017: How to Help Your "Sticky Brained" Child Get Unstuck

In the Boat With Ben

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As a parent who has a sticky brained child and a non-sticky brained child, I can attest to the difficulty this trait can add to a situation. This is where we tend to become broken records, hoping our message can penetrate through our child’s concentration. It’s tempting to want to see it as an undesirable behavior of which we should try to break them.

In this episode we discover more about what goes on inside the sticky brain and how we can help shape the strengths that come along with this trait. We will talk about some practical things you can do to help your child work through their sticky brained tendencies without changing who they are.

Highlights, Takeaways, Quick Wins

• Sticky brain carries with it positive traits, like focus and memory.
• It’s important not to see sticky brain as “bad” so that you can look at the strengths instead of the weaknesses.
• Sticky brain children value what you say, so be careful not to say things if you can’t follow through.
• Dig a little deeper and try to discover what the desires are behind your child’s request.
• When our children feel connected to us, they’re more willing to listen.
• Let your child know when a change is coming.
• When we allow our children to be part of coming up with a new routine, it gives them practice for managing those things on their own.
• Come up with a strategy for when the thing your child wants to do can happen.
• One of the challenges for the sticky brain is recognizing the value of incremental gains.
• The more we can walk our children through situations where they don’t get what they want, the more they will learn that it’s not the end of the world.

Show Notes

• 03:33 Ben: Some of you probably hear the title of today’s show and think, “I know what a sticky brain is,” but in case you don’t, a sticky brained child gets so engrossed in an activity that they have difficulty leaving that activity when it’s time to move on. Other characteristics include: they’ll get an idea of something they want to do, and they have a really hard time letting that idea go. Some sticky brained children have a really hard time when there’s a change in routine, even when the routine is calling for something they don’t particularly want to do. They are very good at remembering half-hearted commitments, like, “We can’t do that right now, we’ll do it tomorrow.”
• 04:56 Rachel: There’s a scientific explanation for the sticky brain. In Susan Stiffelman’s book, Parenting Without Power Struggles, she explains the science behind the sticky brain. It is a physical thing that happens in kid’s brains, and not every child has it.

Sticky Brain Isn’t “Bad”

• 05:39 Ben: There are several different things—it’s a spectrum. Sticky brain isn’t bad; it’s important not to think of it as a negative characteristic. I think about spectrum disorders, for example, and they sometimes carry this negative connotation. When you talk about a child being Autistic or having Aspergers, those words can carry negative connotations, but really they’re just a way of describing how the brain processes information. Sticky brain can come from a lot of different things, but it’s not bad. Your child falls somewhere in this range of children that have a tendency to behave a certain way based on what they’ve decided they want to do or how they perceive their schedule.

It’s important not to see sticky brain as “bad” so that you can look at the strengths instead of the weaknesses.

• 07:13 Sticky brain actually carries with it what we would consider to be positive traits, especially in adults—things like focus, the ability to stick with a single task and not be interrupted by external things. That’s something I would love to have more of as an adult. There’s also memory, the ability to be able to keep important dates and important information from getting diluted by other information in your brain, and being able to really focus on those things.
• 07:50 Rachel: I am a sticky brain person. I used to drive my mom crazy, because I would remember everything she said and everything we needed to remember before she did. As parents, if we do have a sticky brain, there are also some things we might need to work through with that. While it’s a good thing that we remember these things and that we have this linear focus and can balance things, we also have the ability to hang on to things like hurts and the bad things that happen in life. We have a tendency to remember those really well, too. I’ve had filter through some of that stuff in my life and work through it, because I remember it so well since my brain is sticky.
• 08:49 Ben: It’s so good to be self aware. It’s likely that if your child is sticky brained that you or the other parent have some of those same personality traits. For whoever that’s true, the more in touch you can be with how that influences your daily life, the things you’ve done in your own life to manage those tendencies and make them strengths, the easier it’s going to be for you to apply those same things to your children. I’d like us to focus on recognizing the potential strengths, shaping those behaviors, and equipping our children who have sticky brains in a way that allows them, as they grow into adults, to use those strengths to their advantage. We want them to be aware of having overcome the inherent weakness in those things.
• 09:53 Rachel: Having a sticky brain child has made me much more careful about the things I promise or even the words I say. If I say, “It’s not time to color right now, but we can color as soon as you wake up tomorrow,” what if tomorrow we already have something else on the books and he’s not going to have an opportunity to color? He’s going to remember that. He’s called us liars before because of that kind of thing.

Sticky brain children really value what you say, so be careful not to say things if you can’t follow through.

• 10:38 Ben: That’s going to be a major part of our strategy for helping our sticky brained children. In the chat, Robert said, “One positive thing about the sticky brained child is that his persistence has translated into much greater patience when working on difficult tasks—puzzles, legos, etc. I want to foster that stick-to-it-ness without nourishing some of the unappealing aspects.” I love this focus on recognizing the strengths and not just trying to get rid of that and calling the whole thing an issue. Say, “You know, there are some strengths here. Let’s do what we can to equip our children to use those strengths to their advantage.”

Start With Connection

• 11:29 A major part of having a cooperative kid is the first step toward helping your sticky brain child get un-stuck, and that’s fostering that connection (Related: e014 The Secret to Having Cooperative Kids). In general, you want to be connected with your child and make sure that relationship is strong, because the stronger the trust they have with you, the easier it will be for that relationship to override their natural tendency to want to continue doing whatever it is they’re doing. In the moment, when we connect first, we reinforce the idea that what we’re doing is about the relationship instead of being about making them stop doing whatever they’re doing.
• 12:42 Rachel: This week, I’ve dealt with this on multiple occasions. Our oldest is probably the most sticky brained child we have, and he will beat an idea to death. It’s exhausting. There’s this transition when Ben and I hand off, and they have quiet time. They have quiet time approved activities, and our son came to me wanting to go sell some of his comic books by the mailbox. It’s up the road a ways, and I can’t just look out the window and see him. I kept telling him, “It’s not the right time for that.”
• 13:32 I didn’t handle it at all the way we know how to handle it, because I was just so frustrated. It was the third time he had come with something like that, and I had tried it the other way a few times, and it worked, but it took a really long time. I didn’t have the energy to do the whole exchange again. This is an exhausting thing. It’s going to be frustrating to parents and as you find your way through the technique and some of the suggestions we have, there will still be times when you’re so exhausted that you don’t want to have the battle.
• 14:22 Ben: Dealing with any kind of issue with kids is knowing which battles to pick, because you can’t fight all of them. As much as they tell you to be consistent and not give your children any window of opportunity, it’s almost impossible. One of the things I remember from a situation like that with Jadon was that he was really adamant about wanting to do something, and I wasn’t doing this on purpose, but I happened to dig a little bit deeper. When I communicated with him and tried to discover his desires behind the request he was making, it revealed something that I wouldn’t necessarily say no to. What he was asking to do, I would say no to. What he was focused on was what he thought was the best vehicle to accomplish his desires.

Dig a little deeper and try to discover what the desires are behind the request.

• 15:37 Often, we try to say yes instead of saying no, but one of the things that makes it possible to say yes is to uncover the desire. We wouldn’t necessarily say yes to a specific request, but the desire is most likely something you want for your child. With the wanting to sell the books, why does he want to sell them? “Because I want to make money.” Why does he want to make money? “Somebody’s birthday is coming up, and I really want to buy them something.” You don’t know those things unless you probe a little deeper. Once I heard that, I almost got my wallet out. He wants to be generous to somebody else, and that’s awesome.
• 17:32 I have a tendency to spout out whatever change is coming up, like, “Okay, in five minutes we’re going to leave!” One of the things you can do for your sticky brain child is to give them a head’s up. Let your child know when a change is coming. Oftentimes, they’re much more receptive if the change isn’t happening to them right then and they didn’t know about it before that point. Even when you’re giving them a head’s up, instead of just spouting those words out and hoping they land on your sticky brained child’s ears, it’s important to get their attention. Physically go over and put your hand on their shoulders, maybe even grab the sides of their face, though not in a rough way. Make sure you have that connection, so when you communicate that a change is coming, those words don’t fall on preoccupied ears.
• 18:48 If you want to go a step further, you can gain agreement and work together in that moment to make a strategy for when that change comes, or how they’ll know when it’s time to stop doing what they’re doing. You could set a timer, use a secret funny signal like a birdcall or something—be creative with it. It can be powerful to let your child be part of the process of coming up with that. Not only are you greatly increasing your chances that your child will have an easier time transitioning away from what they’re doing, but you’re also teaching them how to have power and control over their natural tendency to continue doing the same thing, which can be a huge asset for them later in life, if that’s something they continue to put into practice.
• 20:22 Empathy is huge. It’s really important for us to put ourselves in our children’s shoes, even non sticky brain children who seem generally compliant, where we might take for granted that they’re typically obedient. Think about the way we’re delivering the message. How do we feel as adults when we’re in the middle of doing something and our children interrupt us with their agenda and their schedule, things we don’t feel are important? Our children feel angry, too. In their world, what they’re doing is very important, and the fact that you need to go to the bank doesn’t matter to them at all.
• 21:33 That empathy is not meant to excuse what they’re doing or to make it okay for them not to be obedient in those situations, but it’s a way we put ourselves on their side and understand the situation from their perspective, which helps us communicate in a more effective way. When we can articulate their desires back to them in our own words, it helps them see that we understand how they feel.

When our children feel connected to us, they’re more willing to listen.

• 22:15 Rachel: Before we can get them to redirect their focus, there has to be that connection piece. If you just go up to a child and you take their papers away, how would you feel if someone came and took your computer away when you were designing something because it was time for dinner? I think about those things a lot, because I want to be an honoring parent to my kids. I feel honored when people take care of my time, so the connection piece is super important.
• 22:54 Ben: I can’t imagine working on my computer in the afternoon, in the middle of a project, and knowing that dinner is coming but there are just a few more things that I have to do. What if Rachel were to come up and say, “Ben, it’s dinner time,” and put my computer to sleep? I would be so upset. When we were talking about this in the chat earlier, Cory Miller said, “Honestly, it sounds like I’m the sticky brained one.”
• 23:32 Rachel: I definitely have issues with sticky brain, and that helps me understand more and also annoys me so much more, because I do understand it. Ben is a more empathetic person when it comes to the sticky brain, because I just want to say, “Get over it!” I don’t ever say that, but in my brain, I’m thinking, “I do not have time to connect and redirect.”

Change in Routine

• 24:02 Ben: I’m definitely not as sticky brained as Rachel in some ways, but in other ways, I can be very sticky brained and very focused, almost like the world fades away and whatever I’m working on is my only focus. As your child grows, becomes involved in different activities, starts school, goes to child care, or you have to move, there are many things that could come in and change the routine your child is accustomed to. Our children are generally good about changes to routine.
• 25:03 Rachel: They weren’t always that way, though. The sticky brained one, Jadon, has been able to handle things like that better as he’s matured, but I remember when he was two or three. Any time there was a night when we had a gig or something and we didn’t get to read stories, it would be an hour before he would go to bed because he was screaming and crying about not getting a story. It definitely happened, but we don’t remember it as well because he’s eight now and doesn’t do that stuff anymore.
• 25:42 Ben: There are a few things we can do to help our sticky brained child with that. Hopefully, most of the time, we know ahead of time when those changes are coming, and we can anticipate those and have a plan in place for when those changes happen. Sit down and talk to your child, as much as they can understand, and help them grasp that these changes are going to be happening. If they understand a little more, help your child work with you to come up with a new schedule. It helps us to write the new schedule down. When we’ve done that and our kids have something visual they can look to, when a change is made, as long as it’s there in the writing, it’s okay. It’s almost like a written contract.
• 26:50 Rachel: As we’ve put some of our routines and rules of the house in place, it’s helped with the sticky brain-ness. They understand their expectations and boundaries, and that helps more when they’re school age and they understand what things like rules are. Sometimes, the sticky brain can come out in different ways than sitting down and resisting stopping what they’re doing or feeling resistance over a schedule change. For instance, when we were about to have our last son, Asher, we had our oldest son in counseling because he was having some behavioral issues and we weren’t sure what was going on. It turned up that he was really anxious about welcoming another brother, how that would change his role in the family, how our schedule might change, and what responsibilities he would have because of that.

Sometimes our kids might struggle with sticky brain in ways that aren’t as obvious to us, so it’s worth it to dig it out.

• 28:22 Ben: Think about the complexity of those emotions. Their ability to feel those feelings is far beyond their ability to communicate them. That’s true for me sometimes, too. I can have difficulty expressing the things I’m feeling, so I think about how much more difficult that must be for our children. I’m glad we had our son in counseling and that he was able to uncover some of that stuff. Another thing we can do is to step back and look at the bigger picture. What other things are going on? It’s likely that the thing that’s giving your child some anxiety, fear, or frustration isn’t something they’re capable of articulating well yet. It’s something you can discover for them.
• 29:26 I’ve found that, even when I tried to sit down and talk to Jadon about it, he shrugged it off a little bit and said, “It’s going to be okay.” He also feels excited and he’s looking forward to it, but it’s so confusing and complicated for him that he doesn’t know how to wrestle with that. Another way we can help our children with changes in routine is to make incremental changes. Instead of going from the schedule they’re used to to a completely new schedule, if it’s something you can change incrementally, do it. Maybe their bedtime is going to change, so you shave off 15 minutes a night for the next several nights. Something like that can help them ease into a new schedule.

When we allow our children to be part of coming up with a new routine, it gives them practice for managing those things on their own.

• 30:56 Rachel: Obviously, we get to make the final decision. They don’t get to say, “I think I should get to go to bed an hour later instead of an hour earlier.” It’s not that kind of thing, but it’s inviting them into the process. We say, “Your bedtime needs to be half an hour earlier because you’re not getting enough sleep. How do you think we should manage that over the next week?”

Have a Specific Plan

• 31:24 Ben: Being intentional and having a plan is really important. I’m thinking about the instance where our child is doing something and we have to move on to something else, or they have an idea and they want to do something, but it’s not the appropriate time for them to do that. If you would, at a different time, give them permission to do it, instead of saying, “You can do that tomorrow,” get specific. Put something on the schedule instead of saying something broad. Charla said in the chat, “I’ve noticed that my sticky brained child makes me much more intentional about the things I say to children. There’s no such thing as a throw-away comment or empty promise. If I delay a middle of the night request by saying, ‘We’ll do that in the morning,’ I’d better be prepared for him to ask to do it as soon as he wakes up.”
• 32:44 Rachel: I remember even as a toddler he had a rich vocabulary, and he would ask about the things we had promised for the next day. Family members would comment on it and ask, “How does he remember that?” We used to think it was because he was really brilliant, but it’s because he has a really sticky brain. Lately, when it’s almost my turn to be off my shift, I’ll say, “Why don’t you ask Daddy about it?” Sorry about that, Ben.
• 33:32 Ben: I do that when you’re on duty. Even if I could answer the question, I’ll say, “Ask Mama.” This is good for the sticky brained child, because sometimes you can’t answer them right then and there. Sometimes the best you can do is say, “I really want to answer that question, but I have to focus on this other thing right now.” It’s good for them to develop that patience, and sometimes that comes by necessity. Be intentional—come up with a strategy for when the thing your child wants to do can happen. Put it in the schedule.

Keeping a schedule is helpful for a sticky brain child because it helps them know what to expect and when transitions are coming.

• 35:03 I also like to have a plan for when things don’t go as planned. That’s just to say that you have a conversation with your child, and you say, “Things aren’t always going to go the way we planned for them to. We can’t always follow our schedule. What do you think we can do when that happens to help us adjust?” Come up with a plan with your child, maybe a phrase or keyword, to help remind them that this is a reality they’ll have to learn to work with.
• 35:55 Rachel: This last week, I’ve been trying to approach some of the things the kids do as if it doesn’t personally affect me. That means that if I want them to clean up because it’s time for lunch and their toys are all over the place, I try not to feel personally connected to the result of cleanup. I make observations, set a timer, and I’ll let them know, “Four and a half more minutes!” It’s helped me approach it with a calmer demeanor. When you’re personally affected by what your child does and you’re more than an observer, your child senses that. When there’s something you gain from that and they don’t want to do it, there’s even more resistance.
• 37:11 Even our sticky brain child has picked up the phrase, “I don’t need to do that. You just want me to do it.” It’s true. We just want him to do it. The thing that helps with that is having consequences in place: “If you don’t clean this stuff up before lunch, it goes on a shelf, and you don’t get to play with the cars for a week.” It’s helped me to stay calmer when it comes to the resistance I get when they’re not ready to put their toys away. You have to have the conversation first so they know exactly what the consequence is. It helps me with the sticky brain child, too; if I’m not as invested in what he does, his consequence isn’t affecting me, it’s only affecting him.

The Somewhat Sticky Brained Child

• 38:45 Ben: Charla says, “I have an occasionally sticky brained child in my youngest, usually easy going, but he occasionally gets completely fixated and inconsolable. How do we figure out how to fight those battles? Is it easier to give him his way, since it’s rare to have him so focused? When we can’t, for whatever reason, it makes him that much more sticky brained.” I’ve seen that every once in a while, though not with our oldest, because he’s consistently sticky brained. Sometimes, it’s more about the fact that they can’t have what they want than it is about the specific thing.
• 39:29 “Oh, you’re going to take this away from me? Now I want it even more.” That seems like a natural human tendency. This is even a marketing tactic that’s used; it’s the idea of scarcity. We could care less that some product out there exists, but when it comes into our consciousness that this product is exclusive, in limited supply, and will be going away forever after this, suddenly there’s a part of us that’s interested. With your kids, pick your battles, but it’s still worth helping them use that in a more productive way and to highlight the positive aspects of that behavioral tendency. You want to encourage the focus, tenacity, and even some of the fight for the things that they want. You don’t want to break that spirit, but it’s got to be tempered with the ability to recognize when it’s time to put something down and trust that they can come back to something later. It’s a balance.
• 41:10 Rachel: It’s valuable for them to learn that, even if they work for themselves someday with freedom to create and do the things they love, they may have a family, they’ll have friends, and if they work all the time without a break and without putting things down until they’re completely finished, they aren’t really living life. Their art is going to suffer for that.
• 41:49 Ben: I was doing this thing mentally where if I couldn’t sit down and work on it all at once, I wasn’t going to do it. I would procrastinate. A lot of things would go undone. I had to come to a point where I recognized that unless I allowed myself to make incremental progress on things, I wasn’t going to accomplish anything I wanted to. When you have big dreams and goals, there’s no way you can do it in one sitting. It has to happen incrementally—it’s small, daily steps.

One of the challenges for the sticky brain is recognizing the value of incremental gains.

• 42:37 It doesn’t feel like a lot of progress, or it doesn’t feel like success, when you’re just seeing the bar move a few inches. But, over time, you see results by making those little moves.

Benefits of Routine

• 43:07 Hannah said, “I’m currently reading Raising Your Spirited Child by Mary Kurcinka, which I know Rachel has read. The book talks about setting up routines to help with difficult transitions. I’m wondering if you’ve had success with that, especially when the child gets into the habit of being stubborn about an issue.” Earlier in the issue, we talked about how routines have helped us. They’re definitely effective, especially if you’re able to stick to them consistently, you make your child part of the process of coming up with that routine and they feel like they have some buy in, and you have it written down somewhere that you can point back to it.
• 44:40 Rachel: If there’s a deviation from that routine, that’s really hard for the sticky brained child. It’s worth it to have that conversation before it happens. If you have a nightly commitment, and one night you can’t do the routine exactly as it appears, sometimes the sticky brained children need to be informed of that. We’ve had battles over that, too.
• 45:10 Ben: I commented in the chat, “Our oldest is this way. He sometimes gets ideas, and it doesn’t matter what time of day it is or whether or not people are trying to sleep. Once he’s got it in his head that he’s going to do something, it’s very hard to reason with him about waiting for a more appropriate time.” Robert responded to that saying, “Appropriate time is one of the biggest challenges for our sticky brained child. Even though he’s young, he understands the sequence of first this, then that. Yet, once he hears something he’s stuck on, he fixates on skipping the ‘this’ and getting right to the ‘that.'” I believe his son is three.
• 45:56 Rachel: We have a three year old sticky brained one, too. Remember the chore he wanted to do? He cried for an hour because he didn’t get to take out the trash.
• 46:21 Ben: It’s weird. I think of it this way: when you’re looking at one of those optical illusions and they tell you to focus on this dot in the center of it, eventually because you’re focusing there so much, your eyes let the stuff in the periphery kind of fade away. It’s like that with tasks or ideas sometimes. Your child may understand the sequence of events and that this has to happen before that can, but when they’re fixated on it and that other stuff has faded out in their periphery, they don’t have the same relationship to that information that you do.
• 47:15 You’ve got a logical connection in your mind; you can see the sequence clearly, but for them, that’s gone out the window. That’s why connecting with them on an emotional level is important. In a lot of ways, when they get sticky about something, they’re dealing with it on an emotional level more than they are on a logical level. You have to go there with them first and make that connection, and then you can guide them back to a more logical relationship with that information.
• 47:49 Rachel: Even though this whole process takes a lot of time, there’s such value in practicing it with our children. The more the sticky brained child practices putting something aside because there’s something the family is going to do together, the more he gets to see that, when he puts this comic book aside, he can still pick it back up and remember the storyline. The value he gets from that, knowing that he can keep that storyline in his head and keep it going, that’s hugely important for children. They’re just starting to learn how to believe in themselves.

The more we can walk our children through situations where they don’t get what they want, the more they will learn that it’s not the end of the world.

• 49:00 Ben: Beware of adding unnecessary adversity. Sometimes, you might have a knee-jerk reaction of saying no to something where, if you had really thought about it, you didn’t have to say no to. Now that you’ve said those words out loud, you don’t want to go back on it. It’s always okay to back peddle and say, “You know what, I said no, but now that I think about it, I think it’s okay for you to do this.” For example, it may be that we’re going to the store and I have this thing in my head, for whatever reason, that he can’t take a book with him and he has to stop reading then and there.
• 49:50 He could take the book in the car with him. He could probably even take the book into the store with him and read it as he follows us around while we’re getting groceries. There may be a conversation to be had there, but the point I’m trying to make is to be careful not to get ahead of yourself and make snap decisions when maybe a “no” isn’t necessary right then and there.
• 50:45 Rachel: Sometimes, with our sticky brained child, every now and then he’ll make a request I’m not ready to grant, so I’ll say, “Why don’t you convince me?” He’ll pull out this whole spiel, and I’ll say, “I’m not quite convinced yet. Can you tweak that a little bit and try to convince me again?” Some people say that you should never negotiate with your kid, but it’s valuable for them to engage in that back and forth and to know that I am open to hearing what they have to say. I may still say no, and that’s the way of the game. It’s valuable for them to take ownership. They’ll have to do some persuasive speaking eventually in whatever job they choose.
• 51:50 Ben: I’m definitely in favor of not just shutting our children down any time they disagree with us. It’s important for them to develop their chops, and having a healthy relationship with authority doesn’t mean that you always follow every rule and do everything you’re told to do. Having a healthy relationship with authority is to understand your position with somebody, but also to have the courage and clarity to communicate your thoughts and ideas in a way that’s respectful and potentially even persuasive enough to make things go the way you want them to go for the better of everyone involved.