CS: You’ve had a lot of folks give you testimonials. You have a lot of case histories. And probably people who have come to you and not necessarily on bended knee, weeping, and thanking you for this, but probably pretty close. what kind of experiences have you had with some of your customers?

LA: We’ve seen a lot of interesting situations and educated parents and different people struggling with really all the same types of issues and we’ve had parents that expect their children to be bad, which is really a shame. The system is telling our children what we expect from them, but one parent set up that if they didn’t argue with mom when they woke up, they got points. And I had to teach them that we can’t expect our children to be bad.

CS: When you say ‘them’, you’ve got to teach the parents.

LA: The parents, yeah. The parents – this is a case where the child was a child psychologist, the parents were at a marriage counselor, and the child psychologist asked them to put in some kind of point system to help the child, and the parents, when they sat down and tried to do this, things like not arguing, when they woke up were things they wanted to reward the child for. And I had to teach them that you don’t expect no and not – anything that begins with no or not is not an expected behavior. We have to expect them to be good. And this is where the parents had lowered – had adjusted their whole thinking. And this is also – there’s a case where some parents think that arguing is acceptable or a good thing, because in this one case the mom was a lawyer, and she thought that, being a lawyer that we don’t want to breed arguing out of our children. And I explained that, yeah, you can have them write a brief. You can do it at the right place at the right time, but we have to learn respect for our parents. We have to listen, but when a child learns that arguing gets him what he wants, that’s where the danger begins.

CS: Well, but the other benefit I should think would be the more together the family is in terms of dealing with children, and the parents’ relationship. I don't know what the statistical relationship would be, but or if you could put a number to it, but if you can get this together with your child, there’s probably a better chance that the family relationship, i.e., husband and wife, will stay together, too.

LA: Yeah, there’s definitely a lot of stress that’s put on the parents’ relationship by things that are going on with the child. Probably the most important thing parents discuss is how we raise our children and so if the parents are really quite different about that, and they can’t find that middle ground, where’s the child left? They’re left without clear expectations. Kids may be getting one extreme from one parent and a very different one from the other, and they’re kind of lost.

CS: And eventually the child maybe left with parents who choose not to live together. And that doesn’t help the problem either.

LA: We have a very large society where, the – divorce is very common today, and, uh, actually what’s interesting is to see that in the single-parent family, and this is in my case, is that this was finally a point where I could set a system – I could put a system in. For a long time, being married, I wanted a system, I wanted to do it, but I couldn’t get agreement between the adults.

particular family was, greatly helped. it took so much stress off the marriage that really – that, they’re all getting along so much better now.

CS: I would like to think that people buy this program because they’re visionaries. Because they’re smart. Because they’re enlightened, and they see this as the way to go. I intuitively feel that most people acquire this program when they’re at the end of their rope. That they’re desperate. Now, is that accurate or is the truth somewhere in between?

LA: I think it’s in between. We have the, we have a family fund and we’re committed to giving this software away for free or discounted for families who can’t afford it. And there’s quite a lot of single parents with, the dad not in the picture or the mom not in the picture that, they're really, really struggling on a very low income. But then, there’s the people that sort of just instinctually know that this is not the way they were raised, so watching their kids not really value things, they’re watching peer pressure to have the, to have a great car, and have all these things in high school. The things that we normally would associate with working hard and being in a career for 10 or 15 years, and achieving, these kids are starting to expect the stuff, when they’re very young, and what happens when they enter the workforce? When they enter the workforce, arguing isn’t going to work. the only thing that gets you ahead in life ultimately is your hard work and the way you treat other people. And if they’re, for a young age, they’ve – they’re basically being programmed to be dysfunctional. And psychologists are now pointing this out – that we’re seeing a generation of kids that are more prone to anxiety. Illnesses like ADHD are so far on the rise that it’s not really clear that – are these really illnesses or are these really a byproduct of the environment?

CS: So essentially you’re giving the whole family a gift. When you adopt this program and you stay with it and it works successfully because you’re consistent, it’s really a lifetime gift ultimately, isn’t it?

LA: The effects go beyond that, because now we have a child that’s raised with something that they’ll carry forward to the next generation. We’re also giving society back something. When we grow up with the right work ethics and the right way to treat people, when we go out into the real world, we will affect other people in positive ways and I mean someone who goes out thinking that the world, that everything is suppose to be given to me without me performing anything, that’s not going to be a very good worker. That’s not going to be a very good member of society, and we’re going to be someone who sort of believes that, we need to take – it’s sort of someone who takes for someone who gives.

CS: So that’s the big picture. I mean, ultimately that’s what it’s all about. To break this cycle of – of raising children the way you were raised, which may not have been positive, and adopting a new strategy which will ultimately not only benefit the family right now, but benefit the child, and perhaps their children down the road. Is that the more global way to look at it?

LA: That’s certainly, my goals are to help, families basically raise kids that are self-reliant and independent. And a parent’s job, I think is to raise them so that they can function without having things given to them. So they can fend for themselves. I don’t think too many people want their children living at home and, after they get to the right age and then they want to see them achieve. They want to see them successful, and so how do we help them be successful? We need to encourage them to become the kind of people that we admire. our mission as parents is to raise self-reliant, independent children. So if you’ve thought about what is it required to be self-reliant and independent in today’s world, there’s a lot of skills that kids need to understand. We need to understand how money works. when we get a job – I was amazed when I had my previous software company that people were constantly coming to me and asking for raises, but they didn’t really understand that the company needed to take more money in, in order to pay them more money. Like, where did that money come from?

CS: So they need to produce more value than a cost. That’s a very interesting concept for a lot of people.

LA: Yes. It’s the idea that, yeah, we create value by our work, and we can also take away from things by disrupting things, and just demanding things, and not looking at what we can contribute. Looking for things from what we can give versus what we can get.

CS: But unlike those nonproductive, disruptive employees, you generally can’t fire your kids.

LA: Oh, no. [laughing] No, and love is number one ingredient, but it doesn’t mean that we just give them things. And doesn’t mean that we’re permissive. It does mean that we set, goals for them and we – we talk to them. And communications is one of the things that seems to have really broken down in families.

CS: And believe that because they’re adults they can figure this out. How to raise a child without any training, without any help. Or is that the wrong question?

LA: I guess they, sometimes, parents are – it’s an ego thing. We want to believe that parenting doesn’t take knowledge or tools and society kind of says that well, you should just be able to do this. Yet parenting is one of the most difficult things we all attempt. I we are responsible for raising a human being. We are our children’s number one teacher. Some parents that seek out books, video tapes, and the problem with these things is that they’re not interactive. We can listen and we can learn about what we should do, but then in the moment when the child’s room is, a mess, or they’ve done something, our emotions take over and we tend to over-react. And then if the child doesn’t do what we ask them to do, instead of being calm about it, we then maybe use threats or other ways to try to manipulate them into doing things. And this really causes problems.

CS: But to some extent we as parents feel that that’s an insult to our personal authority. That our children should respect us because we’re their parents. But life doesn’t necessarily work that way.

LA: The ego is a big part of this. We want our children to be automatically programmed to be successful. And society has a lot of emphasis on success, and success tied to money. And this is where we – the old days I think there was a lot more about being a good person than about how much money you make. Using EasyChild – I try to encourage parents to create non-monetary works. Things kids value things like special time with dad. if you’re good, an hour a week, you sit down and we’ll do anything you ask. Usually it’s playing a game or doing something like that children value their parents time and attention much more than a new toy. It’s a reminder to all of us about how we’re suppose to act. An interesting thing that comes out of this is that one of the other behaviors that I had on the sheet was leaving on lights. You lost a point. And my son would, leave a trail of lights throughout the house and, uh, once he was in the system, he got so good at turning off lights, that he was catching me leaving lights on. And I think about that, and it just took me a minute to think, well, I really need to give him points back, because I've taken a child who was an electric waster and turned him into an electric policeman. And this is a case where the child now is helping the parent realize. Nobody’s a perfect person. But if you tell your children to do one thing, and you do another, then they’re clearly not going to get the message. We as parents have to be, not perfect people, but we are the models that they will follow.

CS: And then you rationalize that behavior by saying well, I’m an adult, you know. I can control my habits.

LA: What’s really interesting about what happens here in that we see ourselves differently in our reflections through the children. Because if we say be easy-going, and then we're, very stressed out and, and today we – they don’t make their bed, we take away the car, and then, next week we give it back. Parents tend to over-punish in the moment of emotion. And then the child realizes that a couple of days later they can argue and get out of it, so there’s no real accountability without a system there’s nothing to grasp onto. It’s not the way the real world functions. In the real world, we don’t have these things where we – things are changing all the time. If we live in an environment – if your job, in one week you got paid so much, and one week you had to be in at 9:00. The next week you had to be in at 11:00. It just – how would you learn to achieve? How do you play a game when you don’t know the rules?

CS: So the rules are the expectations which, to some extent, become the rules are incorporated in your software.

LA: They’re put into the computer and they’re printed out and they’re put on the refrigerator so it’s very clear what the expectations are, and the parent knows how to respond in addition to the child. So to take that arguing out of the relationship is sort of the poison that really starts to take children and parents apart. At some point the kid has been basically reprimanded and told he’s bad and has been threatened so many times that he will just basically rebel and look for his own path. My parents don’t really know what they’re doing. I need to figure this out on my own.

LA: The most common comment I get from parents is that my kids are getting good grades. They don’t need this. Meanwhile, the brother is seeing the other brother over the head with a book. And it’s – it just, parents are using these external measurements, like grades, and it just isn’t – it isn’t really how we, society ultimately determines success.

CS: So what’s going to wake the parents up? When the kids get arrested? When they, run the car over a cliff. I mean, what’s – what’s the moment of reality that sort of shifts people from living in a fantasy land to dealing with the world more realistically?

LA: Unfortunately, it is sometimes a major incident. Usually behavior problems first show up in school. If they haven't shown up there, they’re going to show up in work or in their relationships with their peers, and trouble with the law, and it’s just at that point we're so much behind the starting line that the child needs more intense and sometimes, they do need to be on medications or residential treatment and it just – there is a commonality here, though, all kids benefit from structure. It’s been shown over and over again in behavior modification, if it’s followed through on, at least 80% of the time it helps everyone.