Robert: Is your child generally living a sedentary lifestyle? Do they hate physical activity, choosing to spend their days in the house on the computer or glued to the couch? Is their only exercise getting up to get something to eat from the fridge or to go find a charger for the phone. Well, we’ll be discussing how to get your kids up and out and hopefully excited about exercise and activity today on Just Seven Steps. 

Intro: Welcome to the Just Seven Steps podcast with Robert Schramm, a board-certified behavior analyst, educator, author and developer of the Seven Steps to Successful Parenting. For more than 20 years, Robert has been teaching parents and professionals how to support children and developing the values and priorities necessary to live a successful life. In this podcast, you’ll hear from some of the biggest experts in the fields of education, parenting and behavior analysis. So buckle in and get ready for a wild ride where you’ll learn to be your best in just seven steps. 

Robert: Congratulations. You’ve done it. You found us here at the Just Seven Steps podcast. I am Robert Schramm, the behavior analyst, education specialist, author and dad. And I’m also the developer of the Seven Steps to Instruction on Motivation. Each week, I will provide you with helpful information based on the Just Seven Steps approach. So if you haven’t already subscribed to my YouTube channel, please take a second to help us out. You will certainly be glad that you did. And whether you’re a parent looking to help your child live their best life, or a professional charged with the education of children with or without disabilities, you will find a ton of help and information here, all filtered through just seven steps. In today’s episode, we will be discussing one of the biggest concerns I hear from parents on a regular basis. This concern relates to kids who are not physically active and whose interests are all more sedentary in nature and often indoors only. It’s not uncommon for me to be asked by a parent to help build a little more activity into their child’s daily schedule. But as we know, you can’t just for someone to do something they don’t enjoy and expect them to do it without question, complaint or hassle. Like everything we do here at just seven steps, we’re going to have to find a way to help children who often are quite active, averse, to want to engage in these activities and to find ways to help them become more comfortable with the activities over time and hopefully find a few ways that they’ll want to continue those activities on their own. When we’re no longer there in the background, continuing to motivate it. So if our goal is to find a way so that a child wants to do something that we want them to do, we have to invest some time in looking into the child’s current interests and see if there’s anything that we can incorporate those interests into to create new activities that would meet our goals. For example, if we have a child who loves Disney characters, is there a way that we can design a fun scavenger hunt or other walking activity that includes looking for Disney characters or toys? If your child’s into Magic, The Gathering Cards or Pokemon. Is there some sort of activity that might be of interest there? Pokémon Go is a great way for you to get your child out of the house searching for Pokémon and they can capture live action. Role playing is something that might be popular in your area. This is an outdoor activity where people dress up as characters and they relive or re-imagined battles, magic battles that they can have. If your child is into Minecraft or Roblox, can you hide Minecraft dollars or Roblox cards or even tokens that you create that can be turned in for these special dollars along a walking path or out in your yard? If your child is not into sports like basketball, baseball or football, might there be another sport that they’ve never tried that could be of more interest? Kids who don’t throw balls well might be able to throw a Frisbee disc or kick a soccer ball or hit a golf ball. If so, disc golf or regular golf at the driving range could be an activity that might be of interest to them. Any kind of treasure hunt where the items found could be a value to your child or used to earn things that are of value to them would be a game or activity that you could encourage them to play. Let’s see, what else does your child like to swim or where they run and laugh whenever there’s water involved in a game? If so, a pool or a water balloon fights running through the sprinkler or even soap bubbles might be an option. How about kids who like swings or slides? Can we walk to the park to use those items? Is a trampoline a motivator? What can be more physical than jumping on a trampoline? Even if your child’s only interested in finding the favorite foods, can you set it up so that you have to walk to the store or to the restaurant to get those items that they want rather than driving there? What about dancing to music? This can be done in the kitchen, the bedroom, the backyard, or anywhere that you can get music playing. And if your child’s interested. Can you focus some kind of a dance class? Anything from hip hop to ballroom to swing to breakdancing is going to have value. Some children may not like physical activity, but they may be enamored by science. There’s likely a ton of science experiments you can do and organized that include walking to locate items such as leaves or bugs. Might they be motivated by bird or squirrel watching? Or building rockets that shoot up into the air. But they need to be pumped up and then chased after for physical activity. Paper or Styrofoam airplanes are also sometimes of great interest to kids who might otherwise avoid physical activity. Chasing down and picking up and throwing the airplanes is a great way to get some physical exercise in while enjoying the science of aeronautics. Some kids who are not very active might have a strong affinity for pets. Can you bring an animal into the home or find someone’s pet that you can help to walk or to throw a ball with? You can find. Even finding horses to go to and to brush and to walk might be a way to get your child involved in outdoor activities. And these are really just some of the ideas that are coming off the top of my head. I’m betting with time and knowing your kids interests, you can likely come up with many more. But creatively, coming up with outdoor, more physical type activities based directly on your child’s indoor interests is really only the first step in the process. Additionally, we can consider using additional unrelated motivators to build a desire to try things that might otherwise not be of interest to your child. 

Robert: For example, with many kids, I like to build out a daily schedule that incorporates all of the main daily expectations a parent might have for their child during a typical day. Then we look at all forms of reinforcement the family will have to work with throughout that entire day, and we begin to organize a schedule that has enough reinforcement available to motivate and reinforce all of those daily expectations. And if we’re to consider a physical outdoor activity as an important expectation, we’ll want to incentivize it within that daily schedule. It might look like expecting a bike ride or walking the dog, or 15 minutes of basketball in the driveway with a sibling. As part of those expectations. That would lead to reinforcing opportunities like Minecraft or TV time or a special treat as part of their after school snack. If you decide to try some of those preferred activities to a token system, meaning the amount of those activities they can have each day is determined by the number of tokens they earn throughout the day. Then you can incentivize outdoor activities by offering a large number of tokens for these activities. This way, when your child is planning out their day and they know they’re going to want to have an hour or so on the computer, then they know they’re going to have to earn at least 30 tokens because perhaps tokens are worth 2 minutes of computer time each. Then you can offer 2 to 3 tokens for doing tasks like washing your hands or brushing your teeth or making your bed. But you can have an opportunity for 15 tokens to be earned by choosing an outdoor activity, either alone or with a friend. And different outdoor activities can have different earned values as well. So you can incentivize a game or social event with more tokens. Then you get a solo activity, like going for a walk. If you’re going to use some kind of token economy, please make sure that you have seen my presentations on tokens. It’s very important that tokens are done the right way, and there really are so many ways that you can do tokens incorrectly. They’re designed to offer opportunities to earn small amounts of a future reinforcer and should not ever be used as a punisher. You shouldn’t be threatening to take tokens away when you don’t like a behavior you’re seeing. Your child either earns the tokens or they don’t. But once they do earn those tokens, they should be there to spend on promise reinforcement. Certainly. Check out my website just seven steps dot com for more information on my courses, including everything you need to know about token plans. Remember, the plan here is not to make your child do the activities that you want them to do, but to set up an environment where they see choosing to do an outdoor activity as worth their time and effort and are then willing to participate in it based on how it makes their life better. So it’s not about saying you have to go do this. And it’s not about forcing them or pushing them or nagging them. It’s about saying, here are your options for today. You can choose to do this and then have access to these things. Or you can choose to do that and then have access to something that we know is less rewarding. Then we let the pull of those two motivators do the work for you, so you never have to get upset or worried or nag them or even remind them. They just know that if they want to watch that movie with you, or if they want to have the amount of computer time that they desire, they’re going to need to choose from their list of pre-approved outdoor activities. And then we can just make sure that watching that movie is a strong enough motivator to make choosing an outdoor active activity worth it to your child to do on a daily basis. 

Robert: Once it’s set up a consistently worth it, there’s no more need to argue them with them or to push them or even to remind them to do it. They’re going to choose to do it based on their desire for the better outcome of their day. Another important factor that must be considered is that your child may not dislike certain activities, but might actually find some of them enjoyable. But because of the physical nature, they’re hard for them to do or painful for them to complete. I know that running is generally a fairly painful experience for me at this point in my life, and the thought of having to go out and run is not one that I would ever look forward to. If you were to want to motivate me to go for a run. There are things that could be done, but there are some additional considerations you would need to make that can be just as helpful for your kids as they would be for me. And they’re important to help you get your kids to choose to start doing these activities. So I’ve been entire I’ve been retired from playing rugby for a number of years now, but this last month I had the opportunity to go back to my college for an alumni rugby tournament and I wanted to play for a half hour, but I knew at 53 and having not run for much of the last decade, I would not be able to last very long if I didn’t get out there and start to get into some kind of shape. But I also knew that if I went out and ran too hard, too quickly, I would either injure myself or become very sore. And that would affect my willingness to keep running. As I was trying to get into better shape. I knew that if I was going to be able to play in the game, I had to be able to run for at least 20 minutes straight. But the thought of running for 20 minutes seemed impossible to me. In fact, the first time I went out and honestly, I was barely able to jog for 3 minutes before I had to stop and walk. But rather than push myself into pain or soreness, I decided to run for the length of time that I could and then walk until I had done three full laps around my neighborhood, walking most of the laps, obviously, rather than running. And it actually took me longer than 20 minutes because of the walking to get it done. I knew I could stop at any time when I was running, so I didn’t feel afraid to go out there and start and I wasn’t demotivated to continue. Now, the second day, I ran a little bit longer and walked the rest, and by day three I was able to run for more than 5 minutes. It seemed that each day that I proved I could run and I didn’t overdo it. I was able to motivate myself to go out the next day, and it was easier to run further than the day before. Eventually, after just a few days, I was able to run a full lap around my neighborhood. Then I would walk a lap and then run a lap and then walk a half a lap and then run and then walk before too long. Although it seemed impossible at the very beginning, I was able to run for three laps for more than 20 minutes and I was ultimately able to play in the rugby game successfully. The key here was my understanding that I would need to start at a level that I was able to achieve without too much pain or turmoil. And then with success, I could slowly build to increase that level over time. 

Robert: And any time that you’re trying to increase your child’s use of physical activity, especially activities that they might find unenjoyable or even pain inducing, you might have to start small enough to be able to have easy success. And then once that success is achieved and the child finds the task to be doable and not something that needs to be avoided, you can slowly start to increase the challenge level over time, building their tolerance and increasing their ability and hopefully the enjoyment of the activity. This process I’m talking about is represented as one of the seven steps to instructional motivation. It’s actually in step five that were instructed that in the early stages of the developing of instructional motivation, we should reinforce each positive response that we see eventually changing to an increasing variable ratio of reinforcement. Now again, my goal has never been to get too into the teaching of the Seven Steps with this podcast, but rather to discuss the many ways the seven steps are used to benefit us in supporting the behavior and education of our children. But Step seven** does teach us to start with small, easy to achieve versions of the behavior, reinforce them strongly, consistently, and then over time slowly begin to increase the amount or difficulty level of what we’re willing to reinforce. You know, they say that you can’t put a frog into a boiling pot of water. Well, I know this is a weird analogy, but truly it fits better than any other one I know. Apparently, if you wanted to boil a frog, you could do so by dropping them into a pot of boiling water because the frog would immediately jump out. But if you instead put the frog into a pot of lukewarm water, the frog would have no reason to jump out. And then you could slowly begin to turn up the temperature just a little bit at a time. And the difference in the temperature from moment to moment would remain small enough that the frog would not notice the change. And as long as you let the frog get used to the new slightly higher temperature before raising it again. You could do this over and over and over until the water was actually boiling and the frog would be none the wiser. So if you find yourself in a challenging position of needing to try to encourage and motivate your child to take on some more outdoorsy physical activities and bring them into their daily routines. Then, in addition to identifying things that your child already likes to do indoors and trying to turn them into outdoor activities, you can also motivate outdoor physical activities by offering meaningful reinforcement for participation. Additionally, you can start with very small and acceptable levels of that new activity that your child would find that they wouldn’t find too objectionable. And then over time begin to increase the level of expectation as you continue to increase the difficulty. But only do so in small ways that hold their motivation. So that you can see the activities continue, even with higher levels of expert effort expected. To a degree. This is exactly what I did for myself. Although I hate running and I find running to be quite painful at times, I do love the camaraderie and the game of rugby and I did want to be able to play that game with some old friends. And because of this I was willing to try an activity that I did not like and one that I found that if I started small enough, I can be successful with it. And then through that success and the benefits of that success, I was able to improve my abilities in a reasonably short period of time. 

Robert: And if this 53 year old man can use these techniques to get himself to do something that he doesn’t enjoy and generally hurts to do. I would imagine that you can you know, if you follow this game plan, you can find a way to motivate your child to try something, anything outdoorsy or active, even if it means strongly motivating that activity with some unrelated reinforcer and keeping the task level super low to start. Because if you can find any level of behavior that you can reinforce that reinforcement following the behavior means the behavior will continue to happen, at least under similar circumstances. And if the behavior continues, then you can begin to slowly start to increase the level of expectation and effort that you ask your child to do related to that activity. And if you’re increasing the amount of outdoor activity your child is willing to participate in on a daily basis, they’re going to be more active. And did you know that you could go to my website right now at the just seven steps dot com forward slash workshop page and you can find a free workshop called How to Get Your Kids to Listen Without Raising Your Voice or Nagging. It’s a great workshop with important tips and tricks for you to start getting better cooperation from your kids today. And it is free to you, my podcast listeners. So when you’re finished here, head over to the Just Seven Steps website and enjoy the free workshop at WWW dot just seven steps dot com forward slash workshop. All right. I hope you enjoyed today’s discussion. I can’t wait to share with you what I have planned for next week. Thank you for taking the time to join me today on the Just Seven Steps Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please take just a moment to leave me a comment, give a thumbs up, share the video with others, and subscribe to our YouTube channel so that you won’t miss out on any of our Just Seven Steps videos designed to help parents of children with challenges. Find your family’s path to progress. See you right here next week.