Joe Newman on Raising Lions: conflict as a question, and the break

A summary of the Back to Human Podcast, “Raising Lions: Taming Tantrums & Power Struggles with Joe Newman”, published 21 November 2025, 1 h 20 m 58 s. The host is James, a parent; his son Jax is a toddler, and his wife Jade was pregnant with their second child. The guest is Joe Newman, author of Raising Lions. He was diagnosed with ADHD as a child in the 1970s and has spent about 30 years working with “the toughest kids”, their parents and their teachers. Video: youtu.be/g_VrZxyOnug. Timestamps link into the video at that moment.

This is a friendly interview with a fan. James opens by saying that one use of the method changed his son’s behaviour overnight, and nothing in the episode challenges Newman’s claims. Most of the episode explains a single technique, the break, and the theory behind it. See Method and caveats.

The gist in one paragraph

Newman argues that popular parenting advice gets misbehaviour wrong. It assumes children act out because they don’t understand or can’t cope with “big feelings”. He says most of the time they understand perfectly well. “Conflict asks a question”: who is in charge, do you have power too, can I train you? The question starts at about 14 to 18 months, when a child realises it is separate from its parent. The authoritarian answer crushes the child’s “hand”; the modern answer, all explanation and validation, avoids it, and the child feels that as abandonment. Newman’s answer is to meet the hand: a firm boundary, delivered kindly and without judgement, and with almost no talk about the behaviour, because the talk is itself a reward and takes away the child’s chance to work it out. The tool is a short, escalating, non-judgmental break. It starts at one minute and goes to three minutes, then to a “holding break”, each step announced with a five-second count. Children will test it at first because they are “little scientists” building conditional-probability models. Repeated calmly, it turns into something like a stoplight, a normal part of the day and not a punishment. He also argues that kids are over-medicated and that most praise backfires.

Topics, in order

1. The host’s problem (0:06)

James describes tantrums “in excess” during Jade’s second pregnancy, “walking on eggshells”, other books that only added confusion, and reaching the point of not wanting to spend time with his son. He tried the method once and saw “such a drastic difference” in his son’s temperament. He wanted something other than locking his son in his room or spanking him.

2. How the method came about: “I lived it, then I understood it, then I taught it” (2:50)

Newman was “the poster child for ADHD”. He says he was studied at the NIH and at Johns Hopkins, and that he enjoyed the lab, with its electrodes and “psychedelic movies”. School left him feeling “lazy and broken”, carrying “the 10,000 things that I was told” he did wrong. He dropped out of college after seven weeks in 1981, got a mohawk, surfed, and worked about 30 jobs. “The world was much nicer to me than school was.” After “about five days in prayer” he volunteered at a school, roughly 30 years ago. He says the order matters because it is also how children learn: from experience first, explanation second.

3. Three environments (5:30)

Asked how much behaviour is environmental, he says “most of it”. He describes three environments: the child’s own mind; the family and community; and, the least visible, the historical moment, meaning the “ideas and mythologies and frameworks” we soak in, “a lot of [which] are broken”. “A lot of the conventional wisdom is not wisdom.”

4. Kids and parents are more capable than we assume (7:15)

Parents can tell when a method feels inauthentic, when they get no reciprocity, or when a child isn’t rising to their ability. The child’s response is the feedback signal: keep adjusting “until we get the response we know they’re capable of.” Parents, like children, have to live the change before they understand it.

5. “Conflict asks a question” (9:47)

The key misunderstanding, he says, is the expert view that misbehaving children are “frail”, unable to understand or control themselves, overwhelmed by feelings. He calls that “victim mentality” being instilled in children. His example is a three-year-old who suddenly needs the red bowl when it’s in the dishwasher. That is not a big feeling but a question: “Who’s in charge? … Can I dominate you? Can I train you?” A child who wins these contests learns “I’m not the smartest one in the room but I’m certainly the most powerful,” and that brings anxiety, not security.

6. Separation at 14–18 months (12:06)

For roughly the first year and a half, a child feels one with the parent, which explains the fearless, giddy one-year-old. At 14–18 months the child realises “we’re separate”, which is frightening. The “terrible twos” and the tantrums that “don’t make any sense” are attempts to find out who controls whom. Until that is answered, you have “an anxious child who’s constantly testing the limits.”

7. Meet the hand (13:47)

Newman’s central metaphor: the child’s challenge is a hand pressing up, saying “I’m here, I have power. Are you here? Do you have power?” There are three ways to answer:

By age two, children need a “new kind of connection” in which other people’s needs count too. They will resist stepping up into it.

8. Too much information (16:05)

James says that explaining over and over meant his son held all the power. Newman agrees and adds that explaining something a child already knows treats the child as less capable than they are.

9. Children follow what you do, not what you say (18:58)

• Gopnik’s “little scientists”. Newman cites the developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik (UC Berkeley): babies make “calculations with conditional probabilities that they’re revising to figure out how the world works.” In everyday terms: crying works on mum half the time, never works on dad, and being sweet always does.
• So a gentle explanation is a reinforcer: “I just got another two minutes of your one-on-one time for behavior you want me to stop.”
• For millennia, consequences came packaged with yelling, spanking and shaming, and we still link the two. That link is “completely arbitrary.” The shift he asks for is to be strict about the boundary and kind at the same time, moving from reward/punishment and good/bad to cause and effect. “You have to frustrate them.” He gives a school example: flip the frustration, so that the child who won’t work is the one who misses recess.
• Why parents yell. Nobody plans to. Parents yell because of the “backpack”: each ignored request or failure to self-regulate adds “a 10-pound bag of flour” until you are carrying 200 pounds. “I don’t want to just say parents should learn how to carry 200 pounds of frustration … and still be the Buddha.” Better behaviour from the child is what removes the weight.
• Why a neutral tone (29:21): judgement starts an argument, makes it harder for the child to regulate and sit down, and “will breed a more defiant response.” The first goal is the child’s action, sitting down. Once they sit without being told why, they start solving the problem themselves, which turns “a reactive thinker” into “a proactive thinker.” Much defiance comes from “we steal their autonomy.”
• “No” to everything (32:26) is a natural power move and a way to assert autonomy. It gets worse “the more information you give.”

10. Three kinds of behaviour (34:06)

His test is the “Star Wars Lego set” question: if you offered a big reward for naming what they did wrong, could the child tell you? If so, telling them was detrimental, because “you stole a moment that they could problem solve.”

11. The break, and how Newman would adjust James’s version (41:09)

James’s first attempts: a beanbag “break chair”. He physically got his son into it, gave calm and minimal instructions (“one-minute break, it starts when you’re on your chair, you must be quiet”), and it escalated to five minutes. Nearly every break so far has been the five-minute one, but he could see “the cogs” turning, and “the energy in the house” lightened at once.

Newman’s reading: this is a typical and well-done first attempt. The quick change in mood is what you’d expect when the hand is met firmly. Some parents get dramatic first breaks that need holding through a long tantrum, followed half an hour later by an unprompted “Daddy, I love you.” Newman sees that as proof that the acting-out was a question.

The adjusted protocol (46:00):

1. Start with a one-minute break, unless you have to stop hitting or throwing.
2. Point to a spot nearby (“you can sit right there”). Don’t send the child to another room, and don’t walk over to move or coax them.
3. Expect whining. Present it as their choice: “take the one-minute break or don’t, it’s up to you,” and say that in a moment you’ll count.
4. Count down 5–1. If they’re not sitting, it becomes a three-minute break. Don’t argue about why (“we can talk about it after”).
5. Count again. If they still refuse, it becomes a holding break: stop talking, hold them so they can’t hit, kick or bite, and wait out the tantrum. “Let me know when you’re ready.”
6. Afterwards: “Are you okay, or do you need to talk about it?” Only rarely (“one in a hundred”) do you need to ask them to explain why they got the break, and then they explain it.

Run it the same way every time. His analogy is giving a friend directions on the I-10 in LA: miss the first exit and the next one takes three minutes; miss that and you’re going downtown in traffic. “By the third time they’re … getting off” at the first exit.

Testing is normal (47:07). However well the parent does it, children aged 3–6 usually won’t take the one-minute break at first. The “Madison” case from the book: an eight-year-old at a school for very extreme kids, with seven trained staff and an escalating ladder (focus desk, longer break, leaving the room, crisis room). For five days she never once took the one-minute break. “She’s got eight years of getting everybody else to walk on eggshells.” Her first one-minute break came on day 10. By 10 weeks she was no longer violent, and six months later she was back in a regular school “without medications, without a one-on-one aide.”

12. Can you give too many breaks? (52:10)

No. His example is “Brian”, an impulsive fourth-grader in Texas who got perhaps 10 breaks a day. In his letter to the next year’s class he wrote that fourth grade was the best: “you never get in trouble… if you take it for a minute … you can come right back in. You never miss recess and she never sends mean notes to your mom.” Done often and without judgement, breaks feel like “a stoplight”: annoying, impersonal, not a judgement on you. You aren’t trying to raise “a perfect robot child”. There’s a Goldilocks zone of what to ignore, but “you can give a break for anything” if the tone is right.

13. Medication (57:10)

• Newman took Ritalin from about 1970 to 1977. He says working with kids “felt like having a conversation with my 8-year-old self”. Not over-explaining came intuitively because “I hated it when people kept telling me what I already knew.”
• Are kids over-medicated? “Absolutely.” Diagnosis looks only at the first environment, the child, and ignores family and culture. In the culture he includes technology, constant stimulation and too little boredom. The medical model is backed by a bureaucracy and by legal and insurance systems, which are “all attorneys for the prosecution”, and “I’m the attorney for the defense.”
• He doesn’t see his own ADHD as a disorder but as “highly tangential thinking”: ask him about Joe Rogan and he thinks of 15 things, each leading to 15 more. That makes classroom learning hard. He isn’t trying to “cure” it. He wants children to have enough self-regulation to survive school, “ideally without medication”. He isn’t against medication, but it is often the only one of “10 tools in my woodshed” that families are offered.

14. Why praise backfires (1:03:45)

• Praise is good when it is a sincere expression of feeling or observation, especially about behaviour, not traits like “smart”. It is bad when it is an attempt to manipulate toward an outcome, such as self-esteem.
• Children see through it. He cites NurtureShock: middle-schoolers read heavy teacher praise as a sign that a kid is struggling, and criticism as a sign the teacher thinks the kid is smart (see caveats).
• Self-esteem as a Venn diagram: one circle is what the child thinks they can do, the other is what they actually do, and self-esteem is the overlap. Praise inflates the first circle. Boundaries grow the second. For example: two hours of homework a night, in a shared space, off the phone. “Achievement makes you proud of yourself.”
• James recalls an unearned participation trophy that bothered him at six, and admits to reflexive “that’s so good.”

15. Rapid fire (1:10:11)

• Bath toys left out. Taking the toys away stopped working because the son decided he didn’t care. Newman’s version is to tie the chore to something the child wants, here bedtime stories, and to make time visible. “Book time is 20 minutes and starts in three. Before it starts, the toys are put away.” Start a timer the child can watch shrinking. “I can’t make you put away your bath toys … You decide. You’re in charge of you.” This is a “fork in the road”, not a threat: “This is how you raise a protagonist.”
• “I like breaks.” This is the scientist testing whether liking the consequence takes away its power. If they ask for one: “Sure. One, three or five?” And once they’ve asked for it, “the break has to go the regular way.”
• “Hold me” during a break, when tired. Never turn a break into a cuddle: “I’d love to hold you, but I have to wait till the break is finished.” The usual escalation still applies. They are checking “does the map hold? Can I retrain you?”

16. Close (1:17:51)

Newman points listeners to raisinglions.com for discovery calls, consultation packages, teacher training and webinars, and to Instagram and TikTok. His daughter has joined the business. A podcast with her and a next book are planned. James reports that, as Newman predicted, his son said “I love you guys” the next day.

Method and caveats

• Transcript provenance. The video has no human captions. The auto-generated English track was pulled with yt-dlp --write-auto-subs, de-duplicated and re-flowed into ~30-second blocks (≈14,500 words, 157 blocks). Section timestamps are the show’s own chapter times where they exist, and otherwise cue times accurate to within a block. The description’s last chapter, “1:10 — Rapid fire”, is malformed, and the rapid-fire section actually starts at about 1:10:11.
• Caption corrections. “Allison Gobnik/Gopnick” is Alison Gopnik. “Rolin” is Ritalin. “Brakes” are breaks. “Red Bull” is the red bowl. The freeway exits are La Cienega and Fairfax on the I-10.
• Checked:
  • Adderall is not “the extended-release version of Ritalin.” Ritalin is methylphenidate; Adderall is mixed amphetamine salts, approved for ADHD in 1996. Both are stimulants, which is what Newman means by “the same class of drugs.”
  • Gopnik is a developmental psychologist at UC Berkeley, and the “child as scientist” or probabilistic-learning framing is her well-known position, accurately described.
  • The NurtureShock finding (Bronson & Merryman, 2009) comes from Wulf-Uwe Meyer’s research: older children, roughly from age 12, read praise as a sign of low ability and criticism as a sign of high ability. Newman tells it as a survey of the same students asked twice a couple of years apart, which doesn’t match the book’s description of the studies, but the conclusion he draws is the same one.
• Not checked: that Newman was studied at the NIH and Johns Hopkins; the Madison and Brian outcomes (case reports from his own book and practice, one child each); the “80–90% malignant” share. None of these come with data in the episode.
• Evidence base. The episode presents the method through anecdote. There is no mention of trials or outcome studies, and the host is a satisfied user, not a sceptic. Parts of it resemble established parent-training approaches (consistent, calm, escalating time-out with little verbal attention, as in Parent–Child Interaction Therapy or Triple P), but this summary did not check whether Raising Lions itself has been evaluated. The “holding break” in particular is the kind of physical restraint that some clinicians advise caution about. Ask a professional before using it with a child who has a history of trauma.