291 – Dave Jereb, of Sydney, Australia, An OT To Children With Additional Needs & Author Of ‘Challenging The Story’

Transcript:

Tom Couch: [00:00:00] Special thanks to Horizon Therapeutics for sponsoring the Special Fathers Network Dad to Dad Podcast, working tirelessly to research, develop, and bring forward medicines for people living with rare and rheumatic diseases. Discover more about Horizon Therapeutics’ mission at HorizonTherapeutics.com.

Dave Jereb: 10 seconds of getting down on your child’s level, being present, being connected, can just be enough to shift that brain into a connected mindset that lights up the neurons. Across all front, back, top, bottom, left, right. 10 seconds of connection can ground a child. And I would love teachers to be doing that when they’re greeting that child at the beginning of the day, locking in, getting down on their level and saying, “Hey, it’s good to see you. I think we’re going to have a great day. If things get a bit tricky, I’m wearing an orange shirt today. You’ll be able to find me, just reach out and I’ll help.”

Tom Couch: That’s our guest this week, Dave Jareb, an occupational therapist from Sydney, Australia, who literally wrote the book on supporting children [00:01:00] with challenging behaviors. He and his wife, Kathy, run and operate MoveAbout Therapy Services in Sydney, providing care and therapy for families and children with additional needs. We’ll hear about Dave’s book, Challenging the Story: A Surprisingly Simple Approach to Supporting Children with Challenging Behaviors, and we’ll hear his story as well. That’s all on this week’s Special Fathers Network Dad to Dad Podcast. Now say hello to the founder of the Special Fathers Network and host of the Dad to Dad Podcast, David Hirsch.

David Hirsch: Hi and thanks for listening to the Special Fathers Network Dad to Dad Podcast presented by the Special Fathers Network, a dad to dad mentoring program for fathers raising children with special needs.

The Special Fathers Network MasterMind group experience is the most comprehensive program the 21st Century Dads Foundation offers. Dads raising children with special needs meet virtually on a weekly basis and form meaningful relationships while sharing weekly wins, discussing books, and sharing heartfelt challenges. One of the [00:02:00] highlights of the year is attending an in-person weekend retreat. We’re launching 10 new MasterMind groups in 2024 with 10 dads per group. That means we’re only looking for 10 like-minded dads in each community. If you’re a dad raising a child with special needs, we hope you’ll join a local MasterMind group and make the investment to become the best version of yourself. For more information, please see the show notes or simply go to 21stCenturyDads.org.

Tom Couch: Now let’s hear this inspiring conversation between Dave Jereb and David Hirsch.

David Hirsch: I’m thrilled to be talking today with Dave Jereb of Sydney, Australia, who is the father of two young children, an occupational therapist, co-founder of MoveAbout Therapies, and author of Challenging the Story. Dave, thank you for taking the time to do a podcast interview for the Special Fathers Network.

Dave Jereb: David, thanks for having me. I’m really excited to be chatting to you.

David Hirsch: You and your wife, Kathy, have been married for 17 years and are the proud parents of two boys: Harry, eight, and Hugo, five. Let’s start with some background. Where did you grow up? Tell me something about your family.

Dave Jereb: Yeah, I grew up in a town called Richmond, New South [00:03:00] Wales in Australia. It’s about as far out of Sydney and still called Sydney. So when I was at university, people would laugh at me. If I said I was country, the city people would laugh at me. And if I said I was city, the city people would laugh at me. It was back in those days we had the street directory. It was pretty much the back page of the street directory or the far right corner of the train map. But it was I guess a country town-ish, fairly strong community. I grew up in the house my dad built. He was a builder and a carpenter. And then we moved next door to the other house he built and we rented out our house and then we moved back and we did that a couple of times. It was walking distance to my schools and it was just a great community that I grew up in. Still very closely attached to that community.

David Hirsch: My recollection was that you were the youngest and by a number of years; you have two older siblings.

Dave Jereb: Yes, I was. Yeah, and so I grew up with three mothers in some ways we jokingly said. But that was quite true. My sisters were 11 and 13 years older than me and so they helped out a lot. They were pretty much in high school by the time I was [00:04:00] born, and that’s cool. And it wasn’t until I was closer to 16 to 18 that I really developed a relationship with those guys. Yeah, and I grew up with a lot of people around the house. Like I said, my dad was a builder and built a big house that we lived in at #5. And it was two story, but had an attic space that he turned into a room for me at one stage, which was really cool. And we had lodgers that lived there. So there were always different people from the university. It’s now the University of Western Sydney but it was Hawkesbury Ag College when I grew up. And so we had a lot of people that either rented out the whole house when we lived at #3, or they rented upstairs when we were at #5. It gave me exposure to a wide range of people, some positive, some not so positive. Yeah, as my mum would say, if the walls could tell a story, it could be an interesting conversation.

David Hirsch: You mentioned your dad was a carpenter builder. My recollection was that he was an immigrant. What’s his backstory?

Dave Jereb: Yeah, it’s an interesting backstory. It is one of those, came to the country with nothing but the shirt [00:05:00] on his back. Actually, literally, that is the case. And his story runs like this. He was in communist Yugoslavia at that stage, and he was due to go into the army because they had conscription. The way I hear it – not from him, but from my cousins and uncles and aunties – was that they really persecuted Catholics in the army in those days. So you had to go, but the communist people in leadership would really give you a hard time. And the country was in pretty bad shape overall. So this would have been in the ’60s. He escaped over the border to Austria, where he was captured crossing the border. And he – I don’t know, it’s not really a bad swear word in Australia so I think I can get away with it here. But the way he tells the story is he said, “I spent my 21st birthday in an Austrian jail cell and it was the best bloody birthday ever because I was getting out of that country.” So he spent a night, a couple of nights, in jail and then they took him to a room. And again, is this [00:06:00] truth or urban legend? I don’t know, but this is how he tells the story. This is the chance that I’m born with. They took him to a room that had a whole bunch of tables and in the front was a piece of paper with the name of all the different countries. And he tells the story that he came to Australia because it was the shortest line.

He did have a friend, a neighbor that was in Australia working on the Snowy Mountains Project at that time. His neighbor got him a job and he was a trained carpenter and builder. He got the job, but had to work as a tradesman until he earned enough money to get his own tools. And then he could work as a carpenter.

Yeah, he was a tough old bugger, but he was a loving man. He was a man where love is a verb. He would never say it that way. But he, it was, don’t say it, but show how much you care for people. And amazingly, I didn’t know half the things he did until at his funeral. I had people I hardly even knew coming up and hugging me and talking about how he renovated their shower for a single mum. And it’s like, how did that happen? I do remember growing up, he was Slovenian. So that’s a part [00:07:00] of Yugoslavia. And he had a whole bunch of Macedonian friends, which is another part of Yugoslavia, but there wasn’t a lot of Slovenians in our area. And he’d get together with his mates. And I think they spoke Croatian because it was like a middle language between them, but they’d build each other’s houses. So every weekend he’d be at someone else’s property and they’d just get together and build a house together. And I don’t know if they paid each other or just swapped or, I don’t know. You can get a lot done for the price of a case of beer in Australia sometimes with tradesmen as friends. But yeah, there was a community spirit and that’s you just get in and you get it done and you help people out.

David Hirsch: Yeah. Thanks for sharing. I think I heard you say that your dad was a type of person that actions speak louder than words. Maybe he wasn’t very expressive.

Dave Jereb: Definitely.

David Hirsch: He showed his care, affection, attention for people by his actions. And is there another way that you’d describe your relationship with your dad? Any takeaways that you’ve tried to incorporate into your own parenting for that matter?

Dave Jereb: It was tough. Growing up, I was probably closer to my mum and they had a tough relationship. They didn’t really [00:08:00] communicate on the same wavelength. Mum was eccentric, wonderful, up at the church and out with the ladies and always helping and giving to people. Never very expensively, but… And dad was always take care of your family first. And there was a little bit of conflict in there. And so I was always quite protective of mum.

And I was close to Dad as a kid and then it was quite strained as a teenager. It wasn’t until they split up briefly and I spent time with each of them separately that I really got a bit closer to him when I was about 16 and then we started to really connect and regretfully he passed away when I was 21 and he passed away helping a friend. It was a tragic story actually. The council told his friend to chop down some branches because they were too close to power lines. And so he went along and helped him and they had a saw and a metal pole and when I heard the story I thought oh my goodness this is ridiculous. I thought the pole had fallen on the wires, but actually out in the country, in North Richmond, the telephone wires weren’t [00:09:00] insulated. The electricity wires weren’t insulated. So the power jumped over a meter, over a yard in your measurements. So he was electrocuted when he was, I think, 61.

David Hirsch: Oh my.

Dave Jereb: He fell off the ladder and that saved his life briefly. And we saw him in hospital. And so my final words with my dad before they sedated him to stop him from wriggling around a lot, I said, “Oh, you poor old bugger.” And he said, “Silly old bugger.” And that was the last words we had together. But so we were close at the end. And it’s amazing, I keep learning from him as we go along in terms of just… I absolutely got the value of hard work, the value of actions over words. I’m close with his family over in Slovenia as well. And so I see a lot of him in my uncles.

Compared to my mum’s family, which were incredibly crazy, eccentric, and a bit chaotic when we get together for family functions. We just had them to our house yesterday or the day before yesterday. It was wonderful and wild. And he was a bit, he always seemed a bit overwhelmed in our Mum’s family functions. Yet [00:10:00] he did have a spirit to him of a cheeky spirit and particularly when he went back home to visit his family.

But I always remember him trying to tell a joke and breathlessly laughing as he got to the punchline to the point where you almost couldn’t understand the punchline. He was enjoying it so much. And reflecting back, I do have lots of fun, joyful moments. And I also got to see him as a grandpa with my sister’s kids, and it is funny to see how people evolve, and the wrestling and the rumbling and the playfulness and the… It’s cool.

David Hirsch: Yeah, thanks for sharing. Sorry that he passed away under those circumstances and at such a young age. Any other men who played an influential role in your life, relatives or otherwise?

Dave Jereb: Yeah. I mentioned that to make a little bit of extra money, Dad would rent out the rooms upstairs or the house next door. And so we often had these lodgers that would come. And so we didn’t feed them. They were self-sufficient. They just rented a room and they shared a kitchen together. And so there was always people renting the rooms and they were often [00:11:00] single guys from the ag college. And amazingly, like a lot of them became almost surrogate family members for a few years at a time. And so they’d play backyard cricket with me. There’d sometimes be Christmas presents and I’d see different sorts of a range of different people, intellectuals, and they’d have conversations with me. I had a lot of conversations with adults as a very young kid.

Actually, one story that just made me think of with my dad, he taught me how to play the card game Euchre when I was four. And so I was four playing Euchre with three adult men and already by four I was getting in trouble. If I led with the wrong card, he’d be, “Oh, why’d you lead with that?” Actually, that’s a cool thing, right? Because it was lovingly. It was like I respect you enough to expect high things of you. And it was like I was respected enough to be expected to play the game well.

David Hirsch: My recollection was that you went to the University of Sydney, you have a Bachelor’s degree as well as a Master’s in Occupational Therapy. And I also noticed that you [00:12:00] worked for maybe a handful of years in of all places Skokie, Illinois, which is a near northwest suburb of Chicago, which is like right next door where I grew up in Morton Grove. So what was it that brought you to the US and back to Australia for that matter?

Dave Jereb: I’m an occupational therapist. Actually my wife is also an occupational therapist. And before me, my sister was an occupational therapist. And so she was 11 years older than me. I went over to visit when I was 16 and saw the work she did because I worked in the disability field and support work since I was 14 volunteering and then 15 as a worker. And I went over there and saw her work as an OT and I was in the schools and I really loved it. And so I studied OT. And that led me to a placement in Wisconsin where she was working at one stage. And that’s where I met Kathy, the love of my life. She was also working there, and so we did some international relationship country tag for a while, for about a year and a half before I did a camp there.

[00:13:00] Actually, I did a camp in Hudson, Wisconsin called Camp Avanti, which is an amazing camp run by OTs for kids with additional needs and really empowering. And I met Beth Austin there. And so she was an OT that owned Beth Austin and Associates in Skokie, Illinois. And she was just the most magnificent therapist you ever met. And as we left, I said, “Oh, Beth, I might see you next year. I think I’m going to come back and work in America.” And she said, “You might come work for me.” And I said, “Oh, I might take you up for that.” And off we went in our different ways. And then I went, was she serious? And so I ended up calling her and saying, “Were you serious?” And so we did an interview and she hired me. And so I came back to work in Chicago, in Skokie, Illinois, just by old Orchard Mall. And Kathy moved to Chicago from Madison and we eventually ended up both working for Beth at that practice and it was just the best entrance into OT you could ever have and just a wonderful clinic.

David Hirsch: Yeah thanks for sharing. So that answers the question about how you and [00:14:00] Kathy met, how your career started, and then what was it that brought you back to Australia?

Dave Jereb: Yeah so we were in Chicago for about five years and it was at that stage — so this is 20+ years ago. It was the best place for learning as an OT. It still is at the forefront of everything, but Australia, there wasn’t a lot happening here. My sister actually was instrumental in bringing a lot of the first courses out to Australia in OT and now everything’s online as well as in-person. What brought us back to Australia, I think, and I think it’s probably summed up by the phrase, “Too cold to snow.”

This was something that I never would have conceived when I was in Australia. But for anyone who hasn’t lived in a country that has a lot of cold weather, it can actually get so cold that the snow doesn’t fall. And it is torturous if you’re a Sydneysider where we have warm weather. We could basically go in the water almost all year round.

Yeah. And the snow falls. And it’s beautiful and it’s white and then it’s too cold to [00:15:00] snow and it burns your skin and the snow gets grayer. And there was one really windy Chicago winter that was, I think, particularly tough. And so we decided to give Australia a go and head back to a climate to defrost a little bit. And that’s where we’ve been since.

David Hirsch: The people go in the lake, Lake Michigan, at different points in the year. You could do the Polar Plunge in January.

Dave Jereb: YOU can do the Polar Plunge in January, David. I won’t be doing that.

David Hirsch: I’ve never done the Polar Plunge.

Dave Jereb: I’ll come and cheer you on.

David Hirsch: Okay, let’s talk about MoveAbout Therapy. It’s the business that you and Kathy co-founded. You have three locations there in greater Sydney. What’s the scope of the work you do? Who do you serve?

Dave Jereb: Yeah, so MoveAbout Therapy Services is an occupational therapy clinic. We were multi-dis at one stage. And we try to do a really good job for families, particularly kids that other people find tricky. Kids with challenging behaviours, kids with autism. The kids that other people find tricky we really love. I think we’re really good at [00:16:00] supporting families to connect with their kids, at helping people move from the ‘what’ to the ‘why’ of behaviour, and just have a new lens, a new perspective where the child can be at the centre.

And I guess it’s all summed up what we do by our phrase. Our organizing principle is that we support the people who support the kids. And so that’s our families. That’s our team members. That’s our community. Now that we’re a little bit bigger, we’re really focused on getting knowledge out there to the wider community because we can’t do it all. So if we can help other people support kids and families then we’re getting closer to our vision.

And so we will have families in sessions. We’ll coach and support them to engage with their child with autism. We’ll work with them, sometimes without the child, to break down challenging behaviours, and also with their extended community supporting that kid, whether it’s teachers or support workers or other professionals.

It’s really about putting the child at the center, the relationship at the center, and understanding that everyone’s approaching this situation the best they can with the [00:17:00] resources they have. And so how do we support them from where they’re at to be able to support this child to be their best version of themselves?

David Hirsch: What’s the age range of the students or the children?

Dave Jereb: The larger proportion is two through eight or nine, but we do see kids all through teenage years as well, and we also see some babies.

David Hirsch: And not to focus on the negative, but what are some of the bigger challenges in running an OT practice like that?

Dave Jereb: Supporting people is the biggest challenge, and over the years we’ve found our way of doing it. We’ve always been really good at getting families in and coaching them through it. Team members is the biggest challenge in terms of being able to make sure you can help them grow at the just right level with enough support so that they can do a great job, so that the families are receiving a great service no matter who they see.

Finding OTs is one of the hardest things for a lot of OT practices. We found actually since a couple of years ago that we shifted our focus from trying to be quite, “Oh, let’s be the best so everyone wants to work to us” to let’s just help everyone be great so that other people aren’t burning [00:18:00] people out.

We’ve now hired 11 people without even a job ad. Really, we’re about 25 percent short on OTs in Australia. There’s 28,000 OTs and 9,000 job vacancies at the moment. And yet people are coming to us wanting to work with us because we’ve really focused on building up support systems where therapists can grow at the just right level, where they can have ways to expand and develop their interests.

We talk about pathways in our clinics. There usually is just one pathway and it’s a management pathway for people in this business. You’re a newbie, an intermediate, a team leader, Clinic Manager and Owner. If someone’s ahead of you, you need to either wait your turn or go somewhere else. And we started talking about pathways to give people opportunities to grow and develop leadership skills. So as long as they’re thinking, support the people who support the kids and moving towards a world where all kids, regardless of their differences, can have meaningful lives, there’s a lot of room for therapists to develop their own programs, to develop their own specialties, to find ways of doing things.

And this year [00:19:00] in particular, heading into 2024 at our team retreat in March, we’ll be looking at “Amplify Your Impact” is the theme of our team retreat. And we’ve got some really cool things on the cards. Our team in Sydney is working on Community Connect, which is a program where they’re going to offer free services on a Saturday morning for families that don’t have funding or can’t afford it. There’s a big refugee community just near there. We’ve had team members who’ve just got together and decided there’s kids on a waiting list. We need to produce resources to support them while they’re on the waiting list so they’re not just waiting idly. So they’ve created four different profiles where they’ll send out emails with activities the families can do while they’re waiting.

Whole range of different group programs and things that our team are working on that I didn’t even know were happening. I certainly didn’t even start it, but it’s by allowing them some room to be able to develop these in line with our vision and our values.

That’s been the hardest thing and it’s still the thing I’m working on because it really is the secret sauce that makes it all work together. When [00:20:00] people feel supported, they’re better able to support others. When people feel like they’re growing and learning, then they’re also nurturing the younger new grads coming in and they’re able to support those families as well. So that is what we do best and it’s also the hardest thing that we’re always challenging.

Everything’s relationship. I think in business, the biggest myth in business is the phrase, “it’s just business.” I think even in the businessiest of businesses, it’s all about relationships. Whether you’re in a factory, packing boxes, on a farm, when it comes down to business, it’s all relationship. And when you do relationship-based therapy, it’s especially about relationships.

David Hirsch: Talk a little bit about your YouTube channel and some of the resources there.

Dave Jereb: Yeah. That stems back to lockdowns and the start of COVID. Within MoveAbout, we really pride ourselves on having good communication with our team. And so when that all happened and we were trying to figure out what was going on and we were heading to lockdowns, we pulled the team together and said, okay, we’ve looked at the numbers. We really need to be hitting about two thirds where we are for us to [00:21:00] be sustainable and not have to lay anyone off or force leave or do anything like that. And we have no idea how this is happening. We only want to do that if we’re giving a good service. So we’re not convincing people to get therapy who don’t need therapy or this isn’t the best, but we’re going to make it a great service. And we do have a great sensory clinic with lots of swings and equipment and ball pit and slides. And so people were sometimes like how’s that going to translate to telehealth? However, for our therapy, it’s education, consultation and direct treatment are the three prongs. So it’s about helping families understand their child, helping families know what strategies to do with their child. And then there is a part where we get in and we do some work with them in the clinic, but that’s one third of the whole process.

So because we had that broad range and perspective on therapy, the translation to telehealth was actually pretty smooth. And so we supported our team to support those families to shift to that. And it wasn’t that we just did swinging through the screen. We actually did most of our sessions with the parents when we went to telehealth.

OTs are all about meaningful occupation. And Kath and I had a [00:22:00] chat and we decided to give our occupational therapists meaningful occupation. And so we didn’t want people twiddling their thumbs in their downtime, which they never would, but we broke them into three groups and one worked on direct treatment resources. So they built this great resource that we now share with other OTs and use to give ideas to families online, on our Google drive, on a Google sheet. It just has all these activities with links to different websites and programs. Another group built our social media and our Instagram and our Facebook and really built that up. And then a third group worked on our YouTube channel. And we hadn’t had one until then and we decided to launch one. And Kath and I, back when we were in Chicago, created a deck of cards called the MoveAbout Activity Cards. They’re just some exercises for kids that have 64 pictures, little stick drawings that I drew. Families can just pull them out and kids can choose which ones they do and they can work on arm strength and core strength and sensory diet, which is how you wake your body up and calm your body down. We decided to turn those into videos and then we made a whole range of other videos as well. [00:23:00] Educational ones for parents and for therapists and ones with activities that people could do while at home during COVID. And so we’ve really built that up and I’m very proud of it.

[Audio excerpt from the MoveAbout YouTube channel]

Hey everyone, welcome to the MoveAbout YouTube channel. The MoveAbout team have been busy working on some videos to help you do the MoveAbout activity cards. These are videos that help you help your child set up their body for success in regulation and attention. These activities are intended for parents, occupational therapists, educators…

[Fade out of audio excerpt]

David Hirsch: I’ll be sure to include that in the show notes so it’ll make it as easy as possible for people to find your YouTube channel. Thank you for sharing.

Dave Jereb: Yeah. It’s one of my goals for 2024 is to really boost that channel. I think it’s a really good avenue to help people. And so I’m going to be giving a lot of content on that channel around supporting children and supporting children with challenging behaviors.

Tom Couch: We’ll be back with more of the conversation on the Special Fathers Network Dad to Dad Podcast in just a few moments, but first this quick message. Please help 21st Century Dads gather research on families raising children with [00:24:00] special needs by having them complete the Special Fathers Network Early Intervention Parents Survey. A link to the survey can be found in the show notes. As a token of our appreciation, each person, mom or dad, who completes the survey will receive a Great Dad Coin. Thank you. Now, back to the conversation.

David Hirsch: Let’s switch gears and talk about Challenging the Story, this new book that just came out, the subtitle of which is A Surprisingly Simple Approach to Supporting Children with Challenging Behaviors. It’s a story about Jenny, a teacher, an elementary school teacher with three students: Emma, who’s non-verbal with autism; Henry, who’s tall, a leader on the playground, but sort of a class clown; and then Jesse, a third character in the story, who’s wearing headphones and is sort of aggressive behavior.

And I’m wondering where did the idea — this is a really creative idea, for conveying these simple, easy to put your hands around concepts. Where did the idea for the story come from?

Dave Jereb: Again, I was lucky with the start I had. I fell into my dream [00:25:00] job. Not everyone does, and I had some really great influences. And we’ve always focused on how we support our team members to grow. And I just think I’ve lucked out with finding out all this information about behavior management that makes sense to me. How to support kids with challenging behaviors in a way that feels respectful, yet is effective. And that’s always the thing. Either we feel like we’re being too nice, or we’re being really tough. We’re controlling, we’re getting compliance, but we’re not instilling a desire to be pro-social and engage with others, and to be caring, nurturing kids.

And for the last decade, I’ve been teaching my own team and coaching and mentoring other OTs and teaching at conferences. And it always surprises me that this knowledge blows people away sometimes. So can I give an example of one of those things?

David Hirsch: Sure.

Dave Jereb: One example is the idea of looking at behavior objectively. And so people go yeah, you want to be subjective, you want to be objective. And so an example I give in the book is a real example that I’ve had a lot of times. I get called into a [00:26:00] preschool because this child is being aggressive, or this child is attacking other kids, or this child is… whatever it is.

And I was like can we make that more objective? And it’s like, all right, we’re hitting. And you’re like, okay, that’s a little more objective, but it is actually still subjective. And we can see them hitting. And we can see them moving their hand in the direction of the other person’s face. That’s the objective. And people look at you like you’re crazy. That’s a step too far. Like we know they’re hitting, right?

David Hirsch: Yeah. What are you smoking? Yeah.

Dave Jereb: However, I’m working with kids that are non-speaking, in their own little world and we support their families to connect with them. Now they’re suddenly interested with people. And so half the time I go into this school and I see that they’ve got a smile on their face and they’re reaching and they whack the kid in the other face. So that doesn’t feel good to the other kid but I use the example of you know when you have a five-month old baby sitting on your lap and they’re batting at your face and you gobble their hands and it’s gorgeous right and it’s beautiful. Got less beautiful when my five-month old had a truck in his hand, but still, you don’t blame the five-month old. But then when you have a five-year old, [00:27:00] it’s not as beautiful, particularly if you’re a four-year old next to them and you don’t understand that they’re playing. But, and it’s not that child is like a five=month old, but their planning might be, their mode of planning is, their communication might be.

So that’s one iteration. That’s not the only iteration. I’m not saying every kid that’s moving their hand in the direction of another kid’s face is approaching them to play, but that is one way of doing it. And if you don’t pull it back to objectivity, you don’t see that.

Another iteration is the child’s defensive. They’re reactive. They’re overwhelmed by their senses, to sights, to sounds, to touch. They close themselves off and just look at their toys and then someone brushes past them with some light touch or appears right next to them and they didn’t see it and then they push them away. And that’s, again, that’s defensive. That’s not aggressive. And that difference might not be relevant to the kid that’s just been pushed, but if we know that our behavior management strategy, our strategy to support that child to not, to need that behavior is completely different. And so that was something that blew people away [00:28:00] when they heard it and just made sense. And so I had a lot of these.

I guess the other take of where did this book come from is I love business books. I particularly love business books around emotional intelligence and how do we run relationship-based businesses. So I consume a lot of business books because I think if I can run a good business, I can help more people.

And one book I read often – several times a year, because it’s just such an easy read – is The One Minute Manager. It’s a little bit behavioral in terms of tough behavioral, but I love the way… And he teaches through a fable, he teaches three lessons of management: one minute goal setting, one minute praisings, one minute reprimands. And it’s really just about being clear and concise, not lingering, not shaming, not blaming, but just be clear and move on. And you get that in an hour. You read this, you’re immersed, you remember the characters and it just occurred to me all of the ways we learn in OT and in teaching and in allied health and things. It’s all so dry and boring. And somewhere we lost along the line where throughout history we’ve always learnt through [00:29:00] story and narrative. And then suddenly we went no, if you’re going to learn it has to be boring, we have to put in a textbook with numbers and statistics. That just fell into place. And so it was all the things I was already teaching people.

I think one of my gifts, if I was going to be proud of something, I think it really is being able to put complex topics in easy to understand terms so that parents can understand it. Teachers, support workers, new grad therapists, anyone can understand. And yeah, I tried to get it to about an hour and a quarter, where you could get some really sound knowledge, but in a way that you almost don’t realize you’re learning, except that at the end of each chapter, you have a reflection point that says, in case you missed this in the storyline, here’s a paragraph about what we just learned.

Can I tell one more story?

David Hirsch: Absolutely.

Dave Jereb: One of my favorite clients, he was a giant dude. He was much bigger than me, even at 13, 14. He was a really big guy. He had a few words. He was autistic as well. And I got called into his school because he was tipping the child with CP out of [00:30:00] his wheelchair and then laughing hysterically as everyone came running to figure it out. So I had to come in to the school to give them some strategies for this. And I’m like, oh my goodness, what are they going to want me to do here? I can’t give a sensory diet. It’s not about just waking his body up or calming his body down. Do we want a social story about how you don’t tip kids out of wheelchairs? What am I going to do here?

And then I got into the classroom and I noticed something. He had autism, had trouble reading people’s social cues. That’s part of that profile. And yet, because he was so big and large, I think the teaching team was a bit worried that they might set him off. But he never… he was a gentle giant. Never ever had they had any of those problems, but they used almost no affect, no emotional expression. So they’re almost still-faced or frozen-faced. So not only were their cues hard, their cues were impossible to read. It made me anxious talking to them how little affect they used with him. Others they did.

So we talk about sensory diet is how much sensory input you give [00:31:00] yourself and you might give kids movement or muscle work or different things to wake their bodies up or calm them down. And I actually asked them to give him an affect diet, an emotional expression diet. And so I got them to get the gym ball and pass the gym ball to him and do a, “Whoa, here it comes! Whoa! Woo!” And they started that from that day and the behavior never happened again.

And so why might that be? My hypothesis of what I managed to figure out — because I was just guessing. It’s all hypothesis and testing hypothesis. I have a mentor, Sheila in Madison, and she says, if it works, it’s treatment; if it doesn’t work, it’s assessment. [David chuckles] And so I tried this assessment and it worked and it was treatment worked. And I think it was that I nailed the consequence. So the consequence of tipping the child out of the wheelchair was that everyone lit up like a light and sound toy that were really interesting and funny, and they used affect that I could understand, and I found it hilarious. When they filled that cup at a different time, I didn’t need to do that behaviour [00:32:00] anymore.

David Hirsch: Yeah, it’s a beautiful story.

Dave Jereb: Recognising that it can lead to the behaviour, not just not doing it but finding other ways to fill that cup for that child so that’s not necessary.

David Hirsch: Yeah thanks for sharing. Very insightful. I love the book. You know, no one gets to where they are on their own. And I think that we all benefit from those that play an influential role in our lives in a formal mentoring way or an informal mentoring way. I’ll include some information in the show notes about the book as well so it’ll make it as easy as possible for people to find that. I’m thinking about advice now, and I’m wondering what advice can you offer parents, specifically dads, who might have a child with behavioral differences?

Dave Jereb: Connect. If you’re going to give me one piece of advice, it’s connect. Connect. And it doesn’t have to be lots and lots. When you connect in warm, shared connection, and that could be through eye contact as we’re mostly used to it. Sometimes that’s tricky for kids. It could be through gentle touch. And it is challenging because you need to figure out what’s the pieces of the puzzle for this child. We come [00:33:00] along with a package that’s roughly good enough to take care of a child that’s roughly ready to go and within the middle of the bell curve. But we don’t come along prepared for kids with challenging behaviors, with disabilities, with different needs.

And so I guess the other piece is connect with others. You need support and if you could be courageous enough to ask for support, that’s going to be helpful to your child. So that’s really important. What connection does is it creates oxytocin and oxytocin floods the brain with this beautiful love drug chemical so we often know oxytocin as the love drug, the chemical of love with mums bonding with the infant and during breastfeeding, those sort of things. But it is just love and joyful moments and shared joyful jubilance. Also in compassion and care. And oxytocin actually calms the part of our brain that deals with fear, the amygdala. So the amygdala fires and you’re a bit stressed out, oxytocin calms that and connects it. Or it helps get all parts of our brain connecting and that really can help [00:34:00] with behavior. It also allows us to lock into each other’s rhythm so that we can co-regulate. So babies need to co-regulate, they can’t do it on their own. We actually need it all through our life to be honest. But if we can connect, then we can influence their biological rhythms. We can influence the way they’re feeling and how they wake up and calm down.

And so just the last thing is that it doesn’t have to be long. I remember saying to a mum, she said, I can never fill his cup. We play for hours and hours, and I need to be doing the kitchen, I need to prepare dinner, I need to do all these things, and I’m trying, but it can be hours, and it’s never enough for him. And I was like what are you thinking about while you guys are playing? She’s I’m thinking about all the things I’m not getting done! All right, how about rather than two hours or three hours, how about you do 10 minutes? And set a time, I’ll let him know we’re going to do 10 minutes of play, then Mum’s going to put dinner on. And leave your phone in the kitchen. That’s the hardest thing for me, even as a dad, is to put the phone away. But just focus in for 10 minutes.

Now I say to people, 10 seconds, right? 10 seconds of getting down on your [00:35:00] child’s level, being present, being connected can just be enough to shift that brain into a connected mindset that lights up the neurons. All front, back, top, bottom, left, right. 10 seconds of connection can ground a child. And I would love teachers to be doing that when they’re greeting that child at the beginning of the day. Locking in, getting down on their level and saying, “Hey, it’s good to see you. I think we’re going to have a great day. If things get a bit tricky, I’m wearing an orange shirt today. You’ll be able to find me. Just reach out and I’ll help.” There’s a little bit where you can just anchor, connect, rehearse a strategy to make it better when things get tough. Parents could do that in the car before they go into a shopping centre. They can do it in the morning before they’re going out for the day. Just get that connection right is really the first key. There are lots of different behaviours that you can have different strategies beyond that, but it always starts with connection.

David Hirsch: Yeah, thank you for the emphasis on connection. And if I understood what you were saying, it’s parents connecting with their child, educators connecting with their child, parents connecting with other parents, [00:36:00] as far as resources are concerned. And just having the courage, like you said, to reach out and ask for help, which is something that most men have a difficult time doing. We joke about not pulling over and asking for directions when we’re lost. Brilliant. Let’s give a special shout out to Judith Weiss at Ambition PR for helping connect us.

Dave Jereb: Yes, absolutely.

David Hirsch: If somebody wants to learn more about MoveAbout, therapies, your book, Challenging the Story, or to contact you, what’s the best way to do that?

Dave Jereb: So MoveAbout Therapy Services is moveabout.com.au. We’re in Australia. We are on YouTube; we’re “MoveAbout Therapy Services” on YouTube. And we are MoveAbout.OT on Instagram. I’m also DaveJereb_OT on Instagram. We have some really great content on there. Business-wise, we’re also on LinkedIn. And the book is on Amazon. If you’re buying bulk copies, reach out to MoveAbout, and we can do that a lot cheaper.

But there’s lots of different ways. We’d love to interact with people. I found Instagram last year as an old guy in my mid forties and had a bit of fun with it. And so I like to [00:37:00] educate and a bit of entertaining as people laugh at me. But yeah, lots of ways. The YouTube channel is going to be big in 2024 as well. So yeah, we’d love to speak to anyone and always happy to have people reach out and lend a hand to help them find the right person or to provide advice if we’re the right person to.

David Hirsch: We’ll be sure to include that information in the show notes so it’ll make it as easy as possible for people to follow up with you. Dave, thank you for your time and many insights. As a reminder, Dave is just one of the dads who’s part of the Special Fathers Network, a mentoring program for fathers raising a child with special needs. If you’d like to be a mentor father or are seeking advice from a mentor father with a similar situation to your own, Please go to 21stCenturyDads.org.

Thank you for listening to the latest episode of the Special Fathers Network Dad to Dad Podcast. I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. As you probably know, the 21st Century Dads Foundation is a 501c3 not for profit organization, which means we need your help to keep our content free to all concerned. Would you please consider making a tax-deductible contribution? I would really [00:38:00] appreciate your support. Dave, thanks again.

Dave Jereb: Thanks, David.

Tom Couch: And thank you for listening to the Special Fathers Network Dad to Dad Podcast. The Special Fathers Network is a dad to dad mentoring program for fathers raising children with special needs. Through our personalized matching process, new fathers with special needs children match up with mentor fathers in a similar situation. It’s a great way for dads to support other dads. To find out more, go to 21stCenturyDads.org.

David Hirsch: And if you’re a dad looking for help or would like to offer help, we would be honored to have you join our closed Facebook group. Please go to Facebook.com, groups, and search “dad to dad.” Lastly, we’re always looking to share interesting stories. If you’d like to share your story or know of a compelling story, please send an email to David@ 21stCenturyDads.org.

Tom Couch: The Special Fathers Network Dad to Dad Podcast was produced by me, Tom Couch.

Thanks again to Horizon Therapeutics, who believe that science and [00:39:00] compassion must work together to transform lives. That’s why they work tirelessly to research, develop, and bring forward medicines for people living with rare and rheumatic diseases. Discover more about Horizon Therapeutics at HorizonTherapeutics.com.