children are too sheltered.” I’m like, “Okay, it seems to me you want to tell me something about my children. I want to know what that is, but we need to choose to be calm first, then we can talk about it because that’s my cardinal rule.”

Number one, not going to talk until we’re front brain, which requires calmness because we can’t solve a problem in mid and backbrain. It doesn’t work. Anyway, they keep going thing after thing. Then both of them together in unison, they both go, “Calm, calm, calm. You’re always so calm. It makes me so mad that you’re so calm.” Now, they’re trying reverse-psychology on me, right?

Then I say, “It seems to me that you want to tell me something about calmness, and I want to know what that is. We need to choose to be calm first, then we can talk about it.” Then, finally, they just went, “Okay.” They got calm, and we solved all the problems. They had a problem with our clothing standard in our family, because we were supposed to treat them as if it was our child that came home. Anyone comes to visit, I’m not going to comment on their clothing.

If it’s my child that comes home and their breasts are hanging out, well, I might comment on that or something. Anyway, I said, “Well, how about we go buy you some new clothes?” Then, all of a sudden, they were like, “What? Oh, here I went all out of control over clothes, and we could have just bought new ones like US clothes? That’s exciting. We’re going to go shopping.” Anyway, everything became just fine.

It was interesting that then the next day, the girl, Hannah, I said to her, “Hannah, for two days, you were just really angry. Now, all of a sudden, you’re not. What happened?” I wish this would have been on the camera because this is my favorite part of the whole show. She said, “Well, Nicholeen, at my house, if I yell, I get my way, or at least somebody yells back. Here, you guys were just so calm. It didn’t work. We just chose to be calm, too.” That is so profound. That is high-level understanding right there. She evaluated herself. “If I yell at my house, I get my way, or someone yells back,” which means when you yell back, they get something out of it. That’s huge.

[00:12:31] Gretchen: You just described how I was raised. The person who spoke the loudest won the argument.

[00:12:38] Nicholeen: Well, I think parents think they have to engage in a power struggle. Either they’re going to be permissive, or they’re going to just have to embrace those power struggles. They’re going to have to engage, and it’s going to wear them out. They’re going to be drained, and everything else. I actually figured out how to not be drained, not engage, and still be firm. That’s what people often are coming to me, my books, and classes, and trainings, and stuff for, because they’re like, “No, that is not possible.”

[00:13:10] Gretchen: If I didn’t know you well, I would still be in the realm of, “No, not possible.”

[laughter]

[00:13:17] Nicholeen: Anyway, there’s this beautiful moment in the show, and I’m sure you saw it, where they’re interviewing my son. I didn’t even know they were interviewing him. He’s like, “Well, what they’re just trying to do is push my mom’s buttons, but what they don’t understand is she doesn’t have buttons. I know. I’ve tried.” When I saw that, I was like, “Quinn,” I’m like, “When did you try to push my buttons?” He’s like, “Mom, I have.” He’s like, “There’s nothing that makes it so that you’ll fight me.”

Okay. That’s because I have mentally planned. I’m not doing that. That’s not the way. It’s not required. I’ve told myself, “It’s not required to do that.” I think the reason that people get to that place is because they get to a panic spot inside their head. Usually, they’re in midbrain, maybe even backbrain. They’re panicking, and they think, “It’s all I know to do right now. It’s all that’s required.” They don’t have a plan.

They’re not prepared for how to manage their own thoughts, but they also don’t have something to present to the child so that the child actually has something to hold onto to bring them back to where they need to be. That was something I had to develop for myself when I was taking in these really, really difficult teens because I needed to have them know that home, this place where they were getting trained, was always going to be a safe place, and that it was going to be a place of training, not a place of fighting.

There is a difference. When you take a stand against a child and you power-struggle against them, the training component can get lost in the emotion. You might be trying to tell them something that they really need to know. Maybe even by fear, they’ll comply, but did they get trained? Training requires a change of heart. In self-government, what I teach requires a change of heart.

Anyway, yes, and then people started asking me to speak at the UN; then they asked me to head an international women’s organization that has consultative status at the UN, so I do that. I’ve done a lot of family policy. As you know, Gretchen, that’s been a big thing in my life. Now, I am also in the state legislature where I live, because people asked me if I would do that. You know what I’ve noticed is there’s a lot of people in politics and in the legislature that are out of control, Gretchen. [laughs]

They’re out of control. I’m like, “Where’s our diplomacy people?” Because using your self-government, being able to maintain calm, and get to understanding and good communication, that was the hallmark of a great leader not too long ago. That was the hallmark. That was called diplomacy. It was something that very high-level people would master. Really, it’s called self-government. It’s called mastering you. We see that in the lives of great people. Ben Franklin, for instance, wrote all about it as he made his list of his 13 things that were wrong with him.

What were all of them doing at that time? They were doing something called the pursuit of happiness. This pursuit of happiness, even Dr. John Witherspoon, who was the preacher that went around the colonies, basically got them all into this idea that they could master themselves. With God’s help, of course, but they could do this pursuit of happiness. Then, when it was written in the declaration, everyone was like, “Yes, we can do this.” They wouldn’t have had the bravery if it wouldn’t have been the thing of the time to try to govern all of your vices.

[00:17:16] Gretchen: Sure. It’s fascinating to me because you see, and I think this has been accelerated or maybe exacerbated with the COVID lockdown. It was as though people lost their ability to keep their inner thoughts inner and their outer thoughts outer. I just had a conversation yesterday with a good friend who was at a meeting, where there was a gentleman who was really upset and very loud and very abrasive and confrontational to people in the meeting. She said, “He didn’t get what he wanted because he started from the point of confrontation.” By the same token, those two teens in that episode that I loved so dearly, I was just fascinated. They didn’t get what they wanted because they started from the point of confrontation.

[00:18:24] Nicholeen: Right.

[00:18:26] Gretchen: I’m fascinated, Nicholeen. Somebody had to teach this to you. It was that calm part of your childhood journey to adulthood. It wasn’t in my household because for a lot of reasons.

[00:18:43] Nicholeen: I wish I could say yes. My dad actually was a communications professor, teacher, a debate coach. He knew how to really disagree well with people and whatever. He also was like, “I’m the boss in this family.” He also could come in pretty heavy. My mother had depression and was very emotional. There was a lot of emotions flying. Quite frankly, as a really strong-willed young person, I’m pretty sure they were just praying their guts out that I was going to turn out okay.

I probably gave them all their gray hairs. I was really strong-willed, and I saw all the weaknesses. Sometimes we get little gifts to make us who we are, who we’re supposed to be. I saw all their little weaknesses, and I could just expose them just so easily. I think I was the bane of their existence for quite some time. There was a point where I know they couldn’t trust me, or they felt they couldn’t trust me. Even though I wasn’t one of the bad kids at school, I was actually one of the good ones.

I was living my faith and my morals and just everything. I was really good. I think because I was so disrespectful and pointed at them about– You might call it precocious, like, “Why are you doing that to me?” [chuckles] That kind of thing. Very analytical, and it was just driving them crazy that they put me on lockdown for a while. There were three experiences, and I’ll tell them really fast because I know we want to talk about what parents can do.

One experience was they weren’t letting me go places. One day, by a miracle, I ended up over at a friend’s house. The mother was helping us plan a party that was going to be a boy-girl party. It was going to be so fun, and then I realized there’s no way they’re going to let me go. I told my friend and her mom, “Hey, you guys have a good time at the party,” but there’s no way they’re going to let me go.

My friend’s mom challenged me. She paused, and she’s like, “What do you mean you can’t go? You just helped plan this whole thing. You have to go.” I said, “No, you don’t understand. There’s no way my parents are going to let me go. All we ever do is fight,” because I was pretty sure they hated me. For sure, they didn’t understand me. She’s like, “Nicholeen, have you ever thought of just saying okay?”

I looked at her, and I was like, “That would never work. That’s what they want me to say,” because I’m strong-willed, and I’m thinking, “That’s not how you get your way.” She’s like, “No, you know what? We’ll postpone the party. You go home. For two weeks, every time they tell you to do something or not to do something, say okay and be okay,” and I did that. I put it to the test. My parents were shocked, like, “What’s going on?”

Then, there was this point where my mom told me I needed to clean my room, which had been months and months of just power struggle. I just said, “Okay,” and I started doing it. She was watching me in disbelief, and this voice came to my head. I don’t know. It was just the voice of truth, really. It just came to my head, and it said, “I am so powerful.” I probably misunderstood the voice because I was like, “Yes, I am so powerful.”

I was like, “I just chose to be happy. I just picked it. No one is ever going to make me not happy again.” What I felt like in my youth was one of my hardest circumstances, I just picked happy. I’m like, “I am so powerful. I am choosing happiness right now. I am going to get whatever I want.” Because I chose to say okay and be okay for days, then I could pick to just be totally happy. This compounded with the second story, which is my junior high school vice principal.

One day, I passed him in the hall, and I said, “How are you doing, Mr. Naylor?” He said, “I’m happy. Thank you.” I went to him later that day, and I said, “I passed you earlier in the hall, and you didn’t say, ‘I’m pretty good.’ Most people say, you said, ‘I’m happy. Thank you.’ Why did you say that?” He said, “Because I’m happy.” I said, “Surely, you’re not always happy. That can’t be your go-to salutation.” I said, “Because not everybody’s happy all the time.” He looked at me, and he said, “Why would I choose to be any other way?”

[00:23:13] Gretchen: Wow, what an amazing man.

[00:23:16] Nicholeen: He was like, “Yes. Maybe some days, I could be having a bad moment. I have chosen that as soon as someone asked me how I am, I have a choice right then, and I choose happy.” He told me that. From then on out, when people say, “How are you doing?” I’m like, “I’m happy. Thank you.” I can pick right now. When my mom said, “I need you to clean your room,” and I said, “Okay,” and then somebody says, “I am so powerful,” in my head, and I was like, “Yes, I’m happy. Look how powerful I am,” because my example of happy was this vice principal, right?

It’s like, I found this thing. Every time you get told to do something or not to do something, that’s either follow instruction or accept a no answer. I started developing these skills for myself. Then, the third thing that happened, also because of that same friend, was I had a terrible lying problem. I developed it when I was young. I had lots of lying that was happening. This friend finally pulled me aside one day after everyone ran off on me because I just lied.

She’s like, “Nicholeen, we all know you’re a liar, and we don’t believe in anything you say. You should choose to tell the truth.” Humbled me down to like, you’re 14, you want your friends. She told me that, and then she turned and walked away. She corrected me. If it weren’t for this family across the street, I would not have– and that vice principal. I went home, and I developed a skill set for myself, how to control the impulse to lie, which included controlling the impulse to speak, because I realized that I was lying before I even knew it.

I had to stop myself from speaking first. For multiple years, anytime I felt that craving to speak, which I had identified within myself as a craving, I would stop myself, take a little step back, and I would say, “Is this the truth?” If the answer was yes, then I would take a step forward, and I would tell exactly what the truth was. If what I was going to say was not the truth, if the answer was no, I told myself I had to turn and walk away because if I stayed there, I was going to say it.

I had this little plan. It was a system for how to not lie. I started sometimes getting bad grades on things because I was choosing to tell the truth instead of going out to the locker and hurrying writing my assignment. I would just tell the teacher, “No, I didn’t do it.” I felt it was a great victory because it was me overcoming this impulse to make up a lie. I changed. I became a different person. This age, 14, for me, these three things happened.

It transformed me, and it transformed my relationship with my parents. It put the roles in the right place. It transformed everything. Suddenly, I was more mature. Suddenly, I was given more opportunity. Suddenly, I had more impact for good because, suddenly, I was reining myself in. I wasn’t blaming others for how I felt. Now, I was changing myself, so then I started bringing these troubled youth into my home. Well, guess what? I already have that frame of mind.

Now, that doesn’t mean I’m not a spitfire, Gretchen, because you can tell I might be. I’m still this spitfire, but I can’t shoot darts out at these kids. I had to tell myself, “Okay.” Now, instead of saying, “Is this the truth?” I’m going to say, “I want to say something.” Where’s the craving to say something? When does it happen? When they’re starting to power-struggle. What do power struggles look like?

Okay. If I know the three types of power struggles and what they look like, then I can tell myself to stop right then. I can ask myself a question, and the question is, “Am I calm?” I’ve determined what calmness feels like and looks like for me and what it sounds like and what it doesn’t. Since I’ve pre-taught myself those things, then if the answer is yes, I take a little step forward, and I have my interaction. I follow through with the plan. I know what to say. I know how to handle, no matter what happens.

If the answer is no, then I have to go and do my calm plan. I had created another calm plan for myself that was going to take five minutes or less, and then I could come back and I could handle a problem. Until you are ready to always engage calmly, you have to have the backup plan to get yourself there. I had two plans, and I had a moment of evaluation that I created as a habit for myself. That’s how I trained Nicholeen Peck to be calm.

[00:27:39] Gretchen: Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. Boy, don’t you wish you could export this in so many different avenues, in so many places.

[00:27:55] Nicholeen: Like online. Could we just have everyone on social media understand? It’s beautiful.

[00:28:02] Gretchen: It’s funny. I just had a conversation with one of my adult children in the last week, and it was a tense situation not of his own making. I said, “You don’t have to attend every fight you’re invited to.” [chuckles] He said, “Yes, that’s true.” [laughs] In that moment, you can see him go, “Oh.”

[00:28:32] Nicholeen: Yes, because you get caught. You get stuck. If you go to your midbrain, you start doing that reactive brain stuff. You get wrapped up in the power struggle. You feel like, “I have to finish this.” You don’t recognize that you could finish it by just going front brain and asking yourself a question like, “Is this actually productive?”

[00:28:54] Gretchen: [laughs]

[00:28:55] Nicholeen: Oh, the answer is no. Finished. I’m done. You don’t have to wear yourself out emotionally. You don’t have to go through the firing of all those chemicals. You don’t have to release the adrenaline and the cortisol and all that kind of stuff to get yourself to what I call in my book, The Power of Calm. I call it the reactive calm. It’s like you can get to calm if you go through all of that. You can go midbrain, backbrain, completely lose control, and you can get to calm at the end because your brain chemicals cannot sustain it for that long.

You’ll get there, but you’ll feel like you have to, that you’re entitled to go through all of that venting every time to get to calm, which is basically called bondage, Gretchen. That is bondage. If you have to do that to yourself every time to be understood or get calm, you need a new skill. The other choice is the chosen pathway to calm. You create a plan for yourself, you recognize the power of your choices, and you can get there. Gretchen, you know what a lot of people don’t understand in our world right now? They read the book by Dr. Daniel Goleman called Emotional Intelligence. You know the book?

[00:30:05] Gretchen: Yes, very familiar.

[00:30:07] Nicholeen: People read that book, and they thought that what it meant was that you should dump out all your emotions all the time. That is not what his research showed. That was an assumption that people came to. It was a very entitled conclusion to that book, emotionally entitled. Because he talked about awareness and being aware of your emotions, people assumed that awareness means you have to vomit them on everyone else in order to be emotionally intelligent.

This is not true. There was a part in the book where he said, “This is how an emotion happens. First, you have a feeling.” I might feel cold. Let’s pretend we’re cold this time of year. I might feel cold, okay? Then second, I have a thought. There’s a microsecond where I get this little opportunity to have a thought. The thought might be, “Who turned the AC up? Why are they always torturing me like this?” or just even simply, “This is torture. I can’t handle it.” That’s my micro thought.

Then after that comes the emotion. That is a non-productive thought. If I have a non-productive thought of I’m being tortured, what is my emotion going to be? Frustration, anger, pointing blame at somebody else. I’m going to be like, “Gretchen, how come you keep touching that thing? I know you touched it,” or whatever. I’m going to be somehow frustrated at you. Now, I’m going to say things that I probably shouldn’t be saying because they might not even be true.

Once you feel me saying something that’s not true because it’s rooted in my emotion, you’re going to get combative. Now, you’re going to dump your emotions out at me, and, boom, there you have it. There we find ourselves all the time, but what if I changed my thought? What if I felt cold and I went, “Oh, I’m cold right now,” which is what he said that we should do is identify our feelings.

“Oh, I’m cold right now. What could I do to change the temperature for myself so that I’m more comfortable? Could I check the thermostat? Could I get a blanket? Could I go out into the sunshine? I’ve got options. Which one do I pick?” Now, there’s a whole prefrontal cortex training exercise that I teach children. It’s called the SODAS exercise that would help them think in those terms of what are my options, what are the advantages and disadvantages to these options, what do I pick, and here’s why.

Just training your brain to think differently through your problems makes all the difference. Really, what we’re suffering from in our society right now is not a lack of empathy and understanding, which is what everyone thinks that we’re suffering from. We are suffering from a lack of the ability to solve problems. That is what we are suffering from because we have over-indulged the mid and backbrain. We have given them the driving mechanism for the brain instead of pointing things back toward front brain.

[00:33:18] Gretchen: Just absolutely breathtaking, and you are completely right. In a parental role, it’s tiring. Let’s face it. Being a parent is a full-time. You’re always on. My husband used to say, “How come we never get to tap out?” [laughs] I think you have given in that explanation parental tools that maybe some parents lack in being able to go, “No, wait. First of all, I don’t need to assign blame. I just need to figure out an action for myself.” That’s so powerful in that one explanation that you have created here.

[00:34:10] Nicholeen: Well, it’s not just powerful for the parents, Gretchen. It’s liberating for them and their children. If you teach your child just a simple thing, you teach them, “Okay, in our front brain, when we’re front brain–” you don’t even have to tell them the name that it’s prefrontal cortex. You can just say, “In our front brain, that’s when we can think clear and when we’re calm.” That’s when we’re the happiest when we’re in our front brain. When we’re playing and building, that’s all front brain.

We want to stay in front brain when we talk to people and when we solve our problems. Sometimes we go to midbrain. Now, when we’re in front brain, we have 100% ability to think. When we go to midbrain, we don’t have to call it the amygdala, but that’s what it is. When we go to our little amygdala part of our brain, we only have 40% ability to think. We could explain to the little children, “That’s when we’re starting to get worried. We’re starting to get afraid.”

We’re starting to think, “I can’t do it. I don’t know how to do it. Someone doesn’t understand.” That’s midbrain. We’re getting concerned. Our emotions are starting to get triggered because the thought is, “I can’t do it. I can’t do it.” Then, when we cater to that part a little bit in our midbrain and we go all the way to backbrain, which is brain stem, we go all the way back there. We have about, maybe if we’re lucky, 10% ability to think.

You can explain to your child, “This is the time when you’re stressed, and you do stuff, and you say stuff. Mom says to you after, ‘Why did you say that?’ or we don’t hit.” “I didn’t hit.” “You did. You don’t even remember it because you got all the way back here.” A lot of times, the parents think they’re lying, but a portion of the time they literally don’t remember that they did those things that were so horrible because they got all the way back to fight, flight, freeze, and they’re completely dysregulated, right?

Even if you just explain those little things to them, you can say to them, “Hey, I think we’re going to midbrain right now. Let’s get to front brain.” If you have a plan for how to get them to front brain and that they know the plan for how to get to front brain, it changes everything. Now, I’m not at home, or I would hold up cute books for you. I’ve written 15 books, Gretchen. I’ve got a whole slew of stuff.

[00:36:22] Gretchen: You have, absolutely. They’re amazing.

[00:36:26] Nicholeen: There’s this one book that is to teach children, and it’s called The Calm Crew. The Calm Crew, it’s a three-book set. They come all together as one. The first one teaches them how their brain works. The second one teaches them how to make a calm plan. The third one teaches them that they get to choose it, that they can choose calmness and how to do it in the minute when it’s hard. If you teach them the things in those books, plus then you have the tools that you need as a parent.

I have The Power of Calm book, which is a great book for you understanding as a parent how your brain works and the process that you need to go through to make your own calm plan, to get yourself ready. If you’ve got that and then you’ve got the other teaching self-government skills that are in the other children’s books and in the other parent books, like how to follow instructions, how to accept no answers, which is what my neighbor taught me, how to disagree appropriately, how to accept consequences and take personal responsibility, those types of things.

If you’ve got those things as part of a package and you can help your children get those bits and pieces, they suddenly can analyze what’s going on inside themselves. They can tell you. I’ve got a four-year-old granddaughter. It’s her that just had the new baby brother. It’s a busy household, Gretchen. She’s four and a half, so we can’t forget the half. She’s four and a half.

[00:37:51] Gretchen: Don’t forget the half. [chuckles]

[00:37:52] Nicholeen: No. Then there’s two two-year-old twins, busy as can be, and brand-new baby boy. We got busy mama, busy life. She says to me, here we are taking care of all the twins. One of them is having a total meltdown. She looks at me. She calls me Nini. She goes, “Nini, Aubra’s in backbrain.” I’m like, “You’re right. She is in backbrain.” The thing is that my daughter started teaching these little children. These little toddlers are also, how to take deep breaths, starting at about four months old.

They couldn’t even form a sentence. They’re a year. I could say, “It’s okay, Clara. Nini’s going to take care of it.” She’d go, “Okay.” She would just start regulating because she believed us, because she knew we would take care of it, and because she had been taught she could take deep breaths, which is the number one thing that signals to your brain that you’re okay, that you’re safe, that you don’t need to be afraid.

She was taught how to do that when she was four months old because her daughter was raised by me. Everything was like, “Hey, let’s get calm. How do we get calm?” She started training her how to do that. Now, she disagrees appropriately all the time. She accepts consequences. I’ll say, “Oh, Clara, we need to do a correction.” I do a little correction. I tell her she’s earned an extra chore. Keep in mind, she’s four and a half. Most four-and-a-half-year-olds have a little bit of attitude.

She’s like, “Okay,” and she goes and does it. They’re just like that. They’ll just do it. Sure, they have their little toddler moments, and then we need to get back to calm and go through our plan for how we’re going to go through calm. It’s all planned out, so nothing’s new. It doesn’t increase the anxiety. One of the biggest mistakes that parents make is they start doing new things in the moment when the child cannot regulate. When you bring in something new–

[00:39:52] Gretchen: They’ve already gone midbrain, backbrain. Now, you’re going to do something different. I can’t even–

[00:39:58] Nicholeen: They’re like, “I can’t–” The overstimulation now becomes just overload. Already, they are more stimulated than others, but now it’s going to just hit its max. The smart parent, what they do is they make a plan ahead of time. Now, some parents might say, “Oh, great, click, I’m done. I didn’t make a plan ahead of time.” No, you can always make a plan. Don’t worry, you can make a plan. You just decide, “Okay, what do we want the family to feel like here? What skills do we need? We learn it.” In all my trainings, I talk about creating a family vision, so you get the family on board with who you want to be. You understand calmness. You understand the brain.

You understand roles, which I have a whole other book for. Then you learn the skills for how you’re going to actually talk in those situations. Now, I’m doing this completely no notes, right, Gretchen? You too. We’re living the moment, girls. We can shoot off the cuff. Let’s just go. I could talk for days, as you could tell, literally days, and never stop just teaching because I can go off the cuff. When it comes to training my children, I chose to rein myself in and not get creative in the minute. I realized the way their brain function works, it’s got to be predictable.

Every little toddler will teach you it’s got to be predictable, but for some reason, we’re predictable sometimes with toddlers. We’ll do some predictable thing like one, two, two and a half. That’s actually a parent trying to be predictable to a toddler. It’s a bad method. Drop it. It’s a power struggle. Anyway, people will do that because they know the toddler’s got to have it the same, or they can’t respond. As soon as the child hits five, they’re getting all creative about all the consequences. You’re like, “What are you doing?” Now you’re just making the child try to read your brain, and they can’t do that.

Parents are like– they’ll say things like, “Oh, well, we tried that consequence before, so now we’re going to try this one.” No. What the child just needs is repetition and training. It doesn’t matter if you’ve used an extra chore every time. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t work if they picked it again. What it means is that their brain still is not on autopilot with that particular behavior. They need time because that’s part of development. I wish parents understood how we learn a little bit better. I think you and I work with a lot of homeschoolers, and they’re like, “How do you know if it’s going to work?”

There’s a point where we just have to tell them, “Listen, people learn. They just do. It’s just a natural thing because you do it enough times, you learn.” As a mom, you have enough diaper blowouts; you learn how to put that thing on. It’s going to weigh less of those. It’s just the way it goes. You burn the dinner enough times, you recognize, “Oh, I get distracted when making dinner. I cannot answer my phone while making dinner because then I burn it.” You learn. The children, they learn the same way. The part about the parent is we don’t want to be patient during their learning process when their prefrontal cortexes are so small. Their prefrontal cortexes have to be small.

I know this is an incredible frustration for parents, but if we understand development– like I’ve been watching my other little granddaughter learn how to walk, like pushing the thing. They fall down all the time, but their prefrontal cortexes are so small that they don’t recognize because I started walking, I turfed it. If their prefrontal cortexes were smart enough to put all that cause and effect together, they would not try it again. They’d be like, “I’m sitting down for life. You can carry me. I’m good.” We had people like Einstein, who probably had a very developed prefrontal cortex. He let his mom just do everything for him. He didn’t even talk till he was three.

He was probably on the spectrum, but anyway, he didn’t even talk till he was three. Finally, one day his mom gives him hot chocolate. He’s like, “This is too hot.” First words out of his mouth are a full sentence. What are you talking about? She’s like, “You can talk? How come you never said anything before?” He’s like, “You never did anything wrong before.” He just was letting her do everything. “This is great, Mom. Come on.’ Anyway, their prefrontal cortexes are small for a reason. It makes it so that you can also mess up quite a few times, and they’ll keep forgiving you. Bless that, because we have to learn, too, along the way.

That first little child, it’s like the first pancake on the griddle. It gets a little burned, gets a little bit putting on the inside. You’re like, “Oh.” You get to the second child, and you’re like, “Okay, we’re not going to do that again. Got it.” They have to be patient with our learning, too. We’re not perfect. We don’t have to be. If we learn the skills, and they learn the skills, too, a whole bunch of that pain goes away. Then you can spend your time, instead of talking about making the bed and brushing the teeth, you can spend your time talking about why other people are having tantrums with their parents when they don’t need to.

You can talk about something deep, like why fishes go like that when they don’t breathe. Why do they do it? Figure it out.

[00:45:45] Gretchen: Nicholeen, I was fascinated by the mom who asked the question, where is it? It says, “My husband really wants us to engage in gentle parenting, but I have out-of-control kids. Help. Because this is so omnipresent in society right now, I think maybe we’re misinterpreting gentle and permissive. Maybe it’s just my interpretation. Can you help me codify this, particularly for our audience, because I think they’ll appreciate your perspective?

[00:46:22] Nicholeen: 100%. There was a person named Sarah Ockwell-Smith. She was the one who, back in 2007, popularized the term gentle parenting. I think it was 2015, she published a book called Gentle Parenting. Now, I have to admit I did not read it. I know that she is the one credited with this movement. The whole idea of the movement is not really, I think, what actually happened with the movement. I think she tried to converge two worlds. She tried to converge this really feeling emotionally more entitled movement.

[00:47:05] Gretchen: Empathetic.

[00:47:06] Nicholeen: Yes, understanding, which is actually not a bad thing. That’s a good thing, to be understanding. She wanted to bring that in. Then she did want to say that there should be boundaries and stuff like that. I think that she did want to have some structure there, but it totally missed its mark. In fact, she has said publicly that she regrets using the term gentle parenting and the way that things have gone. Basically, what got popularized online was not what she planned for there to be.

Basically, what happened was parents start saying, “Okay, gentle parenting means that you don’t use consequences because consequences are bad and you don’t tell your child no because that gives them trauma. If that gives them trauma, we’re all traumatized.”

[00:47:59] Gretchen: The world’s going to be an ugly place.

[00:48:01] Nicholeen: Then everyone’s going to have a whole lot of big T trauma later because nobody’s going to have a boundary. You’re supposed to negotiate everything. This is how it got like a permissive parent does. “Oh, I’m going to just negotiate, negotiate, negotiate.” The child’s going to talk back to you, and you’re going to talk back to them. “You hate me.” “No, I don’t because–” “Yes, you do because–” “No, I don’t because–” You’re going to keep going back and forth. They have this fear too. This really has to do a lot with a lot of our millennial parents being coddled when they were children. There was a coddling that happened.

Now, I am not for hitting, spanking, any of those things. It’s not necessary. There’s a lot better things out there. Just go to teachingselfgovernment.com, and you’ll know. Anyway, but still switching like we did to this coddling approach, this emotional, like, “What are you feeling?” Everyone turning into a therapist and having their child vomit stuff that they don’t even know what they’re trying to get out of them. It really did turn out to be problematic. Anyway, this feelings approach made it so the parents were really, really hypersensitive to upsetting their own children.

If the child cries or if the child whines or if the child’s angry, then the parent’s like, “I’m a failure.” That’s how they internalize it. If they’re going to be gentle, that means they now, because that’s how they’re internalizing feelings because of the way that we’ve groomed culture online; it became this, “If your child doesn’t like what you’re doing, you must be doing it wrong.” I actually have parents come to me after they learn teaching self-government, and they’ll say, “I taught them the skill for accepting a no answer,” which, by the way, is vital. If you don’t learn how to accept a no answer, you can’t observe any boundaries. You cannot accept any disappointments.

You can never lose a game or match and be okay. You can never lose your sock and be okay. You can never get dumped by a boyfriend or girlfriend and be okay. You are completely fragile if you cannot accept a no answer. Avoid saying no to your child, as one of the hallmarks of gentle parenting is a big problem, because it’s a super permissive thing to do.

[00:50:17] Gretchen: It also is not portraying the realities of adulthood for your children, which is you’re handicapping them.

[00:50:27] Nicholeen: Exactly. That’s what I was going to say. They’re actually stunting their maturity and their development. Anyway, parents will come to me; they’ll say, “I tried to teach my child to accept a no answer, but they don’t like it.” I’m like, “They don’t have to.” I tell them, “They don’t have to like it. Your role is teacher. You’re the parent; that’s one of your main roles is to be a teacher. Their role is to be a learner, and sometimes they need to learn a boundary.” Then they’ll be like, “Oh, I didn’t think of that.” They’re really so caught up in the emotions that they’re looking for their child to approve of their parenting.

This actually shows you that they’ve had a detachment in their childhood with their parents, probably because their parents were on devices, because they’ll go to their mothers for wisdom and their fathers for acceptance. If their fathers were on devices and computers and TVs through their whole growing up, they may not have felt that acceptance from them or even gotten all the training from their mothers because they were coddled, so they didn’t feel accepted or approved of. Now they’re looking for it from their children. It’s a sign of immaturity. This is what’s going on anyway.

They prioritize happiness over responsibility. They think that you can’t be responsible and be happy. It might accidentally happen to some people, but when you have to accept a consequence or whatever, that’s just automatically bad, and we don’t want anything bad to happen in the child’s life. It sounds like a bed of roses, the gentle parenting approach that’s been popularized, but it’s actually created a lot of problems. It’s created a lot of impulsivity in children, like, “I should just get to do whatever I want. I want to touch the light socket. I want to whatever.” Are you going to tell them no about the light socket? Where’s the line?

Do you get to ever say no, or “Wait, they’re crying about it. Does that mean the way I handled telling no was wrong? Is it my fault?” Do you see what I’m saying? It’s so psychological. Impulsivity is up, which is the power struggles, the really risky behavior. Children are now taking greater risks during adolescence because of gentle parenting. They’re having lower academic achievement. They’re not applying themselves. They’re just getting into laziness. There’s a lot more behavior problems. There’s poor self-control. All of these things are occurring, plus tax, as far as their bonding and attachment to the family, as having problems. All of these things because of the gentle parenting movement.

That is a deep question. I could go into great detail on it. In fact, I’ve recently, just in this last week or two, on my YouTube channel, released some videos about gentle parenting. You may want to check out my YouTube channel about that.

[00:53:15] Gretchen: Great. We’ll definitely include that in the show notes.

[00:53:21] Nicholeen: Anyway, I guess to answer that really complicated question, I understand the draw and why it sounds like it’s going to feel okay. The parent doesn’t want to be the bad guy, but the outcome is bad, and people are turning on the movement. The movement is on the way decline. Everybody was like, “That was a fake. We’ve ruined our children.” Trying something like maybe a teaching self-government approach where you teach them actual skills, like “Here’s how to follow instructions. There’s five steps to it. You look at the person. Keep a calm face, voice, and body. Say, okay, you’re asked to disagree appropriately. Do the task immediately. Then check back.”

You correct them in the same way by having your own script, your own skill to use for all the skills that they need. That makes the predictability and an ability to just– oh, and if they understand calmness and how to get themselves there, what’s going on in their head, that changes everything. There actually is a solution. I don’t want to do a commercial, but the solution is the teaching self-government. If you want to be gentle in your parenting and not get into a power struggle–

[00:54:23] Gretchen: No, and this is part of the reason why I wanted to have you here because I think this is such– maybe we need to have another conversation that is entirely about the fallacies of gentle parenting because I’m seeing parents who are wildly frustrated. As a high school swim coach for three years, I saw the fruit on this tree, and it’s pretty rotten because you have to have an enormous amount of self-discipline to be a successful swimmer. It’s one of the few sports where you participate as a team, but you also participate as an individual. You have to balance both those things.

The kids who struggled with that balance were the kids who never heard the word no. It was really difficult for them.

[00:55:16] Nicholeen: I was going to say, the thing is, it’s hard on them. It hurts them. The parents, the whole time, are trying to make it so that their child has no hurt. In the end, you don’t teach your child how to deal with hurt. Now they’re going to have a lifetime of hurt, and they’re going to be the victim forever. They’re just going to spend their time looking for why their problems are somebody else’s fault and why they shouldn’t have to take responsibility. That is disabling a person. It’s making it so that they’ll always be emotionally immature. It’s rough.

[00:55:44] Gretchen: That’s enormous. I love the fact that through the auspices of teaching self-government, which now, when did you first start this?

[00:55:56] Nicholeen: Wow. As an actual business, it started in 2008, but people started asking me to teach– before I had anything to sell to anyone, people would just ask me to teach. I’ve been teaching it since 1999. It’s been a long time. I was a very young mom back then. I felt like, “I can’t believe people are going to listen to me. These people with gray hair are listening to me. What’s the deal?”

[00:56:23] Gretchen: Yes, but, Nicholeen, if you have good fruit, it doesn’t matter. The fruit has been so good.

[00:56:31] Nicholeen: That’s it. It’s liberating for people. Oh, Gretchen, I just got this just washed over with just tingles all over me because when you said that, it really touched me. People come to me all the time, everywhere I am. They come to me at conferences. You know, we stand there together in our little booths and things. They come to me, and they just say, “Can I just hug you?” I say, “Yes.” They just say, “I just had to come here and hug you and tell you thank you. I never knew that my family could be this happy. I never knew that I could stop power-struggling with my children like that. I never knew. You’ve given me the tools that I need.”

Then they’ll say, “I’m not perfect yet.” I’ll say, “Nobody’s perfect yet.”

[00:57:21] Gretchen: Nobody. [chuckles]

[00:57:22] Nicholeen: Self-government is a journey, but you have to know what to say. The thing is, Gretchen, we’re all robots. We’re programmed by our parents, by society, by the media. We’re programmed. There are certain things we’ve decided to take and put it in our programming. We say it every time. Every time they do that one thing, we say that one thing. Sometimes we have to reprogram ourselves. Sometimes we have to say, “Was that programming actually good? I think I’ll get rid of that piece. Maybe it’s not serving them well.” It’s just a deliberate approach.

Instead of just winging it through and saying, “Yes, this parenting stuff is hard,” say, “This parenting stuff is hard, so I’m going to plan ahead of time how to handle it, and I’m going to hold myself accountable. Here’s the golden thing.” Once you have your plan, then when you go back into the old habit, which can happen for a while because we’re not perfect, then you stop yourself and say, “Wait, that wasn’t the plan. I’m going to redo that, guys. This is just a behavior. Let’s start that again.” “Okay, now mom’s going to use her skill, and I’m going to redo it.” When you give yourself the freedom to stop yourself and to redo it, you realize you didn’t have to get so emotionally invested in that. That’s just a behavior.

[00:58:40] Gretchen: I love the fact that you are empowering parents here to make a different choice. It’s restoring relationship. It’s deepening relationship. You have given parents the tools to restore the order that should have been there in the first place, but because we live in the society we live in, it’s easy for that order to get confused.

[00:59:12] Nicholeen: I think instead of empowering parents, we’re entitling parents.

[00:59:19] Gretchen: Very true. That is very true.

[00:59:22] Nicholeen: It’s having a trickle-down effect to the children, and then they’re like, “Oh, my child, I got a bad one,” or you got a child, and they all need training.

[00:59:37] Gretchen: Absolutely. I had to laugh at my youngest son, had a situation just a couple three weeks ago, and he is excited to be able to volunteer to do something new with regard to work. At the age of 21, he’s about to be put in his own van as a certified electrician. He’s so excited. There’s a couple of guys that work alongside of him that are also the same age. I had to ask him, “How about so-and-so and so-and-so? Are they going to do this?” He goes, “No, they don’t want the responsibility.”

[01:00:15] Gretchen: With confidence comes responsibility. They go together. I said, “How do you feel about that?” He said, “I’m not waiting for them.” He said, “My future’s really bright.” He’s one of those kids who would answer, “I’m happy all the time.” That would be his answer.

[01:00:35] Nicholeen: You need to put that on a meme, Gretchen. That’s your next meme. With confidence comes, what did you say? Responsibility. With confidence comes responsibility. There’s your meme because everyone wants their children to take responsibility, but we’re not actually giving them what they need to develop their confidence. If they can’t control themselves, they’re not confident. If everything has to happen to them, they’re not confident. If they don’t know any skills, they’re not confident. You have to give them the responsibility to develop the confidence for them to take responsibility.

[01:01:09] Gretchen: Yes, really true. I can’t believe it’s already two o’clock. This has gone way too quickly. I could sit here, of course, and listen to you all day.

[01:01:19] Nicholeen: I could talk to you all day too. It’s so fun.

[01:01:21] Gretchen: In the closing minutes, Nicholeen, what would you say that you want parents to remember? Where do you want them to go from here? Based on our conversation, which to me has been enormously empowering and edifying because you’ve given parents the tools to be able to take back, I don’t want to say control; that’s not really the word, but to take back the adulthood of being responsible for their children.

[01:01:54] Nicholeen: The role because we’ve given it up in our society. What would I say? I would say a couple of things. I would say lots, but let’s stick to a couple.

[01:02:10] Gretchen: [laughs] You can say all that you want.

[01:02:11] Nicholeen: All day long. Number one, don’t take things personally. Don’t take behaviors personally. That isn’t a person rejecting you. That is a behavior. That’s it. It’s a behavior that requires teaching. They’re a child. Don’t take it personally. Number two, I would say that calmness is a choice. It’s not something that happens to you, but you don’t know what you don’t know. Find out what you don’t know. If you’ve got a dialogue going on the inside, challenge it. Ask yourself questions so that you can make a different choice right in the minute. Then, after you’ve made the choice to not react, to not engage in the power struggle, get the help you need.

My website is teachingselfgovernment.com. There’s a lot of help there. Right now, there is something that we have made special for your group. It’s called a Calm Family Bundle. The Calm Family Bundle has The Power of Calm book. It has the Calm Crew book. It’s got some cue cards with some scripts that you can use that go with some of my other training materials. It’s got a class about calmness because calmness is a really good place to start. That Calm Family Bundle right now has a discount if you go to teachselfgov.com/gretchen. Gretchen. Just spell Gretchen. Teachselfgov.com/gretchen. If you go there, you’ll be able to get that Calm Parenting Toolkit for way cheaper.

You can see all kinds of stuff at teachingselfgovernment.com. I have free stuff out there galore, but where I would start is I would start with calmness. Then after that, I would learn the skills that you need. You’ve got to have a plan. As long as you don’t have a plan, then you still don’t know what you don’t know, and you’re going to feel like you have to go to midbrain to solve your problem. Then you end up feeling guilt after because once all your brain chemicals calm down, and you’ve been through that chemical calm, that reactive calm, then you go, “Why did I do it again?”

We don’t have to have those moments all the time. We can stop ourselves and say, “I’m making a different plan.” That Calm Family Bundle will help.

[01:04:59] Gretchen: Excellent. I think our audience can see why I have been so excited for this conversation. I have learned things today. I know that all of you have learned things as well. Nicholeen just brings such a depth and breadth of wisdom to the table. I’m just so grateful to know her and to have the privilege of getting to spend time with her. We have to come back around to that singular conversation again because you might have to maybe think about the possibilities of helping parents extricate themselves from what has become a bad deal. That might be a worthwhile conversation.

[01:05:42] Nicholeen: Gretchen, I could talk to you forever. Let’s just hang out. Let’s just have a regular time that we get to see each other. We do at conferences, but it’s never enough.

[01:05:53] Gretchen: I know.

[01:05:54] Nicholeen: We need to. I appreciate it.

[01:05:56] Gretchen: Thank you so much for coming today. Thank you for this time. I’m so grateful that you took time away from a brand-new grandbaby that I prayed in so that we had this time today. [laughs] I wanted to say thank you.

[01:06:08] Nicholeen: Your prayers were answered, and he’s beautiful, and-

[01:06:12] Gretchen: Oh, my goodness.

[01:06:12] Nicholeen: -he’s perfect, and we’re just so happy.

[01:06:14] Gretchen: How much did he weigh? You’ve got to have the deets before you leave.

[01:06:17] Nicholeen: All the details. He was 19 inches, and he weighed 7 pounds, 8 ounces. Just a good, healthy-

[01:06:24] Gretchen: That’s a perfect-sized baby.

[01:06:25] Nicholeen: -little guy, and he’s just calm and wonderful. His little siblings are just enamored with him.

[01:06:32] Gretchen: That’s amazing. Are the twins both girls?

[01:06:36] Nicholeen: No, it’s a girl and a boy. They were fraternal. That means they now have two girls, two boys.

[01:06:43] Gretchen: Two boys. That’s really awesome. Congratulations again to you and to the parents.

[01:06:50] Nicholeen: Thank you.

[01:06:50] Gretchen: I wish you all the joy of the journey. Nicholeen, thank you so much for the time that you spent.

[01:06:54] Nicholeen: My pleasure. Happy to do it again with you, Gretchen.

[01:06:57] Gretchen: Sounds good. Take care.

[01:06:58] Nicholeen: We’ll see you.

[01:06:59] Gretchen: Bye-bye.

[01:06:59] Nicholeen: Bye-bye.