Ep. 75 Importance of Being a Role Model

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Hello and welcome to dyslexia devoted the podcast dedicated to building awareness, understanding and strategies to help those with dyslexia. I'm your host, Lisa Parnello, dyslexia therapist and founder of Parnello education services. Join me as we dive into today's episode of dyslexia devoted. Hello, and welcome to episode 75 of dyslexia devoted, I am so glad that you are back today or just joining us for the first time today. I have had a fabulous weekend. On Friday, I had a business lunch with two other women business owners. And then last night Saturday, I had a business dinner with a another small business owner who's a woman. And these events are actually part of what is inspired this week's episode. Before we get into that, I wanted to let you know that I have some awesome things planned for Black Friday week, which is five days of deals of things for you guys, including some new things for you. So if you want to be sure that you find out about all those things, make sure you go to Parnello education.com, forward slash email. And you can join the dyslexia voter newsletter where you get links to all the resources I mentioned in the episode, but you also get special promo codes and deals and things like that, that you will not get on my website. So make sure you join me for that dyslexia decoded newsletter, I send it out every Thursday. And so I try not to spam you with any emails, the only times you get more than that is if there's something special going on. And so I would love for you to join the email list where you get to learn a little bit more about me and my personal life. And you get to get all the resources straight to your inbox, because I don't know about you, but I never click on the show notes when I'm looking at a podcast. Because I'm driving and I'm not looking at the podcast, I'm just listening to it. So hop on that dyslexia devoted newsletter so that you can find out all the awesome stuff that I have in store for you later this month. Okay, jumping into this week's episode, it was inspired by my nephew. And so this week's episode is called the importance of being a role model. So my nephew is an eighth grader. And he's a little quirky and happens to love gardening and plants and succulents and all sorts of nerdy plant like things. And so since he lives in an apartment not far from here, he has started riding his skateboard over and coming and hanging out with my mom in the garden. So I unexpectedly have a nephew hanging around the house some days. And he's made some comments lately, that really got me thinking. And one of them was about how he can create his own business someday, just like Andy did. And I just was dumbfounded, actually, I did wasn't trying to be a role model or anything. I was honestly just a burned out educator that couldn't handle the education system any longer, but wanted to keep helping kids and families. And my business was really because it started when I couldn't afford to pay my bills on my salary. So it was my side hustle. And then when I was in tears every day over how awful it was at the school, and how much my job was demanding while not paying me enough to pay all my bills every day. And so that's where my business came from. It wasn't actually to try to do anything inspirational, or I'd never dreamed of being an entrepreneur or anything like that it was purely a survival of the fittest. It was you find a way that makes you survive while doing what you love. And so I made a business of all the things that I love to do. And without me even realizing it, apparently, people were watching. And by people, I mean kids, since I started the business. And since I shifted it from being the part time thing I did after school to doing it all the time, my nephew and a few other kids have started making comments about how I'm my own boss, and how maybe they can have their own business someday. And my nephew was loving his plants and talking about how maybe he can have some sort of plant based business, whether it's gardening or landscaping. And so I've been talking to him about like, what kind of directions you can go in. And I love them, but he's also a little quirky. So he might be the kind of person that who actually does better working on his own than for somebody else. It's one of those things where you don't realize how much kids watch you. Kids often don't listen to what we tell them to do. But a lot of times they pay a lot of attention to what they see us do. And there's been a lot of things lately, that make me really proud of some of the clients that I work with, and just how important it is to be a role model for these kids. They don't do a good job of listening to us when we tell them something. But when they see us do it, they think they should do it too. Whether that's good or bad. Let's share some stories this week have some amazing role models. So while my nephew brought it up for me to be a role model for him, and then him and his sister talking about, you know, businesses they could create someday, which I thought was amazing. I've actually seen some amazing moms lately too, that I work with and I usually I work mostly with the kids, but I do you know some parent coaching, or I do the master classes and things like that. And so there are times where I work closely with the parents as well. And so these are are some inspiring stories of what I've seen lately. One mom, who I find to be an awesome role model is one who's doing everything to help her kid get just what she needs. This mom attended my masterclass live a couple of weeks ago. And she listened and took in the information I had to share about what you really look for in the kids curriculum to make sure it's really meeting their needs, and which things really aren't. And I was so excited to see an email in my inbox of a picture. It is a picture of the books that were sent home with their child. And she says, You know what, I think these are the books I'm not supposed to let her read, huh. I think we're completely undoing all the great work that you're doing in your sessions, by having her read these books. And I looked at the books, and they were the ones where this kiddo cannot even read a three or four letter word without some extra love and help. And they were the blustery wind blows in winter. And the pointy crocodile is able to jump on blah, blah, blah. Granted, those are not the exact sentences. But those are the level of difficulty that were in the books. And the kid was reading them by looking at the pictures. And never once looking at the words, the mom was realizing what I've been talking about all along, when she looked at those books closely and said, my kids not even reading the words. She's just looking at the pictures. And that's how she's quote unquote, reading. This is actually what we don't want her to do anymore. We want her to look at the words and be able to sound them out. And it's completely undoing what we've taught her to do. The mom was asking, should I pull her out of the intervention class that's teaching her to do this? And I said, Yes, please do. Because it is actually teaching horrible habits that take years to undo. Once the kids think that that's how good readers read by guessing and looking at the pictures. And I absolutely loved that this mom took new information, applied it and fought for her kid to get the services she deserves. And was asking if maybe we should just not do interventions unless you change the program you're going to use with my child. The next inspiring story is another mom and the dad that I work with who are fighting to make lasting changes for the kids that come after theirs. And maybe the couple of siblings that are on the way, I have been teaching two of their kids for the past year and a half. They got on my schedule, right as I expanded. So I've been able to work with them a couple days a week. And they are seeing just how much progress their kiddos have made. But not because of their schools. It is because of the way that I teach their kids differently that their school doesn't even have an offering for. I told them about sold a story, that amazing podcast that if you haven't listened to it yet, go do it. It's only like six episodes, which may now be seven or eight because they've gotten some bonus episodes because of how impactful it's been. Anyway, listening to that podcast, the mom and dad actually sent me a text message that says I'm so angry after listening to that podcast this week. And at first I thought they meant my podcast. And then I realized which podcasts I told them to listen to that wasn't mine. And they realized that we live in one of the most affluent places in the country, where I'm in the Bay Area in California, in case you didn't already know where I am. And yet we have some of the worst education systems. Because we have programs that don't teach kids how to read. And they're abysmal. And unless you were super severely in need in certain districts, you don't get any help at all. So these parents are now going as far as advocating to their school boards. I just got an email this week asking if I would give a statement to the local school board about, you know, kids with dyslexia and how much they need support and how much the district is not currently helping kids with dyslexia. I said yes, which I don't always have time to do these kinds of things. And in fact, I, I really don't have as much time as I probably should, like, be an advocate. But most of my day is helping the kids. But this one touches my heart because so many of the kids that I teach come from those, just that specific district. So many of the kids I work with actually come from two specific districts that do not help kids with dyslexia. It's really unfortunate. So I think it is amazing what role model parents, these parents are that not only are they making changes for their own kids to get help, but they're also making changes that they can try to help their district do better for all kids to get the support that they need. And that is so critical. Because not everyone can afford to go to a tutor like me. And some of these things just should be in place in a good school district. Dyslexia is the most common learning difference. And yet so many schools don't know how to help the kid with dyslexia, learn how to read, and that's not okay. So being a role model is sometimes doing something small in your everyday life and sometimes being a role model is fighting for change when you really need to.

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Another inspiring story is another mom that I've worked with for many, many years. And so when you work with a family for many, many years, you see the different family dynamic change between when kids are little when they get older and things like that. And there's one parent that I'd noticed things physically felt different when I saw them in recent months, and maybe even the last year or so. But it became really obvious this past month or two. And I couldn't quite put my finger on it, like what feels different. And then I realized it was that nobody was screaming. And this is a kind, loving family, but the way they dealt with problems was to screen. So what would happen if I tried to help the kiddo and something isn't going their way they would scream at me. And I had to change the way I work with them. And screaming is not allowed in my office, it's just not what we do, we're not going to do it that if I raise my voice, something's real bad. If I'm gonna raise my voice at you. One of the things I noticed is nobody has been yelling, the kids learn from what they see. So if a parent's reaction is to yell all the time, the kids reaction is going to be to yell all the time. One of the things that we can do to be a role model is notice when we're making mistakes, and to actively change them. Kids notice these things. As soon as the mom stopped raising her voice all the time, the kids stopped raising their voice all the time. And it's one of those things that you are really powerful without knowing your power. What you do matters, and kids watch what you do, and they mimic it for good or for bad. So this mom realized somewhere along the way, that yelling and screaming turned into yelling and screaming children. So when she handled things more calmly, the kids handled things more calmly. And we need to recognize our power to be amazing role models, the way we deal with problems is the way that kids learn to deal with them. There are a lot of things that I do in my office, because I know kids watch the way I do things. And sometimes there's things I do that I don't realize that I'm even doing. So for example, there's one little boy who was getting really anxious every time he had to do his progress monitoring with me, if you don't know what progress monitoring is, it's when you do frequent short check ins about testing the skills and what they can do. And it's how I decide if a child is able to move on to the next skill. Or if we're staying right where we're at. It takes like two minutes, no big deal. And there are no consequences of they get any wrong answers. And so one kiddo in particular was always really anxious. And I say, You know what, take a breath, you got this. And then now without me saying anything, he's now going to himself, I watch him physically take a breath and go, I got this. And then he does really good. And it's because he saw the way I showed him that we do this, like, it's alright, that you mimic what you show them. And when you tell them you have confidence in them, then they have confidence in themselves. Another thing that I tried to do to model things is to not pretend I know everything. I actually hate when people lie to kids and make up an answer, that's actually not the answer. Instead, we need to teach them that we don't always have all the answers, but we can look them up. And when kids are looking at something or they read a word, or they have a question for me, and I don't know the answer, they've now learned the answer for that I will give them is finished what you're doing. And I'll tell you the answer when we're done. And I'll look it up while you're finishing XYZ. So if they're reading a list of words, and there's a vocabulary word that sometimes I know what it means, but don't explain it to them. And so I'll look it up and find a kid friendly definition, or is we're doing talk about morphology, they're like, wait a minute, that doesn't match the morphology rules we learned. Can you tell me like why this word doesn't sound the same? Like Object? Object means to throw? But object doesn't mean you're throwing anything necessarily. And so that's when I will perfectly clearly answer them go, I don't know, I'll look it up, you finish doing reading your sentence or whatever it is, I want them to finish doing. And I'll look it up but etymology online and show them you know, here's why this word is done this way, and why it doesn't match the normal morphology of this kind of word. I don't pretend to know everything. And that's really powerful for kids to know. I have one kiddo that when she's working now, she will suddenly stop talking. And then I'll realize that if she had a question about something she's going and looking it up, I couldn't answer a question about something. So she wouldn't looked at the answer and found the answer in the middle of our session. Because she's learned that we don't always have the answers, but we can find them. And that's important for kids to know, we are not these magical, all knowing beings that make no mistakes. We all make mistakes. We all learn from them. We don't all know everything. But we can find out the information because of the wonderful world of Google, we need to recognize that being a role model is showing our kids our flaws. It is showing them like I tried doing this and I totally failed. It was a disaster. And letting them know that that happened. Sometimes I was like, Well, looks like I'm gonna redo that one that was a mess. And letting the kids see SPMs and letting them see us how we handle it appropriately. We think that we have to be perfect for the kids or pretend like we know stuff when really that's not our jobs. Our jobs is to help the kids in the real A world and what will it really be like for them? They aren't always going to know the answer. So then what do they do? They are going to fail. So then what are they going to do? They are going to try something and then screw it up, then what are they going to do? Our job, whether you're a parent or an educator, or both, is to be a role model and show them that we are not perfect. We don't know everything, and we do screw up. But the answer is not to be perfect. It's to show them how to be imperfect, and be a good person anyway. Our job is to show them that it isn't easy, and you will mess up a few times. I've totally told my kids in my office, because I'll be perfectly honest with you if you're making it this far into this week's episode. Since it's longer than normal. I didn't sell as many online courses as I was really hoping for. I have no idea what I'm doing with selling online courses. No idea. I'll admit it to you guys. I'm very good at teaching. I'm very good at parent education classes. I'm very good at teacher education classes. I am terrible at email marketing. I am terrible at you know, being a salesman, because that's not my job. My job is to help kids and families. I will tell the kids when I have this major plan for something to go awesome. And it definitely did not. And I will tell them, Oh, well, no big deal. I'll try something new next time. And the kids really appreciate it. They ask thoughtful questions. And I tell them like I don't know what I'm doing. It's okay, I teach enough of you guys. Like it's my fun little side project that I do to help everybody else. It's something that you don't realize how powerful it is for kids to see, you fail. Just as much as it's important for kids to see you advocate. And it's important for kids to see how you handle frustration, and what they should do when they handle frustration. We need kids to see us being great role models for what it looks like to fight for them. We need kids to see us being great role models for what to do when we screw up. We need kids to see us know how to not know everything. We need kids to see us fail and pick ourselves back up and try again. Role models are what make our kids be powerful adults. Because if we solve every problem for them, if we pretend we know everything, they learn nothing. Thank you so much for joining me this week. I hope you go out there and be a role model for the kids in your life. And don't forget, sign up at Parnello education.com forward slash email to get on the dyslexia decoded newsletter to hear all of the fantastic things I have coming for you later this month. That's all for say thank you for hanging around for longer episode than normal. See you next time.

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Thanks for tuning in to today's episode. If you want to learn even more about dyslexia, check out Parnello education.com forward slash courses. See you next time.