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Episode 56: How to deal with flaky or lazy children and flaky friends
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this is the beat your jeans podcast and my name is Nate chief I created this podcast to bridge together the science of evolutionary psychology and the clinical experience of dr. Doug Lyall also what we can discover what life is all about in each episode dr. Lisle analyzes and explains the psychology behind real life situations from our listeners on topics like romance friendship work family health and many more we broadcast live every Wednesday at 8:30 p.m. Pacific Standard Time which means you can call us during the show and ask dr. Lisle a question the us number is six five seven three eight three zero seven five one or send in your question through the website WWV eugene's org all right so welcome welcome dr. Lyle how you doing this evening good good good to be back excellent well so a couple episodes ago we started the show talking about how to deal with flaky friends how to deal to flakey people in general and we were reading The Cosmopolitan magazine what the peer-reviewed journal cosmopolitan about how to ale with or why your friend is flaky and the author was a self-admitted flake and she was listing 10 reasons at least they were good reasons to her about why she flakes a couple of them were that she's trying to please everybody and so she's ending up overextending herself she's not really flaky when it matters things like that and we took a call and we got some more information about the caller on a slightly different topic so here we are today and we're going to finish the part about how to deal with flakes and so what what was interesting to me about that that show was that you said when when the the comment that the author made which is I'm not flaky when it really matters is you said well when does it what that mean right it always matters right might not matter to that to the flake but it matters all the time yeah and that nobody's ever not looking so so yeah looking forward to hear a little bit more from you about about flaky people and flakes and how to deal with flakes as I say flakes enough is it yeah that's good that's good I like it alright let's talk about a couple different things and that is that I have a - two different types of problems that will come to me in therapy one will be when parents are frustrated with their young children so their young children when young children might be 9 years old 10 years old or 12 years old etc sort of that that sort of age and the kids are flaky their rooms a mess they're not turning their homework on time the sort thank the you talked to my dad is that is that how you knew yeah you got it so I'm going trouble this is this is a way that I encourage parents to to deal with this what parents usually do is they usually turn up the anger so they're trying to sort of intimidate the kids into saying look you know it was really serious to us and by god it cetera and there's the and that that generally doesn't work very well it might it might work but it it's a sometimes if you get if you get obviously a nice kid and you push them a little bit that that's not a problem the problem is is when you get kids that are naturally stubborn so you'll get some kids that are naturally stubborn that are going to dig in their heels and they're going to be difficult to deal with so I had a friend of mine that said he was real stubborn and there's no way he was going to clean his room and and his parents would yell at him and he would yell back you actually you actually know this guy this is very mutual friend of ours so anyway the point is is that that their kids like this and the parents can be very frustrated and they're a mom you know dad's the dad's yelled but don't care that much the mom is really frustrated because the kid doesn't you know won't do these basic things so instead of yelling what we want to do is we want to box them in and the way we box them in is through a technique that Ivan that you know I don't know I'm sure other people have invented it but I invented it independently I call it gloat therapy so what we do is we make for ourselves jot down a little list of the things that you do for them that you don't want to do okay so it might be drive their friends to the movies and then have to come pick them up or it might be you know packing their lunch or might be you know could be something as silly as their three dollar rental allowance doing their laundry anything like that okay so think and so this is that it's key that we have some that we do for them that we would just as soon not do and you know trust me a ten-year-old is perfectly capable of doing their own laundry so if you're doing your kids laundry and your kids slob there is no reason for you to have to be doing this so what we do as we sit the kid down and we say okay you know what here's the deal that what what we're going to do is we're gonna have the following arrangement and the arrangement is that on Saturday morning at 10:00 a.m. I am going to inspect your room and your room needs to be in perfect order it has to be the bed has to be perfectly made with no wrinkles in it it has to be that all your clothes are in the drawers and everything is going to have to be in perfect order and there can't be any junk under the bed and your desk has to be cleared off and orderly in any little papers and the proper stacks in other words this has to be outstanding and that's fine if it isn't so let me give you another example if you live in a reasonable neighborhood and and the the school is you know a mile and a half away so it would be you know all of 20 minutes walk for the kid or half an hour walk for the kid to have to go to school and it's perfectly safe and other kids walk along that pathway if all that is true but you drive your kid to school then this is would be another potential Avenue so that would be something to hold over their head so you hold over their head and you say you know here's the deal I don't I pretty much don't like doing your laundry I want you know so I just not do your laundry it'd be a big relief for me not to have to do your laundry so what's going to happen is on Saturday morning I'm going to give you an inspection exactly ten o'clock and if your room fails inspection then you are going to do your own laundry you know for the next two weeks okay that's it that's the deal see you later and we don't say another word about it not one word even if the kid mentions it jokingly tries to test us we don't say anything just smile nope no problem and it's Saturday morning at 10 o'clock you walk up to that room and you open the door now that kid will know it's coming and it's in all probability that kid's room that kid will be like starting to work on on the room they won't actually have done very much they'll actually have started like oh yeah I'm going to get to it and we walk in and we see that it's not done and what we do is we raise our hand above our heads and go yes yeah okay this room fails inspection that's great I don't have to do your laundry fabulous I'm going to go sit and relax and have myself a cup of really cool tea and relax because I don't have to do your laundry for the next two weeks okay and it's interesting because the kids will be like nah no you know they'll start negotiating like no now this deal fantastic see you later hey fuck off now the problem is - you won and it really pisses them off they're all upset man they want it you know who depends upon the kid they want to renegotiate it and I've got a really cool customer that says when I don't care no problem you go down your list of other things that you do for them then you up the ante so now little mister I don't care is going to have to walk himself to school and quite frankly if he's two miles from school if it's a boy in particular and it's not like the neighborhood's fine there's no reason in the world if you're not living in Kansas in the winter that they can't ride their bicycle and I rode my bicycle a long ways to school and people are saying oh it's much more dangerous today it is less dangerous today than it was when I went to school okay so the world is considerably less dangerous than it was in 1970 you know you would go is to go uphill by miles in the snow with Indian moccasins that we traded from the Trading Post so anyway point is is that we gloat and then you know then we out for a couple three days we say well next Saturday you'll have another chance and you're out of business for the next two weeks I'm at the next Saturday with the deal is going to be this other thing okay that I want done so all your homeworks going to have to be on time or I'm not going to do what take you you and your friends and movies oh no you said you're going to no no this is the deal reasonable this is reasonable I'm not asking me to get A's I'm not asking to do it perfect I'm asking you to have it turned in every day of the week if it's not no problem I want to all come in here and inspect your homework before you go to bed each night and if it's not all laid out there and done no problem okay so this is how we gloat we set these things up and then when they don't do them we don't yell we laugh and smile and act like we won now what'll happen is the next Saturday an inspection whatever you know if we set that up to the next Saturday for example for the following two weeks of laundry or however we're going to do it then we when we go in there and at that point it's very likely that it will be in perfect condition now it might be at 80% per condition and they're still working on it at which point we do the same thing hands over our heads and like wow fantastic you fail again okay nobody no no no and then they're going to go complain to Dada Dada I was really you know etc like no no it wasn't done and you got to have both partners in on this it's all cool like no the rules were the rules that's it you lose okay and if the kid wins then what you say is oh man so you're like god you're upset so this is how we've reversed the entire thing on them to where it is that they do exactly what we want them to do perfectly and we act like we're upset about it and they're happy about it this is how we get kids to do okay now the now when when they get older next the next set of techniques I'm going to talk about is how we deal with people you've got you know a 20 year old that sort of dropping out of college and being a flake and doesn't want to get a job and dad's getting mad at them and snarling and when you going to make something yourself or what you're going to do this kind of a problem so when we have young adults that aren't getting off their rear end and accomplishing anything then what we're going to do is we're going to turn up the heat on them in a different way so this or these are no people's circumstances are slightly different but these are some general principles what we do is that we are going to we're going to essentially try to set up the following basically libertarian kind of a situation which is that we have a principle of maximum freedom and maximum self responsibility until proven otherwise so they get tremendous latitude we're not going to yell at them and check at them until it turns out that they have screwed up but we're going to have certain conditions where we're going to have essentially no resources going from us to them there's a few exceptions the exceptions are if they have a car we don't give them a nickel for gasoline but we will absolutely make sure the car is insured okay because that that would be a potential disaster we also are not going to let their teeth rot out of their head so we're going to make sure that dentistry is done once indicated and the third thing is we're going to make sure obviously they have health insurance so those are the three exceptions to the general rule that they don't get any resources so let's talk about other supposedly necessary resources that these young people need to have and other iPhone Renne guys going to say rent food and cell phones and they don't need rent they don't need food and they don't need cellphones they don't need anything they can be homeless and that's perfectly fine if you if you're going to make it okay for them to come home live with you then there should be very very strict draconian expectations and the expectations are going to be things like the bathroom is going to be spic and span everyday your room is going to be spic and span every day you're going to owe us $500 a month to rent in other words are going to charge them market rent although they may not have to pay a deposit and the first month's rent in advance they're going to owe it to you okay and we're going to set a short-term move out date it's going to be 60 or 90 days it's going to be and there's going to be a curfew and there's going to be a peep out of that room after 10 o'clock so the bottom line is they're going to have their own shelf in the refrigerator and they're not going to eat your food so essentially we are going to make this as if they are a roommate in a very strict very reasonable responsibly run boarding house that can be all friendly because it's your mom and your dad and we can talk over problems and help them figure out how they're going to get a job but the bottom line is is that they still owe and this is the rules and they have to absolutely toe the line perfectly and they don't need a cellphone they don't need anything you said well how are they going to get a job no problem they can call from the family phone and they can they can use the family phone if you've got a landline they can use email etc they can they can hustle together a go phone for themselves and that's what they can use on their job applications this is not your problem okay they can figure this out now the way we spring this on them is as follows we say you know we've been noticing that you're growing up and we figured that we really really hadn't sort of sort of really realized that so we we see why it is that you know we've nagged you about doing this and doing that and kind of haven't done things but the truth is is that you're big enough now it's hard for parents to realize that sometimes kids are big enough and smart enough to more or less run their own show so it's an easy mistake for parents to make and so it's time we recognize that you're much more cake bullet making up your own mind and being independent of your decisions so from now on we're going to treat you like an adult instead of liked it now don't world there's rules and you have to follow consequences and that's just how it is like you don't show up on time for stuff you lose your job or you do things wrong go to jail etc so you know we're going to have simple rules too and we're not going to yell at you because you yell at children you don't yell at adults and so here's the rent this is when it's going to be do we want the trash taken out on every trash can and house every day okay or every other day whatever's reasonable we want the bath about all the bathrooms scrubs whatever it is did you want to do certainly there about through music be spic-and-span and if their students and their flake you have minimal grade performance and if they're in school and obviously they're getting financial support they are getting a cellphone and things like that then we have minimal grade performance that is acceptable it would be very achievable by them and if they don't perform then they lose all these consequences okay they can they can lose their car no problem lose their cell phone and they can ride their bike to the library this is not a problem so the the notion is is that a parent parents have a lot of anxiety about pulling the trigger on these things there's many reasons why there's several layers of reasoning that will stop parents from this when I've described these types of things parents get like an exhilarated giddy like and then they feel like oh no they really can't do that you know it's like in my attitude why why wouldn't we your your child is been a complete flake for the last three and a half years everybody's irritated with them they've got two little part-time jobs that they then flaked out on and now they're thinking about going back to school and they're 23 and a half years old and nothing's happening okay so the answer is that these individuals are lazy and irresponsible and in the wild they would not be able to be and they wouldn't be so parents know that their kid is a pretty decent kid they're just acting in a lazy and irresponsible fashion and the truth is is that they would not be lazing irresponsible if they were in a stone-age village in a stone-age village if you're lazy and responsible there's natural consequences like poverty and hunger and poverty and hunger actually cause two things which are effort and responsibility and so what we need to do is parents when we have a kid that's a flaky chip in their head and a lot of them do is we need to essentially impose something that begins to look like the Stone Age environment on the child and taking away their cell phone hardly throws them back to the Stone Age for God's sakes but what we do is we start to put the pressure on and when we kick them out of the house after their little 60-day hiatus we need to know that they we mean business that you are going to be leaving this house in 60 days so you got the next 60 days to hustle together find some job and save some money so you're ultimately going to need to pay us back but you don't have to pay us back up a whole thousand dollars you're going to owe us you could pay us back 100 a month you know for the next year and but in the next two months you need to be saving up a deposit for the next place you're going to live in so you better get busy okay well you know sits around plays the guitar etc okay so two months goes by and let me tell you what you do you kick them out you do not let them have another month it's not appropriate you kick them out and they're like well where am I going to go it's like I don't know not you know hey good luck hope you got some good friends okay the point is like the deer in the headlights is you have to understand that they they need the fear of God in them sometimes and they will figure it out and it's actually really good for them to figure it out so they will lean on their friend they'll couch-surf for a while god knows what is it they're going to do and they're going to cry and whine and this where you have to get the mother to not cave okay nope you're going to go you're going to go out there and just figure it out and they don't need to starve you make sure they know where the homeless shelter is and you make sure they know where the the the free food is there's free food at every community and that's it see you later hey go for it real pleasant no yelling etc you need to make a peace as a parent with some negative consequences and understand that there's things that we can afford and things we cannot afford so there's some some things that we can't afford you have to make peace with several things that are the worst case scenario here are some worst-case scenario things that parents need to make peace with in order to cure the flakiness of young adults you must make peace with bad grades in school you have to be willing to say may if you're you know this is what's happening if you go below these certain grades that's fine I'm not going to don't yell at them and scream at them and grab them by the neck go ahead and let them mess it up that's okay we can live with that there's always ways to mitigate that later after they've woken at age 28 with a sense of responsibility can always go back and renegotiate screw up grades etc you just let them give a give them maximum self responsibility do not you know basically hover around them like the helicopter mother on top of a 22 year old that's at the JC that's perfectly capable of getting good grades decent grades but isn't because they're a flake don't hover all over them it's not your job let them screw it up totally fine another thing that it's fine for them to screw up it's for them to get a credit card and then I'll live for a while on that two or three thousand dollars with credit and then screw it up and wreck their credit this is totally fine okay this is again youth has to pay the price they got to find out how this all works and if it gives them some bumpier roads for a couple of years this is not a problem that you have to you don't wake up up in the morning to get them to make sure that they get to their job on time forget it they can get on their bicycle because they don't want to have their car and they can ride you know they can ride all across town into that job not a problem they could take the bus in other words what we need is we need them to be inconvenienced now another thing is the homelessness are you still there mm-hmm okay okay so you have to be willing to have these kids be homeless they'll figure it out they'll they'll sleep in the friend's backyard and their friend's garage etc they'll work it out now you almost never have to get there but you have to be willing to get there you have to be willing to threaten them and you have to mean business when you're going to tell them that they got a deadline now there's a few things where we need to we do things slightly differently because there's two consequences that are really tough that we don't we never want to deal with his parent and and we have to be we have to be a gentle but be very much parents around these two issues those two issues are drugs and pregnancy so any girl that has a pregnancy issue we have to tell them or or you're a young man that may be involved either one if say listen if you get into trouble you've got to come to me you know this is not going to be a problem we will talk things out we're not going to be we're not going to be angry this is a tough situation and we'll all put our heads together you have to know you know we don't want to see that happen that's a real you know that's a dicey situation and there's a lot to consider there etc but if that happens you know that's what we're here that's what parents are for so you need to set it up in advance that the kid knows that that that quote horrible crisis where they could be so humiliated and embarrassed that a sensitive kid might jump off the Golden Gate Bridge rather than face you they have to know that you are already mentally prepared for this and that you're not upset okay so that they can replay that in their mind if they get into trouble and they recognize that you are not going to fly off the handle and be a freakazoid and now second thing is about drugs so we we have to be worried about drugs because drugs don't play fair drugs can get their hook in some kids mouth and if he's genetically susceptible and to open to experience they can get themselves into a world of and so as a result of that there's certain things that we do people say to me well you know my kids bugs pause okay if you say some smokes pot no no it's not okay okay so this is an addictive substance that draws people into a trap you know it leads to a generalized reduction of motivation actually in some cases causes permanent psychotic symptoms this is like you know people listening to me or like wow what a what a tightwad what in that case etc well no not really the truth is is that of course it's reasonable that they do this on their own time in their own life their own risk etc you know if some parents are completely cool with it that's their problem but if a parent is worrying about why their kid is flake and a deadbeat and the smokin pot and he's not getting a job etc then one place we start is by the no pot smoking and how do we do this if you're worried and again we're not using anger here we're just using parental reasonable firmness just the way the world would treat them if you're in the army and you smoke pot and you get drug tested and you come back positive oops see you later okay well they'll give you one one strike or whatever it is but this is a problem and in many jobs if you test positive you know you're done see you later and nobody's angry nobody yells it in the back room it jumps up and down in screams they just give you a pink slip that's it like oh wait wait wait sorry I mean I'll stop now it's like well it's too late your heavy equipment operator your your driving you know two hundred thousand pound vehicles with gasoline in the back no sorry you're done okay you're never working here again so in the same way if you would like to it is perfectly legitimate to tell you tell you're flaky teenager or young adult when you're in this house you don't need to be smoking any pot so when you get a job and get your money together and go live with your friends you know it's a free country and you can do whatever you want but in in our house that's not what you do so if you live here you're not going to do okay I won't do it so good you're not going to do it so we will test you everyday okay there's these cheap little inexpensive drug tests we'll test you every day and no problem it'll just take a couple seconds and that's that oh well that's too bad that's how it's going to be and the beauty of having drug tests and this goes on incidentally between husbands and wife's when one of them is is addicted to a drug and then they're trying to break free of it the utility of daily drug tests that we do it without exception we follow through every day when a person is clean they actually want to show that they are clean and they want to be have no second-guessing on the part of their parents or their partner because they're like look I'm clean okay so they're proud of this quote I trust you okay we don't need that in the middle of the relationship we don't need the person on the one side thinking well am I a bad guy for not trusting you okay it's like wow Reagan trust that verify that so this is how we do this and it actually very quickly becomes like a joke between the individuals and they don't mind it all and it's no big deal it takes a few seconds and it's all cool okay and and that way everybody knows that that person is not using the person who has had a history of using is not using and that takes pressure off of everybody so we are we aren't looking at them suspiciously and wondering if they're telling us the truth etc we're not random testing and then they're playing Russian roulette trying to hope that you know we forget this weekend etc no forget it you just test every day and you take all the pressure off so these are the general strategies that I use that essentially lay ground rules and obviously every situation is a little different but this is the general tone if I have somebody who is a thirty year old young person who's struggling with a big-time drug addiction has gone back and forth in and out of rehab and it's a mess and they steal from their mother and now mom doesn't know what to do and they're on the street and you know etc etc what do we do what we do is we make sure that the person has essentially a place to go ie we know where the local homeless shelter is and we know what it takes to get in there and we make sure that they have enough food ok so we make sure that these basics are covered and we communicate with them and we and things change whenever they're they ask for help and they want to go into some kind of treatment process and that they're really going to try now now we're going to be a little bit more rewarding and and gentle but when they are not and they're just doing their own number and they're in trouble and they're just their lives are chaotic then it's not a problem we just simply make sure that they are potentially physically safe if they choose to be so and otherwise we we don't yell and what we're trying to signal to these people we're actually trying to signal to this even in the eight-year-old with respect to their clean room and certainly to the thirty year old that's in trouble and to everybody in between we're trying to signal that we actually have confidence in your ability to manage these decisions and we have confidence that you actually know what the right decisions are and we are not going to yell at you and spend our time and energy putting a lot of pressure on you psychologically we're not going to do that what we're going to do is we're going to lay out some very reasonable consequences for alternative courses of action that you might take and we're going to back those up and we're going to back those up 100% essentially with no negotiation and the reason why is that we want you to have these parameters in your head as you're making your decisions and so that's what we do that's what everybody does with everybody else all the time and all business relationships in life and so that's what that's what we do we essentially are putting these problems on a businesslike basis and we're taking out of it the the interpersonal angst and fury and guilt inducing etc we just take that out of the equation and we let people know is essentially the following thing and that is that guess what you are responsible for what happens to you and I'm not here to rescue okay I'm here to be support system and assistive assist you and I'm here to be essentially a buffer against absolute disaster I will always be that but what you think is absolute disaster and what is absolute disaster or two different things and and so we have to come to terms with with somebody being uncomfortable and anxious and broke and not having a cell phone and upset and embarrassed that's fine the only thing I'm worried about or literally threats to life those are the kinds of things were catastrophic financial issues like driving some car without car insurance so there are there are things that we cover and there's things we let go and and we try to put them in a position to understand there's a time for them to to not be considering that the parent is effectively a blank check that they they essentially you know you know can always rely on so that's how we deal with that that's the general general set of ideas interesting so yeah when you were saying that you take away the things that the parents don't really want to do it give me a little flashback when when I was I think in junior high or high school I was never like that extreme but I was a wild kid I always got into mischief and I would get into trouble once in a while so you know I had my door taken off of my room because I think I slammed it once or twice and yeah one time I was in school and you know I was expected to set very high grades very good grades and I think I probably could have tried more you know to be honest and I got you know I got I got a grade that wasn't acceptable to my parents so I intercepted the the report card in the mail and went to the washing machine and and cut out the the the bad grade and then you know glued in the corrector you know but not the correct grade but yeah correct right a good grade what do they call it a Freudian dalip or what yeah so but it was so yeah so uh but but you know my dad caught me and they took away everything in my room except for one pair of underwear one pair of pants and one shirt that was it I had to earn everything back one by one so yeah it's uh beautiful absolutely beautiful you got just what you deserved and didn't hurt you at that point yeah yeah no this is good stuff so how you know Mike my big question here though is when say flake in my mind I think they're at the low conscientiousness so they're at the bell curve maybe the lower part of the bell curve it sounds like what you're saying is this is a combination between a flaky could be somebody who just doesn't feel anxiety that they're not doing the right thing but also they might may have lack impatient for a whole number of different factors yes and in either case this is the right strategy so the probably and this is what parents there's great consternation let's so let's let's look in and try to figure out what drives a great deal of parental consternation when when the flake starts emerging and they start realizing that you know the kid is now 13 years old and we're seeing a lot of flaky behavior and we're not sure what to make of this and we are essentially what goes on inside parents heads is that oh my god I'm not sure that they're going to do so well in school if they don't want at school they won't go to a good college don't quit called so I'm not going to get a good job they don't get a good job they're not going to have good money they're not going to have good money they're not going to be able to mate as effectively they're not going to be as met affecting that grandchildren going to have slightly worth genes now the parents don't quite consciously put all those dots together but it's close and unconsciously they're there they're also fearing that there's going to be a flake on their hands at 19 or 20 or 20 or 21 years old and they're like counting down the clock as to when they can start redirecting their resources to their own personal interests so there's a there's a weaning conflict that is that it's bubbling under here that's that's essentially part of nature we're where the children are going to want resources to get resources from the parents longer than the parents are going to want to give them to the kid so so at any rate this is the conflict that's bubbling under here and there's a misunderstanding a profound misunderstanding about developmental psychology that is that is bubbling through this which is that what's happening at 13 is formative so what one of the obviously the most important mistake in the concept of personality and development in psychology is the notion of what we're going to call the formative years the notion that somehow things are forming when a kid is you know 3 to 13 oh yeah they're not departed teachers habits yeah they don't teach them to have at all yeah they're interested it has nothing to do with anything be what you're seeing is they these are the emergent years you are watching who this kid is emerge out of life they're not forming anything and you say oh no but I saw it you know when you seven years old he's really well-organized and ten years old he's organized so he was forming the habits to be a good CPA when he was 10 years old no you were seeing the genes of a highly intelligent highly conscientious emotionally stable human at 7 years old for god sakes no surprise the kid went on to be a CPA so this is a this is a misunderstanding of personality and development and so parents because of this misunderstanding they have considerable anxiety when the 13 year old is flake because they're thinking oh my god I've got to shape them in to what will be a really good hard-working college student if we're going to get a good job you graduate blah blah blah so they're seeing that their trajectory of the graph of this person's development is not going the direction that they would most hopeful hope for for high achievement and so this also incidentally will take place and parents that are sweating bullets over a kid that isn't achieving that well even though the kids trying reasonably hard but they're not that smart and the parents will fret about this because they can see the doom that their children are not going to be able to let to be go to college and be a professional and they really really really really really want them to be and it's like relax it's either kid either as the shop so they don't have the chops and how hard they work at 12 or 13 years old isn't going to have anything to do with this it's going to be completely irrelevant so this is this is obviously a radical sounding view but it is the correct view it's what it's what essentially all the scientific evidence points to now as a result of that yeah go ahead and and then also is there is what what does it have to do also with you know Society or other parents look at it and judging the parents saying oh you're not as good of a parent because cuz your kid is are performing at this level there's no question so now now they've gotten data so you line sure so you've got sort of you've got a lot of little problems there that are causing a great deal of consternation on the part of parents that are watching some kid that's not living up to their potential and sort of fiddling around so so there's different reasons why kid might not live up to their potential but the but at the at the end of the day we understand in principle that all of the motivational systems are understandable and that they're all a derivative of cost-benefit analysis and so there could be that a kid is an ego trap because the expectations are too high and they're pulling the other direction so we've talked about that at length in previous podcasts that's so as a parent you certainly do not want to set the bar high and push because you will get the kid going the other direction the you want to set the bar at a moderate level of what it is that the kid is reasonably easily able to achieve in school and call it good and if the kid goes beneath that no problem there's consequences then we take the cell phone in the computer way not a problem not at all okay and if the more they wail and are upset about it relax this is not nothing other this is not somebody that has just been bitten by a jackal on the African savannah this is just somebody that just got inconvenienced okay and so we have to get comfortable with with essentially making them uncomfortable if it's appropriate to do so now you're as these kids continue on we are going to find out as they get a little bit older whether or not they are a flake by nature ie low conscientiousness or whether or not they've got chops in them but they have to be appropriately motivated and so the way we do this is just as I said we we set up constraints with very reasonable expectations and and limited assistance etc and then we find out if you have a flake flake will couch serve you know apply for welfare god knows what they're going to do okay join a band who knows if your kid actually has plenty of responsibility and just was was basically a overly comfortable middle-class animal in a zoo that didn't have to do anything to earn its keep and now you have forced it out the door and made it face the wild it will spontaneously get extremely responsible and the good news is is that when they get responsible and they actually get a job and start working they feel better okay they feel better because they feel the sense of esteem process that comes with knowing that they are a self feeding self responsible life unit and feels good and so now they've they've learned something now believe me a lot of people if they didn't have to work they wouldn't they would just sit at home and they can't wait to just sit at home there's reasons for that but if you sit at home indefinitely and you don't contribute and don't do anything that's income producing it's going to start gnawing at your esteem you're going to it's going to be a problem so these kids are willing to sit at home for a while because it's legitimate enough early 20s or late teens to not be doing much and thinking about big thinking big thoughts and accomplishing nothing and people might think that I'm disparaging all young people I'm not we're not talking about all young people we're talking about the 10 or 20 percent that that are lazy enough or irresponsible enough that fall into this pattern and and so you know a lot of young kids are are just absolutely full of ambition and energy and desire and or push push push so completely different animals one animal to the next the but the solution to the dilemma of what do I have here do I have an irresponsible flake or do I have a perfectly responsible kid that is under no anxiety and is inherently lazy unless we push them answer is find out find out you're not going to do anybody any harm and you can take a lot of stress off the parents and and in knowing that you are doing the right thing to put this animal in distress that's what we want to do and and what we get is what we get and either whatever happens it's fine we're making peace with the worst possible outcome yeah worst possible outcome is we find out that our kid is a flake and it's never going to do anything it's like oh well well you know good thing we didn't put him in that fancy $25.00 or your school it was supposed to teach them how to be different because this is what we would have gotten okay so that's not going to happen for most people but but most of the time what we really see is young people who are who have had it easy who have had parents cover cover costs cover them essentially allow them to be irresponsible and we have some kids that will push the limit and it isn't they won't actually get their act together it's just that they will you have to push them you have to give them some consequences to get their act together and most of the time if you do they'll respond very well okay and now so so now let's say let's say you know we've dealt with the kids how do we deal with flaky with flaky people in general I mean in business if I'm dealing with someone I can sense their low conscientiousness I'm just not even going to do business about them it's just going to be or a polite nice superficial that's it but for friends or for you know for flaky friends we you know people listening to podcast they may not be realizing that at one orgy friends might be flaky here and there but but how do they deal with flaky people in general well you know flaky people what's going to happen is is that you're going to be doing a cost-benefit analysis on them sort of unconsciously and so you're you're going to you're going to be winding up irritated with them and realizing that they're kind of mediocre investments and and so it's it's what's good about having the big five in your head and understanding that that personality is genetic and so that we can we can understand that when we see a pattern of somebody's behavior and we can line it up to other people's behavior but the the reasons why we're seeing what we're seeing are largely likely to be genetic you know with certainly certainly there's some there can be situational factors that are involved for various periods of time but in principle that's what is that we're seeing so if you're an adult and you have adult friends and one of them's flake then you understand that that's what it is and so as a result of that you run a cost-benefit analysis on why that individuals even in your life and I'm not saying that this shouldn't be in your life depends upon how enjoyable they are and how interesting they are other things but we certainly know that they are a relatively poor investment so unlike people that are high conscientiousness people that are high conscientiousness are actually outstanding investments they this is a so if you're going to live life long enough to make use of this the notion is is that the this is what old-timers we call conscientiousness is essentially what we call character and so if we we realize that human beings whether we like it or not are essentially operating with each other as insurance policies but that's what that's what friendship relationships are now we may not think of it that way and there there's certainly other elements but if the end of the day that's an extremely important process that is taking place between any two people who call themselves friends and so the problem with having friends that are significantly less conscientious than yourself is that you will tend to analyze the relationship from your own personal perspective with respect to what you think is going on with respect to the trade so this is we're going to be what we call the egocentric bias so let's sit we're going to suppose you're a very high conscientious person and in your mind's eye you would say well boy if if my good if my friend got in trouble I would really go in for a lot of effort you know I'd spent a year of doing hard labeled labor to dig them out of some Mexican prison I would okay I'd be like wow I wouldn't I wouldn't spend 10 years but boy for a bill over there was a pretty good friend of mine yeah if he was really in trouble and it wasn't fair and you know if I needed to dig him out of Mexican prison I would do it now the problem is bill could hear you hear your thoughts and feelings he knows who you are you can tell that your higher conscientiousness so he might even make sounds and smells and noises and have some actions that make it look like he sort of feels the same way but if we look at his behavior and we're tracking what his behavioral history is across various domains we recognize he's actually significantly lower in conscientious than we are it's kind of fun open to experience you know showed you showed you what mushrooms were like to smoke them or whatever the hell it was when you were you know 19 so the point is is he may be an interesting character but you keep your eye on this and realize that you may be a million dollar insurance policy for him but he's worth about $3,000 worth of insurance policy to you so effectively in that friendship you are over insuring him and you are being taken in a trade that you don't even know is taking place and so that's why having friends that are significantly lower unconscious than ourselves are it's not that I'm saying it's terrible initiatives have them etc you're going to cost-benefit analysis on them but when there is a significant discrepancy between your level of conscience --is and someone else's then what you do is you use yourself as a baseline to estimate estimates sort of how much insurance you are probably getting back and you are likely to vastly overestimate the insurance that you would get back in return for the insurance that you're extending in that friendship and therefore it is very likely that on the long run you're going to get taken okay so that's why my attitude is if someone shows me that their flake then I am taking a step back and then I'm not talking about one transgression but I might talk about any one transgression that is significant I had a friend that she had a person in her family died and a woman that was supposedly a good friend of hers pretty good friend of hers was all excited about doing the food for the wake and really was pushy about how she wanted to do the food for the wake and she want to be in charge of it because she was a catering type person and she was really going to take center stage and do this thing well within like two days before the wake was going to take place and anybody that's ever been through a funeral knows this all happens pretty fast so you're hustling around there's a thousand details to deal with and so a couple days before might have been the night before I think it was actually the night before the the flake called and said ah oh I just can't do it I'm just overwrought with emotion and I can't do it it's like wow I've got a whole bunch of people coming to the special unbelievable right in the middle you've had you've had a family member die you yourself for grieving and this person who really wanted all the status to be a big fancy person at the wake that did the food is like bailing out right at the eleventh hour okay there you go and so when I was a traditionalist this person yeah I said listen you that's it you've now discovered that that person is a worthless insurance policy and folks a worthless insurance policy is a lot worse than no insurance policy at all because you are psychologically investing in people that are flakes and you are extending insurance to them at the expense of other people that you would be making connections with that you would be extending insurance to you've only got so many people that you can put in your life slight boat and so it is it makes sense for the quality of your life to to not be too open to experience and not be too agreeable and sharpen up those eyeballs when it comes to the investment in friendships so the the spotting flaky behavior is a very useful thing in this life because if they're a little bit flaky when things are small they're likely to be big flaky when things are big and so we are way better off investing in people with high conscientiousness and that's I think the the big lesson for tonight very interesting I think we'll end there dr. Lao thank you so much wonderful wonderful information really appreciates very good pleasure nay excellent you got it excellent so you know next week we're going to read some questions from some listeners we got some questions about death and dying we've got some questions about the people who actually have no desire to have kids you know all kinds of different questions so I really appreciate all the all the listeners great questions keep them coming and and and we will see everybody next week thanks dr. Lisle really appreciate it very cool thank you thin thanks for listening if you like what you hear subscribe write us a review or share this podcast with a friend to send in a question or read more about the show you can visit our website at www.att.com/biz an 8ji in dr. Lisle with beat your genes in evolutionary psychology podcast for finding happiness in the modern world
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