“How can I become a more askable adult?” Justine wonders. Enter Ran Courant-Morgan. Justine met Ran years ago at a sexuality education training. Justine shares her journey to becoming more ‘askable’ with Ran, a board-certified behavior analyst who managed Parent Education at Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts until a recent switch to running their own business. While Ran’s business is focused on dogs, Ran and Justine find many connections between teaching humans and training dogs. With both, often it’s the adult who is being trained.
Ran Courant-Morgan is the coowner and trainer at The Dog Behavior Institute and a master behavior analyst. You can follow Ran at their Instas, @rantalksdogs, @thedogbehaviorinstitute; and on their website: https://www.thedogbehaviorinstitute.com/
Show Notes:
- Our Whole Lives (OWL) comprehensive sexuality education curriculum: https://www.uua.org/re/owl
- Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts: https://www.plannedparenthood.org/planned-parenthood-massachusetts
- You don’t need to have a teachable moment every twenty minutes but rather when you’re looking for an opportunity to talk about a particular subject [3:30]
- Spend some time thinking about what your values are and how you might share them with your kid [4:15]
- Being askable means not having all of the answers; the right time to answer the question is when it happens (Resource: Advocates for Youth)
- It’s a parent’s job to share values with their kids, but it’s not a teacher’s job; askable adults shouldn’t necessarily be saying “Here’s what I think you should do” [5:30]
- “I feel like most adults have never been taught to share a different idea without saying ‘this is the truth.’ That is a skill and behavior to be learned.” [7:15]
- Offer a range of different ideas and invite them to get more information from their family
- Could there be more than one idea about the question, ‘is Santa real?’ [9:30]
- “How old do I have to be to have sex for the first time?” How to answer without first panicking [11:15]
- Justine learning through OWL how to survive being asked difficult questions [13:45]
- Learning to say “oops,” “ouch,” and thank you [15:30]
- Asking about a person’s pronouns is a polite question, not a statement about how we are presenting [17:45]
- Using pronouns that fit you and your identity and experience better is about being yourself [20:00]
- The language around pronouns is always shifting and changing [22:00]
- Ze, zem, zir pronouns have been around for over 100 years
- Enneagram personality test and how understanding your personality better can help like therapy [24:00]
- As a business, you need to figure out who your people are so that you can be happy with what you’re doing for longer [26:00]
- Provide choices when you can for dogs and for kids because they don’t have control over much in their lives [27:30]
- “It’s potentially more valuable to teach kids to listen when something doesn’t feel right to them, and they don’t have to be able to say exactly what it is, but it is a powerful and correct feeling” [29:15]
- How to be an askable adult:
- Help the person feel their question is legitimate and that you’re interested in the conversation
- Clarify what the context of the question is to be sure you understand what they’re asking, including what their own opinion of the topic is
- Provide facts
- And, if you’re the parent of a young person asking the question, share your values about the topic with your child.
- Ran shared a website created by their team at the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts where you can get a framework for sharing information with kids. It’s called kids-ask.org
Some Nerve is a weekly podcast for people who have the nerve to show up, talk about hard things that matter, and share our secrets. On Some Nerve, we discuss all the stuff your grandmother wouldn’t have wanted you to talk about at her bridge party. Topics will include whatever makes us feel human, like mental health, grief, trust, boundaries, and joy. We hope that understanding each other better will help us build deeper connections in our lives.
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