Welcome to KindlED

In our very first episode of The KindlED Podcast, Kaity and Adriane introduce themselves and set the stage for an exciting journey into the science of relationship-building and empowering young learners. 

They share personal stories, discuss the importance of connection in educational environments, and explore the transformative power of understanding and supporting neurodivergent children. Through their own experiences as parents and educators, Kaity and Adriane dive into the significance of creating individualized learning paths and fostering intrinsic motivation in kids. 

This episode also introduces the mission behind KindlED, offering practical insights and evidence-based tools to help adults kindle curiosity, motivation, and well-being in the young people in their lives.

Relevant links:

• The New Strong-Willed Child by James C. Dobson. 
• Easy to Love, Difficult to Discipline: The 7 Basic Skills for Turning Conflict into Cooperation by Becky A Bailey.
• KindlED Empowerment Hub
• Conscious Discipline
• Raising Kids With Purpose
• The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind by Daniel J. Siegel M.D. and Tina Payne Bryson. 
• Dr. Dan Siegel’s website
• Join The KindlED Collective FB group
• Subscribe to The Sunday Spark Newsletter
• Check out our video series, KindlED Concepts
• Prenda's Instagram

Transcript

Hi, it's me, Kaity, and me, Adriane, and you're listening to KindlED, a podcast where we dig into the science behind building relationships and environments that help kids unlock their full potential and become empowered learners. Together, we'll discover evidence-based tools and methods that will enable you to better kindle the curiosity, motivation, and well-being of the young people in your life.

Thank you, hello, and welcome to the very first episode of KindlED. We're so excited to be here with you, and we can't wait to jump into all of the exciting things we're going to learn and discover together. I know we have so much to share and learn. I cannot wait. But Kaity, can I share something that's going on in my house right now?

Yes, please do.

Okay, so do your kids play any instruments or take any lessons?

Yeah, they attempt to play the piano, and my son is trying to learn guitar on and off.

Oh, that's super cool. And how's it going?

Good. He's pretty driven to do it, but it kind of starts and stops a lot, so we're just being supportive and seeing how it goes.

Well, that's exactly what's been going on in my house. I have a kiddo who I heard this phrase on a podcast, and it totally fits him, so I'm kind of just going with it, but he's a spectrumy, gifted kid. Because of that, he cannot go to traditional school. We've tried lots of different options, so he is home-educated, and we have private teachers and tutors at home, including a piano teacher.

Kaity, this guy will not let him quit. It's amazing. We started back in August or September, and he quickly started learning so fast because he was practicing all day, every day, on his own. If you talked to him about it, he would say, "I hate piano. I don't like this." So, we just didn't say anything, didn't tell him to practice, just let him do his own thing. His teacher would come every week. He even went to his recital and completely blew everyone away with how fast he learned. Then we had a couple of weeks off, and with kids like him, it's hard—you know, if the routine gets disrupted, then he just decided he didn't want his teacher to come anymore. I know, right? But his teacher is like, "Nope, I'm still coming." So, I reached out to him and told him, "I don't know what to do. He doesn't want to work on this music anymore. He's just very discouraged." His teacher was at my house within an hour. He didn’t bring music with him; all he did was sit at my kitchen table with my son, and they drew pictures of Link, which is from Zelda. That’s what my son is really into right now. He gets hyper-focused on things, and he doesn't really play the video game because it dysregulates him, but he has read everything about Link, Zelda, and this whole world. He'd probably be upset that I don't know all the details of all the things he's been learning, doing crafts, and drawing pictures. His music teacher is also an art teacher, so they sat and just talked for an hour and connected. The next day, he came for his lesson and said, "You know what, we're not going to do any of the lessons I had planned for you. Let's get some Zelda music." My son was like, "Okay." So, he rewrote Zelda's Lullaby for my son at his level. Isn’t that amazing?

That is really cool.

It's so awesome. I wish I could say, "Yeah, and then it was all great, and he practices every day, and it's amazing," but we keep going on this back-and-forth journey. That's part of it too, and his teacher just keeps showing up and is totally open and willing to meet him wherever he is.

That's incredible and such a good example of the power of being the kind of adult that understands how to give kids space when they need it, how to approach problems from a variety of interests, and really try to engage him at an individual level. He could have easily just persisted with his lesson plan, but he was flexible and really met him where he was. I just love that.

Yeah, I love that he wasn't forcing him into a box that he clearly doesn't fit into, which the rest of the world really tries to do. It's pretty amazing and encouraging, and it was helpful for me because sometimes I try to force my child into that box without realizing it.

Totally, we all do that sometimes.

For sure, absolutely. Okay, are you ready to jump into this podcast?

Yeah, let's intro the podcast. So first, some background for our listeners. KindlED is a podcast that's powered by Prenda. Prenda is a company that makes it easy for any inspiring and caring adult to start a microschool, which is a group of five to ten learners meeting in an informal space, doing all sorts of awesome educational things with the goal of really empowering those learners to love learning, discover their own passions and curiosities, and develop the skills and knowledge they need to go out into the real world and execute on those big dreams and ideas.

Over the last five years, Prenda has helped thousands of kids come on this journey of being kind of disengaged to really finding their own drive and becoming what we call empowered learners. Along the way, we've helped thousands of adults learn how to kindle a student's love of learning. With this podcast, we want to share what we've learned through all of our experience and research, and we also want to continue our learning alongside you by talking to people who understand the science behind things like motivation, student autonomy, relationship-building, learning, and behavior.

We're also going to talk to inspiring folks who are making a big difference in education and parenting. Some episodes will be Kaity and I going really deep on some awesome topics that we love to nerd out on, and in others, we'll be interviewing guests. Along the way, we'll share our own personal stories and experiences as well as take questions from listeners and help coach you through some of those struggles and challenges.

That's right. So, this podcast might be powered by Prenda, but it's meant to help anyone who interacts with young people. If you're a parent, teacher, coach, educational entrepreneur, administrator, Girl Scout leader, community leader—anything—there's definitely something here for you.

I'm so excited, but I have to ask, what's with the name KindlED, Kaity?

Yeah, that's a great question. It's kind of a funny name, and it's inspired by this old Plutarch quote: "The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled." Over at Prenda, we are big believers in the idea that learning is a natural human interest and also a skill.

Learning is a skill, but lots of educational systems and the way we treat kids in general these days actually diminish their natural curiosity and drive, and their ability to become passionate, capable people. That's not what we want, right?

No, that's not what we want. We really want kids to be curious, motivated, and intrinsically engaged. We say that we want them to be lifelong learners, but the world we've created for them and the culture in our classrooms and homes don't always support this. So, what we're doing is we're on a mission to inspire and equip as many adults as we can with the knowledge and skills to really be able to support kids on this journey—to know how to kindle the fire within our students and our children.

100%, I couldn't agree more. Can I share a few of my favorite definitions of the word kindle?

Yeah, I didn't even look it up. Of course, you would look it up, I love it.

I love it. Obviously, it means to start burning, right? But it also means to stir up, to cause to glow, or to fuel. Isn't that interesting?

That's very interesting. It's exactly what we're trying to do, right?

Totally. That's why we're calling this podcast KindlED, and if you're seeing the name KindlED, you'll notice that the "ED" is emphasized to highlight the tie-in between our work and the education space. But it's not just education—it also bleeds over into any circumstance where you're interacting with young people.

Okay, I think that's a pretty good explanation of what we're doing here. Do you have anything else to add?

No, I'm so excited to dive into these topics.

Okay, me too. So next, since you guys are going to be listening to Adriane and I chat so much, we're going to take a few minutes to just introduce ourselves and tell you about why we're so passionate about this mission that we're on. Adriane, I'm going to have you go first. I'd love it if you would just tell us about your background, any relevant experiences that have brought you here, and why you are so excited about helping adults understand how to become someone who knows how to kindle this love of learning, curiosity, and motivation in kids.

Yes, thank you, Kaity. This is part of a journey, right? We are always learning, growing, and discovering how to kindle and add to the big fires in our kids. I am a mom to three boys, and they're ages 13, 10, and 6. I'm a wife, daughter, friend, and I've always been interested in human behavior. I remember reading a book about genomes in ninth grade and being so excited, but when I went to my friends, I quickly put it in my backpack because they looked at me like I was crazy. I've always had this fascination with why we behave a certain way.

You can't be caught learning stuff at school—that's not cool.

Exactly! And looking back, I wonder why I didn’t go into the field of psychology or sociology or something like that. Honestly, it’s because I didn’t feel smart. I had straight A’s, which is interesting, but I always just thought, "Oh, I just worked really, really hard and had to work way harder than anyone else." But I did not do well on standardized tests, which in my mind equaled "I am dumb." Now, I'm like, "Oh my gosh, growth mindset, neuroplasticity—my brain's always growing!" But those things just weren't available to me in my youth, right?

No, but they are now.

So, I feel like I've rekindled my own fire to learn everything I can about the brain and about my own kids. When I had my first son, I had all these ideas about how parenting was going to be. I read all the books and thought, "If you do this, the child will behave this way." I would go to mom groups, and they would just talk about 1-2-3 Magic, positive discipline, and all these things. "If we do this, our child will behave this way," and everything was all about behavior. My child did not behave in those ways. I remember when he was about two and a half—yeah, he was probably about two—he would literally run into the living room and slam himself into the wall, trying to knock himself out.

Oh my goodness.

I had no idea what to do. I thought I was a terrible mom because he wasn’t behaving in the way I wanted, and what I was doing wasn't working. I remember asking his daycare providers, "He's running into walls; I don’t know what to do." Do you know what they told me? They said, "Well, don’t let him do it."

Oh my goodness. That's maybe not the most helpful response. What do you wish they would have asked or suggested?

I wish they would have asked, "Why? Why is he doing that?" Because now we know he's neurodivergent. What neurodivergence means is that his brain functions and behaviors are wired differently. He has ADHD and he's gifted. My other two kids also probably have lots of different labels we could apply, but like I said, spectrumy, gifted—they just think and experience the world differently than neurotypical kids. Because of that, I really started diving into learning about the brain. The very first book I read was called The Whole-Brain Child by Dr. Dan Siegel and Dr. Tina Payne Bryson. They have a ton of books I highly recommend. That was it for me—I was so excited. I thought, "Oh my gosh, this is it! It's not about the end result of the behavior but about understanding why he's doing it and connecting on that neurological level." I started to understand where my kids are in their nervous systems, and because they're neurodivergent, they behave in much bigger ways—they're way more intense. What I learned is that, as you can see how animated and intense I am, I’m neurodivergent too. It just felt like, "Oh my gosh, someone understands me!"

So then I had all of these ideas and all of this knowledge inside my brain that I wanted to get out. I started a blog called Raising Kids with Purpose and began connecting with parents. I then became a parent coach, and with my kids' educational journey, they started in a traditional school. My husband and I didn't really know of any other options in our area, and we were both traditionally educated, so we thought, "Well, this is the way." The school my oldest went to—remember, the kid running into walls to get proprioceptive input?—he was being forced to sit with his feet flat on the floor and his hands folded on his desk for hours a day. Well, it didn’t go so well. So eventually, we found Prenda, and they went to microschool. We just didn’t turn back. We've had different educational environments since then. All three of my kids go to three different kinds of schools that work best for them, and it’s really a whole-child approach.

That's awesome. So I have a few questions for you. What would you say, in all of the educational environments your kids have been in, are some of the key factors that have created an environment where your kids could learn and be successful?

Connection, honestly. Having an adult not care about the behavior, like I was talking about, but really understanding why they’re behaving that way and connecting. Even in the traditional school, my oldest had a teacher in second grade who was phenomenal at this. Talking to other parents whose kids were constantly losing recess, constantly getting in trouble, being punished—and the behaviors weren’t changing—they would say, "Oh my gosh, we never get emails from her. I don't even know what's going on." Walking into her classroom, she just had this magic I can’t even explain. She really got to know the kids and who they were. In the educational environments they're in now, we have one kid in a hybrid school, one in a Montessori, and one home-educated. In all three environments, there are adults who truly know who my kids are and really understand them. Because they’re able to connect with them on that level, they’ve really been able to learn and grow because their brains are safer.

Something you said that really stood out to me was that it wasn't necessarily the educational environment—your example was from just a traditional classroom, right? It was the nature of the relationship that really determined the quality and your child's ability to learn and feel safe there. I think what I learned from that example is that the ideas, principles, science, and art of kindling are not specific to a location. You can take these ideas and apply them if you're a soccer coach, a traditional classroom teacher, a principal, a microschool leader, or if you've started your own school—they're just so transferable. That’s one of the main reasons we wanted to focus on all this because there’s so much great stuff out there that we can learn and apply, and we can affect millions and millions of kids simply by changing the way the adults in their lives interact with them. We don't have to change the whole learning environment or anything; it's really about this adult-child relationship.

It’s a big paradigm shift because our culture is baked in this power-over, do-as-I-say, adultism, and we're realizing how detrimental that is to development—especially when those children become adults and we look at the mental health crisis. What we're doing here is super important to really help people understand that this kindling we’re talking about is not just, "Oh, let's go kindle," but it's really impactful and transformative.

100%. Okay, so I have one more follow-up question. It looks like you are so motivated to help people understand these ideas. You’re a parenting coach, you’re constantly learning—so I’m wondering, where is this passion coming from? Why do you want to work so hard to help people understand these things?

I think part of it, honestly, is my OCD. I do have clinical OCD—I don’t just say "I’m OCD," and I like to feed that. But then also, I probably have OCD because of my childhood. My first five years of life were very tumultuous. My parents worked all the time, and we were left alone a lot. I wasn’t parented in this connective way. Honestly, when I moved in with my dad when I was about five or six, he worked all the time and didn’t have these tools and this knowledge. What's amazing to me now is that my dad is in his 60s, and he's helping raise my sister's baby. She works, so he is the full-time caregiver. He’s reading all the books, watching videos by psychologists, and relearning how to be this kind of parent. It would have been great to have that, but honestly, it was part of my journey.

So true. And all of the research and science behind all this stuff has really only come into the main social sphere or understanding with the advent of functional MRIs and neuroscience. A lot of us in this generation, who are now parenting young children, weren’t raised by people who had access to this information. No one knew.

Something else that’s really important to hammer home here is that as we go through this journey of learning, we do not want to cause any sort of shame. We want to approach learning from a place of radical self-compassion and just understand that when we know better, we can do better and move on. We don’t have to wallow in our mistakes, as I like to sometimes do. The goal here, again, is not to have a shame-fest at all. It's just to understand, do better, move forward, and not to overwhelm you with all of the neuroscience and jargon, but really break it down and give you practical ways to apply this in your home, your classrooms, your team, on the field—wherever you interact with kids.

Absolutely, absolutely. Okay, Kaity, it’s your turn. I can’t wait to hear your story. Can you please share with us your story?

Sure, yeah. I have four kids: a three-year-old, a six-year-old, an eight-year-old, and a ten-year-old. It’s hard to keep track because in a few months, we’ll just be on all the evens—it’ll be like four, six, eight, ten—but the three really throws me off. It’ll be easier later.

Okay, so I’m a mom, and before I was a mom, I was a speech-language pathologist. I went to grad school and thought I was going to spend my whole life in an elementary school, helping little kids learn how not to lisp, how to say their R’s, not stutter, and all of these fun language things. I started as a speech-language pathologist in the schools, and there were lots of really good things going on, but then there were also some things that made me scratch my head a little bit, which we’ll get into along the way, I’m sure. Essentially, I only spent a very short amount of time in schools before I decided to make a career shift out of school-based speech-language pathology and into the medical world. Instead of working with young people at the beginning of their life careers, I started working with stroke victims who had neurological damage to the language centers of their brains.

It was an interesting switch to see the beginning of life and closer to the end of life, working with elderly people, and I just learned so much from that pendulum shift. What I noticed, my big takeaway, was that as a speech-language pathologist in schools, ninety percent of my time was spent bribing kids to do things. "What sticker will you work for? What kind of candy? What kind of game can I turn this work into so that you want to participate?" When I was working with stroke victims, they were paying lots of money to talk to me. They were asking me for extra homework, and when I would walk down the hall in the hospital, they would call out to me, "Kaity, do you have five minutes? Can you just come work with me for five minutes?" They were so motivated to get better. All of this was happening while I was pregnant with my first child. I had my baby and started wondering what I was going to do for my kids and their educational journey because I wanted them to—no one ever complains about a three- or four-year-old not being curious enough, right? It’s the opposite—"Will you stop asking me questions?" The curiosity is at level 11. But then, if you look at the studies, that tapers off pretty quickly as soon as kids start going to school, and I didn’t want that to happen to my kids. I started doing all of this research into the psychology of motivation, education, and the history of education.

Once my oldest was getting closer to being school-aged, I had three more kids by then, so I had a busy, full house. I decided to homeschool. Through that journey, I discovered all sorts of different pedagogies and approaches to education and saw that there were lots of different ways to do things. There’s not one right answer; there’s not one right fit. Somewhere along the way, I ran into Kelly Smith, who was the founder and CEO of Prenda. When I met him, this was 2018, five years ago, he had six kids in a microschool. He had just pulled his kids out of traditional school, and a few of the neighborhood kids came along to try this microschool with him. I met him and quickly just knew that I was supposed to spend all of my energy getting micro schools up and running because I saw the power of what we’ve been talking about—this connection and the greater levels of autonomy you can have in a smaller group. The motivation—that was kind of the core of what I had noticed in the schools versus working with stroke victims, the motivation factor. I saw how a microschool solved a lot of those problems. As a homeschooler, I felt very isolated and like I needed more support. I was struggling, feeling like I could teach my kids, but I needed them to be away from me sometimes, but not too much. When I was working in the schools, it’s just so easy to get lost in a big sea of kids, so this was such a healthy hybrid in my view. I just dove in, and for the last five years, I’ve been working to build a learning system that is really built on all of this science and research around autonomy, connection, ownership, and personalization—all of these things that we know from the research to be educational and relational best practices but aren’t really happening in our homes or in our classrooms.

As you're talking, I was thinking, "What questions could I even ask her?" Then you would just start answering the questions I had in my head. That was so rich and so good. What I'm hearing too is that what's powerful is the individualization versus just the group dynamics or teaching to all because we're all so unique. Even with the neurodivergent movement, they're realizing more and more people—well, we're all in a way neurodivergent—we're all so unique and different from each other, but we've been trying to put us all into one box. It just doesn't work. Individualization was definitely coming up for me as you were talking. How do you think you got to this place? What's that inner fire that's driving you?

Totally. I was raised—I’m the youngest in my family, and I had lots of siblings. Some of those siblings did wonderfully well in school, and others did not. They will remain nameless. But I saw how differently my parents treated those who succeeded academically and those who did not. I was just kind of middle of the road. I wasn’t a genius; I wasn’t some savant. I didn't even notice that.

That's pretty insightful, I have to say.

Yeah. The other thing about my home is, while it was definitely a very safe place—I had wonderful parents and a good family, and I’m so grateful for that—there were these very subtle undertones of culture that were very instructive to me at a pretty subconscious level. We were not a very emotional family, not very connective. We weren’t hugging and saying, "I love you" all the time. In fact, we did not ever say, "I love you." It was just not in our family vocabulary. Not at all. So I could feel it, knowing how important that is up here, but then also feeling how important that is. There are lots of different ways to show love, right? I felt cared for; I felt provided for. It was just not a verbal affirmation that I was loved.

I had this experience—like I said, I wasn’t a genius, and I never got straight A’s. I was always just like a B-plus kid, you know? I was almost there, really close.

Close enough to be loved.

Then I had this experience where I got straight A’s, finally, and told my dad. He said, "That’s excellent. I love you." I was like, "Oh my gosh, that was the ticket the whole time—getting straight A’s." He needed this academic perfection in order to bequeath his love verbally. The sad thing about this is that I was a junior in college. I had to wait my entire life to hear those words because I could not manage to get straight A’s. I probably could have, but I didn’t care about getting all the points. I loved learning; I was very curious and hardworking, but I didn’t care about getting all the points—playing the game of school enough to get the A.

It was all about the game. I had to undo some of the perfectionism, people-pleasing, and all the things because I was all about the points.

Absolutely. It’s hard not to, and that’s the only thing that’s given to kids, right? It’s so pervasive. I was thinking about this a while ago—it’s literally like if you think about all of the different mechanisms we use to control kids, it’s just like cause-and-effect pinball. They wake up, and they’re just bouncing from different little cause-and-effects and control mechanisms in their life until they go to sleep. They don’t have a lot of time to just be loved, accepted, and feel grounded.

So many of those are demands. With my one son, he has pathological demand avoidance, so every single one of those pings sends him into fight or flight. For him, it’s fight. Now that we understand, okay, let’s help him get out of this pinball machine. Like you said, it doesn’t take a whole lot—just presence, really.

As I started having little kids, I thought, "Okay, how do I be different?" It’s so subconsciously programmed into me, this—I started calling it merit-based love—where I just could not allow myself to love my kids completely. I mean, we all say we love our kids unconditionally, but when it really comes down to it, there are some subtle things internally where you’re like, "I wish you were doing these other things, and then it would be really easy to be excited, proud of you, and tell the neighbors about you." That’s really how our kids internalize or perceive our love. I got this book in the mail one day. I had three little kids at this time, and I was just so tired and busy, trying really hard to be a good mom and conquer all of these subconscious things we’ve talked about. I had a little boy who was just not attached to me. It’s understandable because him and his older brother are very close together, so when he was born, I still had an 18-month-old. I would nurse him and then give him to his dad, and he formed this really beautiful attachment with his dad, which is awesome, but he would tell me things like, "I have one million hugs in me for Dad, and I have zero hugs in me for you."

That was not my favorite because I was the one doing all the work all day long to take care of him.

You deserve those hugs! That’s like the currency of motherhood.

Yes! I got this book in the mail randomly. It was Becky Bailey’s Easy to Love, Difficult to Discipline. It was an old, used copy. I had no idea who sent it to me. I called my mom—sometimes she sends me random books. She said, "I’ve never heard of that book. It’s not me." It just looked and felt like a mistake. I literally had this moment where I was hovering over the garbage can, about to throw this weird book away.

Oh my gosh!

But something told me, "Don’t throw that book away." Have you heard of Becky Bailey before?

Never.

Oh my gosh! Never heard of anything. I was just in my—I think the last parenting book I had read was Parenting a Strong-Willed Child, which is all about very structured cause-and-effect consequences. That’s where I was at in my parenting journey. I just put it on the shelf. Then, a year later, I didn’t have anything to read, so I pulled it out and started reading. It changed my life. It was mind-blowing. It referenced lots of different books in there, and I just went on this little train of finding out all of this other—

Isn’t it amazing? Once you start, you can’t stop.

Oh my gosh, I know! I’ve had lots of those moments too. It’s incredible. I know exactly what you’re describing. I can feel it in my body right now.

Totally! Having not had these things and then learning about them, seeing the power of these ideas, principles, and ways of being in my own life—it’s been healing for me as a person. It’s been wonderful to be able to know how to create a culture of connection, intrinsic motivation, and responsibility in my kids because I didn’t have that. I didn’t know the path, and I didn’t have the skills. Through all this learning, I feel very inspired and very equipped to create this for my own family, and now, as a parenting coach, to help others do the same.

That’s amazing! You’re taking your healing, and it’s transferring to other people, saying, "Hey, come along on this journey, and we’ll see transformation together." That is so beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing.

It’s just a pleasure to be here with you. I’m so happy that we’re doing this project together.

I am too! We’re going to learn so much.

That’s it for today. We hope you’ve enjoyed the very first episode of KindlED. On the next episode, Adriane and I are going to do our first topic, deep dive, so you’re not going to want to miss it.

We have some reminders to share with you. First, we want to encourage you to subscribe to KindlED wherever you get your podcasts. Leave us a review, rate us, and share our episode on social media. Tag us at @prendalearn. For more KindlED content, head over to prenda.com/resources and subscribe to the KindlED newsletter.

Second, we’d love to invite you to submit questions or challenges you’re having via email. All you need to do is email podcast@prenda.com. If you have any struggles or challenges that you’d love for Kaity and me to address, we’ll help coach you through it. We also have a ton of resources, as we’ve been describing, all the books and different things that we have learned along our journey that we would love to share with you.

Thanks for listening, and remember to keep kindling!