Episode 91: How to Find Ease & Flow in Parenting with Kiran Trace
/For this episode, I am happy to be joined by Kiran Trace. She is a human development expert and spiritual teacher with 15 years of clinical experience in childhood development and early childhood education. She has built education, leadership, and developmental skill programs for children in high-risk populations and respite programs for adults and children with mild to severe developmental disabilities for organizations such as Boys & Girls Club, Outward Bound, Bay Area Parks & Recreation, and the Association of Neighborhood Houses. Today her work focuses on helping parents give fulfilling lives to their children.
Here is an overview of our conversation:
The importance of parents to find ease and relaxation in the role of a parent and how to accomplish it
Developmental capacities we want to notice & support in our child once the world starts opening post-COVID
How can we, as parents, step out of neglectful, authoritarian, or over-involved parenting styles (and understanding what each of them are)
To know more about parenting, follow Kiran on social media and visit her website.
Instagram: @kirantrace
YouTube: www.youtube.com/kirantrace
Website: kirantrace.com
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 on this episode of the balanced parent podcast, we're going to be talking about how we as parents can support our children in their optimal development in a way that is not overwhelming stressful or you know really scary for us.
I think lots of parents get stuck in a place of really wanting the best for their kids and they stress themselves out and so I'm bringing in an expert who can help us figure out how to support our kids so that they can have healthy, happy fulfilling lives in a way that is actually kind of easy on us and I'm super intrigued.
So please welcome Karen trace to the show, she's going to be my partner in this conversation. Kiran, thanks for being here with us. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do?
Kiran: Hi Laura, thanks, happy to join you and all of you, the audience of Balanced Parent, which is such a lovely podcasts and are thrilled to be here. I'm thrilled to be with you today, a little bit of what I do. So I have a clinic with other psychologists who work with us and myself and we really work mostly with parents and non parents but adults and really show people how they can live an optimal life, a deeply fulfilling, deeply aligned, highly utilized life from a place of profound ease, from a place of profound effortlessness and in fact by tapping that ease and by tapping that effortlessness. That's actually the only way we can have this profoundly fulfilled, fully utilized life. So that's our specialty and that's that's what our clinic offers.
Laura: Okay, so I think I speak for everybody listening right now, we're like, yeah, we want that. Okay, so how? Tell us.
Kiran: Okay, cool. One of the main challenges that all of us face is we have a deep embedded story in our system that who we are, what we're doing and how we're living our life is like so, so, so, so important and we have to get it right and if we don't get it right, we're messing up, you know, we're harming other people. And so this tension, this is a really big tension in us and that tension is blocking our ability to recognize there's something deeply supportive in each moment, in each present moment.
And if we can land in that present moment and connect to that supportive movement, it has a flow and it's gonna flow us into a really aligned place. And so the place that I find with everybody we work with, we're always trying to help unravel or untangle that deep tension so that they can listen and find that flow.
So, you know, similar to ancient teachings where you're going to like find the dow or listen to the dow, you know, like find that flow step flow state, find that that zone and then I think every parent listening understands that because they found it at many times at many moments that dropped into it for a second and things are just like easy and fun, right and simple? And then it's like, and then you fall out of it again.
Laura: It always seems so slippery. It just, it does, it seems slippery, like hard to hold on to at times.
Kiran: Yeah, exactly. And so let's get into some practical ways that we can actually harness that and have a repeatable access to that flow state, but that's really what we're actually talking about is something that's not unfamiliar to anybody listening. It feels impossible to repeatedly get back there.
Laura: Yeah. And you know, it was something that we were talking about before we started recording, was that how when we're in that state, things also flow easier for our kids. So I kind of want to see which direction you want to go. Do you want to go towards kind of how do we step more into ease and presence and flow or do we want to go in the direction of kind of what are the developmental capacities of our children and move that direction. What feels good to you right now.
Kiran: Yeah, I think if we start with why that is so important to your children and how it affects your children, I think will build slowly the understanding for our listeners here of what the foundation of that is, then we can move into the practical ways that they can do that with. The understanding of this is going to help my kids in this way and this way and this way. So I think we'll start in on how it affects the kids.
Laura: Okay, let's dive in, tell me.
Kiran: Okay, so, you know, you know, and I know we have this language and psychology, we're talking about developmental markers or these developmental capacities, but let's break that down a tiny bit for you know, just for parents that may not have had the academic background we have, but the idea is like if we're talking about something that's developing in your children, right then that is a spontaneous movement and it is about a neural network. So this is connecting information in our neurons, in our brain.
Now we have three brains, we have a brain in our head, we have a brain in our heart and we have a brain in our gut and each of those brains are moving with these neural pathways which we can think of roadways and if we build roads then we can get to places right? And so the more access there is the more ability to flow our children would have. And so when we're talking about a developmental capacity, we're talking about a spontaneous neural network that's going to allow your children.
So the capacity to resource solve, understand and actualize. So we're talking about a developmental capacity, that's what we're talking about the spontaneous movement inside your children to begin to resource solve, understand and actually
Laura: Can we get like a concrete example of something that most parents will have seen this in action with their kids.
Kiran: Absolutely. And that's the thing is like there are fancy charts and you can look online but regardless like throw all that away you as a parent witness your children's capacity all the time, right? All the time. And it's so exciting as a parent to witness that it's a real joy because you're watching your child and your child is like discovering how to tie a shoe or discovering numbers or letters or even like if you think of your child right now and whatever age your child is, you could sit just in your being see their capacity, right? My child has the capacity to well Laura. What are some of the capacities of your kids? Like just one of your girls?
Laura: Oh, I mean they have capacity for great kindness and generosity. They have the ability to figure out how things that they are seeing in there, close world relate to the bigger world. One of them loves to play with numbers and I see her math capacity a lot and I think a stage that I really, I saw some of these developmental drives coming up, these kind of inborn just can't even hold it back, drives that I think most parents will relate to is when language development is happening, even for non hearing kids or kids who are in home that uses sign language.
They babble language, there's this dry for language that most kids have both of my kids when they were learning to crawl, would wake themselves up in the middle of the night, like pushing up on their hands and knees and rocking, you know like and I know I hear about that all the time from other families too, that it just, there's these certain things that are just these drives within a child that's going to happen and we just have to kind of get out of the way.
Kiran: Absolutely. Because that's the thing right? When you see that this is an inborn capacity coming online. It's a spontaneous thing in your child and like just even as you're talking the joy in your heart, right? Like it's so as a parent, this is such a miracle to witness and were touched, were so touched by it. Like it feels like there's nowhere else we would rather be in that moment than witnessing our child developing right? Like getting a skill set organically inside of them.
And I love how you describe like one of your girls, it's math is just really alive for her. Some of the language we use in our clinic is like it's a turn on right, the kid is just turning on like this ignition switch and it's so beautiful because it doesn't have to do with you.
You didn't teach her math, that was a developmental capacity in her, you didn't teach them to crawl right? That was developmental capacity in them and it's going to continue that way right? Like you don't have to teach your children kindness, compassion, these are inborn capacities in children that will come online if we could get out of the way as you say, right?
Laura: I think of what you're saying right now, especially for some of the more social and emotional skills, is not well understood as a capacity that's inborn and that is coming online in the same way that learning to walk or learning to read is understood.
This is something that I experience a lot with one of my own children child. So my oldest has an explosive temper. If you want to label it something that has some other kids developed emotional regulation faster than her. I don't really like calling things delay.
Kiran: It was made.
Laura: She was moving at the pace. That was right for her and she is those things are beautifully coming online in the way in the space and time. That's right for her.
Kiran: But also what if that explosive temper for instance was actually developmental capacity. It was a capacity. So let's say we can have children who are we like to call them rebels? Right? Like a rebel child. And then we have our docile children and both of those children are moving with developmental intelligence, real intelligence. And so are docile children are very turned on right?
Like engaged by rules, they want to know the rules and I don't mean that in the concrete like don't run in the hallway kind rules, but I mean like the rules of society, like the rules of engagement, the rules of civilized world is such a turn on to them? How do we play here? I'm here in this life thing. What are the rules, how do we play in?
Right, that's a docile child's developmental capacity but a rebel child has very little interest in the rules and is much much more into effectiveness, speed and efficiency, that's what our rebels are and they're incredible at it, they're incredible at it. And what happens is they get quite frustrated if there are air quote rules in play that affect efficiency, effectivity and speed.
So if a rule gets in the way of the effectiveness, the speed of it and the efficiency of it, they get incredibly frustrated an explosive as they ought to because it's a real impasse to the thing that most turns them on. And if we allow our rebel children because you know all of you guys know, you know most people have come into contact with the rebel child whether it's their own child or and these are and if you were playmate or whatever, these are very, very creative children and if we allow them the space to make their own pathways through things like it.
Let's say you're at a grocery store with your rebel child, your rebel child doesn't want to do the rules, they don't wanna have to walk that way around the grocery store, they're like in a fine these efficient speedy effective creative solutions and if we're pulling them back because there's a different rule, they get really explosive. And yes we do need to help our child with expression skills then perhaps the actual explosion is a beautiful developmental sign.
Laura: So yeah, yeah. You know, it's funny, this one daughter of mine is actually much more of a rule follower. It takes lots of comfort in rules and actually it gets really upset and finds it really problematic when things are not going according to.
Kiran: Yeah, she just flipped it.
Laura: Just wait. But I think that so many of the parents that I work with, they don't see the range of development and learning of social and emotional skills the same way that they do like their child learning to walk your child's learning to walk. We expect them to fall down, we expect them to stumble. You know, we expect that that's not going to be a perfectly, you know, they're just going to stand up one day and walk perfectly with no stumble and we expect there to be a progression a movement and very few parents apply that to.
Kiran: The passion, kindness, empathy.
Laura: Generosity.
Kiran: Generosity.
Laura: Those pieces
Kiran: Resiliency.
Laura: That yeah, that those things also take time they have, each child will have their own individual developmental trajectory that will look different than other children's.
Kiran: And we'll be spontaneous and will come online.
Laura: Yeah. And we'll come online, there's a piece of trust in there and trusting in children, trusting in their capacity is that I think are embodying here. That is hard for parents to trust sometimes.
Kiran: Yeah. And this is that because for parents, it's hard for them to understand safety already exists or that ease or relaxation and safety are possible places we have this sort of deep programming from our own parents to us and part of the world to us that it's our job to be stressed. It's our job to worry. It's our job to like run ahead of our kid five steps and project a problem. Project a challenge.
That's the thing that's being against that sort of pressing against their ability to just stop witness their kids and then see the what I would call empirical evidence that your kids capacities will come online. Because when you took a second and talked about the developmental capacities of your kids, you can see there's just been this organic progression that you didn't teach, you didn't intervene.
Like they woke themselves up to crawl. You know, they woke themselves up with language. They like looking at how consistent that was. You just witnessed your kid look at how incredibly consistent it was. I feel like that's where the trust comes from. The direct experience of how consistent, consistent, consistent it is.
Laura: And that we can trust them. We can and not just trust our kids as individuals, but trust as an organism as a being right?
Kiran: Yes. So for me, the definition of the word trust has to do a lot with maybe I use the word faith instead of trust and they could almost be interchangeable. But I think with the connotation of faith is an idea that I have this experience of my child in this case, and it's so consistently true about my child that I can have faith, it will continue to be consistent is kind of the definition.
So it's like it's not a blind leap into the unknown. It's a reflective process based in evidence that you as a parent are witnessing, You're witnessing the evidence, witnessing the evidence. The evidence is so consistent that we can absolutely project. It will continue to be consistent.
Laura: For me that feels very reassuring. That feels like something I can say to myself in moments when I'm afraid that my kids aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing or growing or developing skills at the rate that they're supposed to be doing it. That feels very reassuring to me. And I think it's easier for me, given my background for that to be reassuring. What about for the parents were like.
But yeah, and at the same time, the kids have got to go to school, There's rules to follow. They have to be able to say, you know, you know, know that if somebody says no to them that they can't just throw a fit about it. Like what about those situations where there are societal expectations placed on parents and we're living in society, like we're living in culture, what do we do? Sometimes? It feels really hard and lonely.
Kiran: Yes.
Laura: To be parenting this way.
Kiran: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And if we're going back to these spontaneous developments, right? So if you look at just as you're listening right now, right, just put your kids capacity in your mind, right, just as Laura had done here, your kid their capacity, do they have capacity to say, please write is the capacity, They're not the willingness, the capacity is a good different,
Laura: It’s a good differentiation of course the capacity is there.
Kiran: do they have a capacity to stand in line?
Laura: Of course the capacity they use there.
Kiran: Yeah. Do they have a capacity to listen to an adult and understand what's being asked of them? Do they have the capacity to understand and witness the world around them? And they're like, let's say it's like a classroom environment and the kids are all working on a project. Does your child have the capacity to sit in that classroom and recognize she has a role in that space?
Laura: Yes, mine does. I'm not sure that all kids are ready for that.
Kiran: Because if the capacity. Yeah, exactly, it's not at all ages.
Laura: Right, capacity is going to come on board, come online and many of our systems in society like classrooms, right. We don't put our kids in classrooms til they're four or five when that capacity is generally on board.
Laura: Although personally I think it's too early, I think that they should be sitting at desks until they're closer to eight.
Kiran: or maybe never sitting at desk.
Laura: Right. Probably.
Kiran: innovate and make better. Yes, absolutely. Is it the best know and evolution is going to keep changing that and PS Covid has made some really great inroads on how we can start doing the school systems better. However, for now it is generally a capacity of a four year old or five year old to be able to sit in an environment and witness the role going on and understand that they have usually, you know, at four or five, the developmental capacity of your children as they want to engage. They want to be helpful, they want to contribute, they want to know what their job is, give them a job.
Laura: They want to be a part of a community, they want to be part of friendships.
Kiran: Yes, these are organic developmental capacities and regardless you as a parent like trying to give it to them or teach it to them, it will come on board. So for parents who are sort of like, but there's this world in this world expects of my kid, it's like, you know, what chances are your kid, if that's their appropriate environment then chances are your kid will have the developmental capacity or it will, or the environment will help it come online.
Laura: Yeah, there's this quote by Magda Gerber that you just reminded me of that says readiness is when they do it and I love that, I love that, that's what I love that readiness is what I do it and it's just, it's that's been a very comforting thing for me to remind myself of, for example, my oldest who was wonderful and delightful and who I adore has moments where she is reluctant to try new things and it is nervous about certain things and so riding her bike is something that she's wanted to do for a long time.
She has completely has the capacity to do it. She would be like, she could get up on her bike right now and write it without training wheels, I have no doubt, but there is something that is impeding her from doing it, you know, actually doing it and she'll just i it's my job to just trust that she will just, she'll do it when she's ready.
She had the same, you know, it was the same with swimming when she refused to put her face in the water, she refused to let go of the side even though she was clearly strong enough, clearly able to swim. And then one day she was just like, I'm going to do it and then she just swam across the pulling hard.
Kiran: Here's you illustrating a beautiful real time for all of our parents right, that you can use your own witnessing of your child's capacities right to see how consistent it was, trust that that will come on board to trust your word faith, my word, that it will come on board, that this is a spontaneous developmental piece that will come on board and, and the pressure you as a parent have to be like, well, like my kids are swimming classes and she won't leave the side of the pool, you know, like I signed her up and there she is, it's like, you get to actually like relax, sit back and witness your kid and the kid.
Laura: And it's a form of self soothing for me. So I'm an anxious person and so, like, continually reminding myself of these things like, when I take her out to ride on her bike because she's asked me to and it's her leading, I say to myself, she will do it when she's ready, she'll do it when she's ready. There's no rush. If she wants to ride a bike, she will, you know, I just have these little things that I say to myself in my mind because it's, there's pressures there. I grew up in a home.
Kiran: It's pressure, I would say, yeah, what's your home, exactly.
Laura: you know, it was my totally, my upbringing, you know, is totally like the voices of my parents and my mind are there, you should be doing this by now. There's no reason you're not doing this by now, you know, all of those things were there and I have to consciously and intentionally counteract them so that I can be present and relaxed with my kids, you know?
Kiran: Yeah, so this is the beautiful thing, one of the things we talked about a lot, what is innate parenting versus conscious parenting, you know, in our clinic and innate is although that programming that we got in our homes and you know, like conscious is going, you know, this isn't working and right, it wasn't helpful for me, like there's a lot of suffering. Some of this is really hard for me.
Like as an adult, right? Like I have, I'm suffering right? Like I want to get more conscious, so I want to take the stuff that was in my subconscious, I want to take this stuff that was, you know, like in my unconscious and I want to bring awareness to it and bring it into the consciousness so that I can make a different choice. Such a beautiful, beautiful movement in a parent and but it does put this work thing, right? Like I'm yes, and then I have to work on myself.
Laura: And it's cumbersome, it's cumbersome are clunky or I'm screwing it up or I am gonna Pass on my screwed up stuff to them. I know that that's a big fear for so many parents, you know, I didn't get all my healing done before I became a parent and now I'm going to screw up my kids, you know, can you please help us with that a little bit.
Kiran: 1,000%. My total joy. Yes. Okay, so here's an interesting thing about as human beings, right? If we are struggling and suffering with something and it's a challenge, we often think, okay, I have to unlearn this. I have to figure out a new way, but if someone puts another way beside it, that's really easy, really effortless and get you to do the same place, You don't have to unlearn it all, you can just go do it.
So for just as an illustrative example, if you were going to work and you went out your house and you like walked 2.5 miles up the street and then you have to cross this rickety bridge. When you got to the other side, you have to wait for a bus and then you got on a bus and the bus took you like uptown. But then you have to get off the bus and walk through this really sketchy kind of back alley way and then to get up into your work building, right?
So this is how you got to work every day. And then someone just said to you, hey, if you went out your house and turned left two blocks away is the same building, like that's your office right there. You don't have to unlearn the instinct to go right and walk three miles, you know, I mean like you don't like, like you would just literally, you wouldn't have to remind yourself to turn left, even right, you go out the door, turn left, go two blocks, there's your building done, right?
So the cool thing about us human beings that if you can put them more effortless, more years filled, more nourishing play choice in front of you. You will choose that you won't have to unlearn the painful suffering, difficult, challenging things that you have to.
Laura: Yeah. Our brains love efficiency.
Kiran: Some love fantasy and some love rules, right?
Laura: Well, I mean like it to just be simple and straightforward. They like the easy path.
Kiran: Yeah. It's also that our system can recognize nourishment versus suffering instantaneously. Right? Our babies did that right. Are we could see it in our babies. Our babies would respond to nourishment and kind of pull away and be afraid or you know, like be contracted if there was suffering, right?
Like this isn't an eight human. It happens really in our primal brain that's sharp, our brain stem and our limbic part of our brain that we can receive information that says nourishment and we can receive information that is suffering and know the difference instantaneously and we will move towards nourishment and that's a really beautiful human thing. And that is the thing that builds your developmental capacity is moving in. That nourishment really. That's part of what's happening when we're building more brain neurons. So we've got our brain stem and our limbic brain.
These are primal ancient caveman parts of our brain and then we have that cortex which is what we think of, that outer shell of the brain when we think of the brain in our head. And then that prefrontal cortex which takes that whole cortex and links it to the primal part of our brain and what's happening there is building brain fibers, building neurons, right?
And so this whole brain development is occurring through nourishment, not through suffering. We know that suffering breaks neurons, breaks fibers and that nourishment builds them. And so this is the cool thing about us humans. We thrive in nourishment. So if we put for all of our parents, if we if I just illustrate, bring forward where those deeply nourishing places are, you won't have to you have to worry about the trauma that you didn't clear out yet.
Laura: What does that actually look like in practice? I've worked with enough parents to know that they will hear someone say that and they will feel really skeptical that that's possible for them. They need an example of like what that actually looks like.
Kiran: Totally. So let me give you a little more understanding and go right into some examples for this. So we're just talking about our brain development. We just talked about how we build brain fibers, right? How we build these neuron networks. These are like roadways. So it's really easy to get around so we can get around our brain really easy and then suffering or trauma it breaks it and we end up with dead ends, right?
Like that's what suffering feels like. It's like a dead end, dead end, dead end, Right. And so what we know already with data, which is you and you as a, as a parent can understand it immediately is that the place that builds the most neurons or brain fibers and which is also to say the thing that's going to help your children develop the most is relationship not technology, not information. It's and also not doing a skill set.
It's actually going to be relationship that builds fiber and here's a really cool thing about relationship relationship is based in being not doing. So we love to be with our children for instance, right? We love to be with our children and we as parents start to think that we have to do our children are due for our children or do and then we've interrupted the relationship a tiny bit there and it's way more nourishing to just be with our children because that is the heart of relationship.
You be with your dog, you be with your cat, you be with nature, you be with your partner or your friend. It's the being this, that is creating all that yummy relationship and that being this is creating all those beautiful brain fibers and that more brain fires fibers gives us more developmental capacity. So if we so high did see
Laura: Sorry. Yeah, I just want to give an example of that that just so just as an example, my kids like to bake with me and we like to do that together and it can either be really stressful for me or really enjoyable to me, depending on my approach to it, what I do in that moment with them. If I'm focused on the outcome, the doing, they're getting it done the cookies, whatever it is, we're making, getting the recipe. Exactly. Right, teaching them about measuring or whatever.
You know, if I have some agenda for it, it's usually pretty stressful for me. If I'm just in the moment, we're enjoying being together, who cares if the cookies, you know, have a little extra salt in them or, you know, if they get the right number of stirs, like if I'm just in the moment and my priority is on being with them. It's a much more enjoyable experience for all of us
Kiran: For all of you.
Laura: Yeah, there's the nourishment
Laura: for the kids for us. Yeah.
Kiran: totally. Right. The suffering is obvious and the nourishment is obvious. What we're going to start to invite you to do is lead off of those nourishing places. And so let me go into really practical piece of this. So we call this in my clinic, I call it belly time for adult piggyback So beautifully on your program of play, which totally love your program of playing with your kids and I love how you sort of have, it's just like 30 minutes a week. You know, like if you don't have the energy, but it's beautiful.
So here's what I want to invite parents to consider doing for the rest of the week and we call it belly time for adults. And this is like, so imagine that it's like the end of the day you got home from work, right? And then there's everybody needing you, right? The kids are, let's say we're at home with Covid right now maybe, and you've been working in the office or whatever you're doing and then you stop and the kids need, like, the kids want you, the dog wants you, your partner wants you like everybody's like wanting you, right?
And it's just like, it's overwhelming and it's stressful to be like, how do I meet everyone's needs in this moment. We suggest this belly time. So we say, take off your shoes, put the keys down, you know, and get onto your belly, parents right down on the floor level and then the kids will join you. They will come, we're assuming sort of like, you know, school age kids and all you have to do is just lay there on your belly and breathe and witness your children do not. You don't have to do with them. You don't have to play with them. Nothing.
You just sit and witness your children. And so imagine this is like after work or it could be after dinner. I mean, it could be at any point in your day, right? You just get on the floor and lay there. If you have that capacity. If you don't have, if you have a physical impairment that doesn't allow you to do that. Maybe you're on the couch or maybe you're on a chair, but getting down with the kids on the belly and just witnessing them. So this is not disengaging and it's not doing, it's witnessing. So the example I like to use is if we were at a butterfly farm.
And Laura, you and I were sitting on a bench and there was this gorgeous butterflies and imagine they were like giant, like they were like as big as your three year old, right? This is this giant butterfly that you and I would sit and we would, we could watch this butterfly, we want to teach the butterfly. We don't have to teach something or give to.
We would just sit and it would be incredibly nourishing to just sit there and watch the butterfly. Now. Even better than that magical big beautiful butterfly is your child to you as a parent. It's so beautiful. And so there's an opportunity here to just lay on your belly and witness your butterfly.
And at first your kids might be like, whatever they're going to play. Maybe they play like pet shop or maybe they play legos or maybe they play barbies or whatever it is that they're playing or coloring, but they'll just pick up their stuff and start to play is what will happen and you're on the floor with it, they will just start being in their flow and you're witnessing them, you're doing nothing else.
You're just laying there witnessing them and they might say, well you play with my barbie or do you want? And you're like, all you have to say is I see you and then they'll just start playing, they'll just start engaging. They won't, it'll be that what you like to call that independent play, but they're with you, they're being together and what happens is you get super nourished, you're not doing.
And so the invitation here is to lean into that nourishment that you as a parent can recognize, right? Because your head will be like, you should check your messages and did your boss call and what are you gonna have for dinner? Right? Like your head's going to do that. But if we lean towards nourishment and remember, you don't have to unlearn, you don't have to unpack. You just lean towards the nourishment, which is just to lay here and witness my beautiful butterfly and you will watch your children.
It's like your kids were on vitamins. It's so incredible. It's like some B 12 drip, just one into your kid because children is as you talk about a lot of children mirror, they don't act like you act, they mirror you. So if you're looking in the mirror and your hair is a mess, you don't go to the mirror and straighten your hair, right? You have to come to your own head and straighten it. So children are a mirror. They're mirroring of those all those beautiful neurons in their brains. The mirror neurons and they're mirroring you.
So you are sitting there witnessing your beautiful butterfly and they start to respond. They start to thrive. There's this beautiful impact because in essence what you're saying to your children in the mirror language, what you're mirroring to your children is I like being with you mm It also says it's safe to relax here on planet Earth. It's also a mirror to your children to say it's safe to just watch and not do or not no or not even understand, it's still safe.
This is what's being mirrored to your children when you are just laying on the floor witnessing them watching your beautiful butterflies move as parents like the kids are always like mommy will you look at this mommy look at this, your mama you know and our sense is that we need to do for them or respond to them or engage with them but we don't we can just witness and you will watch in your child when you turn to just witness like I see you they see you seeing them and it's not and it's not an engaged movement. It's not like you're on I'm watching you you know that's a different kind of creepy feeling.
This is more like just being with your beautiful butterfly, you're just witnessing your butterfly and they stopped the mummy mummy it stops completely because they feel seen and that's what you're mirroring. You're mirroring. I like being with you. It's safe to relax. It's safe to just watch like you get to be on planet earth, you know baby and just watch and you don't have to do and you don't have to know and you don't even have to understand and look at how nourishing this is this is the mirror to your kid.
Laura: Yeah. It's so powerful. It's such a powerful thing. I've gotten to witness that the power of what you're talking about Over and over with the people that I work with in my 30 days of play challenge the 1st 10 days are just doing that and noticing the effect that it has on your kid and it's huge. I have I have like my own just data just what I've collected on it. And I mean I get Messages all the time from parents that just one shift of spending just 10 minutes just observing, marveling at wondering at witnessing Just 10 minutes a day of that. And it's the truth is is magic.
Kiran: It's totally crazy magic. But it is because of those neurons. Yeah, those mirror neurons and your children. And it's that relationship relationship most fibers in the brain and then and then that relationship is occurring but here's the thing that's really important about that witness, right? You're not trying to do something.
So I'm like, you're not trying to observe, You're not trying to notice, you're not trying to none of that's occurring. It's just lay on your belly, relax and watch your butterfly and maybe you notice nothing that's fine. It's already happening. The spontaneous development is occurring.
You don't have to come away with an observation or come away with nothing has, there's nothing being asked of you and nothing being asked of your kid in that space and that allows for that beautiful developmental growing those brain fibers and your kids through relationship. And it's so cool. It has nothing to do with you as a parent doing anything. It has to do with you doing nothing. What does it feel for you when you say allowing?
Laura: allowing feels very, very spacious. Like it feels very, there's no judgment, there's no ghoul. It just is .
Kiran: lovely. I think for some parents they can try to allow, right? Or they could try to observe or try to. So I love how you define what that feels like because for somebody else that might feel like the real word is like uh spaciousness, right? Or the real word for them is like just relax your role in that moment is to drop the doing, which includes trying to do nothing.
It's the dropping of all of that and that will put you in the zone, it will put you in the flow and it will create all kinds of developmental capacities both for you and your child in a way that just didn't involve you. And then it becomes really, I think organically nourishing to then start to pick that up in other places in the day.
Like when you bake with the kids where you just actually just witness, you know, maybe you're just stirring and witnessing or maybe it's when the kids are going for bedtime routine, you know, and you're putting them through the bedtime routine and all you're doing is witnessing while they brush their teeth. You're just witnessing while they read the book. You know, you might find yourself dropping into that mode because it's so nourishing.
Laura: Yeah, it is nourishing, it's soothing to the nervous system, to your nervous system, loves it. It feels very safe, It gets all the right stuff. So my daughter was, my youngest one was at a pretty long, like a three hour cardiology appointment this morning and there was stress involved in it. There was worrying concerns and most of the time I just was in a place of being with her, watching her as she was watching a movie. And well, because I mean, she had to hold really still to do the assessments and the echo and everything. And so I was just watching her watching the movie. Like I was just.
Kiran: and how did it go that really stressful environment. It's so beautiful, a beautiful example because that's a place where parents will feel like, oh my God, like how could I possibly do that? But I love that. It was in fact so stressful that your only option to sit and be.
Laura: Yeah, well, I mean, you know, these are things, this is the being is a practice that I've been working on for a long time. So I knew that that's what I needed to not go down all of the paths of the what ifs and what could happen and all of those things, you know, I needed to just be in the present moment with her, you know, for my own stress response.
Kiran: Yeah, but when you got home, how was it for both of you?
Laura: We were great. I mean it was fine.
Kiran: Beautiful.
Laura: Yeah.
Kiran: The empirical evidence that regardless of your own trauma Laura, right? Like you can actually enter a really stressful situation with your child and both of you can be really okay all the way through it. And it's not a matter of like you being healed or I'm healed or you know, it's just a matter of choosing the nourishing path.
Laura: and knowing when to recognize that and when to lean into it, you know,
Kiran: Exactly, I feel like that's why we're kind of in this conversation, like feeding in all that brain information so that the parents can deeply understand why your children thrive in that kind of a space because that's the very environment that offers the best developmental opportunities for your child's brain.
Laura: Yeah, I so agree. And it's this kind of like the one this is this one hand washes, the other thing where it's, if we want this for our kids, we have to start with ourselves, you know, start it all starts with us, you know?
Kiran: Yes.
Laura: It's what's good for us is good for them too.
Kiran: Good being the thing that feels deeply nourishing in, right? Like that's the definition of good because a lot of us have definitions of good that are like eat all your vegetables or you know, say your prayers before bed or you know, and those are good and that's going to be safe, you know, in my clinic which is global and thousands, hundreds of thousands of hours of clinical data, we can see the absolute brain development in there.
We have all kinds of beautiful scientific research that points out that actually digital advises those brains. And so I think it's really important that we understand that nourishing choice for us, if we lean towards nourishment, that's going to really allow our own developmental capacities to come on to spontaneously come on board.
Laura: Yeah, that's beautifully put. Okay, so, Kiran, if people want to know more and learn more from you, where can they find you?
Laura: Yes. So kirantrace.com thank you for asking Laura. We have for you guys listeners balanced parents. If you go there to kirantrace.com, you'll see a pop up that says the take the nine day course and it's a free class. It's a great class that I created with my other clinicians and it shows you how to make these kinds of nourishing choices in every day. And it goes very step by step, very detailed information.
And over the course of nine days you might be able to make 3, 4, even five deeply nourishing choice is great if you can make more. I mean, obviously you're welcome to make as many nourishing choices you want. But I think when we're starting from a place of a lot of stress and a lot of effort, I think a lot of these listeners here if your lovely podcasts have a lot of more consciousness. But anyways, it's a free course.
It just helps you to make some of these really delicious and nourishing choices and shows you step by step. And what I think is also really important is if you find yourself way out in stress city way out and overwhelmed way out like which really these days with right at home, we really are. This is this simple, sweet, repeatable path to get right back into the zone to get right back into this place of flow.
And it's just a repeatable, consistent process of just here you go, you can get right back to that nourishing place because we were so stressed and so overwhelmed for like I couldn't find the nourishment if it bit me on my bum curing like I can't see any place of nourishment and so this is a really great way of like how to make some really great choices and how to keep yourself in the nourishing space or return to it if you found yourself way bumped out.
Laura: Awesome. Well thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and your experience with us today. This is a really, really cool and interesting conversation, so I really appreciate it.
Kiran: Yes, thanks. Laura was really sweet to be with you and thank you for all the beautiful examples with you and the girls. Like, I think that that's just so illustrative of what's possible for all of us. So it's great.
Laura: I'm so happy to do that. I think that sometimes it's, you know, we can feel like we've got these big concepts but we have to bring it home and you know, what does that actually look like in our daily lives and it's so important.
Kiran: So important, yep, totally love it. Okay, thanks Laura.
Laura: Absolutely, you too.
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 ish green shot 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