Episode Details

In this episode, Jill Barnett Kaufman tells us all about the courses she provides for continuing education. Her latest course is on how parents can redirect children's behavior. Jill describes the four reasons a child may be misbehaving and the ways we can identify these behaviors. Plus, Jill explains all the different niches she has been part of including parenting classes, court-ordered co-parenting classes, and her upcoming course on thriving through a divorce.

Jill Barnett Kaufman is an experienced therapist, a certified Parent Educator, and a Certified Divorce Mediator. She provides divorce counseling, couples counseling, co-parenting counseling, family counseling, and divorce mediation.

She recently co-authored an online training for therapists entitled "Redirecting Children's Behavior Training for Therapists" which has been approved for 6 CEUs through NASW. She is the mother of three adult children and is committed to helping raise a generation of children who have high self-esteem and a well-developed sense of responsibility for themselves and their community.

Jill researched her course, Redirecting Children's Behavior Training for Therapists, and the specifics on getting approval from the Continuing Education Unit (CEU). Everything we do as therapists requires a lot of steps, and you need to jump through numerous hoops to accomplish it. It's a fifteen-hour course, not all of it is necessary for therapists. Jill took the parts that she thinks therapists would need to know. Currently, it is six hours of classroom time and is available for people to take. Jill uses Teachable, it's a straightforward platform with an excellent sales page, and everything is automated.

Parents look at a child when they misbehave as being bad. Jill's course, Redirecting Children's Behavior Training for Therapists, will teach you how to look at a child as being discouraged instead of bad. Jill teaches therapists on the varying ways to encourage the child, so you're not disciplining or punishing. Instead, you're looking for positive ways to discipline so they are learning while understanding what they did was unacceptable.

There are four goals of a misbehaving child:

1. Attention
2. Power
3. Revenge
4. Avoidance

You discipline the child differently depending on the intention of the child. You find out the goal of the child by analyzing the way you are feeling. If you are feeling irritated, their goal is attention. If you are feeling angry, their goal is power. If you're feeling hurt their goal is revenge. If you are feeling pity for the child, then their goal is an avoidance.

You need to involve the parents to give them the proper skills to parent their child. Therapists can develop a niche working with children and will want to have a session or two with their parents. You can also go to schools – Jill has done training for teachers and parents at schools. This helped Jill get her name out into the community. Now, Jill has people contacting her consistently because her name is out there as a parenting