LAURA-2017(25of35).jpg — The Balanced Parent

*Perfection not required

Welcome to the home of The Balanced Parent Podcast!

Parenting is often lived in the extremes. It's either Great Joy or chaotic overwhelmed. In one moment you’re nailing it and the next you're losing your cool I want to help you find your way to the messy middle, to a place of balance. You see, balance is a verb not a state of being. it is a thing you do not a thing you are. it is an action a process a series of micro-corrections each and every day to keep ourselves feeling centered. We are never truly balanced. We are engaged in the process of balancing.

Hello, I’m Dr. Laura Froyen and this is the Balanced Parent podcast, where overwhelmed stressed out and disconnected parents go to find tools, mindset shifts and practices to help them stop yelling at the people they love and start connecting on a deeper level, all delivered with heaping doses of grace and compassion. Join me in conversations that will help you get clear on your goals and values and start showing up in your parenting, your relationships, YOUR LIFE, with open-hearted authenticity and balance. Let’s go!

November 09, 2021

Episode 84: Conscious Parenting Basics with Sidu

November 09, 2021/ Laura Froyen

I am so excited for this episode because I have been talking about this topic in my community. Actually, this is the center of what I have been teaching which is conscious and respectful parenting. And so, I have brought a new friend and colleague to help us dive deep into what exactly conscious parenting is.

To help me in this conversation, I would love to introduce Sidu Arroyo-Boulter. She is a licensed professional counselor associate specializing in relational issues, anxiety, and parenting. She has pursued additional education in perinatal mental health to support new families. Additionally, she offers parenting support through her online community Instagram (@conscious.parents).

Here is an overview of our conversation:

Conscious parenting and what it means
How to handle kids' resistance
Importance of conscious parenting in relationships

To know more about conscious parenting, check out Sidu's website and follow her on social media. Website: newseedcounseling.com
Instagram: @conscious.parents
Facebook: www.facebook.com/theconsciousparents

TRANSCRIPT

Parenting is often lived in the extremes. It's either great joy or chaotic, overwhelmed. In one moment, you're nailing it and the next you're losing your cool. I want to help you find your way to the messy middle, to a place of balance. You see balance is a verb, not a state of being. It is a thing you do. Not a thing you are. It is an action, a process, a series of micro corrections that you make each and every day to keep yourself feeling centered. We are never truly balanced. We are engaged in the process of balancing.

Hello, I'm Dr. Laura Froyen and this is The Balanced Parent Podcast where overwhelmed, stressed out and disconnected parents go to find tools, mindset shifts, and practices to help them stop yelling at the people they love and start connecting on a deeper level. All delivered with heaping doses of grace and compassion. Join me in conversations that will help you get clear on your goals and values and start showing up in your parenting, your relationships, your life with openhearted authenticity and balance. Let's go!

Laura: Hello everybody, this is Dr. Laura Froyen, and I'm really excited for this episode this week of the balanced parent podcast because we're going to be talking about, a topic that I've mentioned in passing and that we do a lot of here but I've never actually formally introduced it and so I've brought in a new friend and colleague to help me frame this conversation and we're going to be digging into what exactly is conscious parenting like what do we mean when we say that and so to help me out with this conversation, I would love to have you all Welcome to the show Sidu Arroyo-Boulter.

She is a licensed professional counselor and she specializes in relational issues, anxiety and parenting and she is the genius behind the wonderful Instagram account conscious parents. So I'm so excited to have you here with us. You do, thank you for being here. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do?

Sidu: Thank you so much Laura. Yeah, my name is Sidu Arroyo-Boulter. Like you mentioned, I'm a therapist, family therapist. I specialists in relational issues, anxiety. I've done additional training and preparing natal, mental health and I work with adolescents, individuals and families.

Laura: Cool. I always feel a little curious about how people get into conscious parenting because I don't know what your story is with it, but it was definitely in my training and my PhD program. This was not what we were taught, not a lot of what we were taught in terms of parents. Maybe my emotional and social development class got into some of it a little bit, but not a lot. So I feel curious about how your story, how you got into conscious parenting and kind of what it means to you.

Sidu: Your point is very much similar to mine. I don't recall much in my graduate program. Many conversations really around parenting certainly talked about child development and these aspects, but there wasn't much on the parent child relationship or at least nothing that went beyond infancy for me. I think conscious parenting that has been on my mind even prior to having children.

Laura: Oh yeah, your mom of two.

Sidu: Yes, I'm a mom of two. And so I have a background in education. I was a teacher and then school counselor for many, many years before moving into a family therapy. And there I worked not only on the academic part, but I was thrown into doing a lot of almost like parent coaching without really knowing much of what I was doing a side of from the few courses that I had taken in my undergraduate program at that time. And so I would have a lot of conversations with parents, a lot of concerns and my child doesn't, is refusing to do schoolwork or these sort of aspects.

And so we would talk about it brainstorm together and I think it kind of just formed for me from those early days and understanding more of what children need and at that time I think I had an understanding of if you will like the respect that children need to be the worst that children have, regardless of whether they're two ft tall or whatever it may be and that they are still fully human, but I think my approach even then it was still forming, it was still developing.

So while I knew all those things, I think there was still aspects of how I was teaching parents if you will or brainstorming together this idea of well children still need to respect you and then I became a parent, I was also doing my graduate program at the time and I just began to learn more not only of children development but also just the relationship, that aspect of what, how much we come into parenting with our own, if you will condition ing's our own experience of our own parents perhaps.

But even going beyond our own parents also what our society was like, our culture, our religion and all of these different messages that we receive from all over how we bring all of those into parenting and oftentimes we are not aware of these things were functioning with all of these aspects, all of these conditionings, we may be responding to our child in ways that we may not want to, if you will almost like ingrained or it's just something that we do out of

Laura: Habit, pattern.

Sidu: Habit yeah, something like that. I think conscious parenting is a lot of reflection on what are the areas that I need to grow and how can I honor and respect my child and then how can I continue to foster the relationship because at the end, I think that is what ends up driving a lot of what we hope is a relationship we have with our children.

Laura: I had very similar experiences. You know, I became a parent during my grad program as well and you know, so I was in a human development and Family studies program which is very much systems oriented. Was this big focus on becoming aware of your lens, in your research and your work with families, your position, al Itty in the world, all of the different layers and systems that influence you and influence your client and influence the parents that you're working with and that influence the child that you're working with.

There was so much awareness of this and then there's so much beautiful awareness of child development and attachment theory, but very little like putting together of those two things I found in my training that that for me that's what lots of the work of conscious parenting has been is figuring out. Okay, so if we bring this level of awareness of all of our lenses, all of our conditioning, all of the things that we thought were true, that we grew up thinking like this is what our internal working model of ourselves and others is this is the truth.

Our experiences are our truth. If we start thinking about these things, really looking at them from a little bit of distance learning to hold them out a little bit away from you, take a look and examine like, okay, so this is what I believe my whole life, maybe even what I had to believe for a long time to be safe and well taken care of. And then is this really true? And is this true for me, is this what I'm going to choose to pass on to my kids? That is a little stickier, right? So like what does that look like an action? You know, I don't know if you grappled with that a little bit yourself?

Sidu: No. Yeah. You know, you bring up such a great point right there as far as the so we have these lenses, you know, these conditions that we're observing and I love how you stated right there. It's like we can observe them almost. I often refer to it as like we created this little bit of space between this is what I have if you will known the internal working model and now I have a choice by creating just a little bit more space between what I have known and perhaps now what I can choose to do differently if something is not working for my family.

Now for the relationship I have with my child, I think that's a lot of the framework from when I work with families. That's one of the very beginning, things not only being aware of this systems that we have, but then creating a little bit of that space. Yeah, that's are able to choose.

Laura: It's so critical. So I feel like there's like two directions I want to go here. So hopefully we'll have time to go to both of them. But so the first one is, you know, thinking about lots of the time when parents come into my world and I'm sure when they come into your page there's this sense of, okay, so what do I do, What do I say? What do I say to my kids?

You know, they're resisting me, they're not putting on their shoes, they're not brushing their teeth. What do I do and what I always say and what I find so beautiful and lovely about conscious parenting, the way that I think we are aligned and approaching it is that there is not one Right way to approach this. There's you and your child and there's a million different combinations of scenarios and it's about awareness and trusting yourself and trusting your child. But oftentimes parents aren't there yet.

So for those of us who are listening and thinking like, okay, but yeah, what do I do to get my kid to brush their teeth? Can you speak to that kind of that tension of, I just want to know what to say. We're saying. There isn't necessarily a script to follow.

Sidu: Yeah, I 100% can relate to that. I do think that we both kind of approach it in a similar concept in there isn't necessarily this right or wrong or as I've been reflecting with parents just this week that a million different topics such as brushing your teeth, praising my child power struggles. There's so many different topics in parenting are many of these topics are Gray areas where there isn't necessarily one thing, one response, one answer. But there could be a variety of different responses.

There could be a variety of different ways of engaging with our child. Perhaps engaging with ourselves in those moments when my child is not brushing their teeth and possibly pausing and saying maybe I'm expecting too much of myself right now. That's not to say that we won't get to brushing their teeth. But what are perhaps what am I telling myself when my child is refusing to brush their teeth? Am I telling myself like everyone else is doing it better than I am or why can't I do this correctly?

These post on Instagram or these parenting, You know, people are saying to do it like this, but it's not working for me. There must be something wrong with me. That's where noticing that noticing even our own what we're telling ourselves is crucial to this idea if you will of conscious parenting because there isn't necessarily a right or wrong way and it doesn't mean that we're messing up or that we're ruining our child or that we have failed. If it doesn't go according to the scripts that we often read or see on a blog or watch YouTube video.

Laura: Deep in this one more level. This is the beauty of conscious parenting. It's also an opportunity, every single one of those moments where there is a resistance and pushback is an opportunity more deeply understand yourself to understand these stories and meaning that you might be making like you were just saying like this, there must be something wrong with me. Well, where did you first hear that?

Like when did you first think that you know, oftentimes we heard that very messages kids, you spilled your juice again, what's wrong with you? We heard like the very message. And so each one of those opportunities as an invitation to deepen our own understanding of ourselves to offer ourselves compassion and kindness and in doing so, be more able to very, very authentically be more open to connecting with our child and seeing them clearly were aware of those things and we're healing those things. They don't get in the way anymore. And then we're able to see our kid.

Sidu: Yeah, No, I, I'm 100% on board with that. Absolute. Yeah, I think that's very true. That has been my experience as a parent. That has been, my experience is just in working with other families and that we are able to reflect on our areas if you will of growth, the way that we're understanding ourselves, the way that we're understanding our child, then we are able to authentically respond to them, which may not go according to the script that someone gave us.

Laura: Yes, absolutely. And this allows for quite a bit more flexibility and room to be human and let it be a little bit messy and have it be okay and not perfectly scripted. Okay, so then another question I want to ask you that I get often, I think that you know, folks who are new in this area are kind of starting to dabble into relation based relationship based approaches to parenting is this idea that the relationship is the focus, not obedience, not compliance, not necessarily even necessarily discipline, but that the relationship is the focus and that's where we get, you know, that connection is the source of influence. And so I was curious if you could speak a little bit like how do you see the focus on the relationships, the importance of it and what that actually looks like in practice?

Sidu: Well, first I guess let me start off by saying that I do believe that we are wired for relationships right off of the bat as humans. We are wired for relations. We are not meant to be in our own little island and this isolated from people or whatever that may be. And so with that framework, we do need our child needs that relationship with us in a similar way that I need, that we as adults need others.

I guess the phrase of the village hard right now in this pandemic even more so for being able to create villages and so with that in mind then, you know, if when I'm approaching as well with families or people who are new to this world, it's a huge mindset shift for families to move away from this idea that my job as a parent is to ensure that my children will obey that my children, you know, and if they don't, then there's punishment or isolation or whatever it may be. And I think that comes back to, if you will almost like once again, a mindset shift where sometimes I do wonder whether or not with our systems, which we had already talked about behind some of these, there's an underlying sense of children are not good in their being.

And so it's my job to get them to be good, which from my approach, children are already good in there being and they already are worthy of everything that you and I are. And so then we do approach our child or from a relational approach. That's where these other aspects. If you will this idea of like more compliance. When I ask you to brush your teeth or when I ask you your shoes on all of these things come from, if from the child's perspective, if you will, my parents sees me, they accept me. I feel safe with them of course.

Like I want to continue to be in a relationship. And so perhaps when they asked me to brush my teeth, I'm more willing to comply. Not 100% of the time. Because let's be honest how often sometimes we as adults, we may have a very long day. They say, you know what, I'm not washing my hair today. Maybe we're going on 56 days or whatever it may be. The you just say I'm not going to do it. And that's also that part of understanding that's also going to happen with our children. Some days, they may say I really don't want to brush my teeth and so we have to navigate. Okay

Laura: It should not be radical. But what you're saying is that kids get to be human. They do. They get to be human, just like us. What is it then about having a connection, having a solid relationship, a solid sense of my mom or my dad sees me, they understand me, they value me, they want, you know, they really accept me and love me.

How is it that that in your in my experience, that sense of a child feeling very firmly rooted in that can on some days lead to more pushback and freedom to resist. And but then on the other hand also leads to beautiful cooperation and willingness to kind of come along. What's up with that dynamic that happens sometimes.

Sidu: I would say that that pushback is there's certain times when we may need to be clear on our boundaries and if you will hold the boundary or hold the limits perhaps, but if my child is giving me pushback, I view it as the sense of my child really, truly does know what they want. And I want to encourage that I want to encourage their sense of autonomy, their sense of self because that's something that we all have a desire to do. Especially children. They have a desire to differentiate from their parents and it starts young.

Laura: And not even necessarily a desire, which I feel like sometimes parents misconstrued to think that this is like something that's willful, it's a biological drive to CS autonomy. Absolutely. I think sometimes creating a safe relationship allows a child to know that they can resist and advocate for themselves and part of our job is to recognize when that's happening and help them tune in to themselves, listen to themselves, figure out what it is that they actually need and figure out how to get their needs met in a way that works within the family because that can certainly happen. Do you also see though, that when the relationship is steady and firm, where there's this kind of mutual sense of reliability and security that there can be more cooperation too?

Sidu: I think so, I have seen that, I would say it could be no different than any other relationship. Sometimes I'm thinking of even, you know, adult partner relationships, it's there's no show Asian there sometimes they're still conflict. All of these aspects are very normal, relational aspects,

Laura: Healthy.

Sidu: Healthy.

Laura: Yes.

Sidu: We're preparing as well, our child for all of these aspects. So sometimes there may be conflict with our child and that's okay, that's healthy. We want to navigate that conflict in a way that they are expressing perhaps what they need or want and we're problem solving together. Perhaps they don't get what they want or they need. But even within that there's still a sense of, we're cooperating, we're working together to figure out how everyone's needs primarily can be met within this family and and other times perhaps there's certain wants that can't be met and that's okay as well.

Laura: That's also part of life, right, disappointments are part of life and learning to navigate those things. Okay? So sometimes my listeners really like examples and one that I have been hearing from a lot of folks um around here is schools opening up. There's been quite a lot of school refusal going on. And so do you mind if I kind of put you on the spot and give you like a scenario.

Okay? So let's say, you know, mom and dad are rushing to get out of the out of the house, the kids are back in school, it's maybe been a couple of weeks because they're going back to school and one kid just, you know, sits down on the bench in the mud room and says, I'm not going, what do we do? What is the first thing you would do in that scenario. So I'm not going to school today mama.

Sidu: The first thing and now in this scenario I'm imagining that there's still a little bit of time.

Laura: Hopefully there's time, okay.

Sidu: Hopefully there's if not either way we're making time now.

Laura: First thing, If you know this is happening, tell them to put their shoes on at least 20 minutes earlier, just give yourself a buffer and then you can get your starbucks sale on your way. You're done early. Okay? Yes, okay. But so let's just say perhaps I and I think that when there is time parents handle things better. So let's say there isn't time we're late, we're like we're leaving right at time.

Sidu: So let me give a couple of options. I said yes and then we go from there. Option 1, If you will we demand we let them know too bad listening to you, you don't want to go, you need to put your shoes on, we're leaving right now. Again. Obviously depending on the age, the child still could continue to insist, which means that now I as a parent and forced to physically either pick up my child and move them or something along those lines. That's one option.

Laura: It's so hard to force a kicking and screaming kid into a car seat.

Sidu: Another option is approaching it with a sense of curiosity, a sense of understanding, perhaps what my child is experiencing, helping them understand that this is something that we still have to do, we will have to go to school. But empathizing with their experience of them not wanting to go to school perhaps.

And so that may look like approaching the child trying to figure out, you know, why they don't want to go to school, asking, you know, taking if you will four minutes. Because in reality, if we're choosing the first option of the demanding, you know, and like get your shoes on now we're leaving, that's still taking time. The other option of empathizing with our child and trying to relate to them is also going to take up time.

So, either way, both options will end up taking time. Perhaps we need to pause beforehand and almost have like a mental little chat with ourselves realizing today we're going to be late. It's okay. It doesn't make me a terrible employer. It doesn't make me a bad parent. My child is not bad. I am not, I have not failed. This is a human experience. My child is still a good child, I am still a good parent or a good enough parent. And now I can empathize with my child. I can try to figure out why it is that they are not wanting to go to school that day.

You know, I guess it depends on the child, Maybe they talk about they don't like their teacher, maybe today they just woke up on the wrong side of the bed and they're saying like, I just don't really want to go and you know we have a little chat. I hear you baby. Like I know that you don't want to go to school today we will like we still have to go to school and you know we can offer something different like would you like to do this whenever we're in the car, maybe we can continue talking about it.

Maybe we can talk about the things that we're going to do after school together and almost trying to help my child also de escalate probably from their dis regulated state that they might be in if they are saying I refuse to go to school, they may be dis regulated at that point and so we may need to bring them to a state where we can approach them with logic such as mommy has to go to work, you have to go to school. But in that moment that may not be an option.

Laura: Right, they may not have logical reasoning available to them. I mean three year olds have very little of that anyway but for older kids, if they're very upset. You know the rational thinking happens in the you know the part of the brain that usually is a little bit inaccessible right? When they're very upset.

I feel like what I'm hearing you is slow down, check in with yourself, offer yourself a little bit of soothing so that you can be calm for them help them bring them down with some empathy, some meeting of the mind. I always like, especially with any, I like to get down low to getting your changing your posture. You know, it's, it's funny, I don't know that very many parents know how big we look to our little ones and so everybody listening in case you have never done this.

It can be helpful to think of some things you typically say to your kid and then film yourself saying them while holding your hand holding the phone down at the level that your child is and facing up at you and look down at your phone just to give yourself a picture of what you look like to them while while we're panting. Even the most kindly sweetly delivered thing. We're imposing figures to these little beings. You know.

Sidu: Sometimes I remember when my oldest was two years old, I specifically remember what example when we were in the kitchen and we were talking and I'm looking at her obviously from my adult level and I just thought I wonder how interesting everything would look. And so I got down to her level.

Like I squatted down on the ground and I'm just looking up and everything did just from, you know, the kitchen counters which are so high, the ceilings, the fans, the adults as well, even mom or dad, everything is so large for them. And absolutely sometimes just coming back coming down to their level is a way of I see you, I'm coming to meet you where you are.

Laura: Yeah. And we're in this together, like I'm not going to leave you hanging here. I find too, you know, one of my kids does a little bit of school refusal from time to time. And you know, there's times where I don't necessarily even know what to say because it catches me off guard, like, I don't even know, even just repeating, just to give yourself that moment of pause, like repeating what they've said allows you a little bit of time.

So for those parents who are looking for scripts, simply letting your child give you the script can be really helpful too. So just kind of almost paraphrasing back, I'm not going to school today. Oh, you're not really you're not going to go to school today, huh? School sounds hard. You know, they just gives you a little bit of a jumping off point to repeat back a little bit of what they're saying with a not like not like, oh, you're not going to school today, but with a kind of gentle, curious voice can be quite lovely.

Ok, so then, last question in this scenario, let's say we take option one, we get them in the car, you know, and it happens to the best of us that it happens at times. You know, we've got things we can't meet, you know, meetings, we can't miss whatever it happens, but we feel pretty bad about it, you know, that doesn't feel good to anybody. What do we have to do is repair? Look in the conscious parenting paradigm.

Sidu: The repair, I think I had touched a little bit on it already, but I'm going to go back and just reiterate the importance of repairing with ourselves. I think that part is something that is so crucial just in humans. But if you will something in the conscious parenting, that that sense of still reflecting back because if it didn't go the way that we imagined that we empathize and did all of these wonderful things.

But perhaps it didn't turn out like that and maybe we did take that first option. And more than likely we're maybe in those meetings and now reflecting back and thinking, oh my goodness! Like I picked up my child, I put them in there like, what kind of parent does this? And we're going through everything

Laura: We are so hard on ourselves.

Sidu: We are so hard on ourselves. Yes, we are Laura. And so we're pairing with ourselves first, I think is so important, telling ourselves these things happen, I'm human this moment does not define who I am. It does not define the relationship with my child. And when we're giving ourselves that compassion and then when we see our child asking, letting them know, you know, that time earlier on today when you were having a hard time or when we were having a hard time leaving the house, I picked you up in a harsh way.

And I just want to apologize for that. I'm so sorry that I did that it wasn't right for me to pick you up like that and I will be more mindful of communicating what it is that we need to do in a way that is not causing you harm. Maybe that's too wordy for a three year old in the scenario, three year old. But something along those lines to where I'm communicating that I am sorry, I'm not trying to justify my actions. That's, you know, so I'm not throwing back anything to the child of, well, if you had come, but the situation.

Laura: You didn't ever say the word “but” in there good apology. A good rule of thumb on an apology or repair attempt doesn't include the word, but or however my vocabulary flexible people.

Sidu: And then we let that go afterwards.

Laura: Don't just uh per separate on it and beat ourselves up for days.

Sidu: I would encourage us not to, we might come back to in our own mind that's human as well. But yeah, as best as possible. Whenever that thought comes back up, then that's been taken care of, you know, and I'm moving forward.

Laura: Oh, I love that you're so kind and sweet and I owe that invitation to just let it go is huge, I think. And what a gift to ourselves and to our relationships because when we burden ourselves with our past mistakes, we burden the relationship with them too. It's too much. It's too heavy to put on any one relationship. Um, being kind and compassionate and, and releasing and letting go and forgiving ourselves I think is so important. Thank you for that invitation was beautiful. Let it go so hard. I feel like parenting team has taught me so much about that and I have so much to learn still.

Sidu: As do we all learning so much every day. My children are always teaching me things.

Laura: Same there are wonderful partners in this growing up that we're doing. Speaking of learning then. So if people I'm sure are hungry to learn more from you, where can they go to find you and continue this conversation?

Sidu: Probably the best place to find me is on Instagram. My handle name is conscious parents conscious.

Laura: I think there's a dot. Yeah, I have the link in the show notes so it'll be, you can click right on it.

Sidu: Yeah, so that's where I'm most active. We also have a Facebook page. Same thing conscious parents, if parents are interested in working with me like one on one, they're welcome to go to my website. Also can be found on Instagram, but if not it's new seat counseling dot com and I believe those are the main areas where I'm at right now.

Laura: Awesome. Well thank you. So you do for this beautiful conversation. It was so fun to talk about this with you and I feel so happy to have a colleague who has, I don't know, a similar educational background, it has, you know, it just is very nice to have, I don't know people who are figuring out how to put all of this into practice in a real way with me. So thank you for that. I really appreciate it.

Sidu: Thank you Laura. Yes, I enjoy our conversations.

Laura: Thank you for being here. Yeah, this is really, really great and I hope that we'll get to hear from you again.

Sidu: It would be my pleasure.

Okay, so thanks for listening today. Remember to subscribe to the podcast and if it was helpful, leave me a review. That really helps others find the podcast and join us in this really important work of creating a parenthood that we don't have to escape from and creating a childhood for our kids that they don't have to recover from.

And if you're listening, grab a screenshot and tag me on Instagram so that I can give you a shout out and definitely go follow me on Instagram @laurafroyenphd. That's where you can get behind the scenes, look at what balanced, conscious parenting looks like in action with my family and plus, I share a lot of other really great resources there too.

All right. That's it for me today. I hope that you keep taking really good care of your kids and your family and each other and most importantly of yourself. And just remember, balance is a verb and you're already doing it. You've got this.

November 02, 2021

Episode 83: How Embracing Creativity Can Help You as a Parent with Sierra Casher

November 02, 2021/ Laura Froyen

When we think of "creativity", we immediately think of art, paintings, and drawings. But it actually goes way beyond that and creativity is a crucial skill we need as parents for ourselves & our own experience, and for our kids as they grow. Embracing creativity means encouraging our children's (and our own!) curiosity and using everyday situations to stimulate new ideas, find new ways to see old problems, see things with a beginner's mind, and find innovative solutions.

So, even if you don't see yourself as a "creative" person, I invite you to listen to this week's episode with an open mind as we delve into the incredible ways creativity can support you as a balanced, conscious parent. And I have a really wonderful guest with me for this week's episode. Her name is Sierra Casher and she is going to help us talk about cultivating creativity in our kids and ourselves. Sierra and I first connected in a Clubhouse room and I just loved everything she has to say about creativity, embracing JOY, worthiness, and how cultivating creativity can bring more fulfillment and peace. Sierra is a woman who fearlessly embodies creativity while inspiring others to do the same. She's a wife, a mother of two vibrant kiddos, and an artist who paints pictures both with her inspiring stories and on canvas with her magic paintbrush.

Here is a summary of what we talked about:

Ways to express ourselves through art (even if you're not an artist!)
Tips to cultivate creativity and learning in our children
Creativity as a parenting and problem-solving tool

If you want to have more support on how to be creative, follow Sierra on Instagram.

Hello, I'm Dr. Laura Froyen and this is The Balanced Parent Podcast where overwhelmed, stressed out and disconnected parents go to find tools, mindset shifts, and practices to help them stop yelling at the people they love and start connecting on a deeper level. All delivered with heaping doses of grace and compassion. Join me in conversations that will help you get clear on your goals and values and start showing up in your parenting, your relationships, your life with openhearted authenticity and balance. Let's go!

Laura: Hello, everybody! Welcome to another episode of The Balance Parent Podcast, this is Dr. Laura Froyen and I have a really cool guest with me today. Her name is Sierra Casher and she is going to help us talk about cultivating creativity in our kids. Sierra is a woman who fearlessly embodies creativity while inspiring others to do the same. She's a wife, a mother of two vibrant kiddos and an artist who paints pictures both with her inspiring stories and on campuses with her magic paint brushes. Siera, thanks so much for being here. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do?

Sierra: Okay, so from that introduction, I just kind of get a little warm and fuzzy inside me to like I literally probably pandemic really pulled this creativity out of me. I realized that we had to start to be creative as parents, as wives, as my, like all of the areas. I was like, okay what do I do now? And for me it was like going into this space of learning how to problem solving, learning how to navigate, figuring out what I'm going to get food at the grocery store. I had to become creative again and I was like, oh my goodness, this is something that I've been having my pocket for years and I'm having to use it now.

I would say for me it's like I love, love, love being in a space to where I have to problem solve if I'm honest. And so just like you and we talked, I was a very academic person, like people really here, you're very smart here, you can go far. And so I chased that for years and then I realized like that's not what I really want to do. I simply want to be creative and help other people to be creative because I see that is very, very impacting.

Like now especially you have to be creative in some way form of fashion, we just think that it looks like art, we think it looks like painting, drawing, writing and it's more than just that it's problem solving, its resiliency, it's like learning how to problem solve something, but to be able to say okay this, I don't like that, how this looks, I can paint over it and that and practically that looks like I don't like this grocery store that has these things, I'm going to go to another one and that can be painting over it, you're just going to a different grocery store and it's like writing, you know like a lot of times we're getting our stories and we're trying to figure out what is it that I bring to the table and it's like you get to rewrite your story and that's creativity.

I don't want to do the things that I did growing up, so I'm going to do something different, you're rewriting your story and that's creative kitchen when you're cooking, that's creativity, I don't have this ingredient, so I'm gonna substitute with this, that's creativity. I know for us in the pandemic in texas there were certain things that they didn't have at the grocery stores and so I was like how do now I got to look up how to NATO's and something how to replace yeast and something they don't have yeast here and I'm like okay well there's creativity there as well.

And so it's like for me, the pandemic really push this out of me again and it reminded me of who I really am and I was like, man, this is different, but I like it and I've been able to assist other people to realize like, hey, this is not as a big deal as you think it is, you just have to be creative and they're like, I'm not trying to paint, I'm not trying to draw and I'm like, well you don't have to pay the draw, however you do have to solve a problem, and that's what creativity does, it solves problems.

Laura: Oh my gosh, Sierra, you're blowing my mind with this kind of broader conceptualization of creativity because I think you're so right. I think so many of us think, you know, when we think of a person who is a creative, we think about a person who is an artist, but having this broader idea of what it means to be creative. I love, I wanted to touch on two things that you mentioned there. One is that we can build our creative muscles in maybe an art practices, you know, through painting, but that those skills, those muscles can be applied in a variety of ways. I loved all of those examples you just gave.

I love that you mentioned in your upbringing, your creativity, your that piece of you wasn't necessarily seen as valuable, wasn't honed wasn't held to the light wasn't allowed to shine. And I have a very similar story I feel within me that I do have creativity that has just never been nourished because I was academically successful. I just like you got pushed into the sciences. I There was no time when you're taking three science courses to take an art course, there just isn't time for that, you know, and, and that's how I was pushed and directed. And now here I am. We're in the middle of a pandemic.

We've gotten the message that our creativity, you know, maybe some of us were lucky and we had people in our lives who saw that within us and held it to the light, but many of us didn't. So what do we do now? Now we're in this place where we have to learn how to be creative again, you know, or maybe for the first time.

Sierra: So I would say for someone who is learning to be creative for the first time simply maybe go to the store and buy paint whatever you're feeling like if you're feeling paints have like each color of the paint is like a feeling for it. Like blues and greens. They're more so of the happy and yellows and oranges. They're more so of the happier colors and red is usually one of those colors that if you think about it, you look at red and you see the paramedics have read. So that's like alarming. There's red when you see when you go to the hospital, the landing for the airplane that's red. So that's alarming.

So if something alarming is going on, you're probably gonna use a blue. If you're having like a somber type of like melancholy type of day, you may be brown, blacks, greys, it's a gloomy type day. So it's like just go grab some colors and paint and when I say paint, you literally just don't have to paint anything specific. But you just go with the flow turn on your favorite music, put on your favorite dress. If you're a woman and just go go with the flow. It doesn't have to look like anything that you've ever seen. It could just be your imagination.

Laura: That's so hard.

Sierra: We forget that part. It's like, just go, just go like everything, especially in the pandemic. Everything can be boxed in, you know, in a box or it has to look like this or you know where your mask and it's like, okay, this is a place you don't have to wear a mask. Just go, just go with the flow turn on the music and you will be amazed at what you create. I promise you, you'll be amazed at what you create simply just by, especially music.

Laura: I can, I just pull out, this is art is a place where you don't have to wear a mask and I know you're talking about a facial covering that we wear in the source, but we talk a lot in this podcast about the masks we wear and that's so true to your just thinking about this. You know, we were so many masks, you know, we come up through this world finding out figuring out that there are parts of us that are unlovable or worrying that there are parts of us that are unlovable. And so we, we start masking very young and this idea that there is this place where we can go where we don't have to wear a mask. You know, we can be fully and authentically ourselves. It's beautiful.

Sierra: You want to stay there. I promise. Like I think for sometimes when you first see what you create, you're looking, you will be like, I don't really know because you want to make it make sense. You want to see your face. You want it to look like something because everyone around us is telling us to look like this, be this. And if you think about it, it's always especially commercials, be this. Get more of this, look like this, don't look like this. Oh, this is acceptable. This is not acceptable.

But art is for me has been a place that I both found myself and I lost myself at the same time, art is truly freedom. And if we can really tap into it, it will help us to turn those wheels to realize that hey, I don't have to be this. This commercial is telling me, I have to be, I don't have to have more. I simply can create what I want, I could create what I want and like you said, the mask, like for me, that was a part of my story. I mask my creativity for years because it was weird, it was like, what is that? I tried to wear clothes that matched because that was acceptable. I really like to wear in the, I'm still coming out,

I like to wear stripes and circles at the same time, but socially, that's not acceptable. They're like, where are you going? You look like a clown at this point in my life is like, it is what it is going to be wearing stripes and circles and you're just gonna have to just learn how to get with it.

Laura: I love that. And you're highlighting to this place of you know, we are so hard on ourselves and that this the idea that this could be a place where you are free of judgment, self judgment, external judgment. I know I can hear my listeners because I know they're out there, the ones who are thinking like but yeah, but I'm not an artist and you know, who would still be afraid to paint on paper because they would be still continuing to judge themselves. You know that they like what I would make wouldn't look good.

I don't know how to mix colors. I don't know how to make paint strokes and you are encouraging people to be brave and to just do it and to accept what is, that's it, right, accept what comes out. See the beauty and whatever comes out. Even if it doesn't look conventional or what you thought it was going to look like or what joe down the streets as it should look like you were just fully accepting what comes out of you creatively. And in the process, I think you learn to accept yourself.

Sierra: It's like, it's like a mirror or it can be a mirror. Yes, exactly what I was saying about the colors, it's like if you're having a gloomy day, you're more so going to be drawn towards darker colors. If you're feeling vibrant inside, you're probably gonna be drawn to more of the brighter colors. So it's like whatever you're painting on this paper you're going to see and I think there's a part of like art therapy where they present different colors to a child and see which colors they're picking and they'll ask them why did you pick this?

And you will find out, hey, who this child is having this going on with them because of the colors that they have Children just like with us when you're getting ready to paint, if that's not where you want to start, you can find music. I know a lot of people speak music, you can find music that like if you listen to the type of music that you listen to when you're very high you listen to music that's fast, be like Yeah.

And when you're having like those not so good days, you're probably listen to a sad love song and it's like that's art as well. Like we don't necessarily have to simply create. Somebody may have already created something. For you to be able to give life to that thing, if that makes sense.

Laura: Yeah, 100%. I love how we're talking about this. I love that we started out talking of our goal here is to do a little bit of talking about how to cultivate creativity and our kids. And I think we're hitting on this note right here that if we want to really cultivate anything in our kids, we have to embody in ourselves first, right? And so bravely finding ways to express yourself and to figure out like, how am I like, I mean, just even this practice that you're talking about, like letting the things that speak to you give you information without judgment of Yeah, this song is really speaking to me.

I wonder like why it's resonating just a little bit of curiosity there. And I think, you know, to what you're talking about with the idea of art, of creating art with this mind. If we're not going to get it right, there's no perfection. There's no one right way to do this, Bringing this to the way we do art in front of our kids can also be hugely impactful for them. I hear all the time from parents who have kids and kind of the 3-6 ranges. When I see this the most where kids become very perfectionistic with their art, with their drawing, very concerned that they're drawing doesn't look the way it's supposed to.

And I actually, you know, when that's happening, I prescribe scribbling to the parent so that the parent is doing a lot of scribbling a lot of just messy art, a lot of art that looks like nothing to give permission to the child to re-find that in themselves. But I never really thought about it in a like, you know, this was always like from the mindset of this is what the kid needs the kid needs you to to not draw perfectly, because they can't they don't have to fine motor skills to be able to do it. They need you to match where they are and give them permission to do it imperfectly so that they can have a creative process, but I never thought about how just how good it would be for the parent themselves as individuals, you know what I mean?

Sierra: That's one of the philosophies that I live by is like our Children do what we do, not what we fill them. And so it's like if you are embodying what you want them to do, then they're going to do it. If you want them to eat vegetables, you have to eat vegetables because they're like, mom's not eating it. I want to eat it if you want them. Like you're saying like when it comes to article activity, it's like creativity is really about the environment.

If mom is always wearing black and white, I'm probably gonna wear black and white as a kid because I don't see her being vibrant or different choices with her clothing. And so it's like even with my daughter, she'll tell me mom, I want to be a mom want to grow up. And I'm like, why do you say that because you wear lipstick? And I'm like what? And so I took note of that. So when I catch her in my lipstick, I am not, you know scolding her for that because she's trying to be like me. So even with art, she my art is around in her office space and so she will mimic what she sees me doing. Mom, I want to be like you because your paintings are beautiful. And so she'll just try to do what I do.

And so just yesterday she took her canvas and she just went to work on it and I looked at and I was like, she's trying to do something that she saw on the other candidates. And so like now like some paintings that I have that are like flowers and stuff like that. I keep them in the closet because I don't want her to think her paintings have to look the same as mine. And so you don't want to limit her creating like exactly what you were saying. Like I don't want her to feel like, oh mom, my flower doesn't look like yours. It is not supposed to, it's not supposed to simply supposed to be whatever you come up with. And as she grows like I still have her paintings from when she was like, maybe two and three, she's four now and I look back at them and I'm like, wow, I can see improvement.

However, I am still starting to see that she's still a child and Picasso. I'm probably gonna venture this. But Picasso has a, he has a quote where he's talking about basically, you can't go back to childhood. You can't like, like paintings that we see from Children. We are usually in all of them is childlike. And when you try to pay as an adult, you don't paint like a child because you have so many experiences now.

Laura: and you have limitations. You have judgments and thoughts and constraints that kids don't have. They don't know they exist.

Sierra: Exactly unless you put them on them.

Laura: Right. Unless we put them on them and we do that in lots of completely like well intentioned or unintentional ways, you know, like, I mean just with the best of intentions when they're three and they say Mommy will you draw me a horse, like, you know, it's hard to deny a child when they're asking something as simple as that, you know? But in that place, when we do that, when we draw a horse for a child, then we tell them that's a horse and we put a constraint on them right?

Sierra: Now, that we looked at a child's photo, and I know we all do it, but even with my daughter, whatever she draws, if she says it's a horse and it looks like a little flour that is a horse.

Laura: that's a horse.

Sierra: That's the best horse I've ever seen. And if I'm honest, sometimes, like I've been a art teacher at the Boys and Girls Club and the other teachers are not artists and they just didn't get it. So Children would show them scribble scrabble and they'll be like, this is my house, and they're like, this is not, I'm like, don't do that.

Laura: don't crush their dress.

Sierra: you can't see what they think that is their house, and then like, that needs a house, and I'm like, I'll talk to them later and I'm like, hey, don't do that, like this is a place they get to be created, this is a place they get to just create if they draw scribble, you understand that as that, but to them that is a house and we don't want to combine them in here, I don't like there was a time, I hope the people out because I'm like, you're just not ready for this because it's a very tender place and like you were saying earlier, like when they look at something and they think, you know, hey, this is what this is.

And we have those constraints. It usually comes from another person. They view what we did and they're telling us that that's not acceptable and that's a child. They don't realize that I get to be who I wanna be, I get to draw how I want to draw. But we internalize that. I know for myself out, I internalize it as men, I have to do something that works. People looking at and realizing what it is abstract. It was like, no, you can't, no.

Laura: I have to do something that's worth people looking at, Oh my God, I mean that's a metaphor though for everything in parenthood, we do so much as parents in an attempt to fill someone else's idea of what's worthy and right.

Sierra: or oh my kids are eating this and this is what's healthy.

Laura: Yeah, we do so much. We let so many other people's ideas confine us, man, you're really heading

Sierra: It’s an art. This art, it releases you from that. So we constantly do art. It will release you from different boundaries and boxes that people have put us in is beautiful, if I'm honest, like change the world like just be creative every single day, do something creative every single day and you start to realize the boxes that you are in just not being creative.

Laura: okay. And you're really helping me with a block. Actually, Sierra right now that I have around my art because I do really enjoy painting and I have one of the blocks I've had is that what do I do with the paintings when I'm done? That's a waste of money. It's a waste of materials. It's not going to go on a wall. Like maybe I might even throw it away. Like it just there's this piece of me that's very like depression and what like poverty, trauma that comes up from my family history with money story. But there's this idea that the act of doing it is in in and of itself purposeful is what you're saying, right? That's what you're saying that in the in the

Sierra: Nobody has to see? you know, have you, no one has to see it. Like, you don't have to share them with anyone. If you do, then that's a bonus to them because you're sharing your inside, this is my heart. And so that I poured onto paper and if you want to view it, you don't have to say anything. You're just like, oh, thank you. Like, people should be saying thank you for seeing other people's art.

Like you see this and then goes art all the time. And he's basically saying, hey, here is my heart organize, like when we paint and when we create is from the inside, I don't know someone, I don't know how you would be able to create for me, I don't know how you would be able to create without going inside. Like you can do that, somebody can teach me but if without going inside because it's like it's a deep place of that's not judged.

And so it's like if I can put this on paper and let people see it, you are a brave person just to even put it out because it's like almost like open heart surgery, it's like uh what do I want to paint today? Um You gotta put your heart on the paper because people are going to look at it and not all the time, but if you share it, people will look at it based on their perception of their life and their experiences and they will say that's not what that is, that's not what they're supposed to be. Oh that color doesn't go with that color, that's not you, That's them, That's their experiences, That's the things that they have been through and that is like their story, that's coming up with your art.

Laura: Oh my gosh, I feel like Sierra, you are teaching a class in like conscious communication right now. Like I mean you're teaching like all the things through art because you were just talking about boundaries, holding boundaries for yourself. That if you're going to put something out there that's vulnerable. You are not going to let other people's perception of it change how you feel about it.

You just gave everybody a crash course in conscious living. I mean it's beautiful. I love the way that this is all flowing from you. Okay, so let's talk for a minute now. We've been talking a lot about us as parents. So a little bit about kids, but are there other ways that we can be cultivating creativity? I think we've hit on why creativity.

So there's actually a lot of research in the business world in career and financial success That as we move further into the 21st century that people who have creativity, one of their core competencies will be more successful in a future. That requires a lot of flexibility, Problem solving, critical thinking skills, you're spot on with that. That's something that's backed by amazing research. So how do we then, how do we cultivate creativity and our kids? Like can we talk about that a little bit?

Sierra: I would say it starts with the environment to things that are important is doing like simply I was doing, being like simply just being creative. Um not always having very, I would say like maybe by a creative shirt that you have that doesn't look like your regular work shirts. And so like or in the kitchen we usually cook this, this this mix it up a little bit and do something different and that will teach them like mom usually cook oatmeal with apples on the side today.

She cooked oatmeal with, I don't know, let's say apricots on the side and it's like, that's different. Oh mom just get a little creative in the kitchen today and that there's like, oh, so we can do things differently. It doesn't always have to be in such a structured environment. And then also to, I would say that it is being in doing like doing things you want them to mimic the other part, the environment have art work and different things in the environment. Like if the child comes to you and this is my favorite one to use and she has on rain boots, night jacket and pajama pants and you're going to the grocery store, who is she going to harm?

Laura: Oh my gosh.

Sierra: nobody, nobody, she's fully clothed. So let her rare that just let them be in their creativity because they're trying to express themselves. Mama want to be a firefighter. I want to be a princess and a unicorn all at one time, let them just be that and don't and I would say try not to, what do you like if you're going to somewhere that's required of, you know, business attire and they need to be, you know, in a specific uniform, do that.

However, it's like, let them just simply just be, if you're going to a friend's house and they want to warehouse shoes, whatever it is. Let them just express themselves, let them dress themselves and just go and be. And also to like my daughter, she plays with lots of legos actually have a chalkboard wall in my office space. So when she feels creative, so she's not painting on every other wall, draw on the chalkboard wall.

So it's like cultivate the environment first and then they'll just do it. They'll follow your lead by what you're doing. And they'll also see that, oh, this is my space to create. I have a table cloth, like a plastic tablecloth on my office wall and I sent her campus there whenever she will go to that, she's probably painted on the same campus like three or four times and I'll just say, hey, come to mama, let me put the paint into your palate and she can just go paint, clean it up when you're done and you can do it again tomorrow.

And whenever she's feeling it, she'll tell me, mom, I'm about to go paint. I just let it go paint mom. I want to create a car. I let her just create a car and it's like what she's seen me do these things first or she's like I said with the lipstick earlier, she gather creative with that too. And I'm like, yeah, I gotta go hide.

Laura: well, at least our good lipsticks, you know, those things can be expensive sometimes like.

Sierra: we can get one of them, you know.

Laura: we're not about that kind of creativity and we're not about the smashing lipstick creativity. I mean, I love this too. I think that's one thing that can be, what I'm hearing you saying is not being afraid of their creative spirit of nurturing it, creating room for it in your day and supporting them to figure out how they can do that within the bounds of what's okay.

Like you you know, have we're not drawing on all of the walls were going to draw on this wall, that's a chalkboard wall, that's for you to draw on. You know, we're not going to paint on this surface, we're going to paint on this service. So giving her good boundaries in which she can channel, you know, her creativity more freely.

I would imagine to that having access to materials is good, right? So access that she can get herself and feel independent with the ones that need a little bit more support or supervision. Those ones are up high or something.

Sierra: Yes. And then like this only in my office space that she can get her creative stuff. Just because I know like if I leave it anywhere else, I will find paint on the walls, like, like like when she was three, she painted a mural of her hands on the wall, we walked in and there was handprints everywhere and I was like what? And that taught me, you don't have a good boundary because you have the art stuff just where she can reach.

So not only are you teaching them boundaries, you also teaching them to allow their creativity to flow from them. If she, you know, she knows where the things are. However, she still has to come to me and say, hey mom, I'm ready to go paint and then I can get them down for her and versus you know what I learned, You just can't have free access to it.

Just it. But she has legos in her room that she can play with. She has puzzles that there's a lot of different things that besides pain because I like, okay, but there's lots of different things you can use this legos. There's building box. There are like these don't really know what you call them, but they're like star shaped and you put them together. They're usually like very vibrant colors.

Laura: Oh yeah, these like little kind of like, I don't know, brain flakes kind of thing.

Sierra: Yeah.

Laura: That you can stick together.

Sierra: Yes. There's all different types writing. That's the way to be creative. They can have a journal right into draw in sidewalk chalk if you don't want it done in the house. There's so much that they can do saying the kinetic sand.

Laura: I live in that story that you told about your daughter at the handprints, you fully situated the responsibility for that moment on yourself. I love that about like because that's a hard moment. Like it was like, oh, that's on me. You know, I one day I walked into my daughter when she was three, she's eight now, so it's like a long time ago. But she, during her rest time she didn't nap anymore.

But she still intend to her room for quiet time. She got into the bathroom and gotten a jar of raw shea butter and you know, like raw shea butter, like that doesn't smell the best, you know, But it's a lot. She's got this jar of raw shea butter and had rubbed it all over herself and all over her floor. We had hardwood floor.

So I mean just conditioned the floor all over her furniture and we walked in and we're like, well that's on us, the shea butter on the counter, We should have put it up higher. Like, you know, like that's not her fault. Like they don't have any impulse control. You know?

Sierra: Like, I mean, I had, I want to use it. Everything else can use a little shape.

Laura: But yeah, one thing too that I liked to is that you highlighted at how the way that you situate these boundaries is that you are her partner in creativity. You're not a block, You're not a stopper, you're not a, you know, a thing where you're blocking it from happening, that she knows you're her partner in it, that she can come to you when she wants to paint and you're right there with her.

Yeah, I want you to be able to paint too. She knows that you're on her side, they're going to make it work with her. You know, maybe if she wants to paint you know in a certain way or you know that you will help her figure out.

Sierra: She'll ask mama, do you think it's beautiful every time is? Yes, I think that's beautiful. What you know, what are you trying to create? I don't judge it. If you think that those three colours go together, then they go together. I'm really trying my best like in the beginning I was I would be honest, it hasn't always been this way.

I was looking at the scribbles and being like that, it's not that and I realized the impact that it had and then now I for her birthday, her birthday is coming up, I'm gonna her old paintings and her new things. I'm gonna frame them and put them in her room so that she can see like this is what you have created, but also have her age on the back for later on.

So she can see like this is what you painted when he was three and she can make the judgment that she wants to make about her own work. However, at this age, I'm like, I just want her to see, like, continue to create, just continue to create. So there is a constant reminder. So when she becomes an adult continue to create that is my hope that she will continue to create.

Laura: We put our kids artwork on a wall, it tells them something like it communicates to them that this is important. What you just did was important, you know, I love that I have a client whose high school, best friend, her parents do let her draw on all of her walls from childhood and when she moved away from college, they like, took pictures of it all because like, by the time she and she was going to an art school, but and by the time she was 18, when was moving out, they were going to repaint it all of her walls were covered and like, what a beautiful gift for a creative kid, you know, like it was her room and it was ok, like, that was okay with her parents.

Like that's not, I don't know if I can handle that, you know, but I think what a beautiful gift that child's parents saw in her, something that like Doctor that need to do it and cultivated a safe place for her to be able to do it, what an incredibly, like, an incredible thing to be seen in that way by your parents. It's a beautiful thing, right?

Sierra: And I think it's more so, like you were saying, like, they partnered with her and let her do that. I can see how that's a little different as a little child though, just like, I don't know if that's gonna change over to you can't do this in other people's homes or other people.

Laura: Yeah. I think it takes careful holding of those boundaries, you know, really clarifying having a very clear boundary. Yeah. I don't know how it would work for all families, but it worked for there's I mean yeah.

Sierra: I love to draw in my room, Oh it came out.

Laura: My five year old when she goes in for her rest time. She doesn't like to get out of her bed. She likes to stay in her bed, but she plays in it before she had her crib up and we didn't know it was happening, but she has these little murals in the like that she's drawn on the wall between the bars of her crib.

And so when we took her crib away, we saw them there and they're like, you know, they're just like, I couldn't bear, they were just pencils easy to wash off. You know, I couldn't bear to do it. Like there's all represented all this time that she spent in her bed creating, I couldn't bear to wash them away. They're still there even though she's in her big girl bed.

Sierra: Because it's different because like I said, it's their heart wall at that time, they were experiencing this or they were feeling this and they were just like, well, I think I want this to be on the outside you do and it's just like for you to like even to act like sometimes I asked my daughter like what is this about?

And then she was explained to me what it is and the story usually doesn't go with the picture, but I'm like, okay, whatever this is what this is about. And even though they don't match to me, I'm like in her mind, that's what that's about. And like for her that storytelling as well, like you created a whole story off of this picture that you drew.

Laura: Yeah.

Sierra: beautiful. Like it's a purpose in what you just drew.

Laura: I love that you keep saying this that they have put their heart on the page and then they're giving it to you. I think it's really important that we understand that when a child gives us that they are giving us a piece of them a little picture into their mind and into their heart and it's our job to accept it.

Like unconditionally with no judgment to ask them about it. You know? So like some of the things you can do in a child gives you a piece of art or saying things like you know, tell me about this and oh wow, I see you, we're really careful with these colors. Will you tell me about why you chose them? You know, really kind of lets them feel seen and heard and then valued. You know.

Sierra: They'll bring you another one, they'll bring them now.

Laura: They will.

Sierra: Be celebrating it. They're like my daughter, she have a card on my door now because she's like, hey mom and I asked her about it and so she's like, hey, I want to make dad one and like okay, so I think people know that piece of paper into like once you celebrate it and they will see, don't want to just give it to everybody because she told, she's like, hey, for my birthday, I want to make cars for everyone and I'm just like, okay, it's your birthday. However okay.

Laura: But look at the generous heart that you're cultivating through our, I love that I really appreciate this conversation that we've been having about the gifts of creativity, like what it can offer us as parents as such on our journey of releasing perfectionism, releasing self judgment and also for our kids, thank you Sierra so much for this conversation. I really appreciate it. Okay, so tell us where parents can find you because I've watched a few of your paint along videos on instagram and I want everybody to come and see you.

Sierra: So on Instagram I actually just created a new artist page is going to be cashiered to you and if you go to my regular Instagram sierra_cashier and you'll just see the link to get to the new page, haven't uploaded things there yet. However, I'm excited about putting things, there are just simply creativity. Um I also have a website and you can see some of my old paintings and new paintings because there's some things from Instagram there and it's the seracashier.com.

Laura: Just, we'll have all of those links in the show notes for the podcast episode. I hope everybody goes and finds you.

Sierra: Yes, I'm excited.

Laura: Yeah, thank you so much for having this conversation with me. It was fun to talk with you about this. Thank you for, for holding that space for us.

Okay, so thanks for listening today. Remember to subscribe to the podcast and if it was helpful, leave me a review. That really helps others find the podcast and join us in this really important work of creating a parenthood that we don't have to escape from and creating a childhood for our kids that they don't have to recover from.

And if you're listening, grab a screenshot and tag me on Instagram so that I can give you a shout out and definitely go follow me on Instagram @laurafroyenphd. That's where you can get behind the scenes, look at what balanced, conscious parenting looks like in action with my family and plus, I share a lot of other really great resources there too.

October 26, 2021

Episode 82: Helping Kids (And Parents) with ADHD with The Childhood Collective

October 26, 2021/ Laura Froyen

I've been getting a lot of questions from my community about how to handle kids' challenging behaviors and where to get support. And a lot of the stories I hear about these kids send my “ADHD” alarm bell ringing. Kids with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) can look like they are simply misbehaving or being defiant when in reality they have something getting in the way of them being able to meet expectations.

Now, if you are a parent who has a child with ADHD, I know that it can be tough and that you might be feeling worried that something is wrong with your kiddo or that you’re failing them somehow. And I also know many parents maybe suspect something is going on for their kid but are worried about them being diagnosed, labeled, and pidgeon-holed. I get that so much! I’ve had similar concerns for my own daughter when I was seeking to understand her struggles when she was younger.

Navigating the world of diagnoses, therapies, and schooling accommodations can be confusing and lonely. And so, for this week's episode I wanted to help you understand how your child's brain works, help you see how this diagnosis can empower you as a parent, and can help your child get the support they need to do well in all their settings! And to help me with this conversation, I like to introduce you to a crew of amazing parenting and child development experts, Mallory Yee, Laurie Long, and Katie Syverson. Through their work in private practice, they saw a great need for parents to more easily access research-backed parenting tips and tools, particularly those parents raising kids with ADHD, anxiety, learning disorders, and speech/language delays. Here is an overview of our discussion:

Parent mindset shifts when raising a child with ADHD
Prioritizing connection over correction
Viewing "challenging" behaviors as more of a skill deficit (thus in need of teaching!)

To get more support, follow Diana on social media, Facebook: www.facebook.com/childhoodcollective Instagram: @thechildhoodcollective

Clubhouse: @thechildhoodco

Or follow their website www.thechildhoodcollective.com They also have an online course, Creating Calm, for parents raising kids with ADHD ages 4-11 years.

CHECK IT OUT HERE

So to help me with this conversation I've brought in the childhood collective. They are an amazing group of women who just get it. They get what we're trying to do here at this podcast. I'm so excited to have them. So I'm going to let them introduce themselves to you and then we're going to dig into this conversation. Mallory, why don't you take it away?

Mallory: Yeah, Thank you so much. And we're so excited to be here. My name is Mallory Yee. I am a child psychologist, but currently a stay-at-home mom. Although we debate whether I'm a stay-at-home mom or a work-from-home mom now that, you know, the childhood collective is ramping up.

And prior to becoming a stay-at-home mom, however, I worked in the schools. I'm trained in school psychology and I also worked in private practice doing a lot of diagnostic assessments for families, doing a lot of therapy, worked in pediatrician's offices, reaching families in that way, which was amazing because they were already coming to the doctor and then I was there to kind of provide this medical home.

But now, you know, my most important job of all now is staying at home mom. I have two young boys, two and a half, four and a half. They're really making me put all of my knowledge to work every day and extending myself a lot of grace.

Laura: It’s amazing, isn’t it?

Mallory: It really is. So I'm living that stay-at-home mom life and it's actually it feels like it's been recently but we're coming up on the three-year anniversary of that I think so it's been a while now.

Laura: We're so happy to have you and Lori your next.

Lori: Yup. I'm Lori Long and I am also a child psychologist trained in school psychology and I started a private practice in Scottsdale Prism where I mostly do diagnostic evaluations for autism, ADHD, specific learning disorders like dyslexia. And yeah I had training and background in doing therapy for anxiety or helping support families with ADHD.

And you know through that process kind of saw a lot of families really struggling after they get the diagnosis and in particular kids with ADHD. A lot of those families were coming in having gotten diagnostic evaluation from a pediatrician was pretty minimal and they were kind of like not knowing where to go and how to get support and they really just wanted practical strategies and it was hard to give parents evidence-based services.

Even in the huge area of phoenix. You know not a lot of providers were doing parent training and parent help for kids with ADHD. And so we really started the childhood collective to provide an online course creating calm to support our parents of kids with ADHD. Yeah we're doing that through the childhood collective.

Laura: Amazing and Katie, tell us where you fit in in the collective.

Katie: Perfect. So I'm Katie Syverson and I'm the speech-language pathologist. I also work in private practice. I actually lead a small team of speech pathologists and within a psychology practice and small world, that's where we all met kind of once upon a time, but I'm the only one that's still there and I work a lot with the psychology team that we have there in terms of just differential diagnosis when we're looking at a child with autism or ADHD different learning issues and helping figure out how their language, their social skills, their executive functioning, how that all fits into the bigger picture that the psychologists are painting with their reports.

So that's been a huge passion for me. I've been doing diagnostics for almost 10 years and when I do therapy because I do more testing now I try to focus the kids that I see more in the field of executive functioning ADHD and so it's been kind of fun with the childhood collective, bringing out kind of those things that you teach parents every day in one on one. And I know that this is something that you're really passionate about too Laura is just being able to reach more families and do it on a larger scale.

And so I generally will be the one talking about tools that parents can use. I'm also a mom and I use these strategies in my own home all the time when they're not working. I'm problem solving right along with our parents. So that's a lot of my pieces, I think of the tactical kind of executive functioning piece.

Laura: I love it. It's such a pleasure to be able to talk with a group of women who have such broad expertise and really share this vision of seeing the child as a whole person and seeing the family as a whole and deserving of wrap-around support that, you know when we see them as whole kids and whole families, we are looking at ways to support the entire family system and I love that you do that.

Okay so we wanted to talk a little bit then about, I know that you often want to support families as they are coming in, they've gotten a diagnosis or they're figuring out what their diagnosis is and particularly kids with anxiety and ADHD. As families are in that space, what are some of the first things you start helping them with as they are navigating this kind of unsure time?

Mallory: I think a big piece especially if the family is recently diagnosed if the child just has a diagnosis is really helping the family understand what that means, understand how their child's brain works, understand that their child's diagnosis is not their fault, helping them see how having the diagnosis can be really empowering for them as parents because they can figure out how to best support their child but how it's also empowering for their child.

I think a challenge for a lot of children if they're to the point where they're walking through our door for a diagnostic assessment. They realize that something is different, that their brain works differently, that something is challenging for them in a way that it's not challenging for other kids in their class maybe. So I think a big piece is also working with the child to learn how their brain works differently but how that can really be an asset for them.

How we can help in those areas that are more challenging but also tapping into some of those strengths that come from the ways that their brain works differently. So a lot at the beginning is education and a lot of it is a mindset shift to helping them see how the road ahead can be really positive and fulfilling now that they have this diagnosis and we have a little more guidance.

Laura: Does anybody have any other things to add to that piece of it?

Katie: I think for me too, you know, it is that reassurance and really building rapport with the parents because a lot of times I see kids that maybe weren't picked up really young as having a traditional language issue. A lot of kids especially with ADHD. Didn't have a language delay at let's say birthright like as a three-year-old where their language starts to become more problematic as they get older and as they start to write and they start to knead, executive functioning skills and cohesion right to write a paragraph or a story or an essay.

These kinds of things you start to see and those are all fundamentally language-based issues. But the same with social skills, right? They don't present like a child with autism who at the very beginning might be much more independent and less socially engaged. But as they get older and social skills get more nuanced, kids with ADHD who can be really impulsive, can really struggle in reading social situations Modulating themselves to the situation.

These parents are coming in a little later like their child might be 7,8,9 years old and they're going like something's not quite right. I'm not really sure and it might have taken them a really long time to get to this point of getting this diagnosis or getting the help that they need. And even getting a speech pathologist like it's not always common for a child with ADHD to get a speech and language of although it's super helpful and can really pinpoint some of these issues.

So a lot of what I do is really validating the parent and listening to them and taking careful notes on what they say and I have a pretty good memory so maybe I don't even need to take those notes but they watch me type what they're saying and it's like, yes, someone is hearing me, They, believe me, they see that this is an issue and so I know that that can be really exhausting as a parent because you feel like you're always trying to explain what you're seeing and there's always going to be that friend that says everything's fine, grandma is like, he's just a busy guy or whatever. So just validation. I think it's such a huge piece of the puzzle.

Lori: I feel like with the families that I worked with most of the kids that I'm seeing don't just have one single diagnosis, they have ADHD and dyslexia or they have autism and dyslexia and anxiety and so there's oftentimes a lot of different things going on and for parents a lot of times it is prioritizing kind of treatment and what to do and you can't, it can be so overwhelming when you get tons of recommendations about how to address different areas and I think for parents trying to help them kind of decide on what is there biggest challenge or struggle right now and how do we kind of focus on that or address that first so that they're not completely overwhelmed by that process.

Laura: So, so good, okay, I'm thinking about a question right now and I want to just take a second to make sure I get it outright. So I know that you all are very, you know, interested in the Ross Greene Collaborative and Proactive Solutions model, the model that's described in a number of books, but parents are most familiar with the Explosive Child and in that book, they really do a really nice job of describing how some of these underlying issues can make a kid look like they've got behavioral challenges where you make a kid look explosive and really there's these underlying things. Do you see this a lot with ADHD and anxiety in kids and how do you help parents shift from seeing like okay when he's bothering his friends that's really ADHD that's happening when he's losing it after school? It's really because he's got executive over-functioning overload from school, he's exhausted. Can you speak to that a little bit?

Mallory: I think we talk a lot about anxiety through the childhood collective and this is one where we see a lot of families especially at school and you know, we've talked about school refusal and some of our kids will, you know, tear up the front office of the school and they'll be running away from school and they will be cussing and hitting and all of these things and people don't make that connection. That’s anxiety, you know, because to us, anxiety is just kind of being frightened and shivering and kids will state that they're worried and a lot of our kids really don't have the language to say that they are afraid of a situation.

They don't have the language to say what is going on, but their body is in a state of fight or flight, you know, when they're anxious and for a lot of our kids, they start fighting, you know, some of them will flee in run away, but some of them will start fighting. And so yes, I think a lot of times trying to help parents and school staff understand what is the underlying issue, because if we treat it like It's just a behavioral problem, we never get at the source of that.

And if you try and force a kid into a situation where their anxiety is a 10, you know, 10 out of 10 you're never going to get them to do that. You know, if you made me stand on a stage with two million people in front of me, I'm not going to talk, just not because I'm terrified and I can't do that, it's too much for me. So I think it's really important to kind of get that underlying issue and identify that. And I think Ross Green does a really good job of trying to teach parents that there's usually an underlying skill that is missing or an underlying issue going on that can look like defiance.

Katie: Absolutely and like Dr. Greene says, kids do well if they can, and we really adopt that mindset with The Childhood Collective and that's a huge mindset shift for parents because that's not what society is telling them. Society is telling them that they messed up somehow, that they're bad parents, society is telling them that they have a naughty kid and society has a ton of opinions about what they need to do about that.

Laura: Yeah, and it's also the piece of like they can do it sometimes. So a lot of parents say, come to me and say, I know they can do this because I see them do it in circumstances and that means when they're not doing it, they're choosing not to.

Katie: Absolutely. That makes me think of another scenario that a ton of families come to us with, that's incredibly frustrating, but really common and that's that their child holds it together at school and then they come home and it’s the ultimate meltdown. And it's confusing for parents about why can my child regulate their emotions at school?

Why can they, you know, listen to the teacher, the teacher is telling me about one kid and I tell you that's not my child, because my child comes home and that's a different child, and that's a challenge for a lot of families is again, when the underlying need isn't addressed, whether it's anxiety or we need to build skills, some kids can hold it together really well, but it is taxing and it is taking every last drop of energy and mental focus at school and then parents get the meltdown at home because it's safe and because the child has nothing left to give. So that's another really challenging, challenging thing that we see families face in that way.

Laura: I see that all the time too and it's so important to know too that just because a kid looks like they're regulating, it doesn't actually mean that they necessarily are, they could very well be stuffing. And of course, we know that when you're stuffing and it's got to come out somehow, this will come out later, but I'm releasing a real Instagram real on this exact topic that I recorded a couple of days ago. So hopefully you'll take a look.

Yes, it's so common. I hear all the time, my kids can hold it together so well they're angels at school, their model students at school and then they come home and everything is no and it's everything is destroyed and it's so hard and so hard as parents to be on the receiving end of that. I've got one of those kiddos who just white knuckles through her day at school, she's in a different school this year that is not challenging in the same way her other school was and she doesn't do it anymore.

She's another year older, but she doesn't come home with massive headaches and She would get so dis regulated in her old school where she would come home with literal fevers 99, fever once or twice a week because she wasn't sick, her body was just that dis regulated and challenging. It's so hard. It's hard when we love our kids so much and we want the little angels, we want nice, kind, sweet moments with them.

Lori: But I always try and tell parents like we're all like that, you know, I'm going to go to my job and I'm gonna be really sweet and polite to the people that I'm seeing. But then I come home and after a stressful day, I'm snapping at my husband and I talked to angry and don't talk to me and we're all like that to some extent, in some ways there's a positive in the sense that our kids feel safe with us, they feel unconditionally loved and they feel like they can be that way around us, that they don't feel like they can be around other people at school. So in some ways though it feels awful, they feel that way because they feel safe.

Katie: Another challenge with this scenario too is that we're seeing the challenging behaviour at home. The fix is really at school. This is where families encounter difficulties with the school, when the school is saying they're fine, they hold it together all day, they get their work done. What do you mean? Does your child need extra support or accommodations at school? The problem is at home, but with these kids, that's not the case, they, they're telling us that they need more support at school, more accommodation.

omething is really challenging there. Their needs are not being met at school even though they're holding it together. Appearances, you know, so that's another challenge that families face is getting their child extra support at school when appearances would make you think that they're doing fine.

Laura: How can parents do that? Because I know so many parents are in the situation where they know that they're doing what they can at home and they need a partnership with their school. But because the school isn't seeing it, there's not resources available. They can't get an IP. So that they can get accommodations. What can a parent do to advocate for their child in these scenarios?

Katie: We recently did a thing where we were asking people on our Instagram and our email list like what do you need from the teachers if you're a parent and teachers, what do you need from parents of kids in your class, especially those exceptional learners, right. Kids that are going to maybe need a little extra support. And one of the resounding themes was communication, which seems obvious, but I'm a mom and I have a first grader. And it's kind of challenging actually, like we don't, I don't know how your guys schools are set up to your guys were trying not to say your guys, I don't know how.

Laura: We're working on it.

Katie: I know it's a personal goal. I don't know how your schools are set up, but I don't go into my child's school, especially now with Covid, I never go in and talk to the teacher. It's not like preschool. And so it does take a level of intention to reach out to the teacher and really kind of established just a relationship. I'm so grateful to my child's teacher, she's wonderful and my daughter loves her and she always tells me about how things are going and I have a really verbal kid who just will tell me like.

And then so, and so, you know, touched this person's chair and then they had to lose two minutes of recess or whatever. So I get all the details but from my kid, but it's like reaching out to the teacher and really establishing that relationship. I think that even in parenting we tend to do this right? Like things are going well, we'll just stay at the park for 10 more minutes and then things fall apart. So if you know that you have a child who might struggle or you've already kind of, this isn't your first roller coaster.

You might really want to consider like reaching out to the teacher and just building that relationship. Hey, how are things going? I, especially with my little one, she likes to take pictures of things that she does at home and she'll be like, can you email that to my teacher? So I'll just email random pictures of things that she does. The teachers probably like, oh, here she is again in my inbox. That's okay though because then something comes up, you know? And maybe like for example my daughter had an issue on a math test where she is really, I think didn't understand the directions for this one section and I just reached out to the teacher and I was like hey is this a concern? You know?

But it wasn't weird because I already know her, she already knows that she can call me Katie and you know what we had for breakfast three days ago because and I wanted to send her a picture so I feel like it doesn't feel so weird and again it doesn't need to be like a daily check in in some cases maybe it it would but in this sense I think it's just it's almost like an ounce of prevention, right? You're just going to get to know that teacher and build that relationship and that can be really helped full just as like a first line of defense.

Laura: Mallory and Lori, did you have any suggestions too?

Mallory: Parents that are dealing with this situation, their parenting an exceptional child, perhaps their child has ADHD. They really are thrust into the role of advocate. Most parents don't understand how the schools work and this is something that we also talk a lot about on our social media is understanding the medical side of things is different than the school side of things and how can we make these two things work together to really support our kids and it's really important for these families to understand. But it's complicated and so they're thrust into this role of having to advocate for their child without even necessarily knowing what they're advocating for and how to do that and what their rights are.

So encouraging families to learn what their rights are within the school and what to request and how to request it. And there are other people in the school as well that could be helpful to these families, outside of just the classroom teacher, like a school counselor for the school psychologist or vice principal sometimes takes on some of these responsibilities. So knowing that there are options out there that there are other people they can talk to with whom they can bring up these concerns. It is just so challenging that they're instantly taking on this advocate role. It's hard for a lot of families.

Laura: : I am so glad that you're teaching family those things because when I need to advocate for my child, I can just kind of throw around the weight of my PhD, you know, and I can come in and say, you know, like I have that level of confidence, you know, I love that you're empowering parents to have that level of confidence to be well versed in kind of the system that they need to be able to go into. And I just want to also add that parents in general tend to be quite experts in their individual child.

Mallory: Absolutely.

Laura: I think most teachers recognized like most teachers and school administrators. You know, if you come in with that sense of, look, I'm an expert on my child, you're the expert in the school setting. How are we going to work together to support my kiddo?

Lori: I have a PhD and I will go into IP. Meetings frequently and I get so much pushback and it's intimidating for me a lot of times being in an I. P. Meeting. So I think for parents like knowing that it is really helpful to have an advocate or somebody with you who understands the law because the law with 504 plans and IP’s is extremely complicated when I'm at a meeting, I can get pushed back, but I know the law quite well and I can say, wait a second. The law doesn't actually say that as a parent, you know, you're not going to maybe know the intricacies of that to be able to push back a little bit. And so I think a lot of parents really assume that the schools know what is correct with that? And a lot of them don't necessarily. We've been talking in particular about ADHD and you know, the Office of Civil Rights really came out and said we're doing a really not good job in the schools of supporting our kids with a PhD.

In fact, there's been so many violations in the past years that we're basically coming out with guidelines for schools and saying you need to follow these guidelines because there is so much discrimination going on. Our kids with ADHD and essentially, you know, if your child has a diagnosis, you know, you should be advocating for at the very least a 504 plan because if your child has a diagnosis, it's, you know, you get that diagnosis because it's impacting them to a significant degree in their life. And so typically they need those accommodations to level the playing field so that they're able to access the curriculum and do things at the same level as their peers. So it's really important for parents to know that, I guess.

Laura: Yeah, absolutely. Can you just give us a little short little definition of a five or four plan or an IEP. Can you just for people who are listening and I'm going to have to start advocating.

Lori: Yes, for sure. So with a 504 plan, if your child has a diagnosis, again, it's really a plan to say, here are some accommodations that will level the playing field. You're not changing the curriculum, you're not changing their instruction, you might be doing things like giving them fidgets at the desk that they can kind of occupy themselves giving them extra time on a test if they get distracted or taking a test in a quiet room.

If they get really distracted in a large setting where they get anxious during testing. So again you're not changing the actual work that they're doing, they're getting the same level of work. Whereas for an IEP where really when we look at an IEP we're looking at does this child need intensive instruction in a particular area to really make adequate progress? And this is really important. It doesn't have to be just academic.

We have plenty of kids who have ADHD or autism who do well academically. But their challenges are with speech or social communication or social skills or behaviors. Their behaviors are so significant that they can't access the curriculum or the instruction they might need intensive instruction in those areas to really make progress. So it doesn't just have to be academic. Your child can be doing well academically but still need an IEP. And still need instruction in those areas and the IEP.

Again goals has a little bit more weight I guess it doesn't have to be. But typically in the schools you have meetings annually where you're going over did they meet their goals? Those types of things. Whereas the 504 plan maybe you know isn't taken as seriously in the schools it should be. But it isn't based on my experience working in the schools and, and how they have that set up.

Katie: So I think it's important for parents to know that a 504 plan and IEP both hold the same legal weight. The school is legally obligated once this document is created and signed and agreed upon by everyone there legally obligated to implement it. But like Lori said sometimes 504 plans aren't seen as so important. But they both come from federal law, they both hold legal weight. One is not, you know, more valid than the other. They're both important in the school has to follow them.

Laura: Thank you for that clarification. You know, it's Lori you mentioned having fidgets on a 504 plan and I know so many families who are in schools whose teachers have made a blanket ban on all fidgets and that really like that means that probably for some of those kids if they had a five or four plan that, that would be being violated.

Lori: It would be. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I have said this before. I do testing with lots of kids with HD and I've tried fidgets and a lot of times it is very distracting but that doesn't mean that all of them are distracting. And it doesn't mean that there aren't you know sometimes it's putting Velcro under their desk or having silly putty or something like that.

That maybe isn't distracting for other students or them where it's not like a toy but it gives them that ability to get out some of that, those fidgety behaviors or things like that, that they can't control, you know, they really can't control. Their body is kind of moving and going and they don't have the ability to regulate that and they need some help with that. So making blanket statements is probably not appropriate.

But I think most parents think, oh, the teachers should know that and they don't like, teachers don't necessarily get a lot of training in ADHD or five or four plans or things like that. So we do have to do our part and kind of educating and if we, as parents don't know those things getting an advocate to help with those meetings. That does understand the law is really helpful.

Laura: I used to do that in grad school. How would people find someone to come and be an advocate for you in this?

Mallory: Yeah, I think doing a google search for an educational advocate in your area. So I think that can be helpful or talking to other parents. Like if you can get in a Facebook group in your area that's, you know, asking parents within that group like have you had issues at a meeting? Did you use somebody and getting recommendations that way? Most people can be helpful.

Laura: I would imagine your child's other service providers might also be plugged into those networks. Like if your child is you're seeing a slip.

Mallory: Definitely. Yeah. And I think if you're in a rural area again, just remember that especially in this last year with Covid like we can do zoom meetings like that's really easy to do. And I, most of the IEP meetings I attend via a phone conference or zoom, I'm not there in person. So you know, it's really easy to have somebody who's maybe, you know, you have more options for instance in the greater phoenix area, but you might be in Yuma and there's not a lot of people you can still have them assist you with that meaning.

Laura: Awesome. Thank you for that. Okay, so I have one last question for the three of you if there's one thing you wanted families to know as they wrap up listening to this episode about, you know, if they've got a child who's struggling who has some challenging behaviors that might or might not be related to ADHD. But what is it that you really want families and parents to know about their kid about themselves? I'd love to hear that it's not your fault and the same thing.

Lori: Yeah. It's not your fault. And I know that there can be a lot of hesitation about do I want to go down the route of getting a diagnosis when you're starting to see those things and I think there's many advantages to that and I've not once had a family come to me for an evaluation and said I regret this experience. Almost every single person just feels this sense of relief of, okay, now I know what this is now.

I know the science based information to help with this is and I have a direction and a plan and now my child even potentially knows what this is so that they cannot feel like they're stupid and behind their peers and not as good as their peers that they, their brain works differently and so that they can celebrate the awesome ways that they are different.

Their peers aren't just was talking to a kid recently and had autism and we were able to talk about all the amazing things that he could do that his other friends couldn't do because he had autism, how observant he is with his environment and his amazing, intense interests and math and things like that, that really make him unique. It can be so helpful and empowering to families and really set your child up for success in the future with getting interventions that we know are really helpful for that particular diagnosis.

Katie: I think something else that I would want parents to hear is just, you know, as Lori said and Mallory to it's not your fault, but also that you're not alone. I think that for parents who are raising exceptional kids, I was speaking to a mom yesterday and she told me, you know, my kids are just extra and their extra energetic and their extra happy and they're extra athletic, but they can also be extra difficult at times and when you look at other people and you look around a restaurant or see other kids just holding their parents hand nicely in the parking lot.

It can feel really discouraging and really isolating like I'm the only one that struggles with this and we know that that's not true because we deal in a different population right? And so in our jobs were seeing families all the time that are struggling but looking for those resources connecting through social media is such a great way to do it.

But understanding like this is a normal, I put that in quotes experience for a lot of families actually that go through this and you're certainly not alone and think that almost all of us have fears and concerns about our children at times that can be really validating to be around other people who are going through something similar.

Laura: Absolutely Mallory, is there anything to add?

Mallory: I think they said it great and like you said earlier, Laura parents are the expert on their child and they really are the best person to help their child and they have the power and so letting parents know and empowering them with the knowledge that they truly are the expert and that they can help their child I think is one of the, one of the most important takeaways. I hope parents get from that.

Laura: That's beautiful. I just want to add as a person who has a challenging kid who's highly anxious and her anxiety manifests and she has some sensory issues too. They manifest in some really challenging behaviors. I waited way too long to get help and support because I had this idea in my head that I'm supposed to know, I'm the expert, I'm supposed to know how to do all of this, I'm supposed to know how to handle it.

But it's different when you're when it's your child. And so yes, I just want to echo, you're not alone in this, it is not your fault and there's nothing wrong with needing support. And that doesn't mean you failed in any way and your kids are lucky to have you. I mean, you're going to be their greatest partner in figuring out what it means to live with these things because many of these things are going to be kind of walk alongside your kids for the rest of their lives and so how powerful is it to have tools that they're learning now as kids, you know?

Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you all so much for being here with me. I hope everybody will go and follow the Childhood Collective on Instagram. Their content is amazing. And I know you have a course on ADHD. Right, why don't you tell us a little bit about that course. So people can go and check it out and get support if they need it.

Lori: Yeah, we have an online course. It's a video based course for parents who have kids with ADHD between the ages of four and 11, 4 and 12. And again, our course is really trying to give parents like simple science backed information and kind of a step by step process of how to support their kids at home, because we just kind of see parents really struggling with knowing what to do.

And again, our point is to say you don't need to be an ADHD expert, you don't need to have a PhD in child psychology to do this. You really don't do a lot of this stuff we weren't even trained in in schools. And so we're kind of, yeah, we're kind of packaging this stuff that is the most important stuff that you need to know to really support your child and really help them to grow and to be independent. I mean, that's really what we want for our kids. How do we find joy and parenting? How do we grow them into the amazing kids that we know that they can be. So, that's what we want to do with our course. So you can check that out at the thechildhoodcollective.com

Laura: I hope that they do. That sounds like an amazing resource. Probably is helping so many families. Thank you for being here.

Lori: Thank you so much for having us on.

Katie: Yes, thank you so much. And we love your content to so this is really fun to get to sit down and just telling you,

Laura: Oh, I had a lot of fun too. I think we could probably geek out about this stuff forever,

Mallory: I know, probably.

Okay, so thanks for listening today. Remember to subscribe to the podcast and if it was helpful, leave me a review. That really helps others find the podcast and join us in this really important work of creating a parenthood that we don't have to escape from and creating a childhood for our kids that they don't have to recover from.

And if you're listening, grab a screenshot and tag me on Instagram so that I can give you a shout out and definitely go follow me on Instagram @laurafroyenphd. That's where you can get behind the scenes, look at what balanced, conscious parenting looks like in action with my family and plus, I share a lot of other really great resources there too.

October 19, 2021

Episode 81: Social Justice Parenting with Traci Baxley

October 19, 2021/ Laura Froyen

I truly believe, from the bottom of my heart, that one of the most effective ways we as parents can change the world is through our children and our parenting. That conscious, respectful parenting is in itself a radical act of activism in a world that is unjust. And that anti-racist activism is an integral part of this work that we are all doing as we raise our kids differently than how we were parented. I know that you too seek to raise a generation of children who know who they are and what matters to them, who deeply understand justice and seek it in all their spaces, who are fierce advocates not only for themselves but for others, who are more proactive in their kindness, and who intercedes when harm is done.

This is why I'm so thrilled to have Dr. Traci Baxley of Social Justice Parenting as a guest for this week's episode on The Balanced Parent Podcast. She is a professor, consultant, parenting coach, speaker, mother to five children, and the author of a new book that comes out TODAY: Social Justice Parenting. As an educator for over 30 years with degrees in child development, elementary education, and curriculum and instruction, she specializes in diversity and inclusion, anti-bias curriculum, and social justice education.

Here is an overview of what we talked about:

Social Justice Parenting
Shifting from fear to radical love
The difference between being a good person and being pro-justice
Tips on raising kids to know they have power and privilege & how to use it.

To learn more, follow Dr. Traci on social media and visit her website:
Website: socialjusticeparenting.com/home
Instagram: www.instagram.com/socialjusticeparenting
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/tracibaxley

Dr. Traci's book, SOCIAL JUSTICE PARENTING: How to Raise Compassionate, Anti-Racist, Justice-Minded Kids in an Unjust World launches today! This book tackles not only the basics of respectful, connected, empathic parenting, but also what a social justice approach to parenting looks like and what it requires of us (because they are wrapped up in one another!). It also digs deep into specific, practical applications, giving you concrete parenting tools to put the philosophy into practice with your kids immediately!.

GRAB YOUR COPY HERE!

Hello, I'm Dr. Laura Froyen and this is The Balanced Parent Podcast where overwhelmed, stressed out and disconnected parents go to find tools, mindset shifts, and practices to help them stop yelling at the people they love and start connecting on a deeper level. All delivered with heaping doses of grace and compassion. Join me in conversations that will help you get clear on your goals and values and start showing up in your parenting, your relationships, your life with openhearted authenticity and balance. Let's go!

Laura: Hello Everybody, this is Dr. Laura Froyen and on this week's episode of The Balance Parent Podcast we are going to be talking about parenting for social justice and social change and I'm really excited to have my guest who has written a beautiful book on this topic, Dr. Traci Baxley of Social Justice Parenting, amazing account on Instagram and a beautiful philosophy. So Traci, welcome to the show, I'm so excited to have you. Will you tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do?

Traci: Yes. Hi Laura, I'm happy to be here. I am Traci Baxley and I am, I guess my number one job is being a mother of five and I am also a professor and consulting and coach and I work with families around issues of race, racism, raising human beings who are more compassionate, more kind and who want to make the change changers agents in the world.

Laura: Yeah, I love that. It's I think that it's one of the beautiful things I have always loved about your account that as I've been reading your book. It's a beautiful mission to be thinking about how can we not only raise kids who love themselves who feel as if they belong in this world and in our family but then also go out and create that sense of kindness and belonging out in the world. It's beautiful.

Traci: Yeah, thank you. That's the ultimate goal, right? We raise kids in our homes with their own values and our own core values and our ways of being inside the home. But we also have to be conscious that those are the things that they walk out of our homes with and those are the things that they take with them when they, when they leave us. And so how do we start creating this change in our homes so that they create these same changes in their communities and you know, eventually in the world?

Laura: Yeah. Okay, so when we think about the name of your Instagram account and the book is Social Justice Parenting, what does that mean to you?

Traci: I think it's just a way that we intentionally kind of show up in our parenting role that's purposeful and that it really is about raising children who I say care and care deeply who love radically, who can show up themselves and others raising kids who are consciously more kind and more compassionate and who want to do good in the world. I think the more that we are intentionally working on these things in our homes, the more that these things become natural and normalize for our kids as they enter into the more public spaces.

Laura: Absolutely. And why is this so important? Why should we take this on as like an intentional value as parents?

Traci: I think we're seeing a world right now so divided almost more than ever. And I think as we see injustices around us, as we see that we can't find middle ground, I think now more than ever we need to be raising children who learn how to compromise right and, and to show up for others because I'm really afraid about the direction that we're going in as a country, as a nation.

And if we don't start to kind of write this train a little bit through the way we're raising our children, the next generation won't really have a chance to learn what it means to give of yourself right? To be a little bit selfless, to see others as our own in order to really be able to see the humanness and all of us, in order to be able to make the changes that we need in the world.

And I know in a selfish way, I look at that Laura, I need your kids to know who my kids are, right? So we need to think about the way we raised our children as a part of a village, a human village that raising and those values start in our own homes for them to be able to do that in the world.

Laura: It starts early, very young, right? I had a listener reach out to me when she found out that I was interviewing you and asked you know, so she's got little ones infants and toddlers, two year olds and she's just wondering, okay, where do I start with this? Where do I like beyond getting your book, which everybody listening should go do that right now. Hopefully, buy it from an independently owned bookseller. But if Amazon is what you got to go get it there. But what is it that we can do? And we've got really young children like what are the first stepping stones?

Traci: I think the very first thing you do is you have to be honest with yourself about your own feelings, right? So there's a lot of self-reflection that needs to happen about your own childhood about your own biases about your own experiences and being able to unpack those honestly in order to be more intentional about the way you show up with your kids. So it really starts before you even really interact with your kids around things.

Laura: Just like anything else was conscious parenting, right? It always starts with us.

Traci: And I think the bottom line is if we think about the development of kids and there's been studies that show kids as early as six months really recognize facial features and they gravitate to people who look like them. And then by the time they are in preschool they have developed that in-group bias. Right? So that they think that the people who look like them are more important are better friends.

Those are the ones they want to be around. And then by the time they hit early grade school they recognize that with color, with race comes power and privilege. And even kids of color recognize that white children have more power and privilege. So we're talking, if they're already toddlers, if they're already preschoolers, they already have ideas about race um long before we may even have those conversations.

Laura: That's why it's so critical right that we start proactively and very early allowing the discussion of differences of noticing. That's very natural for a child and then starting to have those conversations. One thing I love about your book is that you have this whole section of conversation starters which I just love, especially parents like me who are white and who grew up not having those conversations.

I grew up in a home where we were actively discouraged from having those conversations because that was the colorblind ideology was the thing in the 80s and 90s. I mean I think with good intentions, my parents had good intentions. They really you know, my mom grew up in a home that there was lots of active racism and she was attempting to counter that with us and unknowingly send other messages. I love that you're giving us the words that we might not know how to start. So I really appreciate that. Are there other things that we can be doing with our kiddos?

Traci: I just want to touch on something.

Laura: Okay please do.

Traci: For parents who grew up in the same way because a lot of us did right? But there's a lot of messaging in that silence.

Laura: Oh! so much. Yes, so much.

Traci: You're walking away with ideas whether you say something or not and I always say don't you want them to have your ideas about what race is and not media, not other family members, not their friends. And so I think probably the worst way of showing up in this space is not saying anything at all. There's a study that a teacher, I think it was northwestern did the study where a teacher was reading a book because we all say, okay, read books is a great place to start and it is a great place to start.

But not if you're just reading the words on the page, you really have to unpack what's going on. Point out skin color talk about what that means. And the study basically had a teacher reading the story and to half of the one group of kids, she read it and say we don't see color, right? We're all the same. You know, we love each other. And then the other half of she actually said race. These kids are black. These kids are agent race is a big deal in our country. We have to really unpack what that means. We have to have conversations around it.

We love differences. But she actually used the word race and then the kids had a kind of like a post-test on their ideas and their biases and the studies show that the kids who actually had the real words about race were more able to identify biases later. So our kids don't recognize this vague language that we often use and we really have to be really concrete, age-appropriate. Yes, but very concrete in the way we talk to our kids about race early.

Laura: Thank you for sharing that study with us. I think it's so important to bring the research into this piece of things. What I love too about your book is it invites that self-reflection of, you know, when we are leaning towards the vague language, when it feels more comfortable to go to that vague language, that that is a moment that is inviting self-reflection.

What is it that makes so uncomfortable? For example, for white parents to say that child is black, that's a black child and to use it with a capital B like, what is it that makes us that's anti-blackness showing up in our bodies in our frame of reference that somewhere along the line, we got the idea that we can't say that and, and that's just the reality of it. And I love too that you invite the knowing better and doing better and the not marinating shame and guilt figuring out acknowledging it, moving on doing better.

Traci: Thank you for bringing those up that we can't allow the way our bodies feel to dictate how we are short for our kids. Like we even have to talk about it. I feel a little bit scared to talk about this topic because it wasn't talked to me. Grandma and grandpa didn't talk to me about it. You talk to me about it, right? But I want to do better and do differently because I wanted to have a conversation where you're not afraid to talk about it.

So a lot of times as parents, right? We, our own experiences, our own anxieties. We project that onto our kids call that the fear-based parenting are afraid to allow our kids to think and to feel and to have discussions around. And we just kind of shut off their natural curiosities of asking questions, trying to figure out the world around them. And then we teach them that is not okay to talk about it. We can't talk about race when we're afraid to have those same conversations and then we perpetuate the same.

Laura: Mm-hmm. And we're just passing it down the line. You said something there, that reminded me of another piece that I love in your book that I wanted to pull out. Because it is critical in you know, any way we're looking at parenting shifting from fear to radical love. Would you mind sharing a little bit about that piece and why you have it so front and center in your book?

Traci: Yeah, I think a lot of us, especially when it comes to heart topics like this, we live in this idea of fear And I think the fear is because you know, it may be changes hard, right? talking about something that makes us uncomfortable in general. It's hard to have conversations with our children. We want to protect them. We want to keep them safe. And part of that is because of the fear of what's out there. Right? Talk about this idea of being able to have conversations about what's going on beyond your front door or your gated communities because we want to keep them from the truth.

And so we keep them in this bubble, we are really denying them opportunities to make choices to problem solve, to grow as human beings, to work on being more compassionate and kind when people are different. And so this protection or anxiety that we feel is really keeping them from growing and being good people. And so I really believe in this power of showing up with radical log, which just means really the bottom line is I'm not parenting for my own kid.

Laura: Yeah.

Traci: I am parenting from a space that all kids belong to me in some way and it is my responsibility to teach love and my own children so that love radiates to everybody else outside of my home.

Laura: I love that in fact that piece of part of social justice, parenting is not just considering how we're showing up for our children, but how you're showing up for all children.

Traci: Yeah, because we need each other, right?

Laura: We do, we're all in this together.

Traci: Absolutely. And if we don't start making those small changes in our homes, our kids really believe that we're going to get more of the same.

Laura: Yeah, absolutely. You said something just before about raising kids who are good people and I was kind of curious about if you can talk a little bit about what's the difference between being a good person, which most of us are, and being pro-justice.

Traci: We raised good people, we raised them to be kind and to do no harm, right? We raised pro-justice children, we are raising them to intercede when harm is being done. So it's more active, right? Kind, it's great raising good kids is great, but we want to raise kids who are more proactive in their kindness so that they are really seeing things from other perspectives that they're really wanting to be up to standards and that they see kind deeds and empowering and standing with others as something that's normal and that's what we do.

Laura: There is a difference and I think that there's part of this that is modeling and then also actively teaching our kids what to do, like how to intercede in a way that is safe because most of my friends who are folks of color and who are black have memories of being in school and having microaggressions or actually big racist aggressions perpetuated in school and there were bystanders, there were kids around them.

I think that for folks like me who have white kids, I want to actively teach them young how to intercede and stand up for their friends and for what's wrong. Do you have any tips for those of us who are in that position who really want to raise those activists who raise kids who know like that they have power and privilege and that they can use it even when they're quite young?

Traci: Let me tell you a story that's in the book that came to mind when you when we talked when you said that. So my girlfriend and I were the only two blacks. We were in this eight-week boot camp on one summer before we had kids and we worked out, he did three times a day workout through that time together with this group of people. We got close like a little family. Like even on the weekends we'd go to, it was an ex-marine who ran the boot camp. We would go to his house for happy hour and hors d'oeuvres.

But it was like a little bit of a family at that point. And the last day of the boot camp as we were like during our last-minute stretches he asked his children to go pick up all of the equipment And the girl who probably was like 10 or 11 went right away and start picking up all the equipment where the sun kind of got up, slowly dragging his feet, his body kind of hunched over and the girl turned around to her brother and said stop being lazy or stop walking like her and she said the n word. In that moment of course silence, everybody's wide-eyed looking at each other and then obviously their eyes went to my girlfriend and I were the only two black people in that group.

And when I look back on that moment, of course, I unpacked it with the kids and with the instructor. But in that moment, I needed an ally, right? I needed somebody who raised somebody to say, hey, that's not right or I don't think that's appropriate or I stand with you, or I'm sorry that happened to you. I would never allow that to happen to you or get or something, but nobody said anything because of that fear. And so this idea of what you're saying is for us to raise the next generation who won't be those people, you will learn to stand in solidarity with an empowerment with people who are being marginalized in some ways.

And I think the best way that we can start doing that at home is to literally role play it. So you have these scenarios, maybe it's a Friday night thing, right? We're having movie night pizza and then we're gonna pull sticks from a jar to role-play different events that could happen and actually having kids have the words to say when things happen because in that moment we get afraid and we're not, we don't know what to say.

But if they practiced this thing at home, it becomes second nature that this is what I do. This is what I say, this is how I show up. So don't be afraid to have some of these moments at home. That creates maybe some uncomfortableness at home. So that when they're out in the world, it gives them a little bit more power a little bit more strength to be able to stand up and have these conversations in the moment when they're happening outside of your home.

Laura: So beautifully put Traci, thank you so much for sharing that story so openly to illustrate how powerful it is to raise people to be allies. The role-playing works and help when my daughter who's nine now five hurt on the playground one day a little boy in her class told two of her friends, one who was Indian and when who was Asian and that he didn't like them because they had brown skin and she knew exactly what to say because we practiced it at home.

Like literally practice those things and so she stood in front of them said it's not okay to say that. It's not okay to like people based on the color of their skin or not like people go away and then comforted her friends and then went and got a teacher, you know, so I was super proud of it, you know, but it's and that's not like a cookie. Like we're not asking for, they get it. I think we can trust kids to get this early young, you know, she was only five, you know, so, but they need practice. You know, they need the skill, it's not something they learned overnight, you know.

Traci: By nature, they want to help, they ask the questions, I want to know what the problem is. I want to know how I can help. And when we don't allow them opportunities, when we're telling them to be quiet or shushed or we don't talk about those things. They then don't start trusting their instincts. And so we don't want to be the ones to squash that in our kids. These little moments are really defining moments for who our kids can become when you enter the world.

Laura: Okay. So I feel like we hit some of these pieces. I'm kind of curious about how folks learn more from you beyond this book. I know that you do consulting. Do you teach classes? Are there opportunities to kind of dive deeper and working with you?

Traci: Yeah, I have two courses that are out now. One is a long, longer-term course because it's not the book, but it's a lot of things from the book and extension of the book. I would say it is.

Laura: Yeah.

Traci: And then I have one quick like how to talk to your kids about race. So it's a smaller quicker course. And the other one is a little bit more in-depth with a lot of worksheets and a lot of work that you should be. And I do have one on one clients that I work with parents. And also I have group clients. So there's a group of moms who want to come around a certain topic or issue our parenting. Then I do that as well. Also too, You know, there's a lot of nonprofits and corporations that are doing a lot of DIY work, that's all part of my belonging umbrella. So I do a lot of corporate work as well.

Laura: Beautiful.

Traci: So I just want to work with anybody who wants to work in the space of belonging and being more compassionate, being more allowing people to show up as themselves. It's really important.

Laura: So important. I feel like your book is this kind of essential guide to just parenting consciously and respectfully. Like we all want to raise good people, people who stand up for its right, who knows what's in their heart, who knows how to trust themselves and move out into the world to create a world that is better.

You know, one thing that we didn't get to talk about entirely was this idea that, you know, I really believe that one of the most powerful ways that we as parents can impact the world is through our kids and through our parenting and I so appreciate that call that your book brings us to kind of look at that broader kind of, broadening our perspective, broadening our view of, of what we do as parents.

Traci: Yeah. And what our past experience has taught us and how we're showing up and modeling these things for our children every day and I'm a big, big believer in a family, actively creating core values together because those core values when you're out of line, you can always bring people back to the core values when I'm behaving in a way that doesn't align with your values in my house.

I want my children to call me on it because if we are creating a space where belonging and safety is important, where you have each other's backs like you're your brother's keeper, your sister's keeper is one of our core values and I'm not doing that in a way. You need to be able to call me on it for us to come back in alignment. And so I think that is kind of like the foundation for creating a family dynamic where we can see and do for others.

Laura: Yeah, where we can as a team, hold each other accountable and push our family as a group forward.

Traci: Absolutely.

Laura: Oh, that's so beautiful. Traci, Thank you so much for this conversation and for the gift of your work that you put out into this world. I hope that everybody listening goes and gets a copy of your book. I really appreciate your time and energy that you shared with us today so much.

Traci: Thank you so much, Laura, I really appreciate it being here and being a part of your audience as well.
Laura: The honor is all mine. I was so giddy to get to talk to you today, so I really, really appreciate it.

Traci: Thank you.

Okay, so thanks for listening today. Remember to subscribe to the podcast and if it was helpful, leave me a review that really helps others find the podcast and join us in this really important work of creating a parenthood that we don't have to escape from and creating a childhood for our kids that they don't have to recover from.

And if you're listening, grab a screenshot and tag me on Instagram so that I can give you a shout out um, and definitely go follow me on Instagram. I'm @laurafroyenphd. That's where you can get behind the scenes. Look at what balanced, conscious parenting looks like in action with my family, and plus I share a lot of other, really great resources there too.

All right. That's it for me today. I hope that you keep taking really good care of your kids and your family and each other and most importantly of yourself. And just to remember, balance is a verb and you're already doing it. You've got this.

October 12, 2021

Episode 80: Critical Skills for a More Fulfilling Parenthood with Diana Ballard

October 12, 2021/ Laura Froyen

Parenthood can be really tough. There's so much to think about like house chores, taking care of our kids, keeping our cool, and even managing our careers. It's a LOT. And when we are bombarded with so much stress and fatigue juggling all of these responsibilities (especially after the last 18 months!), we may start to really feel like we are failing, not doing any one thing well, and have this lingering feeling of dissatisfaction.

I know I've been there at various points in my parenting journey, and this past year has brought this on for so many of us and I really want to support you in this, especially as the holiday season approaches (yes, you read that right! It's coming faster than we think!). And so, for this week's episode, I have invited a colleague who is the host of the Mom Training Podcast, Diana Ballard. She is passionate about helping women balance their responsibilities, find fulfillment, and thrive as moms. Now, this episode may be addressed to moms but this can help dads, too! Diana will guide us in creating your own experience according to what works for you so that you can feel fulfillment in your parenthood. Here is a summary of our conversation:

Critical skills to balance responsibilities at home
Self-care practices (that are actually nourishing & sustainable!)
Respectful relationships and communication with our partners

REMINDER: Don't forget that your chance to learn LIVE with me ALL ABOUT SIBLINGS is coming up quick! Head here for all the details: www.laurafroyen.com/sibling

To get more support in your parenting journey, follow Diana on social media,

Facebook: www.facebook.com/Dianaballardlive

Instagram: www.instagram.com/dianaballardlive

YouTube: Mom Training Channel

or join her Facebook community Dancing Through Motherhood and visit her website ww.dianaballard.com

Laura: Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Balance Parent Podcast. I'm really excited to introduce you to my guest today. She is the host of the Mom Training Podcast and is so passionate about helping women balance their responsibilities and find fulfillment and actually thrive in their parenthood and so please welcome Dianna Ballard to the show with me today. I'm really excited for this conversation, Diana. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do and you're amazing story?

Diana: Okay. So I am a mom and a wife, I am growing number four right now.

Laura: Congratulations

Diana: Thank you. I'm excited about that. I love being a mom and I love being successful in motherhood. Now, that doesn't mean being perfect. But it means being successful, alright? So that's like a percentage of the time, I'm very successful. The other percentage I'm still learning, right? And growing. Like the majority of the time, I enjoy motherhood and feel good and what I'm doing.

Before becoming a mom, I was really terrified to become a mom. I had a lot of negative examples around me, not that my growing up, I had great parents, you know, I was the oldest kid, I didn't live around any family or anything. So my experience of seeing young families, I would say I was judgmental. Like I just saw all the horrible things that came with motherhood okay? By looking at these families like, oh, I don't want that.

Like, you know, she looks exhausted and you know, she complains that she's lost herself. She doesn't know what to do and she's bored all day and I was like, oh, I just don't want any of that. So at age 25, I decided that I wanted to become a mom and a wife, but if I was going to step into that moment and I was going to be prepared because like, there was no way in heck I was going to just jump in and think that everything was just going to flow well, I was going to have the right skill sets and mindsets that I needed. So I decided that I was gonna.

Laura: Hold on, I just got to say. I, I became a mom in the midst of a Ph.D. program where I was doing family therapy. I saw how hard it was and I still had these rosy colored glasses, so I just think it's so amazing that you had such clear eyes going into this. Okay, sorry, I took over your story, but I just think so many of us go into motherhood with this kind of rose-colored glasses, you know, with the ideas about what it's going to be like.

Diana: I think is good in a sense, because I mean, if everyone, I mean that's kind of why I had such a bad taste in my mouth for motherhood is if people just only talked about the hard stuff, like a lot of people complain a lot about motherhood and family life, and there's not as many people that are talking about the good stuff, which I understand because you know, I mean you don't want to be like, well let me tell you how good this is when someone's really struggling, right?

You know, I can see how it happens now that you said that I want to backtrack just a tiny bit to tell you why I decided to open my eyes to that and decide that was because I went on a Europe trip by myself, it was my dream to go to Europe. I left with a one-way ticket just by the seat of my pants. It was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life, I ran out of money, I was homeless, I was in the rain standing on the corner, I mean, and like, pretty, I had like a nervous breakdown during that thing and, and literally realized every single area that I sucked or that I like really struggled and I was like, man, I'm so not good at like, I think it was like seven areas, like really big areas, like money management preparation planning.

I mean like huge areas of like, man, I really suck at this. So that's kind of what spurred this on, of saying, well if I'm going to step into this big moment of motherhood and family life, I'm not going to show up the same way I showed up to Europe and have myself fall flat on my face and have to like crawl my way out. So that's how it kind of, that's how it kind of spurred on, on this, this track that I went on. And so I started interviewing just any mom that I could get my hands on, whether that was actually like, I sat down with pen and paper in so many households.

Can you show me how you organize your recipes, what do you do with your husband or how do you bond with him? Like can you give me a tip of this? And I would just go through and I have just paper after paper your paper of so much research of what these women were doing and so what I found over time and like I really dug in for like a couple months and what I found in that amount of time is that there was a significant difference between two groups of women and there was one group of women that you know had their house clean, had great relationships with their husbands.

You know cooked a lot of homemade meals and just found like incredible fulfillment and they had different skillsets and mindsets that they practiced and this was like you know generally through that entire group of okay, how interesting like all of these connect like these women have like a very successful experience and you know they all believe the same things and practice these same things and then the other group, they did not practice those things, they did not believe those things and man, they struggled.

I mean there was so much problem in their marriages and in the way that they felt and they, you know and so you know in which I have compassion for especially now being a mom because like it is challenging, you know, because...

Laura: I just feel like I heard all of my listeners just like lean forward and be like what are the things, what are the things?

Diana: Yeah, no totally .

Laura: That's probably what you teach on your podcast.

Diana: It totally is so I'll totally share some of them with you and obviously like going into detail is the best you can find more on my podcast or in a mom training, which I do. Yeah, I created a system for myself and practiced it for two years before becoming a wife and mom. I got married at 27 I mean things have just flowed smoothly okay anyway, years down the road the podcast came mom training came whatever.

Laura: So the things let's get into the same things, we're all hanging on the edges of our seats.

Diana: So here's the base of them, okay, meal planning, being able to successfully meal plan and what that looks like knowing how to budget on a family budget, you go from single on a single budget to now suddenly being on a family budget where it's very, very different living and that's where a majority of the problems actually came from was people not being trained in money management.

Laura: There's so much research that one of the biggest family stressors is money and money management, that when you helped, families get that figured out that their lives in general get better and move more smoothly that there's like academic quantitative research on that very topic that you noticed. Yeah, validating for, you know,

Diana: Totally. So that was a huge one and there are so many layers that go into that, but, and being able to know exactly what your self-care needs are. So that was like a huge focus me for that two years of, you know, being conscious about what do I need, you know, what fills my bucket, You know, things like that just so before I even got into motherhood and maybe things got a little cloudy because I'm exhausted or hormones or pregnancy or you know, just dealing with a lot of different people's needs that I already had like a basis of what the heck do I need now?

If you're like I didn't do that before I became a mom, what the heck do I do? It just literally is starting as simple as making a note on your phone of like things that make you happy. Like, I mean, it can really be that simple of figuring out like what you need is a person can literally be just being conscious in writing it down or keeping so you can go through and figure out, okay, I'm gonna, this week, do something that makes me happy. I'm gonna go through this note in my phone and say, oh, I like to, you know, walk around the lake and so you're going to go find a lake and you're gonna walk around to get what I'm saying. So.

Laura: I do, yeah, I'd like to have my parents and who are in my membership go through and make a self-care menu where they have little appetizers or tapas, you know, things that are small or shareable, that you can do with your family, the things that are the main courses, things that are deserts the icing on the cake, like, and have just like the menu of self-care options that take five minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, you know, and then the bigger things too. Yeah, I love that idea.

Diana: Yeah, so that was a huge one. And then another topic was relationships and communication and a huge one was about respecting men and which is kind of a huge issue right now in my opinion, that a lot of media does not teach women how to have a successful relationship with a man and that is something that's very detrimental. It's not in the fact that I'm a very independent, very driven, very bold woman.

Like, I work very well with my husband as a partner and you know, it's like, I think there's like a fine line that people kind of balance on sometimes of like, the feminist movement going a little too far slash you know, are we working together? Like, it's not like we're, you know, looked down upon or they're looked down upon, but it's about like, an equal relationship. That was another huge pattern between the two groups of the way that each person treated their husband was significantly different in each group.

And so that I needed major training on learning how to respect and honor men more just because whatever was around me, whatever I was learning the friends I was talking to whatever, you know, being very independent and driven and you know, the mindsets that can come with that I can do it all on my own. I don't need a man that can create a lot of problems.

Laura: Yeah. Or the even just the message that I feel like is so pervasive that men are incompetent or that if you're partnered with a man or parenting with a man that they're like a third child or another child, I see what you're talking about.

It is very hard to have an equal, an egalitarian relationship and a team, a partnership where you are actually a team together where one person is being looked down upon or maybe being, you know, in a situation where they are feeling like they're always doing something wrong. That's very hard.

Diana: I get what you're saying about respect.

Laura: It is it's about respectful relationships. I mean, and so like that's something that all people are deserving of respect are deserving of conscious, compassionate and connected, communication with each other. And I mean, I definitely think that men have a lot to learn on that front as well, but there's a rule for those of us who are partnered with men to see exactly how they've done definitely go both ways.

Diana: Yeah but this is what we can do and part of the communication is learning how to create respect in general with everybody, you know.

Laura: Absolutely, we don't learn growing up for the most part.

Diana: And so another one of the topics was routine, an organization that was amazing to see like how these women that have successful family lives, organized their life, like ridiculously organized and you know, for people that don't like to be organized, they're like, oh man, that's just sucks. I don't want to do that.

But man, it changes your life when you learn how to organize things, when you learn how to get a good routine in how to organize your tasks, organize your mind, especially, it makes a huge difference in how you can run your family and the joy and fulfillment that can come with that. So that was definitely another one that's very, very important and something that I noticed and then let's see. So we had, we had self-care and like nutrition and health.

So that was like the meal planning, how to take care of yourself. We have the money management, the communications and relationships, the organizing, oh emotional mental coping. That was the other 12 of that women knew how to balance out their stress levels or like be aware of what they were feeling and how to take care of that.

Whether that be that they need more sleep, they need to have time alone to themselves or whatever. It may be being able to manage their emotional mental capacity was another very powerful thing that I learned and also have practiced.

Laura: Okay, so it sounds to me like you are incredibly intentional in the way you put these things into practice in your own home, right? Like in your own life, in your own motherhood and that's what allows you to feel so successful in your motherhood or you don't feel overwhelmed, you don't feel overburdened, you don't feel overtaxed. Yeah.

Diana: Yes. Yeah, for sure these things that I practice are crucial for me because if I don't practice them, I get really, really imbalanced. Like my mind, my body, like I feel really, really bad.

Laura: You have a big stress response.

Diana: Yeah, well like I chemically get imbalanced and so without being able to like organize myself, take care of myself with, I need to communicate the way that I need to, it creates a lot of problems and so like it just being like, oh I just want to find fulfillment in motherhood. No, I want to find fulfillment in motherhood instead of feeling like crap all the time.

Laura: Yeah. And so these things are not just because you know you can do them, you have to do them, you're doing them so that you can have a motherhood that feels good to you. Yeah?

Diana: I share that because someone is listening right now and they're like I just don't even know where to start. I feel like crap. I just want people to know that there are ways to build yourself up and give yourself support systems that you have created yourself. Like obviously like reaching out for help and you know, finding the necessary things that you need to support you, that's that's outside of your own home, whatever, like that's that's great. But there are ways for you to build up yourself by learning the skill sets

Laura: And there skills you can learn right, like so like I teach conscious communication, like that's something you can learn, most of us did not learn it growing up, we can learn it now, it will feel awkward, it will feel different, it it is different to communicate respectfully with a partner but if you've never done so before, if you've only ever communicated from a triggered and reactive place it's different. You can feel awkward but you can learn it and so like these skills that you're talking about, I teach some of them but it's so lovely to know that these other ones have a great place to be learned as well.

One of the things that I'm thinking about, you know here at the balance parent, we don't think that balance is a state of being, we think it's a thing you do that you are kind of doing these micro corrections where you are kind of on this like wobble stool and you're keeping yourself balanced, you know by making all of these micro collections, but it's also a piece of having a balanced approach to some of these things that we're learning.

So for example meal planning is something that when I think about meal planning a month of meals or however I've seen some people in Pinterest or Instagram do it, it's so overwhelming for me, it does not work for me. So I do some meal planning in a way that works for me that is more rhythm-based on Mondays.

We have this on Tuesdays, we have this but never I never planned dinner, I only plan snacks and lunches because that in breakfast because that's what I can do and so I want to just, can we have a little bit of a conversation about like how can we make some of these things feel more balanced or feel more they can work for us. Is there kind of permission and room for that flexibility on some of these things?

Diana: Oh totally. Another thing that I really love teaching is called designing motherhood where it's pretty much creating your own world, your own motherhood experience according to what works for you, and once you want these skill sets are like a basis like you know there's a million ways you can do your budget but you need to have some form of a budget so that you're a little more balanced, right?

Just flying by the seat of your pants, it's going to still create a lot of problems if you're not being aware, you're not in your finances, you're not, I'm kind of system. Yeah, I love that when you're saying like this is what I plan, you know, for my meals, you know, for me for meal planning, I plan out five whole days a week, and then we left over the last two days. So that's what works for me. Okay, so, but it, what it is is it's creating a system for yourself.

It works for you now, whether that's, you know, work part-time out of the home or you work in the home during, you know, different hours and you have a nanny or you know, you work only in the evenings and your husband watches the kids like, I mean there's different things that can flow, but what it is is figuring out what's going to bring you peace, what's going to bring you fulfillment, Here's this bubble of meal planning, Okay, what can you put in it? What are you going to do that's going to make you feel peace and fulfillment at the end of the week and

Laura: Make your life a little easier.

Diana: Exactly. There are strategies, There are tips, there are things people have put together that they can share that can spur ideas, and a lot of times maybe you don't want to recreate the wheel, right? You wanna be able to say, okay, like I'm going to try what this person did and see if it worked for me like, okay, that kind of work located for a couple weeks, I'm gonna try another one and see and I'm not saying just hop around to different things, but you'll be able to start to feel okay. You know what that kind of, I've got the flow of that one.

Like I need to tweak it just a little bit here and okay, this is flowing well, like I like that, you know, and I'm going to throw in going out to eat every once in a while because hey, like I need a break sometimes, right? So it's creating what you want, it's designing your motherhood, experience the way that you want it to be and you'll know that you've hit it when you do have that peace and fulfillment at the end of the day and at the end of the week and maybe you don't feel it all the time.

Maybe it's still a work in progress, but being able to just have like a little touch of that, like you'll never go back. Like it's like, oh how that tasted really good. I want to see if I can create that in this area too, you know? So yeah, I love that. It is about giving yourself permission to create the life, that you want the experience that you want.

Laura: Okay, that feels so good. that feels so light, you know, I say this all the time. There is no one right way to do this and that we get to choose, we get to choose what's right for us. I am so glad that we had that last piece of this conversation that it's about tuning in to yourself, getting clear on how you want it to feel what works for you.

Getting in touch with your intuition and trusting yourself and letting guide you, learning new things, you only know what, you know, it's okay to learn new things, try things out and make them your own and make them work for you. I love that, thank you for that so much. Okay, so I have a feeling people are going to want to go and listen to your podcast. Will you tell us where they can find you on Instagram and everything and I'll make sure it's in the show notes, but sometimes my listeners like to hear it out loud to

Diana: Yeah, for sure. So it's called the Mom Training Podcast and so obviously in any podcast app or whatever and then on Instagram and Facebook, it's @DianaBallardlives, I will say that I do a cooking show every Monday, so which is totally fun. So it's called me on Monday, you can come check that out.

But yeah, and then DianaBallard.com is where I have my mom training where we have by weekly coaching that dive into different topics in those areas that I talked about to really dive in to learn the different skill sets and things that you can then apply to your own situation and you know create your own experience, which is wonderful so that's really.

Laura: Awesome. Thank you so much for being here with us. This was so great.

Diana: Thank you so much for having me and I love being on your show. Thanks.

October 05, 2021

Episode 79: Coaching Sibling Squabbles

October 05, 2021/ Laura Froyen

I hope you learn a lot from the Challenging Behavior Series for the past two weeks. If you have any questions about this topic, please let me know! I would love to hear your thoughts, concerns, and your experiences.

Okay so, since last week's episode I have been getting quite a lot of questions from parents asking how they can approach sibling conflicts. SO many of you are wondering how to navigate bickering, hitting, jealousy, etc. And so, for this week's episode, I will be teaching you how to get out of the middle of your kids disagreements and start coaching THEM on solving their own problems.

Here is a summary of this episode.

Mindset shifts on how to view and approach conflict
Reframing arguments as a learning opportunity
Getting out of the middle and allowing them to take responsibility for their relationship
Teach your kids how to solve their problems collaboratively

If you want to have MORE support, I am so excited to announce an opportunity to learn all about Sibling Relationships with me LIVE! My dear friend and colleague Anna Seewald of The Authentic Parenting Podcast and I are collaborating to bring to you a comprehensive two part workshop designed to help you navigate the murky, sometimes turbulent waters of Sibling Relationships.

DETAILS:

October 21st & November 4th @ 11:00 AM Central

Replay available for those who can't attend live

10% discount for my BalancingU members (email me if you want to join before you register to get that discount!)

CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE

You can fill out this survey here to make sure that your needs and questions are addressed in the workshop:

https://forms.gle/m3EmSqTJiXY23dcVA

Hello, I'm Dr. Laura Froyen and this is The Balanced Parent Podcast where overwhelmed, stressed out and disconnected parents go to find tools, mindset shifts, and practices to help them stop yelling at the people they love and start connecting on a deeper level. All delivered with heaping doses of grace and compassion. Join me in conversations that will help you get clear on your goals and values and start showing up in your parenting, your relationships, your life with openhearted authenticity and balance. Let's go!

Laura: Hi everyone, this is Dr. Laura Froyen. So today I have been wanting to talk about siblings stuff and I taught a class at Uw Madison to parents on siblings and it was a lot, I tried to cover way too much in the one class. So I'm going to break it down into little bits today and over the course of the next few weeks and I, so I pulled my groups, the people who are in my online communities on Facebook to find out what their biggest struggles were. I also pulled people who follow my page and it seems as if one of the biggest struggles parents have at least in the groups that are following me or that I'm interacting with is around conflicts and specifically how children will triangulate or bring in a parent to solve the conflict for them.

And lots of parents are really interested in figuring out how to get kids to solve these problems themselves. And so that's what we're going to talk about today and I'm going to offer you some mindset shifts kind of reframes on how we view conflict that can change the way we feel as we enter into helping our children with them. And then some of my favorite strategies is for teaching this important life skill. And so I want to start out, one of the things that I worked with the most on parents really is a frame of mind shift. So often we view our children and their fights with a lens that's kind of cloudy.

It's like we have sunglasses on and we need to shift our lens and change the way that we view the conflict before we start trying to interact with the conflict. So I want to give you three major mindset changes today that can help transform how you see the conflict and how you interact with it. So the first one is that we need to start viewing our sibling interactions between our children and this applies to families that only have one child but engage in play dates or out of the park with other parents.

So this isn't just for kids, okay, but when we see children in their peer group or maybe even outside of their peer group interacting together, we have to understand that conflict is an inevitable part of life, disagreements, differing viewpoints, differences in desires or agendas and goals. Those things are part of human nature and they're going to happen. It's simply a part of being social animals. And so we need to start viewing conflict as a learning opportunity rather than something to avoid.

And this can be really difficult for parents who have grown up in conflict-avoidant homes. I grew up in a somewhat conflict avoid at home and that was really difficult for me as a person who really likes to be upfront and honest and authentic with my emotions and kind of bring things out into the open. I've kind of pulled my family kicking and screaming into being really direct with conflict and open and honest and vulnerable and compassionate, but it's not what's come naturally and I happen to have married a partner who grew up in a very conflict avoid at home and that means that when we see our children fighting, sometimes we get a little triggered because we think of conflict as being bad as something to avoid.

It makes your heart starts racing, our faces get flushed, we go in a little bit into fight, flight, or freeze mode. And the problem with that is is that the kids, if they're fighting, they might already be a little triggered and already be in a little bit of the survival brain mode, The brain that's working back here and they need us to be better regulated and so we need to calm ourselves down. Reframe these arguments as a learning opportunity as a wonderful, beautiful chance to practice a skill that they're going to need for the rest of their lives and start viewing it as an opportunity to teach them and to coach them and to support them and learning how to do this really cool life skill. So the other one is um, I want you to start projecting confidence and viewing your children as capable and able to handle these disagreements that they get into.

This is a part of human behavior that's always been there and it will always be there and we are designed to handle it well sure. We need skills that we need to learn, but we fully believe in the capability of children to learn all of the other schools that they need skills like walking and drawing, and writing with the right supports. You know, they learn those skills. It's the same for conflict. And so we just need to have lots of confidence in their capabilities and viewing them as capable and able to solve these problems on their own were kind of lending our confidence to them. And it kind of projecting that onto them, lets them feel confident in themselves and lets it feel like not like it so much of an emergency or so much of a bad thing. And so that sense of confidence can be really important. Okay.

And then the other big mindset shift that I want to offer you today is to recognize that when children are in a conflict or disagreement, particularly when one child has hurt, the other child may be hitting or taking toys. Maybe one is crying. We have to recognize that in that moment both children are hurting and that both children have unmet needs. It can be really, really easy to take a side in these disagreements to see one child as the victim and one child as the aggressor. And it's really important that we approach these conflicts from a place. Uh, the therapeutic terms, I'm a therapist by training, the therapeutic term is called multi-directed partiality.

And the, basically the simple way of saying that is that we're able to hold space for both realities. Both children, both children are allowed to be hurt and have needs that aren't being met in that moment, even when their conflict when those needs are at odds with each other. And so it's really important to start seeing your children not as victims, not as aggressors, but as individuals with individual hurts and individual needs and those moments and approach the situation from that place. And so that plays into one of the tips that I have that I'll share with you in just a minute. I want to make sure that we are super clear on these shifts.

So viewing conflict as a learning opportunity, projecting confidence that your child is capable of handling these conflicts with grace and compassion most of the time with support and learning new skills and then also recognize that both children are probably having a hard time in this moment, that one is not the victim and one is not the aggressor, that there's probably kind of moving out of that framework and seeing both children as having unique needs that need support in those moments. So now moving on to my tips for coaching, so one of the biggest things you can do and my first step in intervening in a conflict that's heating up well, the first thing you want to do is make sure everybody's safe.

There is physical boundaries set in terms of keeping people physically safe, so move over, get close to them with calm, kind of a calm, assured pace. Again, this is the projecting confidence like you know, that they're not going to really, really seriously injure each other and get to a place where you are able to be present with them and intervene if things get physical okay, so, getting close connecting with them first and then start describing or sportscasting what you see. So say what you see, notice what you are, what's happening, and say it without judgment or blame. So something like let's say they're fighting over a toy, you can say I see both kids are holding on to one end of the toy, jenny really wants it and so does Maggie, you're both holding on really hard. Maggie is saying, mine jenny is saying no, I had it first.

So you start sportscasting and for sometimes for older children, the fact that you've noticed and that you start kind of bringing the conflict out into the open is enough and they can start building on the skills you've already offered them to start negotiating the conflict themselves for younger kids, they'll probably start talking to you and you can continue to narrate and empathize and validate. So this next tip is to not take sides to really get good at this idea of multi directed partiality, that's a big term and we can maybe dig into that term and another time but really what it means is not taking sides and holding space for both kids, reality is being empathetic and validating both kids perspectives at the same time and it can be tricky, this is a skill that you need to learn to do.

But being able to say you really wanted that toy, you are not done playing with it and then being able to turn it around to the other one and validate their feelings of and you really wanted it? You saw it, You feel like you saw it first and you feel like you should have a turn with it, you know, and going back and forth and holding space for both of them, getting them both able to express their feelings and be heard and seen in those feelings without invalidating the other one. And this is something that you have to practice.

So doing some role-playing with your partner can be really good and fun to do over you know, dinner after the kids are in bed and the other tip I want you to do is thinking about this from a skills perspective, we want to start scaffolding these interactions. Scaffolding is a term that comes from Big Lebowski who's a child development theorist. And the basic idea is that for young children, you provide a framework for how to have an interaction and you slowly remove supports as they get more and more skilled and need less and less intervention. You wanna scaffold these interactions in a very intentional way.

So older children will need less of your intervention and help and younger children will need more direct intervention. So when let's say somebody has grabbed a toy, you can, can intervene and have them validate that they would really like a turn with the toy, the other one isn't done and then help them come up with the term, what would you like to use it next You would okay tell her I would like to turn when you're finished, when will you be done? And then if the sister says something like I'm never going to be done, I'm not going to be done until you know we go to bed then you can validate. Okay, so it sounds like you really want a long term with this toy, you're not going to be done for a long time, is that right? Yes, I need a long-term. And so you kind of go back and forth, you become the mediator, like a legal mediator, and help them see each other side point of view. You hold space for each of their desires, but you kind of really scaffold this interaction, and then as they get more and more skilled you pull back.

So in doing this with my own children, I have just turned three years old and a 5.5 years old when we started really specifically attending to scaffolding this, these interactions with them. She was about to, my youngest was about to so we've been doing this for about a year with really like focused attention and now the intervention that we need during their conflicts is to be able to say come in sportscasts, what's going on um I see you two are both want to play with this, talk to each other, I'm confident you can work it out and then they start negotiating and they become really good negotiators with each other and sometimes when we step out of it and don't make all of the suggestions for all of the solutions, they can come up with solutions that are really, really interesting and creative that grown-ups would never have thought of.

So as much as I'm talking about intervening, the goal with your intervening is to teach them skills so that you intervene less and less and they start getting creative and problem solving together. They just need the skills and the words to do it. Let's see Kayla says, I'm pretty good in everyday recognition of each kid’s need how would you recoup from emergency reaction? Like no, don't step on his head as I walk over quickly. Like if somebody is in actual danger, you do have to move quickly, you stop their bodies. And then I would take a minute to and I would actually say out loud, everyone's safe And with, with any child, if I see them attempting to hurt their sibling, I usually use the words I'm going to help you stop yourself. I know in their heart of hearts deep down, no matter how angry they are, they really don't want to hurt their sibling.

All right there in fight, flight, or freeze mode and if they're hitting their literally fighting and that is a triggered, impulsive reaction that they don't have the skills to stop themselves. And so I hand them that language that I'm going to help you stop yourself, recognizing their intentions toward their sibling are good that they don't want to hurt their sibling. I will sometimes even say, I know you don't really want to hurt Evie, my oldest is the one who does more of the hitting. I know you really don't want to hurt Evie. I'm gonna help you stop yourself. No, I can't let you hear her. I know you're very angry right now and then you say you coach them in verbalizing and recognizing their needs.

So with my, my older one who is like at the age that yours is now Kayla I think is your older 14, my oldest was about three, we went through a phase where she would be, start hitting or pushing seemingly out of nowhere and well, of course, couldn't let that happen, but we started to recognize that she would do that when she hadn't had enough one on one attention with one of us. And so in those moments, we coached her to recognize that need and to ask for the need to be met in a way that was socially acceptable. So she was asking for one on one time by hitting or pushing her sister and instead we taught her, you know when you start getting pushing with heavy, that tells us you need some alone time and we're happy to have alone time with you.

So if you start feeling like you want to push or hit, just say I need mommy alone time or I need daddy alone time and we will whisk you away and we'll have a nice playtime together. And what's amazing about giving her that language, we would see it happen, we would see her go to start pushing or right hand back to hit, stop ourselves and say, I feel like hitting, I need some mommy alone time and we would just come together and kind of get her to the alone time that she needed. And so I think sometimes we don't bring that out into the open enough with our kids and bring our thought process because they're not as capable of thinking those things through in their heads. They don't have the cognitive ability to do it, They need to do it out loud and so bringing that out loud, that regulatory process of I need to stop myself and I need help stopping myself. It needs to be more tangible for these younger kids.

They aren't as able to do it inside their own heads, yet giving them the language, you know, helping them recognize their own cues and then helping them engage in those regulatory behaviors to stop themselves. I think it's really important. I hope that helps it's so wonderful to help our children take ownership over their relationships and conveying that we have confidence that this is something they can do is so lovely and I feel so proud of my kids and I see them start to do this and you know, now we're at the point where when they start saying, mommy, mommy, somebody did this or daddy, daddy, somebody did this, we're able to say, oh this happened, what can you do? And they work it out together and but it takes effort, it takes a concerted.

Like I said, we've been spending like an intentional amount of time for a year in coaching them in these skills. And so it's not gonna happen overnight, but teaching them a few phrases, helping them, supporting them scaffolding those interactions, and then slowly withdrawing your support just to see where they are. And then you can always come back in and offer more support during times when maybe they have less self-regulation abilities, they're tired, they're hungry. We all get angry. Sometimes it's recognizing that they might need more support at different times. Let's see Lora Mae walker, I'm having difficulty with an 11-month-old and a 27-month-old baby follows the toddler around everywhere and just wants to take everything from the toddler.

Okay, So that's super normal because your 11-month-old is learning from the 27-month-old and the older sibling is the most attractive learning partner for your younger one where social learners by nature, that's the way that we're, we learn the best as humans, as primates, particularly from the fellow young And so, um, your 11-month-old is biologically driven to learn from your 27th month old and it's very natural and normal that you're 27 month old would be super annoyed by that. She says toddler doesn't appreciate it at all.

No, I can understand why that would be super annoying. The best thing you can do is to have coached your toddler, make sure that your toddler you're older, toddler has a space that's just there's 27 months old, don't need a big space. So it can be a small space. And my kids for those ages, we had to play. He always says it's baby's napping. Of course he does. Oh man, being a big sibling is hard and you can validate to him. Like man, being a big brother is rough sometimes and the fact that maybe he misses one on one time with your time alone with you, where he doesn't have to compete for attention. But those are hard things. But making sure he has some quiet, some space where he can play with his things alone would be really great where the baby can be gated out and coaching him to again recognize like I'm getting tired of my brother following me around.

I need to go to my alone space and you give him a name for it and give him that space there. You can get really creative and even in small, I don't know what your living situation is, but I work with a lot of families who are in student housing. So the graduate students, I mean they're in very small apartments, but we figure out ways to get those older siblings. Even in like two-bedroom apartments, we help them get their own space, even if it's just like a little pop-up tent that the little one isn't allowed in. And then you firmly defend that boundary, that child's boundary. And then you can also talk to your younger one. You can validate that they want to learn from their brother that they want to play.

You know, that their brother’s toys are really fascinating. But I can't let you, I'm going to stop you from following your brother. He doesn't want to be followed right now. He's not ready to play. He wants to play on his own. So when they're younger, like you have two very young children, you have to be more intervening. But you can set the stage right now and you can also give that 27-month-old, the language to use with his brother to be. So be able to say to your brother, tell your brother that you don't want to be followed. I want alone time. Tell your brother, I want alone time and you can really coach those things with them.

Heather says I have a closet that my six-year-old can go play in with his legos. Great. See a closet. Perfect. They don't need a lot of states. They love little caves and hideout. That's the thing that they love. So good thinking how they're nice job. So I made a meditation album. It's a quick five minutes meditation, a self-compassion-based meditation. And the idea is that you can use it with your family. And so I'm bringing it up within the context of this discussion because it's another tool for your family toolbox for moments where maybe you've had a day where everybody is just getting on everybody else's nerves.

Some days like the flow and harmony and the family is just awesome. But some things are really rough and I made this meditation to help shift the mood shift the energy of the house. And so I wanted to offer this tool, I'll put a link to it where you can go and download it. But I just wanted to offer that out there and let you know that this is something that I use with my kids to shift the mood. And it's also something you can do on your own as a daily practice. And what research shows us is that meditation has the ability to shape and rewire our brain so that we are able to be less reactive and respond with more intention in the moment and it can also really calm our nervous systems.

So let's see, respectful parent-connected kids say, I love that you mentioned that sometimes kids just don't have the social capital to solve their squabbles. I see that with mine all the time and sometimes forget to have extra patients and compassion with for that it's so true. You know, sometimes they just have more ability is and sometimes their dreams like at the end of the day, I think that most families that I worked with mentioned at the end of the school day when they come home from school or daycare is the hardest time. Parents, energies are strapped, kids are done in its rough and so offering compassion to each other in those moments can be really great. Actually, I have a couple of families who have been using this, this meditation that I'm going to link to, they use it as their connection ritual for when they enter the house.

So they come in, they all sit down on the couch, they play this meditation, it's only five minutes long and it helps center them and helps them move into their time together as a family with intention and with compassion and with gratitude for their family members and they have a much more relaxed enjoyable evening. So that's one way you can use it to bring more compassion and more gratitude into your family with kind of using it as a ritual has really nice. So I'm going to put that link to the meditation on. I hope that you'll download it and share it if you think you have friends who would be interested and it's but yeah, it was so nice to get to see you guys. I love the interaction we had going today.

Love helping you out with all of these things. Let's see, Laura says, my nine-year-old never acknowledges when he's heard the seven-year-olds feelings that can be so hard, wow, you have a nine-year-old and a seven-year-old to you are busy mama and a blessed mama. Right? So the nine-year-old, I am guessing has some feelings of guilt and shame around having her through sibling and I don't know that necessarily have to force apologies or force recognizing and another nine-year-old. Okay, so maybe google like you know why we don't need to force apologies but and maybe google also restorative justice.

So one of the things that they, self-compassion meditation does, it teaches people to be forgiving and loving to themselves first because you can't offer forgiveness to someone you love without first offering it to yourself because it just won't be heartfelt. It won't be as fulfilling as it would be. So, the meditation might help a nine-year-old can be really good at those things, especially if there may be learning it in school are much. Apparently, lots of nine-year-olds are these days. I don't know that I'd worry too much because I would imagine if they're refusing to say they're sorry that they probably are quite sorry and they will offer an apology or recognition in some other subtle way.

Okay, so thanks for listening today. Remember to subscribe to the podcast and if it was helpful, leave me a review that really helps others find the podcast and join us in this really important work of creating a parenthood that we don't have to escape from and creating a childhood for our kids that they don't have to recover from.

September 28, 2021

Episode 78: Live Coaching: Challenging Behaviors (Challenging Behaviors Series No. 2)

September 28, 2021/ Laura Froyen

I really hoped you enjoyed last week's episode, which was the first installment of a two-part series on "challenging behaviors". We really dug into the "why" behind these behaviors and how to help kiddos through these hard times. Now, I know that sometimes my episodes are a bit conceptual, or theoretical, and that can make it hard to really know what this all looks like in practice. This is why I love it when one of my BalancingU Membership folks agrees to talk through some common challenges on the podcast with us (free coaching is a perk of the membership, learn more here!)

And so, for the second installment of the Challenging Behavior Series, I have invited a member of my Balancing U Community to share her experience on this topic. Now, this mother has five kiddos with different personalities. Two boys are internal processors who are calmer in general but are still aggravated when upset. Another one is a verbal processor who is impulsive both physically and verbally. There is a lot going on in this family and this wonderful mother handles it with so much love and grace! In this live coaching session, we will be tackling how to have boundaries and reframing them so that we can address challenging behaviors with compassion and patience. With practice and our help, our children will be able to stop themselves from hitting, kicking, and throwing.

And to help you even more, download my free cheat sheet on how to build self-regulation through play!

GIVE IT TO ME

Stephanie: Yeah, so my name is Stephanie Sims and I have four little boys. There are 2,4,5 and eight and we have one on the way due in July and we don't know if it's a boy or girl. We have found out with every single one of them except for this one. So that's driving everyone crazy. I feel like everyone wants a girl, but I would be totally happy either way. I am home schooling them all this year, so it's been really eye opening to just I'm a teacher in general, I'm a special education teacher, but I've been home now for a couple of years but it's been really interesting just seeing like who they are as learners and kind of what things trigger them, what their strengths are, what their weaknesses are.

I feel like it just has given me a really good insight into my Children just in general. So I'm super thankful for this time, also super thankful for teachers. But it's cool next fall, but it's been really, really good and I opening to really spend this much time with my kids, they came home, you know last march of 2020 before the pandemic and we just stayed home this entire time. So so yeah, I have also been seeing some things we started talking about that I reached out to you for um with some of my kids, I don't know if you want to go into that, but I would love just wisdom from you, some just even encouragement or whatever around certain behaviors that I've been seeing.

Laura: Yeah, I think you're not alone in seeing new and different sides to our kids, things, you know, having interactions, seeing them in context that we normally would not have access to when they're in school away from us. Think lots of parents are seeing new sides to their kids, some incredibly positive and some a little concerning and we would never even have known about if we weren't having our kids at home like we are and like many of us have had this past year. So yeah, go dive into it. What are you seeing that you're worried about?

Stephanie: So I have a, so all of my boys, obviously they're all different, they all have different personalities and whatever. I have two boys who are a little more like internal processors and they're also just calmer in general, but when they are, even when they get upset, it is still just this more like I'm aggravated like and then it just kind of blows over 99% of the time. Obviously they have tantrums or whatever, but typically it's handled in a quote unquote, like not mature, it's probably not the right word but a way that like seems typical to me for a child and then

Laura: I have a like socially acceptable. Like they handle disappointments or aggravations or frustrations in a way that's more acceptable, right?

Stephanie: It's also quicker.

Laura: Quicker.

Stephanie: Yeah, like they get over it quicker, like I can almost reason with them more, you know, so it's like that initial kind of like fire and then it's like, okay, you know, we can kind of, I can talk through it with them or whatever, but then I have just run into another one of my Children who is very much a verbal processor and he is very impulsive, both physically and verbally and so part of that I think is I mean I'm an external processor, I know that a verbal processor just in general.

So I think that we kind of share that but at the same time it's typically not a positive thing. It is typically like he gets mad, he immediately punches or like he gets mad and it's an immediate, I hate you or you're the worst or some like very strong language that like I don't know that with my other kids I've ever been told I hate you, we don't even use the word hate in our home. And so it's like these words that are coming out of his mouth that are very strong but then I'm like hey where did you even hear those from?

You know what I mean? Into Jesuli people? Like it is I mean it is like spitfire like the second something happens there, it doesn't seem to be any kind of like reasoning time or like time to think about what is happening logically and so me trying to parent that I'm trying to be aware of the fact that like okay you're at least telling me how you're feeling but at the same time you can't punch your brothers, he doesn't punch me but also you can't talk like that. I had my two year old, I asked him to put a toy away the other day and he literally looked at me and said, oh, I hate you mom. Mm I don't know,

Laura: You're worried that language now, you know?

Stephanie: And I was like, oh no, this is not okay. So anyways, I'm like, just working through

like how the heck do I respect the fact that he's feeling what he's feeling, but also putting up boundaries of like this isn't okay. And oftentimes he fairly immediately regrets it. Like he will punch or he will say something and he'll look at me like I shouldn't have done that. I know that now I'm going to have to have some kind of consequences. But you know what I mean? So I feel guilty because I'm like, okay, you know what you're doing, I don't know what's.

Laura: Right. So you know, you've said a couple of times like you can't do that, it's obvious. He knows that he's, he knows he's not supposed to do that. So one thing that can be really helpful is to just reframe this all of this from something that he has active choice and will over to something that is impulsive. Like you were saying before. So the general assumption that in those moments when he is overwhelmed, when he's flooded, when he's triggered. If he could do something different than hitting or saying a hurtful phrase.

He would, because he knows he's not supposed to do that. You see it in his face the second it comes out and he does it, then he's like, oh no, I wasn't supposed to do that or something. Yeah, he knows he's not supposed to do that. So there's this phrase that comes out of Ross Green's work. He wrote the book the Explosive Child, this says that kids do well when they can, sometimes I like to extend that to say more broadly, kids do well when they have the skills they need to do better, you know? So this is clearly a moment where you have a kiddo who is gets dis regulated.

So when you were describing your two other kiddos and then this one, I had a very clear picture of two kids who were well regulated, who can handle the ups and downs of life and when they, you know, get a little bit dis regulated, that can bring themselves back down into an even keeled state. And then you have one kiddo who has some self regulation, I don't like to use the word deficits, but just some self regulation skills that need built some different abilities, some different needs, some different, like levels of what he's capable of right now at this developmental stage.

And so you're noticing something between your kids that I think is so important for us to keep in mind is that none of these things are on purpose For the most part, this is temperament and personality, something that is kind of inborn something that's in the neurobiology and it's the luck of the draw for kids. So you have two kids who have a lucky response to being upset. They have a response that socially acceptable. They had the skills that they need to regulate and modulate their behavior in moments when they're upset.

They're just lucky. And you have another child who has an unlucky response to being upset, there's no good or bad attached to it just one some some kids got through the luck of the draw, they got these skills and through the luck of the draw, your other one got another set of coping behaviors. My kids have a very similar division. I have one kid who's when she's overwhelmed and upset, she crumples and cries and asks for a hug.

Like that's a super like lucky response. That response inspires compassion. That response is like, oh you're struggling here, come let me help you. Where's my other one when she's struggling with the exact same things, can't get her shoes on a seem as funky, you know, in her shoe. You know, she yells, screams, I hate you and throws the shoe at me,

Stephanie: right.

Laura: it's the same problem. There's a wrinkle in her sock or the seam in her sock that feels uncomfortable in her shoe. Just that one kid has a really lucky response to that one that inspires compassion and connection and and assistance and the other one has an unlucky response. One that inspires punishment control, making sure she knows it's not okay. Do you know what I mean? Like so, and so you're noticing that in your kids, I wanted some of your kids have a lucky response and some have an unlucky response. How does that reframing help at all?

Stephanie: Yeah. Well, so I think that it's helpful for me for a couple of reasons. Number one, I think that it helps me not look at it as good and bad. It helps me, you were on my podcast a while ago and I feel like I say to myself all the time and none of my kids all the time and actually in my stuff that I'm doing in my webinar that I'm doing right now, I'm talking about trauma and it's all related to finances.

But I like pointed back to you so many times, even in my thing because when you said every child gets something different, but every child gets what they need right. Every child gets what they need, but every child needs something different. Like to me that just was like, okay, I can just take a freaking breath because this kid needs something different than all of my other kids, you know, or they all just need something different. So I think it's really helpful for me to look specifically at each of the kid and to not necessarily like you said, don't attach any moral to it. It's not good or bad. It's just it is kind of what it is.

So it gives me a starting place, I guess, to go from there. And what I'm also seeing in this child is he's very, very sensory seeking. He is very physical, like, my husband at night lays his almost full weight on this child and he just loves it. Like he loves squeeze hugs. Like he just went like, honestly, sometimes we'll take my hand and squeeze it so hard and it hurts. And I'm like, wow, he's like, well, sorry, he just needs that really deep pressure. I don't know if that is like something else that might just be a part of this.

You know, that that immediate like, physical response could be that sensory seeking part of this also, but I will say what makes me sad I guess, or I don't know if it's sad or scared or whatever, it's that my two other kids are very close and I think it's because I mean for a lot of things they're closer in age, but they're all close at four kids in six years, but because that relationship between the others can be very, like, pretty cordial if they get mad it's over, but when this one enters into the conversation order to playing or whatever, when he's mad, it's like somebody's getting punched or if we have like, a cousin come over, I see this child being like they don't want me, he'll come in and say they don't want me to play where they stopped playing when I come over or whatever.

And I think like you were saying is that the other ones are seeking this connection or the way they handle conflict is seeking connection still or it's inviting this connection or empathy or whatever. The way that my child that we're talking about kind of goes into this conversation with even play and is impulsive and physical and aggressive, like verbally, then all of a sudden he's on the outside because like you said, that's not socially acceptable. So it breaks my heart for him to see that, you know. So anyways, that's like a deeper thing that I've started to see, but it's starting to like really upset my mom a heart for sure.

Laura: Of course it is, it's natural to be worried about our kids, futures and their relationships with each other and and future relationships with friends and partners down the road. Of course it's natural to worry about those things. Um so I just want to go back to the sensory seeking thing. I think you have great wisdom there and noticing that hitting is actually a very grounding response. It's something that he likely is doing intuitively to help himself regulate if that can be redirected.

So if in call moments, you can teach him how helpful hitting can be when we're hitting things that are safe to hit, that might be a conversation that you can have outside of the moment when he is in the moment, he can't learn something new and it's very, very hard to bring in a new skill when you know, as Dan Siegel would say our lids are flipped right? So when our frontal cortex is offline were triggered, we're in kind of our animal brain and our fight or flight system hitting as a fight response and hitting is grounding to our nervous systems because we're releasing that tension and we're completing the stress response cycle when we take that action, right? So if we can do a little bit of psycho education with our kids outside, explain that.

So when you feel like hitting, it's, your body is very, very wise response to get stressed out of your body, your body knows exactly what it needs to do to feel better. Hitting feels good to you, it feels good to your body, it feels settling to your body. Big jumps, feels settling to your body. What are some other things that feel like big squeezes feel good when dad lays on you, it feels good. Thinking about what other big high pressure inputs feel good and relating to them to his body is very wise, attempt to get regulated again and then my kids when they're in hitting phases.

We go around our house and find appropriate things to hit or kick and I have a client whose kid is a kicker and so they went through their house and in every room, they just committed, you know, this one piece of drywall, we're going to have to replace once they're older and they put up a square of blue painter's tape on it and they just committed like that blue square is gonna get replaced, were just committing to repairing our walls, you know, just this one square, they put blue painter's tape around it and they give a place for the kid to kick, you know,.

And so this is about accepting our kids, teaching them to listen to their bodies are very wise bodies and having another outlet. So finding things that he can hit, not his brother, but to get that impulse out to complete that stress cycle may be really helpful. I don't know if you've done that, explored other possibilities. I know you're a teacher so you probably know lots of this stuff.

Stephanie: I mean sometimes I feel like I, yeah, so like we'll do even like couch cushions or you know, just different things like that. But honestly like I feel like, especially even like today, today and yesterday, I have just been on edge too. So I'm like partly this is like my issue, but like,

Laura: It's always our issue. It’s always us.

Stephanie: Like I feel like I am like we have talked before, like I feel like I'm fairly trauma informed just being a special education teacher, being a foster parent, you know, all of these things. And so I'm pretty good at keeping my cool, like not rising with them and all of these things. However like the past two days I'm just like, oh my gosh, and this is like I shouldn't have said this and I know it when it's coming out of my mouth, I should not say this, but I'm like told him, I'm like, you literally cannot be around anyone without somebody getting hurt.

Like that's so bad to say to him, I already know that. But it's just like, I mean it was, I mean it was five times in an hour and it happened like multiple hours, you know? And it's like sometimes it's an accident, sometimes it's this impulsive behavior. He's mad, but it's like I can't, I can't focus or do anything because someone is getting hit, someone's getting, you know, he's just being too rough or whatever and I'm like I was annoyed that I said that, but I also don't even know that I could have stopped myself because it was like so constant and I'm like, what? Like I am just at a complete loss because I'm like, I don't know what to do because I have had the conversation with him. Like I said, he looks remorseful. It's not like he's just like screw it all.

Laura: Yeah. And I'm just not choices on his part. Yeah, these are not active choices on his part, even when he's like not even upset and he's being, you know, rough and tumble or whatever it is, You know, and somebody accidentally gets hurt for the most part, these are not active choices. I would imagine this is a dysregulated nervous system is what it sounds like to me. I can't remember if we talked before, if you've explored OT for him occupational therapy.

Stephanie: I haven't, but I mean I've noticed, like I said like the sensory stuff at me, but we also give him a lot of things. Like I said, like, you know, we'll give like sweet hugs, we got him away to blanket. We, you know, have done certain things like that, but I just don't think it's not like, I mean obviously that's not everything needs to be kind of working simultaneously with, with each other. But I'm just like getting to the point where, I mean, I can tell that I'm probably just regulated like it a lot going on and so it's just like, I'm like, I can't even focus on anything because somebody is always getting hurt or you know, and not badly hurt.

Like it's just even like a shove or push or whatever, but I'm like, I don't know how to parent this because I have other kids now picking up on this behavior, but then also like I can't watch him every second of every single day, every time I turn around, you know what I mean? So I'm just like, what the, how do I know this? And I've sent him to his room when I just like, can't even handle it because I don't want my other kids to get hurt, you know?

And again, it's not like it's not like it's getting punched in the face, it's just like it's enough to disrupt the whole vibe. And then I know I shouldn't just feel like sending him to his room. I do go and I talked to him, we decompress, we talk once he's whatever. But I'm like, that's to me that can probably have its place. But also I feel like it's pretty shameful just in general what I'm saying, things like you can't be around anyone without somebody getting hurt. It's not the right thing to say, but when I'm like, great, you know what I mean? I'm just like, I don't know what else to say so.

Laura: First of all I heard you say something that you don't know how to parent this kid and I would challenge you on that. You do know how to plant this kid. This kid was given to you on purpose. This is a kid who was so lucky to have you as his mom, there's a reason why this little one came into your life and is in your family, he fits just like all your other ones do. He's here for a reason and you are the just the right mom for him? Yeah, you are, Thank heavens he has you in other homes, We know what would be happening to this kid. Yeah. And that's not happening in your house and here you are sitting here with me trying to figure it out. Okay. Just the right mom for him.

Stephanie: When I feel like to that people will say like when I have conversations about him, when I reached out to you the first time I'm like, I feel like I'm not a good talker and cry. But I feel like, I feel like I'm somebody who I look into parenting stuff a lot. I read a lot of whatever. Like I said, I feel like I'm fairly trauma informed just in general.

But when I was told like some people on market name names, but like I need to reach out for somebody because I remember after a super rough day at some point, I just felt like, I remember, I think I have told you this already, but I remember sitting on the toilet lid was closed, it was just like after bath time or whatever. And I was like squeezing this kid and just like holding him and it was just a rough day just in general and they were about to go to bed, which I feel like why do we always, I feel like I always feel guilty once I go to bed because like when it's crazy and loud and during the day it's like, you know whatever, you just don't have any patients and then one

Laura: Survival mode.

Stephanie: Once I start to calm down, it's like, uh but I remember sitting on the toilet like just holding him, my boys were getting in bed, my husband is helping and I was just crying and I told Justin, I'm like, my husband, I'm like, I feel like we're like if something doesn't change, like I just feel like we're gonna lose him one day, like I feel like he's going to grow up and be like, I feel like I didn't fit in or I feel like they didn't understand me or whatever it was and we love him to death. He's like one of the sweetest kids, he's, I mean he's not always like that, he's super snuggly, he's such a mama's boy, you know, and I'm just like, he just needs something different that I don't really know how or what to get and so I'm not, you know.

So then that's when we kind of started talking just in general and some people are like, he's just a kid, he's just being a boy. He's so I'm like, I'm telling you, it's something different. You know, maybe I am doing things, I mean not everything right, but maybe I am doing things right and that just needs to be affirmed or maybe I'm not and I just need more tools, but like I refuse to have this child like in my home and not feel equipped to mother him, you know.

Laura: Yeah the way he needs it. So it will tell you that some kids do have different needs. And it sounds like this is a kid who has some differences, just has some different needs. Sounds like he's got a body that he doesn't always feel comfortable in. He doesn't know how to get comfortable in. And that's when the seeking comes in, right?

But kids who don't feel safe being themselves, they shut down and they stuff it I hear from so many parents whose kids are complete angels at school, do exactly what they are asked, they are obedient, they are compliant, they are angels and then they come home and it's a different story, a different kid and that's because that kid knows it's not safe to be dis regulated at school. It's not that they're well regulated at school, it's that they're holding it together.

You've created an environment where your child feels safe to be themselves. So as much as I understand that fear, especially when you've got one kid who is different, that feeling, you know, the fear that he will feel, it has felt like an outsider, it's clear to me that he wouldn't be doing this if he didn't feel safe to be himself with you. There's that too, there's that too okay, so the thing is with kiddos like this, we've got to make sure that they're kind of, their nervous systems are getting the help and support that they need. You're already doing some sensory stuff because you have this great background that you already know quite a bit, it might be helpful to just think about working with a professional sometimes with these kids who we get pushed back with or who are intense, they get better results when someone who's not the mom is doing some of that work with them, they see things differently.

Like there was stuff that I had this time, like with my oldest where I knew for a while we needed more support and I resisted it because I didn't want to have to admit that I like this is my job, I'm supposed to do this. Like I have my freaking PhD I should be able to do this, you know, all of those things and that kept her from getting the support that she needed for a couple years.

Like when we went in to OT. For the first time, it was immediately obvious to the therapist who did her assessment that there were a few things that she needed to work on and it would have been faster when she was younger. How did myself for waiting? It's okay to do your best. You know, So that's something to just consider, you know there, I mean, if there's other things to add in there, it sounds like he would benefit from some heavy work. I don't know if you've heard that phrase before.

Stephanie: Like literal heavy work. Like I used to have my school kids like carry around heavy backpacks in love.

Laura: Yes, yeah, yeah. So if you google like occupational therapy heavy work for kids, if you just google that there's lots of lists out there that you can get. But things like, hey buddy, I have this like stack of logs over here and we need to move it over here. Like they often kids you need heavy work, enjoy it and do it naturally or like, oh look, here's a sandpit, can you get dig to the bottom, like and they dig or moving wet laundry from the washing machine to the dryer and this is not like hard labor, it's deep pressure work, you know that they can be doing that oftentimes sensory seekers enjoy because it feels good and grounding.

The other thing though is that these skills that you want him to have, those things will help his body be more well regulated. Like I, I feel like the picture I'm getting of him is that when he's playing with kids, he kind of bumps into them, gets into their space a little bit more. When a normal kid would maybe like staying close, he like nudges them or bumps them over, you know, that kind of thing?

Stephanie: It's a lot of like bugging or like enticing, you know what I mean? Kind of into this whole thing Oregon. Just not impulsive, like I'm just kind of that, you know, so I'm gonna react immediately.

Laura: Some of that can even be a little bit of like appropriate reception, not aware of where their bodies are in space. It can also be like unskilled, like social skills, not knowing how to ask to join a games, all of those things. So taking care of his body, his physical body as one piece of it and then practicing and working on the skills he needs to be successful and what's really important is that that work has to happen outside of the moment. So there's a river analogy that I like to use in situations like this. So we're all traveling down the river of our lives and sometimes it's smooth and easy going and sometimes we're in the rapids and we're overwhelmed and this is true for you and it's true for all of your Children.

So when he is playing with a sibling and gets frustrated or annoyed or disappointed by how it's going and those moments when he's going to hit, right, when he is overwhelmed, he's in the rapids when he's in the rapids, he can't learn anything new if you can imagine like going white water rafting. Have you ever been whitewater rafting? Can you imagine like it's your first trip down the river, you've fallen out, You're in the rapids. Now, most of us, if you go white water rafting, you get a little crash course before you go about what to do, if you fall out while you're in the rapids, right?

But if that happens when you're in the water like you can't see like there's rocks coming and people on the boat shouting, point your feet down river like it's really hard to be regulated enough to take on their instructions and get, do what you need to do to get through those rapids. You're kiddo when he is in that moment, he's about to hit, he's in the rapids, he's been flung out of the boat, he's thrashing around, He doesn't know what to do. And so if we're telling him, hit the couch cushion instead of your brother, you know, use your words like they're unavailable for that sort of thing.

Right? So we can either teach them skills for how to navigate the rapids of life better. That has to happen before they're in the rapids or afterwards right after they're out in the water is more smooth and calm or better yet. What if we figured out what sent them into the rapids, what caused them to fall out of the boat and solve that problem beforehand proactively. So that rather than, you know, doing the skills teaching of how to navigate the rapids, you're proactively keeping him out of the rapid. Does that make sense?

Stephanie: Yeah, and he, I mean this isn't exactly necessarily what you were just saying, but I will say that he, you know, I mean I'm around, we have a pretty open floor plan, like I can pretty much see, you know what's going on and so like oftentimes I can kind of see it start to escalate boiling up. You will even like pull back to punch and I'm like graham you know and I'll accept it literally will snap about of it and I'm like you know and I can he won't follow through with it and who literally honestly a lot of times say oh sorry you know or whatever and like and be done and he's probably fine or whatever it might be.

And so it's like almost like he just begins something and then if you can kind of catch him right beforehand he'll snap out and he'll stop and he'll immediately apologize like oh sorry or whatever. So it's like catching that at the beginning to has been helpful and then he almost immediately deregulates because our regulates.

Laura: Because he did for fell out of the boat. He's like about to tip out and he gets up, he's back inside, he feels safe and regulated.

Stephanie: But obviously that I can't do that all the time.

Laura: No you can't. And so part of another thing that happens in O. T. Actually is your occupational therapist can help get in their body and be more aware of their body. There's an exercise that my daughter's ot did every because we had a similar scenario and that we did every time we went in was just a simple exercise of just checking in with your body noticing it and any time she, we moved to a new activity, they practice that exercise of checking in. This was R. O. T. Was amazing.

So that's I mean that's an option with this white water rafting analogy. Yes, teaching the skill of like staying in the boat. But also what is it that's making the water rocky all of a sudden? So for example, rather than problem solving like what to do when you're frustrated with your brother, I would love to see you figuring out what is getting him frustrated and problem solve that.

So maybe it's figuring out who's going to use legos when you're both building with legos maybe that I don't know what they, what they get into tumbles over but it and it's parents often want to be really really general like you know, things like working together with your brother to pick up your room or something but you have to be super, that was actually super specific. Tell me one of the things and I'll have, you know, I know tell me one of those common rapids.

Stephanie: So two big things and actually pretty much just kind of said them number one is I think that it is a boundaries, a physical space boundary issue because like he will be all upon people and so like if my one kid is on the couch, you know, this one will come and sit right, pretty much on top of them, you know, and like just be and not to snuggle sweetly, but just like, you know, they're like, oh my gosh, like get away from me.

Laura: That appropriate exception to me.

Stephanie: Well, so that will happen a lot. And so then it's like to them, I feel like he feels like this kid's like kind of pushing on him, you know? And so it's just this whole issue and then I'm like, you have to move to touch your brother. I'm gonna just escalated from there. And then the second thing is kind of what you were saying is that also, you know, if I do have them, you know, hey, you and your brother go clean your room, you and your brother go clean the living room or whatever. We're working on something. It is always always always this child is like not doing. And so then that starts an issue like nobody wants to be like pear

Laura: Doing all the work.

Stephanie: Yeah, I'm here with him to like do something because they're going to have to like do it all or you know what I mean? And then I have to go in, I'm like, okay, step by step and he's a kid that are like crawl and like they're re and stuff and I'm like, like, yeah, this is, I don't know what to do.

Laura: Yeah, there's multiple problems in that little scenario that you just shared. There's multiple problems to solve their, that all combine likely send him down the rapids, right? So there is working together with a sibling, there is cleaning up. What does cleaning up I mean, you know, so and when navigating like when in the schedule that that happens, what was he doing before? What does he is he going to be doing after?

There's lots of things that go into picking up a playroom or picking up a bedroom and having to do it with a sibling. Navigating it with a sibling to there's lots of complications. We were, you know, to sit down and really like you describe really, really in detail what your expectations are for him. Like in these moments there's probably like four or five problems to be solved there.

Stephanie: Try to like, so like if I said, first of all, there's like hardly anything in the room. Okay, clothes, bedding. They have a little box of like a little box of toys and then they basically just have a toy box with like dress up like closets. There's the room is not a room that can get very messy because there's just not a lot in there. I did that on purpose so into when I send them in, typically I'll like look at the room and I'm like okay, you clean up the closing the books, you clean up the shoes and the toys. That's it. So that way there isn't this like

Laura: yeah, yeah.

Stephanie: like what am I going to do, what are you going to do? But then it's like this kid does all the stuff that they needed to do, so I let them be done and then it's just an issue.

Laura: so and then the problem solving conversation is, hey buddy, I've been noticing you've been having a really tough time and getting your dress up clothes into the bin when it's time to clean up what's up and you solve that problem and just go there with him to figure out like what his concerns are. Well once I get into my room, my brother's there and that's really distracting and I just want to play or once I start looking at the dress up clothes.

I wanna, it makes me think of a game I want to play, you know, and so then I put what some on and I mean to pick them up by, you know, then I put them on and then I'm playing a game okay, so you get distracted, you want to play with them. So you really are understanding like, and that makes sense. That would be hard. Okay. Is there anything else that makes it hard about, you know, getting the dress up clothes put away? Well, you know, sometimes there in the corner and that's where our brother is putting away books and then I can't get to them and so I just have to wait until he's done or I'm like pulling at straws here because I don't know your scenario, but there's lots of, it's amazing the concerns that kids have the things that get in their way.

And so that's what we're doing, thinking about and doing this problem solving, which is fully described in Ross Green's book, the explosive child and you know, in which I highly recommend it was so helpful for me, but we're trying to understand the kid's perspective and what's getting in the way and how we can set them up for success. But in this first part of it, we are not solving the problem. We're just listening to all of the problems that come with needing to put dress up clothes away and they've been in the room when they and their brother are cleaning up the room, you know, like there's these specific scenarios and then you can ask like, okay, so on days when we ask you to put a way the dress up clothes and your brother isn't in the room, is there anything that's hard about that?

You know, Is there anything that's hard about your brother being there? You know? And so you're just getting really specific, like really granular details from him where you're pulling it out and then you ask him to prioritize all of his concerns, you know, so you are taking notes while you're having this conversation. Like, I mean, these are, you know, formal things, they can be, you know, where you're sitting down. Like daughter likes to have a cup of cocoa and my other daughter likes to have fruit snacks that we don't have very often to keep her focused when we're doing news and I take notes.

I have a notebook out. I'm writing them down and then you like you have them, you list out the thing. So like maybe it's, I get distracted. I start dressing up and I start playing a game and then, I get tired. It's hard to get them from because the brother is in the way like you list them out which one of those makes it hardest to put the clothes away. And maybe they'll say like I see the clothes and I want to start playing a game okay.

All right. So, and then you go in and you tell them you're concerned. Right? So the next step is to say, okay. So my concern, you know with putting the clothes away is, and what is your primary concern with getting dressed up clothes put away?

Stephanie: Typically just to have them like clean their room. We do it multiple times a day where we just do like two minute cleans. There's six of us in here. And so I just, well multiple times a day just say, okay, like quick two minute clean. Like let's do all this. We'll put it like a song on that we all like and you know, see how much we can get done in three minutes or whatever and all of its really respond to that or we'll do.

I think we even like think you even said that it's like okay, are you do everything red or you everything this yeah, really specific about what they're doing just so that our house doesn't get out of control. But it just typically the other kids really respond well to like hustling kind of like for those two minutes, this one this one, it's like and then the song is over and he's picked up one shoe and it's like they've cleaned full complete rooms and I'm like.

Laura: okay, let's not compare, right? Because this could have different scope. This could have different things getting in his way, right? So you don't have those things getting in their way.

Stephanie: But my question with this is to like is that my other kids see this, right? And so my other kids will say like granted I keep saying that, but my kid didn't, you know this kid didn't do anything. And the truth is, I mean, they may have picked up a shoe, may have not like, you know what I mean? And so they feel like they're kind of like having to carry the weight which in and of itself whatever, but at the same time, I feel like this is what is causing just this like gradual disconnect between some of my Children because it's like it's not, it's when we're playing, he gets too rough.

It's when we're sitting and just chilling, he's all up on me when he, when he gets mad, he punches me when we have to do work together, he doesn't do part of it. And so it's like, it's just, I feel like underlying li it's like making this just disconnect between my kids and I can see that. And so that is where I'm like, I want him to pull his weight or whatever it might look like or be obviously respectful within the space of his brothers because I don't want his brothers to have that resentment. You know what I mean?

Laura: You don't you don't want them to resent him,

Stephanie: Right? So I'm like, how do I balance him being his own self? But at the same time, like, I don't know why, don't you know what the question? I don't even know the question I have

Laura: No, I completely understand this because it doesn't feel fair or equitable and you, you know, and you don't want the relationship there long term sibling relationship to be damaged by this

Stephanie: And I don't want to necessarily, I mean, and again, I know expectation wise, all kids are going to need something different, but I also don't want to lower my expectations of him because I feel like he needs it. Like, I don't know whether I feel like there's a line and I don't know if I'm walking it well based on like, you know, I don't think all of my kids need straight a pluses in school, but at the same time, like there has to be an expectation there. And it's really interesting.

My husband's amazing. He's very supportive of like any kind of parenting thing that we're doing. We did the whole love and logic thing. He's reading whole brainchild with me. Like, you know, so he's very into like whatever I feel like this kid needs, he's very into learning alongside of me. However, I will say that when he will come up and he he comes and yells and it's crazy. He will just say, hey, you need to go do this and then that kid will go do it.

And so I mean, I'm a stay at home mom. I'm here with him all the time. I know that probably we have different dynamics in general. My husband and this kid have a great relationship to my lowering my expectations of this kid. You know what I mean? Where my husband still is holding like why is there a difference there? I mean there's gonna be difference between parents, but I just don't know what this line is. If I'm crossing and if I'm being too easy, if I'm being too like, let's talk this out.

Laura: Yeah So I mean, clearly delivered expectation can always be really, really helpful. And you know, if you have four kids that you're delivering expectations to all at once. You know, and sometimes even more because I know you got foster kids sometimes two versus when your husband comes in and just this one to this one kid has, is able to give the full attention to giving an expectation a limit a boundary and then holding it, of course the kid is gonna respond differently to that.

You know, when they are full focuses on a kid and they know they can trust us to hold whatever boundary it is that, you know, if we're saying, you know, it's, it's time to clean, you know, to put the dress of clothes in the bin and I'm going to stay here, you know, help make sure it gets done like that's different than saying okay buddy. Like it's time to put the dress of clothes in the bin and then walking off to go through various other cleanup that's happening. Do you see what I mean? I'm not saying that that's what you're doing, but I'm just saying.

Stephanie: I think that just as you were saying that and as I was saying that out loud and thinking like the other thing is that my husband, he works from home, but he works like a full day, you know, whatever the kids can come down and like build legos by him, but he's pretty much working and so when he, I feel like he um when he's trying to discipline or just instruct them to do something or ask them to do something, it happens less because he's not in there all the time.

And so I feel like he has the ability to be more consistent because you know, when you're only asking someone kids to do something X amount of times a day, but when I'm with them from eight a.m. Until whatever, I'm asking them 150 times and so I'm not consistent all the 150 times. So I feel like.

Laura: and it's deluded.

Stephanie: Yeah. You know, for me to be inconsistent because I do it so often where he can come in and be pretty consistent with the times that he needs to be.

Laura: Yeah, 100%. So perhaps a possible lesson is to give you our commands or requests. And there's actually research on that that when parents reduce the requests they make of their Children, intentionally reduce them by 50%. That compliance rates go up. It doesn't mean that means we're letting our kids walk all over us. It's just really noticing. Like, do I actually need to tell them to do this right now?

Or is this, you know, like, you know, put your shoes on the rug, you know, move that glass back from the edge of the table, like, you know, oh your napkins on the floor. Like, you know, like all of these little things that we Sprinkle in. Yeah. Just bringing awareness and aiming to reduce those actually increases compliance rates for kids. So that's just something out to put out there that you're so right on that. But I mean, I do think that there is room for kids who are differently wired or different, you know, have different abilities and skill levels to have different expectations placed on them.

You're a special education teacher, right? So we know that individualized instruction is what works best, right? And so you have a classroom with kids with different levels of skills and abilities, right? And so it doesn't mean having no expectations for your child, but having, you know, figuring out what he can do on his own, what he can do with support and finding that balance is something that perhaps he needs. So in terms of like setting him up for success, if you have the sense of and setting up the sibling relationship for success too.

So if you have the sense of like, if I send them into the living room to pick up the living room together, one is going to do all of the work and this other one is going to kind of goof around, you know, in quotes and not do anything and that's going to endanger the relationship. The one kid is going to feel resentful, the other kid is going to feel incompetent, probably like they are not good enough because they're not doing what their brother is and it's going to jeopardize their relationship.

Then perhaps we adjust that expectation and that kiddo in order to protect the sibling relationship and each child's emotional experience and sense of self, maybe that kiddo gets different tasks on his own in rooms where others aren't. So that that comparison can't happen and where you are available to give more support, more scaffolding to that kiddo, I don't know that the set up of your house and all of those things, but there might be possibilities so that he can have an opportunity to feel successful and competent and not in competition with his brothers too. You know.

Stephanie: When I think you just with the pandemic, I think a lot of people who experienced this, I mean, whether or not you chose to homeschool this following year now or we were just home last year, you know, all of a sudden, there always together, you know,

Laura: They need breaks too.

Stephanie: yeah, there's no separation. You know, there's no nothing in my house right now is it's a ranch and it's literally just like kitchen, living room, dining room is all open in a hallway with four bedrooms. So it's like, there's not a ton of places to just go. And so I feel like they don't have that break. And so then, you know, it's just whatever.

But I have been very intentional about like this morning, I called one of my oldest over to do like our home school work, but then I realized that like him and this child who typically have probably the roughest their relationship still fine, but the roughest kind of relationship, they were like snuggled good on the couch, like doing something or playing something, whatever.

And I just like backed off like, you know what school can wait because there's something positive. And I've like tried to my husband, I was, I was telling him like, I feel like we need to facilitate them to specifically where I feel like there's the most friction to go do something fun just together with maybe their dad, you know, to just do whatever just so that they can start to have fun together again. And it's not just this like always negative.

Laura: See Stephanie, this is a perfect example of how you are the perfect mom. You're so why is your intuition is so on point? You saw what your kids needed and you held yourself back, you let go of your agenda to prioritize their relationships. That's beautiful. Oh my gosh, that's beautiful.

Stephanie: I love to see it because I just feel like it's not as common as I would want to, but I think that I'm just being like creating fun for them, even just specifically with kids, which is really important for us. I feel like because we have such a big family that my husband takes them out on, like, you know, one on one dates will go out on like one on what dates with me.

Like have this one on one time. But then also I think that we just also need to do that with their brothers and then kind of the last thing, I don't know, I probably could talk to you forever. But the last thing I don't know if you can speak into for him is just this or like, just even like tools or whatever to help with him. It's just very negative in her self talk and I'm somebody who, I'm all about affirmations.

My kids do affirmations, like almost every day, they are whatever. But he is somebody where he'll just be playing and we'll get up and walk to me and say, mom, I really am bad at football. He just started black football. He's like, I'm just really bad at football. I suck at that. I'm not good at that. Like, and it's just that I'm so bad at putting my shoes. Like, it's just so negative. And I'm like, man, where is this coming from? You know.

Laura: I want to offer you a reframe here in your awareness. So we know that we have about 60,000 thoughts a day and that we're only conscious, of you know a few 100 of them. right? So most of us have all of these negative stories about ourselves habitual thought patterns, just running through the back of our brain. He's aware of them. He knows that there there, that's something you've done, you've helped him understand that he can choose his thoughts because you're using affirmations.

You've helped him be aware of his thinking and he is verbalizing them to you. So, this is a huge win. All right. This is not a bad thing. Okay. All people have negative thoughts about themselves most of the time. They just operate in the background and were not aware of them and we just feel like crap without any awareness that we're thinking or saying these things to ourselves. He's aware of it. He knows the story is there seriously. And so when we know a story is there, then we can work with it. Like when we know a thought is present, like then we can start working with it. So this is all good stuff. Okay. I just want to reassure you.

Stephanie: It's not really my goodness.

Laura: No, but no, this is a good thing. He's aware of it. He's bringing it to you. He is clearly asking for help with those thoughts, right? So, and this is further evidence that you're the exact mom that he needs. Thank heavens he's in a home where he's learning how to work with his thoughts from his parents. It was beautiful. He's so lucky. Okay. Does he know about in our coach and your inner critic does he know those terms?

Stephanie: He does not know those terms. But we and probably I think that I coach more on like, like the information we do obviously like positive. They're really aligned with the fruits of the spirit just in general or like things that they're struggling with. I've turned them into affirmations? But I don't we don't typically talk so this is probably where my where I need to work with. But I would simply we'll have them say that like the positive things. But when he'll come to me and like say negative things like buddy, you're not bad at football. Like you know, we're kind of like talking through it instead of I don't even know what I mean. What should I?

Laura: Yeah. Okay. So when he comes to you with those thoughts first you want to empathize and validate right? You've been thinking about football home and you're worried you're not very good at it. Okay so you've been thinking about that a lot. Huh? He'll probably tell you some more. Yeah. And you're worried that you're not good at it. Like how do you know whether you're good? So then you get curious right? So you validate and empathize and then you get curious and in this way you're teaching him how to work with his thoughts.

Okay. So you get curious how do you know if you're good five Football or Not? You know saying like oh I missed a throw and stuff. Okay. Yeah. So did you ever make any, well yeah, I made some. Okay. And like how long have you been playing? Like when did you start? Uh huh And the people that you're comparing it against yourself? Like when did they start? Oh they've been doing it for a couple of years Okay. Does it make sense? They would be able to catch more passes or run faster?

Oh yeah, that makes sense. They've been practicing longer. Okay. Like how does a person get good at football? You know? So we're just chatting, you know and you would be letting him lead, you know because this is a one sided conversation right now. It's kind of awkward but you're just getting curious about it like uh okay, but only after you've empathized and validated, right? So if we go straight to changing it, they just feel invalidated and like they're not being accepted how they are, right? So we got to validate and empathize first.

Like really like that's an uncomfortable feeling, isn't it? Nobody likes feeling like they're bad at something, you know, just really sit with them and then do the curious thing and then start thinking about like, okay, is it actually true? Now you're bad football? Like is that actually true? Right. What would he say?

Stephanie: He would probably say? I don't know. And I think he compares himself a lot to his older brothers you see in the pentagon right? And I think it's a pretty familiar narrative that like, you know the first born child is the quote unquote angel child is

Laura: The golden boy.

Stephanie: right? So it's like I don't want to I mean I'm sure there's gonna be some level of that, but like I just don't want him to be comparing himself to his nine year old brother, you know what I mean? Like that's really not, whatever, but he, when they're out there playing, they're catching every throw and he's not. And so I think it immediately makes him, he doesn't see the age gap or the ability gap, right? Like I feel like he just sees his brothers and he wants to be able to catch like they do.

Laura: So it might even be helpful to bring their brother over and be like, hey, hey buddy, come here, come here. When you first started like football, like your brother just started like, did you catch every pass? What would your oldest kids say? You would probably say

Stephanie: he would say no, no, I dropped a lot.

Laura: Yeah. You know, this is about fact checking, right? We, our brains have like this negativity bias where they gloss over lots of facts to prioritize a point of view or a truth that we've decided as true, right? And so bringing in other information can help us broaden our perspective a little bit.

And doing this with him, teaches him this invaluable skill that he can use for the rest of his life because negative thoughts about yourself, negative stories are not going to go away, They're always going to be there, You just have to learn to work with them. Um, so another book that I do like that kind of teaches this topic is called The girl who never made mistakes. It's a lovely that is a lovely book and then sam and the negative voice if he likes having books read to him or reading books on his own. I did I even ask how old he is.

Stephanie: No, it's ok. He just turned by five.

Laura: Yeah. So those are two great books that likely isn't reading yet, but I would love to have read to him. They're lovely books. But that thought work piece that kind of validating and then getting curious and really evaluating and then deciding like so that's his inner critic talking to him and you can call it that we all have an inner critic and and in our coach then our critic is the person who kind of tells us that we're bad at things that we aren't doing something right?

And our inner coaches, another voice that's in our head that tells us what we need to do to improve or, you know, kind of builds us up, we can choose which one we're listening to and what one says, you know, he's not too young to learn about his and our critic and his and our coach. And so then when you start asking these questions and then after you were done with the curiosity phase, you can say like, okay, so that was your inner critic talking to you, wasn't it?

When your inner critic kind of put that thought in your head, you're bad at football? Yeah. All right. So now we've been talking, what do you think? Like, your inner coach can say to your inner critic next time it starts talking to you and then come up with some phrases to have and there you go. There's your affirmations. I mean, that's what affirmations are as cultivating a kind and compassionate in our coach, right?

Stephanie: That's great because I feel like I'm good at like I'll turn that into an affirmation. So I'm good at like I feel like taking negative thoughts and for myself or even for some of my kids and turning them into an information. But I think I'm missing the whole process of saying like the validating and the compassion because a lot of times my first reaction is like, you're not going to football, like what do you mean? You just started you know, like this whole reasoning,

Laura: Yeah.

Stephanie: You know, you're only five your this is your first season, you've had one practice. Like I start to like go through that in my head and he's probably like, I don't that's fine. I feel like I'm

Laura: Yeah, you got to sit with him in the in the stew for just a little bit, just stay with him just right beside him, but just for a little bit and then teach him how to build his own affirmations and affirmations work best when they're believable too.

So we're going from like, I'm terrible at football. We can't jump all the way up to like, I'm a football rock star and I'm going to play professionally if I want to, like, that's just not believable. So, and like something along those lines that would be more believable would be like, I'm new to football and I'm learning and I get better every day. You know, that kind of growth mindset piece of things, make it believable. But yeah, you gotta, you gotta get an empathy for just a little bit, even though of course, our mama hearts are like, no, you're wonderful.

Stephanie: You know, there.

Laura: Yeah, this is actually something that is very common for kids in the five year old range when they're, what they want to be able to do is outstripped by their abilities. It is crushing and frustrating. We see this a lot with kids who in their drawings and as they are learning to write letters because they simply don't have the hand strength to do with their body what they want to be able to do.

They know they can picture in their heads, they started to be able to have they have this new cognitive ability to make clear pictures in their minds and then they can't make reality look like the picture of the catching the football or the drawing of something specific and it's really, really frustrating for them because they're older kids who are 678.

They know that they can have a picture in their mind that likely isn't going to be exactly like that way in reality, but five year olds are still new to being able to picture something in their mind That they haven't figured out yet that like it's not going to look just like what I pictured in my head, you know?

Stephanie: Yeah.

Laura: Experience and practice.

Stephanie: Yes. Yeah.

Laura: Okay, so Stephanie, I hope that was helpful for you.

Stephanie: It was very helpful.

Laura: Okay. Good.

Okay, so thanks for listening today. Remember to subscribe to the podcast and if it was helpful, leave me a review that really helps others find the podcast and join us in this really important work of creating a parenthood that we don't have to escape from and creating a childhood for our kids that they don't have to recover from.

September 21, 2021

Episode 77: Using Brain Science to Understand Challenging Behaviors with Lauren Spigelmyer (Challenging Behaviors Series No. 1)

September 21, 2021/ Laura Froyen

Sometimes kids can be so tricky, right? We don't know exactly what will set them off, and then what do to when they are in the midst of their big feelings and the challenging behaviors that can go with them. Things like defiance, aggression, and destructiveness. It can be a lot and it's no wonder we can get super triggered by it all. It's so hard to keep our heads on straight and remind ourselves that these are little humans that we love that are simply having a hard time. As a parent of a kiddo who has had some super challenging times, I promise, I get it and I want you to know you're not alone in it. AND there are some pretty simple things you can do to help.

Which is why I am so excited for the next two weeks on The Balanced Parent Podcast because we will have a two-episode series on Challenging Behaviors. We are going to talk about behavior, what it tells us about our kids, and what they need from us in moments when they are dysregulated.

For the first episode, Lauren Spigelmyer will help us understand how to use brain science to understand our kids' challenging behaviors. Lauren is a parenting and education consultant and runs The Behavior Hub. It is an organization that works with schools and families to address the needs of students with challenging behaviors through a holistic whole-body approach.

Here is a summary of our discussion.

Five general need areas of children
Why considering communication is essential
Behavior and the brain
Body language (Changing the way we respond)

If you wish to get more support on how to handle challenging behaviors, please check out Lauren's website thebehaviorhub.com where you can find quite a few online courses on this topic. You may also contact her via the website for coaching support, follow her Facebook page The Behavior Hub and join her Facebook Group Raising and Teaching Respectful Children. And as a bonus, Lauren is going to giveaway a few phone backgrounds on the five needs area discussed in the episode.

download it here!

Hello, I'm Dr. Laura Froyen and this is The Balanced Parent Podcast where overwhelmed, stressed out and disconnected parents go to find tools, mindset shifts, and practices to help them stop yelling at the people they love and start connecting on a deeper level. All delivered with heaping doses of grace and compassion. Join me in conversations that will help you get clear on your goals and values and start showing up in your parenting, your relationships, your life with openhearted authenticity and balance. Let's go!

Laura: Hello, everybody! Welcome to an episode of The Balance Parent Podcast and I'm so excited to have you here with me today because we are going to be talking all about behavior, what is telling us about our kids, what they need from us in those moments when they're having a hard time and how to help them and ourselves through this and we have a great expert who's going to help us have this conversation. I want to introduce you to Lauren Spigelmyer. She is Parenting and education consultant and runs the beautiful website, The Behavior Hub. And Lauren, I'm so glad to have you with me. Welcome to the show.

Lauren: Thank you for having me on here. It's a pleasure to join.

Laura: Yeah. Why don't you tell us, just to get us started, a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Lauren: Of course, yeah. So I run The Behavior Hub. It's an organization that works with schools and with families to address needs around challenging behavior and we do so through this very holistic whole body approach. So those psychological supports embed nutrition and we also do exercise in there to all go together to help kids to neutralize more naturally. And when I'm not doing that awesome work and course creating for that and coaching and teaching on there, I am course creating and teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. I work on there and develop their trauma-informed education program.

Laura: Oh my gosh, beautiful. I feel like you're doing it all. That's amazing.

Lauren: I try to.

Laura: Yeah. Okay, well thank you so much for coming to chat with us today. I think one of the things that parents really need support with and I know that I've needed support with myself from time to time because I've got a strong-willed spirited daughter who has some challenging behaviors and I kind of wanted to just dig in, to when we are seeing those behaviors with our kids. So if they're calling their sister a name, they're refusing to do their schoolwork.

I know lots of parents are having that happen right now, especially with kids still going to virtual school and they're refusing to log on. They are maybe lying about what they have done for their homework. Maybe they are just yelling or name-calling at home with the parents, maybe they're hitting kicking. So when we see these challenging behaviors and they are challenging, their triggering, they push our buttons, what's going on there for the kids?

Lauren: Yeah, that's a great question and I think something we share is it's communicating something. So we have to try and figure out what is the need that that behavior is communicating something. I think we so quickly just want to jump in and fix it and reverse it and change it.

Laura: And stop it.

Lauren: Yeah.

Laura: Stop that behavior.

Lauren: Yeah, for sure. So she was driving us crazy or it's making us become more stressed or overwhelmed.

Laura: Yeah!

Lauren: But I think it sometimes just can't be done in the moment because you are too stressed out but afterwards or if you can in the moment there are five general need areas that we can identify the heat we’re swelling into. So it could be the need for control which I think right now is a lot and that makes perfect sense. So much of the world is out of control right now. So that falls over into kids trying to do everything they can to keep control in their own lives. So that that's not logging on, that's something they can control. Like I don't have control here, but I'll get control there. So control is one.

The need to emotionally or self regulate which again, I think it's another area that a lot of kids are having some concerns in right now and that's because of the overwhelming stress of what's going on. And then you've got maybe a sensory need. Just thinking about how to sensory play into this. You might have an attachment or a relationship needs. So maybe a child just seeking that relationship with you or siblings or someone else, they need that attention. And the last of which is a physical need. So are they hungry? Are they tired or all of their needs, physical needs getting met?

Laura: Yeah. Okay, so I love that you're breaking it down into these five areas. Like how as a parent in the moment when this is happening, how can we figure that out?

Lauren: Yeah, it's tough. For sure. So I just, what I try and do is like at first I kept visuals like now I have the five needs memorized, but if I didn't have the memorized, I might put sticky notes around my house to remind me of the five needs. So if I'm in the dining room at the table and they're having a behavior and I have a sticky note reminder of these five needs. So when that behavior happens, I quickly scan those five needs areas and which one of these are they? Why do I think this behavior is happening right now?

Ugh, okay. Loss of control. So then I had to quickly flip gears and think about how can I respond to this behavior to give the child back some control because if that's what they're seeking right now, that's what they need. And if I can get them to comply and still give control, then we both win. And there are some easy ways to do that. Like even offering fair and motivating choices to a child for how to do something or when to do it or where to do.

It gives them some level of control. They don't log on. I might say, well, would you rather do your schoolwork, you know, on the couch or in your bedroom? The choices are neutral. They're fair, they're motivating and they're not thinking about not doing it. They're thinking about which location they'd like to work in.

Laura: And you're partnering with the child, right? You're coming alongside them seeing their need for control and offering it while still staying in within like the bounds of your expectations for the kiddo.

Lauren: True.

Laura: Alright. Okay so, that's in the moment. I mean, I don't know about you, but in my experience for some kids, actually for many kids attempting to do some of that work in the moment is really hard.

It's hard for the parent because they're overwhelmed by the kid's behavior. But it's also hard for the kids because the kids got a lot going on if they're dysregulated. If they've got some like a need for regulation, it's really hard to drop into kind of rational thinking. So I was curious if you could maybe tell us a little bit about what's going on in a kid's brain and maybe even in our brain and in our nervous systems as we are moving through these spaces and why circling back can be helpful like not trying to do all of this necessarily in the moment.

Lauren: And changing the way that we respond as parents or adults. It's kind of like learning a foreign language. Like it's so new to us and it's so unfamiliar and in some ways uncomfortable, you're going to mess it up. Like you do that when you're in a foreign country and you do it all the time. So giving yourself grace for…

Laura: Yes.

Lauren: …times we don't get it right and that's fine.

You're learning, they're learning, we're all learning and then just kind of reflecting and thinking about how can I change that for next time. How can I make improvements for next time in those needs areas too? It's not always just one like you could double up…

Laura: Oh, of course.

Lauren: Like the need money control and self-regulation.

But I think working on those things preventatively to when we can't do at the moment and if there's too much elevation and heat going on there working out preventatively beforehand when they are calm.

Laura: Yeah.

Lauren: Or later when they're calm again. But essentially what's going on in the child's brain, there's a really great hand signal. It's developed from Dan Siegel's work, but it's actually from Georgetown University, they took it and really brought it down to a much more simplified level. So they tuck them fingers on top of your thumb and...

Laura: You guys can't see Lauren but she's making a fist with the thumb tucked in to the fist of her fingers, her forefingers over top of her thumb. And you have maybe seen videos of me where I'm using this same signal to demonstrate this. So I have a video on my Instagram page for example, that shows this signal. But yes, keep going. Explain it to us what's happening here.

Lauren: You're tucking your thumb across your hand and then you're wrapping your four fingers around your thumb. And it's a child's brain and the thumb represents what Georgetown we call the barking dog. So it's your emotional control center. And what's happening in those moments where the children are displaying behaviors is that the dog barks. So then use your thumb to show like a dog barking and it means emotional elevation. And when that happens, the four fingers across the top who represent the wise owl or the thinking brain, they get scared by the barking of a dog and it flies away.

Laura: Oh, I love this and I've never heard it explained just so beautifully like this. This is the way you can explain it to your children, too. Lauren, if it's okay with you, I'm going to post a video of you explaining it, on when this episode goes out so people can see what you're doing because it's so helpful. Okay.

Lauren: What that means is if dog is barking and it scared away the wise owl and it's you know if a child is emotionally elevated and their logic and their thinking is like not, it's not accessible like you have to calm the barking dog, you have to get them to like calm down first before you can have any type of rational conversation or redirection or anything like that because they don't have access to their thinking brain they can't even understand here follow through, make a move. So the first step is just to get the dog to stop barking.

Laura: Yeah.

Lauren: The emotional energy just come back down.

Laura: Yeah and I think it's so important to understand too as parents is that we have a barking dog often too. And so, and kids are still you know especially our youngest ones who are five and under there are still very regulated by our state, you know that our state of minors and kind of our physiological regulation is something that they are very attuned to still. And so if we are triggered or upset by what's going on and we've got a barking dog in our brains and our wise owl has also fled the building, then we're really stuck right? Like then it's because how on earth can we help the kids parking dog calm down and have them return to a kind of rational thought. We ourselves aren't there, right?

Lauren: Absolutely.

Laura: Yeah. It's so important for me too, you know, as a systems thinkers and my, you know, my degree is in family systems. Kids are never in isolation. They are always embedded in the system that they're in and the adults that they are being cared for their teacher, their parents are a huge part of their experience, you know? And so it's so important to remember that our state and their states are not happening in isolation. Right? There's a feedback loops there.

Okay, so then how do we go about calming the barking dog for our kiddos and for ourselves?

Lauren: Yeah, it would be easier to do adults first because we have a little bit more emotional maturity. We should have more parts of our brain fully developed. So it should be a little bit easier for us to calm ourselves though when we are in constant states of stress or anxiety, we tend to jump into one or the other side of the nervous system, which again makes it hard to think clearly and that becomes a more stable state for us. So it's even more important now that we find ways to neutralize so that neutralizing and getting back to balance and equilibrium is our stable state and not one of those heightened energy states.

Laura: Yeah. And I think it is so important to note here too that yeah, we have more experience in the world, more time having spent, you know trying to regulate our emotions, but most of us didn't learn how to do this as kids. Most of us have really poor mechanisms for attempting to return to calm. We stuff, we dismiss, we push away, you know, we berate ourselves, we shame ourselves, we judge ourselves as in an attempt to regulate our emotions, but that's not really what you mean by regulation. Is that… that's not how we actually down regulate.

Lauren: No. Do you think about two for each child, even like within your own family, like each child within your family might be a different response tool and you would need something different maybe based on what motivates you, what you enjoy what you like. So like for example for me when I feel like I am in those heightened states, I will do a couple of things.

So if I have access to it, I will just step outside for a few minutes. Step outside, get some fresh air, take some deep breaths, 30 seconds to a minute, I can come back and that works well for me. I may not work well for someone else. Some deep breathing could work well for some people or it may not getting a drink of water could be helpful, a crunchy or chewy snack can be really like de-escalate the jaw muscles and can really be helpful.

Maybe it's turning on a song for a minute dancing. Maybe it's doing some like physical exercise. Like maybe you can just do some like wall push ups or like some squats or something just to get your blood pumping and get your oxygen going to your system and just really bring you down. Everything about like what kind of feels good to you? Like what are some things that you do as an adult that when you do them, you feel really good and can you embed like micro snippets of that into your day when you're feeling stressed out?

Laura: Yes. Oh my gosh, I love this. And so this is like almost like preventative maintenance. You know how we hear with kids, we need to spend, you know, 10-20 minutes a day connecting with them as a form of preventative maintenance to build that strong connection. We have to be doing this with ourselves too. And I think that parents, you know, think like we're talking about self-care here, but I mean we're talking about real self-care and we're talking about sustainable self-care. Self-care that's built into the rhythm and the fabric of your life, kind of self-care. Like I have a little bit of a tea ritual that I do that's soothing and calming.

So every time I feed my kids, I also make myself a cup of tea. And there's a part like when I'm preparing the meal where I mindfully like as a kind of almost a meditative practice where I'm preparing a cup of tea for myself and that's just built into the rhythm of our day and it's always a touchpoint for me to, you know. If we think about we all have this kind of windows of tolerance and when our window of tolerance is narrowed, we are more reactive. We can are less able to flexibly handle the stressors of being a parent and little practices like what you're talking about, widen that window and then they're on hand and our practice and almost habits for when we are overwhelmed. You know?

Lauren: Yeah, and we might use them more reactively initially. Like you'll, you'll feel the sensation, you're like, okay, I need to use that. Sometimes it will be too strong and it will override and you won't use the practice and that's fine. That's where you give yourself grace. You're like, okay, I didn't use it, it's okay next time I recognize I didn't use it the next time I'm going to try and use it. And then you may remember next time and then you feel good and you get that motivation, all those happy chemicals in your body and like I feel good, I'm gonna use that again.

It becomes like you said a habit or pattern that becomes more natural and then what the ideal thing to do is once you've got that kind of figured out that reactive response is trying to shift it and make it more preventative, like even embedding those things before, like if you know a certain time your day is going to be more stressful, like go ahead and do those things before that moment even comes up. Like if you know breakfast is gonna be stressful, go ahead and go outside and like take your deep breaths or whatever before breakfast starts, you're already like grounded and feeling good before you go into breakfast.

Laura: Yes, this is something that I use, so one of my kids does not transition off of screen time. Well, so when her show was ending, I always go and join her five minutes before it's ending. But in the five minutes before that five minutes before I do something for myself to center myself, make a plan for myself, refocus on this is what happens sometimes, this is how it goes. Sometimes this is what I'll do if it goes this way and I'm prepared for it and then I go in and better able to handle that situation.

Oh, I love this. Okay, so I think that it's hard sometimes for parents, we don't know what soothes us. I love that you're inviting folks to, to find that out for themselves to figure out, like what is it that helps me feel calm, what is it that feels good to me? What is something I can do to bring myself back to center, back to balance? I love that this is an area.

Lauren: I recognize that a lot of adults don't necessarily know. We actually, that's one of the courses the self-care course goes through like a whole personality profiling. So you take multiple personality types quizzes and you record the data and then you go through when you find the similarities between the personality types and that will drive you to your core values and things that really make you feel good and that that list then it's like, okay, here are all the things that I do or that I like or that I enjoy. I now have them in front of me. I just need to align my common coping mechanisms to this list because now I know what the things are.

Laura: Yeah, I love that. And I also, I encourage my clients and students to do something similar and then once they have it to make kind of like a menu for themselves of things that are kind of like the appetizers or the tapas that our little pieces that hold you over to the bigger stuff and then the main courses and then the desserts, you know like I like posting it like you would a take out menu on your refrigerator, you know, and having it available for yourself. So good. Okay, so then how does that all of this translate them to our kids. So once we've got our wise owl back in line, back at our disposal, how do we help our kids?

Lauren: Absolutely. So similar approach. Like they may not again know what it is that they like that calms them. That feels good. So it's a little bit of like intentional watching. Like I try and watch kids do some observations like okay, they're playing that game. That game really seems to keep them mellow or calm and just kind of making no of those things that I see in the environment and then asking them because sometimes they do know sometimes they know more than we realize. So they might know what makes them feel good and what makes them calm down.

Laura: I think they often no more than I realized that when we give the design to.

Lauren: Yeah, human biology is like knows it. We just don't always were not able to like always pull it out or say it. We do have the answers inside of us. I believe that as well.

Laura: I think that we are so kids are so used to us not asking them to, they don't even know sometimes that they know until we start consistently asking them encouraging them to check-in and think about them and listen to their intuitions for themselves and I think those are beautiful skills to be building with our kids, you know.

Lauren: You're so fine. That was good. It was a great introduction. I don't notice something in the environment and they don't give me enough data themselves. Then what I'll do is I'll start to just share options that I know of. So there could be things like I mean there are all types of breathing, like I sometimes breathing isn't motivating for kids but you can find ways to make breathing more motivating. Like for young kids, there are all kinds of like animal breasts, interactive breath, things that they can blow on, blow in like so.

Laura: one of my favorite ones is to have a big bowl of water with a little bit of soap in it and then have them blow bubbles through a straw in through the nose and out through the mouth. Those are, it's a great way to and that kids like love who, what kid doesn't like to blow bubbles in a bowl of water, you know?

Lauren: Absolutely. The straw is a great point I heard this is a seminar one time that when you breathe in your nose and out through a straw, the ratio is 1 to 2 and you want to breathe slower out than you do in.

Laura: Yeah, it forces and yeah, it forces them out like a like a longer out-breath which is good and shifts you into a different nervous system pathway into Yeah, so yeah, yeah, absolutely, I love that. Good. Well, so I just want to ask a little bit. So we've been focusing on kind of how to kind of get kids calm and back to balance and I know that you and I feel similarly about how behavior is a form of communication.

There is a lot of focus I think in the parenting world, on how to get kids to stop doing challenging behaviors and I like that So far our conversation has been more focused on understanding the challenging behaviors, understanding what the underlying cause for the challenging behaviors. I think that that's a really important part of the conversation, but there's still, I think, a tendency, a very natural and normal tendency for parents to want the behaviors to stop, you know, to want compliance. I heard you use the word comply earlier.

They to want compliance, to want the, to not see those behaviors as much anymore. And so they look for methods that stop behaviors and I'm just kind of curious about what you think about that when we focus on reducing behaviors versus maybe some of the things that we've been talking about so far.

Lauren: Yeah, my concern like our impulsive desire still even like having this background in that way too. Like I just want screaming to stop.

Laura: Me too for sure. Oh my gosh, Lauren everybody who listens regularly knows that my kids are always pretending to be dragons and they're loud. Dragons are loud and sometimes I just want them to not be dragons in my house. Absolutely. So of course this desire to just stop is there all the time? All right. I interrupted you.

Lauren: So you're fine. I love those injections cause they're so funny. They're so personal, their lived experiences. But I think when we just focus on stopping the behavior, my concern becomes well that behavior just manifest itself in a different way. We may stop this one pathway of behavior, but because the need hasn't been met because we haven't gotten to the underlying cause of the behavior, will it just shift and display itself? Like maybe we stop the trial from screaming but now do they start hitting or you know, just just for.

Laura: Yeah, there's different methods for approaching behaviors and there's a very behavioral approach to getting a behavior to stop and we can get behaviors to stop in the short term using things like punishments, rewards and timeouts. Kind of more behavioral approaches to challenging behaviors with kids when they're used properly. That there's research to show that they do work. And I'm using work with quotation marks because the behaviors stop.

And I just was hoping that maybe we could just have a little bit of a conversation about what do we mean when we say the word work? Right? So like when we want to know like is this going to work oftentimes we mean is the behavior going to stop. Right? I was hoping that we could just, I don't know, talk about and maybe give parents a different understanding of a way to conceptualize work. We know something is working, you know, what do you think about that?

Lauren: Yeah, it goes back to that five needs areas. Like if we get like I have a child is seeking attention and we just get them to stop nagging us because we want to stop the behavior and that need has never been met. And I just wonder like in the future because of the way we responded to that, like are they still going to seek attention from other people in other ways?

In inappropriate ways? Like it would be better to think about what the need is, make sure the need is met and that way in the future that need isn't still coming up for them in different ways. In inappropriate ways are ways that could be more hurtful or harmful. So I'm just thinking about the long term because the short term is like stop the behavior. But what's the long-term impact of just stopping you?

Laura: Right? I think the focusing on kind of the long game is so important. And I think also that a lot of the techniques that get you quick results, like fast in the moment, stop results. They don't actually teach the kid what to do instead, right? They don't teach the skills many of us really believe that when kids have challenging behavior as it happens because they don't really have the skills that they need to meet the expectations in that moment, they don't have the, you know, the, either the self-regulation abilities or the communication abilities or kind of what they need to be able to tell us without those behaviors, what they need in that moment.

That really they just have, like, this kind of Dr. Ross Screen calls them unsolved problems and lagging skills that are getting in the way, you know? And so, a time out might make them stop nagging us, you know? Or if we say, you know, for every time you ask me that question again, if they're asking the same question over and over again, every time you ask me that question, I'm going to take away one minute of screen time, let me stop them asking the question.

But like, question asking like that usually is a form of connection seeking a behavior, right? Like you said, that need is not, it doesn't teach them how to say, hey mom, I really would love you for to just chat with you for five minutes, will you sit down with me? Like, I mean, I think if a three-year-old said that to their mom, their mom would be like, oh yeah, I'll sit down with you, I want to hear exactly what you say, but instead, we get the like, but what about this? But what about this? But what about this? And we don't see it as this is my kid asking me to sit down and have a moment of community with them, you know, and look to just get it to stop and it doesn't teach them the skills they need. I don't know, I feel like I just went a little bit on a tangent there, but.

Lauren: I completely agree with you though. I mean again the long-term effects and what are we doing to meet this need so that they don't keep coming up again and to build that relationship is so important. And then also give them the skills that they need to thrive in everyday life. Like we are have these kids that are growing into young adults and they don't understand how they feel and I don't understand what needs they have and that aren't getting met and how to meet them appropriately.

And then we have people who are in the world who I just don't understand how to respond and deal with emotions and don't understand why certain behaviors are happening, but if we start that at a young age and we do our best to not respond and react to stopping the behavior actually teaching them skills, they don't make them so much more successful later in life.

But I think all parents want like we want our kids to be independent, successful, empathetic and passionate beings and that starts within childhood teaching them, you know why these behaviors are happening and how to stop them and how to get the needs met and all of those things instead of just jumping to like stop and then they question things as adults like I don't know what I'm feeling or what I'm doing or why I'm acting this way.

Laura: Yeah, I think it's so important to focus on that long game perspective, you know, for I think when we think about like is this going to work? When is this going to work? And if we are saying that to ourselves as we are making efforts to change or parenting, we have to spend a little time on just even just journaling about like what do I mean by work, what does work mean? You know? And I mean, I think even like we have, I know we have educators who listen to this podcast too, like that is the same in the classroom to like when is this going to work, is this approach going to work? I think we really have to spend time thinking about like what do we mean by work? What is our actual goal here and purposely moving beyond a short-term goal?

I mean, of course, there's times when short term goals, goals have to take precedent like if a three-year-olds running towards the street or you know, a five-year-old is hitting the three-year-old in the classic, you know, or like somebody's throwing something like of course we need immediate stopping, you know, like those are things where that has to happen, but when there's time when it's not an emergency, you know.

Lauren: I think that the neural connections, to go a little bit science and.

Laura: oh please go sciences, we love it here, we love nerding science here.

Lauren: Your brain is making me, it's like firing and these connections are wiring together and that becomes your default, then you can default pathway or default behavior and what's happening is like when we just stop these behaviors, these neural connections aren't necessarily being made, just being like cut off, but if we instead nurture these choices and these behaviors and these things that these neural connections are made and then we do it again, it gets stronger and gets stronger and gets stronger and this becomes our default pathway and we want this to become our default pathway, not this broken pathway or this very insecure pathway that is just stopping behaves from happening. So we want to essentially change our child's brain chemistry like we want to create these neural networks, these strong connections that wire them in the direction for success later in life, and sometimes those quick fixes don't do that.

Laura: Oh my gosh, so beautifully stated, Yes, that's what we're doing right as parents, we are wiring their brain. Yeah, okay, so can we go a little bit deeper into kind of how to go about building kind of those good supportive pathways for our kids, helping them build those strong neural connections that are going to be supportive for them as they grow.

Lauren: Yeah, for sure. I think that starts with us and the adults in the family, I think about like what are your family? Like I always have families with the activity of family values like what do you, what are like 3-5 things that you value as a family? Okay then let's break that down into okay, these are your values, these are these broad concepts, but for kids to be able to understand them like maybe like respect as a value like we are respectful as a family, okay, what does respect look like in all areas with respect look like in the grocery store, at school, in the kitchen at bedtime and just kind of break it down to like what do the behaviors that fall into each of those areas?

And then we slowly start to teach kids those expectations what those behaviors look like and reinforce them and by doing so we are making those connections and our wiring those connections that those other behaviors happen and that they fall under the, this value category. So now these Children are developed neurologically too, be respectful, be kind be courteous, like whatever you get your values are but it also takes a lot of shifting with us as well, like these mirror neurons, so what we do becomes what they do, so.

Laura: they're learning your modeling. Yeah. And I think too that many of our defaults, the things that we're wired in us as children and have been wired kind of repeatedly as we age, that those defaults often undermined some of our deeper values and goals. So if we are one of our values and our families that we are respectful of each other, but then we tell our kids, you know, that they can't wear what they want to, to school or you know, we get in there and we're controlling with them or we shame or punish them because of how we were parented, how we think it's supposed to go then sometimes our practices.

I think don't always align with what we state our values to be. You know, kids are so good at spotting hypocrisy. My kids give us feedback all the time where like so risk being respectful of everybody like that's a big value in our family and there are plenty of times where unintentionally we are not respectful of their bodies or of you know, their needs in those moments and my kids are so good at giving us that feedback. You know, mom, I feel like you're not listening to me mom, my needs matter to you know, like just beautiful language, advocating for themselves.

Lauren: Yeah. And you can do a little like check-in some reflect like I encourage the families, your family dinner, like bring up your values, like can we all think of one way we were respectful today, can we think of one way we can grow like just having little points of reflection for both them and for you to make sure that you're all staying on track and, and holding each other accountable.

Laura: Yeah, I think that that's so important. I know too that you would like to talk about communication and communication that was, you know, we've been talking about how kids have these stress responses and we've been talking about the barking dog and the wise owl. What are some ways that'll tie into our nervous system and if we've got a kid’s nervous system is on high alert and highly activated, how can we go about? What are some communication strategies that we can use to help them come down?

Lauren: We want to use things to keep that barking dog from starting to bark and there are different ways to do that. So developed a whole course in my top seven, the ones I've developed a runabout, maybe just a few of those which ones we would use.

Laura: Don't share. You know, we can't overwhelm.

Lauren: Yeah, some of the secrets you think, oh gosh, I probably my favorite one and this one can be hard for families and for adults because like you have to tap into your inner child kind of allow yourself to be vulnerable here. But the one I probably use most frequently is humor. So how can I embed humor to get compliance to get kids to shift or change behaviors or listen? And the reason being is because when you add humor and I'll give you an example here in a second and the dog is barking or not yet, barking humor takes a child from their emotional brain up into their thinking brain insane for adults.

Like if you are really upset by something and you get exposed to like a funny gift for funny meme or something funny, it will shift you up into your thinking brain. So I try and use that one a lot gets kids out of this brain and gets them into their thinking brain. But an example for young kids, like an easy way for me to do this because again if you're stressed out at the moment, it's kind of hard to act funny or be funny. I will just make objects talk. Like for example, a child, remember a couple years ago he would come in his mom and pack his lunch and you always want to eat the snacks first. You won't want to eat good food first.

The teacher would always take the snacks until you get a good food and they would just sit there and not eat lunch and they would have lunch. So I think we get it later. But it was a whole ordeal and I was like, let's just try something here. So I think he had, like some grapes or something in his lunch box that she wanted him to eat first. So I started making his stomach talk as if like I were the stomach and the stomach was so hungry for a great, just please just give me one grape. And he was like giggling and laughing a degree.

But I'm like the stomach So happy. And I was talking as the stomach more grapes give me more grapes. And within 30 seconds all the groups were gone and I was like so easy. Like that took me a minute to get compliance versus you know, he's fighting for control. I'm not eating this food, I want that food. I'm just not going to eat. I'm going to maintain control if I add a level of an element of humor in a very easy fun way. That doesn't take too much time or energy. Suddenly he's compliant.

Laura: Yeah.

Lauren: like tooth brushing, shoes, clothes, eating like all these different things.

Laura: I think it's so important to, to frame this. You know, so that's play, right? You were inviting him into play, which is a way that kids very wisely and very easily and very naturally used to do the things that they need to do in their life. They have not separated the work of life from play yet. For most kids, most kids are still very close to them and it's their language, right? And so I think it's really important to differentiate this from being manipulative, right? So we are not manipulating the child were speaking their language.

We are dropping in to play with them in a way that will make kind of what they need to do a little bit easier. You know, like how can we just make this a little bit easier, a little bit more fun And what a beautiful skill to have in your life. I mean, there's things that like, oh my gosh, laundry is my least favorite thing to do and I can make it playful. It goes so much faster. I'm really not very good at making it playful, but when my five-year-old folds laundry with me, oh my gosh, we have so much fun doing it together. You know, should we like we make the little things that were folding talk. You know, and I mean, it's so much fun.

Their kids are so wise in the way that they use play and we can join them in that I think I'll play is such a lovely tool. You know, I used to think that it was a form of manipulation, but I really don't think it that way anymore. I really think that it is a, you know, when we go to a foreign country, you know, and we go to a place where we, you know, that language is not our first language.

There's nothing more respectful to the folks that live there, then at least attempting to speak their language. You know, there's nothing more respectful than that. And it's languages play than what could be more respectful than attempting to speak their language when they've got to do hard things. And in my experience, very few Children can resist like the shoe monster who wants to eat their toes when you're trying to get the shoes on when you go out the door, very few Children can, can resist that.

Lauren: You can translate it to kids of different ages. Like that's great for like three or four or five years old. I'm like, you know, there are ways to do it for kids in primary school, in middle school, and high school and it looks very different to take a moment and think about what would make kids of those age.

Those they just laugh and maybe it wouldn't be like making things talk. But even for some primary school, like, I've used like foreign languages and my accents are shameful. Like I would adult, heard me, anyone in any other country heard me trying, It's horrible. But the kids love it are then fully engaged or like teens, maybe it's through like gifts or jokes or memes or something that feels a little bit more of their level. But you know, whatever you can do to get them to laugh or two experience that level of humor. We'll flip them up to the top of the brain, which we want.

Laura: Yeah, I love that. Yes. My kids also enjoy when I use an accent that's also helpful. And there will be times where I will be kind of being playful with my eight year old and she's like, mom, I know what you're doing, but okay, let's do it. You know, like she was like, here for it even though like she wants me to know like she knows that I'm just, you know, being playful because we got, to get this done, but she's still here for it. You know, I don't, I mean, I think that that's beautiful. I do you have other examples of like what playfulness would look like for the tweens and teens? Because I know we have a, a few of those folks who listen to this podcast, and then my kids aren't there yet. So I haven't practiced that as much. You have some idea?

Lauren: It's definitely harder because they are more challenging if you have like a comedian like those that each group is the hardest to like break lap. But I have done a lot of memes and GIFs, like funny images online or funny things online. I've done a lot with like note writing to like kind of a silly, funny playful notes because it seems to remove the energy and it's more like it's coming from the note and not from the person and they know that it's coming from the person, but teams scene and tweens to seem pretty receptive to note-taking, especially as a note that like in-site sent to say something back.

Like the note-taking back and forth are taking note writing a lot of the notes and sometimes just like breaking out a little bit of dance like that they act kind of embarrassed at first but I think that internally like they're like this is really funny, this is like my energy is shifting and changing. I'm not gonna participate because I'm too cool for that but inside they're feeling that shift.

Laura: Or even just like oh my gosh, this is so mortifying, I just got to get this to stop. So just to get it to stop.

Lauren: I imagine the energy of like a child getting to stop in that situation versus like a heated head to head like verbal argument. Like it's very different energy that is being exchanged.

Laura: when you're laughing with people, when you are joking around, when you're having fun and playing, you're also connecting, right? So this builds these are things that rather than rupturing a relationship with your child, actually build and maintain the relationship. I think we often think that conflict is by its very nature disconnecting and really conflict has the potential of course to be disconnecting. But it also has the potential to be very connecting very an opportunity to hear and understand and connect on a deeper level with someone. Yeah, that's beautiful. Lauren, thank you so much. Where can people find you and learn more from you.

Lauren: Yeah, the best place is probably the website, thebehaviorhub.com. You can email any avenue, on there for coaching support and there's quite a few online courses all around these topics we discussed today. It's not social media is the second alternative, not quite as interactive, on there, but either of those spots would be easy access to me and great resources.

Laura: Okay, we'll have all of those in the show notes and I encourage you all to go out and check out what Lauren got going on. She's got so much great stuff and I really appreciate this conversation with you today. Thank you.

Lauren: Thank you.

September 15, 2021

Episode 76: Surviving The Teenage Years Without The Drama with Deborah Ann Davis

September 15, 2021/ Laura Froyen

Okay, so my first-born daughter is almost nine years old. And I know that just a few short years from now, I will be dealing with a teenager. This is something that I have been thinking about a LOT lately! I don't want to be caught off guard or unprepared for the teen years, and I know that what I'm doing now as a parent is laying the ground work for smooth transition for both of us as individuals, AND for our relationship.

And I and guessing I'm not alone in all of this! I know you all are likely curious about how to deal with soon-to-be teenagers OR understanding your teen (if you have one now). So for this episode, I'm bringing in a friend and colleague, Deborah Ann Davis. She is a speaker, coach, educator, and the author of "How To Keep Your Daughter From Slamming the Door." She will help us survive the teenage years without the drama, even if you don't have a daughter.

Here is an overview of our discussion:

How the struggles in teenage years are closely tied with the lack of self-compassion
How to have a healthy relationship with our teenagers
How to communicate with troubled teens
How to reach out to distant teens
Striking a healthy BALANCE between Connection and Autonomy with our teens

To learn more about dealing with teenagers, follow Deborah on her social media and website:

Facebook: Deborah Ann Davis

Facebook Mom Group: The Mom Meet-Up: Raising Confident Girls

Instagram: @awesomemomtribe

YouTube: Deborah Ann Davis

Website: www.deborahanndavis.com

And if you like to checkout her book "How To Keep Your Daughter From Slamming the Door", you can find it here:

GET MY COPY!

Hello, I'm Dr. Laura Froyen and this is The Balanced Parent Podcast where overwhelmed, stressed out and disconnected parents go to find tools, mindset shifts, and practices to help them stop yelling at the people they love and start connecting on a deeper level. All delivered with heaping doses of grace and compassion. Join me in conversations that will help you get clear on your goals and values and start showing up in your parenting, your relationships, your life with openhearted authenticity and balance. Let's go!

Laura: Hello everybody, This is Dr. Laura Froyen with the Balanced Parent Podcast and I'm really excited for this conversation today. I know I said that every day but this is one we are actually going to be talking about something that I've been thinking about and wondering about how to have a good, healthy relationship with your child as they move into the teen years. This is something that is I'm on the cusp of it with my almost nine-year-old, it's coming for me and I'm really excited to dig into this. And so to have this conversation, I'm bringing in a friend and colleague Deborah Davis. She has written a book called How To Keep Your Daughter From Slamming the Door and I'm really excited to dig into this topic. Deborah, welcome to the show. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do?

Deborah: Well thank you, I'm so glad to be here. Well, basically I taught high school in middle school for 27 years. I spent three decades with parent meetings where I have the angry, frustrated parent on one side of the table and the sullen defensive teenager on the other side of the table, and my job was to get them to talk to each other because we couldn't solve whatever problem that brought them to the table until they could talk to each other.

So over the years I created this great arsenal of techniques that I could use to try with this parent, try with that parent, try with this kid and try with that kid until it became second nature to me so I can sit down with people and say this is something that you guys can try, this is something that will work for you, but at the time it didn't have a name now we call it a parent coaching.

Laura: Yeah, it's amazing how things like that developed, right, my generation where we're parenting, where parenting is used actively as a verb in everyday language right before it's a verb, you can't have coaches teach you how to do it, right. That's awesome.

Deborah: When I was a young parent, I fully 100 believed in something we call today the supermom myth back then they didn't have that language and that's really all about comparing yourself to other moms and saying, oh, I fall short and they've got it together and they know what they're doing and their child's going to benefit and my child isn't. And for me it was especially difficult because My mother in law seemed to be the quintessence supermom, she had 15 children and I had one squalling baby.

And on top of that, I had two sisters-in-law who had had babies. We were like three months apart with our babies. So I had lots of people up close and personal to be comparing myself to and I always fell short, but I didn't understand was all the other young moms were doing the exact same thing. Some of them were looking at me and saying, wow, she's got it together and I don't. And the other thing is the reason why my mother-in-law was such an incredible mother was because she had a support team and what we do nowadays.

No, I'm not going to say nowadays what moms do is we get in our heads and we think I have to do it right. I have to do it on my own. I don't want anyone to know I'm having difficulty and I got to hide all the difficulty that I'm having and what I'd like to say is you guys don't have to go through that all you need to do is say, you know what, I haven't done this before. I'm a new mom, why in the world would I be expecting me to get it automatically?

So cut yourself some slack and start building your support group. I mean if you're listening to this kind of a podcast, then that's what you're doing is you're creating support system for yourself. Instead of saying, I'm going to reinvent the wheel. You have to give yourself some slack and treat yourself with kindness because isn't it true that if your best friend was struggling with the things that you're struggling with, that you would be there bolstering them up? You wouldn't be saying, why aren't you getting this right? You're a failure. Your kids aren't gonna make it No, I don't have that inner conversation with yourself.

Laura: Oh yes. You know, here in this community, we are so such big supporters of being so kind, offering ourselves the same grace and kindness that we offer every day to our partners, to our friends and to our kids and acknowledging really that if we want to do that fully and authentically and in a way that isn't draining to us. It has to start with us, that all of that has to come from within, like it's never this bottomless. Well, that comes up from within us, so that's beautiful. Okay, so thank you for that reminder and that pep talk,

Deborah: one more reminder. Yeah, I would say that what I just said was the number one thing about treating yourself as if you were your best friend, but the second part of that is that you will be modeling that behavior for your Children and if you treat yourself well then your Children will say well I'm supposed to be treating myself better than I am and that is probably the most important thing we can impart on them.

Laura: Oh my gosh, yes, 100% for going this way, but I feel like I feel called to go there, I know for me my experience as a teenage girl was filled with self-doubt with self-hatred with comparison with not enough, not good enough, not pretty enough, not whatever enough, you know, and I just wonder what my teenage years would have been like and what my relationships with my parents would have been like had we had this context of compassion and enough Nous your enough Nous being endowed by your simple humanity, you know, I wonder about that, so can we talk a little bit about that, about how sometimes the struggle in the teenage years is very closely tied to lack of self-compassion.

Deborah: The thing is that negativity is fueled by the media. My other book, How to get your happy on this. This little experiment at the back of the book that compares your mood influences. It shows how media and music affect your mood. The thing about media is, it is designed to create discontentment. If you are content with your life, then you don't shop if you are discontented or yearning for something or desire something because you've seen these ads, then it makes you go into the store and then if you can't get there for whatever reason you're dissatisfied.

So the media teaches us to be dissatisfied. Commercials, magazines, labels on clothing, they say were exposed to 4000 media inputs a day, wow, I know it's really incredible. And when you've got a teenage girl who is being raised by a mom who's feeling insecure, then she doesn't have anything to guide her in terms of her own insecurity. Now, for all your moms who just heard that and I'm thinking, oh my gosh, I'm messing up my child, let it go, let it go. You have turned into a decent human being.

So your child is going to turn into a decent human being, what we're talking about here is making these years a little easier for you and her. The thing is that statistically, 80% of the mother-daughter relationships that are like crazy bad during the adolescent years Have turned into good relationships as adults. Even if you're banging heads with your kid, you've got an 80% chance of this being a good adult relationship. So what we're talking about here is not, you're doing it wrong, you're screwing up, you're ruining your child's life. What we're talking about here is bridging the gap, Making things calmer in your household okay.

Laura: And focusing on like this is a lifelong relationship that the two of you will have. Exactly every relationship has ups and downs moments of time where things are rocky, urgency that comes sometimes and parenting is a lot. Okay. So then how do we go about making things a little bit more calm? Making connection a little bit easier. What are some ideas that you can share with us?

Deborah: So in the way, my science brain works like different topics you go topic is about how to calm and the second the topic is about how to bridge the gap in the relationship. Come first how’s that?

Laura: Just like my brain sees those two as intimately tied together that through calm connection is available and through connection, calm is available that they are this like hands washing hands kind of situation. But let's go for a while and.

Deborah: I agree with you. It is a chicken and the egg situation you're trying to say which one comes first, You just have to grab one of them. Start with it.

Laura: and start with it. Okay, so let's start with the bridging the gap one then.

Deborah: So we'll talk about bridging the gap first of all those of you who have a gap that needs to be bridged. This whole conversation is going to make you feel very uncomfortable because you're feeling a little hopeless and scared about it right now and you know, your child needs you and you don't know how to cross that bridge so that they can be enveloped in your love and warmth and security, even though you want to offer it.

My experience has been that for kids who are banging heads with their parents, they have a different personality style than their parents do or a different learning style than their parents do. I used to spend a lot of time talking about personality differences, but lately I've been talking about learning styles because so many parents are now intimately involved in their kid's schooling. Right?

So if you go to my website, there's a page in there called the learning styles inventory. I modified it from the Georgia, State Department of Education, and I like it because it only has three learning styles and I've seen some of them have 18, and the way my mind works, I'm like, I just want one and done, just give me something simple so you can find these things for free online if you want to research it if you like.

Laura: We'll put the link to yours and the show, you know, if you send me the link, I'll make sure it goes into the show notes that people can check it out. But yeah, okay.

Deborah: The learning style inventory is like 20 something questions and you go through and you answer it and it will identify the way you is your preferred learning style. So the three of them are auditory kinesthetic and visual. So what does that mean if you are an auditory learner and your teen is a visual learner and your teens watching tv and you come in the living room and say when that shows over, I want you to take out the garbage and the child goes okay. And then two hours later the child's not watching tv, the garbage hasn't been taken out because when you're an auditory person, things in the air make sense to you.

But for a visual person, they don't retain it the same way. Now you do that same scenario where you write on the sticky note garbage and you put it in front of the child and say when the show is over, I want you to take the garbage out and say okay when the show's over, they'll see the note and think, oh the garbage and go take it out. So when the child doesn't meet the parents’ expectations because the parent receives information differently, then the parent gets upset, feels like they're being thwarted or the child listens to her about them.

They're not listening that they feel like it's they get to the point where I feel like it's intentional and then the child's like why did mom get upset? I mean what's the big deal for mom? It's like the 100th time, the child hasn't taken the garbage out for the child. It's like she just asked me one time, okay, if you address it the way the child learns, then they will be able to adhere to what you're saying.

Do what you say, fit into your scope of things and your conflicts will decrease as the bottom line is and I don't care how contentious or angry your relationship is with your child, they want the exact same thing that you want, they want to be loved, they want to feel safe, they want to feel like you have their back, they want to feel like when there is a problem, they have a place where they can go and they want things to be magically good right now, they want the exact same thing you do. So all you gotta do is get a few tricks up your sleeve so that you can do that.

Laura: and it sounds like to like a piece of this is learning to assume positive intent or assume like the best of our kids, you know, I think so often as parents, when we are with our kids, we kind of assume the worst of them, they're doing this to be disrespectful, they're doing this to being manipulative and in reality, if we kind of kind of just say like, oh they must have forgotten kind of just give them a little bit of the grace that were, you know, we talked about offering to ourselves, that allows us to come at it from a different energy too. So yeah, speaking their learning style, I love that giving them t

Deborah: The other thing is your learning style is the way you receive information. It's also the way you process information, it's the way you understand the world and it's the way you do relationships. So if you've got a household where one of your kids gets along really well with your spouse and doesn't get along with you, chances are they have a similar way of approaching the world. So they don't get blindsided by each other and you and this child get blindsided because what makes sense to you and you would expect this kind of reaction from your child is surprising and shocking when you don't get it.

Yeah, we're a little kid when they get blindsided by their mom, because they were expecting mom to be okay with this and mom blew up. That's scary for them because now they don't understand who you are, what you do, how you interact and their trust in you starts to decrease because they don't think you understand them, they don't think, you know what to do. So when they've got a problem with somebody at school, they don't feel like they can come talk to you because you're not going to get it anyway. For example, like me with my daughter, I'm the kind of person, like I'm very intuitive and I want to jump in and fix it fast, right? She is a strong personality

So when she would come to me wanting to share about what was going on, I didn't understand that she needed to vent. She had all these emotions that she had built up over the course of her school day and she just wanted to go blob and I was there listening to two sentences and giving her solutions and she didn't want to hear a solution because how could I possibly tell her what would be better when I didn't really know what the whole story was yet I didn't understand.

So I wasn't going to be able to help her. It made her feel this gap, this bridge, this widening gap. And it wasn't until we had a conversation where I started saying to her, okay, what's my role here? She say, I just want to complain. I just want event. Sometimes she would say, I just want you to be the mommy, sometimes she'd say I just want you to be the friend, sometimes she'd say I need to know what to do, which then my inner self would be going yeah, now I get to do my thing

Laura: Yeah. You know, I used a similar process with my daughters when they come to me with a problem. You know, they start talking to me, I hear them, you know, I'm holding space a little bit and then I, at some point I find a place to interject and say, okay honey, is this something that you want me to just listen to? Is this something that you want my advice on all my thoughts on for how to handle? Or is this something you want me to get involved in and help you with those three levels of kind of like my, like those roles for me that I can take are so help understand.

Yeah, they understand it there and I mean like it's almost, you know, sometimes it's they have to think about it for a second, you know, and they, sometimes one of them will say, well just listen for now and after you're done listening then maybe something else, but right now just listen and the other one is like, yeah, I want advice right now, you know.

I mean, But what you're talking about this process of conscious communication because that's what it is, checking in meta communicating about how we're going to communicate. That is a skill that kids need, that everybody needs, that we don't learn growing up, most of us, I don't know about you.

Deborah: That stuff wasn't actually one thing that was taught in my household when I was growing up, we could have private talks. So if you were upset or if you just wanted to talk you, it was okay for you to sequester yourself away with one of your parents and close the door and nobody could bother you while you talk. We did have that. That's beautiful in our house. Yes. But I would like to say this for the moms who are listening to this and have not done this kind of procedure before you're probably saying, well that works for you, but that won't work in my household. So let me tell you how to start this.

Laura: Yeah, good. That's great.

Deborah: The whole thing first of all with any changes that you want to make in your relationship or your procedures in your household. The thing you have to do is pick a quiet calm time and explain what it is that you're going to do what the changes are going to be because if you insert the most loving change right in the middle of the battlefield, your kids are going to sit back and go, okay, something's wrong with mom

Laura: More like I'm going to reject that.

Deborah: Like I'm not doing that. So, so for example, with this thing you say, I have just found something interesting in a magazine or just heard this great podcast or whatever that has a different way to approach family interactions and I decided I wanted to try it. So I just wanted to let you know, so you would recognize it when it's going on.

So when you come to talk to me about something about school, I'm going to qualify my role right upfront. So I'm going to say to you, what do you want me to do? Do you want me to listen? Do you want me to talk? Do you want me to hug? Right. And then for the older kids you say do you want to vent? Do you want to share and get my input? Are you looking for advice? So that's what I'm gonna do.

Then when the kid comes to you and says it, you're going to say, okay, this is a great time for I'm gonna try this new thing. All right, so you're gonna have your conversation and I'm gonna say do you want me to hug you? Do you want to talk to? You want me to listen? So what time would you like to try and then you started and you might get some eye-rolling or whatever and it's okay because they are uncomfortable with something that's new. They're not rejecting you when they roll their eyes. Okay, so here's the science behind eye-rolling. May I?

Laura: Oh my gosh, please do. Okay. Rolling. Oh my gosh.

Deborah: Biology Behind eye-rolling. Your body creates happy hormones with physical movements. So wiggling, dancing, jumping up and down creates happy hormones. also get a set of happy hormones that get created when you smile. So if you smile because you're happy, you feel it like in the middle of your stomach and if you smile, if you do a fake smile like you're not really happy and just make your face do it, your body can't tell the difference. And it's that little surge of happy hormones with a fake smile.

So I remember when I was telling my daughter that I was going to fake smile in the middle of a fight so she wouldn't think I was crazy, I would be yelling and going at each other and I said wait this is not the way I want this to go and I would do a fake smile, I just gritted her and she sit back and look at me. I said go ahead, grin at me, I don't want to, I said just do it. You don't have to mean it just grit your teeth and move your lips to the side and do it and it would interrupt the negativity.

Laura: Sure.

Deborah: But if I had just grinned at her in the middle of a conversation without telling her ahead of time, she would have said daddy, you need to take mom to the funny farm. So anyway, so the whole thing, so with the happy hormones, I started with a smile because that when everybody can practice while they're doing it grinning when it's not really greening is self-soothing.

It's a physical self-soothing when you cast your eyes upward, like you're glancing up at the sky, just do it right now everybody is listening, just look up, you can feel it in your gut that creates a happy hormone release. Also if you quickly expel air like that, it creates a sensation of relief in your stomach. Oh also banging your feet on the ground or thumping or jiggling or whatever also creates those happy hormones. So when you see a child who stomps her foot and exhales hard and rolls their eyes, they are self-soothing. This is not something they're doing to you, this is something that's happening to them.

Laura: Oh my gosh, you're blowing my mind. Like I feel like as I'm listening to you and everybody is listening like there's just like this like reverberation around the world of my parents minds being blown like what a great reframe, the rolling of the eyes. The stopping of the all of these things are Children's wise, eternally wise bodies, attempts to soothe and regulate Oh man that feels good to know.

Deborah: And the slamming of the door is another one, it's just a rough motion that makes a hormone surge in their body and they released afterwards.

Laura: Yeah.

Deborah: But then when they're on the other side of the door, they don't know how to get back to you and every time they slammed the door they're afraid that they have irrevocably ruined your relationship mm So if you've got a door slammer when they slam the door, just go stand outside the door and say I love you. Even if you're angry and steaming and you want to open the door and slam it yourself. Just say it just like doing a fake smile. It creates a change in your body chemistry saying I love you, shift your perspective.

Laura: Okay, so what does it on the other side of the door? Yells back, Well I hate you or no, you don't love me.

Deborah: Looking at this one. If you had a four-year-old who was upset because they hadn't don't eat their carrots, couldn't play with their truck, whatever and they said I hate you. Would you believe them?

Laura: No, never in a million years.

Deborah: that 17 year old behind the door is an extension of that four-year-old. They don't hate you. I told you already they want the same thing. You want, they want the problem and magically go away. They want to be able to sit next to you and feel comfortable. They want to be unconditionally loved and know that they are safe and secure and you will always be there for them.

That's what you want from them. That's what they want from you and they're going to cloud it up with I hate you. Which is code for I have absolutely no idea what to do right now. I am completely stranded in the universe. I have nowhere to turn. I have no solution And for all, I know this feeling may last for the rest of my entire life.

They're just waiting when they slam the door. They are waiting to be rescued. And so that doesn't mean that's not going to make you mad. That doesn't mean that you have to be all of a sudden the saint with your flying colors and you go storming the door and say, I'm here to rescue you. You know, that's not what's going to happen.

Laura: So what do we do then? Okay, So I'm loving the visual of this scenario that you're creating for us because I feel like we've probably all been there at some point with our kids. The door has been slammed. We've gone up and we've said, honey, I love you. No matter what. I love you. And they come back with no you don't or you, I hate you.

Okay. So now there are on the other side of the door. We know we I believe wholeheartedly in what you just said, that they all they want is love and connection and understanding and safety from us and they're lost. They're adrift. They feel like it's going to last forever. You know that these are completely overwhelmed by their emotions. So like, what do we do? What's next?

Deborah: So you say? I love you, no matter what and they say I hate you. You say, well, that makes me feel sad. But I love you no matter what and when you feel better and you want to come talk to me, I will be here for you and then you say I'm going in the kitchen, I'll be there when you feel better, I will be there. I love you. No matter what. When they say something is hurtful, you don't have to hide that that's hurting you, you could say, well that hurts, but I still love you and I know that if you were in a better place, you wouldn't be trying to hurt me right now. So I understand that.

Laura: Yeah, I love that. I think, you know the assuming the best. There are times when kids don't believe the best of themselves, right? And they need someone to hold them in positive regard unconditionally. Like for those times when they can't see the good in themselves, Do you know what I mean? Like, you know, like just someone there who like, we know like they're always going to think good things of us, like kids need that confidence. You know even.

Deborah: A lot of kids get that from their grandparents, right?

Laura: Oh yeah.

Deborah: grandparents don't discipline them. Their grandparents love them unconditionally, grandparents aren't raising them right there just there for the hug.

Laura: Yeah, there's so much, I think grandparent and child relationships can be very much less complicated than parent and child relationships. For sure. Yeah. Ok, so I'm wondering about if we can talk a little bit just for a moment about I know one of the primary developmental tasks of the teenage years of adolescence is learning how to separate.

Well to fully step into an adult identity to and figure out how to have the like this ultimate of autonomy and related this, that's what attachment theory is about. You know, How do we stay connected and still stay ourselves and teenagers are definitely grappling with that, right? What role do we as parents have to play in that part of the staying connected while still allowing for autonomy and independence? Do you know what I mean?

Deborah: Yeah. That unfortunately is a question that depends on the child. They are all developing at different rates. Again, here's the science part. The brain develops from the back to the front. It's like the cosmic joke that the frontal cortex, which is your logic and reasoning is the last thing to develop.

Laura: Yeah. Not until your twenties, Right?

Deborah: I know, not to your late twenties, like post-college, beginning job. Yeah. No.

Laura: it's terrifying.

Deborah: I know, trust me. I know. So for the Children who are trying to become autonomous, I would say, I mean all Children are trying to become autonomous, but for the parents who are in that situation, I want you to recognize that that stuff starts early. When my daughter turned nine, right after she blew out the candles on her cake. She said, Mom, now that I'm almost a teenager, I said, Whoa you're not almost a teenager.

I will tell you when you're almost a teenager because she's thinking like I'm one year away from 10, that's double digits. That's right. So she was ready for it way back then and I certainly wasn't. So one of the things is you have to pick and choose where they can be autonomous and where they cannot, here's where they cannot be autonomous.

And this these are what I call the non-negotiables, their safety, They cannot be responsible for their safety. You have to be responsible. And that comes from everything between when they can use a sharp knife to when they can drive a car and when they can drive a car, they turn 16. It's when they are ready to drive the car and yes, cell phones, ipads, all those electronic devices that leave them on them because it's exhausting to try to monitor that.

Laura: But I love that you're situating that we have full responsibility for their safety even when they're teenagers.

Deborah: That's right. I'll give you an example back in the day when my daughter was younger, there was I am in a meme. Right, okay. So she wanted to go on that and I had been at all these conferences and stuff because I was a teacher about the pitfalls of it and how it's distracting. So she and I sat down and had this discussion and she said, well, yeah, I know some of my friends are having a hard time doing their homework because they're so distracted by this. But mom, I already know this, so I can keep an eye on it and watch it. I said, okay, so we put it on the computer and in about a week I could see a change in her grades.

So we sat down and talked about it and she goes, you're right. I was not paying attention. I'm going to do better this time. The same thing happened in another week and I said, this isn't working. I'm going to take it off the computer. She goes, all right, I see it. Okay. A week later. I don't know what made me, but I checked the computer and had secretly been put back on there. So I just secretly took it off again and then a week later was secretly back on there and she secretly took it off again.

The funny thing was when she was about 25, I was sharing that with her and she went, I never knew you were taking it off. I thought it was just something that was I hadn't put it on there. Right? So I didn't leave it to her. I want to explore the possibility. But I didn't leave it to her because why was my daughter going to be the only child that wasn't going to become addicted to internet stuff? No, that's not happening. It's like why is my child company? The only one who's going to drink alcohol and not have a problem with it.

Laura: So the analogy that always comes to mind when I talk about this is it's like going bowling but with bumpers like the bumpers and the lame, you know, like we can't just send a toddler to go bowling and imagine that they're going to get a strike, they need bumpers. We can't think that we're going to send a, You know, a 16-year-old out to her, you know, a big hang out with her friends and not put some bumpers on there to keep them safe, you know, to help them make a decision, they need the bumpers.

Deborah: So the non-negotiables are safety, their health, and nutrition, that's non-negotiable, you are in charge of that, not them. And then the 3rd thing is school, you are in charge of that, not them. They don't get to make decisions about whether they're going to do their homework and not do their homework, that's your job. Now if they're struggling because of the flip-flopping of what's going on in the school systems and stuff and you're going to ease that for them so you can make this a more positive situation, that's still your decision. You know, their decision, right?

Laura: I think that, you know, partnering with them on those things too. So if they're struggles figuring out what are the struggles where ,where is it hard or you know, even just, you know, I, you know, growing up in, my parents were both teachers and my dad was a teacher in the school system I was in a science teacher. The advanced placement. Yeah, and I mean and so there are still times where I reflect back on and think about like I did not have choice in my classes I was taking, I was in three science classes with my dad a day and had no time for art that I really wanted to take and I still like I still think about that.

So I think that there is room for agency within our like, you know, for our kids, like really partnering with them, figuring out what it is that they want, why they want it this way, what you know, what is it that's important to them, What are they seeking and wanting these things that they're pushing us for and equipping them to make good well-rounded decisions, you know, as opposed to imposing what we think they should be doing, what we think is right for them, you know, and that all builds connection with them to that builds that Heard understood scene and valued piece of it, that's so important. Right?

Deborah: I 100% agree with you. All I'm saying is you're the person in charge.

Laura: Yeah, of course.

Deborah: Now the negotiable stuff, what color the room is going to be, what clothes they're going to wear within a certain parameter, you know, then you use the Venn diagram, this Venn diagram is like two circles, right?

Laura: Love a good Venn diagram.

Laura: So I use this with my daughter right When she was little , little, she always wanted to wear an outfit with her belly showing and me as a high school teacher is thinking, okay, the writing is on the wall here. So I needed to have a way where we went bang heads when we went shopping for clothes for school, you know? So I said and make a circle with one finger in one hand and say this is all the stuff that you love. And I'd say this is on the other hand, the other circle of the, this is all the stuff I love.

And then I'd overlap them and they say this is all the stuff that we both love and that's what's coming home with us. So we'd go shopping and there would be rules, right? The one rule was that I had to let her try on anything she wanted to try on. And the second rule was that she had to try on everything. I asked her to try on and then the third rule was that there would be no fighting because whatever came home with us, we would both love and that saved us so many headaches because I had a totally different view of what she should wear to school than she did. But she loved everything she brought home.

Laura: So that's interesting. That's a good idea. Yeah. I still don't think schools should be policing girls’ clothing and bodies, but that's probably.

Deborah: I understand what you're saying, but I looked at, I've been in, I've taught in inner-city, I've taught in rural, I've taught in rich communities, I've taught in Atlanta, I've taught in Hartford, I've taught in such a wide variety of environments. In the schools where I taught were the kids wore uniforms, Like Hartford Public schools wear uniforms. I love the uniforms because instead of trying to make the clothing on their body represent who they were, the child had to represent who they were to be through their personality and their actions and their statements, it was like clothing was now taken out of the mix and their personalities could shine through.

Laura: I love it too. I know, and uniforms can be great equalizers too and you know, in terms of access to close and labels and uh you know, yes, I am all for uniforms. Okay, well, I feel like this has been a really good conversation, I really appreciate these things and you know, I think that for everybody who's listening, who is, does not have teen kids does not have that gap. The things that we've been talking about set you up to not have that come up.

I think that there's this big myth, this misunderstanding that the teenage years have to be tumultuous that they have to be filled with discord that they have to be filled with slamming doors and I'm not sure that that's true, you know, that they, you know, I think it's actually a very American concept. Other places in the world don't have as much of that narrative. I think they're getting it more now that media is expanding. You know that Western media is expanding. But yeah, I don't know any other like little tips to kind of yes. Factor to improve our relationships.

Deborah: Yes. The main thing is that you have to take care of you, mm If you take care of you, your kids will follow suit. If you are content, they'll know it and I don't know how much time we have left, but I just want to tell this little story when my daughter was 2.5. I know I'm positive about this age because of where I was driving her at this story, we go to the daycare and we went over a bridge that went over a train track and the hill on the side of the bridge had a tree on it that was situated in such a way that the crown of the tree was right even with where the cars were.

And one day we were at a stoplight right there next to that tree and there was this huge hawk right there Like 10 ft outside of the car window. And me like the science person, like I was also excited and I said Rebecca, look, look see the hawk. And so the next day when he went over the bridge, I said to Rebecca, look, Rebecca, see that tree, that's where the hawk was yesterday. And the day after that when he went over, I said, see the hawk was there the day after that we went over and I said, see the hawk was there. Rebecca says, are you going to say that every day? I said, you know, she's in the back seat, I'm in the front seat.

She can't see my set face. I said, fine, I won't say it anymore. She says to me from the back seat of the car, mommy, you can say it as many times as you want. If my daughter at 2 and a half, intuitively understood, I needed a little comfort, right then, then trust me, your Children know what's going on with you emotionally. You can't fake it. If you don't take care of yourself and feel good about yourself, they will know it on some intuitive level. So you have to walk the walk and talk to talk. And I would start by writing a sticky note and putting it on your bathroom mirror and on the refrigerator.

And every time you see it, you say it and it says I deeply and completely love and appreciate myself when I first started doing that. It was really hard for me to say that. But if you put it up there, your kids will see it and they'll see that. That's what you're aiming for because it's ok if you're not the perfect paragon of a mother right? This moment or a father, because you can say to your kids, well, I'm on a journey,

Laura: Yeah.

Deborah: and they can understand that, and when you show them ways that you're improving yourself, they'll say, oh, so we're supposed to be improving ourselves, I'm down with that.

Laura: Yeah, I love that. I think that's so important. I think self-compassion and self-kindness is just one of the very best things you can offer to yourself as a parent and offer as a model for your kids. Thank you.

Deborah: Coz you deserve it.

Laura: You deserve it. Yes, of course, you because you're human, just like everybody else on this beautiful planet, Right?

Deborah: Yes, exactly.

Laura: Well, Deborah, thank you so much for being here with us. I'll have all the links of people can go and find your books in the show notes. I really appreciate the conversation that you've had with us today.

Deborah: Thank you. I enjoyed this thoroughly. You're lovely.

Laura: oh, thanks, I'm so glad that you're here. All right. I think that's it. It was really nice to chat with you.

Deborah: Thank you very much.

Okay, so thanks for listening today. Remember to subscribe to the podcast and if it was helpful, leave me a review that really helps others find the podcast and join us in this really important work of creating a parenthood that we don't have to escape from and creating a childhood for our kids that they don't have to recover from.

September 07, 2021

Episode 75: Embracing An Abundance Mindset With Ilana Beigel

September 07, 2021/ Laura Froyen

As parents, most of us share the same goal: to provide them the unconditional love & support that we missed (sometimes) growing up. As I transitioned into motherhood I wanted so badly for my daughter to know how deeply she was loved, that I was there for her, that I was sensitively attuned to her needs and would be there to meet them. But in the process, I, like so many of you, found that I was really struggling. In my effort to be everything to my daughter, I had abandoned myself.

Things really came to a head after the birth of my second child. I started to feel there was not enough time for me, the woman I was, anymore. I had so many pulls on my time and attention. There just wasn't ENOUGH of me to go around AND I worried I wasn't ever going to be ENOUGH for my children. I was stuck in scarcity. It was around this time in my life where I started my business (yes, this podcast is part of a business dedicated to supporting both your family & mine! 💕), and I was learning about money mindset and "abundance" mindsets. And I just knew that what I was learning applied to my life as a parent: That I was stuck in scarcity and if I wanted more joy, presence, & connection, that I needed to shift into abundance. That was 6 years ago, and at the time it felt like NOBODY in the parenting world was talking about abundance mindset as it applies to parenthood (at least that I could find).

So I wrote this article: https://www.laurafroyen.com/blog/scarcity and started applying the principles in it.

I wanted to share this powerful mindset shift with you, so I sat down with my friend and colleague Ilana Beigel, who will help us understand how we can embrace an abundance mindset as a parent. And that, there's plenty of time for our children to learn and be resilient. She is a mom of three, a yoga teacher, a speech pathologist, and a mindful parenting coach. Ilana helps moms integrate mindfulness practices into their lives so that they can create effective communication and ultimately peace and fulfillment in their hearts and homes.

Here is a summary of our conversation:

Scarcity and how this can negatively affect parenting
Abundance mindset and how to apply this in parenting
Mindset shifts (Transitioning from scarcity to abundance mindset)
Scarcity vs abundance mindset in children

If you are a part of my monthly membership, BalancingU, Ilana did a deep dive training on Abundance for us! You can access the replay of that in the course platform. If you are NOT part of the membership but would like to be, CLICK HERE to check it out!

You can find Ilana on Instagram @ilanabeigel, Facebook, and at www.ilanab.com.

And if you too have ever felt overwhelmed and LOST in motherhood, I also want to invite you to join me in a couple of weeks at “Return To You: A Virtual Summit For Moms”.

This event is all about guiding unmoored moms in nurturing their body, mind, relationship, and home during the hectic early years of mothering. For 2 fun-filled weeks starting Monday, September 20, 20+ experts in women’s health, parenting, relationships, and motherhood, will offer you their wisdom, experience, and practical steps to help you start finding yourself again. It’s going to be great and I hope you can join me and the other amazing panelists for this life-changing summit!

I personally will be teaching about Parenting as a Team on September 23rd. As you know, I firmly believe all parents deserve access to parenting support that they can afford, and this is a great chance to learn from me for free. You can sign up via the link below!
>>Grab a FREE Ticket here>>

Ilana is a mom of three, a yoga teacher, a speech pathologist, and a mindful parenting coach if that wasn't you know already enough and she helps moms integrate mindfulness practices into their lives so that their patience, presence, and connection or deep and meaningful relationships, rich and effective communication and ultimately more peace harmony filled in their hearts and homes. Ilana, welcome to the Balanced Parent, I'm so happy to have you here. Will you tell us a little bit more about what you do and who you are and all the awesome things that you do?

Ilana: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I'm so glad to have connected with you and found you and be in your orbit and bring this inquiry together along with so many others.

Laura: Oh same. I feel so deeply aligned with what you're doing and that you hold for parents and the support that you offer them. So yeah, tell us a little bit more about how what you do.

Ilana: So I do lots of things that I have an abundance of things that I do, but I am a mom, I'm also a wife and a daughter, I'm a sister, I'm a cousin, I'm a friend all these roles, right. And I work as a mindful parenting coach which is really my purpose. My passion took me many, many years to sort of figure out “what I want to do when I grow up” which is a whole conversation and something that I, that question haunted me for years and years and years, which is probably why it's something that I'm really passionate about not asking my children.

So I do my entrepreneurial venture, my passion of the mindful parenting work and I also work as a speech pathologist in a rehab hospital with People who've had strokes or strokes or brain injury or some sort of neurological condition. And that work is often people whose lives have just like boom been turned upside down its adult, so it's 18 and up, no matter what age, I found people have something happened, whether they're 20 and it's a tragic car accident or there 99 and have lived a full and long life and now they're declining.

Being able to be part of someone's experience of moving life, whatever it is that showing up for them and helping them navigate it and still see the joy and the wonder and the amazing this through all the misery a lot of times, literally through the suffering. I just love connecting with people and being in this inquiry of living the joy and the terror in the hospital.

A lot of times it looks like helping parents navigate their lives and I love what you say, Laura, it's in your podcast intro, maybe having a parenthood we don't need to escape from and offering our kids a childhood, they won't need to recover from. I love that and knowing that obviously like that's our hope, right, kids, our kids won't have to recover, but also giving them and equipping them with the knowledge and the tools that healing, growing learning, evolving is available at any time. So it's not about being perfect or like getting it right because that is way too much pressure on us as parents because it's not possible.

Laura: Absolutely, you know, it's I've been thinking a little bit about changing that intro and playing with it a little bit in my writing right now because I do feel the need to help parents release the idea that they can parent perfectly so that their kids have no work to do, right? Because all people have work to do, that's part of being human.

I mean, and that's part of what mindfulness teaches, right? So we're mindful in the moment recognizing that just like you know, this is the common humanity principle of self-compassion-based mindfulness that just like everybody else we suffer. That suffering is a part of the human experience. There's nothing that we can really do to prevent that from happening for our kids, but we can certainly do our best to clearly communicate how we feel about them and not do any more damage than our unconscious moves might cause you know.

Ilana: Yes, totally. So I mean that intention, that stepping into that, that intention, it is so powerful and with like you said with that underpinning that sort of blanket foundation of and it's not going to be perfect, I'm doing the best I can, I'm perfect right now and there's always a new perfection to evolve in to.

Laura: and it can't be and nor should it be because you know if we are frantically attempting to be perfect with our kids were not being authentically ourselves because humans by definition are imperfect beings and kids need to see imperfections, they need to experience mistakes and ruptures and repair like that's how resilience is built is through struggles that are that we can handle not too big, but certainly little stressors are good for kids, you know, repair rupture, it all builds resilience.

So we're talking a lot about mindset right now and a lot of respectful conscious, mindful parenting is about mindset, it's not so much about what you say and do about the mind state you are in as you say it as you choose your words as you are interacting and communicating with your kids. Okay, so yes, we've heard of an abundance mindset, we've learned about it in business settings or in discussing financial, health or wealth, I'm hoping we can talk about how the abundance mindset cannot be applied much more broadly to.

Ilana: Yeah, for sure, abundance can be talking about wealth and money but that is just one tiny piece of what abundance looks like stepping into abundance of feeling abundant in your life because we know there's so many people who have very little material possessions or money or stuff and feel like the richest people in the world and vice versa, there's tons of people out there who have everything and they're miserable, so it is not a correlation or causation like really just two separate things.

Laura: So tell us what is having an abundance mindset in the way you live your life or specifically in parenting.

Ilana: I think having an abundance mindset is being open of not getting stuck in any idea or fear or stage if you haven't yet learned in parenting. One of the main things I've learned is that as soon as something feels good or feels right or feels bad, it's going to change right? Like change is the only constant. So not getting stuff of being open to infinite possibilities of just this idea and notion that anything is possible.

Laura: Anything is possible.

Ilana: Let me take that back. It's not necessarily anything is possible, but there are infinite possibilities.

Laura: Yeah, I really like that restatement that there are infinite possibilities. Tell me I'm a little bit about the relationship between scarcity and abundance. I would say they're like just opposites like boom, one is the opposite of the other. When you're in this scarcity of like, oh there's never going to be enough. There's not enough time. Don't have enough patience.

I don't have enough money. My kid doesn't have enough knowledge or don't have enough learning this or mastering this and this kid knows this or this family has that or they went to this vacation or they go to this school, like not enough, not enough is scarcity which is just the complete opposite and what I think is really interesting is this comes from yoga philosophy as well is drifting it down and just mindfulness in general of it was real and true or the scarcity mindset is also really tied and I found two anxiety.

I don't know which one comes first or if you can really separate the two, but when that scarcity mindset, when that anxiety comes up of being able to step back and look well what is real and true, like do I actually have the resources I need. And if so okay, put that scarcity aside and how can I step into seeing it and knowing it and feeling that abundance and if not if you look at it and you're like oh I actually don't have the support the time, the resources, whatever it is like okay, well then what can I actually do about it? So instead of getting in this rabbit hole in this spiral in your head, which can take you nowhere good. It's like okay, do I need to do something about this or do I need to step into seeing what is actually real and true and that I have everything I need right now.

Laura: And then the practical piece of if I don't then what are the steps I can do to meet my needs? Right? I think that this is something that is highlighting a piece that I think that abundance mindsets can often be misunderstood in as falling in kind of like the toxic positivity camp where we are supposed to think like everything's fine, everything's going to be wonderful.

Like not see are suffering not cr pay not see our struggles and that's not what abundance is at all to me that you know there's being stuck down in our lack you know, so when I think of scarcity I think of the word lack lack of time, lack of patients, lack of energy, abundance is taking a look at you know I had this all within me. Yes, things are hard right now and at the same time I have resources at my disposal there are options for me available here.

Ilana: Yeah, I agree completely. And it makes me think of a couple of things which one is we're not talking like woo la attraction vision boards although sure that can be part of it, but that's just part of it, right? And there's this saying that hope is not a strategy, you don't hope for dinner, you make dinner and there is such a place for hope, it's just a piece of the puzzle.

One of the definitions of yoga that I love is that yoga is a practice of discernment. So it's this discerning right back. Do I have what I need or is there something actionable I have to do but also discerning like okay is my mindset helping me or getting in the way and not just going into like oh I just need to change my mindset and everything's going to fall into place because no, that's not it either.

Laura: Yeah, this is not a thing that we use to discount other people's suffering to either. You know, there are real struggles in this world and I think sometimes that kind of the, you know, only good vibes kind of toxic positivity movement does discount some of the very real challenges that parents or face regularly and are facing in abundance right now, you know?.

I think you did a really nice job of it kind of giving examples about how like what scarcity sounds like in your mindset with parents. We've all had thoughts like this. Like I don't have the energy for this. I can't handle this. She's never going to learn how to do this. It's really easy for me to come up with examples of scarcity that we say in our self talk with ourselves, that we say out loud to our kids, but I think it's a little harder to come up with like, okay, so what does an abundance mindset sound like when you're engaged in that self talk? Do you have examples for us?

Ilana: First come to mind, before we talking about examples of how we can do this with our kids, We have to first buy into it and live into it in ourselves.

Laura: Yeah, absolutely. That's totally meaning like what does it sound like in our minds as we are talking to ourselves. It's so easy I think to come up with the scarcity. We're so used to being in scarcity as parents, as mothers, you know, there's no one here to help me, I have to do it all myself, you know, there's not enough time, I'm never going to sleep again, whatever it is, you know, it's so easy for me to come up with what scarcity sounds like and I want to give people what does it sound like in your mind when you're in abundance?

Ilana: There's something that comes to mind first and foremost, because you've said it a few times and it was a really powerful shift for me and I've seen it be a really powerful shift for a lot of families I work with is the idea of time and the concept of Einsteinian time versus Newtonian time, Einstein and the theory of relativity, right?

So it's this idea with time of that an hour with a loved one can feel like a minute, whereas a minute of your hand pressed on a hot stove will feel like a lifetime, right? So it's like, right? Time, time is such a thing, especially for parents, especially for parents of young kids, especially for parents now when we're living in this crazy, wild wacky time of like everything has just been turned upside down.

Laura: There's a quote that I think perfectly captures that experience for parents that the days are long, but the years are short, you know.

Ilana: exactly, I love that one. That's definitely been one that's been on my mind for my oldest is almost 18 for 18 years. But in this idea of Einsteinian versus Newtonian time, it's the concept that you are, where time comes from, you are the source of time. And this concept is from a book called The Big Leap, which is a really, really interesting read.

The author is a parent and talks a lot about his parenting in it and I think, I think a lot of times in some of this, back to what you were saying about this toxic positivity and stuff like, and even in this, all this philosophy stuff that I've studied, it's like, okay, well this was thousands of years ago when this was for 13-year-old boys who are monks and renouncing the world, how do all these concepts translate to 2021 householders living in the real world, needing to raise a family and work and send your kids to college and buy groceries and you know, all the things starting with time, it's this idea that you are the source of time.

Like if you think about it, I love to give this example, if you're working right and you now, especially this makes so much more sense your kids home, you're on your computer doing your work and your kid comes in and says, hey mom, we play with me, How many times might you say? I don't have time right now. Is that something that you've ever hear about? You do all this all your work about play like is that something that parents.

Laura: Of course and immediately they are wracked with guilt when they say it and at the same time they have to because it's a lot right now.

Ilana: And so let's rewind that still you're doing your work. Your kid comes in, they've decided to like cut themselves a snack and be resourceful and take out the chef's knife and it's their apple and they slice their finger open and it's bleeding and they come into you mom. I cut my finger help. Are you going to say, oh, that's great honey, Sorry, I don't have time right now. Of course not. Right. It's not time.

That's the issue. I mean it is and it isn't but it's these little subtle shifts of saying, I don't have time puts you in the seat of victim of time of seat a victim of your life. So stepping into ownership of saying what you really mean, which is I really want to play with you right now and I'm going to finish this and I'll play with you at X time, which I know is something that I've seen in your work. You're already doing that like sort of another may be added layer of what that offers, which is this taking ownership of being the source of time.

Laura: I love this taking ownership of being the source of time. Yes. I think when we first started talking about this so many parents listening, we're probably thinking like, but yeah, also virtual school has to happen or it has to happen. Dinner has to get made. You know that we do feel like we are the victims of time. And so I really like this reframe that time is not the problem. It's the way we relate to time and we have to take ownership of time.

Ilana: Yes. And it's always yes. And because there are boots on the ground like real things that are real and true, there is X number of hours in a day, there is X number of hours before I have to make this work call or do this meeting again. So not to like bypass or this toxic positivity, right?

Laura: That's the balance, right? So toxic positivity as a completely unbalanced look at the realities of life. You're advocating absolutely for a realistic, balanced approach to this, recognizing that there are constraints and barriers and at the same time we get to choose how we respond to them.

Ilana: Exactly.

Laura: Absolutely. Oh, I love this. I wasn't expecting to get to talk about time in this philosophical sense that that was really fun. Okay, that was really helpful to see how an abundance mindset around time can act in like be acted out in practice with our kids that moment of Yes, honey, I want to play with you. It's gonna be so much fun. We're gonna have a lot of time to play and right now I have to finish this email in five minutes, I'll be ready to play with you. You know, it's like that's what it looks like versus I don't have time to play with you. That scarcity.

Ilana: Yeah. And even yeah. And even just noticing like as you go through your day, how many times do you think does the thoughts go through your head and I don't have time or you know, just, it's interesting to notice how many times and how much you're putting yourself in a scarcity mindset, what you're saying it out loud or not.

Laura: Not just time. Right? So we're talking about like it can be anything like I don't have energy for that or I can't do that. I, you know, I don't have the ability to do that. I'm just not a patient person, you know, all of these limiting beliefs that are rooted in scarcity. So when we think about changing our mindset from scarcity to abundance, the first step of course is always noticing, right? That's the first step in any awareness, awareness is the very first step of any change process.

So it's just awareness. You know, when I was making some very concerted changes to moving towards abundance, I kept a journal where I wrote my common scarcity phrases that I would say to myself down. Do you have other things that you suggest parents do as they are looking to move into a more abundance mindset as they're in the phase of noticing or maybe they've been noticing for a while and now they're ready to make some shifts like, what do we do?

Ilana: I found that just affirmations or mantra czar so incredibly powerful, noticing, what are you telling yourself that you're like, oh I this isn't how I want to be talking to myself for showing up. What can you replace that with?

Laura: I think affirmations are so intimidating to parents to figure out, like, okay, what do I say in my affirmations, can we talk about that? Just for a second. I don't know if you have a method for teaching parents how to write their own affirmations, but I do.

I would be curious to know if you do, you know if we're two different people who help parents find affirmations for themselves, like we probably have different methods for getting the parents there because I don't ever want people to be reliant on me for to be the source. I want them to be the source of what they need in their parenting. I'm kind of assuming that you also want that for your parents?

Ilana: Yes, for sure.

Laura: Okay, how do parents go around about writing their affirmations.

Ilana: Sort of two-pronged approach. Some people are just give it to me, tell me what is it and that works really well for them. So there are some one sort of out there that are, people can just try on like you don't need to do it yourself. Like here it is. Use this. So a simple one is I am enough or it is enough for I am okay, It can be just super, super simple

Laura: always like to add just as I am.

Ilana: One that I eyes a lot and that a lot of people who have offered it to have really powerful as well and this comes from the work of a woman called rock goddess, Rh a goddess, which is just the best name. I am a content creator and I have the ability to create the life I most desire.

I find myself like sometimes when I'm at my job or doing something where I get I just noticed just that feeling of just heaviness and like, I don't want to be doing this or whatever it might be, I just say that in my head and it's just this immediate like, oh right, I'm in charge here, I'm driving the bus. I am a conscious creator. I have the ability to create the life I most desire and it's just this immediate like openness.

Laura: I think that that's a good, you just mentioned something to that. Like you can, as you're looking for affirmations, you want ones that make you feel open that our heart opening. So like if what you read one, you know, if you're looking, you know, like maybe you Pinterest and you searched on Pinterest for affirmations and you read something, they make you contract.

Those aren't your affirmations. You know, like they kind of like most hurt to say those aren't yours, You've got to find other ones. And this is one of the reasons why I like helping parents write their own because then they find the ones naturally are opening. One thing that I find is helpful for parents, especially as they're just starting out with affirmations that lots of the big ones, you know, like the popular ones that kind of like reach for the star ones don't feel real or realistic. And so sometimes folks need to start a little closer to home, a little closer to where they are. I'm figuring this out is a great one. Can be really lovely kind of middle-of-the-road ones.

Ilana: It's just making me think of what I love to do for affirmations is to ask people to and often do this Like in my yoga class as well. Like how do you want to feel if you've ever taken a yoga class? That's often the start of a classes and intention, right?

Whether it's peace or pins or calm or strength. So in the affirmation markets like, okay, think about how do you want to feel, What is it that you are to, what qualities are you hoping to cultivate in your life and your day and your parenting and then the affirmation is simply like I am that like you say it if we're already true.

Yeah just like I am piece.

Laura: Yeah.

Ilana: I am calm whatever quality is at the forefront.

Laura: Yeah. And sometimes it can also be helpful to just to riff off that a little bit too if you know you want to respond a certain way to your child for example like when they're having a meltdown and right now you're thinking things like they're too old for this. They shouldn't be doing this. This is you know, why does everything have to be so hard?

You know you're having those thoughts and as a result you are impatient with them. You're not as empathetic or compassionate with them. You may be yell at them. I want to send them to their room in that moment when they're having a meltdown. How do you want to be able to respond? You want to be able to respond with compassion.

You want to hold space for them. What thought do you need to be thinking about the scenario in order to be able to be compassionate? Right? And so that kind of walking backwards from how you want to feel, how you want to show up and then okay what thought do I need to be able to show up? That way can be really helpful.

So like the thought in that moment would be like that. You know she's not doing this on purpose. It's because she's five. She is not giving me a hard time, She's having a hard time those thoughts, you know, lend you two more compassion and allow you to be more compassionate. So walking backwards, I think in that way it can be helpful to when we're talking about how do we come up with the things to say to ourselves, you know?

Ilana: And I think one definition perhaps or one way of embodying and really embracing and living into abundance in this idea of living in alignment of aligning your thoughts, your feelings, your words, and your actions right, which is exactly what you were just talking about. So when you're doing that, when all of that is altogether, like when you think and feel and say and do the things that all how you want to be showing up, like you will feel abundant, you will feel that openness and expansiveness and that connection with life and with your Children and with anyone you're in relationship with really I love that way of breaking it down and walking it backwards.

And I also think in terms of affirmations like helping people connect with what are your limiting beliefs, right? And that's another powerful way I found a writing your own affirmation and retraining your brain to be more of an abundant mindset and get not get stuck in your limitations is like to see to start like you said start with awareness, what is it? So really putting it out there. Like my limiting belief is I'm not patient enough.

And then step two is like realizing that's not a truth, that's just a belief. And then the third step is trying a different beliefs just flip it right? So that's a really good way for people to come up with their own is to see what's getting in my way. Okay, no, that's not true, what could be true. And I don't know if you like sort of similar to the work of Byron Katie, that whole concept,

Laura: Byron Katie has her process is called The Work and she has a great book called Loving. What is like there's four steps in it, Is that true? Is it really true? Let's see.

Ilana: Could be true.

Laura: Right? Yeah, I think it's like something like when I believe this, how does it impact me? You know, and how does it change the results? And then who would I be without that thought? I think are her four steps in the work? She's got a great podcast called The work. Two people are looking for more podcasts to listen to ultimately, like it's all the same thing that what we're talking about here. You know, it's all different approaches to the same thing of noticing our thoughts, noticing our beliefs, questioning them with curiosity and without judgement. And then considering alternatives.

And one of the ways that I like to consider alternatives to a lot of the parents that I work with are working on cultivating a wise compassionate in her parent. And so that wise compassionate in our part of you usually has good responses to these things. So like if you your thought is I'm just not a patient mom you can check in with. Okay, so what would the wisest most compassionate part of myself say to that. And usually, even if the person themselves isn't able to say something wise and compassionate back to this thought of I'm not a good mom or I'm not a patient mom. Usually, they can find that wise part who does have something to say about that.

You know who is able to say you know that you are just the mom that your kids need and that you know that patience is something that you're working on and every day you get better you know usually we can find some that compassionate part even if we can't fully embody them ourselves yet when it comes to I don't know talking to ourselves that can be hard.

Ilana: Yeah, it reminds me back a little bit to the abundance. Think quote by Wayne Dyer who is an author of self self help guru or whatever you want to call him but he says abundance is not something we acquire, it's something we tune into. So what are you tuning into and I don't know if you've seen this research we have up to like 60,000 thoughts a day and 80% of them are negative in 95% of them are the same ones we had yesterday.

It's fascinating. You are in charge of where you put your focus in and where you put your energy and what you find right? Like if you want to find more examples and reasons why you're not a patient or good enough mom, you can find that and if you want to find all the reasons and examples and ways of which you are, you can also find that too.

Laura: Yeah, I mean, you know like negativity bias and the way that our brains, our brains are beautiful things, right? So our brains are efficient. These 60,000 thoughts a day are mostly unconscious thoughts, right? We're only aware of about 2000 thoughts a day. And so all these other thoughts are kind of primarily negative and running in the background and influencing the way we view our world, right?

So just as a general example, you know, when we were looking for a car a few years ago we were buying our first minivan which was life-changing and so exciting because automatic doors, who knew that would be like, but we were deciding between Toyota one and the Honda Odyssey one, you know, and all of a sudden I couldn't drive anywhere without seeing those too many bands. They were everywhere.

I would never have noticed them before, but once I started looking for them there, they were right And this is the same thing in our homes, in our lives as parents, as soon as we start looking for something, we see it, we find it if we're looking for negative interactions with our partner, if we're looking for the siblings, you know, the kids never picking up their toys. If we're looking for moments of jealousy between our kids, that's what we'll find. And we filter out our beautiful, efficient brains, filter out the stuff that we're not looking for. They filter out that moment of generosity that we notice we saw but we didn't attend to because we were looking for jealousy.

Ilana: 100% totally, totally agree. And it makes me think of this Oprah quote, you said, if you look at what you have in life, you'll always have more. If you look at what you don't have in life, you'll never have enough.

Laura: Oh my gosh, That's like the core of abundance. Right?

Ilana: Yeah, exactly.

Laura: Okay, so I've taken up a lot of your time, but I just want to ask one more little question because I see. So we've talked a lot about abundance in parenting in our own mindset, but I see scarcity and abundance come up in my kids a lot as an example. We've worked really hard to develop an abundance mindset with food and so when it comes to food with my kids, they notice when a scarcity thought is creeping in.

I mean, we haven't been over it with them, but they notice and they will say things like you know, I feel a little bit worried that I didn't get enough chocolate to eat today, but I know there's always chocolate and if we want more we could have more tomorrow. You know, I hear them talking about it in an abundant way, you know, there's always more, there's always more ice cream at the store if we run out right now, you know, if we every and I finished the last of it right now, you can always go and get more, you know.

Versus the scarcity of like you know, we're almost out. I'm only gonna have a little bit because I want to save it for later, you know like that comes food is just the example that's present in my mind, but I'm curious if we are noticing some scarcity and our kids were noticing, you know, scarcity in the way that they're sharing their toys. If we're noticing scarcity in the way that they are approaching things like screen time, how can we bring abundance to those things?

Ilana: I think that's what we were saying in ourselves, I think starting with the awareness like helping them just see, first of all, that's how they're feeling and then like is it real and true sometimes it is like especially if you're setting a limit or boundary this is only how much chocolate you can have or this is how much time you can have.

Laura: You were saying something about that they really have control over themselves but they really don't have a lot of control over their lives. Is that right?

Ilana: Yeah. I think with our kids it starts with them noticing that they're feeling that way and I think it's natural and normal that they do feel because in a lot of ways yes, they have control and agency over their lives and their experience and what they can do and their body and as children.

They are in a place of being sort of at the mercy of what we will buy them, what we will allow them to do, what boundaries were setting for them, helping them see that there is freedom within the boundaries can be a really powerful shift like if you say to your kids so don't step in the street, what are they going to do? Step in the street if you say so you can walk on the sidewalk or the grass or the park over here, that's where their energy or their attention is going to go. So helping them sort of see that freedom and all that is there instead of no, you can't do this. No, you can't have that, you can't have this, you can do this.

Laura: You know, so that's like standard parenting advice now tell a kid what they can do instead of what they can't do and I had never situated that in a scarcity versus an abundance mindset beautifully stated. Thank you for helping me see that connection there and. I think to like there's room for abundance when we are helping a kid work through a boundary or a limit that we have. They don't like to like the, I mean and this is, this comes up in parenting wisdom to like that, you know that we can give a child in fantasy what they can't have in reality.

So you know, if they want to have more screen time and we've noticed that they do better with less being able to stay with it with them, I know you wish you could play all day. You know that you would play all these games, what games would you play? You know how like how many hours do you think you play? You play all day long and you play meet with your friends online and hide, sit next to you all day long and we'd play, you know, you can give some of that in fantasy and then talk about when they're going to get a chance to play next.

We're going to play at this time and then what are we going to do and focusing on what they do get to do and when they get to do it. Making a plan for, when they get to do it can all be helpful not as a way to tell them not to have their feelings of course they're allowed to be disappointed or frustrated but as a way to frame it when maybe they are ready for it? And it's hard to know. I think sometimes for kids, you know when they're ready to receive the the shift, the mindset shift, you know.

Ilana: And I think just giving kids the opportunity to do less less is more so bring on the opportunities to have literal silence to be out in nature to look up at the sky or the stars or watch all the snowflakes coming down and just being like the wonder and I know you just put it post about this recently as well.

But really just those moments of wonder and curiosity and just like wow, how amazing is this and just expanding their view, their horizon, their awareness from things. Yes, all that, there isn't all that they don't have but even all that they do have like it's not that you have this toy, this book, this whatever just like nature. This connection with nature is a really powerful way to instill a sense of abundance and wonder and curiosity.

Laura: Yes, I so agree. Well Ilana, thank you so much for coming in talking about this with me. I feel like we talked about you know we were going to talk about abundance and we talked about so much and he really helped me broaden my understanding of abundance mindset.

So I really appreciate that so much and I'm sure our listeners do too. I'm guessing that they are going to be very curious about where they can find you and learn more from you so where are you these days work and then they find you and connect with you.

Ilana: Yeah, these days I am kind of hanging out on Instagram in terms of the social stuff because that's where I feel abundant and it feels like, oh I like this, this is a fun platform to be on um and most of some others that feel like stuck in my life, so on Instagram just, it's just my name along the bible and my website is IlanaB.com.

I teach yoga classes, I do one on one coaching, I have a group program that I'm gonna be holding again this spring and I have in terms of communication and an abundance and finding a way to be able to open that conversation with your kids about school and what they're learning. I have, we didn't even get to talk about it, but this really amazing method that I call the lollipop technique and if you want to get that you can get that on my website IlanaB.com. backslash lollipop and that will open up your communication with your kids about what they're learning in school in a really fun and amazing way.

Laura: Oh my gosh, I think that that will be so helpful because I think everybody wants to be able to have kind of abundant open conversations with their kids about school and most of the time we get nothing, it was fine. It was exactly like we got nothing so yeah.

Ilana: okay on the head. Yeah. And so that's all going to be in the show notes for our listeners. Thank you so much for being here. I was so excited to get to talk about this with you. I really appreciate it.

Laura: Yeah, thank you so fun.

August 31, 2021

Episode 74: The Who Does More War with Dr. Jennie Rosier

August 31, 2021/ Laura Froyen

Do you ever feel so overwhelmed by your responsibilities as a parent that you feel like you are carrying a huge burden, all on your own? Like no one sees all you do, and that no one else in the family is doing as much as you? Well, you aren't alone. Most of the parents I coach who are parenting with a partner struggle with communicating with their partners on navigating parenting and responsibilities at home.

And the reason for this is complex and simple at the same time. Our homes & experiences growing up informed our (often unspoken) expectations for the division of labor and load in our families of creation. Whether we unconsciously absorbed what we saw modeled in our family of origin OR we actively decided we wanted something different for our new family, what we learned & witnessed makes a difference in how we show up with our partners. And because you and your partner grew up in different families with different experiences, OF COURSE your expectations will be different too! But the big problem is, most of us don't actually COMMUNICATE about these differences in approach or expectation in a way that is healthy & connecting.

And that's what we are going to talk about in this week's episode on The Balanced Parent Podcast. To help me in this conversation on expectations around parenting and how couples can go about feeling more like a team, I'm bringing in a new friend and colleague, Dr. Jennie Rosier. She is the host of her podcast Love Matters and the author of the book "The Who Does More War." As an expert in romantic and parent-child relationships, Rosier focuses much of her research, speaking, and writing endeavors on helping others create more realistic expectations while enhancing the communication skills needed to maintain these bonds with empathy, respect, and attachment.

Here is a summary of what we talked about:

Setting expectations in our marriage and parenting
How our way of communicating impacts our partner
The common things couples with a baby argue about
The Who Does More War and how we can meet each other's needs and expectations

To find more resources about this topic, follow Dr. Jennie on her social media and website.

Facebook: The Relationships, Love, Happiness Project

Instagram: @RelationshipsLoveHappiness

Website: www.RelationshipsLoveHappiness.com

I also want to give you my free Partners in Parenting Workbook (if you haven't downloaded it yet). It's a tool I use with my private clients to help them navigate their parenting styles.

DOWNLOAD IT HERE

If you want even MORE support, I have an entire course dedicated to getting more aligned and connected with your parenting partner! You can learn more about The Partners in Parenting Course HERE!

TRANSCRIPT

Parenting is often lived in the extremes. It's either great joy or chaotic, overwhelmed. In one moment, you're nailing it and the next you're losing your cool. I want to help you find your way to the messy middle, to a place of balance. You see balance is a verb, not a state of being. It is a thing you do. Not a thing you are. It is an action, a process, a series of micro corrections that you make each and every day to keep yourself feeling centered. We are never truly balanced. We are engaged in the process of balancing.

Hello, I'm Dr. Laura Froyen and this is The Balanced Parent Podcast where overwhelmed, stressed out and disconnected parents go to find tools, mindset shifts and practices to help them stop yelling at the people they love and start connecting on a deeper level. All delivered with heaping doses of grace and compassion. Join me in conversations that will help you get clear on your goals and values and start showing up in your parenting, your relationships, your life with openhearted authenticity and balance. Let's go!

Laura: Hello everybody, this is Dr. Laura Froyen in with another episode of the Balance Parent Podcast and I'm really excited to have you here with me today to join me in this conversation on expectations around parenting and how couples can go about feeling more like a team, have things more balanced in their marriages as they work to parent their kids together. So that's what we're gonna be talking about today and to help me with this conversation. I'm bringing in a new friend and colleague, an expert on all of these topics. Dr Jennie Rosier and she is the host of her own podcast, Love Matters and she has a wonderful book that I'm right in the middle of The Who Does More War. So Jennie, welcome to the show, why don't you tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do?

Jennie: Thanks for having me, like you said, my name is Dr. Jennie Rosier, I am an associate professor of Communications studies at James Madison University in Virginia. I am the host of the Love Matters Podcast, the author of a few popular press books. My most recent one is The Who Does More War. I'm the director of the Relationships Love Happiness Project and I am married to my best friend. We have been together longer than we haven't. So we are celebrating our 21st dating anniversary in June.

Laura: Congratulations!

Jennie: Yeah, and we have four wild and free, rambunctious destructive young children.

Laura: Awesome. And so tell us a little bit about your book, what made you want to start writing this because this is a very common thing I get asked. I know so many parents and when I talk to them separately, they both feel like they're doing more and so I would love to just talk a little bit about your book and some of the things that you found while you were writing it. It's a lovely mix of practical, real stuff and good research which I love in a book. It's my favorite kind. So tell us a little bit about it.

Jennie: So when I was in graduate school I did not have children yet. And my husband and I, we dated for about seven years before we got married. And so... and we had lived together and I just thought like you know the sun rose and set with him and everything was just perfect and we were just going to have this perfect life together. And when I was in grad school I wrote my first book called Make Love Not Scrapbooks. And it is very similar to this book but also very optimistic and flowery

Laura: and rosy color…

Jennie: Yeah. It is very rosy and I wrote that book and I just thought, wow! Like I am going to help people learn how to be in a relationship.

And then my husband, I got married and we had a surprise twins. So all twins are a surprise to be clear. But uh we did not know that we were having twins when I was 6.5 months pregnant and then we had them six weeks early. So we had a very short gap between when we found out we were having twins. So when we actually had twins to figure things out and it was really difficult. They both had a lot of things that made them cry a lot more than the average baby. One of them had acid reflux. The other one had an ulcer rating hemangioma when she was a baby. And so they cried a lot and we were just really overwhelmed and really stressed out and there were some things said to each other that probably…

Laura: I mean we’ve all been there.

Jennie: Yes. And so we quickly had to like make a rule that anything that was said in the middle of the night, you know, we weren't allowed to be mad about the next day. And I started thinking like, wow, a lot of the craft that I just spent two years writing about isn't really working here, what's going on.

Laura: Oh no.

Jennie: And so I started thinking about, you know, all of the things that we were arguing about that. I never thought we would argue about that. I just really never could have imagined. Our twins are now 11, they're about to be 12 and for years I just kept these notes of all these things that we would argue about until I had five solid arguments that I felt like all people who have young children argue about.

Laura: Oh my gosh. I'm dying to know. What are they?

Jennie: This was again with my experience and then backed up by research in the book. But so The Who Does More War, that's the tit for tat war. You know, I'm doing more than, you know, I'm doing more than you. Well I do the dishes while I do the laundry and so I think that some people have the tit for tat war or the who does more war before they have kids, but it is significantly amplified after kids come. And one of the reasons for that is because our list gets longer, your to do list gets exponentially longer. And so of course you're arguing about who does more, especially if one of you is staying home, if one of you is working more and one of you is at home more that tit for tat war is going to potentially become nuclear. So...

Laura: And nobody is seeing all of those things. So, you know, the folks who are at home are not seeing what's happening at work, the folks who are at work are not seeing all of the work that goes into being at home.

Jennie: Yeah. And nobody wins that war, right?

Laura: So there's never a winner.

Jennie: There's never a winner. And so we found ourselves very frequently having this war with each other where I would say, well I am breastfeeding and diaper changing and the least you can do is A B and C. And he's like, well I am, you know working and worried about you all day long and I'm like, and I'm going to grad school and I am doing this and I'm, you know, it was just back and forth and nobody wins.

So there's no clear winner because no matter what you think or your partner thinks both of you think you're doing more than the other person, no matter what is reality. Both of you think you're doing your part both of you think you're doing enough. I mean I'm sure there are relationships out there where it is very clear that one of you is doing more work than the other person. And there may even be relationships out there where it's, your partner knows. Oh yeah. I am not pulling my weight. But for the most part, most people really think that they're doing a lot.

Laura: There's this tenderness to it too because I think many parents know they're doing so much. They have so much to do there. So overwhelmed. And then at the same time they feel like they're failing at whatever it is that they're...

Jennie: Exactly.

Laura: There's this really, it's a very tender subject.

Jennie: Yes.

Laura: Vulnerable subject.

Jennie: And when we had our third son, so when we have a third child, so we had twins first and then two singleton. So which is a word that I apparently have learned when you have to win like oh is it multiple or singleton? So anyways and I just think it's hilarious that I use it all the time now. So when we had our third child, I was put on bed rest for the last 10 weeks, strict bed rest for the last 10 weeks of the pregnancy. And it was in those 10 weeks that my husband recognized just what I did. That he had no idea or just didn't really realize it. I mean I remember him coming to me at some point probably at like week three and he's like how did you do this?

Like how, because he became the full time caregiver for our twins, for the house, for meals. I mean he was in charge of everything and so he was just like wait, how did she do this and work? At that point, I was already a professor and so it was just a very eye-opening experience. So that's one of the wars that new parents, no matter how many children you have. So it doesn't just happen with your first child because with every subsequent child there's more things on the to-do list.

So it happens with every single addition to your family, whether you have one kid or seven kids, it's always going to be there. And the trick is to really check yourself to just not have that war to not bring that conversation up because it's nobody wins.

The second war is the sex war. So this is the why don't you want to bleep me anymore. And this is usually a product of hormonal changes, physical pain, tiredness and this is inescapable as well. There is a period where you just are not interested and this can go both ways. It can be male or female can just be not interested for a certain amount of time and it just seems like so hard to find time to reconnect and to reconnect sexually, like not just emotionally or communication wise, I mean, really to physically connect with one another, it seems just so out of the realm of possibilities because again, there's so much to do.

There's so much to think about. There's so much to worry about. There's sometimes physical issues, hormonal issues. And that is an argument that lots of couples have. And we know this to be true with decades and decades of research about divorce and about marital conflict, that sex is a huge, huge issue and having a baby seriously, you know, complicates that argument that people have. The third war is that you're not doing that right war. So the whole war about gatekeeping and,

Laura: Hold on maternal gatekeeping, a phrase that I know, can you explain to us a little bit of what it is?

Jennie: So maternal gatekeeping, which is usually what it is. Let's be serious. This is when a woman feels that she knows the right way to do things, the right way to care for a baby, to care for a child and they limit their husband's involvement sometimes consciously, many times unconsciously, like you're not even thinking about it.

So this could be where you just take over and you just do all the stuff so you just do it and then it leaves no room for your partner to do anything or you could even go as far as criticizing him whenever he does something or correcting him whenever he does something and then that also limits his willingness to do it again later to try later.

So you know, you're not putting that diaper on correctly, okay, he's just not going to want to do the diapers later because he doesn't want to be told that he's not doing something right or you could make fun in a lighthearted way, I don't know how many times I've seen on facebook, someone has a post of the diapers on backwards and it's like, look at my silly husband

Laura: Or the kids’ clothing on backwards or something.

Jennie: Yes. And so and that can hurt people's feelings. I don't want... people don't want to be made fun of. And so gatekeeping is when you in some way limit your partner's involvement in doing things and then it can start another war, right? So you've created this gatekeeping that, you're not doing that right war and you've had this, it's not always a like direct conflict. Sometimes it is like you're not doing that right? Yes, I am. I know what I'm doing. But many times it's just you're creating this environment of gatekeeping where you are the knower of all things and you keep the gate closed and you don't let him in.

Laura: Yeah, it can be so subtle just even like watching...

Jennie: Yeah, so subtle.

Laura: Just even just like when they're changing the diaper, standing over them and watching how they do it is a very subtle form actually conveys something.

Jennie: Exactly and then it can create that, who does more war because then you're stuck doing everything because you gatekeep the hell out of it and now you are doing more and now you're complaining about that. And so it's this vicious cycle that women very frequently put themselves in. And some of the reason for this is because when we are growing up, when we're kids, even people allow girls to care for other children much more than they allow boys to.

So how many babysitters do you know that are male? How many females do you know who have babysit? Many! Or even just at the family function? Hey, Vivian, could you watch the baby real quick while I run into the other room? I have three boys and one daughter and I have maybe asked one of my sons to watch a younger child a handful of times, they're just like not.

I used to joke that when my daughter saw the baby crawling up the steps, she would go, no, no baby, get off the steps and when my son saw the baby crawling up the steps, he'd be like, yeah, let's do it, come on, go up the steps, let's see what's going to happen. You would like encourage the terribly difficult behavior. And so, um, and so we don't ask little boys to care for babies. We only ask girls to.

Laura: Even young childless men. We don't. So I mean this is something that I loved about my husband before we had kids, he would change my niece and nephews’, diapers and and take care of them and babysit them so that when my brother in law was at work and my sister and I wanted to go out and have lunch, he would take care of them. I love that about him. But that is not typical.

Jennie: It's not the norm. Listeners, how many of your husbands didn't hold a baby until you had a baby?

Laura: Yeah. Most of them.

Jennie: Most!

Laura: My husband's dad had never held a baby so young until he held his granddaughter.

Jennie: Oh my gosh!

Laura: Seriously. Until his granddaughter. There's this cultural shift that's happening and it's hard on this new generation of fathers who has so many expectations fathers haven't had placed on them before and we have expectations on us too to allow that. That's hard too. So we're all learning this new thing together.

Jennie: That's really hard.

Laura: But I think we just need to realize that you know, he is a grown man and you marry him and he can figure it out, even if it takes him 10 times changing the diaper wrong to figure out the correct way to do it. He'll figure it out and the baby is not going to die while he figures it out. It's going to be fine. So just like let go of control and let him figure it out because I mean just think about if the tables were turned and your partner was telling you that you weren't doing it right, you'd be like, please, come on. I know what I'm doing. I'm a woman. You know, I'm the mom.

Laura: And of course I do think that like there's good intentions we wanted. First of all, there's this pressure on at mom's that if things are done wrong, the person who's going to get blamed for it or judge it's the mom. So of course there's this bigger cultural and societal pressure that's there, that's present and that's real. So there's that pressure. But there's also like room for being helpful for showing, you know, I don't think anybody is going in saying like my husband is a buffoon and doesn't know how to change.

Jennie: Exactly!

Laura: Genuine helpfulness. The delivery is a critical skill.

Jennie: So we have 1,2,3 now. The fourth war is that there's no time for us anymore. Or just there's no time when you have kids, when you just have one kid, your time is completely changed. The amount of time it takes you to get out of the house completely changed. The amount of time that you have by yourself, if you have any, completely changed the amount of time that you have with your family and friends that you have with your partner, just all of your time is different. And I honestly believe that that is the hardest shift for most people. That's the biggest like jolt to our expectations because nobody really talks about that. Nobody really talks about the idea. Like there's jokes that, oh well you used to take you two seconds to go in the house and now it takes you two hours to gather all the stuff and there's jokes about that.

Laura: But say goodbye to your social life.

Jennie: Exactly. But I think people really don't realize your time is now dedicated to another person who doesn't care about your time at all.

Laura: And they might go to daycare, they might have times where you are apart, but you're never alone again. They're always on your mind. They're always in your heart.

Jennie: Exactly. Exactly. And so your time is just completely different. And that is something that causes a lot of disagreement, especially if you have, if one or both of you were really independent before kids. Like you had a lot of alone activities or guys’ nights or you know, girls’ lunches and you were really used to that kind of lifestyle and then one or both of you can't go play golf for four hours anymore or can't go shopping with your friends every weekend anymore. It causes some disagreements. And I think the disagreements can get really, really bad when one of you maintains their pre-child life and the other person doesn't, which again often falls on women and you know, the dads just like I got to keep my golf game going. I've got to keep going. I'm going to go this weekend and then he just gets to go and it's just expected that you will stay.

I think the point of all of this is really that we don't have these discussions. We talk about baby names. We talk about what color the nursery is going to be. We talk about what it's going to be like to go to the grandparents house maybe, but we don't have these conversations about this stuff like how are we going to deal with time? The whole book is not just about infancy. I basically have been writing this book for 10 years. I've been thinking about it and taking notes about it for 10 years. And these wars continue all the way through all childhood where... My husband and I are still having some of these disagreements about our 11 year olds.

In the book, I talk about the driving from activity to activity to activity that feeds into the who does more war. My husband is typically the taker of boys to wrestling practice and I am typically the taker of all the kids to school and pick them up from school even though that ends up kind of evening out. We would still argue about it. I mean pre-pandemic. We would still argue, all those things are gone now life is great, but we would still argue about it.

He'd be like, well I'm driving these boys all over the place. You know, four nights a week. And I'm like, I'm driving them to and from school every day, five days a week, what's the difference? And we would just have these disagreements. And so the arguments don't stop in infancy, it's not just about having a baby, it's about having kids of any age.

Laura: Yeah, It's not even necessarily the topics that you're arguing about, it's having the discussions, learning how to have a healthy discussion. You know, you were talking about golfing, my husband is a golfer, his two hobbies are golfing and fishing, which take eight hours.

Jennie: Time consuming.

Laura: So time consuming. And I like we were discussing how like, can't you find a hobby that's like an hour? Because my hobbies are like an hour, I go to an hour too fast or something, but at the same time, like he's a better dad when he's been out on the golf course, like he comes home, he feels refreshed, he's limber, he can wrestle like he just, he's just a better dad and partner.

And so if it was him assuming and just going without checking in without an active discussion without a sitting down and constructing our family values around like him, golfing is good for the whole family, how as a family can we make this work for all of us so that he can still have his golf game, like that's way different than him saying like, OK, saturday morning by without exactly any discussion, that's the discussion, that makes the difference.

Jennie: Exactly, I totally agree with that.

Okay, so the fifth war that I talked about in this book is the what are we going to do with them war? And this is the war where one or both parents compare their kids to other people's kids or one or both parents are upset about the behavior of their kids. You know, like yes, parenting differences, discipline differences and this can cause some serious like really like throw down conflict in my mind.

Laura: Oh I know. This war is the one that I cover how to deal with in my course, partners and parenting. Like it's all…

Jennie: So serious.

Laura: So serious [laugh].

Jennie: Again, we don't talk about this before we have kids. What are your opinions on time out? What are your opinions on spanking? What are your... I mean maybe spanking comes up sometimes but people just don't talk about these things. What are your changes? wWhat are your changes about co-sleeping?

Laura: And it changes once you're in the scenarios. So my husband, I was in grad school to be a couples therapist and I was researching marital satisfaction and its effect on early childhood at the time when I became a mom. I knew the research, I knew that right after you have your first child marital satisfaction flops. Yeah, plummets rock bottom. And I didn't want that to be my story. So my husband and I went to couples counseling preventatively. So we actually did have all of these discussions, couples therapists beforehand and it all still change the skill of the discussion, the skill of fighting. Well you know disagreeing. Well I can't overstate that.

Jennie: Sure, and I want to make it, like emphasize that “what are we going to do with them war” is not just about discipline. It's about like any parenting decision. And so I had mentioned co-sleeping co-sleeping is a great one. I think that lots of times one or both people think that co-sleeping is a great idea and then they do it. Maybe mom really wants to co sleep and dad's like sure we can co sleep with the baby, it's fine. And then three years go by and we're still co sleeping or in my case six years go by and we're still co sleeping.

And sometimes that can cause a problem. Personally, I want to let him co sleep with us as long as he wants. When he wants to go and have his own room, you can go and have his own room. My husband's like uh when do we get in our bed back? Because we've been co-sleeping for 12 years straight and just six years with the last one. And so he's like when is that happening? Like I don't know. And even though my husband is 100% on board with the benefits of co-sleeping and he wholeheartedly believes in it.

We still have little tiny spats about well, when are we going to get our bed back? You know, he's a little old for this. Don't you think? You know, and little comments are made that can stew and can cause conflict. So it's not always about discipline. It's just about any parenting choice. Yeah. Lots of people could get into. Yeah. Everything. Again.

This war is confounded by comparison when you see your friends or your families, kids doing certain things and then it's like, wait a minute, none of our friends have kids who co-sleep at all. What are we doing? Are we doing the right thing? I don't know. You know, I mean, that's just an example. You know, like I think there's just so many times where you compare your children to other people's kids and we have to stop doing that because that just creates conflict in our own relationships.

Laura: Or even just with our own between... if we have more than one kid between our own kids to.

Jennie: Every child is different.

Laura: Okay, so I feel like we've had this conversation has felt a little dire. Can there be some upswing? Can... Is there hope for us?

Jennie: There is.

Laura: And yours?

Jennie: Yes, it's a lot of what you've already said. We have to have these conversations, we have to get more realistic expectations and we have to learn how to fight a fair fight. And lucky for people who buy my book, I have a whole chapter on 75 conversations starting questions that you can tackle a handful or just one a night with your partner and my husband. I actually went through these when I wrote the book and we learned things about each other that we didn't know and we're going on 21 years and we still benefited from having these conversations.

Laura: We're not static people. We change, we're always changing. Our views change, our goals change, our priorities change, our values change. So these questions that are in your book, they're lovely. They’re ongoing conversations that you really will have the rest of your life with your partner.

Jennie: They're not things that you need to have before you have a child.

Laura: No, it’s too late.

Jennie: Should have them. Yeah you should have them before you have a child but you can have them at any point and improve your relationship.

Laura: And multiple times. Just because you asked it two years ago doesn't mean the answer is the same now your kids are two years older. You're two years older, the world is different. Like thinking about like, what's happened this past year. There are values and beliefs and priorities that we had before the pandemic that are radically different now that requires ongoing conversation. Yeah, I love that that's in the book too.

Jennie: And so yes and so conversation starters are in Chapter seven I believe. And so you can go through those and read again, just ask a couple questions or even just one like over dinner and just have that conversation. And then there's also a chapter on how to fight a fair fight. You know, some conflict tips. I think my favorite tip about conflict is research-based and maybe interestingly, maybe not interestingly.

Laura: We're in the audience will be interesting, I’m sure.

Jennie: Research has shown that 69% of relationship conflict is actually never solved. It's just managed. And when I tell people this, sometimes I think they feel solace, right, they go, oh, okay, well this is good. So yeah, so you're saying that it's normal that I can't solve this problem or that we continue to have this argument over and over again.

Okay that's, that's good. Like, we're not we're not abnormal, but then other people, it terrifies them. They're like, I don't want to have that argument for the rest of my life. And so it's about your perspective. But I think it's really just important to recognize that sometimes you're just not going to see eye to eye and you have to figure out a way to manage the conflict, not necessarily solve the conflict.

Laura: So yeah, they're all couples have a few topics that they will disagree over for their entire relationship, you know, and will never be solved. This is also research. So it's the way that matters. And I really like the way that Sue Johnson talks about couple conflict as a dance and that you learn the steps in your family growing up and your partner learned the steps in their family growing up and then you come together and you're figuring out the steps in your own dance as a couple and that's clunky at first. The people's toes get stepped on, you're out of sync and out of balance.

And then you can learn new skills, you can learn your dance steps, you can work with a choreographer, a couples therapist who will help you choreograph a dance that's better for you, that works well for you. So no matter what topic comes up, you know the pattern, you know the flow and you actually like when you're done with the conflict, you end up feeling closer and more connected with each other. I love the dance analogy.

Jennie: No, it's a great analogy and I think it also points to the idea of where our expectations come from, which I also talk about in the beginning of the book and our expectations come from lots of different places. But one of them is our culture and our culture is so incredibly influential in our expectations. You're talking about this dance that one of you learned the steps when you were growing up and the other person learned their own steps and then you come together and you got to figure it out how to dance together. Our culture, American culture really really emphasizes the desire for people to be independent human beings.

We value independence so much and so many of our life decisions are based on, is this going to make us more independent or less independent? And when I talk to my students at JMU about this, they're always like, well how do you know that something is a cultural ideal? And I say, well if someone called you it, would you take it as a compliment? Then it's a cultural ideal. So if somebody said to you, wow, you're so independent, would you take that as a compliment? And they go of course, what do you mean? I said some people in other cultures would not so that it would be an…

Laura: An insult.

Jennie: Yeah and be like, what do you mean?

Laura: Being selfish.

Jennie: Yeah, I'm being selfish, like what does that mean? So our whole lives, we are really bred to believe that independence is so, so so important. We talk about personal happiness, we talk about self-care, we talk about you, do you figure out who you are be unique? You know, have your own style, don't follow the crowd. And then we're like, oh yeah, but marriage is also really important.

So I want you to be super independent and then figure out how to share a life with someone where you have to be dependent on them and that independent stuff will actually hurt your marriage. Good luck. And so our culture really sets us up for failure because like I said, we grew up our whole lives feeling like I'm gonna do me. Personal happiness is paramount. Who I am is so important.

And then we're like, oh yeah, but I have to find a partner? I gotta find someone to get married to, because that's also really important. So then I get married and by the way, I need to give up a little bit of who I am. I need to be selfless. I need to care about another person sometimes more than I care about myself.

Ugh, that doesn't sit right. I don't like that. And then marriage is really hard.

Laura: Yeah, it's that me versus we think that's so hard to navigate.

Jennie: It is, it is really, really difficult.

Laura: It is, but possible and doable

Jennie: Definitely possible and it's totally possible. I think we just need to, like I said, change our expectations and one of the best ways to change your expectations is to have those conversations, but to also talk to other people who are in the life stage that you want to be in. I mean, if we spent the same amount of time talking to people who were married as we do planning the wedding, like if you really spent. You know, let's say the average person spends 2000 hours planning a wedding, which I think is kind of small. If you spent 2000 hours interviewing couples who you thought were in good or even bad relationships, you would be so much more prepared for marriage.

So talk to people who are experiencing what you want to experience and say tell it like it is, please be real with me, you know, talk to people and ask them these questions. What was the hardest part of marriage? What's the easiest or funniest or most rewarding part of marriage? I think that people look at their parents, if your parents are still together when you're an adult, they look at their parents when they have their own children, they're like, well I don't remember my parents having such a hard time. This is like, really, you didn't pay attention to your parents when they had toddlers. They were a mess. They were the same as you. Everyone.

Laura: I just had this conversation with my mom. I was like, you didn't know mom like Dan and I were talking just the other day about like how hard it is, how much we don't like adulting, like how like there's so many things you have to think about when you're growing up and I was like, and I don't remember you acting that way at all. And my mom was like Laura, don't you remember how much I complained about having to pay the bills, you know, once a month and I was like, oh I do remember that, but she's like, no, it was hard. you just didn’t notice.

Jennie: Yeah you weren't privy to those conversations and once you were finally old enough to really start paying attention to those things. Your parents were likely out of the baby stage, they were out of the toddler stage. They were dealing with a different age of Children and they were also hiding things from you more.

We're not arguing in front of our 11-year-old, we're going to go argue by ourselves, we're going to hold that. Let's go argue in another room. You just think that your parents didn't experience this. We all did. Every single 30 years old still thinks I feel like a teenager still, how am I an adult? I feel like a kid. I shouldn't be responsible for these things.

Everyone is experiencing that. Every mom or dad of a baby thinks, I can't believe they let me leave the hospital with this thing or I can't believe that this is my life now. I'm a communication professor. I talk about this stuff all day long. I write about it, I speak about it. I, you know, make videos about it. I create memes about all of this stuff and I still, I turned to my husband very frequently and say I didn't think would be like this. I'm very surprised.

Laura: Me too, all the time. I did not know it would be this hard. I never imagined that we'd have these conversations I never thought. Yeah.

Jennie: There's lots of those. And I talk about many of those things that I never thought I'd have to say to my children. Funny things, but also serious things in the book and like I said, I have three boys and I just, the amount of times that I have to tell them to put clothes on or stop peeing on each other or stop touching each other, stop wrestling. You know, my daughter constantly will come to me and she's like, what's wrong with them? Like I don't know!

Laura: Just boys though. The number of times I've said, no vulvas on the furniture, like I can't. No vulvas in the furniture.

Jennie: You're like, how is this my life? We have rules on our refrigerator about where children are allowed to pee and I'm like, how is this my life? And there's three rules. Here's the rules. Yes, we can see the bridge kids are allowed to be if they're inside. It has to be in a toilet and not know it has to be in a toilet if they are outside, it has to be not where we play. So it can't be where we play or walk and it can't and they can't be on each other outside because before it used to just be the first two, and then when they were outside, they peed on each other and they're like, we don't play on our brother. I was like.

Laura: They're so clever.

Jennie: Yeah. So now it's, you can't feed on each other ever.

Laura: You know, Jennie, this is a great example of updating our expectations too is our kids, you know. So I love the, where you mentioned the expectations piece. Like sometimes we don't even know what our expectations are until we're faced with a time when they're not being met. And so like understanding that your expectations will change as your kids get older and as you move into different phases and like sitting down and talking about what your expectations are of your partner and of yourself, even what they are.

Not even the discussion of changing them, but just getting clear on what they actually are. And then you can take a look at are they reasonable or did you know that I was expecting you to do this? You know, like…

Jennie: It's so important.

Laura: It is like one of my like just cultural expectations is that it's going to be my husband who does the changing of the light bulbs.

You know, he's taller than me and he's going to be the one who takes out the trash because I gag if I have to smell it, you know? But there were had to be over conversations about that and conversations around like is it okay that that's my expectation. Are you willing to take on that responsibility for our family and so that I can have it off my plate? You know, those conversations are ongoing and are so important.

Jennie: You have to continue to check-in. I think that people when they move in together, they, whether you're married or not, whether you have children or not. You think that you've had that conversation like the chore conversation now the chores change. I didn't even know some of the things that are on our to-do list. I didn't even know I would ever have to do them until I had to do them.

Laura: Exactly, wow. Okay. I have this workbook and my membership community that's, it's called The Household Balance Workbook and it is 10 pages of things that I commonly hear parents have to do just and full pages of and this workbook I encourage parents to sit down and go through it together and just get how often are you doing these things just visually represent like these are our duties.

Jennie: Yeah. And there's just so many of them. Nobody talks about the fact that after your children are potty trained, you still have to wipe their ass. Why wasn't that in a book? Why didn't someone tell me that you still have to wipe their butts? Yeah. You still have to wipe their butt but still sometimes there's seven. I mean my child went to kindergarten not knowing how to effectively wipe his own. But and so he didn't, he would come home and I'm like you you stink

Laura: We have done kindergarten practice too.

Jennie: We tried, his arms were too short. He just could not reach. But nobody talks about that. You think I'll be changing diapers for a few years and people celebrate when they're done with diapers. Like there's a celebration. It's just a money celebration. The work every single time they go to the bathroom you have to go and see if they need you. You still have to get up and go. And so the work is still there. It's just the money for the diapers, you don't just spend that anymore, but nobody talks about so many of these little jobs that you have to do and that are like daily jobs.

Laura: How can you even know what your expectations are until you're in the moment? That's why it has to be an ongoing conversation because those, I mean those things like as your child, you know, starts to drive like who's responsible for teaching them? Who's responsible for checking to make sure the tire pressure is good and that the oil is changed on kids’ car that you're never in. You know.

Jennie: Yeah, these little things that you, you don't even know how are things.

Laura: Yeah Right. Oh my goodness, So many good conversations. Jennie, I know you've got to run to go teach a class so I'm really grateful for this conversation. I want to make sure that you know all of the links to everything are in the show notes. But sometimes people like to hear it out loud. So can you let us know where people can go to find your work and follow along with you.

Jennie: Yes, you can always find me on Instagram at relationships. Love happiness. You can find me on the web at www dot relationships. Love happiness dot com. You can also search for the Love matters podcast with Dr. Jennie Rosier wherever you listen to podcasts and you can send me a message and I would love to connect with you. I'm also on Youtube and Facebook. Just search for the Relationships Love Happiness Project.

Laura: Awesome. Well thank you so much for being with us. This was so much fun and thank you for sharing all of your research and experience with the world in this way. It was so helpful..

Jennie: Thank you so much.

August 24, 2021

Episode 73: Raising Little Brains: How Neuroscience Can Inform Our Parenting with Dr. Sarah Allen

August 24, 2021/ Laura Froyen

For this week's episode on The Balanced Parent Podcast, we are going to GEEEK OUT on the amazing stuff going on in your kid’s BRAIN. If you have been following me, you would probably know I love this topic. I love to talk about brains and understanding what's going on inside our kids' brains and I truly believe it can help us understand their behavior, tap into compassion, and meet them where they are!

So, we will be geeking out on this episode, and to help me in this conversation, I have invited Dr. Sarah Allen. She is a mother and a pediatric neuropsychologist. She specializes in making neuroscience translatable in our lives, and so, Dr. Allen aims to help kids and parents find their strengths and who they are so that they can live as healthy, happy, and self-aware adults.

Here is an overview of our conversation:

Neuroscience and how we can use it in parenting to boost our kids' learning
Understanding what's going on with our kids' brain
Skills needed for our kids to be healthy and heavily developed
Modeling self-care and "glow and grow" practices

If you want to understand how our kids' brains work, head over to Dr. Allen's website at www.brainbehaviorbridge.com. You can also find her on:

Facebook: Brain Behavior Bridge

Instagram: @dr.sarahlallen

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-levin-allen-ph-d-cbis-75a9b668/

And if you're looking for more support, send her an email at drallen@brainbehaviorbridge.com. She would love to hear from you.

And I just have a perfect game for you that you can play with your kids to help them hard-wire these self-regulation skills into their brains! With practice, they will be more able to stop themselves when they get the impulse to hit, kick, throw, smash, etc. and YOU will be able to relax a bit more!

GIVE IT TO ME!

Laura: Hello everybody, This is Dr. Laura Froyen in and on this episode of the balance parent podcast we're going to be kicking out all about brains. You guys know that I love this topic so much and to facilitate this conversation a little bit better and bringing on a guest and colleague that I'm really excited to share with you. So Dr. Sarah Allen is a mother, a pediatric neuropsychologist and she specializes in making neuroscience Translatable to our actual lives. Oh my gosh, Sarah thank you so much for helping us with this topic coming in and having this conversation. Welcome to the show. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do?

Sarah: Sure. Thanks so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. As you said, I'm a pediatric neuropsychologist. I call myself a brain gal because any time I go to a cocktail party and I say pediatric neuropsychologist, somebody says oh you're a nurse. And I say no and then I say I deal with brains and then they say what am I thinking?

And then I have a little fun of course because you know you're at a party so might say oh you shouldn't think that or something like that and then I have to go and explain, you know what I do anyway, so, but like you said, you know, I am a neuropsychologist and I do brain health and wellness and I really helped my family that I work with raised happy brains and I do some assessments as well. But most of my love is in coaching parents to help figure out what the skills that they need for their kids to be healthy and heavily developed.

Laura: Yeah, okay. So tell me a little bit about, you know here at the balanced parent podcast. We really believe that to raise Holwell. Openhearted self-aware kids. We've got to be those things ourselves. And we talk a little bit about how those things go hand in hand and how we can knowing about ourselves can help us also raise kids who know about themselves.

Sarah: Absolutely. So we know from a brain standpoint and actually, if you look at the history of therapy, you can even see some of this woven in in order to make change. We need to have insight. So therapy is all about insight and the reason it is that way is because we need to bring things into our conscious awareness in order to be able to change them. And so what happens to us as parents and I'm a mom of two kids myself is that we tend to lose who we are in the first place and when we do that, we're not able to model for our kids what good self-health and self-care and brain health is, and we're not able to transfer those skills to them either.

And so it's really important for parents to know who they are and then start to model this and I do this through a growth mindset approach. So we always do glow and grow charts with my family. So where are you glowing where you just rock in life and where do you need to grow? And if you start to do that process as an individual, as a parent, you model that for your Children and so doing that for yourself and then doing one for your child and then even doing one for yourself as a parent.

So you start to develop what your values are as parents and you get that balance that you speak of so often so much better when you can do it that way because now you know who you are, you know who your child is, you know what your values are as a parent and that makes that path a lot easier to follow. I call it sometimes a parent manual but really what it is is this guide to help make decisions when kids completely take you off the rails which is their job to do?

Laura: Yeah. Sarah but I love what you're saying because you're talking about a manual or a path or a map but it's not one that some expert has given you that you've built for yourself by looking within figuring out what your values are, what your goals are for your family, You create this map yourself. So what are some of the questions that you can ask? Like I love this idea and I know parents are going to want to do this for themselves. So what are some things that they can ask themselves to figure out? Okay, so what does this manual look for my family?

Sarah: Yeah, well I love that you said questions you can ask because one of the tips as parents and I'll go back to your question but is about asking questions so we want to know what is happening with these little brains that we're raising, you know, and I know it's crazy, but that's how I see kids as little brains. We really want to know what is happening with them. And that's one of the main ways of starting to get that manual down is to say what's happening with you. Do you need to talk about something, what do I need to teach my child? What do they need to learn?

And when you start asking those questions, you really start to get some great goals down for your kids. But before you can start that process, the first page is getting to know yourself, right? We just talked about that. And so what you can do is start to say to yourself, okay, what are my values number one? I love the question, what are my superpowers? And then I also encourage my clients to go ask three of your friends or your partner what they think your superpowers are and have that reflected back to you, Who are you jealous of?

I know that's a strange question, but this really starts to tell us what we want to be, what we value, what we're interested in. So although jealousy is a funny feeling, it's a good one to really hone in on and see who is that person that you're jealous of? Who do you admire? On the other hand, and then you start to really build this picture for yourself of who you are and who you want to be and what you value, what is important to you and then from there that's where you can start to develop that glow and grow chart, what are the top three things that you think you're just really, really doing really well at and what are the top three things you really feel like you want to work on?

Once you start to go through that process yourself as an individual, then you can help your kid through that do the same process. Let them find their superpowers. Kids often need a lot more guidance in it, you can kind of give them some ideas but they're really good at coming up with and sometimes even if you ask them what your superpowers are and you'll get some neat things reflected back to yourself too and it becomes this process. Like I said this growth mindset that you set up in your entire household and everything shifts from that point.

Laura: Yeah, I love this. I feel like this really ties into the idea of plasticity that change can happen that we have a lifelong potential for growth and change and rewiring of the brain and I think that's so beautiful to be doing that ourselves and modeling it to our kids doing it. I think it's really powerful to do this work allowed to our kids, you know to let them see us doing this work, we are journaling about something explaining what we're doing, telling them why we're doing it what we're thinking.

I mean even just moments where one of my biggest things that I consistently work on in front of my kids as being kind to myself because I'm not very kind to myself in my head at times and so out loud if I make a mistake who I'm feeling really bad about that you know I'm thinking some bad thoughts about myself. Yeah and I also know everybody makes mistakes and I also know I can be kind even when I've made a mistake. You know like just out loud talking modeling that that is a good dialogue to have.

Sarah: Well and from a brain standpoint it's probably one of the top tips that you can do because you're actually changing brain pathways that way and you're teaching the how in how to think and feel or how to approach something. Those houses are things we don't often teach, we expect kids to pick them up and it's especially important if your kid has a different brain, you know if your kid has been diagnosed with A. D. H. D. or autism or other things they don't necessarily pick up on some of these what I call executive skills or some of these kinds of problem-solving how to skills as much as other kids at times.

So just speaking those things out loud, not only is it a good model emotionally like you're suggesting and such, but you're teaching them problem-solving skills. I used to play this game with my kids, we'd be on the way home from my mother's house from their grandmother's house and it would always be later at night and I need to get a bedtime routine going.

So half of this is just self-preservation and the other half is really, here's a teachable moment, which I love. I love natural teachable moments opportunity to teach sequencing and problem-solving in the brain. So I'd say, what are we gonna do when we get home? What do we do first? Right. I know we're going to get in bed and then brush your teeth and go to the bathroom. I mean my kids are really little at the time to go mom, you're so silly now.

Exactly they would start, we joked about the order and I would do different things like that with them and now building off of that. Having taught my daughter the skilled out loud, I swear my daughter could solve any problem faster than me, I'll just ask her what to do. She usually, well she'll tell me what to do anyway, but normally she, she really does have some good ideas so.

Laura: I love this. Equipping kids with those problem-solving skills is so powerful. We do a lot of problem-solving in our house and when my kids are at their school whenever there's a problem their friends come to them to help them solve because they know that they've got those skills that my kids have, that skill that they can help figure out. Okay, so what's everybody's priorities, what's everybody's concerns, how can we collaborate to make sure that everybody's needs are being met? They know how to do that.

Sarah: And those are so essential. I mean we spend so much time thinking about math and reading, writing these academic skills with our kids and you know, did they get this great on this test and these men as they get older, did they learn this material? You know, and I hate to say this may be a little parents’ secret, but they can google any piece of information that they need to know.

So really we need to stop worrying about academic learning as much and really focus more on these social-emotional problems solving these brain-building skills because these are the things that are long-lasting, these are the things that create connected kids that are socially and emotionally intelligent, that can help their peers that can build businesses and think creatively and abstractly and that are happy and healthy and connected. It's not just about those academic skills. So I love that your kids are doing that.

Laura: And that's what the research is showing us to. This is what the career trajectory research is showing us is that those skills that we're talking about today are actually going to be much more impactful in future careers for kids. So you're setting them up for financial and stability. Success too.

So yes, okay, so I want to just connect a little bit more on the idea of that. We are raising little brains. There are times in my parenting journey where I can see their brain very clearly in their actions, I don't know, do you see that with kids? Like communicating with an immature and undeveloped brain? Like I have to remind myself of that with my little ones. So what are some things that parents need to know about their kids growing?

Sarah: Oh, I love it. So let's just start under five, right? And even when kids are born, when kids are born, they have more neurons which are the brain cells we have in our brain than 2-3 times more than adults, they actually are born with more brain cells than we are. I often used to joke my kids were little, like, don't tell him because my daughter and my son knew that it would completely, you know, up reroute the imbalance of our whole thing, but really it's not about the number of neurons, but it's about efficiency and connections.

So as kids are under five, they go through this process, we call pruning and they get rid of the cells they don't need and they keep the ones that they do need. This is why for kids under five, it's really important to give them exposure to sights and sounds and experiences and connections so that we can lay that groundwork for their brains for the future. The most learning you'll ever have in your entire lifespan is under the age of five.

Now fascinating. I mean I freaked out about this when my daughter turned five, you know, I remember distinctly in the minivan when I have it, you know, driving and realizing her birthday was the next day and she's gonna turn five, she's going to be over this brain hump, which just for everybody's benefit, it doesn't happen in a day, but in my mind, it was five.

Laura: There's no clock in their brain clock. You know, I just remember screaming, you can do anything you put your mind to and what happened I tell you what can I get it? Just trying to give her every little thing. So it doesn't end just for people who might freak out like me. But it really is this opportunity for great growth.

So any experience and exposure that we can give kids to playing with other kids to interacting with other people to learning how to think is really helpful under the age of five. This is why early intervention is so important because we can really lay the groundwork, this brain development, but I was reminded of when kids are about to three when they're first starting to kind of communicate with you and you can see the brain skip at this point.

I always call like a record skip where you, they'll ask you a question. Mom, mom, mom, mom! Mommy um can't and you're like do you want juice? Do you want something to eat? Can I feel this is because it's taking forever? And there you can actually see the fact that they're laying the brain pathway. They're trying to functionally connect these networks and get this efficiency and learn how to use their voice here.

They have to think of what they want and then they have to say it out loud and communicate in an appropriate way. And it's no wonder we then have some kids, some two-year-olds especially fallen on the floor screaming and crying because they can't communicate what they need because it's a lot of work for those little brains.

Laura: Can you imagine how frustrating it must be. It is so hard to be two and three and to not have the vocabulary that you need to express. The complex thoughts that you're having and your wants and your needs or if you have the vocabulary and you know what you want to say, it's not have like the mouth muscle development to be able to get it out of your mouth. It must be so hard.

Sarah: It takes time and this world doesn't give us a lot of that time so we're moving a mile a minute. So you know if a child needs some more time to express themselves, you know, and you're running out the door trying to get another child to a game or something like that, that's when those things can happen, and it's just part of the nature of the world.

But also something to pay attention to is apparent because the more that you can recognize what's happening there, the more you can think about what does this little brain need, what can I teach it, you know, what does it need to learn right now? Doesn't need to learn. I want to hear what you have to say, let's get in the car and then tell me all about it, a little inhibition. Do we need to teach the frontal of a little control?

So and then allow it to express itself. I find as a parent, when I can shift it that way, it reduces my emotion about it. And then it allows me to make these more logical, reasonable decisions as a parent also.

Laura: Tell me more about that, about how knowing what's going on in their brain helps you be less emotional about it and let and be more conscious and in the moment and intentional. Tell me about that, make that connection for us.

Sarah: We are, as parents, so passionate about our Children and our Children are so passionate about hitting every button that we have right there, just really, really, really good at it and that evokes emotion in our brain. So we have a part of our brain called the Amygdala, I like to call her Amy G because she's just so emotional.

Laura: Oh my gosh, I'm gonna start calling my mind that too.

Sarah: I hope everybody does because it really is helpful to recognize that you have this, you know, Amy Gs in your brain, spicy and totally feisty, angry and passionate and all these other things all at one time, right, can't control it. I always pictured her like a teenage girl, I don't know why, but so you know, all crazy and so as a parent, when your Amy G gets triggered the frontal lobe of your brain, I call her Franny just because I like Franny.

So Franny and Amy G like trying to have a conversation basically and Franny has to call me Maggie down, you know Franny think of Franny like the, you know, I like the secretary of the school, you know the one that really actually runs everything the principal thinks they do, but Franny actually does and she's kind of saying Amy G, hey, I get it, this is emotional but calm down, right?

And so this happens in our kids’ brains when they're freaking out and when Franny is common, Amy G down, Franny can't do anything else that's supposed to, it can't regulate your thoughts and feelings, you can't make logical decisions, it can't pull other information from your brain, it can't say, hey I just heard this podcast and I'm supposed to do this. Yeah, I can't do that.

Laura: And parents, this is why right now, what Sarah's explaining to you. This is why in the moment you can't say all the things like this is why all the scripts just fly out of your head in the moment and then you end up repeating what your parents said to you. This is why.

Sarah: Right. Exactly. And also by the way, just verbal expression is a frowny task. Also you're, you're really overtaxed in front here. She can only do so much at one time. So when our kids evoke that Amy G and Franny's kind discussion, we just can't think and do an act in the ways that we would want to, when Amy G calms down. Right And then the mission ng right Yes. And so there's a couple of things that can help for me.

It's a matter of common MG down in a way that will allow my Franny to kind of open up and think more logically. And the way I do that is kind of by externalizing some of this and objectifying a little bit of it. So if I can look at my child instead of seeing that thing that really knows how to push my buttons and I love him or her to death, but they're driving me crazy right now and instead I can say, okay, well what's happening with that brain?

Maybe that Amy G needs a little bit of help right now. You know, instead of thinking of a kid as well, I woke up on the wrong side of the bed is just really misbehaving today. I might think, mm when's the last time that he ate? You know, maybe his brain needs some fuel right now or hey, you know what? He had three hockey games yesterday and we didn't get to bed till really late. Maybe that brain needs a little bit of sleep and so I'm going to lay off a little bit. I'm going to pull back a little bit from my expectations and get it some rest and then really start to think about it or even say, okay.

I often give the example of a two-year-old crying and clicking on the floor right? Instead of thinking they're misbehaving and how am I going to manage this behavior? You think, okay, like we spoke of earlier, Maybe I need to teach this little brain how to use his words or maybe I need to teach the little brain how to, how to calm its body down and that tells you what to do in that situation versus just screaming and doing all the things like you said that your parents may have done or that you've seen or even that Amy G just naturally wants to do.

We all want to yell and scream. We all want to say, why are you doing this now? We have two minutes to get out the door. I don't need you on the floor. But if you can shift you the way you think it will calm your Amy G and your family will be able to make find the thing you want to do and make those logical decisions.

Laura: I think that's so beautiful and helpful to think about. And you know when we do that, when we're calm our state helps regulate their state, right? I just wanted to highlight something that you just said when you were thinking about, Okay, So what does this little brain need to learn in this moment? Thinking about this two-year-old who's kicking and screaming on the floor? We mean by this?

And I'm just guessing because I know you and I'm just guessing. But what we mean by that is that we're not going to overtly teach them with our words and say you need to learn to use your words like that. We're going to show them how to calm down. We're going to be there with them, we are going to help them calm down and be able to express themselves. Not by saying overtly? Like when you're mad, you need to say that you're mad and not fall on the floor. Like that's not what we mean by teaching. Am I right?

Sarah: A little bit of both? I would say so in the moment anything you say to that little brain with Amy G freaking out is not going to be heard. But when you see, let's use the two-year-old, when you see if they need a break and you give them that break of space and then their body comes down, I think it's very important to connect the two to say okay your body was very excited and needed to calm down, so you know mommy asked you to go in this room and calm your body down. You did that, I'm really proud of you for doing that and if it's about communicating, say next time I want you to use your words, if you tell me I can help you try it now, what did you want to say?

Laura: And then you practice Yes yes during your calm, I think that this is something that I see all the time, like when I used to drop my kids off at daycare, you know in different scenarios, a kid would be having a hard time and the teacher would be saying in the moment, use your words and if they could use their words right then they would be like wait we can trust, you know, they're overwhelmed, they've got a little overwhelmed brain that needs to.

I think sometimes it's helpful to think about like the three levels right there in their primal level and they, you know to use words, they need to move back up through the levels and so we've got to help them get up through the levels into their more logical executive brain and then they can use their words and then we can teach them the words to use.

Sarah: And I also think that the only time the accused are helpful is before the meltdown. So if you can start to see my son would have great signs of when his whole body was. You can see it coming. You can totally see you know they start to hunch their shoulders or they get really tight in their body or the face there's a certain face that he makes that's a great time to say wait a minute. I want you to use your words and you know as kids get older you can cue more often. Um And, and that can help upfront because once a kid's body goes up you get this fight or flight response and again you trigger Amy G And then you have to wait when you come down.

There's no like real good way of calming down. You can try breasts and stuff like that. All that has to be practiced ahead of time though. It can barely be used in the moment and for kids who have different brains and have more trouble regulating. You just kind of have to ride them out. You know I used to see this with kids in schools that their kids with different brains would get these big emotional reaction to nine or 10-year-old who really can't control his body or what he's saying or doing and once he's already up, you have to wait till it comes down to just keep them kind of in a safe space until his body comes down.

But other teachers are professionals would try to walk towards, that child would try to, to use more of those kind of strategies. You just want to let your kid calm down and learn how to control their body. People towards them. They're going to end up hitting or kicking. You're getting themselves in trouble when they didn't need to, they're not trying to hurt you. They're trying to get rid of this feeling in their body that Amy G is just slamming them with.

Laura: Right and they perceive that their brain perceives it as a threat, right? It feels threatening and scary.

Sarah: And overwhelming to the brain. The brain can only handle so much and can only regulate so much. So extra stimuli coming at them is going to be problems. We've even used tips like turning off the lights calming the room, you know, those things, your brain is constantly processing these external stimuli.

So if you reduce those and you can use this tip at home with your kids, if you notice they're getting really agitated, try turning off the lights, Try creating a calmer quieter space. Pay attention to the senses in the room and see if you can reduce those that always helps a, an agitated brain calm down a bit more.

Laura: Yeah, and saying less right? You know, I think that popular kind of message out there in the peaceful parenting world is to validate their feelings and you know, we talk a lot and sometimes when a kid's brain is activated and overwhelmed, we need to talk a lot less.

Sarah: Oh yeah Tom Fallon and who wrote 123 magic says this all the time and he is absolutely right about, right about it. You know, they're not little adults and you do need to reduce the language that you're using at times, but that doesn't mean you don't talk to them. That means in the moment you don't and this goes back to what we talked about creating goals and grow and grow charts because I can tell you my son's nine and I can't tell you how many conversations we've had later at night where I lay down and say, I understand that you felt this way, but you can't act that way when we're outside in public.

If you have something you need to say, you can come and talk to me about it. But in that moment, if you act in that way, this is what's going to happen every single time. So come and talk to me about it. It's absolutely valuable what you're feeling. I understand you don't like being in that situation. I understand that how you feel about this and thank you for telling me and we can talk about that and now is a great time, but it's not good to talk with your behavior and I always say kids speak with their behavior and so when you see a lot of this stuff, it really does the outward displays of behavior.

If you start thinking of them as little brains, you'll start to realize ah they're speaking to me, they're trying to tell me something and I'm going to put that one, tuck it away for later and then I'm going to put it back into their brain plan and I'm going to use this to make sure that I have a conversation with them to kind of empathetically listen, make sure they feel hurt all of these things, but not in the moment, if there's something that's happening that they need to learn how to control.

Laura: Yeah, I love that, I think it's so important, that's not in the moment. So in the moment our only goal is to get their brain back online, right, and then we can either be proactive and if we know they're working on a skill, they're working on building things, we can be proactive or we can kind of go from a retroactive place and book in those experiences, but in the moment it's their brains aren't available, they're just not available for that, right?

Sarah: And I think a good tip for parents, I love that, by the way, the retroactive and productivity, that's absolutely a great tip and I would say for parents the majority of the time, the behaviors in the moment that you're talking about are about teaching the brain control and regulation right? Or teaching it that it needs communication because remember if kids are speaking with their behavior then they're trying to tell you something.

Either they need to communicate that to you in a different way or they're not really sure how to regulate the way that emotion makes their body or mind feel. So those are two tips when you're starting to think about your kids’ brain. All right, what are the skills that they might need to learn? Those are usually key ones?

You know if I have a teenager who's refusing to get in the car, going to make me late for work and having all these issues when really it's about a fight they had at school and they don't want to go to school because they're worried about seeing their friends that's a communication issue even though the behavior is not getting in the car on time and making everybody else late. So you kind of shift the way you think about it and it helps to, to chill out Amy G.

Laura: And you just beautifully circled back to the importance of insight and modeling that and inviting them to check in with themselves what was going on for you right then what were you thinking about? Where were you feeling it in your body? You know, what were you thinking about right before you got overwhelmed all those good insight questions.

Sarah: Right? And sometimes kids don't know, sometimes I don't know right? Sometimes I don't know absolutely to be able to those questions as we even started talking about their great things to ask because they start to help kids gain this insight and this self-awareness and you know, I was thinking about it, I don't, the first time I probably ever saw myself on paper or who I was was maybe when I wrote a resume or college essays or something like that, you know, you don't get that opportunity very often.

But if we start young 2,3,4 you can, you don't have to have glow and grow charts out the wazoo but you can start the concepts uh what did you do really good, What do you really like about today? What are you working on when you go back to school? You know those, those concepts you can do at a younger age and build up, they work all the time. I was going to say twenties, but they work for me now, you know, to say, you know what I really loved how I did on this, but I'm going to work on this thing today because I think that if I work on that, I'll feel better about it, you know, it's a great conversation.

Laura: Absolutely. I think you're touching on something that's really important to is that we don't do this just around the problems right? So if we're practicing this and teaching this as a skill that we want our kids to know how to do. It's got to be, you know, it can't just be problem focused because then they're going to be like, oh, I'm in trouble again or oh, I did something wrong again and no, I only do this when I'm in trouble or when I did something wrong. We don't want those negative associations.

Sarah: No, you definitely want to kind of do them. I don't know, once a month, once every couple of weeks of just having the conversation, I'll have a conversation with my kids in the car. Hey guys, you know, I was just thinking about it. It's time to read. You are rhetorical, what is, what are you working on? What should I work on? What do we want to get better at doing? You know, my daughter might say, you know, I'd like to get better at doing this craft. She likes, she's a crafty person, so she likes to do that a little bit more. You know, my son is more of a sports guy, so he might want to work on his hockey, does deck hockey.

It's the biggest thing right now. And so he would love to work on a stick handling skills or something. So we do it across the board, including things like I want to make some more friends, mom, which we moved in September of the year, we went into the pandemic. So we were here for school from September through March and then the whole world shut down. So my kids were lucky in a sense, they got some friends, but they didn't really get to make those deep connections in school.

So that's when their list of things to do is, you know what I really want to connect with some more people and we talked about different ways we can do that. Can we get into some clubs, can we do some things online until the world opens up? You know, what could we do that might meet that goal? And it's a fabulous way of doing it and it makes these happy, healthy brains that we're raising.

Laura: Beautiful. Well, Sarah, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and kind of geeking out a little bit about brains with us. This is a lovely conversation. Why don't you tell us where my listeners can come and find you and learn more about brains from you?

Sarah: Yeah, well my website is a great place to start. So it's brainbehaviorbridge.com. You can also find me on Facebook and all of my Facebook and Instagram links are their, LinkedIn links are there. So I would be happy to talk to people.

And then, you know, I would say just send me an email or give me a call. I always anyone, I mean you gave me this great opportunity to talk about brains. I'm happy to talk about raising brains with anybody and that's just Dr. Allen, drallen@brainbehaviorbridge.com. So thanks so much for having me. This is probably my favorite conversation I've ever had.

Laura: Well, awesome. Well, we love talking about brains here, so thank you so much for having us. I really coming on with us. We really appreciate it.

Sarah: Thank you.

Laura: Wow, that was such a great conversation with Sarah and I'm so glad that you all stuck around towards the end because I wanted to mention, I don't know if you know this, but I have a freebie that you can download that actually teaches your kids brains to wire up for self-regulation and executive functioning.

So some of the things that we were talking about in this episode, there are ways to practice these skills with your kids that are fun and engaging that your kids won't even know that they are building in things like emotion regulation and impulse control because they're having so much fun. So if you go to laurafroyen.com/selfreg, you will get my beautiful list of self reg games, fun games you can play with your kids um to help them build and hardwire self-regulation into their brains. So I hope that you go check that out and thanks for tuning into the balance parent podcast. See you next week.

August 17, 2021

Episode 72: Divorce from a Child's Perspective with Kimberly Ewertz (Divorce Series No. 2)

August 17, 2021/ Laura Froyen

I know that for most couples, as they are navigating a divorce and separation, one of their biggest worries is the effect it will have on their children. Most modern research on divorce is showing that the negative effects on children can usually be attributed to the negative conflict in the years leading up to the divorce, rather than the divorce itself, and can actually be minimal when the couple divorces and then co-parents in a "healthy" way (see last week's episode for how!).

However, we actually have very few accounts from the child's perspective on the effects of divorce and how to make it easier on kids. As parents committed to honoring children's emotions & experience, doesn't it just make sense then that we would seek to understand divorce from a child's perspective? So when an author reached out to me with a book filled with first-hand accounts of adults who reflect on their parent's divorce & guidance to parents navigating these waters, I knew I had to share them with you!

And so for the second episode of the Divorce Series, we are going to focus on the child's experience. And to have this conversation, I'm bringing in a colleague, expert, and a former analyst, Kimberly Ewertz. After experiencing divorce, she witnessed the devastating effect it had on her child. She got support and with the help of a therapist realized that some of what she had been doing in an attempt to protect her son was actually making things worse. She very bravely details these mistakes and how she went about repairing with her son, and her insights and suggestions actually apply to ALL parent-child relationships!

Here is a summary of our conversation:

What children experience during and after a divorce
How do we help children get through parents' separation
How to have healthy emotional boundaries with your children
How to know when kids need support

To learn more about a child's perspective on divorce, get Kim's book Family Redefined: Childhood Reflections on the Impact of Divorce. It's available on Amazon.com and her website www.familyredefinedbook.com. Her book has been nominated for several prestigious awards and won first place in the Midwest Book Awards for the non-fiction Family/Parenting category. And to be updated on Kim's work, follow her on Facebook @FamilyRedefinedBook.

Hello, I'm Dr. Laura Froyen and this is The Balanced Parent Podcast where overwhelmed, stressed out and disconnected parents go to find tools, mindset shifts and practices to help them stop yelling at the people they love and start connecting on a deeper level. All delivered with heaping doses of grace and compassion. Join me in conversations that will help you get clear on your goals and values and start showing up in your parenting, your relationships, your life with openhearted authenticity and balance. Let's go!

Laura: Hello everybody. This is Dr. Laura Froyen with another episode in The Balanced Parent Podcast and we were continuing with our series on divorce, co-parenting, separation, and all things family-separation related. And in this episode, we're going to be focusing on the child's experience. And so to have this conversation, I'm bringing in a colleague and expert, a former journalist who after her own divorce and witnessing the effect it had on her child and realizing the limited availability of children's reflections and perspectives on divorce, she knew that there was a story to tell here. And so I'm bringing in Kim Ewertz and she's going to help us understand more about what kids go through in the midst of divorce and settling into new co-parenting relationships and arrangements and answer some of our questions.

So, Kim welcome to the show. I'm so excited to have you. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about who you are, what you do and your book?

Kim: Well, thank you first of all, Laura for inviting me to your show and having this platform to inform and get the word out that this book is available because I believe it can help every divorce parent as well as be the perfect resource for them to help their children.

I'm a divorced mom. My son Tony was 10 and I knew I was getting us out of very bad environment, emotionally physically abusive environment. So going in, I was so naive to know that this was only going to be positive. How could this have any negative repercussions if I'm taking us out of a bad environment. But unfortunately it did and I witnessed that for the first year after the divorce when he pulled away from me and stopped saying I love you. It was heartbreaking. So years have passed and I've always wanted to get something out there to help divorced parents and their children in a way that I needed and couldn't find because there's plenty of information out there from the experts, you know, which is wonderful and beneficial. But what is the child feeling? What is the child experiencing and how do we help them get through that? The best way I felt to do that was to use my journalistic abilities and tell other people's stories.

So I gave voice to nine adult children of divorce and each chapter in the book is chapter each of their story from the time they first found out about the divorce all the way up into present day. When I interviewed them, I reflected on what that time was like and how the impact of their parents' decision to divorce has carried through in their lives and affected them. The 10th chapter I felt important because it offers how to do it right. It's a mother who had a 10 month old when her husband came home and said marriage is over. I went out. So now her child is 10 years old and she reflects back on those 10 years and the difference that she's seen in her child compared to since she's been remarried she's had two other children And they're both girls. So she can really see that there is a difference and she knows that that was partly mostly due to the divorce. And even though she was only 10 months old, it's had and continues to have an impact on her.

So I just want to get this out there and I felt it important to interview professionals in the field of marriage and family counseling so that all throughout the chapters we can provide those parents that are reading the book really helpful advice and information that they might not have the ability or the resources to go get counseling themselves. And there's even at the back of the book, A Q and A. And it's a Q and A. With the experts. So it's additional questions that are very common among divorced parents that I felt was important to include as well.

Laura: I think that's so important. It's great to have tips and tricks and ideas for us to do as parents when we're in these situations. But I also think, you know, one of my biggest reasons we're doing what I do is I see myself as a child advocate. And so I really love that you are bringing awareness to the perspectives of kind of the child's experience. I think that that's really wonderful and so important and missing in so much of what we do, even in the hair now when kids are little, we often neglect to think about what their experiences are, what their ideas are and ask them, get curious with them. So what are some of the things that you learned about a child's experience of divorce? Was there anything that surprised you or that stood out to you?

Kim: Oh yeah, over and over again. But the one that always pops to mind was my very first interview. So that was over five years ago when I started this whole project. She was in her mid-50s, her name's Lisa in the book and all the names are fictional to keep everyone anonymous for their sake. She was six years old when her parents announced her they're going to separate. So she spent the majority of her time with her mother and all parents. Do we put on a brave front, we want to show that our children that were strong and that we're going to get through this. So, Lisa's mom did exactly that. And in the interview, she said if my mom had just kind of let down her guard and been honest with me about what her fears were and what she was really experiencing at the same time reassuring her that they would get through this. She said that would have just given her such a feeling of camaraderie that oh, it's okay to be scared right now, because mom feels scared too.

So by opening ourselves up and being honest with our children, even in a worst case scenario, like a divorce, you're only gonna bring your child closer to you and we all want them to be honest with us. So why shouldn't we be honest with them? I thought that was eye opening. And I'm like, oh, I wish I had known that.

Laura: I think that that's something for all parents to know that kids are born aware. They know and they are very interested in our emotional experience, our well being. Because they rely on us, right? And so they need to know that we're okay. And they can tell when we're faking it. They can tell when that wall is up, when our guard is up, when we're kind of holding it together and not being authentic and real they can tell. Then there's this tricky balance of being honest, being real and then but not leaning on them, you know, having good healthy boundaries, reassuring them that, yes, this is a hard time. And these are the places where I'm going to get support from adults because adults go to adults and kids go to adults, you know, right. But yeah.

Kim: Some of the therapists have said exactly that large. They said, you know, reassure your child as you're being honest with them of what you're experiencing, that mom or dad has resources. We have friends. I have family members, I have, you know, classes that I'm taking and I'm seeing somebody who's helping me through this journey so that I can be my best me and I can help you. And together we're going to get through this because you know, to forget to reassure them, then the child becomes a bit parentified meaning they take on the role of the parent and they think, well I have to take care of mom or I have to take care of dad and that happens all too often with, you know, a lot of cases of divorce, one of the parents just shuts down as being a parental role model and the child because they live in kind of like a self absorbed world. You know, it's all about them. They feel like there is no one else other than them to take on that responsibility and that's too daunting for any child. You know, even if they're a teenager, it's not fair. Please keep that in mind when, you know, you're going through this.

Laura: And this is true for going through any hard times. Like even now in the midst we're recording this kind of at the, you know, we're a month out from the year mark of the pandemic. You know, I mean, it's hard time for parents, just even the average parent has to be remembered to be real, authentic, honest and also have good emotional boundaries where they're relying on their support systems as opposed to relying on their kids. These are important takeaways.

You mentioned something that made me kind of curious if this ever came up in your book. And if you have any ideas for parents, like how do you know, when your kid needs support? So oftentimes as parents are moving through this, they're getting support either from a therapist. There's even divorced therapists that specialize in separating well, but how do you know when your kids need support?

Kim: Well, all the experts I talked to said that even from, you know, zero to two, you know, the child is going to feel the stress or the frustration that, you know, the environment of the home, even if they can't comprehend it, you know, intellectually that they're taking that in. And so you have to be all the more present with your child and give them the additional attention they need so that they have that feeling of connection. Connection is huge. And so a child that feels they're not receiving that may sometimes, you know, little older, like toddlers on up, they may start displaying anger because anger is one of the very first responses to finding out that their parents are no longer going to stay together and they'll do it through play. They'll do it through maybe crashing cars are, you know, having dolls fight.

So if you can see that, you know, the play that your children are doing is a bit different. You know, and you're seeing some hostility come out. Or even in their words, you know, if they're being hostile to you, then you know, that they're just trying to reach you in some way and they're so young that they don't have that skill set yet to say, please help me. So they're doing it through, you know, actions and mostly actions if they're younger and the older kids, you know, you have to just be on again the word honesty, but you have to be honest with them and say, I know this is a hard time and I'm sorry we're all going through this, but I want you to talk to me, you know.

And then you do what they call active listening. I believe that I have that correct. One of the therapists says, you know, you're not leading the conversation. You're letting the child take you where they want to go. You know, talk about what they want to talk about. And you allow them to have their feelings. You know, if they're negative or even if they're angry at you, my son got so angry at me. He was 10. So all of his anger was coming out and I didn't, sorry, Hey, we're all real parents here. Even though it's been a long time ago. It's, you know, remembering those days when he was so angry with me, he stopped saying, I love you mom. You know, that was our good night. I love you Tony. I love you too. Mom See you in the morning and that was gone for over nine months.

I at the time was going to therapy because I sent my son to therapy first thinking I can't help you. I'm kind of an emotional mess. So get you the help you need through outside resources. And he was just one as another important. I'm sorry. I'm rambling on.

Laura: You're doing great. This is, I'm like learning and this is so good.

Kim: But that's an another important aspect about therapy is children don't always respond to it. They might not be ready to confront what they're going through or they just don't get it. And maybe they were never that verbal with their feelings and emotions at home. So to take them to the, you know, atmosphere where they're sitting in a group where they're sitting one on one and say, okay, time to talk, tell this person you've never met before, this complete stranger what your inner thoughts and feelings are. They'll be like, no, no, that's not gonna happen. And my son would hide under the table at the therapy room, you know, the group therapy room and wait till my shoes at the door and then he would come out.

So he was not receptive. So that therapist suggested that I get therapy and it was the best thing I could have done because by getting help for me, I was able to be stronger and more healthy for him. And then we eventually got through that journey together and we came out on the other end of it all the stronger. Yeah, I don't know if that answers your question. I know I rambled on. I'm sorry.

Laura: I know it was so good. I think you hit on something that a big takeaway from what I'm hearing you say, and from these stories is that the conscious and respectful parenting that all of my listeners are working towards right now, that those are foundational skills that help carry you through hard times as a family, Whatever your family structure looks like being able to listen and hold space for your kids feelings, being able to accept them, acknowledging that when our kids are struggling and where we're struggling with our kids often it's us we have to look at instead of them that feeling our own cup, taking care of ourselves for so that we can hold space for our kids. You're hitting on all of the high points of what I want people to take away from all of my podcast episodes.

Kim: So that's why your program is so beneficial to parents everywhere. Even though my son is all grown up now. It's like I've learned from your podcast.

Laura: Is it okay if I ask like, what does Tony think of your work, your son? What does?

Kim: Yeah, of course. Let me talk about my son.

Laura: I wish you all could see her facing now. She's all lit up just like we all do. Apparently that never goes away.

Kim: Ever. Never. He's 41 now. So he designed the cover of the book.

Laura: Oh wow. Yeah, it's super supportive.

Kim: Super supportive. He has a chapter in the book. It's on you know, anonymous name. But at the end when I share my thoughts as I deal with each chapter, I let the reader know that this is a special chapter for me because it's my son's story. So he wanted to participate, he wanted it to be in there because he knew how important this was. So he has been super supporter as my husband has been as well, so I could not be prouder of either of them and I'm so grateful for their continued support.

Laura: That's beautiful. I think something that I'm picking up right now too is that the message that you don't have to know how to do this perfectly. You can have ups and downs, you can move through it with grace and self compassion and you can make adjustments along the way. And the outcome can be a wonderful close and loving relationship with your child.

Kim: Exactly, yes, exactly. We stumbled through it many times you were able to reconnect and the older he got, the more honest I could be. But I tried always to do what the experts explain is one of the worst things you can do. So I try to always refrain from putting down his father. Even though there were lots of reasons to do that. That's something else. You vent to your friends, your family members to your therapist. You don't have to carry that anger and frustration inside. And once I had that release through the therapy, you know, I could get all those feelings out and not burden my son with them because it's unfair to taint his relationship with his father because all the experts say it's the child that needs to make the decision about how they feel about their parent.

The other parent can't persuade them one way or the other. They have to be neutral territory because you're just hurting your child. If you're trying to, you know, downgrade the other parent, it makes them feel like they're being disloyal to both parents. You just do not want to do that to your child. They don't deserve that.

Laura: No, they don't. And I think that boundary is so important, having really healthy boundaries around that, around what is your relationship with your former partner and what is your child's relationship with your former partner and not doing anything that gets in the way of that Even when it's hard. And I, for many families, it's very, very difficult. Especially if, you know, there's some very big reasons why. Yeah, very high conflict. Yeah. It's really hard but really important. And I think you are so right to highlight why it's so important for you to have for the parents to have their support systems with adults where they can have that outlet so that they can be more balanced and well regulated. I mean really what that's what it is. It's self regulation, Be well regulated and emotionally balanced with their kids for the benefit of the child, not for the benefit of the ex partner, but for the child.

Kim One of the experts use the example of on a plane, you know with the oxygen mask, you put it on yourself first before you do it for your child. Because if you're not taking care of yourself, you can't take care of them. So it's the same philosophy, is the same school of thought. You know, we have to take care of us so that we can be our strongest and give them our strength when they need it and just let them that even if what they want to say is negative, whatever their, you know, situation they’re being negative about, they're going through this difficult time. So let them have that that space to just be honest and tell you, you know, I'm mad at you for leaving dad or I'm mad at dad for not being with us, whatever it is. Just allow them to talk.

Laura: Allow, allow, allow. Yeah.

Kim: Never shut them down.

Laura: Try not to take it personally too, it’s just hard, so hard. But that, allow, always feels so spacious to me like that. There's when we're allowing people to have their own experiences and perspectives. Even small children, there's just more room, there's more room for me, there's more room for the child and there is just you know, it just feels less, I don't know. Their experience can be out here when we're allowing it can be out in front of us. We can see it as opposed to taking it in and like taking it on as our own. Do you know what I mean? I don't know.

Kim: That's a very good example. You know that if you know, you're witnessing what they're going.

Laura: Yeah, witnessing it, not necessarily agreeing with it or saying yes you're right but saying yeah, you're acknowledging feel that way. Yeah.

Kim: Acknowledge their feelings. That's as important as agreeing with them. I think like you said, you don't have to agree with them with everything, but you acknowledge that they have every right to that feeling. I think that's key.

Laura: I think so too. I know that we're talking about in situations of divorce, but really like this just applies to everyday parents and every relationship to this is the basis of healthy resilient relationships, you know? Beautiful.

Kim: Takes so much away from it.

Laura: Absolutely. Because that's what the parent-child relationship is at the end of the day, right? It's just a human relationship and the basics are pretty universal. Kimberly, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom on this. Um why don't we make sure that everybody knows the full name of your book and where to find it? Of course, will have links in the show notes, but sometimes people like to hear it out loud.

Kim: Oh sure. The title of the book is Family Redefine: Childhood reflections on the impact of divorce. And of course it's available on Amazon, but it's also available with my publisher, Little Creek Press. Oh, and if I might boast a bit. My book is a finalist in the Independent Book Awards for the category of family and parenting. I congratulate and feel honored. Just you know, I know it's cheesy to say, I feel honored to be nominated, but it's the truth. I'm like, there's truth to that.

Laura: That's wonderful.

Kim: That competition is judged by librarians and educators and that just like brought it a lump to my throat. And I'm like, those people see the value to this book. So I did good.

Laura: You did. You did. I think that everybody listening has for sure taken away something that they will apply to their family that they can use right now today. And I hope that everybody who is listening will go and pick up this book because I think it's not just parents who are moving through a divorce or separation that could benefit from some of the takeaways here. There is not enough of children's perspectives out there for us to learn from. There's just isn't and I'm so thankful that you wrote a book from this perspective and that you shared it here with us.

Kim: Thank you so much Laura. I can't thank you enough. You're a beacon of light to parents everywhere.

Laura: The feeling is for letting me be on your show, so happy to have you. Thank you.

August 10, 2021

Episode 71: Conscious Co-Parenting with Ashley Wood (Divorce Series No. 1)

August 10, 2021/ Laura Froyen

One of the things that we focus on a lot here at The Balanced Parent is conscious communication. Often that comes up in the context of couples, but the skills I teach are just as important for families that are in the midst of separation or divorce or are looking for support in navigating co-parenting with a former partner.

This stage is difficult. It brings in fear, depression, and anxiety towards what will happen to us in the future. If you are experiencing this right now, I want you to know that you aren't alone & there is help & support available. And so for two weeks, we will have a Divorce Series wherein you will get resources on how to navigate through this stage especially 1) how to consciously co-parent with a former spouse, and 2) how to understand our children's feelings and give them the support that they need.

Even if you aren't currently in the midst of these life changes and transitions, these episodes are filled with golden nuggets on setting healthy emotional boundaries with ourselves and others. I highly recommend you give them a listen, there is something there for everyone!

And so for the first episode in this series, I’m bringing in one of my favorite Instagram and TikTok accounts, Ashley Wood of @theconsciouscoparent. She is a coach who specializes in working with mothers of young children who are overwhelmed and worried about the emotional and financial drain of divorce and feel hopeless about the idea of co-parenting. She also has a great podcast called Split: The After Ever After Podcast. She helps moms who have difficulty leaving relationships to overcome and navigate divorce. And in this episode, she will give us tips and advice on how to consciously co-parent with our former spouse.

Here is an overview of what we talked about:

How to preserve our dignity and relationship with our kids after a divorce
How to co-parent with a former spouse
What are the common misunderstandings in co-parenting
How to communicate with a co-parent and getting on the same page

If you are in need of more support as you navigate through divorce, you can find more resources from Ashley here: linktr.ee/theconsciouscoparent. Her Instagram account is @theconsciouscoparent so do follow her as well.

Ashley: Absolutely. Thank you for having me here and thank you for that lovely intro. I mean if that doesn't hype a person up, I will.

Laura: Your reels and your TikTok are so much fun, I'm so excited to be talking with you and have everybody know you who needs help with co-parenting.

Ashley: Oh, thank you so much. Yeah, so I do love TikTok, even just as a quick scroll through my page, we'll see that. So I actually work in the car business. I've been in the automotive industry for about 10 years, so that's my day job. But since I split with my ex almost two years ago and I'm now a co parenting toddler mom about part way through my divorce journey, I found coaching, so divorce coaching and became really passionate about that. I met a local mediator, we've become friends and we started this podcast and now in training to become a divorce coach myself because it's just something that I'm really, really passionate about and I think that as difficult processed separation and divorce, it could be so much easier and people can transition from like survival mode to truly thriving so much faster if they have the right support. So that's a little bit about me.

Laura: I love that. You know, I think we need support at all big life transitions and divorce is a huge one. It's a huge identity shift. It's a huge shift for your kids and for your family and why not have support for that, you know?

Ashley: Yes, absolutely. I think that in the early stages, much like any difficult transition, like you said, people are really stuck in there, like reptilian brain, you know, their fear, fight or flight response. And so they're not curious about possibilities. They're not necessarily reaching out to all our exploring all avenues that they could take to get the job done and instead they're just very impulsive just in that survival mode, ironically, that's the time when you need the most support so.

Laura: Of course you do it and it makes sense to like, as this is all happening. There's so much feelings, there's so many, there's stigma and shame layered in there and there's fears about yourself and what it will mean, what it means about you, what it means for your family. There's all these thoughts that get flowing and you know, I didn't even know that divorce coaching was a thing. So I'm so glad to know that it is. That's awesome.

Ashley: Yeah, I think it is a loss, right? Like it's grief. It totally is, you know, for your relationship, for your identity. Like you said for me, it was like the hopes and dreams of what, how I wanted my daughter to be raised and what her idea of family would mean. I grew up with my parents had divorced and that I never wanted that. I mean, nobody goes into a marriage and has kids thinking, okay, yeah, we're going to split in a few years and yeah, so,

Laura: But statistically speaking, that's what happens a lot of the time too, you know. Yeah. And so then the question comes, how do we do it well, right? So how do we do it in a way that preserves our dignity, preserves our kids, relationships with ourselves and with their parent, preserves kind of the common humanity in a family? Do you have any ideas like how do you do that? How do you dissolve a marriage in a way that kind of builds a foundation for kind of a shared meaning around what this new way of being in a family is?

Ashley: Yeah, I would not label this as necessarily an easy task, but it can be done with, you know, a few things. One having the support like you said, also, one thing that really helped me and now seeing as I'm working with others within this community is shifting from like the story of divorce and what has happened in the past to the decisions of divorce and focusing forward on how you want to look back at who you were during this time and who you want to be because a lot of people, you know, they're holding on to all of this resentment towards their partner, all of this sadness, all these negative emotions. And it's not to say to just shove those deep down and not address them. Like certainly you need to do that, but it's focusing forward every step of the way. How do I want my future to look? How do I want my kids to grow up through this because this is happening, the relationship is over. But what can I do today and moving forward to limit conflict and ensure that I can still live a happy life and my children can still live a happy life and also your former spouse too, Right?

Laura: Yeah, because of course we want good things for them too for the most part, most of the time. And I heard a piece and then that’s what you're saying too, that it seems like taking really good care of yourself, being very clear on what your work is to do and what's not the work of the children. What, where that work has to happen on your own with a therapist or with a coach, right? And having good boundaries around that process.

Ashley: Absolutely, Like I before this process, I really did not have a lot of boundaries in any of my relationships. So that was a big positive for me coming out of this and where that started to take place is when I realized how little control I had moving forward and I realized obviously when we were separating that when my former spouse had our daughter, he would be parenting his way, but I don't think I actually understood that until it started happening. And especially for people who are coming out of the relationship where there's very little trust, maybe there was an affair or even just poor behavior between spouses. It's very hard to then and trust that person with the other person you care the most about in the entire world because possible. Yeah. And I kept me, stuck in pure grief for quite a while. You know, I remember like there was about a week where I got really sick and I couldn't even get out of bed and I had always like, understood what real depression was, like, I thought I understood and I could empathize with people and they said like they were paralyzed with it, but like, that happened to me, it's really important to have support in place in that self care and have someone like a coach or a therapist to help you along the way.

Laura: So how did you get past that point of just, I don't know if I can handle entrusting my kids to this other person when we're so different. I want to talk about differences in parenting styles, you know, more generally, but that is almost like a mindset kind of thing that probably has to get worked through. How did you do that work?

Ashley: Yeah, it really is. And you know, I will say like, my daughter loves her dad and he loves her and I'm really happy that we're able to support each other so that, you know, we're both actively in her life, so I'm very happy about that. But like I said, there was little to no trust between us at the time we had horrible conflict. It was court ordered by a judge that we had to have someone help with those exchanges. So you know, without getting into the full backstory, just a pin, a picture of like things were pretty rough. But you know, realizing that legally if your child is like quote and quote, physically safe and not in harm or your former partner hasn't done anything to that you've been able to document as that the child is an unsafe environment, then that's it.

You don't really have a lot of control there. So it's accepting that. But then getting to that acceptance piece was again, looking at how do I want our daughter to grow up and how is she when she's with her dad and taking myself out of the equation? Because when I separated, what had happened between us and I looked at how are they when they spend time together, she was happy to see him. She was happy when she came back. Obviously some transitionary things. You know, she's very little. So like that when she would come back home after a weekend, she might have a few tantrums just because it was a big change. But overall she was happy. It's really dividing what has happened between you and the other person. And looking at how they are as a parent and what the relationship is between them and your shared child.

Laura: Yeah. I love what you're saying. It's almost like, you know when we have all of this stuff between us and the other parent, it's like taking off a pair of sunglasses so you can see the situation clearly so we can see clearly what's happening between them and there's a bit of the releasing of control. I mean, I think parenthood is a constant lesson in the art of letting go of another opportunity to learn that lesson of releasing control, accepting what is and then finding where your power is. Where do I get to craft a story that's meaningful for me, right? That's what I want, what I choose.

Ashley: Yeah, exactly. And I think that's why again, going back to support is so key because a lot of people, even if they're not necessarily going into litigation, but they meet with a lawyer and have a consultation and find out what are my legal rights. What are their legal rights and if there's been some sticky situations in the past between you and your partner and you may have some concerns and you have a lawyer tell you while you know, this might be a 50/50 access situation regardless of how you may feel about that person and the lack of trust. That is really hard to absorb.

So having someone like you said, who can be your thinking partner and help you get curious and more open-minded about, okay, let's just see where this goes and giving it a chance and then again, not focusing on what's happened in the past. I just think that's really important.

Laura: I think so too. You know, I heard you say just a little bit ago too, about you talked really openly and candidly about how hard it has been for you. And I really appreciate that message because I think that sometimes we can get like rose-colored glasses kind of view on social media and stuff. And I really appreciate that about your content, that you give a much more realistic view of the parts of it. And we get to see how it's hard sometimes, but we also get to see the benefits of putting a kid first, putting the relationship that the child has with each parent ahead of our other adult concerns. What are some of the things that like that you feel like parents need to know about co-parenting? Like the, what are the myths that you like to bust? What are the, you know, the common misunderstanding?

Ashley: So there's a lot on social media, like you just said about co-parenting, which I think it's great that it takes away a lot of the shame and guilt associated with divorce when kids are involved. So I think that's awesome. But the part that I don't like and why I am really building up my continent with, you know, my experience is you don't have to be best friends and that is for things to be successful and to have low conflict and to have children who feel equally loved by their parents and feel like they still have a family unit, you don't have to be besties. In fact, that can quite often lead to lots of conflict and the people that I've spoken with and you know, the podcasting that I'm doing now myself, that's not like the norm. That's why I try to do a lot of videos about, you know, I did one recently where my ex and my fiance are just having a quick chat in the driveway after pick up and drop off and that was a win. We couldn't have done that a year ago. This was even just being able to do pick up and drop off between the two of us and not have a third party anymore, like is great. So I think it's celebrating those little winds is really important and it builds your confidence back up.

I know when I was going through this, like my confidence as a parent was at an all time low, I just felt like I'd let my daughter down and I had ruined her life. But that's not the case. I think you should just strive to do whatever necessary to keep conflict low because studies and research shows that it's not necessarily the divorce itself that determines the child's resilience. It's the amount of conflict within the family between the parents.

Laura: Yeah, I'm so glad you're mentioning that research. I think that that's something that are still so misunderstood about divorce and separating. I know that there are people listening right now who are contemplating it interesting in a home that's filled with conflict and not great interactions. And they're staying for their kids because they love them and they want to give them a family. You know, that they thought they were supposed to have the research really is pretty clear that it divorce itself is not the problem. It's the conflict. That's the problem. So, and regardless of whether you stay together, you don't, you've got to learn new conflict skills, right? Regardless.

Ashley: For sure, Jennifer and I on our podcast, we talk a lot heavily about communication skills. And another kind of benefit to me in this whole journey is learning how to be a better listener and how to be an active listener and how to communicate my needs clearly and again, bring it up again, but boundaries, boundaries and respecting boundaries.

Yeah. And so, you know, sometimes have people slide into my DMS like I just texted on this now he's saying that or she's saying that and it's like, okay, first of all you're texting, why are we texting?

Laura: You don't need to? Yeah. So what do we need to do? How should we communicate with our co-parents?

Ashley: So there's a few options, like some people will use apps such as like our Family Wizard, which I don't use personally. It's an app that you can text through. It logs, everything attracts everything. And it also filters out any inappropriate language which can be helpful. But I think the greater takeaway in forms of communication is to do whatever you need to do to ensure that you are responding and not just reacting a lot of the time when you get a text, it can derail so quickly because you're making assumptions about what was said and you're replying to quickly and more often than not, we're not taking the time to really think about what the person is trying to say and what we want to say back to focus forward.

So I would personally recommend, first of all, is it child-centered? Because if it's not really don't need to get into that also, it's a lot. But this is where boundaries come in because I would never say you want to just go someone entirely, but you need to make it very clear if you can early on that I think it's best that for right now we just try to focus on only communicating about what the kids need, their immediate needs are and giving yourself some space in the beginning, know that it's definitely possible you can maybe grow a bit of a friendship later on and have more chit chat later on, but your emotions are so intense in the beginning, like you need that space.

Laura: They may always be intact.

Ashley: Always be. And that's ok.

Laura: Yeah. An intense relationship with this person, a deep love person that created a family. Yeah, so things might always be there. Okay, so then maybe after we're out of kind of the intense conflict stage, we've done some of the pieces that you're talking about here, where we've had really conscious communication, we've had really good boundaries and maybe we're moving into like where we can feel a little bit more comfortable. Are there ways to kind of get on the same page as parents when you're co-parenting? You know what I mean? So we talked about before, you know when we just have to kind of accept that they are going to do things different. I believe that to be true. Even when you are parenting in the same house there's a piece of staying in your own lane no matter where your parenting partner is parenting, you know.

Ashley: I think it really depends on who you were as a couple and the reasons why you divorced in the first place you know maybe if it was just like lack of communication mostly and like you know over the years that builds up and then there was just no going back. You probably have a much greater chance of being able to. Like you said, once things have settled you have a parenting plan in place, Your divorce is finalized. Maybe you both have new partners. Is there a chance that your kid tells you something that happened at your former spouses and you want to have a discussion about it with them and it goes well, you can set time aside, make time for a discussion on at that time and move forward. But you are coming from a really toxic relationship or someone with a personality disorder. There was some abuse like you don't necessarily have to full-on parallel parent where you basically don't talk at all, but I think that in order to keep things as low conflict as possible unless it's a health or safety issue, you should really try to stay in your own lane.

Like just as an example, I'm in a fairly good place with my ex now, but I catch myself wanting to insert myself into his parenting. Still, quite a bit like we had a little bit of chit-chat today, just on the phone about something and he told me about my daughter throwing a tantrum over the weekend and he said he had to put her on a time out. You know, I told her you're going right to your bed, and immediately I wanted to be like, can we just not call it like, you're going to bed? Like, were you doing the 123? Like I, you know, I want to go into that, but I knew if I did that, there was a chance you might react by you're questioning me, you're questioning my parenting and ultimately I know she was okay. They adapt to their circumstances, right? Like, I mean, even who my daughter is at daycare is probably a little bit different than who she is with me, her teacher and I both have rules, but they're not exactly the same. And that's OK because she learns different things from daycare and different things from me, and that's what makes us all well rounded. I don't know if that really answers.

Laura: No, that's so helpful to think about those things and there's a piece of it to that. Like we can't be responsible for all of the relationships our children are going to have were responsible for the relationship we have. We can absolutely do things to protect the relationships that they have with other people. I mean, and this goes for everybody in our kids' lives, had to figure this out with my own parents that they would do things that I did not like that were not in line.

And I had to take out like where is the line, where is damage occurring, where is hurt occurring? What is my role in this is my role to set a limit. Helping my daughter set a boundary is my role to comfort my daughter afterwards, because my daughter has some really firm body boundaries. She does not like to be touched unexpectedly. She has a heightened nervous system from some birth trauma and it's just there, you know, And so there's one grandparent in particular who touches her unexpectedly and it's really hard on her nervous system. A lot of my work with her has been rather than focusing on that grandparent has been focusing on my daughter. Yes. How do you set that boundary? How do you communicate that you know?

Ashley: To empowering her? I think it depends on that note and I love everything that you just said they're like because my daughter is very young, there's only so much that I can do with her, but I know with older Children absolutely, it's having the discussion with them and asking them what they're okay with and what they're not okay with because sometimes, like I have a lot of people say my ex is asking our child to call the new partner, mom or dad or some name, that they're not okay within the thing. I always think and I know this is painful. I know it's a sensitive thing, but it's like, okay, well how does the child feel about it? Is the kid okay with it? Is the kid maybe saying something different to you because they know you're not okay with it. Like it's we have to ask these questions. We have to ask what's best for a child, not like what are we getting upset about? What are we inserting into this situation?

Laura: Like getting our ego out of it about the kids so hard to do that. That feels like it must be just like this, like rubber band that just wants to bring back right into place and you're kind of just having to push it off to the side and it's kind of just always giving you a bit of resistance. I don't know.

Ashley: Yeah, I mean even when you were describing the situation with your daughter and the grandparents, I mean it makes me think of, you know grandparents and my own situation and I love my parents too, but you know, sometimes they do things differently and it's so hard, it's so hard not to say anything because it's just it's recognizing like okay, I'm having this thought, I'm kind of being triggered by this, but it's because I love my kids and I just want what's best for them, even just taking a minute to acknowledge that it brings me a little sense of relief, like, OK, I care, therefore I'm doing a great job.

Laura: Yes. And that little touch of compassion for yourself to that sounds like a little mini compassion break that you're giving yourself just a little bit of like, okay, that's what this feeling is, Love and protection and safety and wanting to show up for my kid, okay, I'm a good person and now and then we can lead when we bring a little bit of compassion, just a snitch to our conversations, we show up differently. Our tone of voice is different or softened and we get a better result, don't you think?

Ashley: Absolutely. And you said yeah, having compassion for ourselves and for the other person in case of divorce and co-parenting. Having compassion for the other parent. I mean, even professionals, like I'm sure even you you know, you've been faced with situations as a parent where you're like, I think I know what to do, but I don't like I don't know 100%. I'm kind of just trying my best here and we don't know for sure on so many things I guess is what I'm trying to get at. And so even though you know, we want to say to the other parent, I think you should be doing it this way well why like a control thing or what?

And then I think like over time if you don't make a mountain out of a molehill on every little thing, then when you're faced with something that just really isn't sitting well with you for a few days and you really want to address it, then you have a much greater chance even in a very high conflict situation of having the other person give you the opportunity to calmly voice your concerns and if you're keeping the concern like child-focused, I think you're doing this wrong. You know, instead of that, maybe I have concerns about our child, you know about this area of their development or this piece, can we talk about that? Or even sometimes I ask my ex if it's something I that's just not sitting well with me, I'll say, “Hey, I've been really struggling with this. Like, have you noticed that with her? Has she been acting out with you in this way?” And I just asked, Yeah. And then it's not confrontational, it's just a conversation and it's just both. It's me saying, hey, like I'm not perfect, can we work together on this?

Laura: Yeah, it's teamwork and that's what that felt like to me when you were saying it. Yeah, I love that you're kind of touching on all of the forces of conscious communication, right? So I'm getting really clear on what it is that you want to say what your goals are that you're focused on your child. Getting curious what could be going on. You know, what do I like, curious with yourself, curious with compassion. I mean you're touching on all of them. The fourth scene there is connection and I think like if we're prioritizing the connection that our child has with us and with their partner with their other parent, regardless of how we feel about the other parent, that connection, that parent-child relationship is important, right? Yes. And regardless of how we feel, we've got a, it's the relationship that we have to support, right? The connection. Yeah.

Ashley: Yeah, absolutely. You nailed it all of that? Yes. Okay, good.

Laura: Okay. Well I really appreciate this conversation. I feel like we don't get to talk about it enough. And so I'm really glad that you're putting this information out there for parents who really, really need it. Where can people find you? I know I mentioned your, your handle on Instagram. I kind of like, I'm just out on Instagram today. You know, these days you're the conscious co-parent on Instagram. Yes. Where can they find you? You know on Tiktok or your podcast.

Ashley: Thank you. So yeah, the podcast one more time is split the after ever after podcast and that is with myself and my co-host is a family law mediator and she's just amazing. She specializes in really high conflict situations and just a communication expert all around and we have some really great guests on that show. So you can check that out. But the best way to connect with me is really you're on Instagram, go to Instagram and in my bio I have a link to all my other media outlets. So Tiktok, Facebook, and a bunch of links as well. Website is in the works but not up yet.

Laura: Yeah I hope that you have a course coming out soon. There's something, at some point, a way people can learn with you.

Ashley: Yes, thank you. My coaching certification will be done in April and then I have a certain number of hours until fully fully certified and ready to take clients.

Laura: So good for you. Okay? It's exciting times gay everybody get over there and follow her so you can get on the ground floor of all the beautiful things that she's building. Actually, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it. It's a conversation that is so important and it was so helpful to have you talk with us. Thank you.

Ashley: Thank you, Laura. I love what you put out into the world equally if not more. So it was an honor to be here with you today.

Laura: Well, thank you so much. This is so fun.

August 03, 2021

Episode 70: Raising Responsible Adults with Future Focused Parenting

August 03, 2021/ Laura Froyen

In my community, I get a lot of questions like,

How can we raise kids that will become responsible adults without forcing them to do the tasks they need to?

How do we teach kids to be responsible without using punishments or rewards?

When getting these questions, I feel so in awe of you, because it means that you are brave in reaching out and asking for help, which takes a lot of strength! And I feel so honored that you trust me to give you the support you need. I want to just make sure you know you can always email me or message me with your questions! I use them to inform the guests and topics I choose for the podcast, and you never know, I may already have a video on my Facebook page (there are a LOT, have you checked it out?) or episode answering your exact question!

Ok, so now back to the question of the day: How do we raise responsible adults? I know that for many of you, with your eye on the "long game" that this is one of you goals. You want to raise kind, good humans who know how to take care of themselves and those they love. Who know how to work hard, solve problems with creativity, & have successful lives. And "responsibility" often is a big part of that!

And so, in this episode, we are joined by Deana and Kira of the Future Focused Parenting, the groundbreaking parenting philosophy that starts with the end in mind, encouraging families to make intentional parenting choices. As a child educator and a doula, Deana helps families prepare for the transition of becoming parents and everything that comes afterward. Together with Kira, a parent coach, they co-host the Raising Adults Podcast and discuss topics related to parenting with a long-range view and prepare families to thrive in their parenting journey.

Deana and Kira will help us answer those questions so that we can learn to raise responsible adults not just in doing house chores but also in decision-making.

Here is a summary of our discussion:

What it means to raise responsible adults
When to start teaching kids to be responsible
Giving privileges alongside responsibilities
How to collaborate with your kids
What are the pitfalls in raising responsible adults

If you want to get connected with Deana and Kira, follow them on Instagram @futurefocusedparenting and visit their website www.futurefocusedparenting.com. They are also on Facebook. So be sure to follow their page @futurefocusedparenting.

Get their 12-month Character Trait Freebie where each month you will get information on different character trait like emotional intelligence, wisdom, kindness, activities that you can do with your kids, and books to teach about these character traits.

Laura: Hello everybody, this is Dr. Laura Froyen in and on this episode of the balanced parent podcast, we're going to be looking ahead, looking into the future a little bit, and talking about how to raise responsible adults and I'm so excited to have this conversation with my two guests, Kira and Deana, a future focus parenting and the raising adults podcast. Deana and Cara, thank you for being here with me. I'm so excited for this conversation. Why don't you introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do?

Deana: Sure. Well my name is Deana Thayer and I'm one half of future-focused parenting with Kira and I came into this parenting work via the birth world. So I started off as a childbirth educator and a doula and I was helping families prepare for that transition of becoming parents and started to not sit well with me that I wasn't helping them for everything that comes afterwards. And so I was very grateful to meet Kira along the way. Actually, Kira was my very first twin birth as a doula and now I have the pleasure of working with her and doing the podcast alongside her, and helping families for everything that comes after. And I think the birthing day is so important and transformative and I'm glad that I was part of providing resources for that. But there's so much beyond that and parents really need support as they raise humans. I mean it's a big job, it's just huge and I'm also a parent which I think is important for the context of this conversation.So I have five teen and young adult children.

Kira: I hear a Dorian and I came to this work through the mental health field, so I kind of had the same feelings but the opposite side of them. So I was a childbirth educator as well, but all my work in mental health was really helping adults unpack what had happened to them in their Wildman. And when I started feeling, wouldn't it be amazing if we could help parents know what to do to prevent this, so that these people don't end up on my couch in the first place. So when Deana and I got together, that really is informed for both of us, you know, how do we help parents do right now? What's going to be best for their kids in the long run? Who's the adult we're aiming at, which is why our podcast is called raising adults and that's really the foundation of our future-focused parenting philosophy is start with the end in mind, who are we aiming at? Let's start there and that's going to help us make our best decisions right now.

So I am also parent coach. I do all the same fun stuff in the parenting world that Deana does and I'm a mom as well as she mentioned, I have twins who are 9.5 at the time of this recording and I figured out I am exactly halfway through my parenting journey because my kids, they're late birthdays and we held them back so they will leave the house at 19 and they are 9.5 this week.

Laura: You are saying this is something that we talk about a lot on this podcast that we want to parenthood that parents don't have to escape from and a childhood that Children don't have to recover from. I love this and we also talked a lot here on focusing on the long game, the long-term outcome that so much of parenting, mainstream parenting is focused on short term results, get compliance, obedience, get them to do what we want them to do. And rather than focusing on that long-term distance, that future person and relationship to the relationship that we want to cultivate with these beautiful humans that we are so blessed to get to raise.

Okay, so let's bring this conversation then into raising responsible adults. Like what does that mean to raise a responsible adult? I would love to know your takes. Like what do we think of when we're thinking of responsible adult?

Deana: Yeah. Well, Kyra touched on our philosophy and we think it provides a nice platform for that are kind of a jumping-off point. So when we're talking about looking at the end, start with the end in mind, then we have this really unique opportunity to lay a foundation for that. And so the way we like to think about what is a responsible adult look like, well, it looks like a person who is no longer reliant on us for those day to day tasks, for decision making, for critical thinking, for taking care of themselves out in the world.

So a good kind of picture of it was we like to think of a funnel and that as children grow, they move toward the wider part of the funnel, so they have increasing privileges, but also increasing responsibilities. And that's what we're kind of moving them toward when we're being a future-focused parent, it's hopefully working ourselves out of a job.

Kira: That's exactly it. You know, what does it mean to be an adult where you're on your own right? And have I raised my kids to know how to do that in a way where they're healthy, they're mentally well, they're emotionally, well, they're capable of being in good relationships, they can be self-sufficient. That groundwork happens all throughout the parenting journey and it's our responsibility as parents to set them up for that end game.

Laura: What does that look like in practice? That kind of along the waist? I've got little or kids. So I have an eight-year-old and an almost six-year-old, you know, we've got a teenage mom in the house here today and I know lots of my listeners have very little ones. They've got twos and threes. We talk a little bit about setting up this long game, this future focus looks like throughout the years.

Kira: Yes, please let's because littles is really the most wonderful time to start this and it's never too late. Like we always say you literally can't start this too late, but please start. But if you got that whole trajectory of parenthood ahead of you to set this up. And so Deana touched on it that idea of a funnel, right? So at the beginning we have limited responsibility and limited freedoms and privileges. And as those kids grow we give a little more responsibility. But in exchange for that, we get more privileges.

So an example of this in my home, my kids on their fourth birthday got four chores and every year they turn five we add a chore six, we add a chore. But we also add a privilege so that they're learning over time. Yes, I'm doing more and I'm taking on more responsibility but by showing my parent that I can handle that and that I can do what's necessary to work as a part of my team which is in my home, I am earning this freedom. I'm being trusted with this freedom and so they start to grow in responsibility and in freedom. And of course with that freedom comes some responsibility to write. If I say your bedtime is now 8 30 I need to trust that you're going to be respectful of that and go to bed at 8:30. Otherwise, we're going to probably have to lose that privilege.

But it's just a beautiful balance that as you can kind of hand more and more and gently over the years give a little more, give a little more. But also show them look as you take more responsibility, you get all this amazing freedom. It just blossoms and that's kind of how you play that long game.

Deana: Well I love this, I mean the tying responsibilities and privileges is something that we are big fans of and there are also kind of some practical ways that you can flex that responsibility muscle even with little kids. So I'll just share one of those that we like. It's just a little framework and it's called I do it, we do it, you do it. So a great little framework for maybe teaching a job around the house. Let's use making the bed as an example.

So I do it. The parent is going to first demonstrate how the job is done and we really encourage do it really the way you like it because we're really wanting to teach our children to do the job well and have that responsibility and own it not in a way that we have to come in and fix it later. So that I do it is the parent demonstrating the job and the job done well. Then we do it just like it sounds just peel the covers back off. Now we're going to do it together and you can do this even with a toddler, have them pull up the covers and tidy up the pillow and straighten things out and let them practice along with you. And then over time, you move to you do it with an older child, it could probably be right away okay your turn you make the bed so that you do it is handing that off to your child is a really helpful framework for things like chores or household tasks.

But we also encourage families to think about rehearsals and modeling and kind of practicing even with things that aren't task-related. So that could be things like decision making or how to conduct yourself at certain events, manners, things like that. We encourage talking with your kids. Okay, we're headed to this dinner and how are we going to behave? And so thinking about things like how to politely ask for things to be passed to you, how do you politely ask for the restroom? How do you interact with your host if maybe there's a food you're not fond of? Those are things that maybe aren't a task but there's still responsibility involved in being a polite guest.

So we are big fans of I do it, we do it, you do it for task-based things. It's a great little easy framework lets kids practice. But we also encourage those conversations about things that are less task-based and are more about decision making and critical thinking.

Laura: Yeah, I think you're touching on something that I think is really important. Being able to be really, really clear with our kids about what our expectations are, that gives us an opportunity to be really clear with ourselves. Are my expectations developmentally appropriate? So this is the first step of checking in with ourselves. Okay, so these are my expectations. Just a quick check. Is that reasonable to expect that the kids this age? Okay, so yes it is now, I'm going to clearly communicate it either through this conversation that you were just talking about or through the I do it part of that where I mean where you're modeling the expectation or you're giving them the opportunity to practice or to role-play.

I was just thinking about, I had an article that came out in better homes and gardens on how to know when your kid is ready to stay home alone and one of the things that I said in there was that they role-play different scenarios with you and if they think that that's silly, you know that they're not willing to do that, they think they're above that are too old for that, that kid's not ready for that responsibility. They're showing you that they're not ready to be a little bit vulnerable, to be a little bit silly to practice something that's a skill that they need to build, being able to be home alone.

I love that perspective that you are taking to this, that these are ongoing conversations, and part of its checking in and modeling the checking in process to teaching them how to be discerning members of the community that they're in. I love that, thank you for this.

Okay, so then I know that all the parents who are listening right now are thinking like, okay Deana uh that's great. Are you going to come over to my house when I've done that? I do it, we do it, you do it and they're still not making the bed like what do we do then? And so I would love to know a little bit about your perspective on that.

Kira: I think that there's a common misconception that if something doesn't work right away, we should throw it out instead of playing the long game. I mean like commitment until we're blue in the face, right? It's a game for long game. And this is really one of those things, what both of us can attest you having parented this way is that if you are consistent, if you keep setting that expectation and you are consistently saying, you know, this is how our house runs and it's just my expectation and you're linking it to their freedom, they're going to do it.

I know that sounds crazy when you're starting, you know little and you're like, I can't get my two-year-old do anything, you can, you actually can and it's that consistency over time, it's not gonna be perfect right away. It's going to take them a while to get used to this. But if you're patient and you're going slowly and you're choosing age-appropriate things over time, especially when they're little, if you think about little, they love to help, it's like their favorite thing in the world, and we sort of missed this opportunity because we're like, oh, you're so little, you can't help instead of going what if please help me? You know.

Laura: Who has helped me here, This is how you help.

Kira: Right and then part of that too is the way you honor your kids when you're seeing that they're helping and you're seeing that they're getting it right and we have an opportunity to say, I mean I tell my kids all the time, it is a common phrase in my house that was so responsible, thank you for making a responsible choice. And if they hear that over and over again, what I think I don't want to do, they're going to want to keep making responsible choices because they're being validated there being recognized for their role. We talk in our house all the time, we're a team, We call ourselves team Dorian Deana's family is TD- seven, like we have a name, we're a team.

So the few times that my kids have ever pushed back on chores, we just talk about, you know, we work as a team and that's just not up for debate. Like you're a part of this household, you benefit from all the privileges of living here. So I really need you to participate in helping our home run smoothly and show me that you can appreciate all the wonderful things that exist in this home by caring for it and boom, they go do their chores.

So when you're communicating in that loving way, acknowledging what they're bringing to the table, being grateful that they're bringing it to the table, and giving them freedom for it. It's pretty rare to have a kid pushback on that.

Deana: It's so true and take advantage of this time when they're young and they see the responsibility as a privilege. We were talking about the link between those two and how if an older child isn't and I can attest to this with scenes of an older child isn't meeting a responsibility. We can link it to maybe pulling back on a privilege. But what's so special about those younger years and why we love when lay this foundation is that often they see the responsibility as a privilege. It's what Kira was talking about. They love to help or they feel like it makes them such a big kid to have this job. That's all there's and so really capitalizing on that is so helpful. And then you find that they've learned also take some pride in what they're doing around the house and they're less likely to resist it later. As those, those jobs increase.

Kira: My kids literally don't remember a time when they didn't have household responsibility. It's just always been. Yeah.

Laura: Yeah. I don't know if this is true in your experience, but in mine, most kids want to help out. They want to feel like an important contributing member of a family. They want to feel like a part of the team, They want to have that sense of, you know, in this family, we help each other out in this family, we have each other's back in this family. We work together. They like that family culture and I think so often with little ones too, we almost train helpfulness out of them. They are so naturally helpful. No one is more helpful than a two-year-old whose mom is sweeping the floor like they want to get in there. They've got their little toy broom like there's ways to support that invite that in and without praise over the top praise. There's a difference between praise and encouragement and sincere gratitude and also without consequences or punishments. You know,

Kira: You know, I think like that idea that a responsibility can be a privilege. Like one of the favorite stories we tell on the show sometimes is the year I asked my kids what would you like your privilege to be this year? Because I always get their input and they said can we be in charge of our own snack? You want your privilege to be that I work less. Yes, yes, you may know, but for that it was this huge thing. I get to be in charge. I don't have to ask permission or ask for what I want, I go, I get my snack, I help myself in your leg. Okay great. You know? Yeah, that link is really important.

Laura: Kira, can you dip in there just for a minute? I feel very strongly that our kids are our partners in our family, that they are teams, and that as much as possible we should be collaborative with them. And so I love to hear that you're asking them, what do you want your privilege to be? Can you talk like is their collaboration in this process that you have with your kiddos?

Kira: Definitely. And with almost everything we do and I know Deana said this with her kids too, we always say both of us, I really value your input, your opinion matters to me. I'm going to make the final decision but what you have to say is an important factor. In fact, we just talked about this with our kids because my district is supposed to go back to school on April 19th. I was like, you know, your dad are going to make this decision, but this affects you. I want to hear what you say.

Your opinion really matters to me and this contributes to them feeling so seen and heard. And this is the other beautiful thing that I didn't really get to say earlier, but was on my mind, is this idea that when you're building this trust, like I give you responsibility, you show me you can do it, I gave you this freedom. That relationship that you talked about at the start, it makes it stronger and better. You just have a beautiful relationship because you're in collaboration together and kids have such a strong desire to belong, they want to belong. And so when we give them a team and we give them a role, it increases that sense of belonging. When we value their input and asked for their opinions on things, it increases their sense of belonging.

Deana: You know, if I could just piggyback on that, as for those of you who have little ones, this is a little sneak peek into the future. The dividends of this are huge because when you're inviting your Children to weigh in on decisions that you might have coming down the pipeline or family issues, whatever it might be, they are going to be then far more likely to come to you with their big stuff when they're older because they know, wow what I have to say in this family matters and they've even sought out my opinion and my input it seems like, you know what, my parents are pretty safe place and so then they're going to choose you to go to when things are hard or when they face a challenge.

And so setting the groundwork for that kind of really safe emotional relationship pays off so much I can tell you having olders were so glad that we did say, what do you think about this? Because now they choose to talk to us and I really want to give that message because I think those younger years when you're in the thick of it, it's so hard and you can't see out the other side. But to be able to encourage people to say, wow, this is really worth it. And the relationship that you build can be really beautiful. And then the teen years don't have to be that thing that we're all afraid of, like, oh I have to white knuckle it through the teen years and I'm gonna have this sullen person who doesn't talk to me, it doesn't have to look like that at all. It can be really beautiful.

Kira: Well and I think there's another piece here. I'm so glad you said that data, because what happens is when we seek their input. I can't tell you the number of times that my kids have actually presented me with information that made me change my mind. You're right, thank you for sharing that with me. I was not thinking about that or whatever. Then I changed my mind. What does my child learn? They learned that my critical thinking skills are working because I brought them to my parents, my parents changed their mind. And if we're talking about raising responsible adults right then, as they get into adulthood, they trust their critical thinking skills. They trust themselves because they've seen that their voice matters and that they're capable of thinking in a way that can actually influence their life and so they're much more likely to feel confident making those decisions as they get older.

Laura: Or are you advocating for themselves?

Deana: Yeah, if you can have impact in a family, then you can have impact in your community and in your workplace, and in your friendships.

Laura: It's so beautiful and it's so important to know what Kira just described is not permissiveness. I think parents are so afraid of being permissive that they go the other way and are rigid. It's being flexible and flexibility is something that is a beautiful skill to have. Being able to be flexible, change your mind, and modeling that for your kids is a gift to them.

Kira: But the boundary that never changes right. The difference between permissive flexible is the boundary that never changes is I make the decision. I'm the grown I’m the parent, that's the boundary. I'm going to actually make this decision. But where there's flexibility is I value what you bring to the table to help me understand what's going to be best for you. So that's not permissive. Permissive is I'm going to let you decide.

Laura: Although you're pushing back here, you could have it. Yeah.

Kira: Right. Exactly. And those are not the same thing. We talk a lot about like strong boundaries and then inside of that so much room for feeling, thoughts, and discussion and all the things that combo pack is a way to walk this line.

Laura: Okay. And so then what are some of the common pitfalls that parents kind of fall into when it comes to raising responsible adults?

Deana: Yeah, there's a lot to watch out for. I mean we want to raise responsible adults, but there's ways that we can help foster that and things that parents do need to watch out for. So one is we want to encourage parents to kind of avoid this tendency to only point out the problems like, oh, when you made the bed, the comforter was like, oh, caddy want us instead of what he hinted at and mentioned a little bit ago is praising them when they do get it right. So instead of falling in that pitfall, we've come out on the side of positive reinforcement.

Let's catch our kids when they are demonstrating responsibility. Like she said pointing it out even using that vocabulary, thank you for making that responsible choice because that's something that can be a little bit tricky as we're encouraging responsibility sometimes parents will then just see where they're still following short which is easy to do especially when they're little and still just trying to figure it out. So we don't want to only capitalize on like oh I'm pointing out when you get it wrong, positive reinforcement, catch him getting it right.

I think another place we can kind of fall into the ditch on either end. And a great example of this again would be household responsibilities is, Laura you even mentioned this to thinking about the age-appropriate and frame-appropriate expectations. So a pitfall is giving out too much responsibility too soon. Where there truly not capable of meeting that expectation or performing that task or whatever it might be. You don't ask your four-year-old to clean the bathroom till it's spotless. It's not gonna work out for anybody. They're going to be frustrated and you're just gonna have to do it over.

But on the other side, this one has a pitfall on the other side too. We do encourage parents, give out those responsibilities, let them flex that muscle, let them try it out. If you're, all you have to do is tidy up your room and your 17. Maybe we need to take a look at that. You could have a lot more responsibility and we've maybe aired on the side of not challenging our kids to step in and be part of helping the household run smoothly.

And then the last one that I'll mention, and Kira may want to piggyback from here, but inconsistency is a big pitfall. She mentioned that tendency like I tried it and it didn't work and you just kind of want to bail and this is about that long-range thinking and so when we're helping our kids be responsible and take, take ownership, whether it's a little job around the house, like emptying a bathroom trash can all the way to big things like critical thinking about, should I go to this party when they're older, wherever that is, if we have the ability to be persevering and stay consistent with inviting that input, talking through decisions, clearly stating our expectations, like you mentioned Laura that's going to pay off much more than the, I'm just throwing noodles at the wall and hoping one of them sticks. So I think inconsistency as another pitfall we have to watch for. I tried giving them that job. It didn't work out, so forget it. I'm going to go in and rescue them again. So that's another thing we can watch for.

Laura: I think it keeps coming back to this, but this long game piece of it is so important that it is so instantaneous gratification is quick results. We want that at times because that's where humans and that's how our brains work, right? Everyone that quick, dopamine surge, that's not how it works with raising kids, right? And these things that you're talking about, they are more effortful. The effort is put in on the front end and the dividends are paid out later. You know, it's a longer-term investment.

Kira: I was even surprised despite having this philosophy. I was surprised by how quickly I saw those dividends. I mean really by the time my kids were four or five, I was like worth it, totally worth it. Um you know, so I think, I think those, those toddler years, I often say when we're public speaking, like when you're at the, you're in the thick of it in those years, like that is that is the time when you're like, I've said this 1000 times and I have to say it again. But if you can power through that with that long game, you will be surprised how quickly the benefits start, and once you start to get a little bit of those benefits and you're like, oh, it's working, it's working. It empowers you to keep going for the rest of your parenting journey.

Deana: because it's hard when you feel like that broken record Like I've said this over and over and you still don't get it. But it is so true. I mean what's still game-changing about parenting with this future-focused mindset is when you're thinking about what you want that grown up to look like that adult you're aiming at it is game-changing to help you make a better decision right now. It isn't what you were talking about the top of the episode Laura about just wanting to kind of fix the behavior instead, we're more willing to engage with it, lean in, do the shaping hard work because we know what that looks like on an adult and it helps us really make a decision that's best rather than the one that's easy. And I think that's really powerful.

Laura: I think so too, so powerful. So one of my big values as a parent in our family is that we want our family to feel like we are a team and that we will help each other out. And so when I take an approach to choices might be a little bit different than what you teach and that's totally okay. We don't all have to do it the same, but when my kids express that one of the things that are their responsibilities in the house are hard for them or that they're not up for it right now. We always figure out a way for them to get the support that they need in that moment that will help them. So like one of the small things that kids in our house do early on is to take their plate over after meals to the dishwasher. I can't tell you the number of times where they've said, oh mommy, I'm tired, can you do it for me at dinner? And I said. Yes, honey. I'm always here to help you. I'm so happy to help you.

The very first time my... So let's see how old were my girls? And this happened. They were six and four. The very first time. The little one was always so helpful. Never resisted anything. Always happily took her plate. But the first time she said, no mommy, I'm not going to her. Big sister looked over at her and said, Evie, it's hard for you today. I'll take your plate and just took her plate over for her. They do. They learn through modeling And that took that was three years of concerted effort because my oldest is very strong-willed and can be very resistant at times. And it's just beautiful. Like this is the long game, right? This is what we're looking for. We're looking for kids who know what it's like to feel responsible, who knows what it's like to feel like they are important members of a family and you want to keep that feeling.

Oh, well, thank you so much for this conversation. This is so fun to chat with you. I'm sure my listeners are going to want to check out your podcast. Why don't you tell us give us a rundown of your social media and where they can find you. Everything will be in the show notes. But sometimes people like to hear it out loud too.

Kira: Sure and we actually have a freebie for your listeners, help them raise their responsible adults. I'll just talk about the freebie and then Deana, you can share all the social media goodness. So if you go to bit.ly/raisingadultspodcast, we have a calendar of character traits and so it is a 12-month. It's not like an actual calendar. It's more like 12 months of information where each month we take a different character trait, like emotional intelligence, wisdom, kindness and we give you all this stuff we give you like activities you can do with your kid to foster that character. We give you books, you can read that, teach about that character trait, the definition, what are ways you can model it, what are the questions you should be asking yourselves as parents. It's just packed. So it's 12 different character traits and a video called three essential strategies for raising adults.

And it signs you up to our newsletter, which is, you know, with most newsletters, you get a couple of follow-ups. One of the follow-ups actually is all about chores and has a downloadable freebie that's age-appropriate chores. Yeah.

Deana: And if your listeners want to just learn more about us and what we do as parents coaches. Our website is futurefocusedparenting.com. We always emphasize its past tense focused E D, futurefocusedparenting.com. And we're on both Facebook and Instagram our handle is @futurefocusedparenting. And then, of course, our podcast, we'd love to invite your audience to give it a listen if they'd like, it's called raising adults and you can listen right on our website but we're also on all major podcast platforms.

Laura: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and your experiences here with us. I really appreciated it. It was really fun to chat with you here, lots of fun to talk to.

Kira: Oh thanks so much for having us.

Deana: Thanks. It was a blast.

And if you're listening, grab a screenshot and tag me on Instagram so that I can give you a shout out um and definitely go follow me on Instagram. I'm @laurafroyenphd. That's where you can get behind the scenes. Look at what balanced, conscious parenting looks like in action with my family and plus I share a lot of other, really great resources there too.

July 27, 2021

Episode 69: The Mental Load and How to Ease It with Dr. Morgan Cutlip

July 27, 2021/ Laura Froyen

I don't know about you, but before I became a mom I had no idea how heavy the load would be. Not just the day-to-day tasks of feeding and caring for a family, but all the unseen, unspoken, invisible labor that is a part of modern motherhood. The planning, the home organization, the lists, the mental maps, the appointments... EVERYTHING seems to fall on us at times.

If you ever felt this way, I want to send you compassion and grace for what you are going through. As a mom, I know how it feels and I don't want that for you anymore than I want it for myself. Over the past few years, my husband and I have been slowing chipping away at the inequities in our marriage that were kind of just there by default. In this episode, I hope to get you started on that process for yourself too, so I invited a colleague, Dr. Morgan Cutlip of @mylovethinks to help us break this all down and actually do something about it. She is a relationship coach, speaker, and online course creator and has a Ph.D. Degree in Philosophy. She is a wife and mom of two spirited kids. Working with her father, Dr. John Van Epp, she shares the mission of helping parents feel empowered, stay in love, and ease the burden that surrounds parenthood.

Dr. Morgan will help us understand the load that we carry (often the moms in the relationship) and how to make that load feel a little bit more equitable.

Here is an overview of what we talked about:

The load of motherhood (What it is and How to start working with it!)
How does the mental load happen (even in relationships that were pretty equal before kids!)
Communication tips
Negotiating responsibilities

And if you want to get more personal advice to ease your mental load and find practical ways to approach your relationship, follow Dr. Morgan on Instagram. Her handle is @mylovethinks.

TRANSCRIPT

LAURA: Hello everybody, this is Dr. Laura Froyen and on this episode of The Balanced Parent Podcast, we're going to be talking about the load that parents carry, often one parent in the relationship. And how to make that load feel a little bit more equitable and to have this discussion I've brought in a colleague and expert and just wonderful person, Dr. Morgan Cutlip. She is a wife and mom of two spirited kiddos and has her PhD in psychology and she's going to help us with this conversation.

Dr. Cutlip, thank you for coming on this show. We're so happy to have you.

DR. CUTLIP: Thank you so much for having me, I'm excited to be here.

LAURA: Yeah, we're going to have a good combo. But first why don't you tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do?

DR. CUTLIP: Sure. So, I am a PhD in psychology like you said and I've been in the field of relationships for what feels like my entire life. I've had the biggest blessing of being able to work with my dad who was also in this profession and has his doctorate in psychology and started many years ago taking what he was getting out of private practice and patterns. He was picking up on with couples and singles and people need education. Like people need prevention and so he was kind of like doing courses before courses was a thing and mostly live.

But I started working with him when I was really young, I would go to classes with him, I started speaking with him at conferences, like early college, sometimes in high school and just kind of grew up in the world of relationships and kind of shaped my academic career in that way. And so, we work together now creating courses and content to hopefully be very practical ways of helping and approaching relationships. So, we say, you know, you're shaped by your family. I was definitely shaped by my relationship with my father.

LAURA: That's so cool to hear about. I watch your content and everything. I knew already about this relationship, and it always made me wonder just because my kids are growing up in a setting like that where their mom is actively teaching things, they call me a feelings doctor.

It's really cool to see a grown up who's come out of a family like that where consciousness and awareness and focus on relationships and healthy communication was a part of your growing up. It's really cool to like look into the future a little bit.

DR. CUTLIP: Oh gosh, this is so interesting. This happened today. So, when I was little, my dad and I would play this game on long car rides where he would give me a case essentially like here's a family and they have two kids and this and this is the husband and wife and he would say, what do you think's going on? How do each of them feel, what do you think we should do to help them? And we kind of play this game. I was probably six or seven and it's so funny because I'm driving my daughter to school today and I found myself playing this with her today and helping her analyze it, but I'm like, oh my goodness, hopefully she enjoys it like I did growing up. It was such a happy time to kind of analyze things together and definitely had a huge impact on me.

LAURA: That's such a cool game. I mean a game like that really helps probably with empathy and compassion and perspective taking, learning to see different sides of a problem. Those are beautiful skills that all kids need, whether they go into a field like ours.

[laugh]

DR. CUTLIP: Totally. Totally.

LAURA: Yeah. What a cool thing.

Okay, well thank you for that history piece of it. Now, one of the things I was really excited to talk about with you today was the invisible load that parents carry, often mothers, and something that I think is really a hot topic right now.

We are, at the time of this recording, we are past the one-year mark of this pandemic and there's so much research emerging on how negatively impacted, particularly mothers have been by the increased load that this pandemic has had on us. And even without the pandemic, there was already an imbalance there and here at the balanced parent podcast, we're searching for balance. We know that it's something that you do, not something that you ever done with.

But can we talk about that a little bit? Can you give up me just kind of an intro into this idea of this load of motherhood and what it is and how to start working with it.

DR. CUTLIP: Sure. So, I guess we'll start with the definition and I think I always feel like a little bit silly giving it. But when I learned about the mental load, it's also called what invisible labor. It was so meaningful to have a label for a feeling that is just kind of just exists in the background I think for a lot of people and like you said, especially women, it's funny when I talk about this concept, I will hear from a handful of men and we'll say that's me, I actually do this. And so, I know it's not always women, but that's what the research says.

So, let's start with the definition because I feel like sometimes just defining what feelings feel like can feel really good, like a relief. So, the mental load is essentially the invisible ongoing to-do-list that so many of us carry around in our minds running at all times. It includes things like researching stuff, you know, if you have kids and you're like, oh, you know, what's the best pediatrician or what's the best thing to do this weekend? Is this shampoo toxic? Or you know, all the things that we're constantly researching. You know, organizing events, organizing the home, managing the social life, managing the emotions of family members in the home and then the worry work that is involved in the mental load.

I know for example, my daughter lately is just had kind of like this shift in her amount of anxiety. Well, I'm the one and obviously it's my profession, but I'm sure it would be this anyway. I'm the one looking into that and trying to figure that out. And I think that's the case for a lot of families and a lot of women.

LAURA: I think so too. And I think in all relationships and of course the research on this is biased because it's done primarily with heterosexual couples. But I think that in many relationships there's one person, regardless of gender who takes on some of these roles.

I know for me it manifests a lot in my kind of internal map of my space so that when somebody in the house is looking for something, I know exactly where it is, even if it's not where it belongs. Like I have just this running catalogue of where things are except for my own things.

[laugh]

DR. CUTLIP: Of course.

LAURA: Everybody else is like, it's a lot. How does it happen?

DR. CUTLIP: I mean, I think that that is a huge question, you know, in some ways it's like so ingrained in us in society and kind of who does what and who's responsible for what and where we spend our time and even our conceptualization of time.

I was reading recently, fair play. Like why am I just…

LAURA: I love that book. So good.

DR. CUTLIP: It's so good. And one of the most powerful things she says was how men and women, because that's how she talks about is mostly heterosexual couples, about how men and women think about time differently. Men's time is limited, right? So, they don't do things that are not worth their time where almost we believe that women's time is infinite. And this is a really powerful statement just cause me a lot of falls. Like I listened to my books that to stop me like, oof this is really powerful stuff. And do I see that showing up in my own relationship and other people's?

I think something that I talk about a lot and how I see it coming about is that a lot of times early on in relationships, even before kids come into the picture, we do things for our partners out of just love and care and wanting to be a good partner. I think about early on in my own marriage where I'd be like, you know, I don't mind shopping for the groceries, planning dinner, making dinner and why don't you relax while I clean things up? You know, I'm just doing this to care for you. Really. I'm repeating a lot of what I saw my own home growing up, which we all kind of do and we don't realize it all the time.

But what this did, this is the beginning of something I call piling on precedents.

LAURA: Mm mm.

DR. CUTLIP: I set a precedent that I will cook dinner. I'll shop for the groceries. I’ll plan it and then I'll also clean it up. Now, my husband is a really helpful guy. He doesn't mind doing the dishes or being a part of things, but I took that on without any discussion, without any making it visible. It's another component. A lot of the stuff is invisible. And so, it was my responsibility for a while.

And if you think about all the things in your relationship that you just do to be kind and caring and care for your partner, but you never talk about, it remains invisible. And I think at that moment your partner kind of takes it off their own plate. “Oh great. You do all the holiday shopping, awesome. I'm not worried about it.” And so over time these piles are played very, very full. Throw kids into the mix literally you wake up one day to the next and have a huge increase in the amount of responsibilities that fall on your plate. And so, an already full plate becomes basically unmanageable. And I think that's the breeding ground for eventual resentment and all sorts of other things.

LAURA: Yeah. Okay. So, it sounds like there's a couple pieces here, one is starting to make some of that is invisible visible in your relationship and then there has to be at some point, some kind of conversation. So maybe along the way we've realized that we've kind of, we've filled our plate unintentionally and kind of set these precedents, right? And then now that we're realizing this, we're realizing we're overwhelmed and it's unmanageable, what do we do? What's the next step?

DR. CUTLIP: Yeah, so it's like a backtracking kind of, right?

LAURA: Yeah.

DR. CUTLIP: We have to undo some of what we've done. So I think there's lots of ways of going about this. I think of one kind of small shift is you stop piling on the precedents, you stop doing these things, you know.

I think after kids come, there's a lot of maternal gatekeeping that can sometimes happen and little do we know we're just piling our plates even fuller when we do this, you know? I'll pack the diaper bag, you don't know how to do it or you know, all these different things that we kind of just take care of. And so, I think it's important to recognize how unintentionally we sometimes take things on. And start to make the invisible things visible and involve our partner more.

So instead of just doing stuff because it might be easier and faster, we say, “hey, I'm gonna teach you how to pack the diaper bag so that next time we go out you can take care of this” or “hey, I RSVP'd to this party we're supposed to go to. How about you take care of buying the present?” So, you're vocalizing and articulating all that's involved in taking care of things that usually just happens completely under the radar and out of the awareness of your partner.

So, I think that's one simple thing you can start to do.

LAURA: I think that's so good. I feel like I can hear my audience saying, but “Morgan why would I have to tell them to do these things?” Do you know what I mean? Like that's the objection that I can hear all the time.

DR. CUTLIP: A hundred percent, I know.

LAURA: Why should I? Why can't they just know to do it? What do you say to that?

DR. CUTLIP: Yeah. Okay. So, I have a post that I have shared a couple times and you shouldn't have to ask, but you just might have to.

LAURA: Yeah, right.

DR. CUTLIP: There's a lot of yeah, there's a lot of resistance around asking. So that's why I always start with the piling on of precedents. So, if we can buy in and identify in our relationship, like “Ugh, I totally have done this.” Okay? When we do that, it's nobody's fault. It's no one's fault. But when we do this, we are kind of nudging out our partner and we're almost like handicapping them. So, when then we switch over and we get busier, and we're overwhelmed, and we feel like you should know what to do. It doesn't make sense if we've been taking care of it all along for then us to one day wake up and want them to take initiative.

It's like we have taken care of it for them and now we're wanting them to realize and look around and pay attention to all the stuff we've been doing, like little ninjas invisibly behind the scenes. So, I always say if you think about your partner on a continuum and on one side there is like this resistance to helping, like I have a partner who says they will literally do nothing and on the other side is initiative taking. Take an accurate look, where's your partner fit in? We want our partners to be all the way at the one extreme of taking initiative.

I want that. Who doesn't want that? But if we have piled on precedents for 3,4,5 years, it's going to take some unwinding and so we have to try to move them more towards initiative, especially because most of our partners are not resistant either. So, let's not assume that they are. Let's try to move them more towards initiative by asking. I always say rebrand asking as involving, as teaching, as instructing, not as a burden, but it's something where you're trying to show them.

“Listen, I know I did this before, we can't keep going the way we're going. And so let me show you how this is done. So, you can take care of it next time.”

LAURA: I want to just highlight what you're saying here is that there is this piece of accountability, taking and responsibility taking. And doing that, owning your role, kind of being able to very kindly and self compassionately see like this isn't all on this other person. Some of this is on me too. I've been part of this kind of cycle that we are in, and I have a role in moving us out of this cycle.

I think is such a beautiful thing to be doing. And when we do it, when we approach it from that place of like I know I've been doing this before. I know I kind of just took these things on and we never really had a chance to talk about it. And in doing so, probably felt like I pushed you out or pushed you away. Taking that responsibility can lower defensiveness on your partner's end of things and actually create room.

DR. CUTLIP: Exactly. You know, just to highlight. So, I can imagine some people are listening and they're like, “oh my gosh, now I have to do this,” maybe that makes sense. But it still feels like more to do. You know, I think when we're talking about mental load, I always categorized the way you tackle it is from two perspectives. So, the first is the within, so that's you as an individual. Like what responsibility can you take to do whatever? We can talk about more things that the within can be. But if my partner changes nothing, what can I do? And that's all the internal stuff and this kind of falls a little bit on both of these. But the other is the between.

So yes, there's a lot of stuff you take responsibility for, and you can take a hard look at things. But then also I do believe that there are conversations that have to be had and there's things that need to be renegotiated in the actual dynamic of the relationship, especially if some of the other stuff is not really moving the needle too much. So, the personal responsibility is important, but there is also a need to really come together and renegotiate how things are done and that's also an important piece.

LAURA: Yeah, I absolutely agree. You know, I remember shortly after my youngest was born, I was in the throes of some pretty intense postpartum anxiety, and I had been in a car accident. It was a really hard time in our family, and I just couldn't do laundry anymore. I just couldn't do it. And so, I stopped and do you know what, like laundry happens in our house. I do my own laundry. My husband does pretty much all of the other laundry, the kid's laundry, the house laundry, he does it. But it didn't even need a conversation.

DR. CUTLIP: That’s amazing.

LAURA: It is amazing! I was lucky in that sense though, that that conversation though I think is really important and it can be tricky and scary to go into.

DR. CUTLIP: Oh man.

LAURA: Do you have any tips for folks who are realizing? Okay, some things need to be renegotiated. How can I have this conversation in a way that is actually going to feel like a partnership that we're doing this together, that this is not something that I'm complaining about that's actually going to inspire them to want to be doing more?

DR. CUTLIP: So, I think one of the important things to remember is that relationships just naturally fall out of balance. Whether it's how you divide up responsibilities or how your sex life is going or how you meet each other's needs, that it's really normal for the relationship to be pulled apart by life circumstances.

And so, when you can talk with your partner about getting on the same page in this belief, right? Life's gonna mess up our relationship. We've had changes, we have kids now. You know, things just happen that kind of disrupt our normal rhythm. You don't hit cruise control and just keep going on without ever touching base about your relationship. It doesn't mean that you're deficient or that I'm deficient. This is just something we do to take care of our relationship. It’s that we have to talk about it, especially how roles and responsibilities are handled.

I think the majority of couples probably don't ever talk about how they are going to handle different roles and responsibilities. They probably never have this conversation. And so, to finally have it X number of years into marriage or a committed relationship. Yeah. It's time big deal. We're going to have to do this. You know?

I think some people can feel like I'm complaining or I'm a nag or I'm always bringing things up and it's like, but when have you really had a major conversation about your roles and responsibilities? It's okay to do that. It's normal. It's part of being in a relationship.

LAURA: Yeah. I'm not sure it is normal, but it certainly is healthy and necessary and everybody should be doing it right. I mean…

DR. CUTLIP: The need, they need to.

LAURA: The need is there. Absolutely.

I became a parent while I was in my PhD, getting my PhD in couples and family therapy. So, I knew the statistics on what happens to a marriage after you have your first child. So, my husband and I went to couples therapy while I was pregnant and have those discussions. Those exact discussions. A couple of things though to like of course you have to have discussions around rules and responsibilities. You two grew up in completely different family, is seeing completely different things with completely different expectations of what a person in a relationship does, what a relationship looks like, what a long-term marriage looks like. Of course, you have to have discussions on those things and of course they change over time.

DR. CUTLIP: Yes.

LAURA: You know, every parent who's listening right now can probably pretty confidently say that they are not completely the same person they were when they became a parent. That changes you, it changes your partner too. Changes your expectations, your ideals, your ideas about what it should be like an ongoing conversation that is open and free and without a lot of pressure or it doesn't need to be a bad thing that you need to have this conversation.

DR. CUTLIP: Yeah.

LAURA: Yeah, I love that.

DR. CUTLIP: Yeah, because I think you know, we often say like, okay, when do you talk about your relationship? We talk about relationship when we're having a problem. So, I think, you know this is kind of a big goal, but how do you normalize having regular conversations about your relationship is a big piece.

So, I'll get really specific to go back to the question, how do we have this conversation? I think you can begin with trying to get by in. So, there's two ways. One I'm kind of speaking about now, which is getting buy in that having conversations about your relationship is normal because relationships are not self-correcting, you have to come together and work on them.

I did a video recently where I, where I compared that to like the business world because sometimes you have to make points in different ways.

LAURA: Yeah.

DR. CUTLIP: That can actually capture somebody's buy-in. So, I may or may have not had this conversation with my husband before who is in business, which is you start a business, and you open your doors and things are going well and sales are good. That's not the last time you check in on your business. You're not like, “oh fantastic, this is great. Done. I'm gonna kick my feet up on my desk and I'm gonna watch the money roll in.” No, you have meetings, you check in on your employees’ well-being. You look at the budget and the expenses.

And when you come together as a bunch of employees and you're talking about how things are going, there's always this question of what can we do better? And that's not an attack on how they're doing. That's just how you get your business to grow. And it's no different than how you really have to manage your relationship.

You know, we're doing well. What can we do better? Or this is kind of just slipping a bit this month or whatever. How do we kind of fix this area? How do we address this? What are we going to do together to improve this part of our relationship? So, in getting by, and I think that's one of the ways, I think another way is getting by in around what they'll gain working on this part of the relationship and you're almost like kind of cringe, like saying that, but it's just human nature, you know, what's in it for me?

I think that probably for a lot of the partners who aren't carrying the mental load, it's working out just fine. However, I'm sure that it you could identify as a couple, things that are not going all that well in the relationship or that are starting to suffer. Maybe resentment starting to build and just the tone of the relationship feels kind of off. Maybe there's more snide comments being made or passive aggressive behaviors. Maybe your sex life is not super great right now. You know, I'm sure there are things that would improve if both partners felt the relationship was more equitable and fair. So that's another way of getting buy-in.

LAURA: Okay, you just said two words equitable and fair. And I think that those are really important to just touch on because we know that research shows that when the load is balanced more equitably between caregivers, when there's more egalitarian roles that kids do better, parenting is smoother, the families are happier, but that doesn't necessarily mean everything is equal. And so, can we parse that out a little bit?

DR. CUTLIP: Yes. So, something I like to say is it's not that it needs to be equal, it just needs to feel fair. You know, resentment starts to build when things feel unfair when it feels like you're doing more than your fair share. And so, I think that's a really important piece when you are having that discussion about responsibilities and kind of renegotiating who does what and that's that, you know, listen, it doesn't need to be 50-50. You know, everybody's family situation is different. I've talked with people who, you know, partners are like on a deployment or partners work night shift or partner works two jobs, you know.

And so, the composition of a family situation will affect how things are distributed. But at the end of the day, your gauge is does this feel fair to both people? Does this feel good?

LAURA: Yeah. And to both people because it can feel fair to one and not to the other.

DR. CUTLIP: Yes.

LAURA: I think that you bring up a really good point to that there's all sorts of different structures for families and ways of people contribute to families. I hear about this a lot from families where one parent works outside the home and one parent his home with kids that there is some difference in expectation around who does what based on that, because one person is bringing in the income and seems like unspoken expectation is then all of the other things fall on the one who's at home.

And I think the circles back to this idea of making what's invisible visible because all of the things that those partners, the partner who is at home, does all day very rarely is completely visible, like yes, the kids are alive. Great, okay.

DR. CUTLIP: What did you do all day?

LAURA: What did you do all day?

DR. CUTLIP: It’s the most insulting question.

LAURA: Right? I know. And so, what are some ways that we can go about making these things visible in a way that doesn't seem petty?

DR. CUTLIP: Remember how I said that within and between? So, one other with ends. I have like a category of things called stories that sabotage, which is like the running tapes in our mind that can sometimes either get in the way of us reaching out for help, asking for help, feeling like we deserve. You know, I think that comes up so much when one partner is home full time with kids and the other one is working.

You know, this almost belief system that is because I don't work, I don't deserve a break. And I think that there are lots of stories that we play in our minds that really sabotaged us or even our partners as they're trying to take on more. They can have their own stories that really do get in the way of having a more equitable distribution or even initiating that conversation. This might be where some people start.

Now, maybe I haven't talked about these responsibilities and dividing them up differently because I've got this story in my mind, these expectations that are really kind of crippling my feeling of ability to have this conversation or that I'm entitled to have this conversation. I think another one from the partner's perspective who might be being asked to take on more one of those stories could be when I try to help, I never do it right? So why bother?

LAURA: Mm mm.

DR. CUTLIP: Which I think is when I hear come up a lot. So, I think it's important to take some time and kind of reflect on some of these things. If you're having trouble having this conversation, what are some of the beliefs that you have about how a family should run? Who does what? When do you deserve a break? When do you have the right to ask for help? And kind of dig into those a little bit, which can help kind of move you along and working towards offloading some of this stuff.

LAURA: Oh, I think that's so important, those mindset things and those limiting beliefs are so important to take a look at and notice and figure out like if they are serving your…

DR. CUTLIP: Absolutely.

LAURA: bigger purpose, like if they're actually supporting you.

DR. CUTLIP: Yeah, I always say so, once you can identify them, you know, this is what CBT right? You're like, what the evidence for, what's the evidence against and kind of write it out, I mean, just take some time write it out and then the next thing I think is really important to do, which is take whatever the evidence against is, and kind of restructure that story, rewrite your story and create a one-line mantra.

So, in the moment when that stories starting to queue up and you're like, oh here, it's coming again, you have that one-line mantra to kind of re-center you back in a more realistic story. Remind yourself of the story you've rewritten and then set 1 to 2 goals of behavioral changes that will reinforce the news story.

LAURA: Okay, can we use an example to walk through with this? Would that be okay?

DR. CUTLIP: Sure.

LAURA: Maybe the story of I just, you know, my work is in the home. I don't deserve a break.

DR. CUTLIP: I don't deserve a break.

LAURA: I don't deserve a break.

DR. CUTLIP: So, you know, look at the evidence. Well, do I know other people who don't work outside the home? Do they get a break? What do I think of them if they take a break? Do I feel judgmental about that? You can start to kind of outline where is this coming from? Do you apply this to other people or only to yourself and start working on that evidence? So then maybe you'll rewrite your one liner, and it goes something like the work I do is important, and I deserve a break like everyone else. Right?

LAURA: Yes.

DR. CUTLIP: Yeah.

LAURA: Oh my gosh. Can you put that on a bumper sticker?

DR. CUTLIP: Right?

[laugh]

DR. CUTLIP: Like my shift never ends.

LAURA: My shift never ends.

DR. CUTLIP: My shift never ends. I deserve time to reset. I mean whatever like feels like it hits you in your heart. It's like a compass almost to help guide you when you've kind of lost your way and you're thinking in the moment, right? And then your behavioral change would be something like once a week. I'm going to tell my partner I need to take some time for myself, and you schedule it. Or it might be I'm going to hire a sitter for an hour or two a week and I'm going to go out and like be an independent person for a minute and like exist alone or you know, you can start small and go from there.

And you kind of maybe being this sort of like dissonant state where you're feeling uncomfortable when you're doing this behavior, but when you're tackling it from all these different angles it will, it will take care of it faster.

[laugh]

LAURA: Yeah, I agree. I loved that you said tell your partner, not ask your partner

DR. CUTLIP: I know, I had to watch my words.

LAURA: You did so good. I love that.

DR. CUTLIP: That's even a thing if we think about what I have to ask my partner for them to watch the kids or ask for a break and it's like, oh no, do they ask you? Not usually, right?

LAURA: I know.

DR. CUTLIP: We need to be better at that.

LAURA: I think that there's room for mutual checking in. Like for example, we like any time it's nice, I know that my husband is going to want to go golfing at some point on the weekend. Like I know that that's what he's going to want to do and it's great. It's wonderful. He's a better dad and husband when he's had a chance to be out on the course and that's great. And so, he will come to me and say I really need to go golfing this weekend, when is best for our family and then we fit it in. That's what he would do with us.

DR. CUTLIP: Which is a beautiful way.

LAURA: It’s beautiful. But that's because it's been coached, you know, we worked and worked on it. Whereas like when I'm like there is a yoga retreat coming up, I can go on this weekend or I can go on this weekend, which one would be best for our family.

DR. CUTLIP: I love that. Which is best for our family? That's a great line.

LAURA: Because it is good for our family. These things are good for the entire family, a well taken care of parent, well rested, a nourished parent is a better parent and a better partner. I think it's also really important. I like how you are teaching people to make their own mantras. I think it's really nice to get a nice list of mantras from Pinterest or from Instagram but its way better when you can specifically target them for yourself. And that thought work is so important.

DR. CUTLIP: Absolutely, it has to be meaningful or else it's not gonna really hit home in the moment.

LAURA: Yeah, it was beautiful. Oh well, thank you so much Morgan for helping me with this conversation. I hope that everybody will go and find you on Instagram.

Your Instagram handle is @mylovethinks so definitely head there. She's got a whole series of posts on this exact topic and tons of other ones that will help you have a healthier, more conscious relationship with your partner.

DR. CUTLIP: Thank you.

LAURA: Absolutely.

DR. CUTLIP: Thank you so much. Yeah, I actually, I have a whole course on this topic that organizes, you know what to do, how to do it, how you can word things. I do give some scripts in there, how you can dig into your stores that sabotage. I talk about something called behaviors that backfire. How do you challenge some of those things? And that course is called The Mother Load: Helping Couples Unite to Tackle Them into Load.

LAURA: Well, that sounds awesome. And so, they can find that at?

DR. CUTLIP: On Instagram. We have a blog at mylovethinks.com and there's lots of content there.

LAURA: Perfect. I will make sure that those links are in the show notes so people can find you and take what I'm sure is an amazing course.

DR. CUTLIP: Thank you.

LAURA: Morgan also has one of my favorite courses on boundaries too, a great little mini course with Tracy, that is just lovely. If you need a boundaries course, sorry, I'm plugging your business.

DR. CUTLIP: No, I appreciate that. Always so fun doing that with a doctor, Tracy, she’s amazing.

LAURA: You two together were really wonderful in that course.

DR. CUTLIP: Thank you.

LAURA: Okay, well thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us. It was really lovely having you.

DR. CUTLIP: It was lovely to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Okay, so thanks for listening today. Remember to subscribe to the podcast and if it was helpful, leave me a review. That really helps others find the podcast and join us in this really important work of creating a parenthood that we don't have to escape from and creating a childhood for our kids that they don't have to recover from. And if you're listening, grab a screenshot and tag me on Instagram so that I can give you a shout out and definitely go follow me on Instagram @laurafroyenphd. That's where you can get behind the scenes, look at what balanced, conscious parenting looks like in action with my family and plus, I share a lot of other really great resources there too.

July 20, 2021

Episode 68: Why We Choose Our Partners & How to Engage in Mutual Healing with Heidi Biancat

July 20, 2021/ Laura Froyen

I am so excited for this week on The Balanced Parent Podcast because we will be having a unique "combo" episode! The first part is a replay of a Facebook Live I did where I discussed some "subconscious" reasons we choose our partners. And then a community member reached out with some awesome follow up questions that really took things to the next level, so I asked if we could record our conversation so that you all could listen in!

Here is the summary of our conversation:

Five Subconscious Reasons we choose our partners
How & why our partners invite us to heal old wounds
Understanding our wound language
Deepening our relationship through mutual healing

And if you are looking for a way to be more connected and aligned with your partner, here are some of my resources that would help you (it's FREE to download!):

Partners in Parenting Workbook: www.laurafroyen.com/partners

Random Acts of Connection Game: www.laurafroyen.com/random-acts-of-connection

You may also check my website www.laurafroyen.com for more resources. I also have a Partners in Parenting course so go check that out!

Laura: Hey my dears, this is Laura and I have a really special episode of the balance parent for you this week. So, this episode is kind of a two-parter but all in one. So, we start off with a replay of a video that I made last year on the five subconscious reasons why you chose your partner. And in that segment, we really dive into kind of the psychology behind why we choose our partners. And there's a little piece of it that one of my listeners was really interested in and wanted to dig further into. So, she reached out to me and asked if we could sit down and have a session to discuss it further. And I thought, you know, she was asking such amazing questions. I really thought that it might be helpful for everybody to get the answers to her questions. So, I invited her to come onto the show with me and ask those questions. So, in this episode, you're getting that first video on those five reasons and then a deeper dive Q and A with one of our community members. So, I hope you enjoy it.

Please let me know if you have any questions afterwards. I love hearing from you. I love getting your emails. I love getting your messages on social media. And so, if you do have any questions or if this resonated with you, if it was helpful for you, please reach out. I would love to hear from you.

And if you're looking for a way to feel more connected and in alignment with your partner, I do have some resources for couples. I have both my partners and parenting workbook that's free to download. I have a course by the same name that helps you get a line in your parenting. And then I also have just a fun game that the two of you can play that can help deepen your connection called Random Acts of Connection. It's a little bit of a silly game that I used to play with my couple clients when I was still a couple’s therapist. So, you can check those resources out on my website or here in the show notes.

Alright, here we go. Let's dive into this episode. Enjoy!

PART 1 [LAURA]

So, today I wanted to talk to you about five subconscious reasons we choose our partners.

Early in my relationship with my husband, you know, in that kind of those early honeymoon, super romantic stages of love, I remember telling him that I felt like we fit together like a puzzle piece. There are parts that were hurting and missing in me that were so well complicated and healed by the parts that were hurting and missing in him. And that we're together, we could do anything, that we completed each other. And it really felt that thing.

In those early days of love, we’re kind of blind to all of the bad things about our partners, all of the things that annoy us and you know might get under our skin. We tend to really overlook them, any negative traits or even any negative traits about the relationship. In those early stages of love are really good. Kind of making us unaware of maybe some of the harder things that are coming up in our future.

That early stages, the romantic stage of love or the honeymoon stage of love fades, and we all know that that's true and it's supposed to fade. We can't maintain that type of intense romantic kind of feeling over time. It just is impossible, it's too much. And so, as we got deeper and deeper into our relationship, all of those pieces where we kind of fit so perfectly together, those pieces started to emerge as points of conflict for us. I mean it felt like we were puzzle pieces and we still fit together beautifully but we were like puzzle pieces that like when they came together, and those edges touch those edges were like live wires, and when they touched there were explosions. And that is the kind of the struggle or the conflict stage of love.

If we're thinking about love in three stages, so there's a honeymoon stage, there's the struggle stage and then the third stage is the conscious stage, conscious love, and this is all coming out of the Imago model of relationships. And I'll put a link into kind of linked to some of that information. But in order to get out of that struggle stage and into the conscious stage, we have to understand why we chose our partner and the purpose that they serve and that their relationship serves in our own individual personal journeys towards wholeness. And that's what I want to share with you today because we're drawn to the partners that we choose for a reason, and I wanted to share a few of them.

So, I'm going to share five today, and understanding this, understanding these reasons and why they're there can really open us up to accepting the work that our partners are inviting us to do. Work that will crack us open and invite us to grow and heal wounds that we carried with us our whole lives and that maybe our families have been carrying for generations. I mean, we get to be the person who heals that for ourselves and for our families through our relationships with our partners. But first, we have to understand why we chose the partners that we chose.

So, I'm going to give you five reasons. The first three are kind of more surface-level reasons that our subconscious to us that kind of support the last two that I'm going to share.

Okay, so the first one is that we look for people who are similar to ourselves. We look for people with whom we share commonalities and interests. And there's a lot of research to back this up. So, it mainly has to do with the fact that when we have similar personality traits or background or values, or experiences, we can share more mental and emotional space. And it creates this instant feeling of intimacy with someone. When we have those shared experiences, or values, or backgrounds, it increases our ability to feel like you have this deep knowledge of the other person. Finding that can be really attractive to us.

We also tend to choose someone who is very much like us in a subconscious effort to learn to love and accept ourselves. So, if we are choosing someone who maybe is a perfectionist to super driven or motivated and has some of these other traits that maybe make us a little bit hard to feel positively towards ourselves, we can sometimes subconsciously choosing someone who's like that in an effort to feel more loving and accepting towards ourselves.

So, the second one is familiarity. So, we look for people who feel familiar and comfortable, it could be that they remind us of our family growing up and so they might feel comfortable in that way. And I'm going to dig more into that in a minute. But it also could be simply that we are around them more and exposure and kind of time spent together is a big predictor of whether or not a couple is going to get together, the more exposure we have to, the person, the higher chances are that we will grow to like accept and eventually fall in love with them.

And this is why so many relationships bloom during things like at work, at the office, in college courses. Like maybe if you had the same major as someone, you see them in a few different courses over the course or of your college career or maybe in a shared experience. Like if you're both in a play together as an extracurricular and you've been that time together and it kind of works together with the similarity in the office, and company for a reason and the same courses for reasons, you're doing the same activity for reasons. Dissimilarity and familiarity often work a lot together.

The third one is that there's often a physical attraction as it's very ground basic human level or animal level is also important. This is often sometimes nebulous and differs from person to person and is really informed by culture and cultural standards of beauty. And even anthropologically speaking, there are certain things that we find more attractive. For example, men tend to prefer women with long hair. Anthropologists believe that the reason for that is because your hair can be a health record. I mean, so for women with broad hips for childbearing, kind of deeply, kind of animal pieces to this and there's cultural pieces to it and it's a major factor in choosing our partner.

And so then, whether you call it chemistry or spark, this often comes from some combination of the last three things: similarity, familiarity, and then that physical attraction all works together to create that spark. Now there's a piece of it though that is less well understood and less talked about too. So those three are the kind of the most commonly understood reasons why our subconscious might drive us to choose a certain partner.

The last two I'm going to be getting into are a little bit different and kind of take things to the next level. Okay, so they go a little bit deeper.

The fourth reason, our fourth subconscious reason that we choose a partner is because they bring about in us, they make us feel a familiar form of love. Let me clarify what I mean by that. So, we learn how to love in childhood in our closest relationships. In fact, this is one of the most powerful aspects of the attachment relationship. The bond between parent and child that we form in early infancy and throughout our young childhood. This bond serves to keep us safe as we all know, but it also helps us subconsciously form our internal working model of ourselves, of others, and of relationships. And these models inform the way we view ourselves and how we expect to be treated within the context of loving relationships.

So, when we go out looking for a romantic, intimate partner, we go out with this model of love that we learned in early childhood. We go out looking for the person who is going to replicate those patterns and is going to help us feel love in the way that we're used to in a way that feels familiar. So unfortunately for most of us, while our parents were doing the very best that they could, they often have their own wounds that they passed down to us. And those wounds mean that the love we learned to expect and co-regulate within in childhood likely wasn't built completely out of generosity or compassion, kindness, or consciousness.

And so, we likely came away from childhood with some sense of not being good enough or lovable enough, which means that when we go out looking for an intimate partner, we are subconsciously looking for someone who elicits within us that same, not good enough, unlovable-ness, that unworthiness, whatever wound we're carrying. We go about looking for a partner who will bring that out in us.

Now we don't feel that in those early stages of love, we talked about the honeymoon stage, We don't feel that at all. We don't start to feel that until we're in that struggle phase. And it is the act of reconciling those feelings that brings us into the conscious stage of a relationship. I learned about Imago Therapy when I was a graduate student, getting my Ph.D. in couple and family therapy. But I didn't have the chance to learn from someone who is an expert, and I didn't have the chance to experience it personally. And so, my husband is so wonderful. He is so willing to do experiments with me and to engage in learning with me so I can better serve the folks that I work with and so we can grow too. So, we've been working with an imago therapist, and I've been learning this firsthand within my own relationship and it's so exciting. I wanted to share it with you.

So, the fifth subconscious reason, we choose the partners we choose. We go out and we look for the people who are uniquely suited to partner with us in mutual healing. So, we go out looking for the person who's going to elicit this feeling of unworthiness, who feels familiar in terms of the love that we came to expect growing up. And we go out when we find this person with the subconscious knowledge that they are going to be perfectly suited to elicit that feeling and allow it to be healed. And that's something that's mind-blowing and powerful.

And I want you to really think about what that could mean for your relationship with your intimate partner, your romantic partner, the person that you chose. So, if that is true, that we went out seeking the person, you know, subconsciously, the person who is perfectly suited to bring us to our highest self to heal those wounds that we carry with us in childhood, what would that mean for you? What could it mean to like, do that? And partner with your partner? And it's not like they're gonna magically heal you and you're not going to magically heal them.

You're going to create a scenario of an attachment relationship that provides a secure context for that healing to happen. You're going to have to do some change, you're going to have to do some work. You're going to have to recognize when you're having childlike responses to kind of what your partner is bringing out. When that's harkening back to when you were a hurting child. And then choose conscious adult responses. And in doing that, you will heal. You'll heal those wounds, those fears of being unworthy, you're unlovable. In my case, the fear of being too much or too emotional, or too sensitive.

And so, like in my case, that's my deepest fear. I am too much and too sensitive and I beautifully and wisely subconsciously chose to partner with a person who is afraid of emotions, afraid of getting too deep, afraid of getting too close, and throws up a wall when too much emotion is coming at him.

And so, my work is learning to love myself and learning that I am lovable no matter how much or big my feelings are. And his work is learning how to be safe and feel safe within those big when those big emotions are coming at him. My work is also to learn to regulate so that we can co-regulate. I need to down-regulate some of my feelings in order to create a safe environment for him to be able to step in it with me.

Whoever we partner with, we have these pieces that totally true. We are like puzzles. We fit together. And at the beginning of puzzles where we're like magnetically fused and then in the struggle phase it's like where these puzzle pieces with livewire edges that elicit explosions.

And then as we move into the conscious phase and we move towards more conscious coupling, having a really intentional, deep, intimate, and conscious relationship with our partner. Again, we're fitting together in these puzzle pieces in exactly the spaces the way that we need in order to be able to heal ourselves.

And in order to create the context, we're healing of each other, healing happens within attachment relationship. If we're looking to heal ourselves, having a partner to engage in that process with the growth is so much faster and so much more powerful.

So those are the five reasons that we choose our partner. The subconscious reasons that we choose our partner, I'm just going to say them real fast in case somebody is coming on. So, there’s similarity, familiarity, physical attraction, how we learn to love the model of love that we learned in childhood. And the fifth reason, the most powerful, mind-blowing reason is that we subconsciously choose the partner who is uniquely suited to partner with us in healing.

Okay, so I have a question. She says, what if your spouse doesn't feel that they have anything they need to heal? This all sounds so complicated, and my husband also puts up the wall.

You're not alone. So, most men in our culture and in cultures across the world are not taught how to handle their feelings or the feelings of others when they're coming at them. They are taught that anger is the only acceptable feeling for them to have and that all other feelings, especially soft ones, must be shut down because they're not safe. Because if they have those feelings or if they start connecting with those feelings, they will lose love. They will be unacceptable, and they'll be unworthy. That's the model that they, many men learn in their childhood. That's what we teach our boys when we tell them to man up or boys don't cry. That's what we're doing.

And there's this legacy of harm that's been done and not just a minute, that legacy harms women too. It harms our entire society. When we limit the range of emotions that are available to men, I mean, it makes it nearly impossible for us to be in a conscious relationship.

So, I'm going to share an article that maybe will be helpful that… think that will maybe help, but we all have work to do. And I think that that's the thing. I really like the “Passion Doctor”, it's helpful and then this one too, I really love this article is a great synopsis. I'm putting these in, I would just have your partner read them and just see what they think.

It's a really vulnerable thing and it's hard to do. If they're willing, get yourself to a therapist. Most therapists help partners own their role because that's a big piece of changing a cycle of communication - is owning your role. And so, if you can get them in, that therapists will form a relationship with your partner and allow great safety so that they can acknowledge their role and that really is like the thing that needs to shift. If a partner is having a hard time acknowledging their role in a conflict, it's likely because they don't feel safe doing so. So, you can do the work of having a soft startup of making sure that you are approaching them on something that you are softened and vulnerable and that you frame what you… The request you need to make in a kind of a bubble of love.

And that you know you're not mad and all of those things kind of framing it properly. And then invite them in but until they are ready to lower their defenses and look at the work and growth that they have to do, there's not a lot we can do, we can't make a partner change. But that doesn't necessarily mean that you can't use your partner and the unique gifts that they bring to your relationship to grow and heal yourself.

So, I really want to empower all of you who are listening, that we have a lot of power in these circumstances. And we do not have to wait for our partner to agree to change, to take the first step, we can do that. So, if we are committed to staying with someone, we're in the struggle phase and we want to move more towards consciousness, we can lead the way to that. We can recognize when we're having a reaction that's grounded in a childhood wound and choose a different response. And oftentimes when we start showing up differently, the other person shows up differently too. That's one of the first rules of relational dynamic.

And that when we change the people in our system change by simply stepping into that place of feeling empowered, that I can do this. I can be different. I can show up differently within my relationship and recognize the patterns that I'm repeating from childhood, from the model of love I got growing up and I can use my partner as my greatest healing teacher, as my guide who's showing me where I have room to grow. When we feel defensiveness flare up for the same fight that we're having over and over again. We have the same disagreement. Your partner is wisely clueing you into where your wounds are, and you have healing. And we have to take responsibility for that within ourselves. And hopefully, as we do that, your partner will agree to partner with that because co-regulation is super powerful.

It's a super powerful way to learn, but you can take ownership of that yourself and without anybody else having to agree to do it. You can own that.

If I divorced a long-term partner who helped me heal and become conscious, am I likely to seek a different partner to heal with area? Yes, that's such a good question. I love that. Yes. Oftentimes we will continue fine-tuning our healing and seeking partners. We can also be re-wounded. So, if you're within a relationship and you've done a lot of healing, you've healed with them. But the rupture of that relationship and losing that relationship has kind of re-wounded you or has wounded you in this new way, you might also seek a partner who will help repair that wound. And that happens a lot for survivors of sexual assault in an adult.

Sexual assault represents a significant wound and we often search out partners who will help us heal that wound. So, wounding, uhm, that doesn't necessarily always happen in childhood. Oftentimes our primary model for love comes from childhood, but we've been partnered with multiple people, and we kind of moved into that conscious stage. Absolutely there can be new wounds that come out of that, like the rupturing of that relationship that need to seek and heal too.

Yes, it is so hard when you're triggered and hurt. Yes. It's really learning to practice self-compassion and good, nourishing self-care in order to be able to stay present with that. It's so important.

Let’s see. Mary says when I start holding strong boundaries, my partner got serious about healing himself. Things are very difficult for a while, but so much better now. Healing together is very intimate. You're so right. The intimacy that's generated in that that's where our long-lasting, like the long-born passion, comes from. So many couples who have been married seven or 10, 15 years are wondering where that passion is. When are we going to get that fire back? Where is that spark? That's where it is. This that burn that like long, slow, juicy burn comes from healing together. That's where you'll find it. That's beautiful Mary, thank you for sharing that with us.

And Julie says, how do we start making those changes on your own? Really? It's about heating the call, what your partner is inviting you to heal and grow and change. We're not talking about being a doormat to them. I'm talking about like, you know, when you get triggered, when you're defensive, swell up, looking at those, what is going on for me? What is my soft point? What is my pain point there? What is the deep insecurity I have? What is the truth that I think about myself? What is my deepest fear about myself and my love ability and how is my partner bringing that out in me? And how can I soothe that on my own? How can I know deep down that I am lovable and worthy of love and gentle treatment and compassion by the simple virtue of my humanity? And how can I go about knowing that?

And for me, a big piece of that practice for me is a self-compassion practice, a consistent, gentle, compassionate holding of myself. That's been the most powerful thing that I've been able to do in my own self-healing. When we're talking about co-healing with our partner asking for that and receiving it from my partner. You know, there's this way that I asked him to hold me, he holds me in that way, even sometimes when he doesn't even know why I need it, but when I recognize within myself that I'm needing it, he been able to come to a place where he can kind of put other things aside and hold me in that way so that I can kind of be surrounded by compassion and grace, that's what I need. But figuring that out for yourself is the first place to start.

And so, I think we're going to wrap up now, but I really loved getting to talk with you about this topic and I think I'm going to talk more about it. I love this. And if you have questions and other things you'd like me to talk about or speak to, please never hesitate to send me a message and I will definitely add that to my roster or you know, because this is all about, I'm really looking to serve you. So, if there's things you want me to speak to, please let me know.

Okay, and you guys have a wonderful day. Hold yourselves gently and your partner gently. Impede the call towards healing. Don't just focus on healing your relationship. Heal yourself in the process and this beautiful thing when you aren't managed to do that together. So, send that out to you and I'm going to send you out into the world to go do that for yourselves and for each other.

PART 2

LAURA: Hello everybody, this is Dr. Laura Froyen and I'm here with another episode of The Balanced Parent Podcast. And today we have a guest, she's a listener and a client of mine. And she was listening to a video, I think that I did a while back on how and why we choose the romantic partners that we do, the way that who we choose kind of serves us in our own growth and healing. And she had some questions, and she was asking such good questions that I thought maybe you all would be interested in knowing the answers to. So, I invited her on to come and kind of chat about it with me.

So Heidi, why don't you introduce yourself, and yeah, we'll get started.

HEIDI: Sure. My name is Heidi and I've known Laura for a couple of years now and I've listened to her podcast. And I followed her through the University of Wisconsin Madison and a few different occasions. She's made some references to Imago Theory and some of the unconscious reasons we choose our partners. And I was interested in what she had to say about that and interested in her deepening that conversation.

So Laura, can I just start with a general question, why do we choose the partners we choose?

LAURA: Yeah. So, it's interesting. I think we have our conscious reasons why we choose them. The things that like when they ask us, you know, why did they pick us that we would say it louder for talking to our kids. You know that we would be able to pick up on and really kind of articulate well.

But there's these unconscious reasons too, and very often they are partners that they are echoes of the important relationships that we witnessed growing up and experience growing up that our partners kind of hold a mirror to or shine a light on. There are ways that they remind us of what's comfortable. Kind of what we're used to, even if it's we actively want a different relationship than what we saw growing up or you know, what we experience growing up, we still, we only know what we know.

And so, we unconsciously find people who feel comfortable. Some of those patterns aren't really what we want to actively, consciously choose. We find people who feel familiar and in their familiarity, they trigger us. Sometimes they do things that sound just like the way our dad would say it, or just the way parent would say it, or that bring up some of the stories and the narratives that we have from childhood.

And what's beautiful about that is that when we are triggered, every time were triggered, no matter when or where it's happening around what topic, it is always a trigger that is a call to healing. And trigger is a way that our brains work towards our betterment, towards our wholeness. Our partners do this in us. They awaken old wounds. They shine a light on old wounds. And in doing so, they give us the opportunity to heal them too.

HEIDI: So, they're offering kind of like a map that you can use these little signposts? That you can go back to and reflect on childhood wounds and how those relationships may be affecting your adult relationships?

LAURA: Yeah, I mean, and we know that's true, right? So, when we're young kids, the relationship that we have with our parents and the relationship that we witnessed between our parents, if we are growing up in a family that has multiple caregivers, those provide the information. The map that we build for, how we think relationships work is they're called internal working models, and kids are building them all the time and draw conclusions about our worth based on them. We draw conclusions about love based on them.

So, if we see conditional love happening between our parents for example, and we experience conditional love from our parents towards us, then we start to think things like certain behaviors mean that people don't love us. Like one of the classic ones that I have internal working model, a story, a map in my head is that when somebody loves you, they pay attention to the things that you pay attention to. They care about, the things you care about. And if you tell them that you care about something, then they disregarded that means that they don't care about you. So just as an example of my, you know, I care about where things go in our kitchen, like where a spatula goes, where the spoons go, I kind of care about how things are organized because it makes my life easier to find, be able to find them. And when my husband puts things away in the wrong spot, it makes like that the story I start telling myself about that is that he doesn't care about me. If you cared about me, he'd know where they went.

I make a spatula mean something about my relationship, that it doesn't mean at all, and that meaning is all based on what I witnessed growing up and the love stories that I experienced growing up, you know, do you have those too?

HEIDI: I think so, but it's becoming aware of them I think, and making those connections. And then also I think just accepting the idea that what you're drawn to in familiarity sometimes might be negative and you're drawn to that because it feels familiar, even if it is something that creates conflict or even if it's something that leads to misunderstandings, it's still like a familiar space that's hard to process I think,

LAURA: Right. Like why would we seek out something that causes us pain? And so, one on the one thing, even though it's negative, it does feel comfortable. That's what we expect because that's the map that, you know, that was the programming that was uploaded and that's this kid. But it also gives us a window and an opportunity to change it, right? So, it gives us an opportunity to do something different, you know, to recognize, hey, this is a story that probably was never true to begin with, but certainly doesn't have to be true now.

So now, like when I find the spatula in the wrong drawer, I talk to myself about the spatula doesn't mean anything about how my husband feels about me. Spatula being in this door represents that he was taking care of the house and taking care of our family and it's put away, you know, and focusing on that piece of it, that effort of it that really is at the heart of his, you know what he wants to convey when he is putting away the dishes. You know that he's taking care of our home and our family and that is an act of love whether or not the spatula makes it into the right drawer. You know?

HEIDI: When you do something like that, you're reconciling with your husband. But are you also reconciling with your caretaker from where this, this issue originated or is that not necessary? Is that not part of it?

LAURA: Yes, I very much think it's important to recognize that we can't change the past, right? We can't change what happened to us. We can set boundaries in the future. You know, or in the present we can hopefully he'll relationships if we for example, have a strained relationship with our, with our parents. Now we can do that work here in the present. But really what it's doing is about reworking your thoughts and your feelings in the moment so that they are grounded in what is actually true of your relationship.

And so, with this special example, I know it seems superficial, but this is something that we actually went to therapy over, not the spatula specifically, but it's something that we've discussed in therapy several times because it was so meaningful to me. So, part of this is recognizing that I have a faulty story from my childhood growing up. You know, so part of the work of this is reworking that story, rewriting that story, learning to soothe myself and reassure myself and talk back to that story. But the other part of it is it happens in the space between the two people who are in the relationship. So, part of that is explaining why a spatula so meaningful to my husband. I can see the deep hurt and fear that underline it that I witnessed growing up.

My mom do so much and very rarely have my dad respect what she'd done. You know it was very important to her that the house was tidy and he would kind of come in and just like push like put everything everywhere and disregard that and witnessing that. And so explaining that story to him and actively asking him making a change request is what in imago therapy that it's called where you are talking about the story, you're letting them know the story then validate this.

So, when I put the spatula in the wrong drawer it really makes you question, you know, whether I love you and that makes complete sense. That reminds you of what it was like in your house growing up. And it, I mean, and it just makes complete sense that, that you would be worried about that. And then reassure that it doesn't mean what it is and then, then you make a change request.

So, the change request in this scenario for me and my husband was that it would really mean a lot to me that if you don't know where something goes that you leave it in this special spot on the counter and that by leaving it on this special spot on the counter, that is an act of love. Putting it in that spot is like the little spot where he is recognizing in me, the wound in me and meeting that need, that unmet need, in a way that I've requested.

And so, in doing that, by actively meeting my change request, he is showing me that I'm lovable. That his love for me is not in question and you actively start healing that wound you know and so it's not just you who's doing the healing your relationship is allowing the healing to happen when you've got someone who's willing to do that work with you, you know?

So, who's willing to hear your stories, witness them validate them and then make those changes, do their best effort to make those changes. Those change requests and then you swap roles too. So, it's not just, this is never just one-sided, right? So, we might choose the partners who awakened and alert us to old ruins and old stories that need healing and retelling. But they have them too. We’re awakening in them at the same time.

And so, there's this back and forth, this mutual willingness to create a space where healing can happen.

HEIDI: Yeah, it sounds like it requires a lot of vulnerability to a safe space where you can open up and tell a story like you did. And it sounds to me like a very far away from what many couples do in situations like that, which would be like criticize each other and blame each other. This is a totally different way to go at a conflict.

LAURA: Oh, it totally is. But Heidi, I want to make it clear that the conversation I just described between me and my husband was not our natural way of doing this. The natural way would be for me, what would come naturally and unconsciously out of me in those moments would be to say something like, oh my God, how can you not know where this goes? We've lived here for five years. How can you not know where this goes? Like, why do I have to do everything myself? You know, all of those kind of unconscious thoughts and stories would come out.

And what is amazing about this is that I partnered with someone whose dad spoke that way to him when he was a kid. My unconscious words that come out when this wound is activated in me perfectly mirror the same one of his wounds. That fear of not being good enough, you know, that he remembers from his own childhood. Like in those moments when you're unconscious, it's just wounds talking to each other. It's just all those old stories, all those old fears about, you know, for me, like, you know, looking for evidence, that somebody doesn't love me enough and for him, looking for evidence, that he's not good enough.

And, you know, speaking each other's wound language there in those moments, it took help to slow down and it's hard to do in the moment. It's much easier to do outside of the moment and proactively versus in the moment, you're activated in that way. It's very difficult. It takes a lot of self-regulation and practice to come down and say, okay, something old coming up right now. For me this has nothing to do with what's happening in front of us in the moment, you know?

HEIDI: Yeah, so it's about the spatula but it's really not about the spatula.

LAURA: Oh, it's never about the spatula. Sometimes, like there's just like yeah, it would be nice if the spatula was on the right drawer. It's very rarely about the spatula. And I think every couple has their own spatula. You know, whether there's a million different ways, every couple has their own spatulas. And I mean this is something too that research shows that every successful couple has a few things that they are going to consistently disagree on their entire relationship. And it's the way they have those disagreements, not whether or not that disagreement ever gets resolved because we all have perpetual problems that we will disagree on in relationships.

But the way we disagree about it, that's what makes the difference. And what some theories of couples therapy tell you is that by actively choosing new ways to handle those disagreements, you can actually heal deeply ingrained attachment wounds with each other.

HEIDI: And that doesn't take like one conversation, a process over a long period of time.

LAURA: Like if you're lucky, it is a process of our long period of time. So, in Imago theory, there's three stages of a relationship and most couples never make it out of the second stage.

So, there's this first stage where it's super passionate, you're kind of willing to forgive everything. You just lit up and vibrant. And then in the second stage you're coming to realize like, oh, there's all of this stuff under the surface that we fit together like a puzzle piece, and we perfectly trigger each other, that my triggers are built to trigger his triggers, you know. And many couples don't make it out of that stage. They either stagnant there and just decide, you know, just kind of stay distant and not connected and don't do the work, or they separate, and the relationship ends, and they repeat the process again. This is why until you do your own internal work, no matter who you get into a relationship with, most of the time you're going to end up with a very similar person. Because we are called to the people who wake up in us, the parts that need to be healed. Were drawn to them for our higher good for our own healing. We are called to them.

And then until you're ready to do that work, you're going to keep finding the same person over and over again.

HEIDI: You repeat a pattern.

LAURA: Again, it feels familiar, it feels comfortable even if it doesn't feel good, it feels predictable. We, we know what to expect, we know what's going to come up, you know? And it's hard work. The healing can be hard, but it's also good, especially if you have a partner who's willing to do it with you.

HEIDI: And I like what you mentioned earlier, being aware of your wound language. So, it sounds like each couple has their own specific wound language. Is that what you would say?

LAURA: Once you start thinking about how you talk to yourself and the stories that you tell yourself, they're not hard to find, they're pretty easy to find. You know, like even just asking the question of like what am I making this mean? When you feel really angry, really incensed, really upset, really hurt by your partner asking yourself just to slow down for just a second, what am I making this mean? And you just ask yourself and that tells you, you know where we're reacting from. You know? Because oftentimes we have these stories that are deep-rooted in deep wounds, are deep fears about ourselves. And our partners do to.

Just the other day, my husband and I were, I mean, it wasn't really a disagreement. I said something to him, and I had attempted a kind of a like, funny soft start up, you know, to have a like, because there was something I wanted to get. I don't know, I wanted to have a conversation about, and I went for a little bit of levity, like totally flopped. My soft startup did not go well for him, and I could see the defensiveness bristle in him. I just said, I can see that I hurt you somehow. I can see that your defensive and I'm wondering, you know what that meant to you? What I said, you know what did it, what I say said mean to you? And he was able to just go to the story of, you know, you think I'm not a good husband, I'm failing you.

And when you say it out loud, like of course we get defensive, when we have, when we are we realize that we're talking to those deep fears like the fear of failing the person you love most of not being good at one of your core identity pieces, getting it right. Not being lovable, of being unworthy of someone's love. These are the deep fears that are talking, and it makes sense then that we would be defensive and push back against those things. Those are big, you know?

HEIDI: So you empathize with where he's coming from.

LAURA: And the thing is so like in our pattern, because of my skills as a therapist, it's always tricky because then I go with him and then he's feeling better. We never actually got to talk about what I wanted to talk about, you know? And so, I have to be really good at holding that boundary of like, okay, now it's my turn because I have emotional needs, just like he doesn't.

Just because I'm well versed in how to handle them doesn't mean that I don't need the support from…

HEIDI: That's a very important piece of it too, to make sure that both childhood wounds and both partners are asking questions remaining curious about the other.

LAURA: Oh, I love that you brought up curiosity. The curiosity piece I am starting to really think is so much more important than people realize how important it is to just be genuinely curious about your partner. It's hard to get into curiosity when you're feeling criticized or you're feeling defensive and where you have to protect yourself, it's hard to shift into curiosity. But once you do, it opens up a conversation. It makes people feel really safe to be vulnerable. Again, like you said before, the vulnerability piece of it, you have to be willing to be vulnerable with each other. You know?

And sometimes, like, you don't have to do this alone either. It's okay to need support, to need someone to hold the space for you to encourage you to do this work. My husband and I go to a therapist for that because it's too hard sometimes to do, do it on your own. Like to hold these vulnerable spaces a lot, especially when you got two wounded people trying to talk to each other. You know?

HEIDI: I was going to ask, do the wounds ever get healed completely? Is there any resolution that ever feels that was resolved or just get better or worse this time goes on?

LAURA: Well, I think like if you're not doing anything about it, then changed really can't happen. Like you can't just expect like, oh, I know about it now and not going to make any changes and you really can't. You have to actually doing the work.

This spatula example, you know, that we've been talking about, like now when I see a spatula in the wrong space in the house, I just mov it. It means nothing. But that's over years of kind of reconditioning almost. Like lots of self-talk, lots of conversations, lots of seeking reassurance, you know that even if the special is in the wrong door and I like it just seems so like silly to say it out loud. But I mean whatever, we all have our own spatulas. I mean it's conscious effort in restoring what it means too about me and about our relationship when those things happen.

But yes, it absolutely gets better. But it's not without effort. It is definitely effortful.

HEIDI: Okay. So, there's an awareness. It’s kind of the first piece and then the doing something about it, addressing it.

LAURA: Yeah, and it's I mean it's a cycle. So, there's like awareness coming to understand the story, communicating the story to your partner, having it be heard and validated and understood by them, making a change request too where you are asking for them to do something a little bit differently kind of as a gift to you as a part of your own healing process.

So, like I'm going to reassure myself that you're putting the spatula in the wrong spot, doesn't mean anything about how you feel about me, but you're also going to put it on this place of the counters that I can put everything away, you know, like where I wanted to go if you don't know where it goes, you know?

So those change requests are important and then over time the consistent meeting of needs is what changes it, right? So, if we think about this from an attachment perspective, children build secure attachment bond with their caregivers when their caregivers are sensitively attuned to them and are consistently responsive to their needs. You can be well attached and securely attached to a caregiver if they are, you know, if they miss some things, we don't have to be perfect. They do need consistency. You know, we do need to be able to consistently rely on our needs being met.

And so, then when it comes time to change an attachment-based pattern, which is what these all are. They're all patterns that are grounded in the attachment bonds, the attachment style that we have that we built in childhood. Then we need similar consistency. Consistently kind of meet, like meeting of that need up having a partner who's sensitively attuned to our needs and is responsive to our needs and doing that over and over again. That's how thought patterns are. Patterns is through consistency in that way. I don't know if that makes sense.

HEIDI: Yeah, that's just making me think about the idea of changing and when partners ask their partner to change, but your reframe is can you change as a gift to me to help meet my unresolved needs from childhood.

LAURA: Yeah.

HEIDI: Totally, totally different.

LAURA: Absolutely. So, changing as a gift, but it's also mutual. So, like we talked about before that my kind of unconscious reactive mode in this moment also triggered him. He also makes a change request like about this interaction because it's awakening a wound in him too. He made a change request about how I bring like the tone of voice, my posturing, the words I used when I bring those things up. And I make that change as a gift to him and in making us, the two of us making that change together, we work together to heal our own wounds.

So, we are both making the change request. So, before when it's unrecognized, when it's unconscious, we are engaged in a pattern that is confirming wounds and worries and fears about us. And so, when we make these change requests, we are actively subverting those like our behavior towards each other, is confirming each other's narrative and in the process doing the healing. So, we do this together. Like this is not something you can separate from your part. I mean you can do some of this work yourself, but it is far better and far faster to do it with your partner. Because again like this change is happening within the context of an attachment relationship and if we're talking about attachment-based wounds, then the very best place to heal those wounds is in an attachment relationship.

HEIDI: Yeah, that makes sense. It paints a whole new picture of what conflict means and what being triggered means and what happened an argument with your partner means. You're saying this is an opportunity to discover more about yourself and to reconnect with your partner in a different and deeper way.

LAURA: Absolutely. That's how all conflict is an opportunity to connect and deepen a relationship, deepen our understanding. It's all conflict as an opportunity to be more compassionate and empathetic with the people that we love. All conflict is and if we can shift to seeing that way, we bring an energy kind of in a tone to it. That's so different.

So when my husband and I find a place where we are puzzle pieces together, like we, you know it's funny when we were first dating we felt like we were perfect compliments to each other and we describe each other as that we were puzzle pieces. You know that we fit together like the things that I was good at, you know and the things that he was good at, like we just fit so perfectly together.

And like as things got harder and we kind of came out of that first stage and we're in the second stage we realize like the things that are triggering in you are also triggering in me and like we again, we fit together in this beautiful, perfect puzzle piece way and there was resistance to that, like why can't like why can't it be easier? Why can't it be like it was before? And it can be on the other side of the work, right?

So, if you are doing that work and I don't know, so like when we find a new place where we fit together, where my story so perfectly matches his story and his story so perfectly brings out my story and mine brings out his, we're like, oh man, there's another place. Good. And we feel excited about it.

I mean maybe he doesn't [laugh] he’s so conflicted by it. But I feel excited about it because I'm going to get to know him and I'm going to get to peel something in me and that, just that's going to be better for everybody.

HEIDI: Would you say that you are at the stage three to go back to the stage two? Do you reminisce about the stage one, or is that the, that you've arrived at the… the stage three destination?

I think we're in stage three now because stage two is very, there's a lot of despair there, there's a lot of like, this is not going to work, you know? So we’re not there anymore, and that's good, but it's important to know that all couples have to go through that stage. You have to understand that struggle. That feeling of not working is what tells you okay, now you're ready. And you just have to heed the call to it. You just have to be willing to kind of as would say, you have to be willing to step into the arena together, you know, and do that work because there's something beautiful and deeper on the other side of it.

And that's not to say that, you know, couples can stay in stage two and be fine. You know, they can suppress their feelings and feel disconnected or like that their partner is never really going to understand them and learn to be okay with that. But I don't know, I don't know about you Heidi, but that's not what I want out of my marriage. I want more.

HEIDI: Right.

LAURA: Yeah.

HEIDI: Yeah, absolutely.

LAURA: Yeah. Well Heidi thank you so much for asking these good questions. I really hope that this conversation was helpful both for you and for the listeners today. I really appreciate you being here to help me kind of dig into these topics.

HEIDI: Yeah, no problem at all. And thank you for being a resource for many of your listeners, including myself and sharing your information you have but also your personal stories in such an open and vulnerable way. I appreciate you so much. Thank you.

LAURA: Oh, yeah, absolutely. And that means a lot to me. I hope that everybody listening knows that I am imperfect and learning being right alongside all of you and I'm so glad that we get to do this together, this growing up and showing up together.

HEIDI: Yeah, thank you.

Okay, so thanks for listening today. Remember to subscribe to the podcast and if it was helpful, leave me a review. That really helps others find the podcast and join us in this really important work of creating a parenthood that we don't have to escape from and creating a childhood for our kids that they don't have to recover from.

And if you're listening, grab a screenshot and tag me on Instagram so that I can give you a shout out and definitely go follow me on Instagram @laurafroyenphd. That's where you can get behind the scenes, look at what balanced, conscious parenting looks like in action with my family and plus, I share a lot of other really great resources there too.

July 13, 2021

Episode 67: Teaching Kids About Body Safety & Consent with Rosalia Rivera

July 13, 2021/ Laura Froyen

Okay so, last week on The Balanced Parent Podcast, my guest and I talked about healthy cycles and body beliefs. If you were able to get some takeaways, please let me know. I would love to hear from you and how it helped you have healthier relationships with your bodies.

Now, for this week, I have invited Rosalia Rivera of Consent Parenting to talk more about bodies, particularly: consent, body safety, and boundaries. She is a consent educator, abuse prevention specialist, and sexual literacy and child's rights advocate. She is a speaker and host of the fabulous AboutCONSENT™ podcast for survivors. As a founder of CONSENTparenting™, Rosalia is on a mission to help all parents educate their children about body safety and consent so that they can empower their families to prevent abuse.

I know that this can be an uncomfortable and scary topic to even think about, but it is so important. I know your child's safety is so important to you and I want to equip you with the skills and tools you need to keep your kids safe. We will be providing you information & solutions so that you can protect your children. Here is a summary of our discussion:

Body Consent, Autonomy, and Boundaries
The balance between teaching kids about abuse prevention and the responsibility of keeping them safe
How to create a safety network
Secret Safety and what it means
The nuance between secret-keeping and privacy
A list of books you can purchase or check out from your library to help you have these conversations with your children

To get more resources on this topic, follow Rosalia's social media handles and visit her website:

Website: www.consentparenting.com Instagram: @consentparenting Facebook: www.facebook.com/consentparenting

TRANSCRIPT

Parenting is often lived in the extremes. It's either great joy or chaotic, overwhelmed. In one moment you're nailing it and the next you're losing your cool. I want to help you find your way to the messy middle, to a place of balance. You see balance is a verb, not a state of being. It is a thing you do. Not a thing you are. It is an action, a process, a series of micro corrections that you make each and every day to keep yourself feeling centered. We are never truly balanced. We are engaged in the process of balancing.

Laura: Hello everybody! This is Dr. Laura Froyen and on this episode of The Balanced Parent Podcast, we're going to be talking about consent, body safety boundaries, and all of that with one of my favorite consent educators, Rosalia Rivera.

Thank you so much Rosalia for coming on our show and helping us have this really important conversation about how to keep our kids safe in an ever-changing world where we really want to keep our kids safe without scaring them, without shaming them. I'm so really excited to have this conversation with you.

Rosalia, why don't you just tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do, and then we'll jump in because I've got to lots of questions for you.

Rosalia: Sure. Well, first of all, thank you for having me and for inviting me on. I'm excited for our talk today.

So, I'm Rosalia Rivera and I'm a consent educator, abuse prevention expert, child rights advocate. I've recently really added that to my title because…

Laura: I just added that to my title too.

Rosalia: Really? That's…

Laura: I just realized that’s what I'm doing. That’s what I'm doing. Yes, yeah cool.

Rosalia: Yeah, yeah, I love that. That's super cool. So, that feels like serendipitous for our call.

So, I really help parents. I work a lot with parents who are survivors of child sexual abuse, who are now parenting, wanting to obviously prevent that and break that cycle. And so I help teach them about body safety boundaries and consent and how they can teach their kids to empower their families. So, I really want to always approach these conversations from a place of empowerment and not fear like you said.

And also just to make sure that we are giving our kids the freedom to grow and express who they truly are without being that overprotective parent that like strictly wants to like keep them safe but doesn't let them experience the world. There's like this fine balance, right?

And so, I'm always on that mission because that's how I was raised, really strict, and I know it made me very rebellious growing up and not always the best thing. But anyway, that's part of my mission that I'm really charged with a sense of purpose to child sexual abuse. At the very minimum, create as much awareness about the issue as possible.

Laura: Oh well, we so appreciate that and I so appreciate you’re bringing a balanced perspective to this because the pendulum swings both ways, right? Our goal here, you know, we talk a lot about balance here. But this is one piece of not going so extremely one way and so extremely other best thing. We’re kind of right in the middle and a good place where we're listening to our kids. We are allowing them to be who they are and we are teaching them, equipping them with the skills. I love how you say empowering them versus being based in fear.

Okay, so what is the thing that's really on the front of your mind right now that you've been thinking a lot about? That you really want to start having a discussion with parents about?

Rosalia: I love this question. So thank you for asking it because there is something I've been really trying to formulate how to bring to the table and discuss with parents in a way that's not going to freak them out. So I'm going to just forewarn you that what I say now may frighten you. That's not the intention. The intention is just to give you this information and then to talk about how you can proceed forward in an empowered way, right? It's like I'm always coming at it from that because, I, as a survivor myself can very easily get triggered, can very easily want to retreat and not deal with this conversation. I say this with lots of intention for you to know that there is solution.

Laura: Okay. So listeners, if as you're listening to this conversation and if it's getting hard to hear, don't check out, don't go out the window, stay with us, put your hand on your heart. Have some things that you can say to yourself that you're safe, that we're going to be offering solutions, that there's a path forward for you. There is safety here. If thoughts start running through your head, come back to the present moment, feel the chair that you're sitting on or the ground beneath your feet. Really ground yourself and stay with us. Okay?

Rosalia: Here's the thing. We have been locked down in different waves of it depending on where you live for the last year and a half basically. And unfortunately, through that time, a lot of children have been in unsafe homes, trapped with unsafe people. And because of that, we have seen numbers of abuse skyrocket in the last year and a half. There have been, you know, calls to cyber tip lines because of exploitation, online exploitation, as well as hands-on in-person abuse within the home. And so we are talking about millions of children that are going to be coming out of traumatic situations right going back to school.

And so unfortunately with that, we have the potential for an increase of child-on-child abuse when children return reintegrating into schools, reintegrating into playgroups, daycares, and etcetera. A lot of parents aren't thinking about that. They don't realize that.

Laura: I don’t even think the parents even know the numbers that are coming out of this pandemic on this specific topic.

Rosalia: So just as a baseline, we're talking about pre-pandemic. One in four girls, one in six boys is the statistic in North America of child sexual abuse. And so when we look at a classroom of 20 kids, we're talking about potentially 25% of that, right? A quarter of those children.

Now cut to post-pandemic, that number is likely increased because there is a higher opportunity for children to have had these experiences. Now we're talking about…

Laura: And reporting is down to, so…

Rosalia: The reporting is down exactly.

Laura: They're not in the environment where they could disclose to safe adults. So they're no longer in those places where they can get help.

Rosalia: And unfortunately also for many who are young, who are so young, that they don't even recognize that this is abuse. Then you now have a potential for those children to potentially reenact this behavior in other children. And display those problematic behaviors with siblings with playgroups, anything like that.

Laura: So important to just frame this for folks who might be experiencing this, that this is because that child is bad or damaged in any way. They are processing. Kid's process through play and it makes sense that things like this that would happen to them. They would also process in that way.

Rosalia: Absolutely. And I'm glad that you said that because it is important to note that it does. These children are just products of that trauma. And so that doesn't mean that they're bad or damaged or intentionally harming others. So the reason that I bring that up is because I think that it is now more than ever so much more critical for us to be educating our own children about abuse prevention so that they know to recognize when unsafe behavior is happening even with peers and that they know what to do in those situations, that they know how to speak up and report to the right person so that it doesn't continue. So that, that child can also get help so that there is more support for that child who is enacting that behavior as well to make sure that they are not in an unsafe situation or also get out of that unsafe situation.

So I think that prioritizing abuse prevention education this summer should be at the top of the list because it's not just about the adults in our children's lives, but it's also now the potential for peer-to-peer abuse that we need to be looking at as a potential. This is something that a lot of experts are predicting, are looking at. I think everyone's trying to formulate, like how do you communicate this to parents in a way that supports everyone, all the children involved? Right? Because it's similar to the situation with porn exposure. It's not a matter of if it's going to happen, it's a matter of when it will happen. And so based on the statistics and what we've seen over the last year, in terms of reports that have come out, just even with online reports, it's like 118% increase in the last year of reports, which is, you know, a huge percentage.

What I want parents to know is that if your child is going to be starting school, if they're starting a new school, if they're starting daycare or preschool or graduating to middle school event that this is such an ideal time. Like talking about it slowly, taking your time to talk about it throughout the summer so that you're not like trying to cram all this information into your child's head. Like let's talk about it this whole week and really starting to practice these things at home can really make a huge difference in how your child steps into school.

Laura: Can we dive in, teach us a little bit about what that looks like at different ages and like can, if you haven't been having these conversations, how you go about starting to ease into it, you're not kind of just dumping it all on kid all at once. Can you give us a picture of what that looks like in action?

Rosalia: Yeah. So one of the first things that a lot of parents, kind of, they'll want to start with like, “Hey, I just want you to know that your body belongs to you and you get to say what happens to it and all these things”, right? And that's fantastic and great. But we also need to back up our words with our action, right? So really truly honoring what that means, which is really teaching our kids about their body rights, which is starts from understanding that you have body autonomy or agency, right? And for different ages.

That means different things when your child is two, they're going to have less ability to exercise that as than if they were seven. And what I mean by that is your child can't just run across the street, you know, on their own and exercise their body agency that way if they want to. It means that you examine what that looks like on a day to day, right? So I always recommend to parents like look at your day journal. What does your typical day look like and how are you enforcing certain things that are absolutely health and safety-critical or really your choices and decisions about their body? That maybe you could be handing over a little bit more to them, right?

Laura: Can we make a quick little list of things that maybe can be handed over?

Rosalia: Yeah, for sure. So, I mean to me…

Laura: Hug and touch obviously.

Rosalia: Yes, hugs and touch for sure. Also things like what they want to wear. If it's, you know like they feel like wearing a tutu instead of a skirt. Is that, is it mandatory? Like is it absolutely necessary that you make that call or can you give them that ability to choose? Things like letting your child decide when they're full versus you and forcing them to eat, what you think they need to eat, and letting them learn how to understand their body cues. So things like that versus health and safety, we have to put a seat belt on when we get in the car seat because that is important for your health and for your safety. So those kinds of distinctions.

Teeth brushing is one of the most popular questions I get, which is like, what about this? Finding ways? Can we all brush at the same time and you can copy what I'm doing, you know, as an option versus saying like “you have to brush now and you have to brush this way” and really enforcing it to be this strict boxed in like no option kind of situation versus like how about if we try right before bed or when I'm reading you a book or giving some different options.

Laura: Like autonomy within boundaries, right? So having boundaries brushing teeth needs to happen. But there's lots of possibilities or like getting hands clean after coming inside. I think lots of parents are continuing to be concerned about handwashing right now. There's lots of ways hand washing can happen versus there's one way, the parents’ way, right?

So there's economy within boundaries.

Rosalia: What we're really trying to teach also is the skill of decision making, critical thinking, like helping them develop those things because in the long run that is going to help them when it comes to body safety. Like these skills of learning how to tune into your body, listen to those cues. All of that is developed through these ways of like letting them decide when they're full and letting them decide what feels good for them in that moment to wear and what makes them happy and how that feels in their body. Like all those little pieces. So I know that that seems really simplistic, but that is such a huge foundation for consent, right? Is like them recognizing.

Laura: I think you're hitting on something that's so important for parents to understand is that, that consent and boundaries and body autonomy are not taught in these small few minute conversations that you have, you know, once every few weeks when a boundary has been crossed or something. It's taught through the way that you live, it's in living it. That's how it's taught to kids.

Rosalia: I always talk about finding ways to weave this into your parenting, right? So that it's really the part of the fabric. And so when you start from that foundation regardless of your child's age, what you're really saying to them is I'm truly honoring right who you are as a person. I'm truly honoring your body rights. So, we're really teaching our children about their body rights and that's going to be the strongest foundation for them to start to recognize what is okay, what's not okay with me, right?

And so that's how they learn to start to actually develop their boundaries, then we want to teach them how to implement those boundaries, right? How to say, “I don't really want to hug right now, thank you” or “I would prefer a fist bump” or so this is how we teach them to implement those boundaries. And then we can teach them how to actually uphold them which is if somebody tries to cross that line anyway, which is bound to happen. How to vocalize with confidence, right, if that line did get crossed and they try to uphold it and it still didn't matter that they know how to ask for help, how to get support, how to report that something unsafe happened or that someone made them uncomfortable and that they were comfortable enough to let us know because they've developed that skill set of something is wrong. I don't feel safe. I know that I have a safety person, that is my backup, right? So, whether that's mom, dad, whoever that other person is.

I usually will also teach parents create a safety network because sometimes you may not be available or they may not for whatever reason want to come to you and they at least have another safety line, like another lifeline that they can ask for help.

Laura: And so, I'm thinking then of course about what if the person who's crossing those boundaries is in that network? For example, of my parent’s generation, our parent’s generation are less hip with don't have to give auntie a hug. You don't have to give grandma hug. My parents are working on that. But one of those persons is the person who's crossing some of those boundaries. And of course, we know the statistics that oftentimes in cases of child sexual abuse, the child usually knows the person and that

Rosalia: Mm-hmm 90% of the time.

Laura: So how can we teach our kids? Lots of the holdup that parents have is that we don't want to scare our kids and there's extra piece of we don't want to make kids responsible for their safety and it's our job to keep them safe. So I feel like can we talk about that balance?

Rosalia: I love it because this is my jam. This is exactly where I love to help parents because they do find themselves in that position a lot. Here's the thing, I love that you said it shouldn't be all in our kids and I 1000% agree with that. And I talk about that because we tend to think we teach kids abuse prevention and then we're good, but in fact, it's not our child's responsibility to prevent abuse. A 100% yeah because here's the thing. What we're doing when we teach our kids about abuse prevention is we're skill-building, but that doesn't put the responsibility on them. It's still our responsibility to talk to the people in our children's lives about what we are doing at home. In terms of, you know, hey, we're teaching this, we're practicing this. These are some expectations that we would like you to support, you know, in terms of how you interact with our child. Uh, you know, for grandparents, please do not ask your child to keep even what you consider to be an innocent secret. Because we're teaching them about secret safety.

Laura: Wait, you have a podcast so everybody can go listen to your podcasts. Right?

Rosalia: Well yeah, I do talk about some of this on the podcast

Laura: Okay.

Rosalia: Podcast is more for talking about like survivor topics around trauma and relationships and things like that. But I do have lots of information around this. And one of the things you know, when I talk about creating a safety network, part of creating a safety network, means vetting the people that are on your safety network. So you're not just going to be like, oh these people, I know them so therefore they belong on the safety network.

No, no, no, no, no.

We want to make sure that we have communicated to the people that we have invited into our safety network and to let them know that “hey, my child and I have decided that we're creating a safety network, and these are some of the people that both my child and I have decided could be great to be part of the network”. And so we want to ask you if you would be part of this network and if you do this is what that means, right? And so we want to explain to them that we are practicing consent. We are, you know, teaching our child secret safety. We're teaching them what a safe person is, right? Because a safe person does not mean, oh, it's a police officer, like a uniform on or a doctor who has a lab coat. Like no, that is not relevant. What's relevant or the actions of the person.

So, a safe person does four things. One is that they would never break a body boundary. They would never ask your child to keep a secret. They would always believe your child if they came to them, and they would help keep them safe. They would make sure that that unsafe situation does not happen again. So those four things are the four pillars of what a safe person is. And you want to teach that to your child.

And you also want to let the person who you're inviting into your safety network? No, these are the requirements for someone to be on our team of safe people. Right? So you're really communicating this to the person, you're letting them know. So that one, it's like, do you agree to this? You know, do you want to be part of the safety network. Two, now you know what is required. So, if you are a potential predator, right, then you're going to be like, “oh, you know, like hands-off on this family because they're not an easy target.”

Predators are looking for easy targets. That can be someone in your family. It could be someone in your school. It could be someone in your youth-serving organization. You know, when I say predator, people think of a stranger, but you know, like you said, 90% of abuse happens at the hands of people that the family and the child knows and trusts. And it usually happens through a process called grooming. So, we can't just assume that just because it's a family member, just because it's someone we've known for 20 years. Unfortunately, predators know how to hide in plain sight, and they know how to make themselves look like an upstanding citizen that you would never imagine.

We need to be really vocal about this and talk to the people in our child's life. That's 50% of abuse prevention is us talking to the people in our child's life. And the other half is educating and skill building with our children, right? So, if we look at it as a 50-50 that's the split. We don't want to put all the pressure on our kids. Explain to our children, this is what a safe person is. And we explain to the adult, these are the expectations we have of a safe person that really covers, you know that those two pieces so that we can create those networks. So that kids know, okay, this is the safe person. They would never break the body boundary. They're not going to ask me to keep a secret. They will believe me and they will help to keep me safe.

Laura: Can we touch a little bit on secret safety on what that means?

Rosalia: Yeah. So secret safety is huge. It's so critical. It's one of the biggest pieces that I find a lot of parents don't think to teach because they're not really sure like how to teach it. Because secrets can feel like a tricky kind of conversation. A lot of parents will teach that there's good secrets and that there's bad secrets. We don't want to go down that route because a predator can use the concept of a good secret as a manipulation technique, as a grooming strategy. You know, this is why I always tell parents, ask the people in your child's life, particularly anyone who they spend a lot of time with it. They have one on one access to that they do not ask your child to keep a secret. Let them know we're teaching secret safety, which means that our child knows that there are no secrets between us. Within the family, we do not keep secrets within the family.

So, we want to teach kids about surprises instead because that's like you have birthday parties or a gift that you want to give somebody. Those are things that are meant to be shared. That makes someone feel good. There's a timeline versus a secret is never supposed to be shared. It's something that you don't tell anyone, even if it doesn't make you feel bad, it could be something that a tricky person is trying to get you to believe. And so you want to introduce the concept of a tricky person. A lot of people are like, how do you explain that? But there's a lot of media, books, movies, shows that have these characters already in the storyline.

Um, I always like to point to like the first movie for Frozen with the prince who like seem like a good guy, but he turned out to be a bad guy. That's a tricky person, right? So, you can give your child these examples to say if somebody is asking you to keep a secret, even if it feels like it's an okay secret or they tell you that it's okay to not tell mom and dad. That might be a tricky person, which is why it's so important that you tell mom and dad anyway because then you can confirm and make sure that you're staying safe, and ultimately, a safe person isn't going to ask a child to keep a secret.

A surprise is different. It's meant to be told. There's a timeline. So, making sure that they have that distinction. So, creating a safety rule in your home that we do not keep secrets. That's our safety rule. Giving kids that script to tell someone if someone asked them to keep a secret: “We don't keep secrets in our home. That's our family safety secrets rule.”

And again, that will be a really big red flag to a potential predator that they are like, “oh, this child is being educated hands-off.” Like they're looking for the lowest hanging fruit, like least resistance. The way that they look for children are the homes where kids are not talking about these things, that they don't have the language, that they can very evidently see that this child doesn't know. And they will ask them to keep a good secret, something that's totally innocent to test them to see if they're willing to keep the secret at all. So if your child knows to say that they're getting crossed off the list.

Laura: Okay, so now whenever I start thinking about secrets and secrets safety, I love that phrase. You have really good turn of phrase. I also start my daughter. My oldest is getting older, she's starting to seek more privacy, which is a normal part of development. And so, I also I would love to discuss a little bit of the nuance between secret-keeping and privacy because I do believe especially if we're talking about consent, the kids are entitled to privacy too.

Rosalia: Absolutely.

Laura: So, I'm curious if we can, I don't know, touch on that a little bit too. I feel

Rosalia: Yeah

Laura: like I’m asking you so much.

[laugh]

Rosalia: No, it's all good.

Well, I mean it's important too because that is… it stems from the idea of private parts, right? So if you're teaching about private parts, then you can start to talk about the idea of privacy in general because kids will explore their bodies and these are private activities, right? So something that you can do when you have privacy and then you introduce this idea of that's your own alone time, that's time for you. You can do that, you can do whatever it is that you want in the privacy of that time and space. So, you can give examples of like, you know when someone goes to the bathroom and they close the door. They want privacy. They don't want anyone else to see what's happening in there. And so introducing the idea through those kinds of physical examples kind of sets the stage. So that as they get older they can introduce that like they can kind of transition that into more of an abstract concept of just space and time with things like you know, I don't want someone to know that I still like sleeping with my teddy bear, that's my own private information. I don't want people to know that because it might embarrass me or it might, you know, I just don't want somebody to know about that. So you can introduce the idea that that's okay to have that private information. If you write in your diary, right, that's your private information.

As long as it is not something that is involving someone hurting you or impacting your body safety. This is where you want to introduce this idea because someone could say, “oh well let's keep this between you and I, it's private.” They still use that, that term. But you can say like if somebody is making you feel uncomfortable, if there, whether that's uncomfortable physically or emotionally or mentally, then that is still something that you should come and talk to us about because we can help you with that.

So, introducing the idea that privacy is okay, as long as it doesn't affect your safety. Once it affects your safety, then it's really important that you talk to your safe person about that. And so that could be me, that could be dad, that could be whoever else is on your safety network. So really starting from that place of the physical, private space, private activity. When we're talking about kids exploring their bodies, you can introduce the idea. Then a lot of times kids when they're really small and they're walking around the house, kind of exploring, you know, hands down the band's my kids do without shaming them. We just want to redirect and say, hey, you know, I realized that you know, maybe you want to explore, but let's try to keep that private activity if you want to go hang out in the bedroom or the bathroom or just let mom know, hey, I need some private time and you're on the couch doing your thing. I'll be in the kitchen. That's cool too.

You know, whatever that looks like for you in your home, that's the perfect sort of place to start with concept of privacy.

Laura: Okay. And so then, you know, kind of circling back to the conversation that we were having at the beginning of this episode. What about when kids start wanting to have alone time together? So my daughters will sometimes want to play by themselves and one of their rooms and say, mom and dad, don't come in. You're not allowed, no grownups allowed. How do we navigate those situations?

Rosalia: Personally, I think it's important that we have an open-door policy. The only time that private time is allowed is for yourself when you're between a certain age, right? Especially with playdates. For us, there’s an open-door policy. For me particularly we're about to move and to a new home and I know that the bedrooms are going to be in a different floor. Like right now our bedrooms are on the main floor, but we're having a different situation. And so when friends come over bedrooms are off limits. We don't allow that because I need to know that child better. I need to know the parents better. I need to know more about that family before I feel comfortable saying like, “oh sure guys like closed-door activity.” Like not okay for me because for safety reasons.

So I, even with siblings, will still advocate an open-door policy and just say “I will knock” and still like give you that much of to say, “Hey, you know, I'm coming to see what's going on” or whatever you want to say, but it's got to be an open-door policy. So I still feel like private time is okay for you to do on your own. But when there's another person involved, there's got to be an open-door policy.

Laura: Okay. And so then keeping on this topic that we were talking about before, this whole time, we've been talking about abuse prevention and the slow build. And so if our kids get into a situation where they report something happened to them, some touch that didn't feel good or they weren't even sure about because I think for young kids often they aren't sure.

They… Something happened. It didn't feel quite right. What they didn't know if it was, especially when it's between kids. So, they come to us and they report we find out about it. Our reaction is really important, right? At that moment and time.

Rosalia: Oh yeah.

Laura: And so, do you have any tips for parents who are in that situation? How to go about that without shaming, without blaming? And a child's response and processing of those moments can define whether something's traumatic or whether something they move on from it too. Can you give us some tips for parents?

Rosalia: Yeah.

Laura: About that situation

Rosalia: For sure.

Well, one of the things to that I want to just kind of go backwards a little bit to say is that when we're inviting someone to be part of our safety networks, explaining to them once they agree to be part of the safety network is educating them on this same thing.

How do you respond if my child comes to you so that you're not re-traumatizing them by saying the wrong thing?

So, when we're talking about creating a safety network, it's not just like, “Hey, let's just pick five people,” like there's a process in order to really make it effective and also for your child to be supported by that person, right? So if they were to come to them, you want them to know the same thing that you know about how to respond. And so how to respond is critical for two reasons. One is obviously you don't want to re-traumatize your child, but to you want to make sure that they feel safe enough to really tell you as much as possible. Because a lot of the time they're only going to give you a very small amount of information to see how you handle it before they divulge anything else.

Our initial response is going to be really critical for a potential investigation for, you know, making sure that they feel safe as they unfold any other details. So first you want to commend them for the fact that they did the right thing by coming to tell you. You want to let them know that they didn't do anything wrong. That in fact, you're really proud of the fact that they have come to you and did the right thing that, you know, what you instructed them. And then you wanna let them know that you're going to do everything in your power to make sure that this situation unfolds in a safe way.

You don't want to, you know, if you feel triggered also in the moment that you received the information, like take a breath, take a moment to pause and if you need to like even get up and say, “you know so thirsty. Let me just get a glass of water for a second. Would you like a glass of water?” You know, because they're going to be like looking at every bit of your reaction, right? So just try to stay calm. If you're a survivor yourself, it could be extremely triggering, right? So just prepare yourself with some tools, breathing techniques or something that's going to help you regulates so you can have this conversation.

And then, you know, so that you can be as supportive. Thank you for telling me you did the right thing. You're so courageous for coming and telling me that even if you just felt uncomfortable like sometimes we're not sure how we feel and it's always great to be able to talk to someone. So thank you for trusting me to come and tell me.

And then you want to ask them. So what else would you like to share about that? Was there anything else that you wanted to tell me? Right? You don't want to ask any leading questions. You don't want to um you know, add things in there that you perceive happened without them actually happening. So stay away from leading questions. Just be open to hearing. So what else happened? Is there anything else that you'd like to share? And then do not, you know, if whether it's an adult or a child, we don't want to ever attack that person, you know, “oh my goodness, I can't believe that person did that or I'm going to make sure that they go to jail or oh my goodness, I could just kill that.” You know, like whatever that sometimes response that's in our head, we don't want to verbalize that because that child may have a really good relationship with that friend or that person, that adult and us threatening in some way could really make the child retract and you know, not want to share anymore because of fear of what the repercussion is going to be to that person.

They may just want that situation to not happen anymore. But that doesn't mean that they want that person to necessarily go away in a child's mind. It's like I just want them to stop doing that thing, but they're my friend, so I don't want my friend to go away right? So you don't want to say anything that's going to like make them fear telling you any more information. So calmly say, “I'm going to look into it and see what happened and make sure that it doesn't happen again.” And you know, depending on the age of the child, you want to keep them, you know, feeling like they're involved in the process because if they feel like they've been shut out, there going to be very apprehensive to tell you more because you're shutting them out, they're going to shut you out. So try to keep it open and supportive and then, you know, look at just my child, need to see a play therapist. Do they need to talk to a counselor? Most likely they do, you know, something that really impacted them. You know you want to make sure that you're giving them the support and then do your own investigation from that point. If it's, you know, a situation that needs to involve, it's an adult and you need to involve child protective services. If it's a child, you want to obviously talk to the child's parents> you want to find out if it was something that happened in school-on-school grounds, obviously you're going to take the next steps from there.

But your response, initially, it's going to be really important too, because your child made later come back and say, “so there was this other part of this thing that happened and like I wanted to tell you.” You're going to have follow-up conversations so that first one is going to be really important.

Laura: Okay. And so, one of the things that I'm thinking about now too is so how do we tell the difference as parents between age-appropriate kind of explorations between peers and things that are should not be happening?

Rosalia: So typically, it's there's a 2 to 3-year gap where it can be a curiosity exploration kind of situation, right? If they're in the same peer group and I would say that that's for like six and under. Six and over, we're talking about there should be more knowledge around body safety generally. So if someone is asking another child, you know, to touch them in a private area or wants to touch them in a private area or is asking them not to say anything that's very clear knowledge that they know that that's not appropriate and is leaning more towards that an abusive situation.

Again, the child themselves even may not understand that that's abusive because they may being abused and not recognize that that is not okay. So you know, it really depends on the dynamics. If it's over a 2 to 3 year age gap, let's say the child is six and the older child is 10, that's a very clear like the child is 10. They know that's inappropriate, shouldn't be doing that. That's when you're talking about potential for that to now be abusive. So there's that, that age window um, you know, 2-3 years, yeah, years.

Laura: All the parents listening, I hope that you are staying calm and knowing that this prevention is so important. So having just listened to this interview with Rosalia is doing a whole lot for your family.

But as we move into kind of opening the world, backup kids are going back into school settings. Are there things that we can be doing for our communities? Um, not just for our family but for communities to start these conversations. And we hear all the time it takes a village, but how do we actually put that into practice?

Rosalia: Well, first of all, I think this will make everyone feel better. This is one of my more favorable statistics is that 90% of abuse can be prevented through education. So if we are taking the time to do this education, you should feel good about the fact that's going to really help, right? And what we can do is again, like have these conversations with our inner circle, so grandparents, relatives, family members, friends, then talk to the next level of people who are interacting, educators, let them know. This is why I created consent letters because you can give this letter to someone and say this is what we're doing at home. This is how we're practicing it. We would love for you to be involved and help us, you know, support this education that we're teaching. This is how you can support it. You know, will you support it? You know, it's a really challenge calling people in.

I think a lot of people are afraid to have these conversations because they think that they're going to make that person feel uncomfortable or like you're pointing a finger. But we're not calling people out, we're calling people in. And so coming at it from that, you know, intention, that perspective, it really makes a difference. So whether that is a teacher, a coach, even, you know, a babysitter, hey, we're doing this, this is how we practice it. Having those conversations, not being, you know, as afraid like having the courage to talk about this more openly and educating others. Hey, these statistics have been on the rise, you know, this is not something that I'm making up. I'm not just being paranoid, you know, I think that we're afraid of being seen that way, but in fact, when we start to educate people, they are actually really surprised that they didn't know those statistics because no one is talking about it. So we have to be those first people to say, “I'm going to be the one to talk about it in my community because it's going to make our communities safer.”

Bring a list of abuse prevention books to your local library and say, “Hey, can you bring those books in?” You know, and that really helps to educate more parents in your community, Right? The more, the more we share this information with other parents, like if you're going to a play date and “hey, we're starting to practice this new education and x, y z,” you can share this. So just getting more vocal about it, in general, is going to empower your community and you know, they'll be like, “Hey, you know, where did you learn that? How can I learn more about that? Oh yeah, there's this, you know, website here. There's this podcast there. I learned about this here.”

Give more of those tools to everyone else so that everybody can get on board.

Laura: I love those, especially those two ideas. So, I think those are resources that people can get from you, right? Where can people find those?

Rosalia: Yeah. So, you can go to consentparenting.com and I have the free pdf of the book recommendations that are all about abuse prevention broken up into age groups. So, you can easily take you know, circle which books you want the library to bring in and hand that over to them.

And then my consent letters, you know, I have eight different templates, including ones for sleepovers, you know, for doctors, for yeah, for teachers, for day cares. You know, we want to be able to talk to everybody. Right? And so these letters really help facilitate that communication.

Laura: What a great resource.

Rosalia: Yeah. I even actually…

[laugh]

Well, I was gonna say, I actually also just created two new versions which are videos. So, if you have a co-parent, like if you're in a if you're divorced and you're co-parenting, that sometimes the most challenging is like to try to get your co-parent on board with what you're doing. And so, you can send a consent letter or you can send a video, which is essentially me explaining what you're teaching in your home, how you're teaching it, why are teaching it.

Some statistics to back up like the reason why and then asking them to be on board and asking them, you know, we're practicing secret safety. This is what it means. This is how you can be part of it even if you're living in separate homes. Right? And so it's me basically sharing that information coming from an expert, making it easier for the co-parent to like just send that over and yeah.

Laura: Oh my gosh. What a great resource. Okay, so your website is consentparenting.com and that's also your handle on uhm…

Rosalia: On Instagram.

Laura: On Instagram which everybody listening, if you do Instagram, you should definitely be there. Her page is helpful. So wonderful. Thank you so much for your time and your expertise in what you're doing for the world. You just really are a gift to

Rosalia: Thank you.

Laura: To us parents and I so appreciate you.

Rosalia: Well, thank you for inviting me on and for making this a topic that you're making space for on your podcast. So I really appreciate you for doing that as well.

Laura: I feel just so honored to have had you here with us.

Okay, so thanks for listening today. Remember to subscribe to the podcast and if it was helpful, leave me a review. That really helps others find the podcast and join us in this really important work of creating a parenthood that we don't have to escape from and creating a childhood for our kids that they don't have to recover from.

And if you're listening, grab a screenshot and tag me on Instagram so that I can give you a shout out and definitely go follow me on Instagram @laurafroyenphd. That's where you can get behind the scenes, look at what balanced, conscious parenting looks like in action with my family and plus, I share a lot of other really great resources there too.

July 06, 2021

Episode 66: Healthy Cycles For Ourselves & Our Kids with Aviva Romm, MD

July 06, 2021/ Laura Froyen

For this week's episode on The Balanced Parent Podcast, we will be tackling a topic that I am very passionate about, and I know many of us struggle with: Our relationships with our bodies. Particularly for anyone who menstruates, getting comfortable with our bodies, how they change as the years go by, our cycles & hormones, can bring a layer of stress to our daily lives that can make peaceful parenting just that much harder. And our kids are watching and learning from us all the time, including how we think about, feel about, & take care of our bodies. I have been working hard the past few years to shift my mindset and beliefs toward my body, not just for me, but also for my children. I want my girls to develop a sense of confidence, wonder, & joy in their bodies, and I know that starts with me.

And so this week on the podcast we will be talking about our health, cycles, hormones, and how we can raise a generation of children who have healthy relationships with their bodies. To help me in this conversation, I am thrilled to introduce a world-renowned expert on this topic, Dr. Aviva Romm. (totally #fangirling over here!) She is a Yale-trained MD who aims to redefine women's health by bridging traditional wisdom and modern medicine. She is also a mother to four grown and a grandmother of two (9 and 6).

Here's a summary of what we talked about (Buckle up. It's going to be interesting.):

Body Beliefs and Our Cycles (and how we can identify and shift beliefs that may be getting in our way)
Hormone Imbalances (and the impact on women’s health, and how trauma can show up in gynecologic health)
Debunking Birth Control Myths (and how to become empowered in making the most educated choices)
How to Encourage Healthy Body Image in the Next Generation

Okay so if this topic interests you and you want to know more, visit her website and follow her on social media:

Website: www.avivaromm.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/AvivaRommMD
Instagram: @dr.avivaromm

And don't forget to check out her new book, Hormone Intelligence!

PS- Here is the link to her book if you want to check it out! Just a heads up, this is an "affiliate" link, which means I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. This is one way I am able to keep making amazing free content like this available!

Hello, I'm Dr. Laura Froyen and this is The Balanced Parent Podcast where overwhelmed, stressed out and disconnected parents go to find tools, mindset shifts and practices to help them stop yelling at the people they love and start connecting on a deeper level. All delivered with heaping doses of grace and compassion. Join me in conversations that will help you get clear on your goals and values and start showing up in your parenting, your relationships, your life with openhearted authenticity and balance. Let's go!

Laura: Hello everybody, this is Dr. Laura Froyen and in this episode of the balanced parent podcast, we're going to be talking about women's health are cycles and how we can raise a generation of women of, children who have healthy relationships with their bodies and to partner with me in this conversation, I am over the moon, so thrilled to bring in a world-renowned expert on this topic, Dr. Aviva Romm. Dr. Romm, will you please introduce yourself to the balanced parenting community and tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do, although I know many of them already know who you are.

Aviva: Thank you so much, Laura for having me here. Please call me Aviva, you don't have to call me Doctor or anything and it is such a pleasure to be here. And it's so nice to meet your community. So who am I? Well, I am a mama of four. My kids are now shockingly to me, 36 years old, down to 27 years old. I have two grandchildren who are nine and six. People are always like you have all these accomplishments Aviva, and like for me, my two happiest accomplishments aside from my own kids are that I got to midwife, my grandchildren at home. That to me it was like such a, just so cool you know trumps at Yale M.D. any day.

I grew up in... actually grew up in a housing project with a single mom who worked two jobs to make ends meet. I've seen you know like really the impact of working hard as a mom and what that means and support and lack of support to. And then I went off to college when I was 15 to be a physician and got exposed to alternative medicine. There wasn't actually a term for it back then, it wasn't even called alternative medicine, it was just weird stuff that I was doing, I had to find the other people who were doing the weird stuff too. And at that time I got interested in home birth, midwifery and natural medicine, herbal medicine. And really it all started around this article that I read about how we birth and how we parent and set up so much of our psychology for our life and well I definitely I'm not all about blaming the mom, I think we need to stop always doing that what just happened so often and we blame ourselves.

But looking at the impact of early life imprints really deeply influenced me so much to go on this midwifery path and natural medicine path. And I basically spent 25 years as a home birth midwife and then what got my M.D as a mom did that at Yale, spent four years in medical school at Yale and the year Internal medicine. And then I did my rest of my residency in family medicine with obstetrics.

And it's funny like my passion is really women and children's health and I feel like the children's health is partly so important to me because you know when I was in my medical training, one of my teenagers was going through a really hard time and this wise ophthalmologist who I was studying with at the moment, she had four kids and she said you know Aviva you're only as happy as you're unhappy as child. And it was like the most true thing that I think anyone had ever said to me.

So for me, part of why I really love the pediatrics is that when you're a mom, if your child is suffering and you don't have answers, it's really hard. You know, it's like when your kid is screaming in the car seat and you're trying to go somewhere, it's not a very relaxed journey. And so to me, taking care of kids as part of taking care of moms and women. So now my practice is telemedicine. It actually was quite a bit before the pandemic. I do a lot of online teaching and I write books because I can only see so many patients and teach so many people one on one and writing books is my way to take everything I do in that one on one and try to make it as accessible as possible.

Laura: I love that. And you have a new book coming out?

Aviva: I do. It's called Hormone Intelligence. I'm really excited about it because it really is. You know, I started this work like I said when I was started studying this stuff when I was 15 and 55 the day after my book comes out. So a full 40-year journey, which is also crazy when I think about it out loud, but it's been a really long journey and I feel like this book brings together all these aspects of who I am, myself as a midwife, myself as an herbalist, myself as an MD and myself as a teacher and of course a woman because now that I'm almost 55, I've been through every life cycle, right? I've been through my puberty and my childbearing years and through menopause. So It's just really exciting to bring this experience and maybe even a little wisdom at this point to other women.

Laura: Yeah, I really appreciate that. And I think that likely to the field has grown a lot and what you get to have witnessed that growth and been a part of it too as it's growing as we're changing our understanding of what your hormonal health imbalance for women means.

Aviva: It is really exciting when I got my first period, I was 12 and I was at my grandmother's house and my grandmother has always been very reticent about talking which has passed away now, but she was always very reticent about nudity and sex and menstruation and body parts. So when I got my first period at her house and she was the one I had to go and tell. She could never say the word period. She always called it a what's it she called it a whose and it came from your, what's it like? She couldn't say it the word, yes, she couldn't say the word. And even back then, I mean women talked about change of life, that was the euphemism for menopause or time of month.

And I mean we still use those terms, but I think we use them more for fun or out of, you know, just like common language as opposed to, but we can say the word period or vagina or whatever we need to say even on national television. So it really is. You know, I've really seen some major changes, but also things like when I was first starting out herbal medicine and nutrition and food as healing, my family thought I joined a cult because I became a vegetarian, I was like, no, I'm doing this for environmental reasons and you know, ecology and animal health spirituality.

Whereas now it's just like it's so common that you can see a humorous tv commercial or a sitcom skit about it and people are really taking these things seriously is very, very exciting. The other flip side of that though, it means there's so much noise out there, you know, with the internet, there's so many experts, there's so much information, there's so many different opinions and it can get really overwhelming. I mean even when we think about things like sleep training or potty training or attachment parenting or bottle-feeding or breastfeeding or pacifiers or like it goes on, it's enough to make you just your head spend. You know.

Laura: I do think that there is something to be said for that. It's wonderful how much access to information we have as parents in this time period and at the same time, we have to have really strong filters and healthy boundaries and a sense of self in order to know who to trust and how to filter the information that's coming in through our unique lens of what's right for our family, our goals and our values. You know.

Aviva: I love how you said that it is and we have so been taught by the medical model and we've been taught by parenting experts, but even just as women and mothers that we are not the expert, we are not the ones who know our own children or no, our own body. So I think we can often end up deferring rather than running it by that internal barometer, that filter, and saying, okay, wait a minute. Actually, I do know what's going on here and I can trust that, trust my sense of this information.

Laura: This is something I've always appreciated about you Aviva, is that intuition piece of it. I don't know that I realized that you had been following your intuition since you were 15. And you know that's a beautiful thing that many of us, many of the parents I have the blessing to get to work with. We have to kind of strip away our cultural conditioning of quieting that voice.

Aviva: Grow up with a very strongly feminist single mom. I don't know if it was just because it was the seventies or what. But I can remember funny little moments as a child where I would say the phone would ring and I would say oh that's you know, so and so it could be like a friend of my mom. And then it would be and my mom would say you have really strong intuition or she would say you have E. S. P.

But I can also remember being in third grade and I had done this art project. I still can visualize it was on that brown butcher paper. And I had painted these three women with these Victorian outfits and I was really proud of this artwork. It was like a rolled up scroll and then got put on the wall. And my third grade teacher, Mrs. Amron said at the end of the school year, you can have those back because they were on display in the hallway. It was the last day of school and I asked Mrs. Amron for my artwork back and she said, “no, they’re school property, they’re on the wall.” I just remember putting my hands on my hips and stamping my foot and saying, “well I'm not leaving until I get my artwork back.” And I wasn't a difficult child. Like I was like the star student kind of like, you know, goody goody kid in a way, but I was like, I'm not leaving in.

My mom got called. My mom, single working mom, she got called in to pick me up at the end of the school day, which was not small thing for her to have to come home and do. And she came in, in the classroom and she said to Mrs. Amron, “did you tell her that she can have her schoolwork?” But her artwork back at the end, I mean, I thought I was being in trouble. My mom was like, did you tell her she could have her artwork back at the end of the year? And said, well I did. And my mom said you told to give it to her. There was always this like early instilling, trust my voice, trust my instincts, stick up for myself, that I think really guided me in my life.

Laura: That's beautiful. And I think really encouraging to hear because lots of my listeners are working to instill that in their kids as they are claiming it for themselves, so they're reclaiming it for themselves and are working to not instill the fear of speaking up for themselves. And so that's beautiful. And I feel like that brings us really nicely to this conversation that I'm so excited to have with you.

Many people in my community who have children who are kind of growing up getting older and are starting to approach the 40 years, kind of starting to process their own experience around their body and their cycle. Many of us are kind of as we are shifting our own hormonal experience to our kids, they're kind of were growing up alongside them and for me personally, to starting to reflect back on that I didn't necessarily, I don't want to have my child have the same experience that I do and… and I want them to feel differently about their body, about their, about their cycle, about their period, I want them to know certain things that I don't even necessarily know myself and so I was just, can we have that conversation?

Aviva: I would love to, So I will say one thing, you know, as a mom who has four grown kids, I was like a very early like attachment and my four kids were born at home, breastfed family bed, homeschooled, you know, we were like really in that kind of model of parenting. My kids are amazing human beings that have a son and three daughters and they're all so beautiful and incredible and smart and strong and capable and independent and really couldn't ask for more and their own people and I will say like all the everyone listening, there is no one recipe for a healthy adult. There are so many factors intergenerational, like some of my kids have struggled with anxiety or various things that have come up that I was just talking with my daughter in law recently about this and how like you can't fully account for genetics for the intergenerational influences and you don't even fully while you're in it, know what you're transmitting, like what you think is transmitting may be very different.

So my mom, for example, she grew up in a very repressive home. Again, my grandmother couldn't say period or like any of it, but it was more than that was just a very repressive kind of like post-depression, first-generation American parents who had left Europe because of persecution, just a lot of stuff right? That you don't really necessarily understand how it's fully affecting you and then you raise your kids trying to do your own best next. So my mom, she kind of like swung in the other direction.

So for example, we lived in a tiny apartment, when you walked in the apartment, you were kind of in our little dining area and she had a poster of a woman who was like sitting on her haunches. I remember 1972 and I was six years old and the woman had a calendar on her back. Like that was the calendar and it was basically a naked woman, but you couldn't, you just saw her back, you know, and like curve of her butt and then her feet and even at that age was mortified.

My mom could be in the bathroom and I could have a friend over like sixth grade. My mom could be in the bathroom and call and be like, hey, can you bring me a tampon from the hall closet? I was mortified. I mean just like on and on, remember when I was an early teenager and I wasn't even remotely thinking about having sex for saying to me, you know, whenever you're starting to think about sex, just come talk to me, we can talk about the pill again. I was like, let me die right now.

And how did I get you as my horrible mom? I mean, she was the mom that I was so embarrassed to have, I cannot even begin to tell you and my friends thought she was cool. I was like, please can I trade for any other mother? And what's really funny is that like nudity and like all of it like over the top, like over the top rebound from what her parents did. And so for me growing up, it's funny, like on the one hand, I hated it, but on the other hand, I grew up and I'm a midwife who takes care of women's health, sees a zillion vaginas and like has no problem talking about tampons and period. So it's weird, right?

Laura: Like it obviously had some effect, right?

Aviva: Like there's this deep cellular comfort. The other thing is that I think the fact that my mom would just scream out, hey, bring me a tampon even though I was cringeworthy about periods and didn't have any clue about my own first period really. Other than kind of what I learned in fourth-grade health class, there was a certain normalization about it. Similarly, my mom, you know, again, she's like this feminist, you know, she's like, yeah, I was playing softball when I went into labor with you and then I went to the hospital and had you four hours later.

There was always this like, ha ha ha I laugh in the face of danger. But on the other hand, I grew up with such a normal belief system about birth, right? Like, so you can play softball and then you go to the hospital and have your baby. What's the big deal?

So, I think that there's a lot about what we, how we express our attitudes, but it doesn't mean that our kids are going to like it or be comfortable with it in the moment.

And honestly, it took me until well into my thirties to start to get it that my mom had a clue because I spent most of my parenting, my early parenting like I'm going to do it exactly different than my mom did. So for me, I was much more respectful of boundaries with my kids. I mean we had family bed, obviously all of that, so it wasn't like we weren't naked around our kids, that kind of normal stuff, or take a bath with them.

But when our son got to be like seven or eight I would close the bedroom door, he had his own room by then if he wanted to come in the door jar so he knew he could come in. But it wasn't like let me just take my clothes off in front of you while you're talking to me about yourself all practice or like your little league practice. So for me, I tried to have more boundaries but still maintain that really healthy open at it.

I read this story one time. I think it came from maybe like a Waldorf school story or something like that. It was about how something around like Waldorf psychology I think it was, but it was how kids don't so much learn from what they see us doing as much as how they see us doing it. And the story was about a kid who was, the dad was hammering something like he was putting something like a dog house or something and he invited his son to help him and the dad was ruminating on something that was really bothering him and was angrily hammering and the kid, the mom came out and saw that the kid was really angrily hammering and the mom noticed like the kid was just literally emulating the dad's facial expressions and body movements.

So you know, looking at how we're embodying, you know, how do we talk about our menstrual cycle? How do we normalize it? How do we express our physical comfort in terms of our intimacy with our partner in front of our kids? If we have a partner or another person who might be in your life, how do we answer our kids' questions?

I remember one time I was in the kitchen and my kids were like, probably I'm going to guess like 14 down to five at that time or a little bit older. I think the youngest was like six or seven when this happened. And the third one down and the second the last or two years apart, and the third one down said, I'm just getting the kitchen washing, sink washing dishes, and she's sitting at the island looking at me, she's like, so if you and dad had sex just like, and I was about to answer and the little one I'm guessing is just six at the time. She said, well obviously they've had sex four times for kids. It was like, it was just kind of funny like how it was this normal where I could see somebody like, okay, we don't talk about that. Do you know what I mean? And how we respond is really what shapes that.

Laura: Right? Yeah.

Aviva: It was a very long answer.

Laura: No, no, no. It was so good. And you spoke to the heart of what we do here on this podcast is so we are really focused on as opposed to changing our children, Changing ourselves, taking a good look at our we modeling and showing up in our lives as… as we would want our kids to be showing up too. So I mean, and this is like this is the work, this is the healing ourselves, you know, and also leaving space for our kids to be themselves, understanding that it's not all on us, some of it is there too, you know, and there's going to be work for them to do, but it's not gonna work.

Aviva: Yeah, the more of you know, when I was raising my kids, I would think I was so concerned to have them feel loved and supported and safe and all those things are so important. I think if I were to write a book now on parenting, I would write how to raise a healthy adult. And think about, you know, how are we modeling resilience? How are we modeling self-care and self-love? How are we modeling self-compassion? Like sometimes I'll have a woman in my practice who is struggling with hormone problem and I'll talk about how important it is to or she's struggling with anxiety or depression or inflammation or whatever it is.

And I'll talk about how important it is to sleep more or to take some time to meditate or exercise or just take a long shower or anything that's self-nourishing and how often women will say I don't have time because of my kids. Like I'm busy being a mom and I'll say I'll find myself saying more and more because it's funny sometimes the way to appeal to moms is still, how is this going to get a few kids? Yeah, I'll say two moms like.

So here's the thing if your children, whether it's your sons or your daughters or your nongender binary children, whoever they are, if they are having the role modeling, that being a mom means you're now not a human being who has any needs, that's what they're going to grow up and think being a parent actually is. So actually, if you want to model that mom role in a way that you want your kids to learn whether you want your son to internalize that so that when he becomes a partner, if he becomes a partner to a mom or another, any human being, they see that in a lens that's really hole and your daughters grow up either to not want to rebel against that and be like, heck, I'm never going to be like a mom like that or falling into that being a mom means I don't have any rights to self-care anymore.

And I know from the intensive way that I parented my kids, it's really important to dive into. How do you really feel? It's a big question I ask my patients. I tried to ask myself, how do you really feel, because if you're turning your... yourself inside out to do it and you're not enjoying it, you're modeling that too. It's not that we love being a mom every minute that we don't, but you know, being honest about that is really important. And then that comes through with everything. You know, if you hate your period, figure out why if you hate your period because you're in horrible pain.

Just here's a story. I was teaching some of my students the other night and we were doing a mock patient situation and one of my students was saying how her mother had just the periods from hell, just doubled over in pain every month, like hemorrhagic, horrible, horrible periods. Her mom, it turned out, had endometriosis, but wasn't diagnosed too much later. But my, the woman who was talking to me, she had the same kind of really horrible, painful, miserable periods. She thought it was normal because that's what her mom went through.

So there was no kind of exploration. She was just assuming that the hell that she was going through was normal cause my mom went through hell. So if you're hating your period, if your period’s miserable figure out, you know, what's going on there. Is there a medical issue going on? Is there something that you learned about periods that you internalize that makes you hate it? Was there trauma that you had growing up that shows up through your periods birth to a lot?

You know, there's so much work when a woman is pregnant to unpack her family's birth history, you know, like my mom had a C section and my aunt had a C section on, my sisters had C sections. So for sure I'm going to have a C section or maybe they don't want to and now they're in this inner anxiety in her battle and not to say there's anything wrong if you need to have a C section.

But that story that we recreate and then how do we talk about birth in front of our children? Like, I can't tell you how many women I've heard talk about their birth story with their kids there and saying, oh my baby almost died or I almost died and then the kids are just necessarily internalizing birth is dangerous. You know, these stories that we don't even know how? I think the psychologist once told me that these thoughts are called Interjects. Have you heard that term as a psychologist?

So like thoughts and actual sentences, things that we actually hear almost like a voice saying it, but it's our own voice that sound like truths, but that aren't like, oh, marriage is awful or were so trying to believe them too because you don't you don't know that it's not true because you've heard it for so long. Those are some of the things I like to work with women to unpack and mom's unpack partly as the way that we're showing up for our kids.

Then of course, there's what we directly communicate like when our kids ask us about our bodies or how do we make space for the conversations. And you know, it's funny because as we were steeped in midwifery and home birth and all of it when my kids were growing up and my daughters didn't want to hear any of it from me. I mean they actually start to talk about periods la la la la la la la. I don't want to hear it from your mom talk about sex, la la la la la.

So I think one of the things that's also really helpful is to have other people that your own children can trust. So whether that is your sister or your best friend or your child's best friend, that you as the parents have this sort of like complicit understanding that if my daughter comes to you and talks to you about birth control, that's cool and you don't have to actually tell me everything because I want my daughter to respect that there's privacy unless here's where the boundary gets crossed that we tell each other. Yeah, that is really powerful.

Laura: It's really powerful. You know, my kids are this thing, they call me a feelings doctor and they have very little interest most of the time in learning about their feelings from me. They'd much rather learn from a book or a therapist or their guidance counselor. They have no interest and not at all.

Aviva: But then I will say one of my daughters was in college and she was in college on a different coast. So three hours earlier than I was and my phone rang one in the morning, which isn't unusual as a doctor on collar midwife. So it wasn't surprising. What was surprising was that it was my daughter on the other line saying mom, she and her boyfriend, we were just having sex in the condom broke, what do I do? And it was so funny because she started to tell me more detail.

I was like you could stop with the detail right there, that's all good. I got the condom broke up and it was really funny. My husband slept through the whole conversation, I hung up the phone and I literally physically patted myself on the shoulder and said, well done Aviva. You know when your kid is calling you up at one o'clock in the morning in college, had sex in a condom broke and is actually asking you for advice? Whatever you did communicate was okay.

Laura: Yeah, I think it's so important that we do pat ourselves on the back about those things. So I was really intrigued by a little bit about what you were talking about a little bit ago on the kind of how we talk about and think about our cycles and… and you know, this combination of our intuition. So, if we have the feeling that things aren't quite right or we're noticing we have some thoughts about or some stories about our cycles, that this is just the way it is. But now we're starting to question it because of this conversation. What is the first step that you would recommend a person take? What do you want a person who is starting to think about those things, start to question things, Where do you want them to go first?

Aviva: Yeah. So, you know, we're so not educated about what is normal and what isn't horrible. And because of so many aspects of modern living, so many women are experiencing painful periods and heavy periods are irregular periods or fertility to whatever it is, we've kind of just come to think that common is the same as normal. So a great starting place is to learn what normal is and what normal isn't.

And there is a wide variation in that, but there are some general patterns. So for example, a normal menstrual cycle. So from when you get your period to the day before you get your next period, that's the menstrual cycle versus the period, which is the bleeding time. So normal menstrual cycle should be 26 to 34 days long. So if you're regularly having 24-25 day cycles or cycles that are more than 34 days long, then something might be amiss. That's worth checking out.

If you're having a healthy woman, you shouldn't be blowing through more than six or so tampons or pads in a day. So if you're having to change your tampon every hour, not because you want to, but because you're flooding it or you're bleeding into your, you know, your underwear, through your clothes, something's going on. That's worth checking out.

So learning and the bottom line is that, you know, I say in my book, being a woman is not a diagnosis. So what I mean by that is so often we go to the doctor and they're like, well that's normal because you have a cycle and you're a woman. So it's normal to have PMS and feel like crap, you know, for three days or a week or whatever it is before your period. It's normal to be doubled over and cramps just take ibuprofen. It's normal for your cycles to be different, wildly different every month. It's normal to skip three pairs. Normal is normal as normal as normal. And so it's normal. Take the pill, take Ibuprofen.

But I really want to rethink what we just accept as normal. Because that part about being a diagnosis. Being a woman is not a diagnosis. To me means sort of code for saying being a woman is not should not be about suffering. And so many of us are going through our cycles, going through our life cycles really uncomfortable or miserable and not knowing that that's not just something we should accept.

Learning what is normal and what isn't And then learning what you can do to realign with this very in a blueprint that we have for how our cycles can work is really important within that. I do want to say much like we can't control who our kids are, increasingly think that our kids and our health, our bodies. There's a lot of it that were dealt a hand of cards by genetics by circumstances. It could be where you're born, it could be your socioeconomic status, it could be your cultural or genetic inheritance and how that plays out in the culture we live in.

So we’re dealt this hand of cards and then how we play it is where we have some options. And so you may be dealt a hand of cards that includes a family history of endometriosis or a family history of depression or a family history of diabetes. And so we know that that might be part of your story. But you don't have to keep writing. You can write a different ending to it with the choices that you make. It's always... they start with learning what's normal.

In this new book, I've written Hormone Intelligence. There are three chapters on what's normal, what's not. And here are a bunch of questionnaires to help figure out where you are. And then once you know what is and isn't, you can also learn what basic things help keep our hormones healthy. So what are the foods that are sort of on an evolutionary biology level? Our hormones need to be healthy. So for example, we need certain healthy fats because hormones are made many of our hormones are made out of a cholesterol foundation.

So we need good healthy fat to actually make the hormones, we need fiber for our body to break down and eliminate the hormones once we've burned through them and our body is trying to get rid of them. We get our ancestors like our paleo ancestors got about 100 g of fiber a day from their diet. The average American gets about 15g of fiber a day. And even just from a colon cancer prevention perspective from like conventional medicine, we need 30g of fiber for that.

So learning what things that we can do on a day to day basis to support hormone health. And then, you know, as we've been talking about, what are the stories we have about what it means to be hormonal or what our emotions mean? I'm sure this is much more your area of expertise in mind. But lately I've really been exploring what does it mean to dismiss our emotions as women as hormonal? Like how often do we actually express something we really think or feel and maybe it comes out more explosively premenstrual because our filters down.

But then we apologize for it and backpedal saying, oh, I was just hormonal until the next month when that exact same thing comes up, like, what's on repeat that we're not dealing with and why is it that expressing something in a really emotionally heightened way is not acceptable?

Like why have we come to have to turn the volume down and live at this sort of flat line of emotions unless we're happy? Like that's our culture is like you're either common, peaceful or you're happy and that's acceptable, but rage, grief, sadness, anger, disappointment, all those things that do often come up premenstrual li are suppressed and then they come up and we're like, oops, I was hormonal, I've just apologized for myself, forget everything I said.

Laura: And I think that you're bringing up this really important point of like it leaked through when you were hormonal with air quotes. You know like it but that doesn't mean it hasn't been there under the surface all along, you know? So I have had my own journey with hormone imbalances and had major mood issues at certain points in my cycle because of some of those imbalances, what helped more than anything else, was dealing with the underlying issues that when my window of tolerance was so narrowed during a time when I didn't have the hormonal resources or capacity to cope well that's when those things would come out. Those underlying issues were the problem and reducing my stress load, embracing radical self-acceptance and self-compassion, prioritizing my rest. Those things helped just as much as my functional medicine doctors help with totally those things, you know.

Aviva: I mean those supplements and things can help certainly. And there are a lot of factors like endocrine disruptors from our environment or gut disruptions that we get from maybe antibiotics that we've taken in the past. But I mean I have two chapters on just the emotional capacity in the book because I have one chapter just on stress and one chapter just on sleep because they are so important and I agree. I mean there's a lot that we can't control in our lives and as parents, we learn that pretty quickly, then there are the things that we can use to support ourselves.

And it's the same for me, I find that like when I experienced the greatest disruptions or mood disruptions are always when I have too much on my plate when I am falling into this like sort of performance perfectionism mode and then I'm internally stressing myself out. Or you know, I think with the way our menstrual cycles work from an evolutionary biology perspective. We do tend to feel a lot more elevated and social and connected around our population and we do tend to want to be more private and maybe cave a little bit more during our menstrual cycles.

When I was 17, I spent a month with a first nations group out in Nevada and the women were required to go to Moon Lodge. As soon as their periods started, they dropped everything and they went to the moon lodge. If they had a breastfeeding child, they were allowed to bring that child with them. It was really disturbing to me. I was at that point in my life, you know, very much in my midwifery, feminine sacred moon time consciousness.

And here basically women were being told they were dirty and unsafe and they had to be cordoned off somewhere else. But I'll tell you what the women they look forward to that time like you wouldn't believe because they were like relieved of their work duties, they were relieved of their parenting duties unless they had a little baby. And then they were just hanging out with each other because sometimes women would cycle together and we don't have that ability in our conventional culture to honor and flow with how we feel.

So if you are someone who leans more into a PMS kind of pattern even more so you might want and need that little bit of a day off. And then the idea that we would get menstrual leave is something that stigmatizes women because it's sort of implying that we're not as capable and it's not true. Every study shows that were completely just as academically and intellectually and physically capable, pre-menstrual.

But it's not what we want. We tend to want to go inward. And I think if more women were given permission and we gave ourselves permission to experience those emotions, to allow ourselves to rest, to allow ourselves to clear our plate a little bit, then we would actually see those PMS symptoms, those pain symptoms. They would go down.

Laura: Absolutely. I had the distinct privilege to be involved with a local Moon Lodge that was run by a beautiful Ojibwe woman and she was very clear that the separation was not in any way about that. This was... that we needed, there was any stigma against it was a reverence separation. It was a protection, you know, that these women were in a spiritual and holy time in their cycle and during that time you needed to honor yourself and the entire community wanted to honor what was her love that.

Aviva: It's so important. And here's the funny thing. So you know, here I am Miss Hippie's mom doing all this stuff. You know, like I always said my moon time, I was using like cloth recyclable, not recycle like homemade menstrual pads, but back in the day really in touch with my cycles. And my daughters were like mom, why do you have to say moon time? Can't you just say period like everyone else? So back to the parenting aspect of it.

You know, I think my daughters as adults have very healthy relationships with their bodies and their menstrual cycles for the most part. But again, it's sort of like maybe what seeps in then, what they would have embraced at the time. They did not like my daughters did not want any kind of ceremony acknowledgment honoring.

So I would have ceremonies for my friends who sometimes were my daughter's age and my daughters would come along. We do like a girl's gathering where we would talk about periods and I would have like I give them their own cloth pads pattern and we'd make these little menstrual tiny dolls and talk about it. And so my daughters by proxy would be part of that, but hells no, they didn't want to hear that.

Laura: That's so interesting. I wonder you know, so my oldest, um was able to attend some of these with me before the pandemic, you know, and so she got to see some of the beautiful ceremonies and this is again, we were very privileged to be invited into this space. And this is something that I think you have to be really careful with from a... a cultural appropriation standpoint.

But all traditional cultures, all cultures in the past have traditions around a moon time or your cycle. They all do their available in all of our home cultures too. So I don't know. I think it's powerful to get to see that and that, you know, I grew up in a home that was like the one that your mom grew up in. You know that was, I mean, she was more open. My mom was more open and talking about those things than her mom was certainly. But it's not the way that we talk about those things in our house, you know.

Aviva: About them in a way to educate me or make me feel comfortable. It was more like I had the sense that the rebound for her was I'm not going to do anything repressive. So there was almost a level of shock value in it. And I think that's what I was trying to shield my own kids from. Was that shock value. Like the in your face, you're going to get exposed to this whether you want to or not. I will say that the one time that I found really, really helpful especially to talk with my kids about stuff was in the car.

So, my kids, my kids did traveling soccer and other sports or we were going to events. So when I'd have one kid in the car, one on one, if they were sitting in the back seat or they were sitting in the passenger seat either depending on their age or you know what, where there happened to be sitting. Um, it's really nice because you can be driving, they're a captive audience. So they can't just be like, oh mom. And I mean they can say that and then also you don't have to have, I don't have to have any contact with your eye on the road and then you can have a little conversation and then let it go and that was, that was a good time to do that I found.

Laura: Yeah, I think those are so important to have those touchpoints that again, I really do appreciate the point that you're making that kind of in taking care of ourselves, in committing to being kind to our bodies to understand, into checking in with our bodies and our own cycles that we will be passing on a legacy so that our kids don't have some of the same hurdles and at the same time there they will go on and be themselves.

Aviva: And you know, each kid is different and I don't think I appreciated that quite as much until they were a bit older, but especially if you have more than one child. Each child is so different. You kinda have to meet your child where they're at, one kid may want to know some things one kid may not, one kid may be inherently more outgoing about certain things. Some kids are just inherently more shy. So yeah, learning what each kid needs and wants by listening is really helpful too.

Laura: I love that. Thank you so much. Okay, so why don't you tell us one more time about where we can find your beautiful book?

Aviva: Okay, thank you so much for allowing me to share about that. So you can find out about all of my books over on my website at avivaromm.com. If you just go to the navigation tab on the homepage, you'll see a tab that says books, and then for my new book, Hormone Intelligence you can get that anywhere books are sold.

I definitely encourage you to support your local independent bookstore if you can, but anywhere books are sold. But then once you've got your copy, go over to my website, go to Avivaromm.com forward slash book, just the word book and you're going to get to a page that has some really astonishing actually gifts that come with the book because I was just really all about celebrating this book and getting it out there in a major way.

So there is a 28-day gut reset that if you get this book by June 8th as a pre-order you have. It's a gorgeous course. It's like this whole beautiful gut self-care program um that's 28 days long and also I'm running an event. It's a weekend conference. It's a Friday night and all day Saturday. In fact, Ricky Lake, the television talk shows is interviewing me. Ricky and Abby Epstein are interviewing me about my book on a Friday. We have some phenomenal guest speakers and guess what? That's free with the price of one book too.

So all I have to do is go at avivaromm.com/book. You'll see a place in the middle of the page where you just put your Dietzen and that will automatically get you all these freak episodes. It's really cool. Yeah, for that, that's really you're welcome.

Laura: I really appreciated this conversation. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise and just your beautiful spirit with us.

Aviva: Thank you. It's a beautiful conversation. I really appreciate your energy and your questions and what you're doing, so thank you.

June 29, 2021

Episode 65: How to Handle Lying with Vivek Patel (Feature on Fathers Series No. 4)

June 29, 2021/ Laura Froyen

We are now down to the last episode of the Feature on Fathers Series. I hope that through this series, Dads will feel heard and seen because you are. You are loved and you matter. If you feel that you are struggling in your parenting and in your relationship with others or with yourself, please don't hesitate to reach out and ask for help! I want you all to know that there's no shame in that. It is my mission to help parents find peace and balance in their parenting and in their relationships. I would be glad to help you even more.

And so, for the last episode of this series, we will be talking about lying. Although this topic does not focus specifically on fatherhood, it helps us handle something that might be triggering for us but is developmentally appropriate & important for our children. To help us with this topic, I have invited a great guest, Vivek Patel, who is a father and the genius behind @meaningfulideas handle on Instagram. He is also the host of a beautiful podcast called Gentle Parents Unite where he helps parents have a closer and gentle relationship with their kids.

Here is a summary of our conversation:

Why children lie (it's not what you think!)
The value of lying (beyond the "white lies" we all sometimes tell)
How lying can help us teach our values non-coercively

Hello, I'm Dr. Laura Froyen and this is The Balanced Parent Podcast where overwhelmed, stressed out and disconnected parents go to find tools, mindset shifts and practices to help them stop yelling at the people they love and start connecting on a deeper level. All delivered with heaping doses of grace and compassion. Join me in conversations that will help you get clear on your goals and values and start showing up in your parenting, your relationships, your life with openhearted authenticity and balance. Let's go!

Laura: Hello everybody, this is Dr. Laura Froyen, and today we're going to be talking about lying here on the Balance Parent Podcast. So buckle up, we're going to rock your world. I have a really great guest today who is going to help us talk about this topic that can be super triggering for parents and it's also super developmentally normal for kids. So please welcome my guests Vivek Patel. He is the... the mastermind behind the @meaningfulideas handle on Instagram. He's also a beautiful host of a podcast called Gentle Parents Unite. Vivek, thank you so much for coming here with me. Why don't you tell me a little bit more about who you are and what you do?

Vivek: Thank you Laura. I'm still happy to be here with you. I've been following your work for a while and I really admire you and the stuff that you share and I really appreciate being on your show. Yeah, for sure. For sure. I learn a lot from you.

Laura: The feeling is mutual. You're one of my favorite parenting experts.

Vivek: Well, I'm glad, I'm glad and I shy a little bit away from the word expert. I hear that a lot, but really I think of myself as more of like an advanced student because I'm always learning, you know, and I think that's one of the things about me is that I really value my learning mindset and I think my learning mindset is one of the main things I wanted to pass on to my kids. You know, I didn't want to appear an expert to her either. I wanted her to feel like we were learning together through life and that's why I don't see I raised her. I say we grew up together. That's not how I talk about it. And I really like that. And she's going to be 24 like soon in a couple of months, she's going to be 24.

And when she was born, I remember looking into her. I... I was the very first thing she saw because I pushed all the doctors out of the way when... when she popped out. And uh and the very first thing that she saw was me. I went right into her face and I held her and I looked into her eyes And just for 30 seconds I just said, I love you, I love you, I love you. I love you. I love you. I love. And then the doctors pushed me away and they took her and they cleaned her up and gave her to mom. But the very if that was your first experience and I remember almost psychically I could hear her repeat back to me. Thanks dad, I hear you. But if you treat me like most parents treat their kids, I'm going to hate you when I'm a teenager. Mm. And I said, oh, okay, noted, thank you very much. And that was really part of the impetus for me to parent in a very different way than everyone around me was parenting at that time. This in 1997.

So it was a long time ago. There was no internet to speak of. I didn't have Facebook groups. I was just kind of figuring it out. And I knew very clearly from the early days that what I really wanted to focus on was having a deeply connected trusting relationship with her and not to do anything that would damage that trust. And I wanted her to trust me deeply. I wanted her to feel accepted her deeply. And so I knew from the early days that any kind of punishment that I would give her, any kind of consequences, that I would give her any way that I would force her to do anything she didn't want to do or stop her from doing something she did want to do. We're using force that she would not trust me because I really didn't want that. You know?

And I could feel, and I think it would slip out. I would slip out sometimes because the old mindset was in me and more human and we're human. Exactly. And I have all that programming from my own past. But every time that would happen, I could actually feel the trust be damaged. I could see it in her eyes. I could feel it in the tone of her body. You know? And I was like, uh, I would react like that was like, okay there. I said it was okay, but make make, no, don't do that again.

Laura: You're reminding me of a conversation that we had once, I think in your Facebook group, which is a beautiful space to be in where somebody was asking about lying. And this is when we first connected about lying. And then I said that my first when I find out that my kid is lying to me and I was told a fib or whatever, the very first response on my lips and my heart is how I wonder what it is.

You know, that I've done to make it feel not safe to tell me the truth in this moment. Oftentimes I like then go like my apology like, hey, somehow I gave you the idea that I wasn't safe. That's all about trust, right, that they can't trust you with the information, you know, with the truth, but that spurred on a lot of conversations between you and me about lying, how you feel about lying and, you know, it's funny, I have some kind of radical feelings about lying, especially when it starts to develop, but I would love for you to share some of your views if you don't mind.

Vivek: Yeah, for sure. Well, one of my one liners, I read a lot of one liners because I really love them and one of my one liners is I didn't teach my kid not to lie, I taught her how to lie.

Laura: Love it. Yeah, I know that a huge portion of my audience just went like.

Vivek: Yeah, exactly, but that's the idea behind one liner and you know, the idea behind that is it doesn't mean that I actually want her to lie to me, or that I want her to go through life managing her situations are in life by lying. That's not the idea behind the idea behind it is to understand that truth is a very relative thing, and that there is a difference between a lie that's used to manipulate and the lie that's used to protect oneself. Perhaps there is a lie that maybe it's a lot of a mission, like, I don't want to share everything that I think and feel with every person I interact with, right? I want to use some discernment around that. And so when I say, I taught her how to lie.

What I really mean is let's learn about the discernment necessary about what we share with people and what we don't share with people and how we share it with people so that we can keep ourselves safe so that we can form deep relationships with the people that we really trust and we can have a certain, you know, wariness about the people that we know could use things against us and then every situation we're in is different and every person we interact with is different and requires a lot of subtlety to teach that kind of discernment and that kind of self awareness to kids. It's so different than just making a rule saying don't ever lie. You can't really teach that kind of subtlety and discernment and you use the word Guide earlier, you can't really guide your kids through understanding the complexities of life with hard and fast rules. It's not really effective.

Laura: in a black and white world where we need to teach them about the shades of gray that are there for sure. I really like that word discernment. I mean we talked about this in lots of different contexts with our kids, teaching them to be a discerning consumer of media, tuning in, listening to themselves, figuring out how to keep themselves safe. Yeah, I really like the way that you're framing this.

Okay, so but then what about the, you know, lots of us grew up and have the idea that lying is bad, that when people lie to us, we feel disrespected, we feel um valued whatever it is. Like what do you think about this, this kind of idea? This idea that lying is bad. I don't actually think lying is black and white like that. I think most people at some point or another lie throughout their lives and not necessarily in a malicious way, But do you think about the morality of lying?

Vivek: Yeah, I think it's a good question. I think morality in general is another area of non black and whiteness. You know, I think there are some things that are clearly always going to be damaging to people. And there are things that notice, I didn't say wrong, I said always going to be damaging right, and that's important because what I'm... I'm not looking at so much some system of morality. I'm looking at what... what's an actual impact on the other humans in my life? How am I impacting them and what kind of person do I want to be? And what kind of relationships do I want to have? And what kind of impact do I want to have in the world? And I call these the self reflective questions that I ask kids all the time. I don't want them. I don't want to impose my sense of morality and values on them. I want them to think about. I want their sense of morality and values to come from.

What kind of person do they want to be and what kind of experiences do they want to have in life and how do they want to impact themselves in the world and other people? And I think that's where a lot of morality comes from. And you know, I think that for me, I don't want to hurt other people. I don't want to cause damage to them. I don't want to make their lives less happy and less enriched. I want to nourish other people. I want to help other people find their truth and find joy in their lives and live a meaningful, authentic life and this is what I want. So if I'm lying to somebody and the damages trust with them, it makes them feel hurt or unseen.

You know, if it makes them feel like they can't be themselves or they can't trust me or they can't trust themselves or whatever, then that's not what I want to do and that's not how I want to walk in the world. This is kind of how I think of morality. I think morality as more of like a living thing about my expression in the world and that's what I want to do, teach kids to and want them to know. I want them to know what kind of person do you really want to be? Not what kind of person do you want to be, but what kind of person do you really want to be from your heart.

Laura: Curious, open, What kind of relationships do you want to have?

Vivek: What kind of impact do you want to have on the world on other people? These are really deep questions that I think young kids can understand these questions. People often they go, well when my kids 10, maybe I can ask them that kind of question, but I interact with two year olds this way and they get it. They really do you know when they don't have the judgment attached to it, when they don't have the force attached to it? They really get it.

Laura: They do, and they don't have they are unencumbered. I think young Children are unencumbered by society and by a lot of culture in a lot of ways, they can see themselves a little bit more clearly. They can see relationships more clearly because they don't have all this other stuff layered on top of it, that we have all the should and all of those things that society gives us. Do you know what I mean?

Vivek: I totally know what you're saying. Yeah, those layers, those layers we get those layers early on, don't we?

Laura: We do. They start coming you know, as we move out of our families and out into the world or even in our families if we have, you know, we as parents are, you know, we all have moments of unconsciousness where we transmit our layers are lenses, are views down to our kids, you know, we all do. Yeah.

And so I want to ask you then because I agreed with everything you were saying is so beautifully put. So and I think we can all agree that there are times when lies can absolutely be do imagining to authentic relationships into trust. Are there times when they're not? Are there times when they serve healthy function in our lives? You mentioned before keeping ourselves safe? But what about in relationships?

Vivek: Yeah, for sure. Well I'll give you a great examples... example just the other day, my wife was yesterday, day before yesterday. My wife was telling me that she's going to be giving up this for lent and that for land and she wants to do that. I'm not Christian And I don't follow any organized religion and I don't do things like that. And I've been married for 27 years now. So for the early part of our marriage, if I thought that was something, you know, like that didn't make sense to me, I would just say, yeah, that doesn't make sense. Why are you doing that? And there was a lot of disconnection that would come from that between and what happened was yesterday when I heard that those thoughts came into my head.

I could hear them from the past, and I was like, but that's not the kind of person you want to be. And I edited myself. Did I lie? Did I withhold the truth that I would hold my thoughts? I don't know, was it? I don't know. Maybe. Maybe, but I didn't do that. What I said was how can I support you and what can I do? I could be your accountability partner and maybe I can help you through it. And that's how I responded. And she was all over me. She was like, oh, thank you, that's so great, I love that. You know?

And so, you know, some people might think that we have to share every bit of what we think. Was that a lie? I don't think so. Was that discernment? I think so. Um when I was in junior high school, I was bullied relentlessly and I had a very hard childhood. I was bullied at home and I was bullied school and I was just bullied all over them and I have that victim mentality was was really strong with and a lot of the time when kids would come up to me and say things to me and ask me questions and prodding questions or ask me where I'm going or what I'm doing, you know, just to keep myself safe and not get beat up every day. A lot of the time I would lie. Yeah, imagine being too. I mean I also lied to my parents about it because I didn't feel safe to tell them about it.

And so that's a different kind of law, right? So the lie at school was keeping me safe. The lie at home probably wasn't keeping me safe and I would like to have been more felt more free to be able to share it. I wouldn't share it with my dad because I would feel dismissed and I wouldn't share with my mom because I could feel how much it hurt her. It was very different reasons. But in both cases, I would hold it and I held a lot of that inside of myself.

So there's a lot I wish that I had been able to not hold. But the lying, there's those kids at school kept me alive in a lot of ways. And imagine if I was told when I got home oh Vivek, you shouldn't lie. It makes you a bad person. It's a bad thing to do. And then I go to school and I would have this whole conflict around that. How could I resolve that would be so hard for me to have resolved.

Fortunately I didn't have that or at least I don't remember having, but yeah, I mean there are some example and then there's like a whole range of stuff in between that, you know, I would think of my kid being in a difficult situation and in the moment, the only thing she could think of to get out of it would be Allah you know, like I think there are situations where not telling the complete truth to the person in front of you makes a lot of set.

Laura: I think so too. But this was something that as I moved into my teenage years, my mom taught me to do that. She said overtly, I will always be the bad guy for you whenever you need an excuse to get out of something, you can always blame it on me. I mean, so like I had friends who wanted to talk on the phone all night, but I wanted to do my homework and go to bed, right? So my mom and I had a hand signal for when I wanted to get off the phone and then she would say “Laura it's time to get off the phone”. Just this beautiful moment of grace. Was it a lie? Yeah. Kind of was it, you know, would it have been better if I could have authentically held that boundary with my friends maybe? But at the same time like learning to set boundaries authentically and compassionately hold them. It's really hard. Like I teach adults how to do that. It does.

Vivek: It takes time right?

Laura: It does. It takes time. And so I've always felt really grateful for my mom that she taught me, you know I mean? Yeah, I guess it was like she was always willing to be the bad guy for me that she was always willing to kind of engage in this kind of co-conspiracy kind of thing between, you know, the two of us. Yeah, it was... it was beautiful and this is one of the things that I think with the black and white thinking abound lying. Like, I don't know, I also knew like if I was at a party in a situation that didn't feel good, I could blame it on my parents, always parents.

Vivek: Yeah, for sure. And I think that if we want to teach our kids about that strength of holding boundaries and having confidence in ourselves, forcing them to do it through a system of right and wrong and morality isn't the way to do that anyway. Right. I actually think that your mom probably felt so safe to you that if she said, you know, another way to look at it might be this. And I wonder if you could explore this idea also that you wouldn't have felt judged because of the openness that she had. But if she insisted on it and told you were wrong for the other way, then you would have had to close yourself off to her as a guide.

And I think in the system of parenting that I teach, one of the things I talk about is the three main relationships that parents have with their kids that replaces the control authority based relationship. Because a lot of the time when we do this gentle conscious parenting stuff, we talk about what not to do right and say don't do the punishment, don't do the consequences. Don't do authority, don't do forest, but we always talk about what to do do. I called it, don't do what they do do. And uh, which is one of my fun concepts that I like.

And so I think that one of the do do is what relationship do we replace it with them. Because you hear a lot of people say, oh I can't just be my kid's friends. And I actually think there's some truth to that. I don't think just a friend is enough to contain the vastness of the intensity of parent child relationship. So I have three relationships that I talked about and they are the relationship of model guide and friend and none of them have authority and because all of them are mutual. We're each other's models for each other's guides and we're each other's friends.

But each of those things I pay real attention to and I think about when I'm interacting with my child in this moment, how am I model, how am I being a guide? How am I being a friend and all three of those things, they compensate for each other. They work with each other and they overlap with each other. And the guide relationship is really super important. And in the guide relationship I want my kid to trust me. I want her to trust my guidance and anything that I do that pushes her away from trusting my guidance, I'm destroying that.

So I want to do things because I want to teach her things. I want her to pass on values. I think it's worthwhile To pass on. I mean when my kid was born, I was 28, that means I had 28 years of mistakes that I've been reflecting on. I didn't want that to go to waste. I wanted to pass it on to her. But how can I do that if she would do the eye roll and resist me and no. And then you want to do the opposite.

The other day, my wife was looking out the window, it's snowing like wild here in Toronto and she said, hey, there's this, there's a kid out there running around without a hat on. And I said, oh, I bet his parents told him to put his hat on. That's why he's not wearing his hat. Because when kids get told things and you can see this in your own kids, if you watch them, when they get told something from an authority figure position, they immediately want to resist.

Laura: Of course they do. Like that's a human thing. Yeah, sure.

Vivek: Yeah, exactly.

Laura: I mean, I still feel that in me sometimes, like if I'm walking down the hallway and the sign says wet paint, like I'm like, but you know, is it really like I've done it for me to do exactly that, but Okay. Yeah, So I love this idea of how to teach values without collusion and control. I love this. Okay, so now we've been kind of high level, been talking about the theory, you know, the kind of the theory background piece of this. Can we get down into some of the when lying happens in our daily lives with our kids. Especially a lot of my listeners have young kids. One thing that is coming up for lots of parents right now is kids lying about washing their hands.

Yeah. You know, so hand washing is big right now, we're in a pandemic. There's pressure, their stress on us as pants, make sure our kids are washing their hands, they feel the pressure. Of course they resist it, right? Of course they do this job is to resist. And so then we know they didn't wash their hands or they didn't wash their hands and sing the whole abc song, you know, whatever. How do we handle it? When we say a parent goes in and says, did you wash your hands? And the kids like, yeah, I wash my hands and we know they did not really do first of all, don't ask some questions that you already know the answer to that. Don't invite a lie, Right? But let's say we did. We invited them. Why?

Vivek: Sure? Well, it's going to happen, right? It's going to happen for sure. There's no way around it actually. It's an inevitable thing to happen. So there's a couple of things I would address. First of all, I like what you said earlier, which was when that happens to take that moment to reflect how have I contributed to this. I think this is really important.

Not I noticed I said contributed also, and the reason I use the word contributed is it's not laden with a lot of blame and shame. And I'm really, really, really careful about that, both with myself as a parent and with my kids. I don't want to take blame and shame onto myself and I don't want to put it on there.

Laura: But that doesn't mean shame. Shut us down. They shut down growth and learning. They do and we know not to use it with our kids, but often we use it with ourselves.

Vivek: Often we use it with ourselves.

Laura: We learned that's what we have in our upbringing, you know? Anyway, go ahead.

Vivek: Thank you. And that's why I love the word contributed because it's less, it's got less charged to it and it helps me look at it, right? It helps me look at it honestly. So that's my first thing. My first thing is ah ha okay, so this is happening. How have I contributed to 100% we have? So that's one thing and that's another thing. Like if I had shame attached that, I couldn't say it with joy 100% I have and then look at it, really look at it, I couldn't do that If I had blamed, I'd be like, have I don't know what have I done? I'm a terrible parent comes the guilt and the worries and yes, so I always go number one inside.

The first step is to give myself love and compassion. Always, always, always. And to be honest with myself, this is always where I start because then when I, when I'm in that state I'm more settled, I'm not in a rush, I'm not trying to pressure it because that's always gonna push our kids further away.

Second thing is as soon as they lie to recognize there's a real emotional relational thing happening at that moment. You know, you can't force emotions away. You can't convince emotions away. So let's start by relating from that same place. Okay, you didn't wash your hands. So I'm really glad that you told me. I really appreciate when you tell me, I mean, you did wash your hands. I really appreciate you telling me what you did.

You know, that's really great. I'm glad you wash your hands because I know you care about the safety and that's great because again, it's that thing I want them to be safe, right? I want them to feel safe to tell me they didn't wash their hands. Why didn't they wash their hands? What are they feeling? There's definitely a cause there. And so for me, what I do is I don't want to address it at the moment. And I know that goes against a lot of the way people think because they're going to the common phrases, then you're condoning it and they're going to do it more in the future. But if you actually look how things turn out, the exact opposite is true when we do that, they do it more in the future because they know that they have to keep lying to be able to do what they want to do.

Laura: It's like a classic phrase, what we resist, persists.

Vivek: Yes, that's exactly it. That's exactly it. I mean for me when I was young, like in my early teen years, I went through something like three years, four years where I never brush my teeth because my parents would always push me to brush my teeth and they would come in, they would check and they would ask me and they would check and they would check the toothbrush and they would smell my breath and they would just so what I did was I would put a little toothpaste in the quarter of my mouth, I would put toothpaste on the toothbrush and rinse it off. And I would push slash water all around the sink and I would say I finished and they would come and check. Okay, good. But they're good. You brush your teeth and this is my, this is my rebellion, right?

Laura: Oh my gosh. I can just imagine little you doing this effort, some lies take. It would've been easier to brush your teeth. But there was something getting in the way. Yeah.

Vivek: That's the thing. And I did not want to brush my teeth, had nothing to do with the teeth. One of my sayings is the question isn't, how do I get my kid to brush their teeth? The question is, how do I get my kid to love their teeth? And I think it's similar with the hand washing. If they're resisting the hand washing, they ain't loving it, they don't understand the context for it, They haven't made the context something that they own that's important to them.

That matters to them, you know, and that's what I would like to work on with kids. Like how can I help them develop this healthy habits in a way that self-sustaining. I don't have to constantly be checking over their shoulders and they don't feel like they have to hide it from honestly that hiding it doesn't go away just like continuing the same path. It really does. Especially the continuing the same path that created in the first place.

Laura: Right now, It's small, it's washing hands but it grows its beers under the car seat. When team it gets bigger, it grows.

Vivek: Yeah. And so what I would do is I would in the moment I would really validate and connect, especially if that isn't how you've been doing because then they're like, oh this was different. My parents suddenly didn't push me away in the same way because that even just doing that once has an effect on the brain because it's new input. It's you know, there's like the thing that I normally have to guard myself against all of a sudden I don't and it's like this whole other way, the brain gets wired and you do that a few times and the kid starts to really trust that.

And then if they don't wash their hands and you can say okay, I can see you probably had a really good reason for not washing your hands. I'd like to hear about that. That's so interesting. I sometimes don't want to wash my hands also and I think that's a very natural thing, but sometimes not want to wash your hands. I'd love to hear about that. Maybe we can explore that and then what's happening is all of a sudden it's not scary for them to tell you they didn't wash their hands and and now that it's not scary to tell you they didn't wash their hands and they don't feel bad about the lie. Also because when they feel bad about the lie, like we said, it just persists.

Then you've created this whole environment and relationship of safety where you can actually explore why the washing of the hands is important without getting that resistance happening. And then you can really shift the behavior, You can really shift the choices. And maybe there's so many things that you can then creatively explore together will and they can tell you what they don't like about. A lot of it will come from the feeling of it being imposed upon them. So then maybe we collaborate on how can we do it in such a way that seems fun.

How can we do it in a way that seems meaningful? How can we do it in a way that has variety attached to it? Because there's a lot of ways to wash hands. You can wash your hands in the sink, you can wash your hands in the tub, you can wash your hands in a basin, living room, you can wash your hands with pink bubbles and you can wash your hands while you're putting stickers on the sink and you can wash your hands while singing a song and you can wash your hands while doing a dance, and you can wash your hands while I'm holding you upside down by your ankles. You know what I'm saying? Like there's so many ways that we can creatively brainstorm together and but it's hard to do that When the relationship to the issue and the relationship to us isn't at that point.

Laura: You know, I think it's really important to just pull out something because this was also beautiful. But the sense the feel I got, as I heard you talking about this was that this is not an emergency. This kid is going to be washing their hands for the rest of their life. They've got 90 years of handwashing ahead of them, that none of this is an emergency. And I know it feels especially with hand washing, I know it feels like an emergency right now because we're worried about germs and all of those things. There's this extra layer of living in parenting through a pandemic that's just there with this specific topic.

But I do think that many of us when we find the lie, when the light comes at us and we find it, we have our own stuff layered on it and it feels like an emergency. It feels like we've got to make sure they know that's not okay. We've got to teach them some lesson right now, right now in the moment, they need to make sure they know one, not washing your hands, it's not okay and to not lying about it is not okay. Like there's this urgency. I think that parents feel and I think, yeah, we all need to take a breath, None of this is an emergency.

This does not mean that they are going to be pathological liars when they grow up. It's quite natural that they don't want to do what they're told. Sometimes it's quite natural that you know there's lots of good reasons why a child wouldn't want to wash their hands or brush their teeth or you know, there's lots of reasons why they might hit their sister and then tell you they didn't. There's lots of reasons and lots of time to learn. Yeah, those things none of it's an emergency, you know.

Vivek: For sure. And I think that even if it is something that we do really want to teach them that feeling that's an emergency actually slows us down slows down the progress. It actually takes longer when we push and when we rush. So because the slowing down actually doesn't slow down the progress, it just slows us down. We're actually accelerating the progress by slowing down, which is kind of yin yang to think that way, you know, it's kind of can seem un intuitive on a surface level.

Laura: Yeah, Yeah, there's this analogy that I used to teach this, so if we're thinking about, we need to run a run one time around the track, right for super out of shape, we haven't run since we did our fitness test in high school, you know, we're super out of shape if we go and we're like, we just got to get this over with as fast as we can and we sprint and we got halfway around and we're like, oh my gosh, like I just got to take a break right now, I can't go on. If we had kept a steady pace, we probably would finish faster, you know? Before anyway I interrupted you. I'm so sorry.

Vivek: No, no, no, it's great. We were both going to throw analogies at it. Yeah, I know, but I want to talk about that one too, because then when we get halfway around, we're also throwing up and we're sick and we have a cramp in our stomach, right, and we never see that finish line and then we have to come back and try again and when we come back and try again, if we want full tilt again, we're not building up the muscles and the endurance that we need, you know?

Laura: And later on all the thoughts like, oh, I'm so out of shape. Like, you know, we layer it all on ourselves, all the shame, all the blame. Exactly. It just gets in our way.

Vivek: So let's say what happens is I have been running the track that way and I have been and I'm still not making it to the finish line. So then you hear this podcast, you're like, okay, wait a minute, I'm gonna run around that track differently this time. So part of that is acknowledging what I have been doing and how I have been running and slowing down, saying, okay, I understand that I did that because that's how I was taught. That's what I was. I always thought I had to force myself, but now I've heard this podcast, I'm not going to run that way anymore.

I'm going to take us think about a different way of running, I'm going to take that slower pace that laura suggested, and I'm going to just jog and then you start to jog, but even then you're still not in shape, it's still going to be hard, you're not going to look like what you wanted to look like, but at least you're going to get to the end of the track and then you do it again and then you do it again and you slowly build up the capacity and this is the thing with dealing with those feelings of emergency in a way that's non coercive and collaborative and connected, but you're always more effective, you know, and it's that thing, but do I believe that it's more effective? That's one of the first things, believing it, you know, if you don't believe it's more effective, you're not going to really try.

So let's first start with that. Yes, I'm going to believe that it's more effective to slow down and then recognize that it's going to be clumsy for a while, it's going to be difficult. I'm going to have that tendency to suddenly run again so let me slow down, let me keep going this pace and trust that you're building capacity because after 3,4,5 times doing it that way, you're going to be able to jog around and you're going to notice the scenery and you're gonna enjoy the wind on your face and you're gonna see the birds flying by and it's going to become a pleasant experience. We're pretty effortlessly.

It really wasn't pleasant, you know? And so I think that there's a lot to be said for that analogy, like we can really take a whole different approach, but it takes time and if it takes time for us to learn this new thing makes sense for us to recognize it takes time for our kids to learn anything. Right.

Laura: Yes. Absolutely. Okay. Yes. So and the one thing I just wanted to touch on and we couldn't almost got there a few minutes ago and I want to circle back to it, I do want to talk a little bit about maybe well, two things kind of the difference between lying pretending creative imagination, kind of kidding, joking, all of that nuance.

Like I think that is worth a little bit of a conversation, but also I'd love to talk a little bit about the developmental stuff that is happening when kids start lying, because I actually, when I see kids starting to lie, it lights me up inside there, like there to, you know, approaching three is really when it starts happening and it just, it's evidence of growing brain and growing sense of self. And I don't know, do you feel that way about life?

Sometimes Lies are super triggering with my kids. Like, I just, you know, it feels like, Yeah, it feels it brings up all sorts of stuff from my own childhood, you know? But with little ones that's fascinating to me, you know, it's much less triggering and that's the power of a mindset shift, you know? Right? Yes.

So I mean in terms of developmental appropriateness, like lying happens because their brain is developing in a new way and they have discovered what they think in their head is separate from what you think in your head and that they can have thoughts that are their own and you can have thoughts that are their own and that you can't read their mind and so that the concept of a lie emerges.

Vivek: Yeah, it's very much connected to them forming a sense of themselves, their self image. Because kids, you said for a long time they don't recognize that they're separate beings. I mean at first they weren't right. Like physically, literally they weren't and then suddenly they are, but for a long time they don't recognize that they're separate from us. And then that separation slowly starts to occur. They slowly start to recognize themselves as individuals.

And yet even as they grow older and they become individuals, they're never really separate individuals. None of us are really completely separate individuals. We're all part of an organic system and integrated system. You know, you and I are in different parts of the world and we're talking over zoom, but still, we're not separate from each other, entire. So there is a sense of us that separate and a sense of us that isn't. And that's a very subtle thing to recognize also, you know, like what in our family, what we did was we nurtured the independence at the same time as we nurture the interdependence and interconnectedness, you know?

So that even now, like I said, my kids, Well, we're going to be 24 soon. Even now, we don't fully feel like we're separate individuals entitled. We have this deep connectedness that's always there, and at the same time, my kid is extremely independent, she has her own thoughts, she has her own feelings and that's something that I also really worked at nurturing. And so when kids start to do things like lie or hide things from us, which I think is a little different from lying, because lying is like, telling something that's directly opposite to what happened.

Holding things back is something that we're like, I'm keeping something to myself that I don't necessarily want to share or don't feel like it makes sense to share. There's so many different reasons they can do it, but all of them, I think, have to do with exploring the mind, how it works, exploring language and exploring reality, exploring communication and relationships and what those things mean. And we want to be their partners in that exploration, you know, I think this is one of the main things, you know, like I want to be my kids partner in that exploration, and even the parents that I support, I support a lot of parents in this journey, making the transition from traditional parenting to non course of collaborative parenting.

And even in there, I want to be their partner, I don't want to be an authority figure, nobody's going to listen to me with an authority figure, right? I want to be their partner, I want to see their humanity, I want to see their struggle, I want to see their growth, I want to be a partner with them and it's the same thing with our kids. And so when a kid does something like that, my eyes light up . I'm like, this is an opportunity, this is an opportunity for me to connect, this is an opportunity for us to grow together.

This is an opportunity to explore what's going on in the brain. I would always talking with my kid about how fascinating the brain is and how fascinating the mind is and look at how it works and look at how we perceive things and we can think things and we have opinions, what is an opinion, What's a preference? There's such interesting things, you know, and when we can explore those things, suddenly it's not so personal that we're watching together, even as kids grow up, we're watching together, we're watching our minds develop and it's a beautiful thing.

So yeah, I totally dig it when you say that your eyes light up when you, when you see something like that, because there's so much richness in those things. If we take it that way, if we take it from the spirit of wrongness, if we take in the spirit of, like you said the emergency, we have to fix this now or we're going to catastrophes and it's going to be the worst thing and our kids are going to lie forever, then there's a lot of trouble that it's going to happen.

Laura: Yeah, something like, as I was listening to you talk about this, there's this kind of this sense of openness, I think oftentimes when we hear like come from our kids, there's like this kind of contraction, we don't, that doesn't feel good. We don't like being lied to, We have all these slots about lying and I like the reframe of, you know that this is an opportunity, Here we go. Here. It is, this is it, this is our chance to get to know them better. We get to find out more about them. I get to that, that feels much looser, much less like a contraction. I think acceptance always feels a little bit better in the body, definitely resistance.

Vivek: Definitely. One of my sayings is relaxation is self preservation.

Laura: I love your little idioms.

Vivek: Me too, Me too. It actually came from, I'm a dancer and a martial artist and so I do a lot of physical stuff and I've been teaching both also for many years and in both of those arts, the dance I do as an improvisational dance form and we do a lot of lifts and a lot of flying all over the place and it's very, and there's no preset moose, you never know what's going to happen. And I remember there was a few years ago I was dancing with this guy And he had me up in his shoulders and was spinning me around and suddenly I slipped off and it's a long, he was like 6ft tall is a long way to fall and just like, and as I was falling, he was, he like caught me on his hip and then it caught me on his knee and it caught me on his ankle and kind of helped me to the ground.

So it wasn't as destructive as it could have been sometimes it asked, but after it was over, he said to me that I have dropped people before. I've never felt anyone be so relaxed during the descent. Everybody gets tense when they have that experience. And that's what I said to him. Yeah, because relaxation is self preservation but in order to do that, I mean I also have, you know, 30 years of martial arts training that I've overcome through training, I've overcome the instinct to tense up in those moments because it is a martial artist to if someone's throwing a punch at you and you tense up, you can't move as quickly, you're not going to make the right choice, your body's going to, you're going to get hit basically.

And so but if you're relaxed you can flow with the energy, you can flow at the moment and you can defend yourself and so in both of those situations, but it wasn't natural and both of those situations, I had to learn a new instinct. I have to train myself right? And I think one of the beautiful things about being human is we can actually choose the mindset we operate from. We can choose to act different than our instincts a lot of the time because a lot of the time our instincts are, you know, the revolutionary, their animalistic, they come from a past that doesn't necessarily exist anymore.

And as we understand more about how the mind works and how relationships work and how learning works. We can adjust the way we behave and the way we feel and the way we interact that's more in alignment with those things. Um and it's great we can train ourselves. So yes, even if we do tighten up when our kids lie to us, it's like tightening up when my students would first come into class, of course they're gonna tighten up. When you first grab them, we're trying or punch at them, right? They're going to tighten up and then we lead them through exercises on how to relax and how to receive it. And then we can do the same thing for ourselves that way. We can be much more effective in really connecting with our kids and guiding them through those difficult moments.

Laura: I love that. Okay, so I know at this point, you know we're kind of coming to the end of our discussion, but I know that their parents who are listening that are like but wait, what do I do then? You know, I know my four year old just hit her little sister and she said I didn't hit her or I've got two girls and they both have their own truths, our own realities about things that happened.

No, you said it first, know you were mean to me first, you know all of those things happened. What do we do when we're faced with the truth with the lower teeth? You know someone else's truth. What do we do in that moment where we saw you hit your sister and now you're saying I didn't hit my sister. What do we say? You know?

Vivek: Yeah. So for me, what I like to do with kids in those moments is I talk about the feelings, not the behavior and I think this is really important because even if they do admit that they hit them, like you can play them, even if you play them the video back and they say, okay, okay, I hit you haven't actually help this situation in any way.

You haven't helped them learn anything. You haven't helped them figure out how they might not want to hit their sister in the future. It's just not happening. But if we can let them know that we see their feelings. So this I didn't hit my sister. I said, oh, I can see that you were really frustrated in that moment and you're really upset. And then to the other kids, I can see that you really felt like you were hurt and you're really sad. I call it ping pong empathy. Well, we can give both kids, we can get both empathy.

Laura: in the therapy world. It's called multi directed partiality. But I like ping pong empathy. Way better.

Vivek: I really want things to be digestible, right? So that's why... that's why I love those phrases and we're not seeing anyone is right and we're not seeing anyone is wrong. And that's the key because as soon as one person is writing one person's wrong, we have an aggressor and the victim, even if we don't say the words were labelling the kids with our attitude and what I prefer to see as to struggling suffering kids that need a wise adult, a wise none of white as adults.

But a wise guide who can hold them in their emotional experience and help guide them through it because then they can see themselves, it's safe to see themselves. It's safe to evaluate because how many times do parents come and tell me well? But later on I can see that they feel bad and they tell me they feel bad about hitting their right because the feeling bad part when a kid feels bad on their own, that feeling of remorse is actually a beautiful thing because it's part of their inner compass, it's part of their conscience.

When I heard someone, I feel bad about it. I don't necessarily feel I am bad, but I feel bad about it because I don't want to hurt other people. And I think even little kids are like a lot of the time when kids hit and you say don't hit, They have what I call the laughed this laughter that comes out and they're like, do it again. I love to hit my sister right?

And this is so common that I actually have a name for. I just called the lab and I'm fortunate that the Facebook group that I admit you mentioned, gentle parents unite. It's also the Facebook group that I admin and we have a beautiful admin team and we have 77,000 people at the moment in that group. So for a long time I've been watching quite a large sample size and that laugh is one of the most common thing. And we can easily think that our kids actually want to hurt that actually what's happening is they're protecting themselves big this regulation to exactly.

Laura: I can't think of myself that way. So I need to think about myself some other way.

Vivek: Exactly. And when they calm down and they feel more regulated. I like that word, thank you. Then the feeling like, oh, I wish I hadn't done that comes to them. And that feeling I actually like to sit with my kids and I don't want to rush them out of that. I said, yeah, yeah. I can feel that you feel that way. Thank you for sharing that with me. I'm really glad you shared that with me.

You know, because then they have a chance to self reflect. I don't want to say seed. Then you should, you don't want to feel that way. You shouldn't hit your kid. I'm not gonna, shouldn't get your sibling. That's not going to help. But I just sit with him in that because then they can tune into that feeling more. But in the moment, in the moment I want to relate to the feelings. I don't need to tell them it's wrong in that moment.

Even if later on, I'll say, hey, you know where you really felt upset? That time? I could really see the felt upset and it's natural to feel that way. And you lashed out at your sister in that moment. It was really hard, you know? And I wonder how you feel about that. Even then, I'm not going to tell them it's wrong. You're going to see what.

Laura: They know what's wrong too. Even the littlest kids, you know, I don't want to hurt what they love. Yeah.

Vivek: You said that so beautifully. Yeah.

Laura: Don't they know they already know and if they didn't know they wouldn't be lying about it, you know, to Exactly we don't need to teach. I just that's the thing that they're lying. If they thought it was OK, they wouldn't be lying about it lying about because they already know. So there's no lesson that needs to be taught there. In my opinion, they already know.

Vivek: And the key for me is helping them tune into that intercompany. Yeah.

Laura: That's so different from shame. Shame is about I'm bad, I'm wrong sitting in a place of discomfort of having made a mistake with loads of just compassion for your imperfect humanness. Yeah, that's a skill. That's a skill of practice that most grownups are still learning. Yeah, for sure. For that space to our kids too.

Vivek: Which is why I... like I said earlier, which is why I always start with giving ourselves compassion, even if your kid lies and hits the other kids. It's weird to think about it. The first thing I do is I give myself compassion when I see that, you know, when I see one kid hitting another, the first thing I do is I give myself compassion because it helps me slow down and helps me more self aware. And then I engage with them from that place because if I'm giving myself compassion, that's what's going to flow out of me towards them.

Laura: That's what I teach too. We're so in sync on that. I think about compassion. If I want to be compassionate with my kids, I have to be a font of it. And so has well up within me from me to them. And so yes, I do a regular, I have a self meditation, a self compassion practice and to help me with this because a compassionate response is not my default. My default is blame and shame judgment, that's my default. That's what I learned growing up it is. And so I practice this outside the moment. And I have a, you know, whenever I'm doing a loving kindness meditation for myself, I always have my hand over my heart. So then any time stuff starts happening with the kids, my hand goes to my heart and it just reminds me, okay, we're okay.

Vivek: Beautiful.

Laura: None of this means that we're bad moms. None of this means our kids are bad kids. Yeah. Okay. And then we have way more resources available to us.

Vivek: Beautiful. I teach something called the Microsoft compassion and it's that exact same meditation but done in single moments throughout the day. Single talks throughout the day. Yeah.

Laura: I didn't know that. Yeah. You know, stopped at a red light. Great. Get cut off in traffic there. Loving kindness. Loving kindness to me. Loving kindness to you. Yeah, absolutely. Exactly. I mean, I think if this is the mindset that we want, we want to view the world through the lens of compassion, we have to consciously pull that lens up over and over again and have a well, kind of just like with the running the track, it's exercise, its practice, right? And Oh yeah, okay. Well I feel like this was a great conversation around lying and that there's not an emergency with it, that it is a normal human behavior that there are shades of gray and we don't have to have black and white thinking around it. Yeah.

Vivek: And I just want to say, you know, for those parents who do have a strong value around it, I don't think that we're saying you shouldn't have a strong value around. Um, I think it's wonderful to have values and we want to pass them on to your kids and even in that case wrong, this is not the way to go about. It will be much more successful in passing on that value through modeling through gentle guidance through empathy and acceptance than you will in 100.

Like it's 100 to 1 then you will ever by using any kind of wrongness or rules or telling them how would you feel or okay, I don't trust you. I always want my kid to feel I trust them more. Even if they lied, I don't want to feel that they feel that I trust them and you'll get much further end and passing on that really important value by doing it this way, then you will the other way. It's so beautiful to take that approach.

Laura: I really appreciate you kind of putting that at the end. That we are not saying you have to give up your values, it's changing the way you impart those values. Yeah, beautifully said, thank you, thank you, thank you so much for this time with us. I really appreciate it.

Vivek: Wonderful. I've had a great conversation. I was so great every time we interact Laura and I love this conversation it was still flowing and we really resonate. So I really appreciate it.

Laura: I always feel that way too. So thank you for spending this time with my community.

Vivek: Wonderful.

Okay, so thanks for listening today. Remember to subscribe to the podcast and if it was helpful, leave me a review that really helps others find the podcast and join us in this really important work of creating a parenthood that we don't have to escape from and creating a childhood for our kids that they don't have to recover from.

Laura Froyen, PhD

Laura Froyen, PhD

Balanced Parent Podcast

Laura Froyen, PhD

Welcome to the home of The Balanced Parent Podcast!

Episode 84: Conscious Parenting Basics with Sidu

Episode 83: How Embracing Creativity Can Help You as a Parent with Sierra Casher

Episode 82: Helping Kids (And Parents) with ADHD with The Childhood Collective

Episode 81: Social Justice Parenting with Traci Baxley

Episode 80: Critical Skills for a More Fulfilling Parenthood with Diana Ballard

Episode 79: Coaching Sibling Squabbles

Episode 78: Live Coaching: Challenging Behaviors (Challenging Behaviors Series No. 2)

Episode 77: Using Brain Science to Understand Challenging Behaviors with Lauren Spigelmyer (Challenging Behaviors Series No. 1)

Episode 76: Surviving The Teenage Years Without The Drama with Deborah Ann Davis

Episode 75: Embracing An Abundance Mindset With Ilana Beigel

Episode 74: The Who Does More War with Dr. Jennie Rosier

Episode 73: Raising Little Brains: How Neuroscience Can Inform Our Parenting with Dr. Sarah Allen

Episode 72: Divorce from a Child's Perspective with Kimberly Ewertz (Divorce Series No. 2)

Episode 71: Conscious Co-Parenting with Ashley Wood (Divorce Series No. 1)

Episode 70: Raising Responsible Adults with Future Focused Parenting

Episode 69: The Mental Load and How to Ease It with Dr. Morgan Cutlip

Episode 68: Why We Choose Our Partners & How to Engage in Mutual Healing with Heidi Biancat

Episode 67: Teaching Kids About Body Safety & Consent with Rosalia Rivera

Episode 66: Healthy Cycles For Ourselves & Our Kids with Aviva Romm, MD

Episode 65: How to Handle Lying with Vivek Patel (Feature on Fathers Series No. 4)