Become a Writer Today

How to Make the Biggest Impact with a Book That Has an Important Message with Carol and Matthew Newell

June 28, 2021 Bryan Collins Season 2
Become a Writer Today
How to Make the Biggest Impact with a Book That Has an Important Message with Carol and Matthew Newell
Show Notes Transcript

Carol and Matthew Newell run the Family Hope Center. It's an organization that has so far supported over 20,000 families dealing with special needs children.

Carol and Matthew took some of the ideas they've refined throughout their careers and turned them into a book.

One of the key challenges they faced is having spent their entire careers as experts in their field, they found it hard to convey the knowledge they take for granted.

I've experienced reading books written by clinicians, and I appreciate that the books could often be challenging to read. I was struck by how accessible their new book, Healing Your Child's Brain, is.

I wanted to understand how they turned their expertise into something that parents can understand. It was interesting to hear how they didn't write the book to generate an income. Instead, they're doing it because of the message they want to share with parents.

 In this episode we discuss:

  • Their background and how they came to start The Family Hope Centre
  • How society forces people to be labeled disabled
  • The importance of making information easy for parents to understand.
  • What is a neuroparent and how to become one
  • The reasons behind them writing the book
  • How they are getting the book into the hands of as many parents as possible

Resources

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If you enjoyed the show please leave a review on Apple. And if you have any questions you can find me on Twitter @BryanJCollins

Thanks for listening!

Matthew: Well, we teach parents. We’ve been teaching this particular information for 20 years. And our audience could be a doctor, a neurologist, you know, who says, “I learned more in three days than I’ve learned in medical school,” and then we’ll have a parent over there that graduated ninth grade, an Amish family who graduated ninth grade over there in the other seat. So we’ll have 60, 70 people in a room and what we’ve been really working hard is how do you take a complex subject and get everybody on board in a way that respects everybody’s level of education? So, we’re nose to nose with parents and we realized, “Oh, when I say that sentence, they get it. If I said it that way, they don’t get it,” so we’re always trying to refine the way in which we present information that respects it and respects the individual.


Introduction


Welcome to the Become a Writer Today Podcast with Bryan Collins. Here, you’ll find practical advice and interviews for all kinds of writers.


Bryan: How can you make a bigger impact with your book or what if you have an important message that you want to get into the hands of as many people as possible? Hi, there. My name is Bryan Collins, and welcome to the Become a Writer Today Podcast. Some authors write a book because they have an important message that they want to share with their ideal readers, just like this week’s two interviewees, Carol and Matthew Newell. As clinicians, they’ll admit that writing books isn’t something that they do full time but they’ve helped over 20,000 families through their organization for people with special needs, the Family Hope Center. Carol and Matthew wanted to take some of the ideas that they’ve refined throughout their career and turn them into a book. One of the key challenges in doing something like this is when you have spent a career becoming an expert in a particular topic, it can be very hard to convey knowledge that you take for granted into everyday language and everyday words that readers can understand and ideas that they’ll remember. And back when I was studying for a master’s in disability studies, which was many years ago before I started Become a Writer Today, I read a lot of books in the area and I found that when a book was written by a clinician, it was often difficult to read or dry and I would nearly have to have a second book with me to understand the first book. So I was struck by their new book, Healing Your Child’s Brain, by how accessible it is and I wanted to speak to Matthew and Carol to understand how they turned their ideas that they honed throughout their clinical practice and turned them into something that parents can understand. It’s also interesting to talk to Matthew and Carol because they want to do something that, as a goal of many writers, they wanted to make an impact with their book. In other words, they’re not writing this book or publishing it for book sales or to build a business. They’re doing it because they have a message that they want to share with parents. So, if you’re going to write a book and it’s because you want to make an impact, then you might get something from this week’s interview that would help you understand what that book should do. Carol and Matthew also had some good tips about how to collaborate with each other or with your co-writer if you’re working on a book like this and they also talked about how a ghostwriter helps them refine some of their ideas as well.


Now, if you enjoy the show, please consider leaving a short review on iTunes. Your review will help more people find the Become a Writer Today Podcast. And you can also share the show on Overcast, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you’re listening. If you’ve got feedback or questions for me, guest suggestions, please reach out on Twitter, I’m @bryanjcollins, and I’ll answer if I can.


Now, let’s go over to this week’s interview with Matthew and Carol.


(interview)


Carol: So, I started my career in early childhood education with a desire to work with children with special needs, which is what I ended up training in finally, and my work has been working with children with special needs for the last 40 years and starting out my career in the UK and then moving to the United States and I’ve been working there and Matthew and I met in the United States and we’ve been working together, started our own organization about 20 years ago for where we have a clinic of professionals who work with families together and to support them and guide them in the development of their children.


Bryan: And Matthew?


Matthew: Yeah, so I started in the field in 1981. I was originally studying to be an occupational therapist and I decided to put all my time and energy into the brain and healing the brain, which is the core issue if you’re going to really help kids as opposed to managing it. So, that’s where I met Carol working for about 20 years with an organization teaching parents and then, about 20 years ago, we started our own organization, the Family Hope Center, and we haven’t actually treated 20,000 people as much as we’ve been teaching parents, at least 20,000 parents, from six continents and 34 different countries. Our objective is to really teach people about the brain so they can feel empowered. Parents are the heroes here, you know? We’re the guides. We had two kids who were special needs who are now well. The second one — first one was born fine and everything went okay. The second one had a vaccination shot which sometimes can create some issues for kids and she became severely hurt and it took us about 12 years to completely heal her brain and the third one — and now she’s a doctor in occupational therapy in CZ. Our second grandchild was born through her just a couple of weeks ago. And our third child we adopted and she came to us at five months and she had severe learning issues and behavior issues. Understanding her and understanding her brain, we were able to improve and restore the neurology of her and she graduated college and she’s a firefighter now, an EMT now, rescuing people, but it took us awhile. You know, her brain, she couldn’t even go to school —


Bryan: Yeah.


Matthew: — for about 10 years because she couldn’t survive school. So, we — taking on knowledge that we had of working with families, we obviously used it for our own children and, through that and through helping families, we’ve been able to put together a strategic plan to help families really get back in the driver’s seat for their children. 


Bryan: So, years ago, before I was doing all of this, I used to work in a service for people with intellectual disabilities and I learned about something called the universal model of care of disability, which basically says that if society was set up in a certain way, then nobody would have disabilities, but because people can’t access the right services and because they can’t access the right jobs, they’re being disabled by the way society treats people who have different needs to you or I. Is that something that you found in your practice?


Matthew: I think so. I think when you have a neurological issue, whether it is expressed in autism or attention deficit or obsessive compulsive disorders, well, we tend to look at it and say, “Where’s the neurological root of all this, all these behavior issues?” Even post-traumatic stress disorder can support or hurt a brain and compromise the abilities of a child, Down syndrome, and the diagnosis of cerebral palsy, all these different things. You have the brain and you have the child. The child is magnificent, the brain is hurt, and there’s a lot of really quick assumptions that occur, like, “You’re not capable of this,” or, “This is as far as you can go,” and, “This is the way it’s gonna be,” and, “This is your prognosis,” and, if you’re blind, you’re blind, and, frankly, 94 percent of our kids who come to us blind for neurological reasons learn to see and read within 18 months, regardless of how old they are. So the brain has the capacity to mature and grow but it needs a teacher, it needs a supporter, it needs a strategic plan, love needs an action plan, always does, and when you see that and kids who mature, then people around you begin to respect you and see you for the person that you really can be as opposed to, “Oh, you’re this diagnosis, therefore, this is your limit and, therefore, we’re gonna put you down this pathway.”


Bryan: Yeah, I think to give somebody a diagnosis can limit them in many different ways, like people are more than just what a doctor says —


Matthew: Absolutely.


Bryan: — is a particular condition to have at any one time. It sounds like it took you and Carol like a lifetime or a career to develop the ideas that are inside the book.


Matthew: Yeah, like anything. One of my mentors said, you know, you can have all the knowledge in the world and 10,000 times later, you have skill and, you know, when you’re working nose to nose with parents for 12 hours a day, you learn the things that work clinically are very straightforward engineering marvel. If you understand that these parts of the brain does these things, then you learn things that don’t quite work. You know, scientists are wonderful. They figure out that the brain does this and this and this, and we’re clinicians and we — doctors see the problem and you can map out what sort of — what’s necessary, you could then develop a strategy. You know, our strategies, through the science of neuroplasticity, in the brain, when you really pare it down is — Einstein was once quoted as saying that, they asked him like, “How do you solve a problem?” He said, “Well, I spend 90 percent of my time identifying what it is and 10 percent of my time solving it.” 90 percent of my time defining where it is and we define the areas of the brain that are neurologically compromised. We teach it to the parents because they’re absolutely invested in the outcome of their child. They’re just lost. They just look, you know what, can you please tell me where the autism spectrum symptoms are coming from? It is coming from his limbic brain? Is it coming from his pons, his midbrain, his basal ganglia, his cerebellum? What’s going on with my child who’s running around with his pants on fire? What’s going on with this behavior issue? Can we not psychologicalize it as opposed to neurologicalize it? And then I can get in a strategy. So, I and Carol and my team, we are never stopping trying to learn more direct, clean, clear ways to teach parents, like we’ll learn something and then reverse engineer it and teach it to a parent, you know? And that’s what parents want. They want a guide. They want somebody to stand next to them and say this is the stepping stone you need to take. If you did this, this, and this, you’re going to be able to sort out your attention issues, your tight muscles, your eye that’s going in that you’re wearing glasses for because that comes from the brain, it doesn’t come from the muscle, if you know what I mean. So, we’ve been thrilled to get up every day and try to figure things out and teach parents how to be the parent that they want to be, you know? Every parent wants to be what they need to be. They want to shepherd their kids. They just don’t have the foggiest idea of what’s going on with their child’s brain and they get confused. They get depressed and confused. The book is all about showing them this is the pathway, this is how the brain works, this is how you actually work as a parent.


Bryan: One of the sections that stood out to me in the book was the idea of becoming a neuroparent. Could you elaborate on how that works?


Carol: Yeah. So, we’ve done this for years throughout our careers is we started to realize how important it was to be able to understand the brain, as Matthew said, and where these things are coming from in the brain and finding ways to, as Matthew said, also to reverse engineer what we’ve learned and teach that to the parents. And whenever we would learn something new that we thought, okay, this could be beneficial to the child in their development, we’d always have this filter of the brain. We want to look through the eyes of, “Is this something that will change the brain?” Because there’s a lot of ways you can intervene but we were always looking at the brain first and filtering anything we learn in that way and if it was something that would change the brain, we’d add it to what we were doing. So, having those neuroparenting points and teaching parents to become a neuroparent is our way of saying, “How can you understand your child’s brain?” Because if you understand your child’s brain and become a neuroparent, you’re not going to be so upset by different behaviors because you’re going to know where they’re coming from and once you know the source of the brain, then you can start to implement plans of action that will change your child’s brain.


Matthew: Yeah, you can decide whether you’re going to manage your child or you’re going to manage something through medication or you’re going to heal it. If you get the idea that seizures come from a neurological dysfunction in the brain and that the seizure isn’t a problem but it’s a signpost to a deeper issue in the brain, or autism isn’t the issue, it is the limbic brain and the pons that are distorted so the child’s behavior is a distortion and manifestation of his neurological disorganization, not because he’s got a psychological problem, then — or dyslexia is this and it’s really not this, then parents go, “You know what, thank you,” you know? I work my pants off every day trying to manage my child, trying to heal him, and trying to support him, trying to create pathways for him to win. “Oh, you’re telling me that I don’t really have to work any harder, I could just work smarter? If I do this rather than this, I have a chance to go down the pathway of restoring the issue as opposed to managing it ’til they’re 25 years old?” 


Bryan: Yeah.


Matthew: And parents are excited about that. They’re excited about getting in, rolling up their arms — and, by the way, they’re not alone. We’re standing next to them, coaching them. I get coaching for a whole bunch of stuff, like I get coaching for my finances, I get coaching for, you know, construction jobs around my house, you know? I call people who are really smart, they’re capable, they’ve been qualified, they have good results, you know, and I say, “You know what, I don’t know anything about this. Could you come over to my house and work with me while we solve this to that extent?” I want to learn as much as I can but I trust people to do certain things and, in this area, Carol and I have devoted 40 years nonstop trying to figure out, okay, what’s the best way to heal this child’s brain and put the family on a pathway so that they can really see what’s going on and —


Carol: And become neuroparents.


Matthew: Yeah. Parents wear 55 hats, right? You wear the hat of the chef, you wear the hat of the disciplinarian, you wear the hat of the school teacher by helping your kid with his homework. I mean, you’re always — you’re putting on a hat every day depending on what your kids need, your four kids, your five kids, whatever your kid needs, you step up and you try to help them do it. Just the neurology of the brain is straightforward and we said, you know what, we need to — in between all of our clinical work and our traveling, we spent evenings, nights, and weekends putting together our thoughts down on paper, refining it, and saying, “Can we put people in the driver’s seat and guide, support, and help them see the brain and its magnificence?”


Bryan: So that was the reason why you decided to write the book?


Matthew: Yeah. I mean, it’s been in our head, you know, for many years but it’s just sitting down and finally saying, “Okay, we got to do this,” and it took us, you know, a year and a half of just writing it and refining it and deciding on, you know, we got somebody to help us to put those sentences where they’re supposed to go.


Bryan: Yeah. A copywriter or a ghostwriter or was it an editor?


Matthew: We hired a guy who was really good at writing and we said, “Look, we have all these ideas —


Bryan: Yeah.


Matthew: — and we want you to come to our clinic, we want you to see what we’re doing, we want you to understand the style and kind of the way which we teach parents and we wanna take this style and we’d like you to listen to how we teach. We want this book to be a conversation.”


Bryan: Yeah.


Matthew: And she came and she worked with us and she saw what we did and she said okay and then we put it together. Yeah, we’re thankful. It was nights, weekends but we are thankful that it finally got down on paper and that we’re — it’s already in a couple of languages and, you know, we just want to —


Carol: We want to reach more people.


Matthew: Yeah, we want to reach more people. We want to say, “Hey, here’s an idea here, it’s worth looking at.”


Bryan: So when I read books in the past that have been written by people with clinical expertise, they tend to be, you know, quite dry or I’d nearly need a second book to understand the first book. How did you go about simplifying your ideas for, I suppose, for a layperson who might not necessarily have the same background that you have?


Matthew: Well, we teach parents. We’ve been teaching this particular information for 20 years. And our audience could be a doctor, a neurologist, you know, who says, “I learned more in three days than I’ve learned in medical school,” and then we’ll have a parent over there that graduated ninth grade, an Amish family who graduated ninth grade over there in the other seat. So we’ll have 60, 70 people in a room and what we’ve been really working hard is how do you take a complex subject and get everybody on board in a way that respects everybody’s level of education? 


Bryan: Yeah.


Matthew: So, we’re nose to nose with parents and we realized, “Oh, when I say that sentence, they get it. If I said it that way, they don’t get it,” so we’re always trying to refine the way in which we present information that respects it and respects the individual and we know when we overstate something and we know when we get too scientific, we see people’s eyes glaze over, so we said, “Well, how can we say the same thing in a way that is helpful?” and that’s what we try to do in the book. I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to read the whole thing. I know, it’s pretty —


Bryan: So I’ve read a couple of chapters and what I was struck by was like how accessible the language is and you’ve broken it up with, you know, tables and graphical elements and questions that the reader can ask themselves. Like I’m curious, Carol, at any point did you have any, well, not a disagreement but, you know, debate over what to put into book versus what to keep out of the book? Because it’s hard enough for one person to write a book while I can imagine collaborating, you know, there are other challenges.


Carol: I think because we worked together and we’ve learned to work together, in the very beginning, as we said, we had a ghostwriter who came and sat through our courses and just took all of our materials and said, “Put it into book form,” and Matthew worked on a lot of that in the beginning directly with her and then brought me in when I needed to. There are a couple of chapters that I worked on directly where we’re speaking directly to parents, parents looking after themselves, and that’s the kind of stuff we didn’t actually have in depth in our clinic, in our courses, but it was something we felt was very important to stress in the book and that was a real struggle for me because I feel I’m not a writer, it’s not my forte, but I do teach parents and I do work directly with parents in their relationship so, in the end, Matthew said, “Well, how do you teach the parents?” I said, “Well, I talk to them, of course.” He said, “Well, yes, so go and talk in a microphone and just put it all on audio,” and I went for several long walks and just spoke to the parents directly onto my iPhone and saved the recordings and then transferred that into writing and then was able to get that message across in the chapters that I — so that was kind of my strategy is audio tape the things that I know parents want to hear.


Bryan: So these are the family success stories that come at the end of some of the chapters?


Carol: Most of the family success stories actually are directly from families —


Bryan: Yeah.


Carol: — and then my chapters were, I think it was chapter 8 where I’m talking to parents and really kind of just helping them to — looking after themselves was a big thing. We wanted to make sure we put it in the book. Parents can have a lot of desire to change their child and burn out very quickly —


Bryan: Yeah.


Carol: — and so we wanted to really put that piece in the book to say you’re in a marathon as a parent, no matter whether you’ve got a child with special needs or not. It’s a marathon, and particularly when you’ve got a child with special needs, there’s the idea that if you just run faster, you’ll get there and you then forget to look after yourself. So important to get that message into the book for parents. Take it one step at a time, understand where your child is today and what can you do today to change their child’s brain and do a little bit at a time and take that as a process that you’re going through as a parent. It’s not a sprint, and you can’t sprint your way out of healing the brain. You have to take it one piece at a time.


Bryan: Yeah, there’s a good section about where parents should ask themselves what energizes them —


Carol: Yes.


Bryan: I thought that was pretty impactful as somebody who’s got three kids. So when you showed the early drafts of the book to parents or people who are mentioned in the book, what were the reactions from them?


Matthew: They were excited for us. They were very, very excited for us. They have been waiting for the book and when we finally — when we found somebody who could be an agent for us, he was excited for the book. I mean, everybody knows somebody who’s struggling. Everybody knows somebody struggling with Alzheimer’s or ADHD or whatever diagnosis is out there. We all know somebody. We’re all grieving in our heart that we wish we could help a person. So when we finally said, okay, we got this book, our parents were thrilled that they could read it and they could remember the information and they could hand it to somebody and say, “Listen, I’m grieving for you or I see you and I’m hoping for you and here’s some ideas that may be helpful to you,” so we were thankful for the feedback and we were thankful for the suggestions. The cover. Even the word, the “Family Hope Center,” is not our term for the book, our term for our organization. It was a term that a mother told us we should name our organization the Family Hope Center. I was going to name it the Institute for Neurological Reorganization or something like that and a mother said, “No, no, no, you can’t do that. Please don’t do that. My kid was sitting in the middle of a floor at five years old and he couldn’t see and he didn’t move and he had seizures and he flapped his arms and he was on the spectrum and now he’s in school, he understands, he reads, he’s doing really well and you gave my family hope. In fact, you should call it the Family Hope Center,” and I said, “There’s no way I’m calling it the Family Hope Center.” It’s too girly. It’s not macho enough or whatever. It was not scientific enough. And Carol said, “That’s what we’re calling it,” you know? So I think having two hurt kids on our own, kids that were hurt, you know, you don’t want that for yourself. It’s an existential experience you never ask for, and it brings you right to your knees every single day. You’re begging and praying for wisdom and the ability to shepherd your kids in a way that makes sense to them and not to mess it up. And, for us, we were, you know, when you have a child down the hallway who’s not doing well, nobody ever sleeps, not really. I mean, you might sleep a little bit but you’re always like, “Oh, my gosh. What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?” And so we’ve had the grief and we’ve had the pain but we also, when our kids were injured, we — when we say “injured,” meaning the brain was hurt — we knew the answers but we weren’t as depressed as everybody is because we had some idea what to do so we were able to execute a neurological strategy that didn’t blow up our family and didn’t blow up the kids. Meanwhile, we’re helping a lot of other kids but when you have a child who’s struggling, it’s personal. Families that have kids that are struggling, they know — they know. It’s hard to talk to someone. If we didn’t have a hurt child, it would have been difficult to write a book like this —


Bryan: Yeah.


Matthew: — especially the last couple of chapters. Yeah, we could have written the technical chapters, but we’ve been in pain and, you know, it refines you, it brings you to your knees and makes you, you know, think, okay, how do I become a better father here? Because this child needs me to be more informed, more focused, more compassionate, more empathetic, more smart, more intel— he needs me, I need to step up to be another level of father if I want to help shepherd this child. And so we said, you know, we have to get that into parents’ hands because we have this experience and we help a lot of kids but there’s a whole bunch of kids who can’t come to the Family Hope Center, who can’t come to Philadelphia, who can’t come to Kilkenny or can’t come to Dublin, you know, when we’re teaching, so how can we put this in their hands and let them read it and decide for themselves? Parents won’t allow that. They want options. Parents want options that makes sense, that don’t hurt somebody. 


Bryan: Yeah.


Matthew: And so that was our hope.


Bryan: And on the idea of getting the book into parents’ hands, how would you go about doing that with a book like this?


Carol: Well, we have it — certainly, we have it on social media. A lot of our parents are sharing that information with others. And it’s on Amazon, it’s in Barnes and Noble, it’s in the main, you know, a lot of different booksellers have it, they’re selling it, if anybody, you know, wants to put it in their books, you know, we went through a publisher. We are clinicians, we’re not — we don’t sell books. We’re using the experts to do that for us and get it out there so a publishing company is working with us to help get the word out and we’re doing that also internally as well. That’s our goal.


Bryan: Yeah, yeah. So your goal is to get the book into the hands of as many parents as possible.


Carol: Absolutely.


Matthew: Absolutely. And as many languages as possible. It’s already being published in Portuguese, in Brazil, and in Turkey and we have contracts, you know, pending for Korea and in Spanish —


Bryan: Did you have to change much of the ideas in the book to suit the different countries or was it just a straight translation?


Matthew: No. They liked it and they said, “We wanna translate this book and here’s the contract.” I was like, “Perfect,” you know? Listen, in the end, it’s not about being popular, it’s not about being anything like that. It’s about giving parents a clear idea about what’s happening in the brain and giving them a pathway and an option of helping their family and, by the way, the siblings are grieving also. If you have a hurt brother and sister who’s struggling, you’re desperate too. You don’t know what to do so when the family starts gathering around and starts doing something that’s proactive and you see change, that motivates you to get up the next day and say, “Hey, the brain goes by use, frequency, intensity, and duration of playing, you know, handball or golf or soccer or learning a new language. If I do it with frequency, intensity, and duration and the person who’s teaching me loves me, cares about me, you know, tells me, you know, here we go, let’s go, come on, come on, come on, then I’m gonna learn something if I spend enough time doing it and I have a good coach who cares about me and looks me in the eye and when I start getting snippy, you know, looks at me like a big tiger to the little cub tiger and I go, okay, he’s serious. I better do it,” you know? And, you know, parents have a certain amount of leverage but they also have love and that’s the secret ingredient that everybody takes for granted, that your love is not powerful enough. Well, it is, if you have a plan that’s scientific and generated through a family.


Bryan: So where can people find more information about the Family Hope Center?


Carol: If you just Google “Family Hope Center,” we’re based in Norristown. Yeah, we do have a Pinterest group but we have our primary groups, our Instagram, @thefamilyhopecenter, Instagram, and also Facebook. We teach a course as well, which we mentioned, and we have free information on our website for people to take if they are not sure, “Is this right for me?” they could take a couple of our webinars and watch those and then get the book if they want from there. So, yeah, Instagram, the Family Hope Center, both on Facebook and on Instagram and our website as well.


Matthew: You mentioned that we have a lot of free content.


Carol: Yes, we have a lot of free content on our website and —


Matthew: Three hours of our opening course for parents too, the principles and practices of healing a child’s brain. It’s a three-hour course that’s for free. People can just click on it and say, “Who are these people? What do they do? What do they think? And does this make sense to me?” And so we want to give parents the most amount of information they can to make the most informed decision.


Bryan: I’ll put the links in the show notes, but it was very nice to talk to you both today and good luck with your book.


Carol: Thank you. Thank you very much.


Matthew: Thank you. Thank you for inviting us and, yeah, we can’t wait to get back to Ireland. We have a whole bunch of kids we’re looking forward to seeing.


(outro)


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