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!

March 22, 2022

Episode 110: How Implementing Boundaries Can Improve any Relationship with Melissa Salmeron

March 22, 2022/ Laura Froyen

Did you ever feel forced to do something uncomfortable because you do not want to offend that person? Do you struggle with saying "no" even when you know you should? There is so much pressure on us as parents, especially the moms reading this, to be everything and do everything for everyone. And we know the answer is to set more boundaries, to actually say no when we need to so that we have more time and energy for the things that truly matter to us. But it's not actually that simple, is it? The art of saying no is complicated and often it's an inside job.

So, what is a healthy boundary and what is not? How can we set a personal boundary that would not come off as being arrogant or rude?

For this week's episode on The Balanced Parent Podcast, we are going to dig deep into healthy boundary setting and how it can improve any relationship that matters to us. And to help me in this conversation, I brought in my friend and colleague, Melissa Salmeron. She is a Certified Master Life Coach and helps other moms give themselves the space they need to defeat overwhelm, step into their power, and show up as their true selves through the power of the CARE Method. She will be helping us learn:

Boundaries: What they are and what they aren't
Purpose of setting a healthy boundary
How to set healthy boundaries

REMEMBER: If you find the podcast helpful, rating and reviewing on your favorite listening platform helps me land amazing guests and helps other struggling parents find this amazing community! Taking a few minutes to send your feedback really helps (and I read each and every one!) Thanks for your support!

To get more resources, do follow Melissa on her social media and visit her website.
Facebook: Melissa Salmeron
Instagram: @mrssalmeron
Website: www.melissasalmeron.com

TRANSCRIPT

Parenting is often lived in the extremes. It's either great joy or chaotic overwhelm. 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 are going to dive deep into boundary setting. So we're going to be talking all about how setting healthy intentional boundaries can improve nearly any relationship. And to have this conversation, I'm bringing in my new friend and colleague, a wonderful guest, Melissa Salmeron. She is a master life coach and she helps moms give themselves the space they need to defeat overwhelm, step into their power, and show up as their true selves. And we're gonna just really kind of geek out about boundaries today. So Melissa, welcome to the show! I'm really excited for this conversation. Will you tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do?

Melissa: Yes and yayyy boundaries! So exciting!

First, Laura, thank you for having me. I think the conversations that you have around parenting are just so important and I just, I love your work. So I appreciate the opportunity to be here.

So, I am Melissa Salmeron and as she said, I am a master certified life coach and my passion is helping busy, overworked moms. Yes, work on defeating that - overwhelmed. So that they can live a life of more peace and calm. And I think now more than ever we need to be supporting moms. I mean all parents, yes, need support. But moms are near and dear to my heart as I am one and I have traveled down this road and we also often say “We teach what we need to learn”. And so, that is just a little bit about me.

And I wanted to share if it's okay, Laura, just this topic of boundaries, why also it's something I'm really passionate about.

I started this journey. I've always really wanted to know more about myself and understand, you know, why I am the way I am and always looked to improve myself. And I have three kids, so a ten year old, a seven year old and almost two year old. And around the time my second child was born, I realized that I needed some extra support because I found myself in this stage where I think a lot of moms do, where somewhere along the line I just completely lost myself. And it just sort of hit me like a ton of bricks that I really didn't know who I was and I needed to get control of that quickly because I wasn't showing up the mom that I wanted to be, as the wife that I wanted to be, as the co-worker, any of it really.

And so, I started seeing a therapist and she, one of the first things she asked me was, “Do you know anything about boundaries?”. And I'm like, not really. I mean, yes, but it's always been sort of confusing to me because I always really thought that to be really loving, you didn't want to draw. I thought of boundary it’s like this hard line in the sand, you know. And I just didn't think that that was, you know, the loving way that I wanted to show up.

And so, I started doing a lot of work with her around boundaries. And you know, I think a lot of people find themselves and you know, maybe they weren't taught the skill. I think boundaries, they are skill. I've been working on this for several years and you know, I'm not a master. I'll say that, yes. And we all come from like various backgrounds. But yeah, so I think this topic is, it's so good to really understand what a boundary is and what it is not.

Laura: Yeah. Can we dig in there a little bit? Because I feel like we have this, you know, we have this kind of general like “Yeah, boundaries are important.Yes, we need boundaries.” But what does it actually mean? What do they actually look like? What's a healthy boundary? What's not so healthy boundary? Can we dive in there?

Melissa: Yeah, let's do that for sure. So, personal boundary. It's a limit in a rule that we set for ourselves. So it's all about us and what we're willing to do and not do. And as I said, it's not a line in the sand, it's not a rule. And so this is not my imagery, but I love it so much.

It's kind of like if you think of the boundaries like this hula hoop that you put your, put around yourself, you know, it's defining where, it's like where you end and the other person begins. And a rule would be something that, you know, you're forcing on someone else or you're using fear or power to really control someone else,

Laura: Right.

Melissa: Which never feels good.

Laura: In the parenting world, I think about boundaries are about us and limit setting are about the child's behavior. So if we're thinking about setting boundaries with our kids, like a limit would be, “I can't let you run out into the street that's not safe. I got to keep you safe.” Whereas a boundary is “My back is hurting today and I can't be your jungle gym. I can't wrestle with you today.” That's a boundary. You know, the boundaries are about us and limit setting for kids is about them.

And hopefully we're only enacting limit setting, you know, in times where their safety is at stake or you know, we're really working hard not to infringe on their personal rights. Right? Another analogy that I love, it gets taught everywhere about boundaries is thinking about a boundary as the property line. So if you're a homeowner and you own your home, that your boundary is that property line. Right now, I don't know listener, if you can hear my neighbor is mowing their yard and if my neighbor were to come over and he's very particular, he takes great pride in how his yard is mown. He does, you know, the cross hatching, it's beautiful.

But if he were to come over and say to us, you know to his next door neighbor, say like “you also need to mow your yard in that cross hatch design.” You know, “you need to do X, Y and Z with your yard,” that would be him crossing into my property into my boundary. And that happens a lot in, you know, so it's easy to talk about it in terms of like concrete terms of like our property, our yard, but it's much harder, gets much… The lines are harder to see when it comes to other aspects of personal relationships, especially if we grew up in homes where there weren't clear boundaries and more where boundary setting wasn't modeled to us in a healthy way.

Can we talk a little bit about that then? So where? You know, again, it's easy to say like my neighbor doesn't get to come and tell me how, what color to paint my door. My dad doesn't get to come and tell me where I should plant flowers. It's so easy to talk about in like personal property. But what does that mean for us in terms of emotional boundaries or relational boundaries? Like, what do those?

Melissa: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think it's important for us to understand that, you know, like we have certain rights and I didn't really get this myself for a really long time. It's like I am in so many ways like I have a right to be treated with respect, right? I have a right to say no without feeling guilty. Big one. That's such a big one. I think so many of us struggle with.

My needs, your needs are just as important as everyone else's. And you have a right to accept your mistakes and your failures. So I would get confused in the past around thinking I didn't do something, I didn't follow through. And so, to sort of like even the playing field, I need to let you do something that I don't really feel comfortable with because I let you down. Now, hearing that it makes no sense.

Laura: Oh no, but I can see why someone would think that though.

Melissa: Yes. But just because, you know, you've done something over here, doesn't change, you know what your limits are, what your personal limits are, right? Like that has nothing to do with the other basically like those are two separate things.

Laura: Yeah.

Melissa: And then, we don't have to meet other people's unreasonable expectations of us. So Laura, you mentioned earlier, like the example of the mother-in-law gets such a bad rap. But I'll just say my brother-in-law actually was giving me a hard time over the holidays. He was wanting me to stay out late for a party and my in-laws loved to stay up late and start their day late.

They're just on a completely different schedule than I am. And he tried, you know, every single enticement there possibly could have been to get me to stay and I was just like “No, you guys stay. Have a great time. I'll miss you and I'll see you tomorrow.” You know, like because I wasn't going to give in because I was going to throw my entire schedule for the next day and the kids and all of that, right? So just because someone really, really wants you to do something doesn't obligate you really, really have to do it.

Laura: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's so empowering to find out where our lines are and to confidently state them so that we can actually be confident in our “no” and what feels good and it's not something that's like that we have to master perfectly. You know, it's a dance, it's figuring out process and there's room for imperfection. And there's room for getting it wrong too for realizing like, you know what? I kind of let someone push me into doing something that I didn't want to do.

What did I learn about this situation? How can I show up better for myself next time? Just like last night my parents had been away. They've been on a trip and my mom wanted to reconnect and chat and I really had had a long day. It's a long holiday weekend. We're recording this the day after Memorial Day. I've been working in my garden for three days straight. I was tired and I should have said “No.” I should have said, “you know what mom, I really, really want to connect with you. I really want to hear about your trip. I'm really excited. I can't do it tonight. I'm tired tonight. I want to stay home with my husband and sit on the deck and talk with him.”

That's what I want to do. That's what I wanted to do. I didn't. You know, I let myself be talked into going over there. Like if I were to, my mom doesn't usually listen to my podcast, but I think if she were to hear this, I think she would be surprised and sad and feel badly that I hadn't listened to me, to my own heart and set that boundary with her. I think that she would have wanted me to be honest with her and say that to her. And for whatever reason, I just didn't have a firm sense of where my line was at that moment in time when I said yes and I went over there and that's just a learning opportunity.

I've been practicing healthy boundaries actively and professionally, you know, for years. And I'm still just figuring those things out. So it doesn't mean like I failed or you know, let myself down. It's just a kind of a learning process of how can I have, you know, really healthy boundaries that prioritize my needs while staying connected to someone else. And I think you're, you've been talking a little bit about these hard lines in the sand and I think it's really important for people to know that, you know, that a healthy boundary is flexible, is compassionate, is kind and is caring and has the goal of keeping a relationship going those hard lines in the sand.

Really, really hard boundaries are just as unhealthy as really porous boundaries. Sometimes really firm hard line in the sand boundaries are necessary with someone who's consistently crossing our boundaries, who’s consistently pushing them. Sometimes we do need something that's much more firm and clear. Like cutting off for example. I know lots of our listeners have family members that they don't see anymore because there was too much boundary crossing.

That's a really hard boundary and I guarantee that the listeners who have done that don't always feel 100% good about that and wish it could have been different. But they had to to protect themselves. But I bet they wish they could have had more healthy flexible boundaries with someone so that they could stay in a relationship because that's what the boundary ultimately is, right? Is that what you, how you see the purpose of a boundary?

Melissa: Yes, absolutely. It's just protecting yourself and knowing yourself so you can show up in the relationship in the best possible way, right? And when you don't have boundaries, I did not realize I had so much pent up resentment. I'll just stay with my husband. You know, it was showing up and it was impacting our relationship.

So that's why, you know, I think they're just huge and when you start working on these things, you will, it's a byproduct of when you know yourself really well and you're able to found these are like an act of self love.
Laura: And compassion. Yeah.
Melissa: And compassion. And so, it could completely transform everything, every other relationship around you when you really clear on what those are. And I think what you said earlier about knowing yourself. It’s knowing your values.

Knowing what your values are. And then saying, “okay, well where my values being knocked up against.” Right? Really taking the time to examine that. And you know kind of being very self aware around that process of like, you know, “What is this making me feel? And what can I do about it?”

Laura: Yeah. Absolutely. I want to skip back to the resentment piece of it. I think you hit on something that is so important especially when it comes to boundaries. So if we are not self aware and haven't gone through this process of figuring out what is important to us, what matters to us, what our values are, and started figuring out how to set those boundaries, then we let people cross them. And oftentimes that happens kind of like under the surface, the other person doesn't always even know that it's happening. And then resentment builds, right?

So like when I first went over to my mom's last night, there was resentment bubbling under the surface. I was annoyed that I was there. I didn't want to be there. It was like impacting our interactions and I like I gave myself a little talking to in the moment. I was like you know what Laura, you're responsible for this. You didn't set the boundary. She didn't even know that there was this possibility of resentment brewing. She had no clue. She was completely unaware that all of this was happening within me. This was my lack of boundary, was what was creating the resentment, not her doing anything. It was my responsibility. If I didn't want to go there, it was my responsibility to deliver a boundary with kindness and compassion and not do it and to say no, that was my responsibility.

And so that resentment that was bubbling up that I was feeling towards my mom had no actual place there. Like it was completely unfair and I was putting a burden on our relationship that didn't need to be there and wouldn't have been had I set the boundary that was true and authentic for me. We really can get in our own way of having meaningful, authentic relationships. True, authentic connections.

When we have porous boundaries, you know? Okay, so then if people are realizing this, that there's resentment sprinkled in their relationships, that they are not setting their boundaries that they need, that they're not standing up for themselves, like, and showing up for themselves and the relationships in the way that they want to.

It seems to me like you're saying the very first step of learning how to set healthy boundaries is figuring out what they are by diving into.
Melissa: Absolutely.
Laura: Can you walk us through that process a little bit? So that the listeners can really start doing like I really like it when there's almost like journal prompts in…

Melissa: Oh man I should have brought some journal prompts.

Laura: They're already there. You already said them. You know, what's important to me? What are my values? You already said them. So are there other ones that we can be asking ourselves?

Melissa: Yeah, I mean I think categorizing if I like a lot of structure actually myself and so really asking your questions, yourself questions around your physical, your emotional, your spiritual, all of these different areas, right? Like what, what is okay with me and what is not okay with me is a great place to start. Maybe in each of these categories.

Sometimes we just don't stop and think about what is ok with me and what is not okay with me. We just sort of inherently have a feeling, right? But we don't necessarily know where that feeling came from because we maybe never sat down and taking the time to examine what is okay and what is not okay with me.

Laura: Yeah. And I really like how you broke it down into kind of sections like emotional boundaries. Physical boundaries. What was the other one that you?

Melissa: Spiritual boundaries.

Laura: Spiritual boundaries. Yeah, I also think too, that there's this place where we have to be really aware of what is ours to control and what is not ours to control. So, like I can set a boundary for how I want to be treated. But I cannot control how someone's gonna react to that boundary. That is not in my wheelhouse.

Melissa: That's the other thing. Actually, Laura, I mean, finding out that I was trying to control so many situations.

Laura: Yeah, right?

Melissa: But I was never going to be able to control. I'm never going to be able to control you know, the other person's thoughts, feelings, or actions and we know this, right? We so know this. We so know but yet it's still like and we just fall into the trap. I just think it's very easy to fall into the trap of thinking. And when you let that control piece go, oh my goodness. It is just so free. Like all I have to worry about is myself and what is and isn't okay with me and that's it. And then, I get to decide based on the other person's behavior.

You know, whether I will allow that. You know, whether or not that's a deal breaker for me, as you mentioned earlier about, you know, sometimes we have people who are reading a book recently, I think terry cole in her book all some boundary destroyers. And it's unfortunate, you know. But sometimes relationships just have to end because even all the boundaries in the world we put in place, some people are just not going to be willing to accept those. And that's their choice, right? That has nothing to do with us.

Laura: Yeah. And so you're tapping into some of the boundaries that we set with ourselves too on what we're willing to take on situating what someone else's stuff and what's our stuff and really setting firm boundaries for our self, that we are not going to let someone else's poor boundaries or someone else's stuff impact us. I think it is so important, those boundaries that we set with ourselves, that we are going to not let someone else change us.

You know, so my mother in law is a lovely person, wonderful, has so many strength for some reason. She does get under my skin. And sometimes when I'm around her, it is very hard to be myself. Because there's this part of me that just this, like, 13 year old, like, “you can't tell me what to do.”

Part of me just wants to push back, and I have to be really kind and compassionate with myself in those moments, and at the same time, that boundary has to be with me, with my inner teenager. You know, my mother-in-law does not get to dictate how I show up in this world.

My mother-in-law does not, you know, whatever energy she brings into the house, and it's not intentional, it's just this dynamic that's there, it's just there. There's acceptance there that can't control it. It's there. My only thing I can control is my reaction to it.

And that's a boundary too. You were mentioning before that giving up that control is very freeing and it's also incredibly empowering. When we start giving up our power to someone else, and hold those healthy boundaries, it can feel very empowering. Have you experienced that too?

Melissa: Oh yeah, definitely. It's what you said earlier, just taking that responsibility just for myself, right? And only having to worry about myself and just really focusing in on that and just letting go. It's like but the, it's just like the self respect I guess, you know, just giving myself permission to be okay with saying what I want and leaving it at that, right? And just being able to leave it at that really, because for so long that I struggled with.

Okay yes, I said my boundary, but then I would give her things where “ooh, should I take it back?” You know? It's you know, sort of backtrack on that, you know, I guess I'm thinking of just like that dance of learning how to set it right, learning how to set that boundary at the beginning.

Laura: So I feel like we've been kind of talking about boundaries in the theoretical sense, can we get really practical? So like what does it figure it out our values, where the lines are, what's important, what matters to us, what the deal breakers are, then how do we go about actually implementing and setting those boundaries with the people we love? What does that sound like?

Melissa: Yeah, I think being assertive is really, really important. So what's really clear, the difference between, you know, how we're going to implement the boundary. So in the past, I'll give you an example. My husband is a pack rat. He just loves to cover every single surface of our house. And so in the past, you know, pre-boundary setting me would have been like, “you need to clean up this clutter, it's an absolute disaster. I can't function like this.”
Whereas, that's a very reactive state versus being assertive and using an “I” statement like “I need, you know, the house, this space to be clutter free,” can't be the entire house and our house would have to compromise. But I need these spaces to be clutter free. You know, it's really stating what you need first and then, when you make that really clear and giving them a chance to respond with what they are willing to do versus you know, getting into this situation where it's blaming, then let’s say making it all about what they're doing, not what you need.

Laura: That's taking responsibility piece. So identifying what your actual needs are and the why’s too. So being able to say, you know, so when I walk into a room and every surface is cluttered, it really makes it hard for me to concentrate. It raises my anxiety level. I would really love to work with you to figure out some way we could have some of the surfaces be clear, you know? Or what is your thought on it without blame without shame. And really positioning as a, you’re recognizing like this is my stuff. Like I'm understanding that not everybody has the same reaction to a cluttered surface. This is my reaction to it. Here is the reaction. Can we work together to figure this out, right?

Melissa: Exactly. And the feelings are very important. As you said, Laura, like, because for so long I wasn't very comfortable sharing my feelings just because I thought my spouse wasn't going to care about what my feelings were. It was a story that I made up in my mind.

Laura: Yeah, I think we often have those stories from our childhood because it seemed as if our parents didn't care and then we're in a very familiar feeling, loving relationship and we make the conclusion that other people won't care too.

Melissa: Yeah. So I would come up with an approach of just do it, just get it done. And it was sort of like a petty tyrant, right? But when you really start opening up and having conversations about why, why it matters to you, and makes you, can make a tremendous difference, I think. And then the second thing I'll say is just, you know, is so important, learning how to say no when you don't want to do something many of us just say yes out of habit.

Laura: Or to avoid a conflict or…

Melissa: Or to avoid a conflict.

Laura:Or avoid disappointing someone.

Melissa: Or to look good, you know? Yes, I'll bake the brownies for the PTA and you know, I have zero time to do that. So it really is okay to say no. And I'm always practicing saying no without an explanation. That's too wise. No.

Laura: What does that sound like that? Like that pinged a little bit of anxiety in me. I can't. There's not a word for that like, but it totally did. It was like you guys can't see me, but I keep making the same thing. But what does no without an explanation sound like? This is groundbreaking.

Melissa: You know, “Thank you for thinking of me. Unfortunately, I will not be able to do X, Y, Z.” Or just “No, I can't make it.” Simple as that. It is like in the beginning and sometimes, you know via text message, I find myself like going into the explanation and I'm like…..

Laura: Delete. Delete. Delete.

Melissa: Yes, yes. It’s okay. And I've got, I've got a friend who does a really great job of just modeling that too. Or she'll just say “thanks for thinking of me, maybe next time,” you know, or “that won't work for me.” I don't use that one as often. That one doesn't feel.

Laura: It's uncomfortable for you.

Melissa: Yeah, that one doesn't feel as comfortable for me. But there are plenty of ways to say no that I've even read. Of course they're not coming top of mind. It doesn't have to be like “no, period,” if that doesn't feel right to you. But sometimes it can't just be “no, period,” right?

Laura: Yeah. I do like the sandwiching approach that you were modeling. The sandwich, you sandwich the “No” with two positives.
Thank you so much for thinking of me.
That's not going to work out this time.
Feel free to circle back.

You know, or…

You know, I do want to support your effort, this is the way I'm available to support.

You know this or you know, or thanks so much for reaching out. I would love to spend more time with you.

I'm not available this weekend.

I look forward to catching up. Are you available to do X, Y and Z, that's within your boundary? So I like sandwiching a lot.

Melissa: Yes, so I had the opportunity to help my son out with some boundary setting recently.

Laura: Ooh I love that.

Melissa: Oh my goodness. It was like, “oh man, I really want to jump in and just save you here.” But I know that it's not the right thing to do. But he had a friend that kept stopping by unannounced and it really wasn't someone who he wanted to play with and he was getting very angry. And I was like, well we did some role playing and it was like I gave him a couple of different options and he's such a sweet kid. He's like, you know, I don't want to like say, you know, I'll play later because I probably don't want to play later.

You know, like we had a lot of back and forth around that. And so he was able to practice and he was able to nip it in the bud and then this is, this is someone he goes to school with as well. But he was even uncomfortable with the situation that happened at school and he let the little boy know, the friend know. But he went until the teacher, like when he couldn't handle it himself. It was such a proud mom moment to see him be able to really stand in what was comfortable for him because you see it on our kids, right? Where because they don't have that emotional regulation. He was just seething in anger every time this kid showed up. But not really wanting to say anything initially.

Laura: Because it's a tricky thing. This is the thing like we teach our kids from a very young age to not be exclusive right to include, include, include everybody is your friend. And it's really not teaching the best boundaries, right, when they're little. And so then, they get to be older and they know they're not supposed to not be friends with everybody.

We have personal preferences. There are people that just we don't jive with, that we don't want to spend time with and that's okay. So I mean part, like part of me wants parents be teaching kids this all along to check in with your internal compass. Is this a person you enjoy spending time with? And then, how do we set that boundary if they're not in a kind and loving way? You know, in a way that is respectful. Can I ask you like what was the final like way that your son delivered this boundary that you ended up role playing? Do you remember what the final… you wanted to use?

Melissa: I let him do it himself. So I think he, I think he chose to say, hey man, that's, I think he wanted to play baseball with him quite a bit. “I really just don't feel like it today.” I think was one of them he used and I think that he also… I did see it takes some time. It was a couple of drop drop and so I think he tried a couple of them. I think he said let's just play at school was one of them. And so I mean they were all very kind. You know, they weren't like eventually in the beginning that they weren't always kind of, you know, like just coming over here.

Laura: It's a skill like, like you're saying at the very beginning, it's a skill that needs to be practiced. You know, it's funny like as a kid, my mom was always willing to be kind of the bad guy and help me set boundaries by setting them for me. And I always really appreciated that as a kid who had a hard time hurting other people's feelings, who was nervous to stand up for myself in certain circumstances. For example, like I've always needed to go to bed early even as a teenager, I was like “nine o'clock lights out” and I always had friends who wanted to stay up and talk on the phone and I just, I couldn't manage to set that boundary myself.

And so my mom, like we would have a signal and she would yell, “Laura, get off the phone,” you know. And I think it's lovely to have someone who has your back, who you can depend on to help you with those things. But I also do wish she had coached me more in like what you did with your son and how to confidently set that boundary for yourself. I do think that that would have made boundary setting in my, you know, late teens and early college twenties, that would have made things a lot easier. I think you're setting yourself up for a lot of success, there's a balance that needs to be there, right?

Melissa: Absolutely. But that's the goal, right? The absolute goal is just to help him in situations because there's going to be a lot of situations coming down the line where, you know, we're not there.

Laura: Yeah, and he needs those skills. So these are low stakes moment where you're there to support him so that he can have those skills in high stakes moments, like when it's the choice to get into the car with a friend who's been drinking for example, like you want him to have healthy boundaries there, like, “no man, let's call an Uber,” you know? You want him to be able to confidently set those boundaries.

Melissa: Yes, absolutely. Oh my goodness, someone cringing thing about the teenage years,

Laura: They're coming for all of us. We need to lay the foundation now, like it's good stuff, you know? I think like, I really am glad that we circled into this conversation with our kids too, because this is part of, you know, part of what we believe here is that kids learn through modeling. So if we've been consistently setting healthy boundaries in front of our kids for ourselves, their whole lives, they will have information and resources about boundaries and then once they start getting into more and more situations, we can coach them and support them in figuring it out.

I think that balance though is really key. Like they need to know we’re there. Like, for example, like when my girls are at a party, like I want them to know, like I will be the bad guy for them. Like I will be the, you know, like that they can be like, “oh my mom, she's such a make believe.” Like that is fine with me, you know, if that's what they need. I have a feeling, I have one very, like, very good boundary setting daughter. My older one. I don't think that she's going to need that so much. I think she's going to be very confident in delivering her boundaries, but my other one might need a little bit more support.

Melissa: Yeah, but I think that I've heard you talk about this before, just the generational impact, right? You know, I learned boundaries in my thirties and you know, they don't, they don't have to go through so much of their life without having these skills. To me, that's just everything.

Laura: It's everything. Yeah, it's absolutely, it's…So these boundaries are good for us, but they're good for our kids and they're good for our entire lineage, right? So that future generations, it's beautiful work. Thank you Melissa so much for this conversation about boundaries. I feel like this was really helpful and I hope that it was good for you too.

Melissa: Oh yes. Thank you for having me. I've been having your reflections back on some of this is really helpful for me as well. So just a great conversation. I so appreciate the opportunity to be here.

Laura: Absolutely! Well, thank you for coming. I want to make sure that everybody knows where to find you. Do you want to drop your socials every, all the links of course will be in the show notes. But sometimes listeners like to hear out loud where to find people.

Melissa: Yeah. So I hang out mostly on Facebook and my um you can find me under Melissa Salmeron Coaching and there's a link to my group, which is where I like to have a lot of conversations and that sort of safe space with moms. And I also have a website, it's melissasalmeron.com. And yes, if you don't know how to spell it…
Laura: I will put that in the show notes.

Melissa: But yeah, this are the places to find me.

Laura: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and experiences and your stories. It was really lovely to get to meet you and talk with you.

Melissa: Thank you, Laura.

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. 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.

Alright, 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!

March 15, 2022

Episode 109: Challenging Behaviors Re-Imagined with Dr. Mona Delahooke

March 15, 2022/ Laura Froyen

I am so excited for today's episode on The Balanced Parent Podcast because our guest is one of my favorite authors. She's got a great book that you may already have read: Beyond Behaviors: Using Brain Science and Compassion to Understand and Solve Children’s Behavioral Challenges. Plus a brand new book we are going to be discussing that will radically change the way you approach your child's challenging behaviors! Her work has transformed the lives of so many children and families, including my own, and I am so excited to share what I have learned from her with you!

I know learning to understand our kid's challenging behaviors can be really difficult as there's so much for us to uncover. And so for this episode, we will be figuring out how to see beyond our kids' challenging behaviors and really dig deep and understand what's going on for them, the underlying reasons for why they are the way they are, and how to support them more fully. To help us, Dr. Mona Delahooke has joined me in this conversation. She is a licensed clinical psychologist with more than thirty years of experience caring for children and their families. She is a senior faculty member of the Profectum Foundation and a member of the American Psychological Association. She is a frequent speaker, trainer, and consultant to parents, organizations, schools, and public agencies.

Here is an summary of our conversation:

The importance of looking beyond our children’s behaviors
Difference between stress behavior and intentional misbehavior (This is IT!)
The importance of knowing our child's nervous system
Co-regulation: Why is it important? And how to do it?
Advice on raising resilient kiddos

To get more resources, follow Dr. Delahooke on social media and visit her website.

Instagram: @monadelahooke

Twitter: @monadelahooke

Facebook Page: Mona Delahooke, Phd

Website: monadelahooke.com

Dr. Mona's new book BRAIN-BODY PARENTING: How to Stop Managing Behavior and Start Raising Joyful, Resilient Kids is on-sale today!

GRAB A COPY 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.

Laura: Hello everybody, this is Dr. Laura Froyen and on this episode of The Balanced Parent podcast, we are going to be figuring out how to see beyond our kids' challenging behaviors and figure out what's really going on for them and how to help them and to guide us in. This conversation is one of my favorite writers. Her name is Dr. Mona Delahooke. She's got a great book Beyond Behaviors and she's got a new book coming out called Brain-Body Parenting that is going to change the way we see our children and see ourselves and see our role as parents. So Mona, thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm so excited to talk to you.

Mona: Oh, I am equally as excited Laura. I'm just thrilled to be here so much to talk about.

Laura: Oh, there is so much to talk about. Right before we were hitting the record, I mentioned to Mona that this book was the next one that I was going to ask my husband to read because we've got a kiddo in our lives who can be quite reactive, you can have kind of some big challenging behaviors seemingly out of the blue. And I know that this book will help him understand her in a way that I do because of my background and training, but he doesn't have that background and training.

And I think that, that's one thing one of that is so important about your book is that most of us don't have this kind of basic knowledge of our nervous systems and what's going on kind of under the surface, not just for kids, but for ourselves too. I just so appreciate that you bring that to this book in a way that parents can actually learn and then see visually happening in their kids lives with their kids.

Mona: Thank you so much for that affirmation because it's kind of the lens that I wish I would have had looking back on myself as a young mother who struggled so much and who couldn't find anybody to tell me that there was different lens other than pathology in myself or my child or my own dark thoughts that I wasn't a good enough parent, you know, and why am I losing it? So, thank you for that. It's a great joy for me to talk about it in this end of my life where I've got grown children and I've seen clients in my office for three decades now I can speak with confidence and I'm so grateful if this can help one parent at a time, feel more compassion for themselves, then my day is good.

Laura: Oh! What a mission to have. Right? Hmm, that's good stuff. Okay, so you hit on something there that I just want to pull out because I do think that when parents are dealing with struggles with their child, when their child is behaving in a way that they think might be somewhat developmentally appropriate, but also seems kind of extreme and that they don't really see other kids doing and we go to seek help for it often times either the kid gets blamed.

There's something wrong with the kid or we get blamed that there's something wrong with how we've been doing things. We don't have enough limits or boundaries, we’re pushovers, we’re permissive or we’re, you know, too strict, too harsh for those folks who are in that place, who are trying to figure out like what do I do with these kids? What do I do with myself? What would you say to them?

Mona: Yeah. Well, the first thing I would say to them is be prepared to get a lot of noise from the world about what's going on. You know, and it's well intentioned noise. I'm not saying that pediatricians and teachers and even those in our own field of psychology, Laura, aren't well intentioned, they are. But the training just really hasn't been updated. The lens by which we view behavioral challenges, has not been updated in the last Say 50-75 years. It's so true and that's because system change takes a long time.

But also the decade of the brain was not that long ago. So with compassion for the human beings who are trying to do the research, it hasn't translated for parents. And so parents suffer a lot. We suffer when I say we, you know, I had a child who had developmental differences and regulatory issues. And the only framework that I was given were like the DSM Diagnosis situation, like it could be X. Y or Z.

Which as you know, is very limited. And the demons in my head saying, you know, oh, my own dark childhood, maybe he's catching up with my children or genetics. All these things that I was taught in graduate school, right? But my story has a coda, it has a really wonderful piece to it and that was that about 30 years ago I had a colleague who was in the same position but she wanted to go into neuroscience studying neuroscience and she had twins who were struggling. And she contacted this neuroscientist named Dr. Stephen Porges who was actually doing research on the nervous system on the brain and body.

So I was introduced to a lens shift very early in my career and that changed my life over the years. Of course it took me quite a while to integrate it, to study it and to practice it to make sure I was able to say with confidence that there is a new way to view behavioral challenges other than through the lens of pathology or through the lens of self blame and that's basically what beyond behaviors was about.

A new lens that blends compassion with brain science so that you have the evidence that you need to say, oh wow, it's not because I'm a bad parent or I'm inconsistent in my discipline or I have to do a better sticker chart. It's about two nervous systems trying really hard to stay safe to survive and to make it through the day.

Laura: Yeah, I really love that. I love your emphasis that there's two nervous systems that play. I think so often as parents, we’re, are given the message that we really just need to focus on the child's nervous system but ours plays a big role in it too. So, okay, let me ask you a question then.

So when we think about kind of looking beyond children's behaviors or coming to understand that not all behaviors that a child is kind of engaging in, particularly the ones that we classify as challenging or misbehaving are actually willful because I think that that's something that trips parents up a lot. Parents think, well, I know he can do this without having a tantrum. I know that she can, you know, she knows not to hit her sibling. So she must be choosing to do. So she must be choosing these bad behaviors. What do you say to that?

Mona: That is brilliant. And I get it. We're thinking, wait a second. They just did they were able to do it an hour ago. What's with the program and now they're flipping out, throwing things at their sibling. And to be honest, if it doesn't piss you off as a parent, then, you know, you're in the minority because that would be like, oh my gosh, you just did that. I know you can do it try harder. I know you can do it, try harder. Come on. All right.

Laura: So what's really happening then?

Mona: Here's one way of looking at it. We're not distinguishing between top down and bottom or body of behaviors and a little way of an easy way of thinking about that is that top down behaviors are all mediated by a child's effort and thinking about it. In other words, I'm choosing to slap my sibling right now and you're actually thinking about it through your brain. But not all behaviors are mediated. Not all behaviors are top down our culture doesn't know that yet. We really think of all behaviors as being a choice.

So there's something called the autonomic nervous system which is basically our brain and body connection we think of as a neural platform, a brain body based platform that launches behaviors. Sometimes in children oftentimes in toddlers. But even if sometimes as adults, we have behaviors launched their protective subconsciously to our bodies, but end up being very challenging. And for our children, we have to remember that the thresholds for our ability to control our behaviors float throughout the day and that is why your child may be able to comply with the task one hour and the next hour they can't because their platform has shifted towards a deficit and they are unable at that moment to control their behaviors.

Laura: And so, okay, so then how does a parent know when that's happening when the child's kind of platform has shifted when their capacity has narrowed to the point where they can't handle something that they could handle before?

Mona: That's the huge question and it's not always easy to distinguish. Let me just say that in our field the research, you know, some of the older research said that there are signatures on the face, for example, that you can tell what a child is feeling by looking at their facial expression. But actually that research has is being challenged very strongly by the work of neuroscience, some neuroscientists in affective neuroscience and how emotions are constructed. But let me just say that the way I found that's the most useful is that we look like clusters of markers, what we call physiological markers on your child's face and body.

And that way you'll know if the child's physiology is producing a shaky platform, what does that mean? For example, your child may have different ways of moving their body if they are throwing, kicking, hitting, screaming, foaming at the mouth if they're crying. If their voices really strained and whiny and loud and controlled. Those are some signs of a signature autonomic distress or of what we call the fight or flight response. Like the, I call it the red pathway. Is the child or am I in the red? Is there a rapid heart rate? Sometimes you can put your hand gently and maybe if the child looks you, if they're a little one on their chest or in their in their back and you can feel that heart rate just like racing.

That's one sign. We look at clusters, not just one because a child could have a racing heart because they're playing and having fun, right? And they're excited. But we look for signs of distress and what I call the red pathway and in the book and Beyond Behaviors. And in my new book, Brain-Body Parenting. I lay out all of those lists of things that we look for. So you can actually tabulate in your child if they're calm in their nervous system. If we could, if they're in the green, what we call it, the green pathway, meaning their body is common, alert, then we might say, okay, this child is being a scientist.

They're trying to test this limit and their physiology is supporting that. I go one way with my parenting, right? That's certainly happens as we all know because children are scientists there have to discover the limits of their own authority. That's fine. But if a child is out of control of their physiology, we go another way. And as I know, you know, because I've listened to some of your podcasts, compassion can lead the way of those directions. We can always be empathic and kind not that it's easy, we can tell ourselves like Ross Greene says, children do well if they can. I do believe that parents do well when they can. We just sometimes we can't.

Laura: Oh my gosh, I love parents so much. I have so much compassion for them for us. You know, for yes, you said something there that I just want to pull out that I feel like not very many people can say. You said they might be on the green pathway, you know, and testing the limits of their own, you know, autonomy and you said and that's fine. And I just want to like highlight because this lens shift is important.

Being able to see like this limit testing is not about defiance, it's not about disobedience, it's not about authority, it's not about them disrespecting you, it's about a biological developmental drive to figure out their world and like and when we can have a like and that's fine attitude about it, it releases it so much. I'm so glad you tease that out.

Mona: I'm so glad you tease that out because for some parents that could sound like almost trivializing it and let me say, yeah, the reason I said and that's fine is that I've seen it work out. I've worked with, you know now probably thousands of families either virtually or in person and then you see these testing behaviors and while they're happening in the moment, especially thinking about teenagers, like I'm thinking as a mom when I'm like, and that's fine. Yeah. How did I feel when my child, you know, snuck in a phone to school when cell phones were not allowed right?

And I get called at the moment and did not feel fine, but I can tell you now that I've gone through teenager hood with three children that these behaviors that humans do to test out their authority starting in toddlerhood thank goodness they have them because if they didn't they would never leave us and as hard as it seems or as sad as it seems when you have little children for your children to be independent and go to college if they want to or live on their own. The reason these behaviors are there is that they can survive on their own one day. So this parenting journey is one heck of an emotional trip. But when you see your child doing some of these behaviors that your neighbors or maybe even your own parents might be like oh my gosh what's happening?

Laura: They need a time out.

Mona: Yeah maybe you're not disciplining enough or if a teacher or an IEPT. Maybe again well intentioned lee says perhaps you're inconsistent with your discipline at home. You can tell yourself a different story that behaviors are adaptive and protective, we just have to understand them better.

Laura: Okay and so I feel like this is something that is really important to tease out and and then I want to ask about older kids. So when we say that behaviors are adaptive and protective and when we say that you know when some kids are having really challenging times there on this kind of red pathway in the fight or flight system, tell us a little bit more about how some of these challenging behaviors that we perceive as being challenging, hitting, kicking, spitting, you know, screaming, yelling, how we can start shifting to see them as adaptive and protective because I think that that's a key piece.

Mona: Yeah. And certainly I'm not talking about them being adaptive in the conventional sense, so functionally in our world, in a little preschool, when a child is hitting, that's not adaptive. That's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is from a neurodevelopmental perspective that they are adaptive to that child's nervous system. What does that mean? It means that through a process called your assumption that I talk about the new book and brain body parenting as our safety detector, it's our safety system detector kind of like a fire alarm for internally.

That's subconscious when that goes off inside a person's body. Whether whether it's a child or an adult, the body is instructed to move in ways, get the child back to feeling calm in human beings through our evolutionary history, that's through movement through movement, can be running away, could be hitting, shoving, it could be kind of hitting your or slapping your mama's face if you're a toddler and oh my gosh, that feels so horrible to us as parents were like, oh my gosh, you know, that's not good.

But what we think about is that this is protective to the child's nervous system and the child doesn't know it, the child's invisible to this, especially toddlers, right? They have their less mediated by their ability to explain themselves and more mediated by this nervous system adaptation to stress, which involves movement. So if you see your child fly off the handle, you can also think their nervous system has shifted into the red path. We get into the red, what I call the red the fight or flight response without their permission. And what we need to do is adaptive lee help them get back to green.

And how do we do that is through our relationship in human beings. We lend our nervous system to another nervous system, our child and we co regulate through our interactions and there are certain ways there's certain keys to unlock for each child. I don't believe in scripts because one script might work great for one kid and but you're often your tone of voice and that sends the child further into the red. So we develop our interactions to customize to each of our child's nervous systems and that is the basically the magic bullet is we customize our interactions to every child's nervous system.

Laura: I love this so much. I get asked for scripts all the time from parents. Yeah, we totally get it. We all want to know what to say. Please just tell us the right thing to do and say so we can be okay, totally understand those things. But the important, I think the piece that you really are highlighting here is that you and I don't know your kid is the one who knows you're the one who has your child and you are the ones with the true capacity for knowing.

Mona: That is absolutely right. And until our child is developmentally able to tell us right. Being able to talk about your internal world and let your parents know what you need is a huge social emotional acquisition. It's a milestone in the process. And so many it takes years and years.

Laura: So many of us are still working on that. Right.

Mona: Right. And that's why sometimes reasoning falls short. But the idea about co regulation affect our emotions through our relationship, basically the research is showing us that our emotional tone is more important than the words we say. And that's where parental self-care and balance and I love again your podcast because it's the balanced parent, a balanced parent. And one that is a little bit mindful. You don't have to be a yogi.

You don't have to do anything that's not you. But if you can observe yourself again, I think about like the stories I tell in brain body parenting or on myself. I was living in an out of body experience. There were times where I forgot to drink water during the day and I was you know like so disconnected from my body because I was so busy parenting and working that when we can self observe, why am I hungry? Am I thirsty? Where are my emotions right now? Am I red or green? Then we can be that co regulator. Research shows us the best thing for a nervous system in distress is the another nervous system who loves them and who is not in distress?

Laura: Mm hmm. Yeah.

Mona: And it's, it might sound like a lot of pressure but we have to take pressure off ourselves because there's so much redundancy in our system so we can ruptures are going to happen more often than repairs.

Laura: I love that part of your book. Listeners, I hope you do pick up her book, but there's an entire section that kind of describes the importance of rupture and repair and the reality that there will be more ruptures than kind of getting it spot on perfect. And that's okay.

Mona: And that's okay. We are not our children, our children from the moment they're born, they have a different brain and body than we do. And so we'll never know what it's like to live inside of them because we're not them. We love them beyond measure. And we love them more than we've probably ever loved anything in the world.

That's why I think in the scheme of things, repairs are so magical and we don't have to be perfect parents. We don't have to get it right. We can't get it right because we're not them. But what we can do is be keen observers of them and ourselves. And I hope my work will help move the ball forward away from generic parenting advice or what is good for a generic child to helping us figure out what's good for us and what's good for our own beautiful child, one child at a time.

Laura: Oh yes, I love that so much. I so agree with the observation thing. So in my community we spend the entire month of January which we're recording this at that point right now, where my community and I spend an entire month just learning how to be keen observers of our children in their play, a very deep dive into learning how to be non judgmental, present mindful observers, which is so important to what you're teaching in your book. It's a really important skill to build as a parent so that you can figure out what's going on.

Is my kid in the red zone or you know, in the red pathway, I love that you talk about that so much and being a keen observer of ourselves of our own internal states. I want to ask about older kids because that is something that as of my child moves into middle childhood, I have a nine year old, there is so much less out there for older kids. So I do want to move there, but I think before I do, I want to talk a little bit more about co regulation.

I do feel like it is a buzzword that we're hearing a lot and we're hearing about it in marital contexts and with friendships. And with with parenting and I kind of just, I wanna like no, like okay, so as a parent, what does co regulation literally look like in practice with my child when they're just regulated. So let's say just the common scenario. Kiddo is we set a limit there, it's put them onto the red pathway and they're hitting us. What does co-regulation look like in that moment?

Mona: It's the best question because I agree with you, co regulation is getting thrown around so much kind of like a buzzword and everyone's assuming. I think that I don't know what people are assuming about what it means, but some parents I've talked to think that it means just being nice or you know, and there's so many definitions but to me the definition of co regulation is it goes back down to very young developmental stage which continues throughout the lifespan and that is our role as a parent.

Is to help co regulate the physiological state of our child, of our baby, that's our sole role. What does that mean? It means paying attention, feeding the baby when they're hungry, attending to the crying baby or toddler giving attunement which is noticing. So if I had to say the steps of co regulation one the first step in the example you gave the child is just like freaking out. You know…

Laura: We've all been there.

Mona: We've all been there, so two letters, one word, so stop and observe, okay stop for a second and observe two things observe yourself in that moment because if you're nervous system has just gone red with your child, that's valuable information. Have so much compassion like okay stop and observe. I'm in the red, the child's in the red. We got a problem here. And so that little problem is for the moment, what can I do for myself in the moment?

We do take care of our nervous system first because we are the tool were the tool. Our ability to see a human in distress. If a child has just hit a sibling and you know they're a loving child, you know that that was a stress behavior and not an intentional purposeful bad behavior. We need to keep the child safe and then help them get back to green. So keeping the child safe would be making sure your values are projected. No no sweetheart. We, in our family, we do not hit our siblings and oh my sweetheart, how are we going to feel better right now? So we stop and observe and then we attend to that child's nervous system. If we're able to, if we're not we take a few breaths if you have a partner close by a co partner, you know, grab them.

Laura: In my community. We have little code words for when you need to tag and tag out for sure.

Mona: Love it. You love it. Tag somebody. Many parents are single parents or you are not with a person right? Then, you're really needing to pull for that self compassion and find a moment to get back to green because if you're in the red yourself, you likely will not be as effective for your child as if you're in control. So stop and observe and then check in with that child depending on where they are at. If they're up regulated. If their body is needing to move, then we really try to provide that some ability to move their body.

Not a good idea to force a child to sit down. If they're in the red, we really would like to allow the child to move about the room. Of course making sure they're safe, but letting them know that we see their distress. So if we're yelling and screaming at the child and saying that's really bad to hate your sibling. What I want parents to know is that that child as soon as they get back to green is going to feel remorseful and they're not gonna know why they hit their sibling if it truly was a stress reaction and we see this very often in neurodivergent children and in toddlers who are, you know, don't have the capacity yet.

And frankly, you know, a lot of humans, especially through this pandemic are on their knees with their regulations. We have to love and have compassion for those humans who can't control their behaviors right now because they're suffering too.

Laura: Yes. Oh my goodness, they are. You know, something that I do for myself when I'm find myself in the red zone, when my kids are in the red zone, I have a little thing that I say to myself that helps me. So I put my hand on my heart and I say, here I am, I am here. I am safe. I am loved just a few times to just kind of get myself back into my body.

I think that our you know, if that if we're in the red zone, then all our bodies really want to know is am I safe? Right? That's really what they want to know. Yes. You know, and for our kids to and what's beautiful. I think about that too, is that that's good modeling for them. You know.

Mona: It's beautiful or it's so beautiful. This recognition, the stopping and observing so that we can ground ourselves and not beat ourselves up. You know, because sometimes when your child does that, an automatic thought is I've taught them better than that or we might project in the future and think, what kind of person are you going to be in the world?

I have to train you not to be aggressive because then you'll do really bad at school and, you know, our minds go tell a story, of course they do what our child's behavior means. And we can start telling ourselves a news story, starting with ourselves.

Laura: And staying, you know, I found the stories that we tell ourselves are either way in the past, our way in the future. And by observing, we pull ourselves into the present moment where reality is actually happening versus, you know, those stories, you know?

Mona: Yeah, we totally do. And I'm hoping that this knowledge of the different types of behaviors that stress behaviors are qualitatively different than than purposeful misbehaviors that we can start to be more granular in our parenting techniques and use more specific techniques that are better for each issue and child and for each child's nervous system for each town. So it's about customizing our interactions and that is so exciting. That's really fun.

And yeah, it's also hard. I wanted to follow up on another thing that you said about this month for your community and we are not really trained, I think as parents and even as again as as professionals to just follow our child's lead and spend some time marveling at how they play because let's remind ourselves from birth to really, you know, it could be up to 10, I don't know, I played as a 10 year old, but let's say for sure, birth to seven or eight plays the natural language and if we can watch our children play and play with them that oh my goodness.

The research on that is again, it's in the book, You've probably read it, the research on play is through the roof. It's the natural best way to boost our relationship with our child, but also to boost our child's cognitive development, their social development, their emotional development. It's insanely powerful to learn how to play. And most of us don't know how or aren't comfortable with it and that's okay, there's support for that five minutes a day, it can be five minutes, it doesn't have to be all day and then, you know.

Laura: Oh, of course, no. You know, around here we love play and we recognize that parents don't always have the time or energy for it. But yes, five minutes. And, and when, you know how to play with a child, it's much easier than we think it has to be. I think we all think it has to be like we're like being really active and have art using our imaginations and our mental capacity and really when we step back and let the child lead, which is what really they need to have happen anyway.

You know, if they if we think about it from a therapy perspective, if we're sitting down with a therapist and the therapist is doing all the talking, we're not getting the best bang for our buck on that section, Right? And so when it comes to a play session with kids, if we're doing all the playing the kid is not getting the benefit right?

Mona: Absolutely. If you do it in a way that is actually fun for you and there is a way to learn how to do it. It's like you're also having fun both of you but we don't have to do the heavy lifting. In fact we don't recommend that parents don't do the heavy lifting bench following the child's lead. So anyway.

Laura: Absolutely. I had a podcast episode coming out on in January on that exact topic on stop doing the heavy lifting of the play, okay. We talked about this kind of scenario, we envisioned a young child completely on the Redpath hitting and what to do how to engage in co regulation. And I'd like to kind of bring this out to older kids. I think older kids are really struggling in this pandemic and they're not getting a lot of attention.

The parents of nine to kind of 18 year olds that I work with right now, Their kids are we're seeing a huge right like increase in anxiety, depression and ADHD. diagnoses right now and these are you know, manifesting in some big behavioral responses and these kids are bigger now. They're not three, they're not easy to kind of you know scoop up and kind of push put into a place that's safe to keep them safe.

They're big and so what are some of the advice or guidance you have for these parents of these big kids who are struggling. Like it's struggling. They're struggling like legitimately struggling right now.

Mona: Definitely struggling because they're legitimately suffering. So, let's think about just for a moment, like a context for us to understand what our older children that are, you know, think about 9-18, that age range of child is wanting developmentally are launching into the world of peers and launching into their own world.

This is the third year, beginning the third year of the pandemic. That ability to launch into the world has been thwarted. My idea is one of the reasons we're seeing increase such huge increases in depression and anxiety in that demographic is because developmentally they have been put in kind of these artificial cages.

Laura: I so agree, right? It's like, you know, it's like when your kids are learning to walk when they're babies or learning to crawl. Like my kids, both of them went through sleep regressions because they literally couldn't sleep because they would spend all night up on their hands and knees rocking and trying to crawl. You know, it's a developmental imperative for them. It is a development or biologically driven need. And I also agree that these older kids are being caged. They're being confined, confined.

Mona: So let's draw the analogy of the human nervous system and what is the nervous system do when it is sensing threat because it can't move. The symbolism of movement is like our children, we have been telling our children now that you can't move, you can't go back to high school, you're, you know, many of them didn't go back to college? Middle school is a huge movement away from parents and it's that first tentative one, right? And it's scary, but it's exhilarating at the same time.

So I think the upswing is definitely, it's a deal and it wasn't easy before that because teenager hood and seeking independence biologically for humans isn't necessarily easy for the parents. It's easier for the teenagers, but it's much less easy for these dear parents who adore our children and who have kind of maybe hovered over them more than our parents hovered over us or previous generations because of the way the world has progressed and we do have a situation. So the basic idea I think would be first of all co regulation happens throughout the lifespan.

So what does that mean? I think from a nonverbal and verbal perspective of our whole bodies, if a child is upset, suffering, struggling to try to withhold judgment and use our presence if we can just again stop and observe and say things like or slow down our bodies, be able to tolerate hearing that, that your child is suffering. And I know as a sensitive mom that was really hard for me because I wanted to fix it right away and I don't like to see my kids suffering, but to be able to just be there and say, this sucks, this is so hard honey.

I see that you are upset right now and I'm just wondering, is there anything I can do to that would support you at this moment or would you like just have some time to yourself? I think our presence is we can't underestimate the power of presence. And I think I remember in my life when when my teenagers were struggling, one of the most powerful things I did was kind of hang out in their room or hang out where they were. But without saying anything I was like, hey, I've got some papers here, I'm grading or I've got, you know, I'm working on something.

Can I just hang it, can I just sit here with you? Hang out and I think your music school and I just want to be there and sometimes they look at me like “what, that's weird”. But sooner or later sometimes it took days, Sometimes it took hours. We just like, hey, can I talk to you for a sec now? Taking locks, maybe going to grab a coffee or making coffee and tea, whatever. You know, presence really helps. And so that's one piece.

The other piece is to just try to be creative I think to help them help support, they're finding ways to be with their friends creative ways and to have a big band with maybe for the amount of time they want to spend online with friends because that is again, it's their natural instinct is really teenagers want to spend less time with us and more time with their peer group and that's what we call phyllo genetically adaptive, you know? So I wish I had really some, some ants of other answers. What have you found or is helping most with your kids with your older child?

Laura: Well, so I mean, I think as a therapist, we are well trained in cultivating silence and trusting our partner in the silence to come in and into the silent space and so learning how to tolerate a little bit of silent, creating that vacuum then that they will then kind of fill in trusting that they like, that's something that just naturally happen. So I love that you, I do that too. I will, if my daughter is in her room, I will say, hey honey, I want to do a little knitting.

Do you mind if I come in, you know, nick next to you while you're reading and then sooner or later we're chatting, we keep a journal together. I find that sometimes there are things that are hard to talk about and I know that this is helpful for lots of older kids too, who can't say the things that they want to say to their parents. And so, you know, for those of us who have younger kids are still kind of into it. If you start the practice now when they're younger than you'll have that journal to kind of fall back on when if things get rough.

I found with some of my older clients to that texting between parents and children often gets a little bit more of the nitty gritty and the honesty and two, there's something about that platform and using the notes app, having a shared notes because sometimes teens will be less likely to to text something because it feels very like in the moment like, oh my mom's gonna see this and then she's gonna come busting into my room but using a shared no app where you can almost like the journaling but digital,

Mona: You know that it's kind of a little bit like a google doc that you can update.

Laura: Exactly yeah, so those are nice little things to build connection, but I think that there's also room especially with their older children and in your book, I think you call it kind of this top down educating, starting to teach them about their brain and about what's going on for them and about why things maybe are harder, you know right now developmentally and kind of culturally sociologically because of what we're going through. Do you have any recommendations for how a parent can kind of start those conversations of teaching their children a little bit about their brain and about the different pathways.

Mona: Totally yes, it starts with modeling and I think we can model when they're younger. I encourage parents to model our internal process and the way we do this is that we actually start with modeling self awareness to our bodies? Because that's where emotions ultimately come from is from our physical bodies, not from our brain remember that our brain gets fed operating instructions from our bodies. And so, so when you're with your child, you know, something happens, like say you say you're driving and you're with your child in the car and all of a sudden a large fire truck and police cars zoom by and you didn't really see them. It was scary, like, oh my goodness, that was so loud.

Oh my goodness, wow! Or oh, my heart's beating a little fast. I'm glad they passed. And let me make sure there's no more cars coming. Take a breath. Okay, now, let me continue driving. I mean, so just like allowing children to see that we notice shifts in our body is really powerful. So modeling that and I have examples of happy. Yeah, for different age ranges. So modeling is is sets the table this future ability to self observe. And then the idea that we can also teach children about the fact that we have these nervous systems. And I don't usually use that word.

I, you know, I use the wording of our bodies give us information and sometimes it gives us information that makes us feel like we have to get away from something like that. We get maybe get really angry or agitated or want to hit something and there are ways that we can begin to notice that and then ask the child, have you ever felt that way? If you ever felt like so pissed off that your sibling or so upset and then have the child come up with a word for that? What might, what word do you have for that?

You can even let them know, what would you if you have a word for that? You know, when I get a blow up or a child might have and say, well, I feel like a firecracker, like, oh my goodness, firecracker, Yes. Tell me if you remember the last time you were felt that way your body was feeling that way. We don't just have, you know, one pathway. We have multiple pathways in the book. The newest, the latest research is also that in addition to those three main pathways, you know, you have your calm alert, which is the ventral vagal pathway, you have the fight or flight, you know, the red pathway and then the the the shutdown, the dorsal vagal would be the, what we call the blue pathway that research is showing that there are like overlapping pathways. So it's very complex.

But for for kids, we don't want to over simplified to the point that we're saying this is exactly what the science is, but more of here's how we can observe our body reacting to different things from our inside of our gut and from the outside world. Sometimes we have stomach aches right? And then or sometimes we have a rapid heart rate that sometimes we will hear or think about something that makes us feel upset and then other times there will be like we'll hear loud noises. Is that a gunshot? Is that a, you know, a car backfiring depending on our situations, we humans have different ways that our bodies and brains manage stress and helping our children come up with their own ways of understanding how their body is managing stress is what I talked about, I think in chapters seven and eight and nine in the book and I the only caveat is that I really think it's important to not teach too soon.

So for preschoolers for example, if we're, if we're busy teaching them about their brains and bodies, it kind of cuts into co regulation, which is really non verbal and not teaching, it's more relational. So the embodied experience of it starts first and then as our children age and coming to you know later childhood and teenager hood of course we can talk about our nervous systems.

Laura: Yeah, I like that you're mentioning that that it's the younger kids need to experience it, they need the modeling, they need the presence, they need experience of it and as kids get older and have more access to language and executive functioning, then they can start talking about it a little bit more that it's it's meta cognition is what we're talking about and that's something that is a very advanced skill.

Mona: Worry, it involves concept formation. Yes, that's an advanced skill so yeah, I don't know if you're trying to teach too soon, that's okay just you know that you know if it's it's not really taking taking hold in your child, there's a developmental reason why.

Laura: Okay we've talked longer than I expected to. I'm so sorry Dr. Delahooke, I did want to just you know because we're the balanced parent here and we do you have an entire chapter devoted to kind of taking care of your own self and how important that is. Do you have any just like little things? You know I, I know parents are sick of hearing about self care and were just sick of it but what are some like some things that we can do to take really good care of our nervous systems that are easy though, don't add more to the to do list.

Mona: Well I've started talking about micro moments of self care. Micro moments because some of the blog posts that I wrote about self care, like no one read because I think it was like oh no who has, I'm barely surviving. How can I even think about self care right?

Laura: I think we have to radically change the way we even think about self care at some point, you know?

Mona: But I'm not even sure that's the right word.

Laura: It isn't.

Mona: No it isn't but I think but in the moment let's say we've hit on it already is that awareness mixed with compassion. If we have awareness that's okay, that's kind of more generic mindfulness. But to me one of the best mental health studies I've done and deep dives I've done is with Dr. Krsiten Neff. I went to two week long workshops with her and Chris Germer and it was about and when you couple mindful awareness of the present moment with self compassion it's pretty powerful. It actually reduces your heart rate.

So some of the things I might do would be especially if I'm by myself is literally put my hand on my heart right and take a mindful moment and just like say to myself this is a difficult moment human beings struggle and I'm a human being and may I be gentle, may I be kind and sometimes I shorten that to may I be gentle to myself gentleness because for some reason us mommies and and many daddies are really hard on ourselves.

Laura: We are. We're so committed to being gentle parents and at the same time we enact on ourselves all the things that were done to us. You know we don't make that internal shift to be you know as we're cultivating a wise compassionate outer parent. I I hope that we are also working to cultivate a wise compassion in our parents too.

Mona: So in the moment, I do. I do have some mantras that I use and I guess some of the things that I do for myself now, I mean I do have the benefit of having not doing actual care for children. However I do have a super busy life is trying to get outside or either look up at the sky and I love looking at clouds because I envision the problems in my life as the clouds and me as the sky, like the greater perspective of the sky isn't going to take me down you know, but the clouds are gonna pass so I can feel like those are clouds and my children's problems and my issues are clouds that do pass are suffering shifts and changes. So getting outside for a few minutes a day grounding your feet taking some steps. It's really helped my mental health and it's great for for exercise to, to walk a little bit during the day. And some of the things that you can do.

Laura: Oh and there's so much research to back up the benefits of being in nature, to our nervous is so much.

Mona: So much. And if you're not, if you live in a city you can even find nature in a you know something growing out of the sidewalk, right little sprout of a weed coming out of the sidewalk can be beautiful because it's green and it's it's alive and sometimes we feel so alone if we reach out to other humans and also feel that sense of shared humanity and hopefully it will help.

Laura: Absolutely Mona. Thank you so much for this time and for your wisdom and for your work. I know that you have already changed the lives of thousands and thousands of parents. I hope that everybody listening gets your book. I'm planning to host a book club and my membership so we can go through it and really dig in and figure out how it all applies to our own kids.

Mona: That's so wonderful. Thank you.

Laura: Oh, it will be wonderful. I want you to know that we are also so grateful for your contribution to this world because it's it continues and like, you know, we went through our trainings at different points in the trajectory of kind of this field and I learned everything I know about this aspect of things after grad school. You know, it's it was just wasn't part, you know, all of my training was behavioralist and because you have to unlearn a lot.

Mona: We have to unlearn a lot and it's a pleasure to be with and amongst and talking to colleagues like you who are shifting the paradigm and helping support parents feel more compassion for themselves and for their kids. And so thank you again for having me on, I'm so grateful.

Laura: Oh my gosh, well, me too, thank you so much.

Laura: Oh my gosh, how awesome was that interview with Dr. Delahooke, I love her work. I think that she sees children and parents through this beautiful, compassionate and science based lens and I still appreciate the invitation to look beyond our kids misbehavior, challenging behaviors and start seeing them clearly now. I hope that you will all grab her book, brain body parenting. I of course don't benefit from that in any way. I just think it's a really great book. Um it has a real lot of really important information in it. Um but books like this can be a lot to navigate on your own sometimes.

And so I just wanted to invite you in if you're not already in my balancing new membership community, but we are going to be doing a book club with this book where we are having regular meetings to discuss and to figure out what does this mean for our individual children and how do I apply this in my family in a way that works for us.

And so if you are wanting to read this book once and support, just know that our book club is going to be starting for this. The book comes out on March 16, so we'll give you a little bit of time to get the book and I think we'll probably start the book club in April. So we'd love to have you join our book club in the Balancing U membership community. Alright, that's it for this episode. See you soon.

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

March 08, 2022

Episode 108: How to change your brain patterns to achieve your goals with Adele Spraggon

March 08, 2022/ Laura Froyen

I know that you are doing your best to improve on your parenting and I'm right there with you, doing the work myself and cheering you on! But when it comes to actually implementing all that you have learned up until now, it can be really difficult. And so, for this week's episode, we are going to learn how we can change our brain patterns to achieve our goals in parenting and in our lives.

To help me in this conversation, I have brought in, Adele Spraggon, a behavioral change expert and award-winning author. After decades of feeling stuck in patterns of procrastination, avoidance and quitting, all of which kept her from living her life to its greatest potential, Adele set out on a journey of discovery and learning. The result is the creation of her proprietary 4 Step Re-patterning Technique, which she delivers through a member portal called the Pattern Maker Hub. Today, She now works with thousands of people to help them attain high levels of happiness, peace of mind, prosperity, goal achievement, and life fulfillment.

Here is an overview of our discussion:

What awareness looks like when we realize we are reacting out of habit or old patterns
The root cause of procrastination or overwhelm
Brain pattern changes we can start implementing today to achieve our goals

To get more resources, follow Adele on social media and visit her website.

Instagram: @adelespraggon
Facebook Page: Adele Spraggon Repatternist
Website: www.adelespraggon.com

Grab a copy of her book Shift: 4 Steps to Personal Empowerment HERE.

Laura: Hello everybody, this is Dr. Laura Froyen. And on this episode of the Balanced Parent Podcast, we are going to be learning and diving deep into how to change our brain patterns to achieve our goals and to have this conversation. I am going to bring in a behavioral change expert, Adele Spraggon, and we're going to have this conversation and we're going to apply it to things in our own personal lives, changes that we want to be making in our own behavior, but also the changes that we want to be making as parents. I'm really excited for this conversation.

I know lots of, you know exactly what you're supposed to be doing and your parenting and then when it comes to actually implementing it and actually having the interactions that you want to be having with your kids that can be really hard and we're going to dive deep into why that's so hard and how to actually make lasting change. So Adele, thank you so much for having this conversation with me. I'm so excited for it. Will you tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do?

Adele: Oh, I'd love to Laura. So as you said, my name is Adele spray gun and I'm a behavioral change expert. Yes. I'm also, you could say, a thought leader. So you know, I've been in the personal development industry Laura for about 30 years now and in the beginning initially like everybody, I was using typical mindset techniques in order to apply what I was learning in personal development and I was teaching in this way too.

I was teaching mindset, I was teaching positive thinking and you know application and commitment and goal setting and all the typical things that we learned. But after about 10 years I started to realize something. I started to realize that my participants were not getting the results that they were hoping to get. So even though they knew what to do, they had a very difficult time applying what it is that they knew to do and I started to wonder why.

So I enrolled in university and I got to say Laura, I was exactly the same. I I had this terrible pattern of quitting and procrastinating and no matter how much mindset tools I kept applying, I couldn't break free of these patterns. So I applied to University and I went and I got my Masters in Humanities because I wanted to study how does this human brain think. And so I studied it from all different angles and I started to realize, oh hang on. Our brain runs on patterns. It doesn't run on thoughts or beliefs or anything like that, it is wired in a particular way.

And those patterns we adopt, I should say when were little, you know, and we're learning different things and we face different situations and each situation we face, our brain builds a pattern for that situation and then that's what we continue to use going on in life. And so I started to realize, oh, okay, the reason that my participants can't apply this mindset t tools and get where they want to go is because we're actually working on the wrong thing. We're starting with our thoughts and we need to be starting with the pattern itself.

Once we can change the pattern and upgrade it, then it's easy to take those actions right? So I did a deep dive into my own mind and I had a lot of background doing that because I was also a meditation facilitator, so I could observe my own mind very well and I noticed something surprising that is now only recently been backed up by neuroscience and that is that the action I was taking was actually occurring a fraction of a second before my conscious mind caught up to the fact that I was taking that action.

So I would say something, right, do something, be something, behave in a particular way. And then my mind would say, oh yeah, that is because and add the story on why I was doing that right. Once I uncovered that I went okay, now I know exactly what we need to do. And so I devised this method which is a four step method which dives deep into the pattern and changes the pattern and starts in the subconscious rather than in the conscious mind. And so yeah, just to sum up, that's what I do.

Laura: I love talking about this, this is something that actually talked about on the show before, that these patterns, these subconscious patterns are laid down in childhood and over time and because our brain loves efficiency, our brain doesn't like things to be, you know, cumbersome, It really wants to move fast, they rely on those patterns, the brain really relies on that a lot and so it can be really hard to become aware of our patterns, right?

So like where is the first step for someone who's just starting out and is in that place where they're realizing like they're reacting out of habit and out of a pattern and they're starting to become aware of it. What does that awareness look like?

Adele: Yeah. So you know, I'll start with an example because that might be the easiest way to understand how to start upgrading the patterns. I worked with one couple and they were really struggling to raise their Children and a lot of the conflicts between them were all around parenting issues. She herself was a coach and she very much wanted to be in support of the kids and be on their side.

And he was very much the disciplinarian who wanted everything to run efficiently. And so they batted heads often often often. And one of the things that really, really frustrated her was he, I couldn't stand at being late, I mean, so this is how bad it got dinner would be ready and he would go to the bottom of the stairs, never walk up the stairs, always stand at the bottom of the stairs screaming up the stairs, dinner's ready.

And if the kids didn't bolt out of their rooms, he would start screaming again and yelling again and yelling again until they got down there and this used to drive her crazy and even though he would promise he would say things like, yeah, yeah, I'll never do that again. And yeah, I understand. I know, I know I'm being a bad parent and all of this stuff, he couldn't stop this particular pattern of doing this. So I suggested to him, I said, okay, we're not gonna dig back into your childhood to figure out why you're doing this. That that's inefficient, okay, we're gonna start right from now and what it is that you're doing. I said to him, tell me how you feel when you think about those kids not coming down those stairs.

And he noticed his emotion was one of complete frustration, rage, anger. And I asked him, okay, so where is that in the body? Where are you feeling that? And he said, oh my gosh, like I, you know, I just want to clench my fists and just burst. And I said perfect, that is a pattern. So a pattern. What we need to know about patterns is that they're not just mental, their physical, emotional and mental at the same time, remember I said that my actions were coming before my conscious mind caught up. That's because my physical emotion is actually arising first within the pattern and then the mind is along for a ride, it comes in after that emotional reaction.

Laura: It's making sense of what we're doing with our bodies and

Adele: Yes

Laura: Yeah

Adele: Exactly, exactly. So when he was able to see that he could see, oh yeah, like I'm really not reacting to the kids, I'm reacting to my internal pattern. We started to flip that switch. So he used to think that that was the situation that was giving rise to those feelings, those reactions. What we did was we flip the switch and we said okay, the pattern is giving rise to the reaction. It's a rising internally, not based on what's going on outside.

And that had him able to start the process of removing that pattern because that's the first step that we need to do. It's not what should you do? That's the wrong question. What are you doing? And does it work? And if it doesn't work, we're just going to remove it, we're gonna get rid of that first before we even start to put anything else in the box.

Laura: Okay. Yes, now, so I really love this idea of situating the source of the pattern or the source of the problem within ourselves. It can be really hard and vulnerable to do, to recognize that this is coming from within us. I think that when our kids or our partners trigger us, it's much more comfortable to say there's something wrong with them. They're making me feel this way and they're triggering me.

But whenever we are triggered, the work is within us, right? So I love that you're really helping someone switch very compassionately to viewing them this issue without blame, shame, judgment or guilt, but just kind of very fact based this pattern starts in here, it starts inside, you know, regardless of what's happening outside, it's the locus of control where we have power to change is within us, right?

Adele: Yes, exactly. And one of the key things that I see is occurring in today's the world, I'm just going to say overarching world is we tend to judge a lot through, Is that the right thing to do? And the problem with that is it takes it out of context in the right situation that father screaming at his kids is absolutely correct, get out of the road right, you need to take that level of democratic, I'm taking charge, you know, do it now, right, That's absolutely correct. And when we take things out of context and we start to see is that right? Or is that wrong? It gets all screwed up in our heads, because now we gotta figure out what's the right thing to do instead of just asking, is this working, doesn't he? And there's no blame or shame and is this working? Is this actually accomplishing what I'm trying to accomplish?

Which in his case, when I asked him that he said no, because what I really want is to have my kids want to come down to the table and enjoy having dinner with me and want to be with me and he said, and frankly they're hiding in their rooms, like I can't even get them out of their rooms most of the time and when they do come, they come begrudgingly and they're rebelling and they're angry and he said no it's not working. So I said okay great, there's no blame or shame. Like you said right, there's nothing wrong here. Our job is just to remove what isn't working and you're right, that's such a gentle way of doing things.

Laura: okay. Yes. Absolutely. And I think that we're applying this to a parenting moment and absolutely one of the very first questions I asked parents when they start talking about kind of what they're doing and wanting to make changes is you know, is it working for you? Because if it's working there's not much, you know, I don't know that you need to change it, Like does it feel right?

Does it feel in alignment with what you want, how you want to be? Is it actually getting you the results you want? If the answer is yes, don't change it. And this comes up a lot for sleep with parents, parents who are worried about co-sleeping and sleeping with their you know bed sharing with their kids and they think they shouldn't and really it's all up down too if it's working. So I love this, how does this apply to other aspects of our life. So we've been talking a lot about parenting but what about you know things like you know being able to stay on top of what's going on in your home? Other things like, cause feelings of overwhelm and stress.

Adele: Yeah, perfect. I mean that it applies everywhere actually, because everything that we do is the result of a brain pattern, there isn't a single thing/action that we take that doesn't have an underlying brain pattern that is taking that action. And so if we're procrastinating, if we're overwhelmed, if we're being ineffective at work, I was quitting, I kept quitting business after business after business. I couldn't understand why and why is the wrong question, because the mind will always create a story of why, and it will always seem reasonable to the mind, we gotta stop asking why, it's just what am I doing and doesn't work? Right?

So, you know, in my pattern of quitting, I was consistently initially asking why and I always had an excuse, oh yeah, it was this business partner or oh yeah, the the idea wasn't good and over and over again, but when I stopped asking why and just started to ask does this work? I went, no, this isn't working for me at all. So let's address the underlying pattern, but I do need to go back to that question, Does it work? Because that is actually a very difficult question sometimes to answer. So let's ask it differently, Does it work for everybody involved? Does it work for my spouse? Doesn't work for the kids, it doesn't work for me, because he could easily have said, Yeah, it works.

The kids come down when he started to ask, does that work for the kids? He went, no. Is that working for my spouse? No, like we're constantly fighting. So because this conflict, it's not working somewhere, it's not working now. The beautiful thing about re patterning is we don't need to know the solution. That's going to be really tricky for your audience to understand. Okay, so let me back up, if you think of your brain as an iceberg, and at the bottom of the water are all your brain patterns, and at the top of the water is everything.

You do everything you feel everything you think flows out of one of those patterns or pattern gives rise to an action or behavior or belief. If we start looking for the solution, can you see how we just keep dipping into the same pattern box over and over again? Does that make sense? Okay, so if the solution was in your brain patterning as it is right now, you wouldn't have the problem and that's really important to understand. It's like the problem, The solution isn't in there.

So we keep scrambling around inside this pattern box trying to pull out the solution and we just keep pulling out problem after problem after problem because we don't have it. So we need to let go of the thought, how do I fix this? That's the wrong question. How do I remove this problem?

Laura: Okay, great. So you're reminding me of an analogy that I use for working with behaviorally challenging kids, You're the “how do I fix this?” Is it like treating a symptom? You're asking people to dig under and find the root cause and cure the underlying illness rather than trying to treat a symptom.

Adele: Exactly, exactly. Now, the beautiful thing is I'm going to give you something really amazing about this brain of ours, in the unconscious is stored everything that you have ever seen, heard, tasted smelled and touched in your lifetime. And you know this because if you come across the smell, did you ever notice that it takes you back to an incident in your childhood and you go, I forgot all about that. Okay. Or you know, so we're constantly in here, it's stored everything, but we need to get it into patterns and until we get it into patterns, we will not have the solution.

Now, why can't we tap into that vast warehouse within and pull out the solution? Right now? It's because, like you say, the brain is a little bit lazy and once it's created one of those neural pathways, it much prefers that we just stick with that. Right, okay, that'll do. So we need to first tease apart that neural pathway. As soon as we do though, your brain will not have an open pathway, just void of anything, just floating around the brain, it's immediately going to snap into a new channel and where is it going to go when it snaps into a news channel, it's gonna dip into that vast warehouse.

Hopefully I haven't lost you. But the point here is that we do have the solutions inside of us. We have a lot more, every human being on this planet who has reached adulthood has massive quantities of available knowledge, which is not yet in the form of knowledge trapped inside this vast warehouse yet, which is not plugged in. And as soon as we upgrade those patterns though, all of that past experience becomes fodder or grist for the mill, right, and it's from there that your brain is going to start creating solutions and so you know, let's go back to, to my couple and him yelling at the bottom of the stairs.

As soon as he upgraded that pattern, his brain teased apart that channel, snapped it into a new channel and boom, he suddenly became aware of why he was yelling at the bottom of the stairs. He had this flashback to his mother, constantly telling him you're late, you're late, you're late. And this anxiety that would build in him every time that clock was ticking and that's when he was reacting to but it was hidden from him until he upgraded the pattern.

So the first thing the new pattern showed him was why he was doing what he was doing, which was amazingly revealing for him. But the second thing that allowed him to do is it allowed him to totally relax because the new channel in the brain was not reacting in the same way it was now responding to the actual situation he was in which is the kids in the room.

Laura: Right? So I just want to even highlight, pull out a little bit there for in this scenario with your client, for our listeners when we're being yelled at as little children, our nervous systems are activated. It's a stressful situation that we're in when we're being yelled at by a caregiver. You know, you're late, you're late. That, you know, and we don't even have to have a specific memory of that happening.

But he was thrown into the same physiological state when so what you're saying is that there is this pattern around lateness that his body would get into. He's thrown into that physiological state that he didn't even necessarily understand or remember at the time for years he would be thrown into the state of stress of that kind of stress response system. His nervous system being activated in that same way.

That's what a trigger is. Right? That's what it is. That's what it does. It's a situation and external situation triggers within us of familiar physiological state that we then go and make sense of and try to deal with in some oftentimes in unhealthy ways. And so then what does he do then? Like in that moment where, so he's realized this physiological state that I'm experiencing right now in the moment with my kids when they're not coming to the dinner table has nothing to do with my kids and everything to do with just my body. Like what do you do next?

Adele: Yeah, great question. So let me put it this way, when you're in the situation, it's kind of a little bit too late because the information is already running but down that channel and it's hard to pull the train back, right? Okay, so what we do with repatterning is we don't wait for the situation. We imagine the kids not coming down for dinner and we notice what occurs in the body in that moment, inside our imagination. So now we're a little bit removed, were a little bit detached from the actual situation.

And that allows us to start removing that pattern in that place. So there's four steps to repatterning. The first step is just identify what is going on. What am I feeling? Where do I feel that in the body? And what am I thinking? As I think about that situation as I imagine myself in that situation. That's step one, identify. Step two is own it. Remember I said we're going to flip the switch, it's not actually happening out there, it's happening in you.

So we're just gonna flip that switch and own it as a pattern. The third step is to detachment, get into the body. Remember I said that the pattern is initiated in the body and the physical sensations that you're saying that physiological shift, it's occurring there. So we're not going to use this mind of ours at all. I like to say the conscious mind is the dumb cousin of the unconscious.

Okay, the subconscious. So let's get out of this thing because it's not really helping us. So we're going to use the body and with detachment, we're just going to observe that body as it does its thing as it that rage starts to build. We're just going to be very detached and just observe it. Now let me say something.

Laura: That's a beautiful use of mindfulness by the way, like...

Adele: Yes, non identified, you know, mindfulness. Beautiful.

Adele: Yes. Yes. Yes. And it's a state of surrender and surrender at the level of pattern is the most powerful thing. We can do surrender at the level of action behaviors, beliefs is giving up, Oh, I just can't do anything about this. I'm just going to throw in the white towel, right? But surrender. The level of pattern is something extremely powerful because it allows us to stop running that pattern and observed two different realities arising at the same time. The first reality is the reality of the pattern itself, That anger that they're late. They're disrespecting me, this is terrible. That's short, that's happening inside the brain that is a real reality and we don't make that wrong.

But the second reality is the reality of what's actually occurring in this current moment, which is nothing to do with the past and his mother and all of that stuff. It's it's the actual situation of based in this family, these kids, his relationship with his kids, his wife and that reality is hidden from the conscious mind, but available in the subconscious and when we surrender those two realities don't line up and the pattern just collapses and it's beautiful to watch because the person surprises themselves when they just don't react in the same way.

So he was just absolutely delighted the day that he just stopped yelling. He actually walked up the stairs, didn't even realize it because remember action is coming before thought walks up the stairs and knocked on the door, Dennis ready kids in this delightful voice and it shifted from that moment on and so yes, so that's step three, I got distracted and then step four is to then upgrade that pattern to create those new patterns that comes only after we've removed the existing ones.

Laura: Oh, it's beautiful. Okay, so listeners, you've had heard from lots of different guests teach lots of different ways to do this exact thing and there's lots of different terminology, but Adele you're getting really beautifully to your stripping away a lot of the jargon and really coming helping a parent come to understand that in the midst of a trigger, there's this, these two paths that are running in our brain, there's what we think is happening or what our body thinks is happening. The story that we're telling ourselves.

There's lots of different ways to talk about this, that people have heard that different experts use different jargon, you know, that there's this this interpretation, this story, there's this kind of parallel track and then there's reality of what's actually happening, and this is so applicable to almost all interactions that we have with whether it's with a partner, a child with your own parents, like we get caught up in these stories and these patterns and we just react out of habit becoming aware of, okay, so this is the what we think is happening or what our body thinks is happening, and then dropping into the present moment of what is actually happening, or my kids actually disrespecting me, you know, is my partner actually telling me that he doesn't care about me or love me, is my dad actually telling me that he thinks I'm incompetent, you know, is that actually what's happening right now, and most of the time it's not true.

Adele: And sometimes Laura it is true, but but again, we need to come back to our own patterns and not from a position to blame my shame, it's like, okay, what brought me here, what is allowing me to be disrespected, right? I mean, I have been in, in situations where yes, I have been in relationships where I was disrespected and when we just step back from, you know, I'm bad or there's something wrong with me and all of those things that we tend to throw on ourselves and instead just ask, okay, what patterns were running that got me here, right, and what do I need to remove in order to not react in this way in the future? That's super powerful because people transform some amazingly complicated and conflicted relationships by doing that by just owning Yeah, okay. I mean, I'm not enjoying the situation I'm in, but at least it's mine. At least I can own it there and that's powerful.

Laura: Yeah, absolutely. And then of course, just you know, the important caveat that that doesn't excuse abusive behavior.

Adele: Absolutely, yes, thank you for adding that.

Laura: But being able to step into empowered place so that you are able to respond rather than just react out of old habits. Yes, I know that most of the parents that I work with, that's what they want to be able to do in all of their relationships and in the relationship with themselves, they want to stop feeling like they are just reacting to what's happening to them and start feeling like they are more intentional and present that they are responsive in whatever situation that they are in, that there truly there and choosing for themselves, a response that is in alignment with what they truly believe about themselves and their family versus old patterns, old beliefs that were handed to them that weren't there choice.

Adele: Yes, absolutely. And, you know, one of the beautiful things about re-patterning is it also comes with this feeling of deep trust, as you're saying, the ability to trust yourself no, know in your heart that you are going to make the right choice for this situation. And that doesn't come from determining what that right action should be. Because that doesn't that takes it out of context, that takes it out of the actual situation. Everybody knows when they are repatterning, that they will respond ideally optimally, for the situation at hand.

How does that happen? Because past created patterns are actually responding to a different situation, a situation that occurred in the past. If we go back to my client, he was responding to his mother, he wasn't responding to the kids. And so that the situation with his mother kept actually overriding the situation that he was in today, when, you know how to upgrade those patterns though, you're actually responding in alignment with what's actually going on, what's actually happening in your situation.

And so, the peace of mind, the joy, the connection to what's actually going on is what the Buddhist masters have been calling enlightenment, and in a way that's the State, you know, Science today has said, our brains are wired for enlightened thought, right, dr Andrew Newberg, I don't know if you know him, but he has this great book called The Enlightened Brain and that's what he's he's uncovered through brain scanners, is our brain is actually wired to be in the moment.

We just have been educated to think that we've got to pull everything from the past and figure it all out. If we stop doing that, our brain will naturally align you. I mean, if you have the tools to do it, you need the proper techniques naturally align you with what's going on. And it's a beautiful space of pure trust, as you're saying.

Laura: Absolutely. And I think something else that a lot of parents that I speak to and interact with, I feel like they can't do this really powerful repatterning work because they don't have memories of their childhood.

They don't have active conscious memories of where those patterns came from, and I really appreciate a doll, you're bringing this method and so that we can hold it to the light and look at it for those families in particular who feel like they can't advance their parenting or their, you know, have healthy relationships because they don't remember where the patterns got started. I love that you're saying that you really don't need to I think in this example with the dad that we're we've been talking about. I don't even know that he would have needed to have have that memory resurfaced in order to do this powerful work. I see you shaking your head fingers.

Adele: Exactly. He did not. In fact, I always say insight is cheap. I know all about your childhood if you want, but I'll tell you most of the time your conscious mind is making it up anyway. So it doesn't really mean anything. I barely remembered any of my childhood until I started re patterning most of my childhood was blocked off for me. But like I said, it's stored in that there's a reason for that for most people remember their childhood.

Laura: There's a reason for that for most people remembering their childhood there's a reason.

Adele: Absolutely a lot of times it's trauma.

Laura: Your brain is so good at protecting you two. Right, right, good. I really believe in speaking love over our brains. Like our brains are just so beautiful, like, you know, good at protecting us, so good at serving us. We just have to know just how to harness them and put that put the brain to work for us. You know?

Adele: Absolutely. That this tool that we have in our head, it is truly remarkable.

Laura: It's magical. It is, it's beautiful.

Adele: Yeah, so I 100% agree with you. In fact, I always suggest don't go digging in the past trying to find the originating incident. Your brain would find something, but as I said, most of the time it just make something up and now, you know, okay, Laura, I'm going to say something and I hope I don't lose your listener notice how now you actually have two problems, you have the situation and your reaction today, and then you have the past situation that now needs to be corrected as well.

So now you're just adding another problem. Okay, so let's stop doing that. We're gonna stay right here now in this moment. I'm going to deal with it powerfully now in this moment. And if your mind remembers this, the originating situation is great, if it doesn't great, it makes no difference because you will be powerful in the moment.

Laura: I think that that's so important. I'm so glad that you said that because again, I know a lot of listeners are what if they do have memories, if they do have some understanding of where these patterns got started, of the trauma of their past, of really rough hard childhoods, they hang their growth and their progress on fixing or making up or forgiveness or some kind of mending of those old wounds.

They and they hang it and and again, like there, we've been talking a lot today about situating ourselves empowering ourselves and when we do that, when we make our future growth, our progress, our improvement dependent on someone else apologizing or recognizing or taking responsibility for what they did. We strip ourselves, I think of our power, I love what you're saying that that is unnecessary to go back there and get that whatever it is that we're seeking. I mean, it's fine to want, it makes sense to want it to desperately want it because at the end of the day, we all want our parents to love us unconditionally.

And it makes sense to want to go back and get that repaired. But sometimes we can't, sometimes it's unavailable and it's really important to separate those two things. You know, like yes, fine. That's something to think strive for and stuff. But don't hang your progress on it. Do you know what I don't I don't know. I feel like.

Adele: I oh, I totally get what you're saying and if I can use myself as an example, I used to wear my heart on my sleeve. I used to lead with it. It was like my coaches would be saying, Adele like go out there and be powerful and in my mind I would be thinking, no, you don't understand. You don't know what I've been through. You're asking too much for me. And at the time I so felt like that. I mean, I it was so much my reality.

And it was I think looking back reflecting back, I think it's because I was taught that I needed to fix that originating incident before I could go forward. And so I was consistently trying to work on the past rather than just looking into my future. And so, you know, part of the re patterning technique that I teach is it's okay. Like whatever you went through is in your vast warehouse and from there is where you're gonna get your power and I know that sometimes that is so painful, right? So painful.

But it is also the root of compassion and empathy and everything else that as human beings that brings us together. Because if we can if we have been through pain then we know pain and we know it whether it's in ourselves or in somebody else and it's from there that we can build those deep, deep connections when we know how to upgrade our brain patterns and stop allowing that past to affect us.

Laura: I so agree. And that's not to say that that's easy. Like it's not to say it can be incredibly hard and difficult and painful and take time to come to a place of acceptance that there's things in our past that are that we cannot change that will never be gone because it happens their reality. And at the same time, we don't have to be shackled to them. They don't have to drive our future.

Adele: They can actually be the source of a new future. If we know how to deal with it. If we are gentle with ourselves, if you never needed compassion, you don't know how to give compassion if you never needed to be heard, you never learn how to hear. And so yes, those pasts are painful, but they're also the source of everything that we care deeply about this world, which is love and connection and relationships.

Laura: Yeah, absolutely.

Adele: Like I said, you're gonna have to do a lot of it.

Laura: You're fine. Don't worry. It's okay. I mean, honestly, I I think sometimes it's good for people to hear that we don't always say things perfectly that there are hiccups and the times where we have to get our thoughts straight. So I think that that's okay. I don't mind modeling that for my audience. I think it's good for them to hear, you know, that we don't it's not always a picture perfect, perfectly delivered line, you know. Right. I've really enjoyed this conversation adult. Thank you for bringing your wisdom and experience and knowledge to our show to our community. I'm curious you have a book that teaches this is where folks can dive deeper too, right?

Adele: Yes.

Laura: And I'd love to learn from you more.

Adele: Absolutely. If anybody would like a free copy of my book, all I ask is that they pay for shipping. You can go to www.shift4steps That's the number four dot com. And there's a button there and there's also some free training on there too. If anybody wants to know more about repatterning and yeah, I'd love to send you an autographed copy and I'm here just to spread the word like there's a re patterning is so powerful and it brings so much peace and so much joy, I think that we all need it. So if you're, if you're a reader who wants a copy of my book, I would love to give it .

Laura: Awesome. Well thank you so much Adele. Thank you. I really, really appreciate it.

And if you're listening, grab a screen 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.

March 01, 2022

Episode 107: Supporting Yourself Through Hard Times with Tanisha of MedicalMomsofNICU

March 01, 2022/ Laura Froyen

For this week's episode on The Balanced Parent Podcast, we are going to talk about a topic that is a little bit different from what we have tackled before and is quite personal in my own parenting journey. Many of you know that while I was pregnant with my second daughter I got into a car accident that started me down a path that eventually lead me away from academia and into my work with you all. But something I rarely talk about is my first daughter's traumatic birth that resulted in a Neonatal Intensive Care stay. During both of these incredibly difficult moments I had to dig deep to figure out how to support myself and how to be fully present with my family. I struggled with my self worth, knowing what was right, and feeling like I was constantly failing. During both of these incredibly difficult moments I had to dig deep to figure out how to support myself and how to be fully present with my family.

It wasn't easy and at the time I felt incredibly alone.

I am speaking more about this experience TODAY in this online retreat, I'd love to have you join me!

I know now that my emotions and experience in response to these stressful situations were incredibly common and understandable and that I'm definitely not alone. And while you maybe haven't had these exact experiences or had a medically complex child, I know that there have likely been times, especially over these past two years, where things have felt very heavy and hard. And that's what I want to support you with in this week's episode with my guest Tanisha Burke-Wormley. She is a NICU mom of a medically complex child who supports moms all over the world as they move through the space of having to stay in Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) with their child. Her son, Jaleel, is a NICU and Kidney Warrior who she helps conquer Chronic Kidney Stage 5 everyday as a Stay-at-home Medical Mom. She also has a healthy daughter, Jameela, that she gave birth to at home in October 2020 during the Covid pandemic.

She will be helping us learn:

Ways to support NICU Moms and Special Needs Moms
Self-care during difficult times
Staying present with our children despite life's challenges

To get more support, follow Tanisha on social media and join her Facebook community. She is a grad student and donates much of her time to these causes, so supporting her by giving her a follow or spreading the word to moms you know who need support is hugely appreciated!

Instagram: @medicalmomsofnicu
Facebook Page: www.facebook.com/MedicalMomsofNICU
Facebook Group: Medical Moms of NICU Group

Laura: Hello everybody, this is Dr. Laura Froyen and today we're going to be talking about something that is a little bit different than what we've talked about before and is quite personal in my own parenting journey and to have this conversation and I've brought on a guest in a beautiful soul that I'm so excited to introduce you to, who supports moms all over this world as they move through spaces after having had a NICU stay with their little ones. So Tanisha Burke-Wormley, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to have you, can you tell us a little bit more about your story, who you are and how you support moms?

Tanisha: Yes, so thank you Dr. Laura for this opportunity. I appreciate you. I'm glad we were able to come together in Clubhouse, make this podcast happen. But for those who don't know me, Tanisha Burke-Wormley, I'm a proud NICU mom, especially mom to Chelios Jaleel. He's three now and he is a chronic kidney disease stage five warrior and marches Kidney Month for those who do not know.

So this is a blessing that I'm on this show, marches kidney month and national kidney month and he just received a kidney transplant on February 4th 2021 and now he's off dialysis. So our life has changed tremendously and we're just so thankful to God and based on his story, I was able to create a project, a professional project catered to NICU moms, but medical moms, because I found myself just having a lot of supplies, speedy tube supplies.

My son is a G2 baby and he's in Dallas is no longer on dialysis now, but he was on dialysis and then I had mass medication. So that's the reason why I came up with the medical moms of NICU mom and that community has grown tremendously and we're just so thankful in our own facebook is a private group for all of us connect and share our resources from our NICU experience.

Laura: Oh, Tanisha. Yeah. I think that's so amazing. You know, so my oldest daughter had a NICU stay. She had breathing difficulty use after birth and otherwise she was beautifully healthy. We were so fortunate. But the small NICU stay was so scary, so stressful, so traumatic. We had had an emergency c section. It was so hard and there was no support. I had nowhere to turn to. I was in grad school at the time.

My husband was too, it was so hard and I just wish I had had the support of a group of women who had been there. Who knew what it's like to not be able to room in with your baby to be floors away from your baby. And I had to go home with, I'm sure you did to, to go home without your baby. It's so hard. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about and how you got started? Cause I think you were in grad school to when you had your NICU experience. Will you tell me?

Tanisha: Yes. We both were strong for taking on grad school on top of the NICU stay. Like, let me tell you like I still have blown away. So congratulations to you dr lure for finishing your education. But I started out with my program when I was pregnant with Julia and everything looks smooth. 20 weeks. We did the anatomy skin.

And that's when things started to trickle out of control because they found that Jalil's kidneys were really massive out of the perimeter of normal. And what was happening was, you know, how you have amniotic fluid around the baby. Well, Jalil's flew was trapped into his kidneys and he had a block that caused damage to his kidneys and his lungs. And it was called lower urinary tract obstruction. And it's a rare, rare condition that some babies that are in the womb have and it can be terminal if not intervene.

And so we left from Arkansas. I thought to mention I'm from Arkansas, we left from Arkansas to go to Cincinnati Ohio for fetal care intervention. And I'm so full for Cincinnati Children's Hospital in this Samaritan Hospital because without their care and intervention, I know julie wouldn't have made it outside the womb alive. And so from there, I was still coordinating with my professors because they knew that this was an emergency situation and I was just letting them know. I really desire to finish this program. But right now my life is tumultuous, but the NICU stay not knowing when we're coming home.

And so they told me there's no deadlines, deadlines as you finish your project the end of the semester. Don't worry about the deadlines. And so that's how I was able to complete my degree while in the NICU. But I was pacing myself and really the reason why I did it because like, it was insane to do it because you're already stressed with the NICU, but it gave me an outlet because I love education. I've always been very passionate about education. I'm the first of my immediate family to earn my bachelor's and master's back to back.

So I really have a passion and it kept me from really focusing so much on the trauma Julia was going through and kind of put my attention elsewhere. And so that's the reason why I kept pushing forward.

Laura: Oh my gosh, wow. Well, congratulations. And pushing in that way and having, I think a purpose and a higher way of serving can be really helpful in those circumstances. I'm so glad you had a supportive advisors to who had your back and that's so wonderful.

Tanisha: I'm going to just withdraw completely and just picked it up later. But they knew that I was so close to finishing. They were like, no, we're going to keep you in the program. Just let us know updates on Jalil.

And so recently I was happy to let them know because they've been through this process with me since he was in my womb. I was like, you look at a kidney to look at a kid, you tell everybody in the kidney kidney. So they're like, overjoyed with us. So it's just been a blessing to share so great news with everyone that's been following him since he was In my womb at 20 weeks. And so.

Laura: Oh my God, Tanisia, I think you're highlighting something right here that is so crucial that we need support. We need support as moms, whether you've had a nick you stay or a traumatic birth or health challenges for yourself or for your kids, that is a universal truth that we are not meant to do this alone. And so I so admire that you're providing the support for, especially for these moms who have had specific challenges to face as they transition into motherhood. Can you speak a little bit what kind of support you've noticed that moms really need this time? And you know, statistically speaking, there's lots of people who are listening who have had these experiences and maybe didn't have a place to go. And so I'd love to know a little bit of, like if we know people who are in this space now how we can support them.

But also if we've been there perhaps in the past and we didn't have a chance to get the support that we needed what we can do now to kind of cope and recover because it's a lifelong process, I don't know, I still cry over my daughter's birth and NICU stay, sometimes it's eight, you know, so.

Tanisha: And then because the way I thought I was going to be okay, but I'm still healing. I didn't realize that I'm still in a place of healing from all that we've been through. But of course I would definitely say that my project was grad pacific and the reason why I was so grateful for the experience now that I look at it Jaleel’s journey, is that my professor and advisor? She was like, why don't you start?

Because I was in mass communications, that's my degree. You might want to do a project that's tailored twist NICU moms because you're in that road right now. And I know you're getting a lot of resources from the hospital. And so I was like, yes. So that's where the medical moms of NICU came about and really what I did was interview some of the moms that I connected to that had the same diagnosis as my son.

And I featured their story on Youtube and I was just doing questions Q. And A session of like what resources they bumped into and if their child didn't have the diagnosis as mine could, they briefly share what it was and how they could be a resource to another mom. And so I was just trying to connect us all together because I feel like if you can find someone who understands and you can reach out directly to them and get your answers quicker.

And so with that transpired to is a private group on facebook medical moms of NICU and I when I started that in 2019 doctor lawyer, I was just sending Nikki journals because that's not a NICU K leon George Eliot and she sells NICU mom diary journals. You can document little notes of your journal and your story because it's so, so much going on and sometimes we just need to let out how we're feeling. And so I started to collaborate with her to sponsor some moms to get that journal that she provides.

And then from there I started finding some other NICU moms with Children's books featuring there NICU experience and sending Children's books out to moms to kind of help them and their experience and inspire them. And then recently last year I went for a scholarship from the National Society of Leadership and Success and they blessed medical mom's NICU because of what we did small.

They bless us with $1000 responsive or moms. And so I told them all about mom care package. So it started to find some moms, different items that I knew they needed. Like for instance, you know when you're in the hospital didn't really give you like really good skin care products.

Laura: I've never had worse chapped lips than when I was in the NICU like, oh my gosh and all the hand washing my hands were so raw you have to do a full scrub like I want to put your baby.

Tanisha: Yeah. So I started to look around the company called brutti by roots and they make really oatmeal, Himalayas, seesaw scrubs and put that in the package along with the journal. Then we had some victoria's secret little smell goods and the tote and they gifted us a gift card because they saw what I was doing, victoria's secret.

I used to work there so I was just so happy that they were able to give us a little bit discount on those products and then I just put a little bit of love and they're just like letting them know like they have some essential oil where they can subscribe their body. So a lot of this stuff was just mind body and soul

Laura: You have loving on his mom's.

Tanisha: Loving on them because we pour so much in our NICU miracle that were depleted and we can't pour from an empty source.

Laura: No you cannot.

Tanisha: So that's what I really did. I was just pointing to and then another mom that I ran into on social media, her name's Charlotte and she has seven Children, seven and so she was like, I'm willing to give these mamas if they're willing to discount on my mommy meltdown session. So we had the mental aspect too. So I created like a self care package that was highlighting the mind body and soul healing that you desperately need when you're in a NICU experience just putting products to heal that area.

Laura: Oh my gosh, I love that, I don't know if you know this but there's research out there to that kids who've had nick, you stays tend to be more sensitive than other kids. More sensory sensitive and have more up and down emotions. And so that's something to that I like, you know, looking forward, I think that there needs to be a space for its wonderful. Of course they need support in the moment when they're in there.

But just having a community of like, okay, so now we're raising our babies, we're raising our babies who are different, have different needs, have different experiences, have different, you know, birth trauma trauma for us, but it's also trauma for them. NICU trauma is trauma for us. But for them to, I think it's so beautiful to have a space moms can stay connected and support each other through all those challenges that life with a baby who's needed more support is just as the truth of it.

Tanisha: Absolutely. And especially in this pandemic doctor, I know you imagine even with your work, a lot of the therapy because my son is delayed in ot speech physical therapy. We went to a facility before, Covid that was too hot. And so you're trying to learn how to do these therapy exercises virtually and do tele therapy.

Laura: With a three year old and oh, oh my gosh, so now you have to wear all those hats, right, We have to wear so many hats anyway. Oh yeah. Uh huh.

Tanisha: Yeah, it's like now everyone gets it because all the moms have to home school, you know, they're figuring it out. But it's just like you can find your community and I really, I just tell the NICU moms in my own community, like please please share whatever works for you.

Like there is no judgment if you decide to put your child in the developmental preschool while we're in the pandemic, I'm not judging you if you decide to do the virtual learning or the virtual telemedicine because your child is chronically ill or medically fragile. I'm not judging you but just show us the progress that they're making because I really want to shine light on the medical milestones because our Children have been through so much and it feels good to like feature little highlights of their story. I'm so glad that moms are doing that now because I didn't want it to be about just blue. I wanted two spotlights, The NICU miracles that have different journeys than his.

Laura: Okay, so I don't know if it's true for you, but I'm imagining for these moms who are getting to tell their story. I know storytelling for me is incredibly healing. Speaking to the story and so just the act of sharing a story I think can be healing and then hearing someone else's and you know, no matter your story is going to be different, but there will be pieces that resonate and here, I'll say that they too struggled with that. That that was hard to, can be so powerful.

Tanisha: Yes. Again, I found it to be very filling for all of us because before the pandemic, I was hosting zoom interviews and it was so saturated, right? Because we all have these stories and I was like one day I'm gonna get to a point where I can just do one on one interviews because I really went to spotlight everyone's story and really take a pause and really ask specific questions to their story so that when another mom comes in they can just go straight to that mom that's been through that journey.

And so I'm like in the process of rebranding medical models and make you because I really want the story to be really compelling and that's not brushed it so often. I don't know if you've seen this in your work Dr. Laura, but we tend to rush and said my son was in the nick use such in such days and he's been through all this living stuff and we don't really process it.

Laura: You're talking about something that's so common in the trauma world. We have almost like an elevator speech that we can talk about the details in a way that's almost cold in a self preservation sense because once we start to slow down and really connect to what we're saying. That's when the emotions come up, they well up within us and it's hard to stay composed. It's hard to stay, you know what we think we're supposed to look like when we're sharing our story.

But you know, so that elevator speech of course is crucial because people want to know and you have to have good boundaries with yourself. You have to keep be able to keep yourself safe, right? You have to be able to know like, okay, so I can be emotionally contained in this space, but it's also important to have a space where you can let those walls down a little bit. You can be a little softer and slower and more tender with yourself. That's where healing happens, processing it, you know?

Tanisha: And I've always been that way, like even before, you know, doing the work with the NICU Mom. I want to share the dark side that I was feeling of a journalist. I took pictures because I couldn't write what I was feeling.

But I did capture lots of videos and photos. So whoever is watching that's NICU Mom right now, that's loving your podcast, please. If you can just take pictures and videos. Because when you're in a place where you can process in journal is going to make it easier again in that moment and I'm just so thankful because I wasn't able to be present because so much was going on, it was like chaos.

Laura: You were in survival mode. Of course, you know, and it's also normal, you know, if you're on the other side of that now to have very few memories of it because when we're in trauma, when we're in survival mode, the parts of our brain that encode memories are turned off to protect us. You know, our brains are beautiful. And so like sometimes when I think back on it, it's very fuzzy and I'm so grateful that I took pictures.

We actually have a little book that sometimes my eight year old still wants to sit down and look through. She sits on my lap and she sometimes has very primal crying sessions while we look at it when she looks at this baby with all the wires coming out and connect with like that's me and I was crying for you and the nurses wouldn't let you come to me.

Like we do processing sessions me and my child together now because she holds that trauma in her just like I do and we have to craft a narrative. I think telling your story over and over and over again allows you to process and it also allows you to make meaning and make sense out of it. I think that's what you're doing. It's a beautiful gift you're giving.

Tanisha: Yes. And I didn't see that before. I'm glad that you're able to share the story of your eight year old and where she's come from because that's her story and she's owning it right now. Like so often as adults, we don't even own our trauma what we've been through. And so I think you're doing an awesome job just by sharing her story so that he can be self confident and walk into a purpose without any secrets.

You know and I appreciate you and that's what I'm intentionally doing for my son. Like his story is out there and I want him to own it. I don't want him to hide it from the world. I think it's inspiring. And yes as a mom you're trying to conceal some things that are delicate don't share but for the things that you know are very inspirational and can be motivating to another mom why not share it.

And when you were talking honestly it made me think about a year ago this mom reached out to me from instagram And because Lou two is so rare she saw Jill and she was pregnant at the same time as me and she was given no hope and she was like she's in United Kingdom by the way. And so it's an international damn.

And she reached out to me and she was like Tanisha, I'm so glad I found you will because they were giving me a grave news about my son and I was telling her about how Julia received a shot to kind of help that fluid that was building in him be released. And so she went and went to another medical facility and received the same services that we received here in the United States And long story short, she was able to get the shot for her son just like me and her son is alive. He's thriving. He's thriving.

And so she was just let me know his update recently. And I'm just like, I didn't know that we were going through this journey to save another mom, another mom, you know, and another mom.

Laura: And a baby in the whole life.

Tanisha: A whole life. And it's like they gave us three options. They said that Jalil be a still born, we could terminate At 20 weeks pregnant and want to do this is my first child. By the way, I had a miscarriage before him. So of course I'm not in that place to terminate. I'm already attacked your attachment. You get the pregnancy right? So at 20 weeks, you know, I'm not gonna tap out on that.

And then they were telling me that I could care full term. But the likelihood of him surviving is really low because his lungs were affected because he was getting no amniotic fluid to breathe in and out in and out, no practice.

But I was like, no, there's got to be my husband. I was numb. So my husband was like, there's got to be more options and I'm so thankful that he opened up his mouth because I was crying, my eyes out. I cannot profit what they were saying. And when he spoke up then immediately I went to work the next day and started calling these hospitals like can you see if we're willing to travel just to see what you can do.

Laura: It is the way you have catered for your child and yourself. It's beautiful.

Tanisha: Yes, we have to, we were given a NICU miracle for a reason. I didn't realize my strength into I end up in this journey. I'm like, oh my God, because I was very like when it came to I had really bad white cooked syndrome, scared of doctors. I was like, no, no, no. I never really wanted to ask questions or challenge what they were saying.

But Julia has grown me speak out loud if I'm seeing a care provider that's not attending to my son in a certain way change it and someone else because at the end of the day, your child is relying on you because my second speak right now he's developmental delayed, so I am his mouthpiece. And so he's relying on me and dad to be the voice that he needs right now.

And so it's not one of those possibilities to take lightly. And I just think that we know best as moms mama intuition when our child needs at the end of the day with the degree or no degree.

Laura: I agree so much, you know, it's easy for me, you know, like when I have to advocate for my kids and early childhood settings, I had to do this a little bit more because there were times where the care providers and I didn't align on things or they were looking at my daughter, you know, in a different way and I needed to advocate for her and it was so easy for me to come in and like plop my PhD in human development down and be like, nope, I know what I'm talking about, but I didn't need that. We have everything within us.

You know, we do, we have every right to be confident in because we know our kids best. We know how to listen to them and oh my gosh, I'm so glad that you have been able to really step into your power as Julio's mom. That's so beautiful.

Tanisha: Yes, that is a blessing because at first I was very fragile. The first wave of the Nikki journey, my husband was the one that was drily advocating until I got to the most face where I can get myself together because you know, you're going through those hormone drops after you have a child.

And when you have a child that's in the nick you unfortunately you don't get to bond the way you thought, like you were saying with all these cords and wires, how are you supposed to have that experience of skin and skin?

So I really was going through, you know, the baby blues syndrome, so to speak, and I was not able to really share what I needed to my husband's he saw that and it's really a precious thing that We're able to be one in marriage. Because I don't know if I have the strength in the beginning to really communicate what I needed for Jalil, but my husband being in tune with my needs, he was able to pick up where I didn't have the strength to and I got to a place where I could start being the one that was like, you call me before you do that, you call me.

Laura: Oh Tanisha. I think you're highlighting something that's so important to what you know. So I'm a couple therapist by training and you and your husband demonstrated there is turning in toward each other in a difficult time. And so, you know, so often when we face difficult circumstances, oftentimes, you know, partners that struggle, they turn away from each other and you really turned into each other. Do you have any, I don't know, tips for people who are in a hard time with or noticing like, oh, as a partnership, we're turning away from each other right now and how we can turn in and rely on each other and have a kind of, it's this is us against the world kind of mentality that it seems like your partner really had with you.

Tanisha: I would say the biggest tips that I've seen Dr. Laura and my own personal walk is just the fact to be vulnerable. Because even when we were at the care conference and they were telling us the what if, the possibilities, the risks and the benefits of conversation for my husband to be open and communicate how he felt.

I've seen his emotions like sometimes like men they hold it all in, right? In certain situations like that, I was able to see him in his grand moments and I just feel like we have to break down those walls of “I have to be strong”.

I can't show my emotions as a man or as a father that's hurting because this is his first child too, right? It's not just me. So I like for us to be in tune with each other and share how we're feeling from one day at a time, not so much, you know, looking at what the future holds, but taking it one day at a time and processing for the day.

Laura: Be present with each other, vulnerable. Yeah. In embracing that as strength, I think it's so important that especially, you know, you're a mom raising a little man, you know that we really have to redefine what it means to be a strong man and a strong man can be a soft man. You know.

Tanisha: You can cry. That has been one of those things that's hindered us from healing is not crying, a releasing moment.

Laura: It is. It's so beautiful. You can measure cortisol, a really big stress hormone in your tears, tears are one of the bigger bodies biggest healing mechanisms, tears and shaking. I don't know if you remember shaking after in that process but shaking is another just natural way our body releases stress. So shaking and crying do it all just cry did and

Tanisha: I think too because we process things a little different as when we love to talk and release and we find that and for my husband, he had a few friends that he reached out to during the process like it was all us together applaud the process of NICU was God and my husband and I. It was a trinity because at that time we were all feeling it and I was just like you know, you go to your space and you connect with your friends that you trust and then without me included because I know that you need that just like I need to reach out to somebody, NICU moms because I'm not feeling the best you get field, because if you get that field then you're able to talk to me instead of being disconnected. And I don't know what's going on with you because you're not communicating with me.

So I think to we have to also allow our husbands or our partners to reach out to those that they trust their friends just like we do with our friends and then once they got that grounded, healing from a male standpoint or from a father, a husband standpoint then they're able to come and connect with us as their wife and they're partner

Laura: So you're hitting on something that is just so incredibly wise that a marriage cannot hold all that we are, it cannot carry the weight of all of the burden of being a human who experiences pain. It can't hold it also. And yeah, you're so right. We've got to look for support and outlets outside of our marriage at times so that we can come to our partnership where we're not relying entirely on the other person for our own well being right.

Tanisha: Like that's the reason why you're counseling, right? Marriage relationships. This is the reason why there's so many counselors out their relationship because we can't just rely on each other and they will bring.

Laura: Yeah. Well Tanisha, I have loved this conversation. I think what you're doing is amazing. So if people wanted to find, I guarantee there are people who are listening right now who feel so inspired and want to support the moms that you work with or who have been in these places and either want to lend you know their story to your project or get support. Where can they find you, how can they get in touch with you?

Tanisha: The easiest way done everywhere is the guy on facebook Medical Moms of NICU type that into the search bar and you will find the page. But what I want them to look for is the group, the private group where they can connect several different moms and so if you go to medical moms of NICU and you go on the page, you click the group, you'll see the private group and all you have to do is ask a few questions really just to verify that your NICU mom or special needs mom and just briefly tell how long you were in the NICU and from there, we'll give you access to care, your story, your resources and you'll have the opportunity to get giveaways like we spoke about earlier.

So it's really a blessing. And on Instagram is the same way you can find us on Medical Moms of NICU and they can send out a DM if they have any questions about the facebook group. But if they want to connect with moms, definitely go to the facebook group first.

Laura: Okay. So yeah, absolutely. So I'll put the link to the Facebook group in the show notes here and then if there's anybody who's not a NICU mom but wants to support your work, they can get you, get in touch with you on Instagram.

Tanisha: DM on instagram. Thank you. So I appreciate the work that you're doing. I appreciate a conversation Dr. Laura. Like I said, you felt genuine when I communicated with you on Clubhouse and I'm just so thankful that we were able to make this happen and if you're listening as a NICU mom, I just want you to know, take it one day at a time. I know it sounds cliche, but if you just take it one day at a time you won't overstress and burn yourself out. And I know that the doctors are just telling you those risks because they have to tell you those risks. But it doesn't mean that your child is going to experience those risks. So stay faithful. Stay optimistic in the process.

Laura: Mm and you're not alone. You're not alone.

Tanisha: Yes. And there's a community out there waiting to hold you and embrace you and give you virtual. Oh, so just reach. I love it.

Laura: Okay, well thank you so much. Again, wow, you're a wonderful and a gift. Thank you for sharing your gift with us.

Tanisha: Thank you that the Lord for your work and I appreciate you for a lot of me just create a safe space to talk about this.

February 22, 2022

Episode 106: Making Meditation Accessible for Ourselves & Our Kids with Keli Carpenter

February 22, 2022/ Laura Froyen

First, I want to check in with you. How are you? I hope you are doing well and if there's anything that you would like help with, please do not hesitate to contact me (just hit comment!) or my assistant, Eugene through team@laurafroyen.com. We are always here for you and cheering you on!

For the past couple of episodes, we have been focusing a lot on mental health and how to overcome the many hurdles we are facing in our lives. And you've likely heard A LOT that meditation can be a powerful tool for mental health and wellbeing, right? Well if you're anything like me, when I first started dabbling in meditation it seemed like a tool that is "ideal" but not really "doable". And as a recovering perfectionist, if I can't do it "right" then I may as well not do it at all. Sound familiar, or is that just me??

I had to learn how to make meditation and mindfulness work FOR ME instead of it being yet another thing I was failing at. Here are some things that helped me get started:

- Giving myself permission to keep it short and sweet. Even 30 seconds was "enough"

- Inviting mindfulness into everyday moments, like washing the dishes or observing my kids play

- Offering loving kindness to myself and others during natural "downtime" like waiting in line or at a red light.

- Seeing it as an opportunity to model imperfect action to my kids

These practices have been instrumental in helping me be a more present, aware, and attuned mom AND have directly enabled me to be able to get the coveted "PAUSE" so I can respond rather than react when I'm triggered or overwhelmed.

If you're wanting to learn more about how mindfulness and meditation can help you as a parent, and maybe even your child when they are overwhelmed, you'll definitely want to check out this week's episode!

To help me in this conversation, I am joined by Keli Carpenter. She is a Chopra Center certified Transcendent Meditation (PSM®) instructor, Forgiveness Coach and Breathwork Practitioner, and a mother herself! Her commitment to maintaining her practice has allowed her to raise three beautiful children with mindfulness, overcome limiting self-concepts, and experience unity consciousness.

She will be helping us learn:

The impact of meditation on the different stages and ages of your family
How and when to introduce meditation to kids
The qualities of consciousness and their role in your ability to respond versus react
The five parts to emotional overwhelm and triggers and how to unravel them
How to build a safe emotional container and discover the gift in the center of your difficult feelings

To get more resources, follow Kelli on social media and visit her website.
Instagram: @theothersideofaverage
Facebook: www.facebook.com/theothersideofaverage
Website: theothersideofaverage.com

TRANSCRIPT:

Parenting is often lived in the extremes. It's either great joy or chaotic overwhelm. 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 we're back with another episode of The Balanced Parent Podcast and I'm really excited to share this guest with you today. We're gonna be talking about mindfulness and meditation and how we can share these beautiful practices with our kids in a way that's supportive of them and of us.

So please welcome to the show, Keli Carpenter. She is a transcendent meditation teacher and a conscious healing coach and she's going to help us with this conversation. Keli, welcome to the show, why don't you tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do?

Keli: Wonderful. Thank you, Laura. It's a pleasure to be here. My biggest passion is meditation that really for all of us coming back home to ourselves and the impact that that means for not only, you know, our own fulfillment in life, but for the impact that it has on our children.

And I was actually a child of meditation that started when I was six years old and I've also raised really three beautiful human beings. My children are 16, 18 and 21 with meditation and mindfulness as their foundations for life.

Laura: Amazing. Okay, I just feel really called to ask you this question because I say this phrase a lot and I don't know that we've ever defined it here on the show. This idea of coming home to yourself; I love that idea. It feels so good to me. What does that mean to you?

Keli: Good question. Well, you know, we have probably all experienced some sort of either prolonged stress, some sort of trauma in our life, some sort of difficult experience that has created fragments, fractures, you know, a disconnect

Laura: Cut off.

Keli: Yeah, exactly. And it really takes some specific tools, some space holding for us to, what I call, maybe make membership again. So to remember that wholeness. Because when we have those difficult situations, we kind of forget why we were here, we forget the innate gifts. And you know, for even some, I don't even feel like they knew they had the power.

Laura: Right. The trauma happened so early on that we don't even have a firm sense of who we are. Okay. So then I know one of the big goals for my listenership for my beautiful community here is that they really want. One of their biggest weights on their heart is that they want to prevent that from happening to their own kids.

They want their kids to come out of the childhood in their home with a sense of who they are, knowing deeply who they are and staying connected to who they are. And I'm guessing that meditation and mindfulness can help with this. So why don't we go in there? How can we share this with our kids? How can they support us with this big powerful goal as parents?

Keli: I'll talk a little bit about the three types of meditation, but in general, meditation is a practice of stillness because when we really come into the moment in silence in stillness, we get to reconnect again with that part of us that is bigger than the story, that's bigger than the trauma, that's bigger than our physical experience of the world.And mindfulness is really more the state of being or the quality of experience. We start developing mindfulness as a result of the practice of meditation.

So we develop that witnessing awareness, we see what, what is there to see instead of maybe what we want to see. And so the three types of meditation, there's observant, focused, and transcendent.

So observant meditation is we're just observing what is as it is without manipulation. So that could be mindfulness practices, sure everyone's heard of that or walking meditation where we're just walking and just really taking in the forest and nature. You know the sounds experience.

Focused meditation is we're focused on one thing. So it could be a candle meditation that could be even an audio. So we're focused on listening to the audio and that visualization that might be leading us to

Laura: This also focusing on the breath. Yes. Okay.

Keli: Yeah. So in observant, we could just observe the breath as it is without manipulation. In focused, we would be focused maybe on a particular breath pattern, so pranayama or, I'm a conscious connected breathwork facilitator and trainer. So you know, we're actually focused on a particular pattern of breath during that. and then there's transcendent. And transcendent is we're using the mind in just the right way with the use of a mantra. So it doesn't have a meaning, not English, it's used more for its vibrational qualities and ultimately it's just a tool for the mind.

You know, we've given so much emphasis on our cognitive intellectual status in the world and less on, you know when you think about children and we raised them right away, what does the cow say? What are your ABCs? You know, it's all on that. But how often do we teach them to listen within, check into their intuition to connect to that wholeness, that sense of self and to move through the world from there?

So we've given so much overuse to the mind that it's just a perfect tool and to disconnect the way that the power that we've given it, I guess. So if you think of the way thoughts work, we think of a thought we associate it with the fact separatism. That monkey mind is going and we're you know, off on ramblings in our head. And with transcendent meditation, it's like our mind can't grab hold of it and run with it because it doesn't have a meaning. So it just helps us settle the mind until we drop that much further into the body and access that place of stillness.

And if I was really to break down all three observant and focused, we start with the practice and we end with the practice. And with transcendent, we start with the practice but we transcend the practice.

Yeah. So that idea that you know, we just have this effortless repetition with the mantra but we end up because of the way that it, this really profound tool that it is, it just has a way of settling everything until we drop into more of that silent space.

So we might start, you know, might not even call it focused because we're focused on mantra, but really it's, we're transcending the practice. So we start on a walking meditation, we end, you know, if we start focused on a candle, we end focused on a candle and then with transcendent, we start with the mantra, but we transcend.

Laura: Okay, well I hear a lot of people thinking, you know, sometimes I hear my audience in my head asking questions and so I'm imagining lots of people are thinking about right now are like okay, yes, but Keli, when I try to meditate my mind just keeps rolling. You know, I can't stop the thoughts coming and I can never be perfectly still. So what would you say to that kind of question?

Keli: Well, two folds. The whole never be perfectly still is correct for everyone. I often say that, you know, we don't meditate for the experience in the meditation. We actually meditate for the other 23 hours in the day when we're more present, when we're more you know, engage when we feel more alive or creative intuitive, you know, those kinds of, there's more flow.

And then the other piece of that is that's what I hear the most as well. I can't meditate and you know, it's probably just an experience of ill-informed. There's something really important about having a teacher that can really navigate, you know, support, guide you through all of the experiences that might come up in meditation.

The one thing that I say for certain, I mean, my students hear me say it a number of times over and over again is you can't avoid that which you seek if you implement the practice.

So even if you start with that monkey mind that’s just going crazy, with the right tools, so you know, the right practice for you, you will settle that mind. You know, even just focus in our body and being present with that, with a consistent practice, the mind will settle. We just can't avoid the benefits of meditation. The only way we can actually, is to not meditate.

Laura: It’s to not do it. It's not just some means to an end; it's the means itself, it's the process.

Keli: Yeah, that's right.

Laura: Absolutely, for sure. Okay, many parents understand the benefits and even if they are like, well I can't do it myself, I want my kids to have the benefits. Right? And so how can we start that conversation with our kids? How can we introduce it to your kids? What are some of the benefits of various ages? Get us started.

Keli: Yeah, absolutely. And to frame this ahead of time, which I know I loved from actually listening to some of your podcasts, is that idea of perfection. And it's the lowest standard that we can hold for ourselves.

So as I go through the different stages and ages and the impact meditation, you know, has is to remember that it’s really about the journey. It's really about the learning, it's really about, yet the implementation and and the absolute flows and what we learn from those.

So in the prenatal stages, that's where it's really about our own inner connection. There's tapping into our own wisdom source, really connecting to our baby. I actually have had, it sounds really strange, we could do a whole separate podcast on this, but I've had blissful pain free childbirth from bringing that much presence to them. You know, really, again, that prenatal stage for you brings that trust, that is the birth, that, you know, there's a lot of fear that comes up for moms, that for women that are pregnant, fear of something–complications or different things.

So it really helps us connect in a whole new way to ourselves, our inner wisdom and our, you know, children. Then the 0 to 5, you know, I kind of break that down a little bit more at the 0 to 3 and then, you know, 3 to 5, but again, that's mostly about our wellness, you know. It's our presence, our patients, you know there's so much that's going on all the sleepless nights, you know, you know, the soy meatballs, you know. Everything that it means to be a new mom again, that's really forefront is our wellness and our inner connection.

Laura: The sense of like, am I going to screw up my baby? Am I doing this right? Yes.

Keli: Yeah. So you can imagine even just that you know if that chatter was settled, you know by half even the impact,

Laura: You could be different with your kids.

Keli: Yeah, exactly.

Laura: So I love how you're talking about right now that in this kind of 0 to 5 range especially or even the 0 to 3, that really it's about us. So when we talk about meditation with our kids really, when they're very young, we mean meditation with us and how that impacts how we are with our kids.

Keli: Absolutely. And I mean, how many of us had parents that weren't present? We completely know what

Laura: Everybody just put their hands up

Keli: Exactly. We know what that's like out there in the world. There's somebody in somebody's life who is not present. We know, we sense, we just feel what that feels like and so you know mostly it's for our own wellness but then you notice that impact.

So if we were really present, even just the act of, you know, breastfeeding and being, you know, extra present in that moment. It's just the impact that it has a sense of safety that it develops for our children is really quite profound.

Laura: Yeah. And no matter how you're feeling, not just with breastfeeding but bottle feeding too. Those are moments of you could drop fully into the present moment–put your phone away and be fully present.

And that, it's just something just super nerdy that I know about child development, that when babies are born their eyesight range is the perfect distance so that they, what's clear to them is your face when you're holding them in your arms in a feeding position, whether you're breastfeeding or bottle feeding doesn't matter. They are perfectly primed biologically to see your face and connect with you. So anyway, go ahead.

Keli: Yeah that just gives me like the truth bombs that this is like, just, you know that

Laura: Yeah, we are designed for each other.

Keli: Yeah, totally agree more. Yeah. And so that 3-5 age range is perfect where you can introduce the awareness of breath. You know if we're going to be you know ABCs and what does the cow say? Why not be implementing, you know, where they are with the breath? It's the first thing that people start shutting down when life is difficult so you can imagine other than swearing, what's the first thing that somebody does when they stub their toe? Yeah. It is hold our breath.

And that, if every single mom took this one thing away from this time today is that if you could, you know, teach your children to breathe into that stub toe, to breathe into that skinned knee, it has a massive impact on their life as a whole. That, you know, we're teaching them to turn towards and to be with and to bring presents to things that are difficult.

And you know, how would that be even for us as adults if you didn't try to numb, dissociate, you know, project, avoid things that were difficult that we turn towards and we learned how to be with them and receive the wisdom in them.

Laura: And this is so different and so radical. And of course it is, of course it makes sense that it is our instinct to turn away from pain. Of course it makes sense that we don't want it to be true, that our kids will suffer. You know, of course we don't want them to experience pain and it's the unavoidable truth of being human. And you know, it is instinct to say, oh, you know, you're fine, you're fine, you're fine. But what you're offering is the opposite turning in. There it is.

Keli: And there's such an amazing, such a gift that all the shames, the pains, the hurts, they're not the gift, but there's a gift in the center of it when we learn the skills to unravel, to be with, to hold, to listen.

Laura: What is that gift?

Keli: Oh, it's unique for everyone. You know, that might be for some, different triggers that overwhelm, that might be, you know, a reclaiming of their innocence that maybe they lost at some point in their life.

Laura: Yeah, I love that. I think about all of my triggers. I'm so grateful for every time I get flooded or overwhelmed by something with my kids because it's a chance to be kind to myself. It is such a wise thing that my experience, my life is offering me just like, oh yes, here's a chance I can be kind, you know?

Keli: Yeah, beautiful. Yeah. Okay. Okay, so, and then we move into more of the 6-12 year range and this is where we have a really captive audience. This is where children can actually develop the practice of meditation in a whole new way.

Laura: I just want to say, I love that you're not talking about like sitting down and attempting to meditate with a five year old. That you're talking about bringing presents and mindful awareness and curiosity to these children as a matter of practice and in the context of a relationship. I think too often we get a message that we have to teach these skills and tools like as a checkbox to young kids and that's, I'm so glad that you're talking about it in this different way. Thank you for that. Okay, and then when they're older and they're ready.

Keli: Yeah, exactly. And then even when they're older and they're ready, there’s different; not every seven year old could sit for five minutes, but many seven year olds would. So how do we, it might be a more structured meditation practice but still unique to them because when they're older, you know, even much older, they will sit.

Being with them at every stage of it and one of the words that you chose when you were talking, you know when you're talking about the five year old is that word curiosity. As we know it from, you know, raising small children, you know at 5, they ask 40 questions a day and at 40, we ask 5. And it's usually the same ones like, what? You know, where's my keys? What do we have for dinner? So for all of us, do, you know, maintain that beautiful curiosity in life, you know, to question everything.

Laura: Yes, I will never stop saying that curiosity is a superpower to be cultivated and yes, context, I will never stop saying it, it's a superpower sometimes. And I'm some of my more skeptical, like especially dads would be like she's kind of lame for us, you know, she’s kind of silly for saying that, but it is, it's a superpower. I love it. I love curiosity, it’s the best thing in the world.

Keli: Yeah, I love that you brought that up. Wonderful. Yeah, so 6 to 12, this is where they can also answer deeper questions, different inquiry like, where is that emotion in my body? So you know, as a parent we can implement any of the three types of practice and you know, they can listen to guided audio meditations.

They can do, I mean I learned transcendent meditation at the age of six so we can implement any of the three as a more structured practice. Best to pick one or two, you know, that is kind of consistent, that could be a breath practice. It can be transcendent meditation, but where there is some sense of consistency or regularity or is it part of the routine?

Laura: Yeah, building it into the rhythm

Kelly: I wasn't asking to meditate at six; just meditating because I was told. I had my kids you know, either at least try everything on their plate or maybe on the days you didn't want her to go to their sports. You know, things. It's like, nope, we're going, you know, unless there was something really big.

So it's we really can without, you know, it's a fine line between making it a struggle and really difficult. So you navigate that and we set those kind of deals with those routines as a parent. So we have that ability.

Laura: I was going to ask you, what if your kid is resistant to some of these things like what do you do with their resistance? How do you meet them in their resistance?

Keli: Well, I think that's beautiful, just what you said, let's meet them in their resistance. And that again, that can look like breathing. It's hard because it would be different for between 6 and 12 and such a range in there. But I would say, you know, we meet them there.

Laura: Yeah, part of me is feeling like you know, there's a kind of instead of for some kids, a lot of my listenership has has at least one child who is maybe would be called strong willed or spirited or quite resistant to outside influence as a firm sense of who they are and their boundaries. Yes, I feel like that's more empowering to say than to say they're like a difficult child or challenging, but, you know, whatever label you put on it.

And so for me and with a practice like this, inviting them in, leaving it open, leaving them space, because when we push it, we back them into a corner and we don't give them any other option with their personality and temperament than to push back and resist.

So if we leave a kind of open, we invite them in this is what we're doing as a family right now, if you'd like to join us, okay, you know, and just leave that open, that consistent invitation and with no attachment and no meaning to what it will mean if they do or they don't

Keli: Yes, so important. And my oldest, you know, to be honest, was more like that. And at night I used to do a lot of just guiding again, just helping them live in their bodies. Again, it's like that, breathing into the toe, embodying being in our bodies, it just has such a profound impact. So it doesn't have to be in that really structured way where that invitation is open, but there's so many opportunities for us as a parent to invite an inquiry and remember that inquiry isn't so much about the need for the answer. It's actually about the inquiry itself is the most important piece.

So if we're helping them asking questions of them in reference to their body or their feelings or where things are, not so much that they have the answers if their strong willed and not really wanting to answer, that inquiry impacts them.

Laura: Just as an example. My almost six year old had a performance recently at school and she was very nervous and very reluctant to participate in it. And so we just did an inquiry, just curiosity with her. You know, as much as she needed to.

What's going on? What are you thinking about when you think about doing it? How does it feel in your body? Where do you feel the nervousness? What does it look like? What color is it? Was it telling you? What did it feel like to do this? Using her like all of that? And eventually she decided to perform. And she had a great time and she was so happy that she did. But it was two days of kind of near constant inquiry about it.

Keli: So what you were doing with that inquiry is you were helping her turn towards it.

Laura: And what's important for parents listening to know is that process, that practice, that skill of turning in and listening to yourself, listening to your internal compass, what your body is telling you, what your heart is telling you–that's the exact same process that is going to help her when she's at a party and someone brings out pot or she's with a partner and they're ready to do something she's not. Those are the exact skills we want them equipped with as they grow.

Keli: Absolutely! Hell yeah to that. And so let's talk about the teenager because they’re the difficult ones for, you know, we from the experience them and they're challenging for, you know, the teen and they're challenging for the parents.

You know, when you look at, kind of done a survey before with the number one fear of parents and you know, it's like high 90s, it's the fear of death, of losing them. But when I dug a little bit deeper into that fear in the younger years, it looks like death, like the physical aspects of losing them, but actually in the teen years, it's emotionally being disconnected from them.

There's a mor, yeah, and you know, it's that difficultness that can come in those years and if we have set them up with this ability to tune in this whole new level of conversation, not only with their own self, but then with us, it's amazing the tools that they have to make these difficult years, you know.

Instead of being lost, you know, they already know who they are and it's still going to be challenging, but there's a whole foundation that has been built and there's more opportunity or ability to meet future growth to meet life, you know, and navigate that. You know, maybe just adding in, you know, my kids are those ages, so 16, 18 and 21.

And it's really then that I, at this time, I mean, I've seen the impact all the way along with different scenarios that you go through being a family, raising three kids. But it's right now I love watching my three teens and how they support each other, how they meet life, and how they work through the processes. You know, one quick story. I, we’re running out of, starting

Laura: No, no, no, we love stories here, we love to see it in action for sure

Keli: I have so many stories about my kids, but, you know, my middle son; through these processes that I do with my kids it's like, you know, they lived through workshops over and over again.

My one son, 17, he was away on a ski weekend with some of his friends and something happened. I don't remember the details, but he was triggered and feeling a bit angry, you know, and then that's also some hurt, and because he's, you know, worked with his own emotions before, he knew that he just needed some time.

So, you know, he went somewhere kind of sat down, you know, just really checked and turned towards, you know, the anger and was with it and he came home and he had a grin from ear to ear and he was like, mom, I was able to just sit and love my anger, you know, I was able just to be with it and you know, he went on to have a great weekend.

But without these skills of being able to turn towards difficult emotions and to unravel some of the stories that we have attached to them, we all know where that could have gone. That anger could have been a bit more resentment, maybe some conflict over the weekend or you know, who knows what, you know, possibilities could have come from that trigger that arose for him, but he knew exactly what to do with it. And so I'm seeing them on their own, you know, really practice some of these

Laura: That’s so beautiful. As a mom to younger ones, I love thinking about what that might look like for me and for my kids as they move into the future. That's so beautiful.

Okay, so I just felt like everybody lean in when you're talking about your son having this moment where he sat and was present with his anger and grateful towards it. I think we were all kind of thinking about like, I have times as a parent where I'm overwhelmed by negative emotion, where I'm flooded by negative emotion, where I feel triggered by something that's going on with my kids.

And so many of us know here in this community that when our kids are pushing our buttons, the kind of, we are, our instinct is to focus on the person pushing the button, but in reality we need to focus on the button and the owner of the button. And so I feel like this would be just a really natural spot to dig in a little bit to kind of how do we go about, you know, when we are overwhelmed, slowing down so that we can respond rather than react from our trigger, like your son did.

Keli: The breath in that moment is, you know, such a powerful tool when you start really developing and noticing the difference between being present and not present. Again, it's just a skill that gets developed and when we have that skill and it's developed, we actually just naturally drop into presence when there's difficult things going on. You know what I mentioned, we see what is instead of what we want to see or

Laura: What we think we see or we've been conditioned to see. Absolutely.

Keli: So we just naturally, you know, tend to our garden and started to just trying to manage someone else's weeds. We, you know, breath is the biggest thing. And would it be okay right now to talk a little bit about the five parts? Let's do the emotional overwhelm because we can save that for another time where we can

Laura: No, no, no, let's get there now, it just feels good now.

Keli: Okay, so there's actually five parts to your triggers or our overwhelm that we're feeling. And the first is where it is in our body because our body is a storehouse of everything that's, you know, that's happening, that has happened. And it actually notices emotions long before we do. But typically we're so disconnected from our body that your body needs to shout to get our attention.

Then there's the actual emotion itself and emotions actually only take about 90 seconds to move through. So why do we hang onto emotions or grievances for 40 years? It's actually because of the narrative that's underneath it. The story, the meaning, the belief that's attached to it. But the emotion is there to be truly validated and felt and witnessed and held.

We just don't want to justify the narrative or the story because that's usually about somebody else. It's either, you know, it's all those projections, you know, that we have on things outside of ourselves or we're beating ourselves up on the inside or both. Right.

So, it's looking at the narrative and, you know, what's truer because we might have a statement like, you know, I can't do this or I'm not good enough or relationships are difficult or the world isn't safe. And there's so many different beliefs that we have that kind of run the show that we live our lives through.

So when we can pause in the moment, we could just really validate the emotion coming to our body, wherein my body am I holding that, not just be with it. And then inquire into that narrative–what thoughts, what beliefs, you know, what reoccurring stuff is going on?

Laura: That’s the story I'm telling myself. Am I making this mean about me or my child? Yeah.

Keli: Exactly. And then look at what's truer–still part of the narrative, but what's true or how can we reframe that?

Laura: Yeah. I also like what else could be true? What is also true? You know, creating space for multiplicity and truth? I think so often we think there's truth with a capital T but most of the time there's multiple truths available to us.

Keli: Absolutely. And that's why every time we inquire, it's more about the inquiry than the answer, because, you know, just unravels so many different layers to it.

Laura: Absolutely.

Keli: And then the next is a need. We have a true unmet need that because that trigger, that overwhelm is from an old wound. It's from an old fracture. It's from something, you know, deep within.

So when we inquire, what do I really need right now? It's amazing what arises. And when we can meet that need, so kind of the next one in reference to that, that need is, how can I meet it? What can I cultivate? What can I, you know, ask for? How can I need it? What happens is, well, not only do we feel build up because our needs are being met.

We take other people off the hook because lots of times when we project that outside of ourselves with these false expectations that somebody else will really be able to meet those. We take it, it comes in all kinds of forms–passive aggressive, manipulative sort of behaviors. We take other people off the hook and it frees the space actually for people to step up and support us in ways that we couldn't even imagine

Laura: Tell me more about this kind of, this letting other people off the hook. There's a piece for this sounds like a lot like kind of I'm taking responsibility for my own experience and my own emotions. Can you dig in just a smidge there?

Keli: Yeah. Well, I mean, what you said is correct. I mean, even the whole process in itself is taking responsibility. You know, our feelings are ours.

Laura: I think so many of us grew up in homes where we were made to be responsible for other people's feelings. And so then we think that that's what love is, that's what family is. And so then we go out and we seek partners who are going to expect that we're going to meet their emotional needs and they're going to meet our emotional needs and you know, and that's going to be what it is.

And you're inviting us into considering something different; that in order to have a true marriage where we feel supported by our family, where we feel supported by each other, we first have to meet our own needs, right?

Keli: Yes, absolutely. I love what you said about growing up in households where we were made to feel responsible for someone else's emotional well being or triggers or anything else. And as parents it’s truly what we want, you know, how we want to show up as parents is to be responsible for our own self and teach our children to be responsible for their own emotional experience of life and you know, when we do that, is just so any victim narrative because that's essentially a victim narrative locks in powerlessness.

And you know, there might be some people listening that had truly difficult situations that they were truly a victim and I run a program where I called Evolve Behind Your Story; it's a really deep process work. And one of the things about people have really deep victim narratives because something wrong truly did happen.

However, 2% or 1%of that victim narrative can you now claim because we all want to be free, we want to feel empowered instead of enslaved by the circumstance. So when any portion of that experience that we can really step into and take responsibility in a healthy way because we can overuse that word–responsibility–as well, but really truly take responsibility for it, we step more into our own empowerment.

Laura: Yeah. You know, so as a survivor myself there, this delicate balance and line to walk between kind of accepting what is, what happened–it's unchangeable and there's parts of the victim narrative for me that kind of that I can get sucked into and kind of wishing it had been different and if only it had been different, then I could be this way and that's simply not reality, that it is what it is and it's not going to change.

And so now I get to choose, I get to step fully into my power in moving forward and living my life with this piece that is a part, you know, and I get to decide what to do with it. I think that that's probably what you're

Keli: Yeah, absolutely. You know, if you look at you know anybody who's truly overcome, you know, I mean some of the world's most influential people have been through horrendous things. You know, let’s use Oprah as an example, you know, that level of influence, that level of success that she, you know, has in the impact that she has.

And there's like a similar theme for everyone that, you know, falls into that category and one is they've connected to the truth of who they are–that essence, that meditation and stillness we talk about. They've connected to the part of them that is beyond the story that's beyond the physical and they've integrated their story because she has some, you know, you know, large parts to her story in her past where she was quite victimized so, and traumatized.

So, you know, in a really broad sense of word, trauma means an event that happened that we couldn't make meaning of; we couldn't integrate, we didn't have the support, we didn't have the tools, we didn't have the ability to unravel truly the gift that's underneath it. There's, you know, the pain, the shame, you know

Laura: Right. Or we integrate it in a way that ultimately didn't serve us; doesn’t serve us currently

Keli: Absolutely, yeah, we created a meaning that was way overhear about it, what it meant about us, you know, what it meant about life

Laura:: And about the safety of the world.

Keli: Yes. Yeah.

Laura: Absolutely. For sure.

Keli: Which kind of brings us to the last–that five part of emotional overwhelm is the last one is the gift because there's always a gift on the other side. So when we can turn towards, when we can unravel that narrative, when we can meet our needs, we just step more empowered. We reclaim our innocence. We find more love in our life.

Laura: We can start listening internal wisdom. Yeah. And that's where responsiveness as a parent comes from. It’s you know, hopefully there will be times when you can do this in the moment where you catch yourself, but most of the time and this is new, you will be doing this retroactively, you know, where you're like, oh, I lost it, let's figure this out, let's get curious, let's step into inquiry with myself, you know, and it will get, you'll get better and better and better. That moment of awareness will come sooner and sooner and sooner. But it takes time, luckily we've got our whole lives, there's no rush.

I think lots of parents feel a lot of pressure and urgency as they are kind of awakened to how I'm doing this. I'm doing this parenting thing, I'm stewarding a life and it feels very big and very urgent and I just want everybody to know there is time–there’s time for you, there's time for your child, and there's time for your relationship with your child. You have your whole lives for it.

Keli: Yes, absolutely. It's one of the questions I've had as well, you know-is it too late? Has the damage been done? And, you know, I answered this one particular person with a question and it was, and I know that she has a difficult relationship with her parents.

And I said, think about it if your mom–I know you have a difficult relationship wit–all of a sudden, brought more presents, more awareness, more love to the table. How would that impact you as an adult? It's absolutely never, it's never too late at any, any stage that we bring more presence. You know, we all crave to be seen, to be heard, that presence. And so yeah, it's never, it's a journey. There's no perfection and it's just never too late to bring more consciousness into our lives

Laura: Beautifully said, I can't think of a better way to end and leave, leave my listeners for the day. Thank you, Keli. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and your heart with us today. I really appreciate it.

Keli: Thank you. Thank you for, you know, having this podcast and supporting so many moms. It's parents, you know, families, it's such a soft spot in my heart.

Laura: Yeah, it's a gift and an honor and we thank you for walking alongside me as we do this thing together.

Keli: Thank you so much.

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. 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.

February 15, 2022

Episode 105: Recovering from Adverse Childhood Experiences with Dr. Bre Gentile

February 15, 2022/ Laura Froyen

Mental health is as important as our physical health. And as parents, we need every bit of help regarding this matter because parenting is never easy when we are mentally exhausted. Not to mention, our wonderful children have a real knack for showing us know where we have healing to do, right? And so, we are going to talk about mental health and trauma informed practices and how understanding our pasts can help make our parenting a little bit easier.

To help me in that conversation, I have invited Dr. Bre Gentile. She has a bachelor's degree in psychology at Gonzaga University and has gone on to receive two master's degrees, one from Golden Gate University in Counseling and the second from Palo Alto University in Clinical Psychology, where she also got her PhD. Dr. Gentile has spent over 10 years working to improve outcomes for children, teens, and their caregivers working through her research on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and toxic stress. Her work with mental health providers, communities, and families has allowed her to develop a keen insight into the challenges of supporting resilience through trauma-informed practices.

Here's a summary of what we discussed:

Trauma informed practices and what it is
Adverse childhood experiences and their effects
How to recover from adverse childhood experiences if you have some
How we can determine if our children are having the same experiences
Getting the right help for mental health

To get more resources, visit Dr. Gentile's website www.drgslab.com.
You may also check:
www.stresshealth.org
centerforyouthwellness.org
www.theconfessproject.com

TRANSCRIPT

Parenting is often lived in the extremes. It's either great joy or chaotic overwhelm. 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, welcome back to another episode of The Balanced Parent Podcast. In this episode, we're going to be talking about mental health and trauma-informed practices and how having a trauma-informed lens as we approach parenting can be really helpful for ourselves, making parenting a little bit easier and in working with our kids and to help me with this conversation, I'm bringing in a clinical psychologist, her name is Dr. Bre Gentile, we'll call her Dr. G and she is the director of product design at the Center for Youth Wellness in an expert in adverse childhood experiences and toxic stress. So I'm so happy to have Dr. G on the show. DR G, why don't you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do?

Dr. Bre: Absolutely. Thanks for having me. So as you mentioned, I'm the product designer over at Center for Youth Wellness and I came to this place after being a bachelor's degree in psychology and continuing on to get my Masters and then my Ph.D. and myself as a psycho oncologist and then became super interested in mental health tank.

So I left the psychology world to do some tech work. I did some U.X hardware research with google and found myself really unfulfilled and ended up back into the nonprofit space where I'm at now with Center for Youth Wellness and really what I do there is I help our products and services become very trauma-informed and trauma conscious and we help families, communities, and providers such as pediatricians and other behavioral professionals with aces and toxic stress and resilience. So I'm really happy to be part of the conversation today.

Laura: I'm so glad that you're here. Okay, so can we just touch real quick on what you mean by trauma-informed practices like what does that mean to us?

Dr. Bre: So it really means making sure that you're thinking about not only the trauma or the toxic stress that your child has gone through, but also as a parent or a caregiver what you've gone through as well and bringing that to the conversation, whether it's with your teacher pediatrician, even your dentist.

I mean it's really interesting and you'll see as our conversation goes on, that toxic stress is really just a biological response. So it can come up in all different ways and all different places where you might not think that it would be important, but it actually is very important throughout your life span and throughout the different places that you show up.

So that's really what we mean by taking a trauma-informed lens is just remembering and acknowledging the stress and the events that you have gone through as a parent and also that your child may be going through as well.

Laura: I think that this piece of it is so important Dr. G especially as kids return to the classroom after this pandemic, I think it cannot be overstated that we have all kind of been through a collective trauma and having trauma-informed practices in the classroom is incredibly important. Don't you think?

Dr. Bre: it's a little discouraging at times when I hear conversations about getting back to the new normal and rushing into this new normal of getting back into the classroom and I just have to hope that, you know, our school counselors, our principals and our teachers are getting the training that they need to also acknowledge their own low level of trauma or toxic stress that they may have gone through, but also to look for signs in our kids and their students and how do they plan on addressing that and being proactive about it.

I think is going to be really important and not just waiting for some kid to show up in your office or for a behavioral outbursts to happen, but to really just outwardly address what just happened in this last year, year and a half or so, how that might be affecting them as kids and how it might be affecting their supportive adult as well. I think it's going to be really important.

Laura: Oh yes. That acknowledgement of our role in the kind of the systemic nature of these interactions is so important. So kids don't exist in a vacuum. Neither do teachers or parents or doctors or therapists. We have the relationships with each other and those exists in the space between two people and so two people are both bringing their own experiences and background and trauma and stress responses to interactions and acknowledging that I think is so important.

So I'm so glad that we're having this conversation. This is what the balance parent is all about, is contextualizing the parenting experience where we are looking at the whole child, but also the system that the child is embedded in an understanding that, you know, what's going on for the child can be isolated from what's going on with the parent. Right?

Dr. Bre: Right. Absolutely. Yeah, this system is huge. That's a really important key factor that you mentioned.

Laura: Yeah, Okay, so let's talk a little bit about adverse childhood experiences. I think most of my audience will have heard about these in looking back on their own childhood and thinking about if they've had trauma in their own lives, can we talk a little bit about adverse childhood experiences? Or ACEs are where that term came from and what some of the things you know, that come up when parents are looking back at their own upbringing.

Dr. Bre: So, the 10 original adverse childhood experiences, there's been a couple of them that have been added on since the 10 original are really divided up into three different categories. So, you've got abuse neglect and household instability. So I'll go through each category because there's experiences within the category.

So within abuse, you have physical abuse, emotional abuse, and of course sexual abuse, and then within neglect, you have, again, physical neglect and emotional neglect and within household instability, which I think is one of the ones that is really not obvious but has tremendous effect on our health outcomes, which is mental illness, incarcerated, relative mother treated violently substance abuse and then divorce.

So, those are the original 10 adverse childhood experiences. I think there's been a couple of studies that have added things like deportation anything around immigration and then a couple of things have been thought about about adding bullying. And I think that's probably maybe interpersonal violence may be also be added on, but discrimination is also one of those that we're thinking about adding to.

Laura: Yeah, absolutely. And so the research on ACEs then, what does it say about folks who have had 12 or more of these experiences in their childhood as they came up?

Dr. Bre: Yeah. So, you know, the science of ACEs has been pretty much going on since the original study of Feleti, but it's really grown and so the science of it, it's just been decades of scientific investigation. It's showing that, you know, adversity that we experience as children, it can affect us into our adulthood. So the challenges that children face in school life and ultimately in their health, they're often the symptoms of ACEs and toxic stress.

So, you know, I don't want to go too far without giving some good news, which is that the earlier we can identify that a child spirit is experiencing ACEs and toxic stress the sooner the children and families can be connected to the services that they need to prevent and to heal effects. So, You know, the landmark adverse childhood experience study that I mentioned was in 1998. And the idea is that one, I think it's about one is okay, right.

One is something that we probably all have. But when you get up to four, Such as emotional abuse, emotional neglect, mental illness and substance abuse, that's when we start to look at the risks and the risk factors, you know, again from that study, the idea is that aces are incredibly common. In fact, I think it's something about 67% had at least one ace.

But There are also 13% of that had four or more aces. And so the more aces that you have, the higher risk, um for chronic diseases as an adult, so you can be experiencing these aces as a child and you won't see the effect until you're an adult where you're three times at risk for heart disease or lung cancer. So things like that, that you might not see until you're older? And there's also, which is probably the most shocking result to me is there's a 20-year difference in life expectancy for children that have cases that were left unattended. 20.

Laura: That's heavy. So I feel like parents are, who are receiving this information right now are in the spot where they're like, do I have these are these, is this part of what makes things hard for me? Is this contributing to things that might be difficult?

And then how do I know if these are experiences that my child is having? So what is a good starting point for parents who are just starting to think about, like, oh, the things that she mentioned, I have those in my past for the parent, what do we do? And then we'll talk about the kid out later.

Dr. Bre: That sounds great. So I think the idea is the question is really as a caregiver's an adult, you're asking? Okay, what can I do? Right. So yes, we have the power to help our children. Absolutely. But we also need to think about what about my aces? What about my aces? So the first thing is to know, acknowledging did I go through some of these hard times as a child?

A lot of times we just thought it was just, you know, our error or it was just how things were done and it was just how our mom was or how our dad was. But really when you think about it, was it really how it just was or was there some really hard times that you want to recall may be disciplined. For example, this is a really big one may be disciplined. What was excessively harsh at home.

Maybe one of your parents drink too much or verbally abused your struggled with a drug addiction. So those are the types of aces that can cause toxic stress and put people at higher risk for the heart disease and the depression like I mentioned, I think what it brings up to me is, you know, in California, we have screening for ACEs at the pediatric level, but you can also find the ace quiz or the ace scale That you could take on your own to find out. Did I have one of these or more of these? 10 aces.

And so I think just taking that and taking stock in that and I highly recommend doing it with a licensed professional because it can bring up a lot of different things and we don't know the idea is not to re traumatize you but to give you some awareness and to give you some grounding in that, you know, these weren't just people just being people or eras being errors. These were actually really hard times that you went through that affect you as an adult.

Laura: Yeah, I think that's so important. I think so many of us. I want to say that like yeah, things were heard. Yeah. There were things about my upbringing that I wish had been different. Yeah, parents were harsh with me. Yeah, it was bad at this point in time, but other people had it worse. And so what should I, you know, what am I complaining about?

But I think really taking a good look at your upbringing and how it's affecting you in ways you may not even realize that the health implications that you're talking about are wild. They're astounding. So okay, now let's say then you're ready to start looking at it.

You're ready to start working on some of the stress maybe that you, this trauma response that you've been in perhaps your whole life, you're starting to want to look at that. How can you find a provider, a therapist who is informed, who is trauma informed and who will help you work through some of those things? Do you have any suggestions on how to find the right mental health care provider?

Dr. Bre: Yeah. The first place I would always look at is wherever you're getting your psychology or mental health tip, it's whether it's like, Psychology today or another forum that you use to start there because you can filter your results by trauma or PTSD. So, I think that that's really important to actually find a professional that has worked with trauma or PTSD.

And even though if you're thinking, I don't have PTSD, like you said, it wasn't that bad. Those therapists are going to know how to work with trauma and how to work with toxic stress. It doesn't have to be on the continuum over here. With PTSD can be on the other side of the continuum, that's just traumatic events happening. So I really highly recommend getting somebody that's actually specialized in trauma.

Laura: Oh, I so agree. Dr. G, I was just talking with a person who's in my balancing you membership. She was trying to find a therapist and she's, you know, seeing several over the past years and they've all just been terrible fits and done more harm than good for her.

And so I was giving her some search terms further, like what psychology today profiles and gave it that exact hip and she found someone on her first try who's a great fit who is trauma informed and just even having that search term trauma informed or searching for people who specialize in trauma recovery.

It makes all the difference because folks who are trained in those things that they have specialized training you know to and they have expertise and often times I don't know if your experience in the clinical world. When I was a practicing therapist, I was a specialist with trauma survivors. And there was a reason why those folks came to me because I was good at working with them.

So usually the people who specialized in it, they have some kind of gift with it too, you know where they know that they're good at it. They found out that this is something that they feel really passionately about and want to do. They're invested in it and then you get better care providers to.

Dr. Bre: Yeah, absolutely agree. And I think actually going with the search term of trauma informed over the search term parenting or family, I think you're gonna find yourself getting much better results because parenting with aces is a whole different realm than just your normal parenting stress. Right? So I think it's really important to bypass that parenting or family search term and go straight for the trauma.

Laura: I agree so much. Okay, it's so important you and I know what all the letters in the names and all of those things mean after people's names, but I think it's so important to be very, very clear and help people find the right care provider for them.

Thank you for that. It's so important. Okay, so then what about if perhaps there are people who are listening and thinking about their own family that they have now, their family of creation, the children that they are raising right now. And they're realizing that some of what they've got going on is perhaps contributing to their children's dress too.

Perhaps like a pediatrician would have something pop up on that screen. What do parents do if they're realizing that their kids right now are experiencing or have experienced earlier in their childhood, one of these adverse experiences?

Dr. Bre: Yeah, so again, I think that the important part is to first take a moment to realize that you have the power to help kids lead longer and healthier lives. A lot of times we may feel like if we're holding all of this trauma and we're realizing, gosh, I could be more calm if I only had this response system in track or I could, you know, not just completely freeze and shut down if I had, you know, this system in check.

And so I think the first thing is to just take a moment to realize that even though you went through these things and you're maybe parenting with your own aces, you still have the power to help your kids. So I think that the right kind of support like we talked about is really, really important in mitigating the impact of toxic stress.

But also I think that there's certain conversations that you can definitely have outside of your pediatric or outside of your licensed professional that you can have and most of those are going to be around what I call the seven domains of wellness. So we developed them at Center for Youth Wellness and those conversations are usually held within one of the domains which is the supportive relationship.

So if you find maybe one, maybe two, maybe it's six right? Supportive healthy relationships. Having the conversation about your own aces and your child's ACEs can really mitigate the effects and the impact of the toxic stress. So that's just one of the domains that I highly recommend taking a look at because that's one of the ones that you probably already have, you probably already have maybe at least one supportive relationship hopefully that you can use and utilize in that way.

Laura: Okay. Yeah. So tell me more about the seven domains of wellness. What are they and how can they support a family as they're moving through hard times.

Dr. Bre: Yeah, so the seven domains of wellness, our domains that we know mitigate the effects of toxic stress. And so the seven of them are supportive relationships, which I just mentioned, nutrition, sleep, exercise, mindfulness, mental health and nature. So I can go into each one of those really briefly that you can find a lot of this information on our website which is stresshealth.org.

So stresshealth.org. So supportive relationship like I said, is where we actually have a supportive relationship and it might not be your partner, it might be your best friend, it might be your child's mom, right? Or your child's friends, Mom, excuse me. So the idea is that we as parents can also use these domains of wellness and we can also encourage our children to use these domains of wellness.

So as the parent using supportive relationship, it's really seeking out that friend or that family member that you can have difficult conversations with and talk about stress for our kids that looks like them having a teacher or having hopefully maybe a parent, but we know, you know, as they get older, they may tend to not have those difficult conversations with you.

So a teacher, a coach, any of those will be a supportive relationship for your child and what that does is it allows them to have conversations that they don't have to hold and they can actually let that out so we can move on to nutrition.

Laura: Oh wait, hold on. I just wanted to highlight something. So when you were talking about the supportive relationships, I noticed that you were mentioning for relationships that your child would be having, that they would be with adults, but not with peers, and I think I wanted to just highlight the last thing there that you said is that they can have these kind of conversations where they don't have to hold it anymore.

I think that probably the reason why we're talking about relationships with adults, a child's relationship with an adult is so that I don't know that peers are not being burdened with heavy stuff. Is that kind of, am I on the right track?

Dr. Bre: Yeah, because the truth of the matter is, although we really want our children to have friends and be able to talk to their friends, their friends are not equipped to have a response to some of the stuff that may be going on. So while our friends are really great at normalizing what's going on and being like, oh, you know, Yeah, my dad does the same thing or my mom does the same thing, that's great.

But it doesn't have a great response because they're just not equipped to come and say that's a difficult situation. Why don't we talk about that a little bit deeper, Right? They don't have the active listening skills with reflective listening skills that adults do. So we do want them to have friends, but we also want there to be distinguished between a good friend and a supportive adult.

Laura: Good. I'm so glad that we kind of highlighted that a little bit more so there's a reason that there's a difference between these supportive relationships that you're mentioning here and paris Yes. Good. Okay.

Dr. Bre: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for making that distinguished to go ahead and move on to the nutrition then. And I always like to breakfast nutrition, but this is actually not necessarily about making sure you hit all of the food pyramid or you eat, you know, more vegetables really what nutrition is about when you're talking in terms of aces is actually something really simple like eating together as a family.

So, a consistent routine around being with safe and trusting adults during mealtime. It's a really important daily routine and it allows you to just set aside a specific time where you eat together, even the babies can eat together, but you're all around a family table and it doesn't have to be family, right? It doesn't, it can be mom, coach, grandma, auntie, it doesn't matter who's at the table, It's about the routine and about the coming together over a meal. That's really important with mitigating the toxic stress.

Also we talk about, you know, not having distractions, so avoiding screens and you know, phones, television, all that during mealtime, it's really tempting and we understand that if you ditch the distraction when you're just retelling the story to the kid that you matter, You matter, I'm here, I matter, I'm here, we're here together and that matters. So that's really important. I also think that it's super important about nutrition, specifically eating breakfast is really important. Obviously we, you know, we hear a lot of signs about that and of course the most colorful vegetables are always the most preferred ones.

But we know that you know, especially in San Francisco and the district that we serve, we know that getting fresh fruit and vegetables is not always possible. We serve Bayview, which is considered a food desert and so we understand that well it's nice to go to whole foods and get all the colorful vegetables you can get or go to a farmer's market and get fresh produce that is just not possible for everybody.

And we know for sure that in our black and brown communities, it's really difficult to have breakfast together because 11 parents are already out the door or we have parents who are working two different jobs and having dinner together isn't even a possibility. So one of the things I've always been thinking about is that the domains of wellness are really fixed right now for parents and families who have a general amount of resources, but how do we make those.

But for the lives of folks who are really low resource, maybe perhaps even living out of their car or you know, really suffering with homeless and food insecurity. So constantly thinking about that, but just want that to be shared that I'm well aware that it is not always a possibility to do these things.

Laura: Yes. Access and privilege are an incredibly important aspect of this conversation.

Dr. Bre: So sleep is our next one. And again, we know that you're supposed to have a certain amount of hours per sleep. And we know that largely our entire nation is not giving enough sleep. But the really important thing that I love to hone in on this because again, we know that there are folks and families who are sleeping 3, 4 to a room and getting good sleep and having a good mattress and all of this is just not possible. But if you can keep the bedtime and the wake up time consistent, that will help your brain and your body work better together. So it's not necessarily about getting the 8-12 hours of sleep for your teenager.

It's actually more important to say, you know, 10 o'clock is bedtime and 10 o'clock is wake up time no matter what, on the weekends, right? If it's a school night then maybe it's nine o'clock and You know, 7:00 or something. But as long as you have those consistent bedtimes and wake up times, it will help your body and your brain work better together.

The other thing that I know is really just kind of thrown at parents all the time, it's cutting back on screen time and we know it's really difficult. Sometimes it's our only time as a parent to just get, you know, a few minutes of social media time in or just something that really allows us to decompress. But the truth of the matter is it's just actually not decompressing us at all. It does the exact opposite.

So as much as you can model that for your kid, even if you end up using it right before you go to bed, if you can model it for your kid, you know, a couple of hours or maybe even like a half an hour is trying to start with before bedtime, they will see you doing that. And like I said, even if you end up going into your room and going right back on, that's fine. It's really just about modeling that that behavior is possible and then your children will know, okay, that's something possible. And I see mom and or dad or grandma grandpa doing it so I can do that. And then I think that the other one is that don't be afraid to seek support from a health care provider for your kids, right?

Like we're quick to do it as adults and saying like, I need help. I'm not sleeping while I have insomnia, but we don't want to do it for our kids. There's a lot of shaming and a lot of guilt that comes around parenting and sleep. I remember it from being a parent myself having an infant. It was like, oh, your kids not sleeping through the night yet.

Oh, you know, it's like I'm site, you know, so it's really okay to get help from a professional if you feel like your kid, especially if they're having frequent awakenings and it's not something that they will, you know, kind of go back to sleep, but it's, you know, frequent nightmares or night terrors or sleep walking. Any of that talk with your healthcare provider, there's really no shame in that.

Laura: Oh, I think that's so important. Especially with older kids. I think that we take such a behavioral approach to sleep with kids and that we think that it's when they're having trouble sleeping, that it's a choice that they are having rather as opposed to an indication that, you know, they might need support in some way to, you know, Yes.

Dr. Bre: That is such an important part to bring up because we do, we go, you know, from day one, we're reading sleep training books, right? It's something we can train them to do. But you know, we don't understand that there's a whole biological system. Yeah. Play behind all of this. And you know, more than likely our kids are not choosing to not go to bed.

Laura: Exactly. It was like adults. I'm in recovery from insomnia and people are like just sleep. Oh, thank you for that. Yeah, it's the same. Yeah, Exactly.

Dr. Bre: So that brings us to exercise and again, you know, we have so much around exercise that I hardly touch on exercise because there's just so much pressure already for adults to be active, you know, five times a week, 30 minutes minimum and then there's already so much pressure on our kids to be even more active than they already are. But I think the combination of the pressure on the two people on the adult and the child, it ends up just being like let's just throw that out the window, let's not even talk about that.

Laura: Instead of using the word exercise, I've started using the term joyful movement and that feels so much better to me .

Dr. Bre: I love that. I really love that idea. I think that that's great because then you get out and you're like ok this is you know, even if you're just going for a walk it's joyful, even if you're outside blowing bubbles like you don't have to be you know, exercising heart pounding, sweat dripping type of activity.

Laura: A dance party in your kitchen is lovely.

Dr. Bre: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, that's one of the things that I actually recommend a lot is doing a freeze dance. So you know dancing in your kitchen or in your front room and then you turn off the music and whoever freezes last loses that round. So I think it's really fun to do, especially if you have young children they get a really big kick out of you know adults not being able to stop on time.

Laura: I co signed that my kids love those.

Dr. Bre: totally, I love it too. So I don't want to touch too much on exercise other than the fact that we do know that daily physical activity or or joyful movement can counteract some of the key impacts of aces. So you know it's it's reducing of the stress hormone that's all that we care about is just lowering that cortisol level so that they're not stressed and then it helps strengthen their immune system.

So just thinking about, you know, a little bit of movement, joyful activities doesn't have to be outside. It can really just be jumping up and down or you know just something really that you wouldn't even think about as being exercised. So I don't like to harp too much on that one. We get enough of that as parents.

Laura: Yes, for sure.

Dr. Bre: So that brings me to mindfulness and again, you know mindfulness can be this like meditation practice and like no it's really really not about that. It's really about self regulation and that can be for adults and kids. So what I like to do is start with the adult because it's really difficult to explain this, tweak it and I know there are apps that do wonderful jobs at it and we're getting so much better at bringing this down to the child.

But for adults, if you can do this then you'll see that your child will actually mimic you even if they're older. I have a nine year old who's starting to mimic me when I do some of these self regulatory activities. I don't think it's just for kids who are still, you know, two eyes peering at you all the time. But what I like to do is if you're facing a challenging situation or you're really stressed out, just stop, stop for a moment and just ask yourself what am I feeling right now? It can be the worst feeling ever. And it doesn't even matter, don't judge yourself, don't lighten it down. You know, you're not publishing this on facebook or anywhere else.

Just ask yourself what am I feeling right now and then take a breath and then you just ask yourself again? Okay? My breathing too fast right now. Am I holding my breath? Can I even take a deep breath right now and then just observe? Right, so, okay, what else am I feeling in my body? What are my thoughts right now? And then by the time you get to the observation place you're like, okay, all right then you can kind of move forward right? And like, am I, am I okay with what happens next if I decide to yell at my kids?

Am I okay with that? Am I okay with grounding my kids? Am I okay with turning off the video games? Am I okay with leaving the house and going for a walk? So you just kind of ask yourself and decide what way you want to respond? So I think that that's a really cool way, you know? So again, you just stop you, ask yourself what you're feeling right now you talk to yourself about your breath, asking yourself if you're holding your breath, it's too fast. Can you even take a deep breath, ask what else you're feeling in your body or your thoughts and then ask yourself if you're okay with how you plan to proceed, am I okay with it?

Laura: I love that. And I think I really love the reframe two of mindfulness, simply a self regulation. I think that people get so freaked out by the term mindfulness and they think they are going to have to change into some other being, you know, but really what it is is just learning how to have healthy emotional regulation.

Dr. Bre: Yeah, absolutely, you can do this with your kid without having the like, you know, kind of calm app or headspace app script in your head and I think the biggest way to do it is really just changing that question usually like what's wrong, right or what's going on. But if you ask, how are you feeling? It kind of gets you as a parent in this mode and then it gets the kids to start thinking like I'm feeling really frustrated, you know?

And then that just opens up a dialog to just like, okay, I hear you, you know, So I think if we just ask that without giving too many things to parents because God knows we have so much already, but just to ask change that question instead of asking your child next time, what's wrong or what's going on, ask them, how are you feeling? And I think it will open up a totally different dialogue.

Laura: I love that too. Or even like asking out loud, how am I feeling? Take the pressure off the kid to some for some of the parents who listen, they have really explosive kiddos, kids who are have a really hard time even talking about their emotions. So even just a tense moment saying like, okay, let's slow down. I'm just going to take a second to check in with myself and model that overtly okay, how am I feeling right now?

I'm feeling really overwhelmed or I'm feeling really frustrated, I'm feeling really concerned that we're not going to get to the bus on time or I'm feeling really concerned because I'm making dinner and it's burning. But I also want to help my kiddo with homework, even narrating it out loud for yourself can be helpful too.

Dr. Bre: So I have two more domains for you, but the next one is mental health which we've already touched on, so that's just really brief of like, you know, getting to the right professionals, there's really, I know that there's still a lot again, especially in our black and brown communities here in San Francisco accessibility is an issue and there's all sorts of other trusting issues going on.

So to not think about mental health in the same sense as a four walls couch kind of area, right, so there's this really great thing that we're doing in Bayview which is training barbers to have difficult conversations so that you as a male who don't typically open up this, you can go get your haircut and you can sit there and you can talk about what's going on and your barber is now trauma informed so

Laura: Oh my gosh, that's alright saying it's amazing.

Dr. Bre: Yeah, the project is fantastic, I love what they're doing.

Laura: What is the name of that project? I have, you have to know more.

Dr. Bre: Totally, the project is called The Confess Project and I will connect you offline with the founder of it, he's amazing, they're actually coming on Wednesday to train our barbers here in San Francisco to have those difficult conversations, so thinking about the different places, you know, it might be a beauty salon, it might be the nail salon, it really you don't have to seek out this space in the traditional way that you're thinking about it, especially if you're in a black and brown body and especially if you're suffering with accessibility barriers.

Laura: So one of my best friends is a hair stylist and she has been talking with me about how her community is so overwhelmed with the pandemic stress that's coming in her doors and they're so unprepared, this is a great project. Fantastic! So I highly recommend checking them out indefinitely.

Dr. Bre: Happy to connect you guys. It's a really fantastic way to think about mental health.

Laura: Oh yes, I will. And it will link for everybody who's listening and is looking for amazing organization to support. I will be putting the link in the show notes too.

Dr. Bre: So our last domain is nature. Yeah, I know. Yeah, I need to be one of nature. It's really about getting outside as much as you possibly can, but we know that some neighborhoods aren't safe. Sometimes it's actually not possible to get outside for whatever reason. So even just looking at pictures of nature or listening to nature sounds, we'll do the same effect as lowering your cortisol levels.

So you know if your friend is out there going on to Costa Rica excursion, tell him or her to send some pictures. I have encouraged a lot of our teachers to put up a screen saver of a nature during class breaks. So it's just again just to start thinking about nature and what it might feel like and hear the sounds and smell the smells and all of that. It really just slows your body down and lowers your cortisol level. So it increases our resilience and we feel more refreshed as well. So it's a win win.Laura: Yes. Yeah. You know I have found that guided nature meditations where you visualize during a meditation where you visualize nature can also be quite effective at getting you some of the same effects of like nature bathing when you don't have access to it. Love it. Thank you so much Dr. G for this conversation, Understanding how stress and the accumulation of stress over the course of a lifetime can really impact us. And then the things that we can do to help ameliorate that stress are really helpful.

Dr. Bre: You're so welcome. Thank you for having me.

Laura: Absolutely. And so I want to make sure that people know where to find you. I know you have a website too. So we've talked about the Center for Youth Wellness, but what about your website? Drop it. I'll put it in the show notes, but sometimes people like to hear it out loud.

Dr. Bre: Yeah. Yeah. So my website to my personal work is called drgslab.com. So D R G S lab dot com, You can find out more about me there. And the work I'm doing outside of my center for youth on this work.

Laura: Well, you're doing amazing work and I feel so grateful to have had you on the show. Thank you so much.

Dr. Bre: Thank you. It's been great.

February 08, 2022

Episode 104: How to Release Negative Self-Talk for Yourself & Your Child with Dr. Anjani Amladi

February 08, 2022/ Laura Froyen

We all have an inner critic; this voice that ever so helpfully (but not always nicely!) tells us all the things we are doing wrong. And while sometimes we are aware of this inner negative voice, because they can be LOUD, sometimes these negative thought patterns are just kind of running in the background, outside of our conscious awareness. And it's hard to tell which is worse right? On the one hand, it can be exhausting to be beaten up from the inside all the time, but on the other hand, at least you're aware of it and can start working with the negative self-talk, right? When it's running in the background and you don't even know it's going on, it can still impact your mood and self-confidence, right?!

What's true for you? Which are you experiencing these days? Are you aware of your inner critic? Are you dialoguing with it? Let me know by hitting comment!

Now, I want you to know that there is a way to release yourself from the vicious habit of negative self-talk. While it is okay to honestly, and compassionately assess ourselves so that we can improve and move toward our goals, engaging in chronic negative self-talk isn't actually helpful. No one learns to do better by being made to feel worse, right?!

And so, if we can learn to free ourselves from this negative inner dialogue, we can not only move more confidently and compassionately toward our goals, but we can also model this for our children in a really powerful way (because they are always watching, right?). And if you've already noticed some negative self-talk cropping up with your kids, don't worry, I've got you covered there too!

That is why for this week's episode, I invited Dr. Anjani Amladi on the show! She is an adult and child/adolescent psychiatrist who takes a holistic approach to patient care. Dr. Amladi has an extensive experience treating a wide range of psychiatric diseases, including ADHD, OCD, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and other mental health issues. Her best-selling book, When the World Got Sick, focuses on guiding parents and children to discuss about the effects of COVID-19 and how to cope during this difficult period.

She will help us learn the following:

Negative self-talk: What it is and how to recognize it in ourselves and in our kids
How to reassure or comfort ourselves and our kids without dismissing the concerns and feelings
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: What it is and how it can help release negative self-talk

To get more resources, visit Dr. Amladi's website anjaniamladimd.com and follow her on Instagram @anjaniamladimd. And get a copy of her book When the World Got Sick HERE.

If you are struggling with how to comfort your kids with anxiety, this book might be for you: Anxious Kids, Anxious Parents: 7 Ways to Stop the Worry Cycle and Raise Courageous and Independent Children

TRANSCRIPT

Laura: Hello, everybody. This is Dr. Laura Froyen and on this week's episode of The Balance Parent Podcast, we're going to be digging pretty deep into negative self-talk when it happens in ourselves and in our kids and what to do about it.

And to help me out with this conversation, I'm bringing in a colleague, an amazing doctor who's going to help us have peace, all of this out and understand how we can help ourselves and our kids. So everybody please welcome Dr. Anjani Amladi to the show. I'm so happy to have you here. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about yourself and what you do?

Anjani: Sure. So I am a Medical Doctor. So my specialty is actually Psychiatry. So I specialize in mental health and my subspecialty is actually mini-humans, so tiny humans. So I'm a Board Certified Adult Psychiatrist as well as a Board Certified Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist and my, the vast majority of my practice is kiddos. So 99% of the folks that I see are under 18, but I do see adults too.

Laura: Cool. And are there any age groups that you find yourself working with more that you really like to focus in or any kind of, you know, diagnoses or specific areas that are your favorites.

Anjani: So I love the 20 something honestly. So transitional age youth and I also really like mini-humans, so 12 and under is probably my favorite age group to work with because there's so much fun and they keep you really young. But in general, the population that I probably specialize the most in is under 30.

Laura: Okay, so young adults and teens. Cool. And so going to be talking about negative self-talk and I'm kind of curious if you can just start us off telling us what that is. Can you give us just kind of like a baseline understanding of it? What it looks like? How to recognize it in ourselves and recognize it in our kids?

Anjani: Sure. And I think it's important to mention that negative self-talk is something that we often engage in quite a bit and a lot of times we don't even realize that we're doing it. So it's these kind of negative feedback loops when something happens or it doesn't turn out the way that we expect it to, and then we start associating that action or that outcome with who we are as people, who we are as individuals.

And we say things to and about ourselves that we would never say about other people that we care about. And I think that the difference is, we are attributing characteristics to ourselves that first start not accurate. Second are often not logical and third that we would never attribute to other people that we care about. So that's kind of the cycle that we're talking about when we talk about negative self talk.

Laura: Yeah. And one thing that I feel like it's so tricky about negative self-talk is because we're thinking it about ourselves; we believe it. So we’re so much more likely to actually believe it too, right?

Anjani: Right. It's all connected so that our thoughts or feelings or behaviors, they're all interconnected and any one of those elements can cause an increase or decrease in any of the other two pieces. So our thoughts have a huge impact on our behaviors and vice versa and they can also have a huge impact on our emotions.

And one of the main treatments that we use when we talk about when our thoughts are not quite accurate or not quite logical. They're called cognitive distortions, which means that we're thinking things and feeling things that may not necessarily be accurate. And the target treatment for those symptoms is actually called cognitive behavioral therapy. So you're working on changing your thoughts as well as your feelings as well as your emotions all in one therapy modality which is really neat and it's an evidence-based treatment that works really well for both adults and for kids.

Laura: Yeah, I love CBT. It's one of the most well-researched forms of therapy; great for anxiety and for depression. It's really lovely. And what's amazing is that like in my experience, parents can pretty quickly learn some of these techniques, use them with themselves and also teach them to their kids.

Anjani: Yes. And there is actually a book that came out, I can't remember if it was last year or the year before, but it was within the last couple years. It's called CBT for Parents of Anxious Children. So basically what it is, is parents who are basically quarterbacking, implementing cognitive behavioral therapy techniques to help anxious kids.

So it's helping yourself to help your kids which is a really, really cool concept of the book that I've read. I've recommended its appearance and they, the feedback that I have gotten is that when you learn to kind of manage your own anxiety, then it really helps your kid out to help manage their anxiety as well.

And it's the thing, negative self-talk, we often emulate what we see. So when as, so as parents when we're talking about our own negative self talk, how are we emulating that for our children and how can we change that?

Laura: Yeah, I really love that you're bringing this up because as a Systems Oriented Therapist, I have to see kids in there embedded in the systems that they're in. And you know, it's so important for everybody to understand that how we are with ourselves, absolutely influences how kids are with themselves. And that there's this transaction that happens between us and certainly not in any kind of blaming way, but just it is what it is because kids don't grow up in a vacuum. They grew up in a family, right?

Okay, so if we start noticing some negative self talk and kids like what are some of the things that you might see, seeing that crop up? I know like for me as a parent, I often started seeing that around three or four when they were learning to draw or write letters and start getting frustrated with themselves? Like I can't do this, that sort of thing. What about you? Are there other things that parents can be looking out for? Things that, or common things that you hear in your practice?

Anjani: Probably the most because kids spend most of their time in two places. One, at home and two, at school. So I would say the earliest you'll probably notice it is when kids start going to school, when they start having tasks and specifically new tasks that might be challenging for them that they're learning, is probably the first time that you'll see that kind of feedback loop.

The other place might be sports–and we're not doing a whole lot of that right now because of the pandemic, but that's another place that it can show up and then also in the household if their older siblings or other family members that look like they're having an easier time doing something that they have a difficult time with themselves. You can see it in those areas, but it's usually in the context of some type of challenge where they're really struggling and it's hard.

Laura: Yeah. Oh gosh, You just, you made me think of something as you were talking about that. It's almost as if like once we have a standard or I should like, you should do it this way, that's when kids start bumping up against that feeling of not being good enough or not being able to do it right, and that's such a tender thing.

I know as a parent like we all feel that in ourselves. It's hard to think about our kids feeling that way and I think for many of us our instinct is to be like no, no, no, you're a great drawer, you're so good at sports or you're learning, you're getting better every day. And to kind of move in that kind of I don't know, we want to reassure them, but I think sometimes that comes off as dismissive or downplaying their concerns. Do you have any suggestions for what we can do?

Anjani: Sure. The way that you talk about this is going to be different based on the age group, right? So for adolescents and young adults who are able to abstract, having more logical conversations and being able to kind of use abstract examples to kind of have that discussion about skill level and ability, you know, not equating to value in society or in your household or you know within your the construct of what it means to be successful.

But for younger kids, kind of reiterating the message that it's not about the product, it's about the journey. So if you're doing your best, that is more than good enough. So kind of making sure that we're not invalidating the way that they're feeling because the reality is that there, we cannot all be good at everything all the time and that's something that our kiddos are smart enough to realize and notice that although they might want to be good at everything all the time, it's not possible. Not just for them, but for anybody. So really focusing on this idea that as long as you're trying your best, your best is good enough.

Laura: Yeah, oh and introducing self compassion and self kindness as early as possible, right? You know, for parents who are noticing a lot of negative self-talk in their kids or are experiencing very heightened frustration or angry outbursts when a child is struggling, and they're wanting to get a handle on this and maybe wanting to start doing a little bit of the thought work that can help restructure some of those thoughts.

What are some things that a parent can do at home? I mean obviously I'll put the link to the book that you were mentioning in the show notes. I have a book too that I love for parents of anxious kids, but anyway, what are some of the things that, like where can we start?

Anjani: I think the easiest place and the best bang for your buck because when you're, I was really struggling, individual facetime is really, really important. It’s the fastest way to connect on a personal level and it allows children to not only be seen but also heard as well. So, one of the questions that I often ask families whose kiddos are struggling–having a lot of meltdowns, getting really frustrated, having a lot of outbursts is how much individual facetime are you actually spending with your kid?

And if we really think about one of the promises of therapy when kiddos come into the office and see us for therapy, what are we doing? We're spending complete and total undivided individual attention with the kiddo and they get to share what their day was like, how they're feeling, what's going on in their life. And if you really, really think about that and be really honest with ourselves about that, how often do we give our kids complete and total undivided individual attention? It’s rare.

One of the fastest ways to try to figure out what's going on and help kids feel seen and feel heard is just to sit down and do something–an activity for younger kids. It could be coloring, could be a walk in the park, it could be, you know, washing the dogs together. It could be all sorts of different things. And I think the important thing to remember that it's not a grand, it doesn't have to be a grand gesture.

Kids are very aware of things like financial strain or job stress. They just want to be seen and they just want to be heard and it doesn't take much to do that. Like if you're working and they want to sit down and color on your floor while you do that, great. Perfect.

If you want to go for a walk and just kind of hang out together and you know, what do you see, what are you hear? What are, what are you observing around you and how are you feeling? When you notice these things that make you happy, are always to kind of tap into those three spears to how they're thinking, how they're feeling and it will definitely affect how they behave. So I think that's, that's my one pitch if I can get that across this. If we can spend more individual time with our kiddos, you will get so much bang for your bucks there.

Laura: I think so too. It builds that connection. You know, everybody just wants to be seen and heard and feel like they matter to the people that they love. And it also, I think especially like if you're spending some time in play with them, it helps you get to know them. It helps you get to know what's important to them and what they're thinking about and we have to prioritize it too.

I really do agree with you there, that connection. Especially like if they've been at school all day reconnecting when they come home. And not just over the typical things, I think that sometimes parents try to stack dinner or bath time or reading and use that as their connection time and that's beautiful. But sometimes kids need just 5 or 10 minutes of your undivided attention. It's not a lot.

In other times, the people that I learned from in love, Magda Gerber calls it Wants-Nothing Time where nobody is doing anything other than being together, where you're just dropping into the present moment and they need it. They need that time with us. I love that.

Anjani: And it works. It really works. And what you'll find is it works in adult relationships too. So one of the things that we do in our out of the no phones rule at dinner because we were finding that our phone chime is on and it's like, oh let me check this one email and let me check this one text or let me into this one phone call.

And then with between myself and my husband; we're both very busy, we have full time jobs, we work a lot. We were realizing that we're, the quality time quote unquote that we're supposed to be spending with each other is completely eliminated by the fact that we're letting work invade our personal life. And I think that's also helped–a small example. There are other things that we do too, but small example of the things that I increase connection and just facetime, interpersonal relationships, not just with your children but with your partner as well.

Laura: I think that's so important. That's something that my partner and I when we notice we're getting a little like snippy with each other or feeling a little disconnected, we have a kind of a standard rule of, okay, so when we're noticing that this is going on, that means that our phones go into a drawer at the kids’ bedtime and they don't come out for an hour afterward. And that's, and it just, it takes care of the problem. It's just that one little shift.

I was also reading a study earlier this week where they asked teenagers about how their parents' phone and technology use affected them and what they actually wanted their parents to be doing, and the kids were pretty strong. They opinionated that they did not want their parents on their phones during transition time. So like leaving, picking up from school or during meal times, which was really interesting. Kids feel really strongly about this that they want their parents off their phones. They notice.

Anjani: Yeah. And it's interesting because the behavioral things that you see in younger kids and older kids and teens and young adults, there's a pattern right? There's some want or need that they have that isn't being filled or met in some way. And it causes these behaviors to come out because it's the fastest way to get recognized and seen and hurt.

So what we want to do is try to foster that connection and build those relationships in a more positive way so that we know how to calmly ask for the things that we need because as kids get older, what we want to teach them is you don't have to be in crisis. You don't have to have a meltdown to get your knees yet.

So how can we communicate what it is that we need and what it is that we want in a way that other people are much more likely to respond in a positive way as opposed to a negative way? And that's the whole point is we want our kids to feel connected. We want them to feel seen, we want them to feel heard, we want them to feel loved and know that they have the skills, an ability to ask for the things that they need in a positive way so that their response then in and of itself is positive as opposed to negative.

Laura: Oh, so beautifully sai., I have to tell you, is that I feel like I'm going to take a little tangent for just a moment if it's okay. I work with a lot of families whose kids are working with a psychiatrist and families really struggle to find a psychiatrist who shares that view that you just expressed so beautifully that all behaviors have an underlying need there be communicating.

You said it so beautifully and I, it's rare for me to hear that perspective coming from a medical professional and so I feel like probably people are listening and thinking like how do I get a psychiatrist for my kid like you? Do you have any tips on, that's a big thing trying to figure out who does that take your kid to? Like is there anything that we could be looking for?

I help people find therapists all the time and I have like the inside knowledge of like what the letters behind the names mean and you know what all the little specialty use mean. Do you have any tips for how to find a person who would be aligned with kind of disrespectful parenting approach that you're beautifully discussing?

Anjani: You know it's, that's a good question because I get asked that a lot and it's kind of hard to make a recommendation because of where people are geographically and where certain providers may be licensed.

I have found that people who post psychiatrist specifically with child and adolescent training, seem to be more open to the idea of like a Family Systems Model. It's not to say that adult psychiatrists don't, but we specifically enough training in a Family Systems Model and you don't know what you don't know, right? So if that's not part of your training as an adult psychiatrist, then having that training as a child and adolescent psychiatrist, it just allows for more of an open mind when it comes to family systems and things.

So my recommendation would probably be if you're looking, even if you're looking for somebody who kind of emulates that model. Looking for somebody who has a child and adolescent psychiatry training is really helpful because my whole 13 years of training, that's gotten me to practice as a fully functioning independent provider, I've always been told through that entire journey that if you want to be a good child psychiatrist, you have to be a good adult psychiatrist.

So making sure that you have a strong foundation in adults that you can then use to understand children and when you put those two things together, it kind of comes full both circle. So that would probably be my recommendation.

The other thing is that finding a psychiatrist or any doctor, it's a little bit like trying to figure out what your favorite ice cream is. You may have to try a few people before you kind of align with somebody that you feel comfortable with. And you know that as a therapist, that fit is a really big deal for reasons that are unknown to fit with one provider may not necessarily because for reasons that are beyond anybody's control and that's okay, you don't have to stick with somebody that's not a good fit for you if you don't feel like you align in a way that is helpful as far as moving forward for treatment.

So I've seen personally many patients who have been with the same provider, not just psychiatrist, but primary care doctors as well, pediatricians OB-GYN across the board that they haven't felt really heard them or haven't felt really seen by, sound familiar? Looking to switch journey provider until they find somebody that they really aligned with what they really like, and then everything just go so much smoother when you feel like you can work well together. Because if the relationship is difficult, if it's adversarial and it's not therapeutic, why would I stay?

Laura: Yes. Oh my gosh, thank you for saying that it's so important. Goodness of fit is just, it's so important. And you know, any I'm guessing any doctor any, certainly any therapist who knows their stuff knows how important goodness of fit is and is not going to be offended. They'll help you find like.

Anjani: Exactly

Laura: A good therapist will be like, yeah, it is so important and if it's not here, and we you know, I'm not serving you well, then we gotta find somebody who's right for you. This is, this is not about ego or and if if it is for that therapist, get out and get a different way. You know, if you know, if it's the ego is there, you got to find somebody else because you don't want that. You don't want ego getting in the way of your mental health, your well being.

Anjani: Well. Yeah, this is a conversation. Especially with teens for me, this is a conversation that I find myself having a lot. I generally try to have it with everybody that I've seen in my office that, you know, I'm not necessarily for everybody and that's okay. It's not your fault, it is not my fault. It's just the dynamic for whatever reason, the reasons that will be under control. It's just that's not happening. There isn't a connection and that's okay. What do you feel like you need? And do I know somebody that you know might fit those criteria for you?

So for example, I have a lot of young women who have a history of trauma, who come from male providers, is that I really enjoyed talking to them and seeing them. However, there are things that I want to talk about that I just can't talk about with a male provider, that's okay. So then you know, they go on to meet somebody not necessarily me, but other providers as well that they are much more comfortable with and then that's where the healing process starts. So you have to be comfortable, you have to have a good fit. And if it's not a good fit, there is no shame in moving on and trying to find somebody that is a better fit.

Laura: Yes, and I mean it all circles back to the relationship, right? So just like with our kids, we want our kids to have a good relationship if they have a provider. We want us to have a good relationship, we need that with our kids too. I love that you focused on that so much.

Okay, so yes, the relationship is so important. I do want to give some very practical little like things, a little like many things that parents can do with their kids in the midst of some negative self-talk.

So let's say that kid is drawing and they, you know, they have an idea in their mind of how they want to draw a dragon, for example, my kids are forever drawing dragons, and they didn't turn out right and they've thrown their pencil and just that I can't do it, what do we do?

Anjani: So I think having the discussion about what's happening right now. In that moment, they may not be able to have that discussion. So sitting down and being like well what happened, what's happening right now? And if they're in full meltdown, can pull it together long enough to have that conversation and take a break.

A lot of times, tantrums and behaviors tend to escalate when kids are already feeling overwhelmed, and then when you ask them one more thing is like I can't, I can't do one more thing, you know, stop asking me questions and things like that, you know how it does. So if we need to take a break, take a break.

Redirecting, doing something more fun, making sure that you know, they feel safe, and a lot of times you don't have to say anything, you can just be there. They, you know, I'm really sorry that your drawing didn't turn out the way that you wanted it to but let's try again later when you're feeling a little bit better than you are right now, it's as an example.

Laura: Yeah. And sometimes even just silence, right? Just it, or it didn't turn out the way you wanted it to? Or you had a picture in your mind and your hands can’t get it just right? That's hard. Yeah.

Okay. If you can circle back to it sounds like there's some piece of like getting in touch with reality, like what's really happening, you know, doing a little a few checks maybe of, you know, is it true that you can't draw? Are there never any pictures that you're satisfied with? You know, and doing some reality checking. I find to be helpful with some of my kids. Are there other little like, I don't know, CBT things that are easy to do with our kids?

Anjani: I think that's probably the one that I would go with. That's the one that I can think about the top of my head because it's quick, it's direct and it's in the moment. I think my suggestion would be trying to do things in real-time because in the course of that day, you know, you try to revisit things that make his upset. They may not even remember in that moment what they were upset about. That we kind of lost the opportunity to intervene in a CBT kind of minded approach.

So we want to do things in real-time in a way that's easy to understand and to help bring a sense of relief and ease. If we see that kids are escalating, then we stop or take a break.

Laura: Yeah. And we have to be careful to balance this so that it doesn't mean like they don't feel like we're dismissing their concerns, right? And so one thing that's helpful too I think is adding the word yet to it. Oh, you couldn't get that dragon right yet, you know, or you're working really hard on those pieces and they're just not right yet. You know, putting that in there or you're playing this game and you really wanted to get to that level and you haven't made it yet. So I feel like yet it's a good word. Just Yeah, like that. It's good.

Okay. And then what about with us? We all have negative self-talk that pops in from time to time. When we’re, we find ourselves stuck in the moment and stuck in one of those loops. What are some things that we can do to get ourselves out of it, particularly if we're in a heightened moment with our kids?

You know like today, for example, my kids were mad at me for not letting them crawl through the grass at a dog park that had lots of dog poop in it. You know, heaven forbid, I don't let them crawl through dog poop. You know, I was the bad guy in this scenario. They were really upset with me and in the midst of them being upset and man, like me working with their emotions, I was also upset within myself.

Like there was negative self-talk happening with me, cognitive distortions, things like, you know, I can never do anything right is one that flips through my head a lot that I remember very specifically where I know where that came from in my childhood. So in those moments when, who are flooded with our own thoughts, our kids are also upset. Like what do you have any tips for us?

Anjani: Yeah. You have to find a way to. you have to find a way to calm your nervous system. So we don't think, behave or react very well when we are in a fight or flight kind of mode. Our blood pressure's up, our adrenaline is pumping and we're ready to fight. Yeah.

Finding a way to calm ourselves down whether it's listening to music or taking a quick breath or you know, letting the kiddos sit in the car and then you, you know it’s hot obviously turn on the air conditioning, but take a take up the outside of the, you know.

If you're feeling like the last thing that I can do right now is get in the car with my kids and drive somewhere, then don't. Take a few breaths, grab a sip of water if you have something, and find a way to decrease your heart rate and decrease your blood pressure because you will function much better. You'll interact with your kids much better when you're calm. Nothing good ever happens when we get into discussions or disagreements or arguments when we're already riled up.

I do square breathing, but some people call it box breathing. So if you know, breathing in and then holding it and then breathing out and then holding it, and then just kind of repeating that square until you feel calm and it really helps.

I keep gum in my purse just in case. So if I need something really quick that's tactile to kind of distract me from, you know, whatever it is that's going on, mints work just as well. Making sure that I keep snacks in my purse, it's another thing because I often notice that I'm much shorter with not only with myself but with people that are around me if I'm hungry and also trying to get enough sleep too.

Making sure that we're taking care of ourselves, that we're putting ourselves in the best position to be able to be the best version of ourselves that we can be. Because we often, especially as women, I feel like we put everybody's needs ahead of ours, and then when we start unraveling, that's when things start going to show up in the best way.

And so we have to make sure that we're taking care of ourselves and it all just comes back to getting these feeling seen, feeling heard, feeling loved, being understood. Connection, connection, connection.

And that also means with ourselves, not just with each other as well. If we're feeling disconnected from ourselves, it's really difficult to have loving, caring, meaningful relationships if we're denying that, to our own folks.

Laura: Oh my gosh, I'm so glad that you said that. I think it's so important. The idea that we can cultivate a kind, compassionate inner dialogue with ourselves. You know, I think if we're engaging in negative self-talk, we can't just let it run. You know, cultivating a voice that can talk back to it. Not a cruel voice, not an unkind voice; a nice gentle voice that can slowly kind of be like, is that true?

So like the thought of like, you can't like God, I can't do anything right? Or I'm a terrible mom pops into my head. My like my kind voice is, huh? Yeah. You're feeling bad right now, but is that true? Just like so like, curious and gentle. Is that true? Are you actually a terrible mom? Mm What's the evidence for that? You know? Yeah. Just those little curious questions with yourself are so important.

Anjani: Yeah. And I think also in those moments when you're really feeling not so great is finding the exact opposite of that? So, in that example of how you, like feeling like a terrible mom on the flip side of that, what is something that I did really well today and what went really well today?

It may not have been much if it was a rough day, but what is one thing that you did well. And then a lot of times when we start thinking about the one thing that we did well, we started thinking about the bunch of other things that we did well or the things that went well. Even it's on some days, it doesn't seem like there's a lot. There's always something

Laura: I love that too. And our, you know, our brains really like what we can put them on a search mission and they will find things to confirm, you know what we think about ourselves. So if we're thinking I'm a terrible mom, they will go and find all of the evidence for being a terrible mom. But if we're thinking about, you know, we put them on the, on the job of searching for the evidence that we're a pretty great mom, they can find those things pretty easily. I love that.

That reminds me of a practice that I do with my family. Every day we ask, we go around the table at dinner and we share one thing that we did really well today, one mistake that we made and one way that we were kind to ourselves in the midst of the mistake. I feel like that helps in structuring, I don't even just like the idea that we make mistakes every single day and every single time we do, we can be kind to ourselves, you know, we don't have to beat ourselves up. Yeah.

Anjani: That's great. I love that.

Laura: It's something that my husband and I like if the kids aren’t into it, my husband and I will just do it too. Like we don't make the kids do it, but we certainly model it. I think you know, going back to how what we were talking about at the beginning, I think the way we talk to ourselves is incredibly important and we have to be modeling good self talk to our kids

Anjani: And I hope, and I want to reiterate that if you have an episode of one negative self-talk kind of experience and your kids see that you're not damaging your kids, for like, we do this all the time. It's about severity and it's about frequency.

So what we want to do is model a good positive self-talk and minimize negative self-talk. We want to decrease the severity and decrease the frequency of negative self-talk. If this is something that happens every once in a while, you're not damaging your kids for life, they're not going to pick up this habit and that's the only thing that they're going to be able to do.

It's about modeling the process as well of being kind to yourself. It's not about being 100% perfect. I'm never going to engage in negative self-talk. It's about putting in the effort and showing your kids that we are constantly adapting and overcoming difficult situations and that as adults, we make mistakes too and that we want to try to be better, not just for ourselves, but for our kids and our families too.

So I think that's something to really reiterate because I think unfortunately we often do a lot of parent shaming. Sometimes directly, but mostly indirectly I would say and this feeling of the perfect parent, you know, perfect provider, that it doesn't exist. We all make mistakes. Yeah.

Some days are better than others. And I think, I think that's something I really want to drive home is that when you're doing the best that you can and you're trying and giving it your all is more than enough because there is no such thing as a perfect parent or the perfect provider. A perfect person that doesn't exist.

Laura: It doesn't. And when we make those beautifully human imperfect errors, we get to model something really, really powerful for our kids. We get to circle back and say, you know, you heard me talking to myself earlier and I was not very kind and I sat myself down and we had a little chat about it and you know, next time when something like that happens, I'm going to say x, y and z to myself instead of what I said.

You know you can circle back and model 100%. None of us are perfect, we are all just doing our very best with what we know. And you only know what, you know until you know it, and then when you know better, you can do better, right?

Anjani: Yeah. And I think one of the things that kids are so amazing, that is reminding us that we don't have to be perfect either. I think that's something we, I feel like parents in general spend so much time trying to do everything exactly right, quote-unquote, perfect. Right?

And when you talk to kids, when you interact with kids and you ask them, you know what their idea of a perfect parent is, they'll say the cutest things like somebody who hangs out with me or somebody who reads me a story or somebody that I can tell things to when I'm having a difficult day.

You know, really beautifully human characteristics. And no, no kid that I've ever asked that of has said, you know, I will need my parents to be perfect 100% of the time and do this and do that. They just want you to be there.

Laura: Yeah, that's so powerful. It's so true too. There'sa, kids are so wise and so lovely and so good at being humans. I feel like we've got so much to learn from them.

Anjani: Yeah, they're pretty great and that's why I love my job because I think hanging out with kids all day every day is just such a cool reminder that we are imperfectly perfect.

Laura: Yeah, we're just and we're just fine. Just very wonderful just the way we are good.

Oh well thank you so much for coming on and sharing your wisdom. I want to make sure that people can find you. Can you tell us the name of your website and I'll make sure to put it in the show notes. And are you on social media? Are you on Instagram?

Anjani: Yeah. So my Instagram is @anjaniamladimd and then my website where I do all my blogging and things like that is anjaniamladimd.com.

Laura: Okay, well I'll make sure that's all in the show notes. I'm so, it was such a lovely honor to get to talk to you about all of these things. Thank you so much.

Anjani: Yeah, thank you. That was really fun. I really enjoyed it.

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. 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.

February 01, 2022

Episode 103: Helping Kids with ADHD with Arti Kumar-Jain

February 01, 2022/ Laura Froyen

How are you all doing? I hope the first month of 2022 went well for all of you!

Not too long ago, I released an episode about ADHD and how we can help children who are diagnosed with it. And I know that one episode is not enough to give you all the resources that you need. There is still so much more to learn and apply in our day-to-day routine, especially for those with kids who have it.

And that is why I'm bringing in Arti Kumar-Jain for this week's episode on The Balanced Parent Podcast. She is a parent-child family coach who focuses on providing support through deep empathy, care, and a space.

She will be teaching us:

How to manage our feelings with the ADHD diagnosis

How a child with ADHD wants to be viewed
Tips and strategies to make it easier to establish structure and routine around a child with ADHD (check my blog MORNING ROUTINE CHART for a sample visual routine calendar)

If you are in my BalancingU Membership, you also have access to training with Arti on Childhood Anxiety if you're looking to learn more from her.

And be sure to download my Rhythms Routines & Rituals Workbook to bring more connection, ease, and joy into your life.

To get more support and resources, follow Arti on social media and visit her website.
Instagram: @loveandlight4kidz
Facebook: Love & Light 4 Kidz LLC
Website: www.loveandlight4kidzllc.com

TRANSCRIPT

Laura: Hello, everybody. Welcome back to an episode of The Balanced Parent Podcast. And in this week's episode, we are going to be talking about kids with ADHD And how we as their parents can support them and to have this conversation I'm bringing in my friend and colleague who is the Founding Director of Love and Light for kids, Arti Kumar-Jain. Thank you so much for being here with me. Welcome to the podcast.

Arti: Hi Laura, thanks for having me.

Laura: So tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do.

Arti: Sure. So I am the Founding Director of Loving Life for Kids, which is a business that was started back two years ago to really help in the parent-child family module. But as it's building, I'm adding on a lot of newness to it, which is yoga and mindfulness is a big push right now in our organization. Also trying to make books accessible so I just became an independent consultant with Osborne and books and more so that we can really start helping to get literacy going in different areas.

Laura: Okay, cool. And I know you do a lot of educating uh kind of practitioners on different topics, like you've come into my Balance Parenting Community and given a talk on anxiety, but lots of your work is talking to actual practitioners and how we can support parents whose kids maybe have a new diagnosis, you know, anxiety or OCD Or ADHD and how then you can, the practitioners can help parents support their kids.

So now you get to speak to parents in this context. I'm so excited to have you help us out with this because a lot of, you know, the diagnosis rates for ADHD are going up. They are much higher now in the, during the pandemic. Even the rates of diagnosis have gone up for kiddos.

I want to support parents who are facing this diagnosis with their kiddos. Let's start us out talking about kind of how ADHD can manifest, how it can impact kids and families, and kind of some of the first things parents should do when they are suspecting or figuring out or finding out that their kids maybe have some ADHD going on for them.

Arti: So Laura, I always talk a lot about journaling in different areas, but especially with symptoms of any kind, I encourage parents to keep a journal if they have more than one child. Like almost like a… I don't call, like a medical journal almost, but one that they have all their pediatrician's appointments. They jot down notes they want to discuss with their pediatrician and just ways of writing down the time of day and some of the symptoms that they're seeing.

Those of us who have kind of also done some type of diet or nutrition program know that you're supposed to monitor what you're eating and how much and what time. It's the same thing with behavior. You can have different behaviors at different times and to really figure out like, so for instance, apparent who is seeing something; a seven-day log and they can just see are things happening around the same time.

When are they happening–morning, afternoon, or evening? Because those are going to be things that they're going to take into a mental health provider. Their mental health provider is going to ask one of these happenings during their intake and what ends up happening during an intake is there so many questions and then a parent can feel very overwhelmed.

You may not remember on the site, but if they take this journal and some of their questions, you really feel empowered. And the clinician also really values someone who has taken the time to sit down and reflect on their child's behavior in that lens. It also helps to create a really good systematic program to have. So I really encourage a for the parent to be documenting what they're seeing.

And Laura, the reason why I say in a journal is because then it's all in one place. It's also important to flip back and see what's happening because you know, we talk a lot in the field about antecedent behavior, which is like what happened right before that? Did Johnny have a fight with his sister or was it like Johnny had an explosion because he's hungry, right? Like you can look at all that data for a clinician that's trying to help.

And also back to the relationship with a pediatrician, you really want your pediatrician to be on board and understand. So if you have a well check coming up or even just to do a consult on the phone, you know, you can always call into the nurse’s line and start discussing and they document all of this stuff that's happening and that can go on the chart and the pediatrician can review.

So I highly recommend parents to start using that modality too, where they have things documented so that when they go in for the checkup or they're ready to have someone see them, then they have all this data collection like you were saying.

Very, very important because that is going to be a huge part of how that diagnosis is actually given is to figure out how long has this been happening, right? We typically need six months of behavior to usually classify it being as a disorder that is affecting impairment of functioning.

Laura: Okay. Yeah. And so this is something that I think like it's just good to take just a little pause to talk about here. So I have my Ph.D. in a therapy field, I know how to diagnose things like ADHD and anxiety in kids. And my feelings around diagnoses, lots of parents are nervous for their kids to be a label that they're going to carry with them their whole lives.

And so I just wanted to just give a little framing for how I think about diagnoses. Diagnoses are just helpful information that can give your child access to the services and support that they need and that's really how I feel about diagnoses. That they're not something bad, something that's going to hinder your kid. They're going to give your kids access to support, help them get the support that they need either in school or from you or and get you the support that you need to. How do you feel about diagnoses?

Arti: I mean, to be honest with, I can only imagine because when I used to work in a day treatment program, a lot of our kids did have ADHD, and even on the paperwork, it's hard to see as a clinician, right? But I can't imagine as a parent what it must feel like. But what I want to say to you as a parent is, it does help your whole community come together to provide care.

Because when ADHD diagnosis, right, or a label versus the way that a child who's on the spectrum, right? They're going to have ways of us intervening be different versus a child who actually has oppositional defiant disorder, right? Like, and those are just three classifications many more.

What I'm trying to say is that the interventions are different. I actually give the analogy of we don't treat diabetes. A child who has juvenile diabetes and a child who has basically obesity, let's say, or let's say there's another chronic condition that they have. You don't treat them the same way. The interventions aren't the same, right?

Laura: So, like obesity versus maybe sickle cell disease. Like those two things would be treated completely differently, right? And so a diagnosis can help us understand more about what's going on and meet a child where they are.

Arti: And more in all honesty in 2021, just to let the audience know–clinicians, the community, mental health community, and people at large don't look at mental diagnosis of the brain in the same way. Brain health is becoming the most sought after, looked at, these disorders because they are.

There's something happening neurobiologically in each one of these disorders, right? That the scans show it. Something is impairing functioning for our children and our adults and so this particular time period doesn't have as much shame blame that might have been 10 years ago of the stigma that we do have faced with ADHD.

Laura: This is a great time to be a parent in this way. And it's a beautiful opportunity to teach our children about the loving care that our bodies and brains deserve. Like this is a beautiful opportunity to be like, you've got a brain, you've got a body. We take care of our brains and our bodies. Like we take care of our souls, we take care of our spirits, we take care of our emotional health. This is just part of being human, you know.

And it's a beautiful opportunity to teach a kid young because many of these things and I think probably many parents who are listening right now, who kind of have some thoughts like perhaps I have some ADHD going on, wouldn't it have been so great or like in terms of like anxiety as an example.

I was an anxious kid. No one in my world knew I was anxious. No one thought to think about it. I didn't think about it and I didn't realize it until I was in college that I really had symptoms of anxiety most of my life. Wouldn't have been so great if as a child, someone had seen it and said like, you know, there are things we can do for this, this anxiety is going to be your lifelong friend that's gonna walk alongside you in the same with ADHD.

These things are part of us, they’re there, there are differences in how the brain works and there are things we can do to support and make life easier and more fulfilling and use the special powers that these things give us to our benefit.

Arti: Once there is diagnosis, then I highly always tell the parents to always go ahead and tell their child that they have been diagnosed with this because this is part of their lives, right? I think a lot of times we’re so afraid of telling our children the truth, but then explaining what it looks and what it feels like and how the support is going to happen.

And the mental health clinicians going to do it to write their relationship with that child, but the parent themselves the minute that they say, okay, this is what we're working with and now we know right now. We know what might be causing these meltdowns and these crashes to happen.

For a child to feel like, gosh, because our internal dialogue for that child is, what's wrong with me? Why can't I do anything right? Because they're also the ones who are getting in trouble, right? For not sitting still, fidgeting, doing things in school. So they're getting penalized in all of their domains.

They're also the ones even on a sports team that is getting penalized for oftentimes wandering and not listening to the coach. Then they're getting penalized in their home setting, then they're getting penalized and compared even in the home setting to a different sibling.

So, if you notice there's a lot of negative attention that has occurred for this child all the years up until that diagnosis, ends up happening is there's a sigh of relief to almost no, that, oh, my gosh, I actually. There's a reason that something's happening in my life for me and this diagnosis then for a child and a family can really provide that support that we're talking about.

Laura: Arti, when you said that, I felt my shoulders relax and I think it's not kids and the parents. I can imagine might just have just a sigh like, I'm not a bad kid I just have this going on or, and the parents too. Like I am not a completely ineffective, bad mom. Like it's just I got this going on and now I can learn the new tools that I need to, to support them, right?

Arti: So I had a parent last week. To me, she was sobbing on the phone big different diagnosis. But the fact is, she said for all of these years, I knew something was wrong and I kept telling him, but I wasn't heard and all these years that we've lost from my child has lost and I have lost. And my heart was like, and then Laura, you know where I went? This is happening across this country where we have so many families and so many children that are missing out because these parents inevitably know.

They feel it in their body, they feel it everywhere and that's one message I do want to tell you all as parents listening in–trust the gut. Because that parent gut and especially moms, like there's something that happens in the woman, they're doing that research, you know, like.

Laura: Or even moms where the baby didn't grow in your womb. There's still the gut.

Arti: Moms have the gut, foster moms have the gut because guess what? It's all relational. So yeah, fathers too. Dads know too.

Laura: Absolutely. So I think empowering you to trust your intuition, you know your kid and then advocating for your child too. You know, I think that so often parents are afraid to go into spaces like into a doctor's office or into a school setting where they feel like they're in a one-down position where they are in a position where the other person has more education and more power, but I just want to tell all the parents out there listening, you are the expert in your child. You know what's going on and you have powerful.

This is one of the things that you were talking about journaling, keeping a data journal that will help you feel more empowered, but you know your kid and you can stand up for them and advocate for them

Arti: And lower back to this journal idea, there's something about going in when you are nervous but going into a meeting with a pool or with a doctor, I'm telling you, I have done it myself when I'm feeling really nervous in a setting and I'm the patient or the. I'm telling you, going in with them and what they literally take you more seriously. I have seen it with my own two eyes so that empowerment tool for you, for parents I think is really helpful and it will reduce your own anxiety going in to feel like you're, you know, how to approach the situation.

Laura: Absolutely. Okay, so I want to kind of start, you know, we were talking for a second about kind of, what a child has been thinking. So I wanted to ask you so much of my work is getting into the headspace of a child, thinking about things from the perspective of the child. So I'm curious about, you know, a kid who's maybe just found out that they have ADHD or has been struggling for a long time. How do they want to be viewed? Like how do they want to be treated and viewed as they work through the struggles that are part of having ADHD?

Arti: Great question. I think it goes back to, we were talking about, how they have been so negatively viewed for so long. I think it's the acknowledgment of, every child wants to feel special and they haven't gotten a chance to feel special, right? So it's like the feeling of finally feeling, to be good because they don't feel good. They haven't been made to feel good.

Laura: It just breaks my heart.

Arti: We've talked a lot about behaviors and things that happen but a child who has ADHD gets doubly punished and penalized because they have these moments, right? They have these moments of feeling really almost like understood for a bit when their behavior’s like this. And then when they have some type of like reaction, they literally lose it to throw things. Then they're being penalized.

So it's like for them that child is always a pendulum, right? there. It's never just smooth sailing and very different. That's why we're not bringing up ADD today because these are two very much different ways of diagnosis and so with ADHD it's like a constant when you think of just like an, like literally.

That's where speaking of their love language is hugely important. And what I mean about love languages, like a lot of parents have a hard time. And the children to actually really go back to the basics of even giving that, those gentle like squeezes and hugs. And so I have found, even if you notice, even with your own children, when they have had some type of meltdown, even when they don't want that hug, when you just go behind, just say, I just want to give you a hug to support you and I hope that's okay with you. And even sometimes you will get a gentle acknowledgment by body language. You can literally feel a difference, right?

Laura: You know, you were saying just there. You were, you all can't see us, but Arti was using her hands up and down like making hand-like sound wave motions, you know. And I was thinking about like for all kids have things like that, where they feel the glow of our approval and then the darkness of our disappointment like that happens.

And so wouldn't it be quite lovely if all kids had this just this constant of our love reflected to them that no matter what you do, my love does not go up or down. So I think oftentimes parents think about this from a place of, you know, I want my kids to know that nothing they could do could ever make me love them any less, but they also need to know that nothing you could ever do would make me love you more.

My love is completely unrelated in every way to what you do. I love who you are, you know–so you get an A on your test, great! I'm happy for you, you seem so proud, but I don't love you anymore. You fail your test, uh bad, that must really be hard. I don't love you any less–that our love is constant. There is no wave to our love and it is a straight, solid dependable line. I think that all kids need that.

Arti: Absolutely. You said that all kids need it, especially, imagine what's happening, back to the constant in the ADHD brain, a child who has been, it's like constant, right? Like the right and the left are constantly going and it's actually an amazing thing when you look inside of an ADHD brain like it is amazing, but it's a lot of work.

What's happening is everything's firing all at the same time. So for you, Laura, to bring up the example of just constant love and this domain is really important. And you know, I often tell parents it's a struggle, but even at the end of the night, you can literally tell them at the end of the night and have that conversation with the courageous conversation of saying, you know, I may not have approached you really well when you have that meltdown or oh my God I would have my own feel.

Just be honest and relate after you've had some decompressed time. Use the power of the nighttime or whatever it is for you, but use your time after you've reflected–to have that honest, courageous conversation with your child and a child with ADHD like any child just wants to hear reflective parenting happening because they want to know that it's not always them in the wrong or you know.

Laura: Yeah. Absolutely. So I think this is all very beautiful but let's get really practical. What are some tips and strategies that can make it easier for families who are dealing with an ADHD diagnosis to establish some structure and routines that will help serve their child? So when we think about treating ADHD, there's this kind of classic, we're going to use medication to treat it.

And what I know what research is showing us more and more with most mental health diagnoses is that medication can play a lovely role of, you know, bringing stability but that, you know, other interventions, other supportive therapies really or what kind of take things to the next level.

So regardless of whether a parent has chosen to use medication to kind of even things out or help support their child, what are some things that parents can be doing at home at school to support their kiddos in their diagnosis and their symptoms.

Arti: Let's start with just getting ready for school. Many parents have already probably heard this, but I think we forget at any age, we need to have a visual schedule. And what I mean by visual is one that is designed by the child and the parent. Because oftentimes what ends up happening is we create these things and it's so fabulous and it's using Pinterest and whatnot, but the child's like, they were never included.

Laura: Yeah. So everybody listening, I do have a blog post with a video of my free program you can use to make one of these with your kids and when I made one for my daughter, she just sat beside me at the computer. She helped me pick out all the little icons. We broke down all of her getting ready routine and put it all on there and then printed it out for her. Yes, But so I do, I'll put that in the show notes. Everybody can go and watch that on how to make those routine charts in easy and free and fun way with your kids.

Arti: Laura, that's awesome because it is coming down to making sure that it is done together collaboratively. Otherwise, it turns into, remember this whole thing about this is a diagnosis that the child has gotten, but it is affecting the whole family but you really want to empower your child on how do they present within what's best. So back to creating co-collaboration of everything is really key.

Laura: It's their life. They're going to need these strategies and so we can't just be like, oh, here's a tool for your toolbox and not teach them how to use it. Do we want them to go to college and not be able to manage their class schedule because they've never learned how to sit down and make a plan? No, of course not.

Arti: And Laura, they do this a lot in classrooms but their child is not, they are someone who has the diagnosis of ADHD but it's still mainstream, which is, meaning they're spending a majority of the time still in the regular classroom. I would still tell the parents, go ahead and when you go school shopping, like get those colored highlighters because it's really important. A child who has ADHD, remember they almost, there's so many benefits too because they're right and left brain like I was telling before. It's actually working

Laura: I love talking about these benefits of these diagnoses. There’s benefits for sure.

Arti: There are benefits. It's almost like they have an extrasensory, like they are able to perceive their world like no other, right? Because they're able to take in and it is overwhelming. They're able to take everything. All of their five senses are so heightened. Their five senses are so powerful, but then again, how do we help to bring it in?

So simple example, but colored highlighters. And then because what happens is I had a lot of kids in my, in the classroom that were diagnosed with ADHD but they couldn't process, like break down things because everything was in black ink, right? Or like a pencil. So we literally would create boxes around subjects, right? It even taught me how to be a better teacher because, on our actual agenda grid, I learned how to use colors better.

That's the thing parents, you will learn to be a better parent. I'm telling you hundred percent, you learn to be a better parent when you have a child who has been diagnosed because you’d look at the world through their lens a little more and what you actually will start doing for yourself. Because as I've said, parents become better planners too at times when they start to map out their own days.

Letting them choose what's going to help them. Like we always have found that binders are helpful and even in kindergarten first grade for a child if they're diagnosed because the binder has everything in there. Okay, because otherwise have 20 different notebooks. Like it's just, it's too much to lose.

Laura: Like it's easy, too much to lose to keep track of.

Arti: Too much to lose, too much to sort, remember they're going rapid fire and then looking for things is like causing so much time and they're like you lost them, right? So you want to click with everything. You want to be quick and organized and efficient and actually again a great way to live, right efficiency.

Laura: I think something else too that I know that in the families that I've worked with that are working through an ADHD diagnosis is that even things that seem very simple to us as parents are often very very complex to every child but even more so for a child with ADHD.

So the simple task of brushing your teeth, for example, we think it's just one step–brush your teeth. It is not one step. There's lots of steps in brushing your teeth. And so for a child who's really struggling to get these basic self-care tasks done, sometimes they need to be broken down into very clear and manageable steps–I go into the bathroom. I put toothpaste on my toothbrush. I brush the top teeth. I brush the bottom teeth. I spit. I rinse my toothbrush and I wash out the sink and I put my toothbrush away.

You know, every little step because otherwise like, you know, parents walk in after a child who, you know, a young child or a child with ADHD, she brushes their teeth. There's toothpaste everywhere. There's you know, the toothbrush is on the, you know, in a puddle on the counter like it's, and that's not because they're a bad kid or because they're disorganized, it's just because there's lots of steps. Brushing your teeth is complicated.

Arti: Laura, it's true. Every task has lots of different steps–putting on clothes, buttoning your jeans–and that breakdown of the visual. Because here's the thing, I've noticed that parents after the age of seven or eight feel like the visuals don't need to have. We all do it, we just think that they know automaticity but the fact is for a child with ADHD or any of anyone we actually do need a lot of visuals.

Eighty to ninety percent, remember auditory and visual are huge fields for us, but visual actually is a strong strong suit to help a child to go and just process visually. Even if they can get in the habit you can even tell your child to read it out loud so that we know what is their primary modality.

Remember we have kinesthetic auditory-visual processing all over five, which is their strongest and then once we figure that out, that is the modality that the information is going to be processed for them.

Laura: We can even have things like, you know if we know that they're visual chore or visual kind of task list. If they're auditory, we can set Alexa to know and give it to, you know, put Alexa in the bathroom while brushing teeth. I think that you know like I don't know why I'm stuck on brushing teeth, but it's a very common struggle that I hear about a lot with from parents but for some kids brushing teeth is not stimulating enough. The bathroom isn't a stimulating enough environment, it's not enjoyable and pleasurable to be in there and so, of course, they avoid it, you know. So for many kids, they need a lot of stimulation in order to be able to focus too.

Arti: I'm glad you brought that up about music and Alexa. Even that you said Alexa giving reminders, a big focus now in the ADHD movement is talking about all of these different modalities and music is huge. And so playing, like, using music and you've heard people use music to do homework or whatnot but like it's really important.

The music is actually a real great piece to use with a child who's been diagnosed and then different types of music at different portions. And again, you could create a playlist with your child is what I always say to do because then you get to pick your music up and then if you're picking like something like really heavy hard-hitting music during work time and you can talk about what's really going to be good for your brain and then having a conversation around that.

Laura: And you can teach your kids to check-in too. So okay, so we're listening to the song, you really like the song, where do you feel it? What does it make your body want to do? Like you know what gets moving in your body, you know what, how does this music make you feel and which playlist should this go on? You know, this music is really making your body want to move, maybe this needs to be in our movement break playlist, you know.

And that's process of checking in, figuring out is this supportive of me? How can you support me to meet certain goals versus how would this detract from other goals that I have that checking in, that again is a lifelong process, a skill. We want our kids equipped to be able to do. All right.

Arti: Yes, the schematics. Another quick tip is: they say typically a 5 to 3 ratio, which means five minutes on task, let's say for doing homework and then taking a three-minute break. When I do tell parents that recommendation, I say try it for a week, but then you really have to gauge your child too. They're just giving an example of the 5, 5 on task, like doing our homework and 3 break, but then prepare ahead of time.

What do you want your, does the child want their break to look like because then right, if we're over-stimulating a behavior, doing an over stimulate activity to bring them back. All conversations you can have around it, but I have found that some kids need 10-3, right? Or it just depends. What they have found that 5-3 in the very beginning is a great number to use.

Laura: Yeah, I love this idea too that it's not set in stone and it's your individual child and it's collaborative. And I think sometimes too we need to listen to our kids and not, you know, sometimes it's hard for us to take off our adult lens of what we think learning or engagement or focus should look like and accept what it actually looks like for our kids.

I do a lot of sessions with parents and children where I'm helping the parents learn how to use problem-solving skills with their kids, collaborative problem-solving. Sometimes during those sessions, the parents are so set on your… come your child, you need to sit in front of the camera or the video screen, you need to sit here, we're going to sit here, we're going to it's going to look this certain way this what our idea of what focuses and we've all experienced this in school too.

Like I don't know if you remember this, but growing up, you know, like a good listener, you know, put your listening body on, you know, sitting up straight, feet on the floor. Like I've had some of my best problem-solving conversations with kids who are hanging upside down or the laying upside down on the back of the couch or are jumping on a trampoline. Those have been my best ones. They're so well regulated and such good problem solver.

Arti: And that's so true, Laura, and people can talk about their most creative if you look and that's the other thing I want to bring up. You can do the research with your child to show, like all of these masterminds that we consider masterminds, a lot of them had ADHD or symptoms of it because they basically had what are called overactive, calm, overactive, awesome brains.

Because what's happening is, you're coming up with phenomenal ideas like your example, it's absolutely true. And actually, as an adult, go back and look to when you have the most, best creative points, where are they happening? You know, are they happening in the middle of the night? I mean right, like are you literally sitting at your desk and you have the magical idea of how you're, of what you're going to present at your meeting. Like

Laura: Normally my mind comes when I'm sleeping. Like I wake up and like

Arti: Yes. If you talk to most parents and most adults and kids who we, that's a whole different discussion about reflective sleep for ADHD, what their sleep looks like because they have some really, they can actually sometimes vividly dream in a whole different way too.

Laura: Oh my gosh, ADHD sounds really cool. I really like the way that you think about it. You're, you all can't see her but her face just kind of lights up when she talks about how cool it is.

Arti: Because I have seen kids who have it when you approach it the right way and it's like any child. When every child gets a chance to be approached the right way by their family, by their community, by all the systems and also for those who have siblings. For the sibling to understand what's happening, can completely change the relationship between siblings too.

Laura: Yeah, I love that. You know, we're kind of wrapping up here, but are there last tips or advice for parents with more than one kid with siblings?

Arti: This is very hard for all of us to remember and I say us because when you do have more than one, the natural inclination is to compare. You have to literally turn, you literally have to have conversations with yourself about comparison shopping. It’s not a Walmart versus Target discussion. These are children. And if you get into that mindset, you have to literally develop a phrase, like stop talk to yourself. We talk to ourselves all the time. Come up with a dialogue and find out why are you comparing. Is it because your own anxiety is so high right now? Because you're really having a hard time dealing with your child? Okay, step back. Reflect.

With siblings, I used to love bibliotherapy There's some books out there for relationships and helping children in the sibling relationship, but I just say authentically just need to be really authentic with your own feelings and then the child, that the sibling also for them to have time with you to process their feelings because it's hugely important for them to have a space, those are going through a lot of themselves.

Laura: I so agree. I think having an environment of equity in your home too, as opposed to fairness. Lots of kids want things to be fair but when you have a kid who has some differences, things won't be fair. And so, you know, that is a situation that plays out a little bit in our house. My oldest has some differences from sensory needs and just needs a different approach at times.

And in our house, the culture is, everybody gets what they need and people need different things at different times. And so, you know, right now, this kiddo needs this and right, you know, some other time, this other kiddo might need this and it's not about comparison, but it's about recognizing the individual needs of each child and meeting each child where they are and each kid gets what I need.

Thank you so much for helping me with this conversation. I really, really appreciate it so much. Where can everybody go and find you and learn more?

Arti: Sure. So www.loveandlight4kidzlc.com

Laura: Yeah, I'll have that in the show notes to the link for that.

Arti: Yeah. And just remember at the end of the day, I always say if you lie at your, if you can lie down at the end of the day and know that you tried your best, it's a good day.

And if you have the time where you really are like, what could I have done differently? Then just reflect on that and try again, that's all.

Laura: Oh, I love that. Yes. A last little note of compassion and you know what, like even if it was a really hard day and you made lots of mistakes, you still likely were doing your very best in those moments with what you had at that time.

And so like no matter what, just like your love for your child is this constant line, this constant immovable line, so should your compassion for yourself. Your compassion for yourself should not be dependent on what you do, but dependent simply on your humanity. Love that. Thank you for that reminder.

Arti: We needed it to have a conversation about all of this forever. But just you just take a bit by bit, step by step and just love on your child. That's it.

Laura: Well, thank you so much for being with us today. We so appreciate it.

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. 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.

January 25, 2022

Episode 102: How to Heal Our Own Wounds with Sonnet and Veronica

January 25, 2022/ Laura Froyen

One of my biggest fears as a parent is that I will pass down hurts, wounds, fears, and thought & behavioral patterns that have not served me well. That through my own unconsciousness and wounding that I will hurt my child in the same way that I was hurt. That they will worry about their worth. That they will struggle with not feeling good enough. That they will feel pressure to be anything other than the imperfect beings they are.

In the beginning I thought I could just study and muscle my way through this. That if I just read enough and applied what I learned that I would be fine. So I read allllll the books. I took diligent notes in my grad classes. I memorized the phases, did the workbooks, did all the things. And still.... (You know where this is going right??)

There were (and still are!) moments where all of that went out the window and my parents' voice fell from my mouth, with the very words I swore to myself that I would NEVER say to my kids. It was like watching a train wreck in slow motion. I knew it wasn't how I wanted to show up, and yet, it felt unstoppable.

I know I'm not alone in this experience, right? If this happens for you, I'd love to hear from you, right now! I can't respond to everyone, but the act of telling your story, writing it down, saying ME TOO! Can help you feel not so alone, like we are in this together.

And while I can't give you all the answers in this email (I don't even have them all!) I CAN tell you what has helped me so much: Understanding that each an every time I get triggered, my brain and body are offering me an opportunity for my own healing. And it is only through attending to my OWN wounds, that I have any hope of not passing them down to my children.

This is at the heart of healing through our parenting. Our kids crack us open and shine a light on all of the healing we have to do, and it is up to us to head that call. We will absolutely make mistakes, and I know you may not want to hear it, but your kids likely WILL have their own work to do when they are grown up. But if you are with me in this journey, and I think you are, they at the very least won't have the SAME work, right? Because we will have done ours. That's all we can do. And it's enough.

And that is what we are going to focus on in this week's episode! I am so excited to introduce you to Sonnet and Veronica of Raising Children You Like and Conscious Mommy (two of my favorite Instagram accounts!). They are two friends who became mamas and started their motherhood journey together. Their mission is to help parents deepen their connection with their children by understanding their underlying needs and healing their old wounds in the process. And that's what they are going to bring in this conversation.

Here is a summary of our discussion:

The inner work we need to do as parents
How to heal from our past wounds and not pass it to our children
How to raise a child with empathy, resilience, and compassion

To get more support and resources, follow Raising Children You like (@raisingchildrenyoulike) and Conscious Mommy (@consciousmommy) on Instagram.

TRANSCRIPT

Laura: Hello everybody, this is Dr. Laura Froyen and on this episode of The Balance Parent Podcast, we are going to be digging in to how the powerful and important work of healing your own wounds actually happens so that you can parent from a place of confidence and that's fully healed and not pass on your wounds, your stuff to your kids.

And to have this conversation with me. I brought in the creators of one of my favorite Instagram accounts,Raising Children You Like and the host of a beautiful podcast, Not Your Mother's Podcast. So we have a Sonnet and Veronica here and I'm gonna let them introduce themselves to you. Why don't you tell me a little bit more about who you are and what you do? And then we're going to dive into that good old wound healing stuff.

Sonnet: Thanks for having us. We're so excited. This is Sonnet and I'm one third of Raising Children You Like with Veronica and Brianna Kappa. And we started our podcast, Veronica and I, Not Your Mother's Podcast on a search to find the answers to the things that people weren't talking about.

We became new moms together and we just kept having this question of like why isn't anybody talking about this? Why isn't anybody talking about this? Why isn't anybody talking about this?

We sought out the experts and the people who were talking about it and we started interviewing them and asking them like actionable questions like what can we do to change this? What can we do to shift this in our life or you know, really give our listeners an action plan as well as ourselves.

And so one of our guests was Brianna Kappa and I was also taking a mommy and me class with her. She's a life marriage family therapist and infant mental health specialist and she just was talking about things that resounded so deeply to us, both of our background is in digital marketing and I'm a singer and songwriter also and she, we were like, let's create something together.

So toddler parenting course and platform to help support parents, everything from tantrums and discipline without yelling to really identifying and understanding the inner work that has to happen kind of in tandem with handling our children because we see our triggers come up and we often put those on our children. And what we want to do is examine them and look at them and heal them ourselves so we don't pass those on to our children.

Veronica: Yeah, it was great. And also just to add to it a little bit too is like, you know when you become a toddler parent, you start realizing, like, you know, you go onto Instagram and you start getting all these scripts and all these hacks and like, oh, you know what to say and you know how to say it. And because in the beginning you don't know what you're saying, you're like they're hitting and like, I don't know how to stop the hitting or I don't know what to say when they're having a meltdown and I don't want to and you're trying to be mindful, right?

Like there's like this whole like conscious parenting movement happening, but like what does that even mean? And so what we kept running into is that we kept saying the right things, but we were still upset about the behavior. So like how we were showing up was changing, but the inside of us wasn't changing. We were still upset, we were still triggered, we were still feeling like there is some more work to do.

And that's ultimately like why Raising Children You Like is much more different than a lot of the parenting courses out there because we go beyond the behavior and really identify and meet our own needs so we can not pass that down to our children.

Laura: Absolutely, I really do love and appreciate that. I think that there's almost these parallel tracks, right? So when you are first learning how to show up differently with your kids, parent differently, that's different than what you're seeing, different than what you experience, you do need some scripts.

But ultimately, I know for the folks that I work with, I don't want needing me to tell them what to do and say. I want them being able to tune in, turn inward, check with their inner compass and their inner wisdom and be confident that what they are choosing, they are actively and consciously choosing to do in their parenting is in alignment with what they truly believe and what they, with their core values and their goals for their kids.

And you can't do that if you haven't done the inner work because if you were checking in with yourself and you're checking in with all those wounds and you're reacting out of fears and worries and and hurt, then you can’t always trust yourself. You know what I mean?

Veronica: Yeah. Gosh, it's such a great way of putting it. If you check in with yourself and you check in with all your wounds, then you're getting the wrong answers because you're thinking like, well, it's my child's job to change here because you're checking in with an old limiting belief that says children should be, for example, like children should be, should obey at all times or like my child is out of control because they are crying and I need to get them to stop crying because they should be seen and not heard.

And so we get so triggered by this behavior and when we check-in, we think, well that's because they should be seen and not hurt. But when we dig a little bit deeper and we're like, why do we think that? Well, why are we so uncomfortable with my child having big emotions? You know, it's one thing to say, I don't like the behavior of hitting. It's not okay to hit, but it's okay to be upset. It's okay to be mad. It's okay to be sad. Why are we not making space for that?

And so when we look at what is coming up for us, it's hard to examine that. It's hard to look underneath and say, oh, maybe that's a false narrative there and really I wasn't given space as a child to have a big emotion or I wasn't taught that it's okay to take up space and be loud or ask questions.

And so how do I reframe that and rework that dialogue in my mind so that I can start making space and showing up for my child so that I can set the limit in a healthy way. Yes, we don't hit, but show me your anger in another way. Like let's talk about why you're mad or let's figure out another way to work through that rather than just shut it down.

Sonnet: And also just like teaching acceptance of all the feelings. Like it's okay to be angry. It's not okay to hit our bodies. You know, if you need some space and you can have some bubble space and also like teaching them that they don't have to be alone with their feelings. You know, we were all raised to be, go into your room and come out when you're ready because that message is, is like I can't handle your emotions so you need to go deal with these big scary feelings on your own.

And that's the way society is, right? Like we favor prisons over schools. Like you can just tell by the funding like follow the dollars. People would much rather just be put away than to actually teach them how we want them to be in society.

And that was another thing is like consequences, like, children need consequences. That's how they're going to learn, but it's like, well no, they learn by telling them what you expect. Like they're new to the world, you're just saying negative things like don't do this, don't do that. Like you're telling them what you don't want. And so they're kind of like, okay, well what do you want? You know, you're not telling me what you want and and so like what we love about this work is the reparenting process can happen in any relationship, right?

Like this is just human relationships. We're just seeing it from a parent-child perspectives with specifically toddlers and so it's applicable with so many people, but it's just great to see it from on the smaller scale of like children and parents because like that's where we're, that's where we're at, you know. And that's and if we can get them in this transformational time, we're really setting the foundation for when they do have bigger feelings and they do have bigger problems. They have the tools to know how to like check in with themselves and also like trust that a parent is going to be there and understand where they are emotionally.

Laura: I love that. I really do believe that our kids are really good at showing us where we have work to do. I think that sometimes in the conscious parenting world, it gets put on kids a lot like that they, you know that our kids are triggering us or that it's their job to be our teachers.

Like I feel like I hear that a lot that it's that our kids are our greatest teachers and sometimes it puts up to me too much responsibility on the child. The child is just being a child, they're just being themselves and when them and their selfness and their toddler -iness and their two -ness, or their three -ness, wakes stuff up inside of us or shines a light, you know, onto a shadowy bit for ourselves, or part of ourselves that we've cut off for the world has told us isn't lovable or acceptable.

It's not their job to shine that light, they just do. And it's our job to recognize when that's happening like in the moment and heed that call. Heed that call to healing that they are calling us to. You know what I mean?

Veronica: I love what you're saying.

Laura: Okay. And so then if that's, let's say we've got a toddler who triggers us all over the place, who's waking us up, showing us all of our shadowy bits, what do we do in that moment?

Veronica: I mean the first thing to do is just that awareness where we start getting, we take a moment, you take a breath, you get back into your body, you're like, okay, I'm being triggered right now because we often just react and we're not even aware that we are triggered.

We're just like I need to react to my child and start yelling, I start limit setting, I start telling them can't do rather than take a moment and and acknowledged and become aware that I'm being triggered right now by my child's behavior. And then start seeing how that feels in the body, and start bringing yourself back into your body. So we tend to leave our bodies in those experiences because we are feeling either like tiger mode, flight flight for free.

It's like our toddler is sending us into this experience where we all of a sudden have to fight tigers and we remind ourselves, one of the biggest things that helps me in my moments. It's just reminding myself my child is not a tiger. My child is a three year old toddler who is having her experience in the world and I can handle this and I can examine where I show up here.

So finding that self regulation. It starts with just getting back into your body and then we have some breathing exercises to help if you need to take a break if you have older children or your children are safe place and you can say, I see that you really need my help right now, mommy needs to go calm her body for a second. I'll be right back.

If your children are safe and you can leave. It is okay to step outside for a second and take a breath, come back and then you can lead in with behavior shifting the behavior, speaking to that, acknowledging their emotions, all of the things that we can go into more detail. But that first step is to just become aware that you're being triggered and to regulate your body and then handle the behavior once you're handled and then you start identifying. Later, you reflect. Why was I triggered? Why does that behavior, how come every time my child hits me or screams, I feel triggered?What is it about that behavior?

And in our course; we have a two part course. The second part takes the list, the audience member through identifying your triggers and undoing the work. Like where did it come from? How can I restructure it? What are those blocks there? Because most of the time they're there because it served a purpose in our life at some point, we'll mechanism, and it no longer is and it's something we don't pass on to our child as a surviving mechanism.

So how can we restructure it? Take down that block and build a bridge between ourselves and that child so that we have a connection rather than just like a, a wall where we no longer are connecting to our child. So we really take you through the work of that. Take you through building and creating boundaries with our whole set and hold method.

It starts with that moment of becoming aware, taking you out of the reaction and into the responding net from their growth

Sonnet: And that's the preventative piece, right? Like in order for you to access regulation, it's you you practice it when you are regulated and you practice it when you're not heated and you practice like the your self care. And we talk about self care so much, but it's not just like getting your nails and your hair done. It's like truly knowing that you're worth as a person deserves minutes to yourselves like throughout the day because a lot of times it's hard.

It's hard to put down the to-do list. It's hard to put down the expectations that we put on ourselves, that our partners put on ourselves, that our children put on ourselves. And it's like if you truly truly don't have the capacity to hold for others, like you're going to fall apart.

You're going to have those ruptured moments, you're going to feel guilty for not responding in the way that you knew that you like you knew how to but you didn't have the band with and you know. It's like all these pieces really come from a preventative standpoint.

So it's really about like just getting even together with your parenting partner--if you have one--weekly just to kind of talk about like the things that worked, the things that didn't, and then both of you scheduling some time to yourselves to do the things that you enjoy doing before you were a parent that bring you back to that whole person that you were before you just poured yourself into your children.

Because not only do you does that create the space for you to actually parent from a place of where you intend to, but it also models to them, like what it's like to be a whole person, like a true happy person that has all these areas in their life that are lit up with the things that make you passionate, that make you you, that make you unique, that make you interesting. You know, if you drop those things, it's not good.

Veronica: It's so exhausting to do that.

Laura: Totally is. It's so exhausting and we want to be modeling for our kids, right? So, I think one of the things I love about what the conversation that we're having is because we're talking about enacting in our generational change, right? So we are showing up differently in the moment with our kids than how we were shown up with, right?

So we are not using punitive measures. We're talking about connecting first. We're talking about guiding--discipline as guidance and teaching as opposed to punishment and consequences. So we're showing up differently so that they don't have things to unlearn. But we're also modeling just a more full, vibrant and fulfilling life too at the same time, and that's an important aspect that I think it's overlooked, like on the conscious parenting side of things.

This type of parenting that we're talking about, you know that you talk about on your podcast and I talked about a lot, it's more effortful. We have to be taking even more care of ourselves in order to be able to do it well, you know, to widen that window of tolerance and increase our capacity to stay calm.

Veronica: Yeah, because it's it's a lot easier just to be dormant, right? It's easier to be unaware. It's easier to react. It's easier to fall asleep at the wheel. But for you to show up consciously and aware that you're doing something and then having the capacity to unlearn and relearn like in the same moment, is so difficult. Because it's a new muscle, you know, but it's like, like any muscle, the more that you practice it, the easier it is to access.

And that's why it's important to do it when you're not triggered because like your best self, like after your period you're like, all right, I'm going to do all this stuff. I have all the energy and then when your period comes, you're like, I have no energy. You know, that's not the time to rebuild. It's the time to like think about all the things that didn't work.

And it's the same with when you're learning new things. It's like when you feel that energy to like propel you forward, like put your best foot forward and do everything that you want. So when it is time for you to access at those moments in the hard times you have that muscle already worked out.

Laura: Yes, I so agree. It's you know, the parenting this way is a marathon, right? Not a sprint and so we need to be training outside of the race.

Sonnet: I love what you said also just that, it is full on and we have to model the behavior ourselves, but we are raising ourselves in a new way and we get to show up for our children, but we're being such better people, you know, really healing our own wounds by digging into that work and not that you're not a better person if you don't do it, but you know, we're just pushing up against our edges to just keep growing and that's the kind of work that always lights me up. You know, it always is just like what else are we doing if we're not digging into that? So yes, it is more involved and it does require us getting uncomfortable.

But through that modeling of behavior, we are like, I just read something the other day that said, you know, I'm going to love my summer body because my daughter is watching and so we're all changing our narrative around just loving our bodies because we realize that our children have been watching just like we watched our children in this time we watched our parents and this generation, we're going to change that so that we have a different dialogue that's happening.

And that's just one of the very many aspects that we model the behavior, but you see how it it truly makes us happier and more round when we can increase that window of understanding.

And what I'm trying to say is just that we also benefit from it. You know, just as much as our Children do and as much as they get the skills of processing their emotions and don't take on our baggage, we are benefiting from this work as well because we are healing and showing up motivated to show up more whole.

Laura: Yeah. Sonnet, I think you're bringing up a really important point. I think so often for parents, in order to convince them to do this work, we have to convince them that it's good for their kids. They really won't do it for themselves. If we tell them like it's good for your kids, they'll do it. But I think you are really highlighting like it's good for your kids because it's good for you and it's okay also to do things that are just good--for you for the sole purpose that it's good for you.

I really like makeup and stuff. I have these really fancy nails on right now. You know, it brings me joy. These are solely for me, not like me and then they like what they cost, you know, it's like those little like gel strips that you can put on like 10 bucks that it costs a lot of money, and it but it was my time. It was my enjoyment. It was thinking about how they are looking when the sun catches the light on. You know, when they glitter catches the light of the sun on them, they bring me a little bit of joy. That's for me.

And it is so important to do those things. Not like and for people to know for people to hear like it's okay. Like that's not selfish. And yes, it does benefit your kids. Yes, my daughters are watching me do things just for my pleasure, just for my joy. They are watching and they're learning how to be a mom. They're learning how to be a woman. They're learning about their worthiness. And even if they weren't, I would still be worthy a little piece of joy, a little spot of pleasure in my life. Even if they weren't watching.

Veronica: I love that.

Laura: I mean that was your point. That's what you were saying, that like I really do think that, like we often do have to convince parents to do this work to invest in their growth for their kids. But really at the end of the day, you're worth it all on your own. I really appreciate that you bring that message forward.

Sonnet: I also am motivated by like tell me it's good for my kids and I'll get in there. You know, it's like the biggest motivating factor, but then when you get in there and you're like this is hard. You're like okay, but I deserve to be here too. Like, you know, this whole process is bringing something for all of us to the table.

Veronica: Well, even like when you are in that reflective time and you're thinking about why you respond to the way that you did or you know where these triggers are coming from, you visit those old wounds, right?

Like my mom, I grew up with a depressed mom. My dad died when I was four and I kept finding myself like when I fall asleep at the wheel, like, I find myself being like a depressed person and I'm just I'm not naturally, but like when it comes to parenting, like I found myself like with my eyebrows furrowed and kind of just like not as excited and not as spunky as I consider myself to be. And it was like I was replaying this like old tape of like moms are depressed, you know, like my my mom was depressed, so that means maybe I'm going to be a depressed mother.

And so it's not like until I really start examining that, like, oh wow, like I'm just passing that down unconsciously like I'm just not even thinking about what I'm doing or how I'm showing up because I'm playing this old narrative and that's where you know my worthiness comes in like no, I deserve to be a happy mother.

I deserve to be the mom that I know that I can be. I deserve to heal my--the pain of my own childhood and I get to be a mom and be able to write my own narrative because I can take the pieces from my past and build something new. I don't have to just carry the entire load.

Laura: Yes. And also, how? I know that there are people here who are listening right now who are like, yes, yes, this is like, and how do we do it? Like, so what, what does that look like in practice on a daily basis? I know that you both have toddlers. How old are your kids these days?

Sonnet: I have a two and a three year old.

Laura: You're in it, you are in it. Yes, I started working with parents when my kids were three and one and yeah, you know, they're eight and six now and I mean it's a different lot, you know, and the work looks different now with older kids. But for you two, what does that look like in the moment on a daily basis? What does healing old wounds actually look like? What does that mean?

Veronica: For me it's creating pockets in the day of like self worthiness and self acceptance. So like every morning, I wake up and I just start with gratitude. So it's like, I'm not, I'm already filling it up right? I'm just thankful.

Like if I wake up cranky, I just start with the little things like thank you for a roof over my head, food on the table, a healthy family. And kind of that kind of just gets the ball rolling and then I'll do a five minute meditation and then I'll journal just like any thoughts like good, bad ugly, like whatever they are just journal and then I work out because I need to because I'm just so crazy if I know if I don't work out.

And then like throughout the day I just, you know, I do everything that I need to get done, but when the girls are taking a bath, I'll give myself a facial massage and I'll tell myself like, I appreciate everything that I want to hear. Like everything that I expect like my partner to say or like things like that.

Like I would say like I appreciate you for making dinner today and doing the dishes immediately after and not, you know, not making another task for yourself. And I appreciate that you're so thoughtful of you with your friends and I'm so happy for you that you called your relative because you've been thinking about them and you actually took action.

So like I say all these things to myself that I want other people that I think that I expect other people to tell me like how they appreciate me and how like how I'm showing up and while I massage my face because I have a lot--my go to is anger when it comes to, like, being triggered.

And so I have a lot of stress in my jaw or my eyebrows get furrowed. So I kind of just like, bring attention to those spaces and kind of just like, massage them out and then give myself, like, a body massage and really just, like, words of affirmation. Just saying, like, I'm so proud of you for taking care of yourself, you know, and things like that, because it's all preventative. It's like the preventative piece.

Laura: But Veronica, what you're talking about is meeting your own emotional needs. So often we all, like, most of us grew up in a home where we were responsible for other people's emotional needs. And we never we had no one modeling the healthy aspect of taking responsibility for your own emotional needs.

And that's what you're doing. You're saying I need affirmation. I need to be shown appreciation and I, why put that in someone else's hands who I have no control over when I can offer that to myself? And it can feel good and I can believe it and it's soothing to me. That's beautiful. Thank you for sharing that with us. And modeling that for all of us. That's beautiful.

Veronica: Yeah, that's been probably the most transformative thing of it all because my expectations are just put on myself and I get to meet the need knowing that what I seek when I'm doing like attention-seeking behavior like good or bad. It's because I'm just like looking to be acknowledged and so now I can just acknowledge myself.

Laura: With that also does so like I can't help but take my marriage and family therapy lens. You know--that's one of the places where my background is. That also helps you have more authentic and grounded relationships with other people.

Because if we're looking for other people to meet those needs and we're not communicating those needs very clearly to them. If it's kind of just simmering under the surface, that's where resentment builds. That's where we start doing love tests; where we're saying like if they really loved me, they would know what I needed to hear them. They would know.

And it puts a lot of burden on relationships and by meeting your needs yourself. You are unburdening the other relationships in your life. It’s beautiful. Yeah, that's so true. Yeah, that's so true. What about for you, Sonnet?

Sonnet: One of the aspects for me has just been, I've spent a lot of time looking at my triggers or where, where things get sticky for me and for me it was around boundary work. Around holding boundaries for my child and also modeling healthy boundaries in my behavior and when I started kind of uncovering it, I kept coming up against this idea that like having setting boundaries meant that I didn't love them or that I was showing them that I didn't love you because I'm not just, I'm being too firm or that's how I am with other people by saying yes to everything.

So by really holding this container and what does that look like and being super clear this is what I need. And the more that I dug into it, the more I really was able to see. Like it's not just about the boundaries; it's about this messaging that somewhere along the way I was taught that just be a good girl and say yes and be like that's what, that's where you get your compliments, that's where you get your self worth, that's where people say, oh you're doing such a great job, you're such a good girl.

And so reprogramming that messaging, they're saying I am enough. Like I am worthy of the things that I need and if I need to take that time to give to myself, like I it's I'm worthy of that. By setting this boundary, it shows up not just in boundary work because that's like a big undercurrent that just really shows up in a lot of places.

But for boundaries, it's very clear because I'm working with the toddler and I need to set some boundaries and I need to hold those boundaries and I need to model to her what boundaries look like.

So that was like the first indicator and as I kept going deeper, I started seeing, you know, really like, my place was like you mentioned, you know, a lot of us were from that parentification place where I really took care of my parents or my mom and didn't have a dad.

And so how can I repair it myself now so that I can have that space and that understanding? And that it's not just about being a good girl and a yes, and you know, that boundaries actually mean I love you and that boundaries mean I care and that I can hold from boundaries and that I'm not my mother, you know?

So just all of that work comes up as used to keep digging and like, I'm sure I'm going to get two more layers, you know, next week. So it's not just like you're just healed. It's like you're healing as you're parenting your child and like, you guys are both doing this together and you don't just get to the end. You just keep going and you can’t keep them anymore.

Veronica: There is no end.

Sonnet: Yeah. Yeah, there's some reason in your mind, you're like, okay, I'm going to get this down and then we're going to be good. But then you're like, whoa, there's more there. That's so interesting. Again that, like, self affirmation really helps to and just becoming aware of the identifying like, oh, this is where I need to pause.

That pause is so big because it's like, oh, don't react. Pause. What's happening for me? What's going on in my body right now? Like what does the boundary sound like? What would a healthy boundary sound like here? Do I need to say, let me get back to you on that so that I can figure out what that healthy boundary looks like, you know, and then get back to that person and that's my,

Laura: What are my work is? What are my fears? Yeah. Okay. I know you all know this, but I love talking about reparenting. I think it's one of the most beautiful things we can do. I love the idea that we are growing up alongside our kids.

I hear from parents a lot that they wish that they had done this work before they were parents and I honestly don't, I mean, I think you can do some work before you’re a parent. But I really don't know that you can do the level of work that we're talking about until you have your partner-- your child there--to show you where the work is.

You know, I just don't think you can. I think it's I mean, I think you can do some, I think you can certainly be. I wish I had been more prepared for the level of work that I had to do. You know, but I do think our kids are really, really good at, you know, as they are growing up, you know, and I don't know about you, but I have found that at each age for my kids, they have shown me little parts of myself that have been wondering like, am I lovable? Am I worthy? I don't know.

So in the reparenting work, I I'm like reparenting myself at the ages that my kids are, you know. So especially like my just turned six year old and my eight year old, you know, they are at these ages, like a lot of my stuff, my work is at those ages for myself. And what's beautiful about reparenting is that your inner children, they don't know that you're grown up. They just feel like hurting six year old or hurting three year old, you know, that's all they vary.

The subconscious is very interesting in that way. I do have a question for you all. One thing that I get asked a lot by parents is how to do this work if you don't have specific memories from your childhood, like if you really don't remember what happened. You know it wasn't that great or you know, or maybe you have a general feeling of like it was a kind of a normal childhood, there wasn't anything really bad, but you don't have any specifics. Can you, do you feel like you can do this work, this healing work?

Sonnet: Yeah, because it starts with questions. So you just ask like why don't I have memories? And then like take the pause and then really just kind of like sit with that question until the answer comes because the answers do come, like your subconscious does show up eventually, but you have to ask the questions for you to be able to get the answer.

So I would say like if you're having blocked memories because it all lives in your body right? Like the body keeps the score. Like it's it's not gone forever, it's just gone for right now. And so if you just ask yourself, like I wonder what why I blocked that out of my memory and then just kind of sit with it and then just keep asking yourself and the answer will come and you just have to be ready for--you have to be ready for the answer because it's going to come and be like oh that's why that's why.

Veronica: We have this workbook that accompanies the part two of the course. So you go on a journey of exploring and asking these. We set it up so that it's like these progressive questions that you ask and explore and take that you know so little by little. It's not just maybe you're going to find the memory and it's just going to hit you. It might be like you just remember a feeling or then you you don't even have to be like, well I remember in fourth grade this exact thing happened.

It just might be all of a sudden you feel, you know, it starts unraveling and it might not be a specific memory, but then you start realizing like how you felt. Like I didn't feel safe as a child because I wasn't allowed to express my emotions and that might be what comes up for you. Or I was always put on time out or my mom always was mad when I got sad or just these kind of things might come up for you as you work through the workbook.

And so you don't even have to have like a clear memory of exactly when it happened as things start coming up for you and you start understanding what the messages are that you were receiving as a child. You start unraveling it.

Laura: I absolutely agree. And I think too, like some, some folks are justifiably nervous to dig up old memories. Too traumatic memories. And so I really do think like, we can, we can work on the this all in the here now--in the present moment.

What is the story that's here and now? And I think too, like, you know, for a lot of my own personal work, it's very vague. Somewhere along the way, I got the idea that you know, somewhere along the way, I got the message that I, you know, needed to be high achieving in order to have people approve of me. You know, or somewhere along the way, I got the, you know, the idea that if I make a mistake, it makes me unworthy of love. You know, just like those are the script that are there.

We don't have to, I mean most of the time it's not just one instance anyway. It was a pattern of responses that we got a feedback we got from the world.

Veronica: Yeah, exactly, exactly. So I love just putting it back into the here and now where it doesn't feel this like scary. I have to identify like what happened in my life, but it's more of just like separating yourself from the messages that you've internalized as who you are and what you believe in saying.

But do I believe this? Like taking this out and saying that is, does this still serve me? Can I reshape this messaging that I have to be high achieving to be worthy, to be appreciated or can I change that? Do I want to hold on to that as or you know, just like taking out these messages and the here and now. I love that. And really identifying what are those because they're so close to us that we just have internalized them as who we are.

Laura: And our kids just happen to show us-- where they show us where those messages are.

Okay, so if people want to learn more from you and start diving into this work, where can they go to find out about this?

Veronica: Well you can always come over to our Instagram page. We share lots of free content. There are lots of tips, lots of information around all of this, and then our two-part parenting course, I believe you're going to have on your show notes.

So find out the link to it there and everything that you--the link will take you to a page that gives you some video ideas so you'll get little snippets of the course. You'll get to really see, try it on, see if it works for you. All the modules are there, all the information. I'm happy to talk about it here too, but that link will take you there to really dive in and digest if it's a good if it's a good fit for you and your parenting.

Laura: Beautiful. Thank you so much. Any last little things that you would like, that you really want the parents listening to know from either of you? Any last little

Veronica: I think just by being a listener of your podcast, you're already doing a great job. You're already a great parent, you know, just for you to be open to just listening to these conversations is enough to get you on the path. If you feel overwhelmed of like how to get started, the awareness piece is always the hardest because that's what prompts the action. So you're doing great.

Sonnet: Yeah. And I would just add to that just that our children--we’re exactly what our children need. So our journey alongside of them is exactly what they need and exactly what we need and I truly believe that our children--we have everything that they need for us and we're learning alongside of them.

Laura: Those are two beautiful perspectives to end with things.

Veronica: And it's and it's also it's never too late. It's never too late to start. You can always repair. You can always repair as long as you repair any mishaps that have happened like as long as you repair, you take responsibility for your part. Like that's all children need. They are very forgiving and they're more than willing to cooperate and so just always remember that.

Laura: Beautiful. Thank you so much you two. I really appreciate your time and your expertise. You're a gift to this world.

Sonnet: Thank you for having us.

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. 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.

January 18, 2022

Episode 101: Helping Kids Simplify for Better Quality Play with Allie Casazza

January 18, 2022/ Laura Froyen

Last November, I released an episode about how to move from the feeling of overwhelm to simplicity with intention and grace with Allie Casazza. And I heard from so many of you how much it resonated and helped you (I love it when that happens!).Thank you for sharing your experiences with me and how decluttering helped you find some clarity and peacefulness in your homes.

BUT a LOT of you expressed the need for specific support around decluttering with KIDS! One of the big questions that came up from that episode is how to declutter our kid's toys so that they too can find the simplicity they need to get deep into their play. And so, for this week's episode, I'm bringing back Allie (if you missed her episode on How to Move from Overwhelm to Simplicity with Intention & Grace, listen HERE).

She has a new book coming out designed specifically for KIDS (plus if you pre-order it comes with a free course, that her kids teach to your kids!! Love kids teaching kids!) and is going to share some of her secrets with us today! (Pre order here!)

Here is a summary of our discussion:

How to manage and declutter toys
Why simplifying can lead to deeper play
How to create an environment conducive for play

To get more support, follow Allie through her social media and website:

Instagram: @allie_thatsme

Facebook: www.facebook.com/alliecasazzablog

Website: alliecasazza.com

Listen to her podcast: The Purpose Show

January 12, 2022

Episode 100: Reconnecting to Play for Our Own Wellbeing with Amanda Evans

January 12, 2022/ Laura Froyen

It's my 100th episode in The Balanced Parent Podcast! I can't believe it has already been this long and I want to extend my sincerest gratitude for tuning in, for sending in your feedback, for sharing your takeaways with me, and for welcoming me into your homes and hearts each week. I am on a mission to bring more presence, ease, & connection to parenting, and I couldn't think of a better community to be doing this important work with. Thank you so much for your dedication to this work; I honestly believe that together we are changing the world, one child at a time.

Okay so, you see, as we grow older, the weight of expectations and responsibilities of adulting and parenting put so much pressure on us and we get the overwhelming message from our culture that it's time to "grow up" and leave childish things behind. And while yes, we are the grown ups and no one is coming to save us, we are also human beings, equally deserving of time, rest, and yes, even fun! But figuring out how to have simple pleasures in our lives just as we did when we were children, is so NOT simple. There are parts of us that resist it, that see it as frivolous, unproductive and therefore unnecessary, and those parts need a bit of time, attention, and healing, before we can play with ease.

Which is why this week we are focusing on how we can use play for our own inner work and healing. For this week's episode, I am joined by Amanda Evans. She is a Parent Coach, Speaker, and Intuitive Energy/Play-based Healer who is passionate about supporting children and families to be their happiest and healthiest selves! Her own healing journey taught her so much about the extraordinary healing powers of play, love and connection and helped her develop her "stay and play method" to supporting both children and parents alike. She is dedicated to helping people take their health and happiness into their own hands, believing in their own magic and the power to heal from within.

Here is a summary of our discussion:

Healing the child while healing a parent's inner child
Connection and play-based ways to heal and grow
How to re-parent ourselves

To give you more support, follow Amanda on Instagram @mind_body_soul_miracles and visit her website www.mindbodysoulmiracles.com.

TRANSCRIPT

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 back to The Balanced Parent Podcast and we are continuing our conversations about play during our 30 Days of Play Challenge and this time we're gonna be talking about you–you, the parents, and your relationship to play.

A lot of us go through our days as parents feeling pulled away from the things we have to do and into play with our kids and there can be kind of a lingering sense of resentment or I really don't like doing this, I really don't know how to do this anymore. And I wanted to in this episode help you reconnect with play for your own pleasure and enjoyment and joy and so that you can actually enjoy those interactions with your child.

And so to help me with this conversation, I have a play expert coming in. Her name is Amanda Evans and I'm so excited to introduce you to her. Amanda, welcome to the show.

Amanda: Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here and to talk about play.

Laura: Yeah, right, let's geek out about play. This is one of the funnest months in my podcast. So well, Amanda, why don't you tell us a little bit more about yourself and you know who you are and what you do?

Amanda: Yeah, so my name is Amanda Evans and I'm the CEO and Founder of my business, it's called Mind Body Soul Miracles and I'm a Play-Based Healer. So what that means is I really, I support families to reconnect with themselves and each other. And I primarily, I support conscious parents who are feeling overwhelmed and triggered by their child's big emotions and tantrums so that they can parent with greater ease, play presents.

And something that I love is really helping the parents to reconnect with their own play because kids are such great teachers of how to play and how to find the joy in the little moments and I personally feel like that's one of the most important things.

So I work with both parents and kids and primarily those sensitive empathic little ones who have so much to teach us in the world. But what I do is, I call it is, I'm a Master Coach and I call it Master coach meets Mary Poppins because it's very much like when you watch the movie Mary Poppins of how can we bring coaching and making friends with emotions together with play? Because together it's like magic.

Laura: Yeah, so tell me what is play-based healing?

Amanda: It's very similar to play-based therapy in a way. However, I'm an energy healer. So there is an aspect of that in the sessions, but really the idea is that in these sessions that I have with children is they're all child-led. So there's going to be toys and games and all of the favorite things that they could play with that are all around them set up for them and it is the space where they get to come in and they get to choose, they get to leave, what are we going to play and explore and navigate today.

And the beautiful thing is when kids are playing and when they feel a positive bond, a connection and that safety with someone–which in this instance is me in those sessions–they naturally want to open up about their emotions and talk about what's on their heart and talk about what's going on in their life. And really, that safety is what heals.

So they get a chance to do the thing that makes them feel the most like them because oftentimes, especially if a child has like a label or a diagnosis, sometimes it feels like people see them as that. Whereas in this setting, in these sessions, they just get to be seen and really known as the person that they are who has these passions; things they're excited about. And really get to be seen in that positive light while also being supported to talk about their needs, their wants, their emotions.

So within that framework, they get to play and build that positive connection with someone who feels safe while also learning tools and new ways to release their emotions, to express their emotions, to really feel safe to ask for what they need within their families. But then there's something that happens with having that time with someone and the safety with someone, it then integrates out into their family and to their school and to the society. So that being safe and being themselves with one person, it gets to keep expanding out to their other connections.

Laura: Yeah, so I mean you're talking really about Play Therapy. I'm a Play Therapist by training. I don't do it anymore but I do have a course called Playful Healing that is a deep dive and teaches parents how to do what you're describing. The research on play-based therapy is the parent is so impactful because the attachment relationship is already there and an attachment relationship is that ideal context for healing.

And so for listeners, if what Amanda is describing to you sounds interesting, you can actually do this yourself too. And so there's a course that's available to you called Playful Healing on my website. You can go check out, that is a beautiful invitation to reconnect and heal your relationship with your child and just provide a beautiful space of connection and understanding. So that's available.

But I think what I want to talk about with you today, Amanda, is how we can help parents feel more connected to play themselves. I think that so often we grow up, we lose that childlike sense of wonder and we lose our ability to play. And so I would really love to know from you how we can help parents tap back into play for themselves. Not just for their kids, but for themselves.

Amanda: Well, first I would say really define parents what is play with them because they think that that's sometimes what gets in the way of parents, like how do I play because they think of play is something that their child does. Whereas play can be anything. And my personal definition is play is like that thing that when you're doing it, you're so in the moment that it's like time goes away. So play presents really go together for me, but I think it's so personal for each person and before you can spend time doing that thing, you need to figure out what does play mean to you.

So, I would encourage parents in your community to really connect with themselves and and what that means to them. And what are those activities that bring them completely into the present moment that remind them of like that childlike magic and innocence and that really just bring them joy.

Laura: Yeah, I love that. So I often describe play as a flow process; kids get into flow with their play and we talk about flow a lot in the 30 Days of Play Challenge and your description is so beautiful because I think that if we ask parents, we ask grown-ups to think about when do you get into a flow state? They know what a flow state is.

You know, that time where kind of time slips away, where you're on the cusp of something that is challenging and interesting, but there's ease to it. Lots of runners will talk about the runs as a flow state, yoga is a great flow state. I get into flow when I'm baking. So there's different, you know, ways to get into flow.

But I think if we ask parents to really reflect on when do I have that sense of, you know, the time is just passing and I'm in complete enjoyment in the present moment and what I'm doing. And I love redefining play. I think that that's so important.

Amanda: Well I love that and I love the reminder about flow state because it's just, it's like pure presence and magic and I think just that reminder of, what are the things that when you do that you really enter that state?

But then I think there's also a conversation for parents around when do we make the time for it? Because parents have such full plates and are making sure that their children's needs are met. And so with parents, it's like, how can you really block in a little bit of time to make that a priority?

But the question I talked with a lot of parents about is how can you also just make those tasks that are already on your list more playful? Like how can you change your approach to what you're already doing and have more fun with it?

Laura: Okay, so when you say more playful, you mean more fun?

Amanda: More fun.

Laura: Yeah. So what does that look like in practice? Can you give us some descriptions?

Amanda: Well, I think it's depending on the person. But personally for me, for example, if you have things on your list that are like cleaning, doing the dishes or all of those tasks that we do every day or like cleaning up the toys with your kids, it's like how can you take that activity and make it more fun?

So for me music is like always go to, it's like how can I put on the favorite songs or like the family's favorite songs, make it a dance party and sing along while you're doing the activities. Or maybe it's turning the activities that you already doing into a game.

So if it's like clean up with your kids, it's like how can we make this fun and be like, how can we do this as a team or who can clean up their side faster than the other person and, and just really like engaging in connection with your family while you're doing these things that you might look at as one more thing on your list or one more opportunity to have fun and to connect.

Laura: I love that. I want to mention too for listeners who are thinking about kind of doing races and who can do things the fastest, that it's best if you've got siblings to either race the clock or to have the kids on the team who are racing parents because sibling rivalry can really sneak in there sometimes.

A personal example of something that I used to do when my kids were younger and getting out the door to daycare into preschool is really, really hard. I would pretend to be a flight attendant who was boarding a plane and so I would stand at the door and you know, make announcements now, you know, boarding row, whatever and really like get into character and then they would get loaded in and then we would..

I mean I would be the pilot and we would, as we got up onto the expressway, I would be like, again we, you know, we have, you know, we have lift off our wheels are being being tucked in. Do you hear the landing gear, you know, just the whole way and you know, I only needed to do that, you know, for a week or two and it really eased the kind of the new rhythm of going to school.

They didn't need it every time, but there were days when it was really hard, like when it was hard to say goodbye, it was hard to leave home that the play really helped, you know. It's funny like I think that parents think and you tell me if you agree with this.

I think parents think that they have to be naturally silly or naturally playful to be able to do this, but in actuality, your kids don't know that you might be faking it or that it might not come naturally to you or that you got the idea from a podcast. They don't know and you don't have to tell them, you know, they're delighted.

Most kids, even if you think like your delivery and your acting is, or your accent is terrible, most kids are so delighted by it that they don't care. They won't say anything about it. They'll just, I mean, my nine-year-old will sometimes like when I'm being silly, you know, as to make things easier, she'll be like, mom, I know what you're trying to do. You're trying to get me to brush my teeth and I love it and then she does, you know, but it's not even trickery. It's yeah, I am trying to make it easier for you to brush your teeth right now. Let's make it fun, you know.

Amanda: I love that and I love how smart kids are too. I saw you on those things but like you said, she's like, yeah, that's okay. I'm gonna do it. I know that's what you're doing

Laura: Actually when this comes out she will be nine and she, I feel like she's getting a little too cool for school for some of those things. And so like my six year old still loves to do things, you know, like brushing teeth games and then, you know, she'll be over there brushing her own teeth kind of rolling her eyes, but then you can see her kind of inching and leaning into it a little bit too. It's so funny. Kids are so funny.

Okay, so we've talked about reconnecting to kind of and redefining what play means to us and then making some space and time for that in our busy lives, taking opportunities of things that we do every day to just make them more fun and playful in a way that's authentic but also push ourselves a little bit. What are some other things that we can do as parents to really actually like enjoy play in our families, in our daily lives?

Amanda: You spoke to something really beautiful which is, and really about making it authentic, right? But you're just some parents that play might feel like really silly and like you have to be a certain way and I think that brought up a really good point about the play that looks different to everyone. And so it might not be super silly, super loud, super this because that's not how play feels good.

So really I would say it's like you're a parent and you're still trying to figure out what play is to you and how you do it. Like remember it's not play isn't how somebody else plays that makes it great. How do you feel the most like you? So it's that reminder that you and your child might play in a very quiet way. Your play might be like snuggling in a cozy corner in your room or pulling out a book or affirmation cards or it might be journaling and I think the reminder is that like play can be whatever feels good.

Laura: Yeah, you just said something there that play is where you feel most like you. I really like that statement a lot. I feel like I need to say it again. Play is where you feel most like you. I think that that's one of the reasons why kids like play so much is because they feel completely and entirely themselves when we are with them in the present moment with their play really witnessing them. They feel loved and unconditionally accepted when we're not trying to change their play or criticize their play or make them play the way we want them to.

It's so beautiful to be seen and held in that way for kids. And I think we have to recognize that we need that type of presence and witnessing, you know, and we can't wait around for someone else to give it to us. Like we have to be able to offer that to ourselves. We have to be like good moms, good parents to ourselves. And oftentimes we're looking for other people to witness that in us. And I think, you know, we're the grown ups now, we have to kind of take on that job of, you know, being the mom to ourselves, giving ourselves that space and time to do it.

Okay, so then how do we go about getting the time to do our own play? So there's, we're talking about two different kinds of play, right? So we're talking about play with our kids, which I hope we will talk about like how to actually enjoy playing with your kids because I think that that's what lots of parents struggle with, but we're also talking about play with ourselves. So how do we go about getting that time to actually play?

Amanda: Well, honestly, I think it's each parent has really taken inventory of what your schedule and day looks like already because the last thing you want to do is make it one more thing that you feel like you're squeezing in because it's meant to actually, like make everything feel better. And so like any new routine or any new habit to start small.

So for parents like 10 minutes, a magical number. If you can schedule in 10 minutes and it might be scheduling it at first because it's not something that you're normally used to and starting just with one activity that feels playful to you. So if it is journaling, if it's coloring, if it is like your meditation, it's.. Scheduling it in your calendar for 10 minutes and just start there. And I think that starting off your day with play changes how you feel throughout the whole day.

So I know a lot of parents, they start their day off early because they're trying to make sure that they can get everything they need and then support their kids. And if you can make that first moment of your day, your play, your time, your joy, it's quite likely that what follows that is going to be so much more present, so much more playful, so much more just like loving because you've already had space to be yourself without anyone seeing you.

Laura: I really like that. You know, it's.. Reading is one of the ways that I play

Amanda: I love that.

Laura: Since I started reading as a child, I like, that was one of my plays, you know, the way that I would play and so I wake up every morning and read in bed, you know, before I get up for the day.

Amanda: That sounds so amazing.

Laura: It's really lovely. I mean if you're a reader, it's just really love, you know, sometimes it's like parenting books. Sometimes it's like, you know, like kind of self-help type books, but sometimes it's just novels and fiction, which I really enjoy. And so and that does help me like when I don't get that, I'm a little grumpier and I like that I just I really like how we're talking about that this play is a way to get to be yourself. I really just really like that phrasing a lot.

One other thing that I have found for me personally that lets me get my play in is to cultivate play practices. And when we say play practices, we're really talking about self-care, you know, I mean really like let's just like.. let's just cut through like the coding and we're talking about self-care. But cultivating self-care or play practices that I can do alongside my kids.

So like coloring and painting, you know, creativity–opportunities to be creative and make something beautiful is one of my deepest pleasures. And so doing that alongside my children, you know. So, if I have my water colors out, you know, just setting up. If I'm getting my water colors out, I just set up theirs right next to me and they can join me if they want to, or they can play independently if they want to.

And another thing though too is that, I think with that so, yes, having stuff that you can do alongside your children, but I also think it's okay to set, like, firm boundaries around when the play is just for you.

So baking is one of my forms of play. I really love baking, but what I love about the baking is getting deep into the recipe, having the mental space and time to think about nothing else. To really follow a complicated–because baking can be hard, you know, to really follow a complicated recipe, have no one interrupting me and just really be in the moment with it. I cannot do that if I'm baking with my kids.

So, yeah, and so I have to have a really firm boundary of who is this baking for? Is this baking for me? Then no, I'm sorry, honey, we can make cookies afterward. This baking is for me, you know, versus if this baking is for the kids, then it's a completely different experience. And I have to have that internal boundary within myself, do you know what I mean? Like, like what is the purpose of this for me? My play or is it for theirs? And it's okay for it to be separate, you know?

Amanda: So something that… It's funny, I actually do this myself, but I also recommended with clients iis sometimes a goal can be a personal one and some of the personal goals, one that I have right now is from Monday to Friday, I actually like, it's like a checkoff thing.

It's I've committed to 20 minutes of pure presence and play for myself and then it's, it's funny, I actually do this with my dog and then another 20 minutes is just him and I with child or dog in this instance, directed play. So I do what I do with my clients that I deal with my dog and I do it with myself.

And what I've noticed is that when you hold that boundary, there might be the pushback at first. It's like, but I want that place. So for instance, if you're a parent and you, you might schedule this in, you might have 20 minutes, that's just your playtime and then another 20 that you're like, this is the time where we play together where we do that thing.

So maybe it's baking with yourself versus painting with your child. And because you know that you have that commitment of that time with you just like you were saying, knowing what the purpose of your play is versus your child, it's much easier to be able to communicate that to them. To be like, you know what, right now, I'm doing this baking and this is just my time to play with me, to do this, and we will have that time together to paint at and be very clear about when it's going to happen. To really communicate.

And then the more and more that it's communicated, the more and more they'll get used to it, but they also know that their needs and their desire for that connection and that play will happen because it's so clear and then you as a parent, because you've made a commitment to yourself in that time, you also know that you are going to need that time.

Laura: Yeah, and I mean, and the thing is that then you have to show up for your play dates with your kids, you know, you've got to show up and commit and you've got to show up for yourself too. These are beautiful things to be modeling for our kids.

You know, I think so many of us didn't grow up in a home where it was modeled for us. And even if it was being modeled, it wasn't overtly like, attention wasn't overtly drawn to it, you know, so being able to have those firm clear boundaries of yes, my sweetheart, I want to read to you, and right now I'm reading my book for my own enjoyment and so I'm going to finish this chapter, you know, I have just one more chapter to go and then I will be able to read to you.

Having those very clear, you know boundaries, it really is what it is and I think it's so important to not just model but to talk about it, you know. So I do explain to my kids why they're not invited to bake with me at that moment in time, you know, that this is something for me, this is one of the ways I play. I really enjoy being able to concentrate and I don't want to have to negotiate who gets to put what ingredient in.

I want to put the ingredients and the reassuring that there, don't worry, I have a recipe plan for you too. Don't worry after we're done, I have it all, you know, planned out. We'll get to make your favorite cookies for sure. Sometimes I will fill their cup first with it too. Like if I know I'm going to be, you know, doing something that's just for me, I will do, intentionally do their stuff first, top that cup up so that they can kind of handle it.

You know there's something too that I feel like we're not, we're kind of skipping over and there's a part to this series that we're in our 30 Days of Play Challenge, there is a part and at the time of recording I haven't fully outlined it. So I don't know where the part is going to fall, but there's a part on playing with your inner child.

Amanda: I was feeling that too. I was like we're gonna get the inner child.

Laura: Yeah, there's a whole episode on doing child-directed play with your inner child. So there's a whole episode on that, but I just feel curious if you have any tips on that topic for us as we're reconnecting with play for ourselves.

Amanda: Well, you know what there's so many different things with your inner child. But first off, my favorite question to ask people is how they played as a child? Because oftentimes that has to do with how we still enjoy play with ourselves now.

And so I would encourage that–just that self-discovery. It's like really whoever's listening to this right now is like, take time to go down memory lane of like when you were a little kid and you were so happy in the moment and playing. What were the things or the games that you played? Because asking that question is gonna prompt those memories which A, is already like so good for your brain and neural plasticity and all of that goodness, but also just even visualizing and remembering.

It A) like, brings the inner child out. And it activates that feeling of really getting into our parasympathetic nervous system of already starting to feel calmer and more playful. But once you ask that question you hear the answers, it gives you a window into what connects you with your inner child.

So for instance, I will speak about me when I was little, I was very nurturing and so I always loved any sort of like mothering or role play games. So I was all about playing house at school and I loved Barbies. So I like got to make up my stories and I honestly have this theory about, if you ask anybody what their Barbie story was when they were little, it tends to say a lot about them in their life now or what they do.

But when I think about that, I immediately like feel my connection with my inner child as a little kid. And then I think about if I'm doing inner child-directed play, what games am I going to be playing? What did she–what did little Amanda like? And then how can I do that again now to really connect with my inner child? So I might bring some of those activities back. I might bring Barbies or I might even visualize about it or I might consider doing something that is related to that now.

So for instance, if you were a kid who really like to build lego, you might start thinking about how could you do that in grown-up ways now or how do you build in your own life or what do you want your playtime to look like. Is it actually maybe getting lego again and building something, or is it noticing in your life where you're already doing those things?

So where do you build in your daily life, or what do you love about what you're already doing? Because I think that's the big question. It's.. we think it's one more thing we have to do, but sometimes connecting with our inner child reminds us of all the ways we already play in our life.

But I would also say there's so many ways to connect with your inner child, which I'm sure you're going to touch on too. But some ways that I've really learned is–there's different techniques, but first off if you just bring out toys, and I work a lot with kids and it's like literally bringing out puppets. But having conversations with them and something you can do is, it's called the empty chair process. And it's it's a technique I learned in coaching, but I know it's the way that I've connected with my inner child and what you do is you have a conversation with your inner child.

So you might set up two chairs in front of each other and you, as a grown-up sits in one and then you're gonna ask questions to your inner child and then go to the other side and hear the answers because it might just be–what do you need to feel safe today or what do you want to do to play today?

And by asking the question, you leave room for the answers that little you that's inside is going to feel safe to communicate with their needs and what their desires are and how they want to play with you. So then you listen just like you do with your kids and then make space for that.

Laura: Yeah. And so one thing that, like, as you're talking, I think that doing this process is really important. So lots of the parents I talk to who don't like playing with their kids, don't like playing with their kids because their kid is so bossy during the play and they feel like the kids never listening to any of their ideas and that they always get told no, don't say that and told what to do and they don't like it.

And my theory on this is that it's because, for those parents, there is an inner child who doesn't get to play anymore and who desperately wants to be playing. And that if we are nurturing and taking care of the inner child through our own play and outside times, and we learn to sit back and let our children's playtime with us before them and the unmet needs of our inner children are being met elsewhere in our own play. we can let our play with our children be for them–which is what it's supposed to be for. Right?

So I think that the inner child aspect of play is actually really important for parents to be able to achieve presence with their children's play and actually be child-directed in the play with their children. Because otherwise, sometimes–not all parents, but some parents have very loud inner children who have been ignored for a very long time.

Amanda: And they just want their needs to finally be met

Laura: I mean, so this happens with dad's a lot. A lot of the dads I work with really struggle with this because I think even more than women, play has been taken from dads, from them. Boys are forced to grow up and abandon their feelings so early in our culture. So early. And so when they sit down to play lego with their sons or their daughters, it's really really hard for them to hold back because they've got a vision too inside them.

I mean, so in those instances I really, I recommend having a separate set of legos for those… Yes, going to the toy section in Target and like getting out of your head and just like noticing which one jumps off the shelf, and buy it for yourself. It's 20 bucks. You know, it's okay to, you know, spend that on yourself and you don't have to share it with your child either. You can put it together for yourself just to please and enjoy yourself too.

And that will let that inner child, by needing that–your inner needs, your own needs first. It allows you to be more present and available to your child's needs, you know? Do you agree?

Amanda: Oh, completely. Yeah, no, you're like speaking to the heart of what I also believe. And it's so true. It's like we all just needed that space to keep playing and to keep being in touch with our emotions. So I love what you're saying about the dads and just not being afraid to have their own lego or their own set of toys and really go back to that space of connecting with themselves.

Laura: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that this is something too that I like, I just you know, so I focus a lot on partners in parenting, So being good..

Amanda: Yeah, I love that.

Laura: I think we have to recognize that if we are parenting with a partner who we love, who we’re in a couple of relationship with, it's such a gift to prioritize the other person's pleasure and play too to really give them opportunities to play.

You know, so this is something that my husband and I do all the time. We sit down at the beginning of our week and our family meeting and we take a look at how are mom and dad going to get a chance to play? I mean we don't always use those words, but how is dad going to get his golf game in? How is mom going to get her walks and yoga? And we really look at it carefully and advocate for each other, you know, stick up for each other.

Yeah, it's important. I think play is so important. And not just for kids. For us too. It takes practice as well. I think it takes time to relearn how to play. And so I hope all of our listeners are gonna be really gentle and gracious with themselves as they reconnect and re-learn how to do this.

Amanda: Yeah. And I love what you're saying, just your focus and the partnership, but also really understanding each other's inner child and each other's favorite ways to play or give themselves the self-care that they need and really like honoring it.

So it can be easy to be like well, but I want to do this and we need to do this. But that conversation that you have at the beginning of the week is so beautiful of like, really being like how can you get that time and how can I get that time and how do we all have the space to do what we love and feel like ourselves?

Laura: Yeah. Oh gosh, you just keep coming back to that statement. Feel like ourselves. I really like that. I feel like I need to explore that a lot in some journaling. I really just like the idea that play is where we feel most like ourselves. We all need that chance. Oh, that's so beautiful.

Thank you, Amanda, for bringing that nugget to us. I really appreciate it.

Amanda: It’s a pleasure. I've always sound that like why I find play so important is it takes the pressure off. It's like I know that growing up, I was a total perfectionist. I felt like I had to be perfect in every way and I think that play is the space where there's no expectation and that's why we feel like ourselves. It's like who are we if we're not performing? Who are we if we're not needing to complete a task? Who are we when we're just being?

Laura: Yeah, I think that our productivity culture gets in the way of our place so much. It's something that I grapple with in my art all the time, you know because I, I will paint and I'd be like, why do I want to paint? What am I gonna do with all these paintings? They don't do or serve a purpose, you know?

And so productivity absolutely can get in the way of play. And at the same time, it's really important to exercise that muscle of releasing uphold towards productivity, which is really just a cultural thing that's been forced upon us anyway, you know? Absolutely.

Okay, so Amanda, tell us where people can find you and connect with you. Obviously, we have your links in the show notes, but sometimes folks like to hear it out loud.

Amanda: For sure. So you can find me on Instagram. It's @mind_body_soul_miracles or you can just head to my website. So it's www.mindbodysoulmiracles.com and there's plenty of information about me there, but you can also just connect with me on there or book a 30-minute connection session. I would love that.

Laura: Alright, well, thank you so much, Amanda. I really appreciate your expertise and everybody who's following along with the 30 Days of Play Challenge, I hope that you are enjoying it. You can always reach out to me with your questions. I want to support you in this and make sure that the challenges is exactly what you need to start your year off right.

So thanks so much Amanda for joining us and helping us with this conversation.

Amanda: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

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. 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.

January 04, 2022

Episode 99: Mindful Tech Use for Parents and Kids with Sophie Brickman

January 04, 2022/ Laura Froyen

The episodes on this month for The Balanced Parent Podcast will all be about PLAY! And so, for this week's episode, I am joined by Sophie Brickman. She is a writer, reporter, and editor who has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times, and other outlets.

Nowadays, play does not only happen through the use of toys and that as we move forward in time, our kids adapt more and more with technology. Hence, play also happens through the use of phones and other gadgets. Sophie will be helping us know how to use technology mindfully.

Here is a summary of our conversation:

Smart toys vs analog blocks
Choosing the right thing to watch without forever scarring our kids
The right age for screen time
Mindful tech use

For more information, visit www.sophiebrickman.com.

TRANSCRIPT

Laura: Hello everybody, this is Dr. Laura Froyen and on this episode of The Balanced Parent Podcast we are going to be talking about how technology affects both parenting and kids.

To help me with this conversation, I'm bringing in an amazing human and writer, Sophie Brickman. She wrote a book called Baby Unplugged and it is delightful and filled with a lot of good information and interesting questions.

So Sophie, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to have you here. Will you tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do?

Sophie: Sure, Laura, it’s so so lovely to be here. So I'm a journalist. I'm based in New York. I am the mom of three, relatively newly–the mom of my third. So I have a five and a half year old, and a two and a half year old, and a 4 month old. And I wrote this book mostly because I live with my husband who a, who loves technology.

So we lived in San Francisco for a while, he worked at a startup and he started his own company and now he works very closely with startups and he just loves technology and the power of technology to kind of, you know, make our world a better place. And he himself really likes gadgets and tracking his own metrics and stuff.

So he has, you know, various devices strapped to his body throughout the day and I didn't really, you know, faze me until my oldest daughter was born and she's now five and a half as I said, but her third day on this planet, she came home and Dave strapped a little sock onto her; some sort of smart sort of device that was supposed to track her heart rate or her oxygen level or something.

And you know, I've never taken care of a newborn before. I was a new parent, I hadn't slept in, you know, 72 hours plus or minus however many months that you don't sleep when you're pregnant and I was like okay sure technology can help me parent and make me calmer, like great let's do it.

And then that night in the middle of the night, the alarm went off from this device and was like bleeping through my house and I thought something horrible had happened and Ella was fine. And it had lost connection to our Wi-Fi; we lived in like a you know, crappy walk up with bad Wi-Fi.

And I thought okay this is like a very crystallizing moment where I need to figure out how am I gonna let technology infiltrate her life? And like I've been really thoughtless about it on my own. So I sort of selfishly embarked on this journey to try to figure out where technology could help and where it really, you know, it's just making us more stressed out.

Laura: Yeah, I think you're speaking to something that a lot of us experience in parenting, especially that we engage with certain pieces of technology, whether it's for ourselves, you know, Facebook groups, you know Dr. Google or for their kids–things that are supposed to make things easier, supposed to calm us down, supposed to reassure us, and they end up doing the opposite. At least that's what the data is showing, right?

Sophie: Totally. And I mean like it really is a personal relationship with technology and some people I spoke to really loved the peace of mind that various pieces of technology brought to their house.

For me, I found that by and large a lot of the technology was very, it's all about optimizing things–either optimizing your kid or optimizing that moment. And it made me very anxious because I was like, oh my God, I'm doing something wrong. I could be doing something better. You know, I could be enriching her more, I could be more efficiently changing her diaper or whatever it is.

And you know, you're very vulnerable as parents and you're open to advice like you want information. And so it's sort of, it feels like there's a firehose of information coming at you and a firehose of products being, like I can simplify this for you and so it's very hard to look away.

What I found out doing a research is that it's not necessarily needed and that, you know, on a case by case basis, it might make you much more nervous than you think.

Laura: Yeah, I think you're speaking to something that I've absolutely seen in my Facebook group. So I run a couple of very large Facebook groups and I think I do a pretty decent job in them because most of my, the folks who post in there indicate that they're the only groups that they go into, that they're the ones that they really enjoy being in and that's through design and on purpose.

But I do see things happening where folks are going to the group with questions, when really what I would want to–and invite them to do–is to actually turn inward and sit with themselves for a minute to really sit with what's going on and get in touch with how they are thinking and feeling.

I think that we go for the quick fix; we go through the kind of attempt to defuse the anxiety or the worry of whatever scenario is coming up that we're going to the group for and I think you're speaking to this, like, need to be really intentional with our use of technology and and really aware of, is it serving me? Is the way I'm interacting with it serving me? Or is it hindering something?

Sophie: Absolutely. And I think, I mean like more power to you that people are coming to your groups and really finding those to be a place of solace and care because I find there's a lot of uncurated groups out there that are online.

I wrote a chapter about social media and kind of the question being, you know, can virtual villages either stand in the place of real villages or how best to have them enrich your life, you know, add to your life as a parent.

I'm a member of a bunch of them and I became a member of them even before my daughter was born and it can be incredibly comforting to know that there are however many thousands of strangers out there, what you're going through, you know, if you're up at three in the morning nursing and you're tired and you're this and you go on your phone and there are other people around the world that are going the rest of this with you.

It feels like you're less isolated and you really are in a lot of ways, but I think you need to know what you're going to the groups for and like you said, you know, crowdsourcing information is not always the best for every question.

Laura: Yeah, I think parents today and you know, I know you've done your research, I interact with hundreds of parents every day and so many of them have gotten so conditioned to look for answers outside of themselves.

We don't come up in the same, you know, village environment where we are looking after, you know, cousins and little siblings or we're interacting with lots of different parenting styles kind of, you know, throughout our childhoods were in these like tight knit communities and so we become parents and we really don't know what we're doing.

You know, there's no manual and so we look to the experts, we look for gurus, we look for people to tell us what to do and we are also hyper aware of that what we're doing matters. I think this generation of parents is more aware of the fact that what we're doing with these kids matters for their outcomes.

I think it creates a lot of anxiety and the, you know, the overarching like research on parenting is that good enough parenting is where it's at, you know, the mistakes, you know, balancing it, you know, some good stuff, some bad stuff that's good enough is great and wonderful.

And that one of the biggest things you can do to help a parent is to increase their self efficacy or their self trust in their own skills as a parent. And I think that sometimes when we're conditioned to look outside of ourselves, it really gets in the way of that.

Sophie: Absolutely. And you know, it's interesting that you're talking about this because the, after you finish the book and you send it into the publisher and you're like crossing your T’s and dotting your I's you're trying to figure out you know, both what the title should be and what the subtitle should be.

And so I like agonized over the subtitle and I wanted it to be something that really spoke to this feeling and I'm very happy with what we landed on, but for a while it was about trusting your gut and it's like how do you trust your gut in the age of tech driven parenting when there is so much information coming at you that you feel like you think, you know what to do and then all of a sudden there are another 10,000 people saying like, well why don't you consider this?

And you're like, okay, this is only the most important thing in my life, is raising this child to be successful. Like sure I'll listen, like I'll take a look and then it's very, very hard to pull back, you know the pole frankly like the evolutionary pull towards gathering more information. It is deeply rooted in us. And so it's really hard to look away and it's really at our fingertips.

So I do believe that there are many moments where if you did stop and you took a breath, you would likely know what to do.

The reason I wrote the book is because I thought I knew what to do, but I was like why don't I go to the experts and get legit validation that this is actually what I should be doing? And that was very comforting for me.

Laura: So has there been a point in your own personal parenting journey, Sophie, where you have stopped crowdsourcing and really, you know, moved beyond the like, oh I think this is what I'm going to do. Maybe I should just check in and get some validation and some confirmation and moved into a place of like yeah, I know what to do, I know how to handle this situation.

Sophie: I mean I'm still there and I think that's probably like a journey that we will be on with my kids because every, you know, every two months it feels like there's a whole new ballgame and you're like, wait a second now you're going to kindergarten and now you like have a friend that's doing this thing and you're not, I mean like if you're constantly learning.

But I did have a very good friend who has a child. Her first kid was born in a couple of years before my first and so she's like just ahead of me in this journey and I started going online and getting all this information about all sorts of things like medical stuff, people to look for, you know what, whether or not to use the pacifier, like all sorts of things.

And she said, look if I could give you one piece of advice, it would be to pick a rabbi and what she meant. She was like, just pick one person who's gonna be your person that you go to for advice and just try to stick with them.

And so I thought about it and I was like, okay. And I picked two people because I like couldn't just pick one and I picked the pediatrician who I really adore and who I know is a medical professional. And then I picked my mom and I'm very close with my mom and she's gone through this twice before and I, you know, she was and of course I have my WhatsApp group with very close friends and I will text about little things for sure. But for real advice about that kind of stuff, I found that a couple of curated answers get way more for me and made me much calmer than crowdsourcing.

Laura: Absolutely, I love that. And I love this idea to picking with someone and sticking with them. I think that there's you know, so folks who are in my world are moving away from kind of mainstream, punitive parenting and more into connection-based and respectful parenting. And it's an isolating world when you're doing that. It's a lonely thing; it can be especially if you're in parts of the country in the world where there's limited in-person communities and when your family did things differently.

So when you are making big changes, you know, lots of the folks in my family or sorry, in my–they are kind of like a family in my community–are making really big intergenerational change, you know, that the first people who are not choosing to spank their children for example.

And it's big and isolating cause then they can't go to their mom or that one aunt, you know, because the stuff moves in families and I just want to like see the people who are struggling with that.

Sophie: I'm glad you brought that up. So it's part of the research that I did for that, for the social media chapter involved going to many, many different types of virtual villages and some of them are solely online and some of them are anonymous online and some of them are kind of a hybrid model of trying to get people virtually and then to meet me together.

And one of the most surprising things that I came out about it; I don't know how familiar you are with Reddit, but I was not really on Reddit very much for many things and I had this sort of idea of Reddit as being very like Black Ops and like like the different types of people that that I usually think that would go on it.

And I went to the parenting communities on Reddit and it's very, some of them are just plainly anonymous and then there's kind of another level of anonymity if you want to be like completely anonymous and just be able to share whatever and have nobody have any contact with you.

And there was an enormous amount of warmth in these online communities because people were sharing these grievances and airing these traumas and airing things about parenting that they really didn't feel comfortable talking about with anybody, but they found so much love and support in these communities. And I spoke to a researcher who found that kind of the ability to air taboo subjects often would encourage people to come out of anonymity.

So they were like, look this is my–whatever the case may be–I found out that my child is not really my child, I found out all sorts of traumatic things and they found other people like them and then they came out of anonymity and sort of got a different bond, you know, the online of which can be incredibly powerful. I do not mean to to say that, you know, virtual villages do not stand in the way of it. There's a wonderful power in being able to reach people at the far reaches of the world that are like

Laura: Yeah, and I'm really enjoying the balance in this conversation, you know, so this is The Balanced Parent Podcast and we approach all aspects of the world looking for balance and I really love that there's a place and a time and then there's conscious awareness on, you know, is it actually serving the purpose and looking for it to serve and are there other opportunities? I really appreciated that.

And I also like I really appreciate that, I feel like most books that are about technology and kids really focus on the kids aspect of the technology and I, you know, as a systems thinker. So I see kids as embedded in their contexts and so the parents' experience with technology absolutely trickles down and affects the child. And so I really appreciate it and that you included kind of both sides of that coin.

Sophie: For sure. And I mean, I think just, you know, to speak more to the balance aspect of it. Part of the reason that I wanted to write the book myself is that there are books out there about technology and parenting and there's a lot of information out there about technology engineering, but it's often very there on either end of the extremes.

Often, often it's technology is both the fact of modern life and an unequivocally good thing. And look at all the amazing things you can do with technology and so let's like plug our kids into the wall and have them be particularly enriched and wonderful.

And then on the other side, if like if you show your kids screen, if you're on your phone in front of your screen for your kids, like they will not succeed in life and so like live off the grid and just let your kids wild. And I was like I live in New York City, I can't let my kids run wild, you know, the west side and I'm a modern mother, so I need, you know, I do have my phone and every once in a while I do need to put my kid in front of a screen and I'm interested in this stuff.

How do I do it in a way that feels smart? And how do I do it in a way that feels reasoned and research back, frankly? So that's the kind of balance I needed to do–I'm not saying that it would be wonderful if we all, you know, have kids running around in the wild and with wonderful subsidized child care, you know, that might be wonderful, but that's not my reality. I think there is a need and a want that parents have to figure out how to be balanced with that.

Laura: I so, so agree. I mean there's definitely times where I, like fantasize about like moving to a remote farm with my best friend and just raising our kids together, you know, but that isn't the reality of what our situation is right now. So, but I totally appreciate that.

Okay, so I'm super curious and I know my listeners are, what did you learn about balancing technology for kids? What are some of the big take home points that you found?

Sophie: I mean, I think specifically I think we should talk. You know, we should see the way the book is split up. It's technology for the parents and the technology for the kids half and half.

So like in terms of technology for the parents, there's a lot of technology out there for parents that pushes the idea that if you have a lot of data on your kids, you can somehow make the act of parenting simpler. Or you can, if you know more about your kid and how often they throw their pacifier out of the crib, you can make them sleep longer or whatever. And also that you should be packing all this stuff and crunching numbers on your kid and some people love it.

When I spoke to my pediatrician who was one of my like two people in my corner, he said, you know, we have pediatric visits at certain intervals because that's when we need to be weighing them, measuring their length and measuring their head circumference. And like we're doing the monitoring for you essentially.

So that was something that was very freeing for me. I was like, yeah, maybe it's interesting to be tracking some of this data for her, but do I need to be doing it? Is it critical? No. And then I talked about a lot of different things in the first half of the book.

The second half of the book about technology for kids, which is really a lot about screen time, you know, be that programs that kids are watching or interactive apps that they're playing or e-books. And then there's a chapter about smart toys, like toys that do more than, you know, a box that will be kind of like sexy things for them.

You know, I guess what I found was, you know, there's specific and pragmatic takeaways that you can absolutely get into about how to evaluate the programs that they're going on, how to choose the right television show for them to watch by and large for young kids. You know, less is more.

When you get them, when you agonize about what toy to get and then they end up playing with the cardboard box. You know, that sort of is them telling you like this is what I need, like I need this box and the act, that care that goes into them, turning that box into a spaceship or a sport or whatever it is that they're doing is so beneficial for them. So much more so than various toys or apps that will sort of quote unquote enrich them for you.

Laura: Absolutely. You're reminding me of one of my favorite quotes by Magda Gerber, who is a respectful parenting expert, and she says that active toys make for passive babies and passive toys make for active babies. I think that that has always been a guiding principle when it comes to the toys that we bring into our home.

Sophie: I researched her at length and I spoke to who was the head of Rye, which is you know, the you know, when I started and I was really taken with their philosophy. And there are some extreme versions, like some extreme right practitioners who are like, oh I spoke to and I had like a little doctor's jacket for my daughter because she liked to prepare the pretend doctor. And they were like, no, you can't do that because like the doctor's coat is, can only be a doctor's coat. You want her to be able to put like all of the imagination to everything, that was too extreme for me.

What was an extreme for me was like go into your kitchen, get some bowls, get some things that your kids will have a blast. You probably have all of the toys that you need, you know, in your house already. You don't have to go and buy them.

Laura: Veterinarian. There's lots of things, a dentist coat, there's lots of things, a lab coat. My brother in law is a chemist and so my kids play chemistry professor sometimes, you know, like there's lots of things that a white coat can be used for. So I think that yeah, yeah. No, of course it's okay.

I think this is the balanced piece of it, right? But I did, I used to run a play group pre Covid and absolutely the favorite toy in my like a pack of toys for these babies who were all under a year was a small aluminum bowl. Like that was it. They always, everybody just jump right to it. They would, you know, have baby tussles over who gets to hold it and bang it on the floor. It's.. yeah, I agree. The less is definitely more when it comes to our kids.

Sophie: And it's when you go deep as you have in the Developmental Psychology and it's not just like a phrase, less is more, it's like, it's better for the kid, it's better for their brain, it's better for their gross motor skills, it's better for their fine motor skills. Like the more the baby can do, the more active the baby can be, the better it is for him or her, which is very free and concept for a parent in terms of the anxiety over what it is that your kids should be doing.

Like your kids should be playing with a cardboard box and the movement of goal at a very young age, like that's appropriate for them developmentally and it does, it works wonders for them. to exercise their creativity. It does all sorts of things like the less the toy does for the baby, the better it is.

Laura: Yeah. And what's beautiful about this too, like I can geek out about play all day long, but what I've noticed and you know, and what research says is that kids who have access to passive toys to open-ended toys, they play deeper and longer. And that's something that's really good for parents, you know, once kids, you know, start building in their independent play skills and it is a skill that gives parents a lot of opportunity for self care, for peace and quiet to kind of be off duty while their kids are doing a very important job of playing.

And you know, when kids get used to being entertained either by their toys or by screens, then they do come to expect entertainment in their interactions, right? And we use screens in my family as needed, you know, and absolutely, and has a wonderful benefit to them at, you know, at times and places. But there's absolutely a time where kids come to expect the entertainment value that can get in the way of other things.

Sophie: Totally. And you're circling around something that I spoke about. I was, you know, I was talking to a group of parents about this and there's this question of stamina, it's like, kids need to learn, they need to build the stamina to play on their own.

Laura: Yeah. Capacity.

Sophie: They need to learn to learn to do it; it's a skill, as you said. And so, like I said at the beginning, there's an idea in this technological age that every moment, like that instant gratification is at our fingertips. We should, we should have it, we should give it to our kids. And so if kids start to get agitated off and you'll see a parent throw a screen in front of them or, or, or try to like quash that moment.

If you look at that moment in a totally different way, which is, this is my little kid working through something, getting stronger, learning how to play on their own or handle disappointment or whatever it is that they're working through, like, that's a good thing for me as a parent to be instilling in them. It completely changes the moment in your head. You don't think you need to quash it. If you wash it, you kind of obliterate that moment of them learning.

Laura: And you steal the learning opportunity from them.

Sophie: You know that boredom can be where all the magic happens, you know, calm down a little bit. Like let them work through it for a little bit. Maybe they're gonna cry, maybe they're going to get agitated, but maybe tomorrow they'll give you an extra five minutes where you can do whatever it is that you want to be doing and they can be playing by themselves very happily.

Laura: Yeah, absolutely beautiful. Okay. So now let's talk a little bit about the eBooks piece of things. I think that is something I'm seeing more and more and I I feel kind of curious about what you found in your research.

Sophie: Sure. So as part of my research I spoke to a lot of developmental psychologists, a lot of neurologists, pediatricians and time and time again they would say to me, you know, like books, you can't improve upon a book.

You know, one of my favorite quotes that I got from doing research was a pediatrician who deals with early literacy and he said, and I asked a lot of the same questions to different people and one of the questions I always ask was like what is the single best piece of tech? You know, because that's like a sexy question and you want to be like, okay, if I'm only gonna have one thing I'm gonna have that.

And he said he thought for a while he said, you know, if I went to the smartest minds in the world and I asked them to build me something that would make it smarter and more resilient and more socio emotionally connected. It's like better modern citizens, what would they come back with? They would come back with a book. And they wouldn't come back with an e-book, they'd come back with a print book.

And the reason that books are so good are, there are many reasons. One of them is that it is built for young kids–at least who can't read. It's built to be a shared object; like a kid can't read on their own, they want to look at the pictures, they want to be read to.

And so in the moment of reading to a kid, you're doing a million things at the same time. You're telling them that books are fun and that you can do it together. You're saying this is a sweet, unhurried time, like you can't speed read Goodnight Moon, like the kids just won't pay attention, you know, and so, and you know, verbal exposure has been shown to be very, very important for future success.

There are a million benefits. But I really wanted to understand what's the difference between reading Goodnight Moon on a book in a book and reading Goodnight Moon on your iPad? And there are a lot of differences for very, very young kids.

One of them is that the device that you're reading on is not designed to be a shared object. You know, your iPad or your iPhone as you'll see, like you can't really do the thing with your kids. They, you know, at least with my kids, it's like a lot of elbows come out when you're like, can I take that? And you're like, no get away. So it's very hard to do it together. And also there are a lot of distractions and reading is, you know, it's hard to read. It's hard to figure out what's going on on the page and it is a skill and it's enjoyable.

There's a lot going on in the kid's brain when they're seeing words on a page and pictures on a page. And so distracting–it is not beneficial. I don't know, we could go in a number of different directions, but by and large, if you're able to give your child a print book, that is really a wonderful tool for them.

Laura: Yeah, I just want to highlight some pieces too, this is what I did my PhD. So I love that you're talking about this and you know, really, when it comes to shared book reading, which is one of the biggest things that parents can do for their kids. The research on it is actually that it's more about the relationship that it builds; the closeness and the connection and the attachment relationship benefits than anything that they're really doing.

I mean those print concepts are learned as they're turning the page and learning the direction that, you know, the text flows. But really that relationship that you're building; the warmth and the snuggled up-ness of it is so important too and it doesn't go away with age. You know, my kids are nine, and six and a half and we still, as a family lay in our big bed every night and read a story together and that closeness is just a beautiful thing to keep going in.

Sophie: I'll bring up something that came up after the book was published. But that, there is something called the NAEP, which is like kind of the national report card. And so the government takes, does surveys, kids who are nine and thirteen about various things to get a sense for how they're doing academically. And one of the questions that they started asking in 1984 was, how often do you read for joy?

And this past year where the data had been collected pre-pandemic, so it was a 2020 NAEP, but all the data came from before the pandemic hit, was that the lowest number of kids ever reported reading for fun. This year was a historical loan. And so kids nine and thirteen are not looking to books as much as an object for fun and joy.

And that is that you know, you cannot draw a direct line between screen time and books at all. There are many, many factors. It's multifactorial. But using screens does displace other activities and one of those activities that it displaces is reading and I think, you know, when you look at academic success and how they, directly related it is to reading and being read to, it gets very scary and very damning as a society that you know, I think it's, I have to look this up, but I think it's 1 in 3 eight graders do not ever throughout the week one time pick up a book for fun and that's when

Laura: Oh gosh it's heartbreaking.

Sophie: It's awful and so you can start habits early, like habits do start early. And so the earlier you can start reading to your kids, the better.

I mean the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends reading to your kid from birth, which like feels really silly because they're like there's like a burrito here who they can barely see what are we doing. So they can feel the warmth, they can feel the love. It's about, as you said, it's about at the young ages, it's about this broadband connection that they're feeling around this activity.

Laura: Yeah. You know, there's even research that babies who were read certain books in utero prefer the cadences of those books outside. So I mean, yeah, we read while I was pregnant to both of the kids, which we're I think we're on board, you know, I feel like we're kind of, you know, let's bring some balance into the conversation. What did you find around when technology is really useful and positive to bring into your home and into your kids’ lives?

Sophie: I think one very specific positive that we found was FaceTime, particularly during the pandemic. Like we lived seven blocks from my parents, so we didn't make it very far, but during the pandemic and in the early days of the pandemic, when everybody was very, very anxious. You know, my parents didn't leave their house and we hardly left our house, we were in lockdown and we FaceTime every day.

And you know, there is something about the verbal back and forth that makes FaceTime and video chatting in general, not as negative at all in the eyes of researchers as other types of screen time. And so that's something that we employ all the time.

I think, you know, similarly like sharing photos and the photo stream was an amazing way to connect with my parents and, and my husband's parents and let them know what was going on in their kids' lives. And then we are absolutely, we’re not an anti-tech family at all. And so we watch movies and we, you know, we let the kids watch screens every once in a while.

And I think, you know, one of my big takeaways from this was that if you can watch something together with your kids and use whatever is on the screen the same way that you might with a book, what you're doing is you're having a shared experience.

And you know, we watched Willy Wonka or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory the other day, which I don't remember watching since I was very very little, but like, it was wonderful and a lot of fun. And now we listen to the soundtrack and Gene Wilder is like singing all over the house. and I think, I think there are ways to use technology in a way that's really magical and wonderful.

You know, something that I'm sure you're familiar with and in your research and background is you know this this term ‘serve and return interactions’, which is something coming up against, which is having a conversation with your kid, you know, at whatever, meeting them at whatever age they are.

So like my my son is four months old. He just started smiling, like he smiles, I smile. Like that's our serve and return interactions. With my two year old, it was different. With my five year old, it's different.

But the idea is if you can have as many serve and return interactions as possible, it's really good for your kids. And one of the ways to do that is to kind of share whatever is going on in the screen. And so we try to watch things together. Of course you want to put your kid in front of the screen often so that you don't have to watch with them. You know, I haven't watched Frozen all 900 times that my daughters have watched it, but you know, I know what's going on. I know some of the songs, we can sort of like talk about it after they watch it. All of that is good stuff for them.

Laura: Yeah, absolutely. I think there's so many opportunities for shared experiences too. You know, just, yeah, it definitely can be very mindful and especially as kids get older and start, you know, wanting to, you know, interact with social media and technology more independently or more with their peers, having built the practice of being involved in sharing the technological experience that, you know, in our family, we keep iPads in the living room, you know, and not in rooms. In our family, you know, when we're, you know, playing games, mom's nearby, you know, and here to help.

Having a culture of that, I think as kids move into the teen years, lets you be, continue to be more present and aware of what's going on in terms of their technology. I'm not looking forward to those days when my kids enter the teen years and I have to start learning how to like set parent controls. I don't have to do that yet. It's so overwhelming.

Sophie: I'm like, I'm just like hopeful that maybe something will be figured out by the time that she hits on anyone, but like God, I don't know, I don't know one day at a time.

Laura: Yeah, right. I think like the folks who are in that place, the general, you know, kind of takeaway is that kids will always be able to get around your parenting, your parent controls on your apps and devices. And so it's far better to invest our time in building trusting relationships with our children so that there isn't a need, you know, a felt need for moving around controls.

Sophie: One of the doctors that I spoke to, who has done an enormous amount of research on, I think I interviewed him about the importance of play and you know, how smart choice might not be as enriching as, as they are marketed as being.

He likened early parenting to a bank, and he was like thinking about investing the time in your kids when they're younger. And he's like the door doesn't shut at any point, but it gets smaller and smaller and so when they're younger, if you can kind of put the time in and invest in them then later on when they're 13, 14 when they're having a fight about whatever, or you can sort of pull on that as an investment. Like it'll look through over time.

And I like that idea. It's like you have these years, you know, it pertains to like quashing the moment with the screen or letting them work through it. If you let them work through it and you learn what takes them off or you learn more about them, you're building that foundation. And you're learning more about who they are as people and how they interact with you in the world around them.

And later on when you have that rock solid foundation, when they wanna, you know, skirt something on the screen and go do something bad, like maybe they won't, or maybe they'll come talk to you about it or or what have you, you know

Laura: I totally agree. All of this stuff seems really small now, but it does pay out dividends later. For sure.

Well, Sophie, I really appreciate this conversation that you've had with us. Thank you so much for being here. Why don't you make sure everybody knows where they can get your book. It’s a great one to check out.

Sophie: Thank you. You can get it wherever books are sold, like hopefully at your local independent retailer, but you can get it at Amazon or anywhere else too. My website is just my name .com. If you want to, you can reach out to me there directly.

And my hope with the book–one little parting thing is–a lot of parenting books out there, which can be very helpful and wonderful or kind of more self help or like how to’ books and this absolutely has to have a lot of practical takeaways–how do you navigate this, what programs are better, and how to evaluate it–but it really was a personal story.

It's kind of part memoir, part research and so my hope is that parents who leave this will feel some sort of solidarity and like comfort in the fact that I'm going through all of this stuff with you.

December 31, 2021

Episode 98: How to Actually Enjoy Playing with Your Kids

December 31, 2021/ Laura Froyen

No matter what the last year has looked like for you, I want you all to know that I am so proud of you for all the efforts you've made into finding more connection, joy, and balance in your life. You have showed up here and in your homes with love, commitment, and grace and it absolutely shows! And I want you to know how truly honored and grateful I am for trusting me to be a part of your journey. 💕 Okay, are you all set up with our Annual 30 Days of Play Challenge? We began on January 2nd but there is still PLENTY of time to join us! If you haven't signed up yet, don't worry, you're not behind, you can just jump right in today. There really is no "behind" for our kids or for us as parents. There is only starting where we are, in the here and now, and moving forward with intention at the pace that is right for us!

If you are participating in my Play Challenge, then you know that I asked you all to fill out a survey to get a starting point for the challenge. And one of the things I learned from your answers that the majority of you are hoping to learn how to actually enjoy playing with your kids AND want to connect with them on a deeper level. So that's what this week's podcast episode covers!

Here is a summary of what I covered on this episode:

Mindset shifts to enjoy play.

1. Know yourself, what you like, and your boundaries.

2. How to be genuinely interested with your child's play.

3. Drop into the present moment and connect with your child.

4. Shift how you view your role in your child's play to make play more fun.

5. Figure out how to create a practice of showing up for play with your kids. I will be discussing more about play through a series episodes for this month on The Balanced Parent Podcast so stay tuned for that!

TRANSCRIPT

Hello everybody, this is Dr. Laura Froyen and on this episode of The Balanced Parent Podcast, we're going to talk about how to actually enjoy playing with your kids even when it's not really your thing or you're feeling too overwhelmed and stressed out to really enjoy it.

A lot of us get asked by our kids to play with them and we have so many presses on our time. So many things that pull on our attention so many things on our to-do list can be really hard to drop into the present moment with them and actually enjoy playing with them. And we hear a lot as parents that we need to be playing with our kids, that it's really important for them. And I want to just start off by being perfectly honest with you.

Well, I love play and children's play. I, as you know, we're heading into our play challenge month where we spend the whole month of January really dedicated and focused on play because it is incredibly important for young children and honestly for adults too.

Humans have a unique relationship with play that is unlike some of the other animals in the animal kingdom. And it's something that we should be focusing on and encouraging throughout the lifespan, but especially in childhood, you know.

As you know, we love play around here, we geek out about it. We spend the whole month of January focusing on play and if you want to join the play challenge, this is a perfect time to get signed up. The link is in the show notes, it's laurafroyen.com/playchallenge.

But because of all the emphasis that's on play, I think sometimes people get the idea that I love playing with my kids and I don't always. There are certain things I love to do with my kids, but a lot of the play that you find cumbersome or tedious or annoying or a little frustrating. I experienced those feelings around play too.

I want you to know that you're not alone and you're not abnormal and the play that our children are doing, it's really, really unique and it's happening in a developmental context that is completely appropriate for them and isn't necessarily appropriate for us. And so it makes sense that we don't always love it. Plus, we have so many other things that weigh on our minds and press on our time that it is really hard to drop into the present moment with our kids.

And the other thing I think that really can get in our way is that we have some idea in our mind of what playing with our kids means, you know. So if I asked you right now to close your eyes and picture a parent playing with their child, you would probably picture a parent may be on the ground, maybe dressed up having a tea party or you know, really actively engaged in the play where they are being, you know, really exciting and do all the fun voices and tell their kids an elaborate story where there really involved in the play.

And well some parents enjoy that type of play when it comes to actually what kids want and need from parents when we're playing with them. That's exactly what they need. You know, so when our kids say play with me mama, what they really mean is see me, hear me drop into the present moment with me; be with me.

They don't really mean entertain me, you know, show me how to play, teach me how to play and so all those active things that we picture, you know when we picture playing with our kids, that's not exactly what kids are looking for or what they need.

And so I want to invite you today to start shifting some of the ways you think about playing with your kids and I'm going to offer you five important shifts that you can make playing with your kids more enjoyable for you and more fulfilling and nurturing and connecting for them, and help you set some boundaries around when you do want to play and what types of play you want to do and give you permission to really be your authentic self with your children.

So one of the things I think just before we dive into those five shifts is that it's really important that we be our authentic selves with our kids. We’re not fully present with our kids when we are, you know, they say play with me and we sit down and play but we're still checking, you know, our email from work, we're thinking about you know how we need to add some things to the shopping list or we need to get started on dinner.

They can tell when we're not fully with them. They can also tell when we say yes to a game or a type of play that we're not really interested in. They can feel that. Children are very naturally attuned to the emotional state and presence of their parents. They have to be, that's part of the attachment system that regulates kind of distance and relationships between, you know, physical and emotional proximity between caregiver and a child.

And so they are attuned to us very closely and carefully and it's quite confusing to them when we say, oh yes, I want to play with you, but they can feel that kind of that pull away or that kind of oh, I don't really want to be doing this. So it's really important that we’re authentic and honest with our kids.

You know, some of the shifts I'm going to be offering today might help you more authentically enjoy playing with your kids so that the things that you normally would say no to, you actually enjoy better. Shifting your mindset so that you can go into them with an open heart without resentment and authentically enjoy them.

But the very first shift that is so important is that you really get to know yourself and what you like and where your boundaries are and what you're okay with. The type of play that you're interested in with them that you can authentically pour yourself into. Knowing when and where you have time and space and energy for that type of play and only saying yes to play when it is a 100% yes.

It's really important to model 100% yeses to our kids and so if you can't authentically, truly enjoy it, then don't do it. Give yourself permission to say no to have a pass on those things. It's really important to sit down and get to know yourself as a parent, get to know yourself as an adult and your relationship with play, and what you like and doing with your kids– what fills you up, what brings you joy and what you don't like necessarily doing with your kids. What drains you, what feels like too much–and so being really honest with yourself.

And this is actually something that our 30 Days of Play Challenge that we do in January that starts, I think when you're hearing this, if you're listening to this on the day it releases, starts in just a couple of days.

One of the purposes of this 30 Days of Play Challenge is not just to get to know your kids through play, but I also get to know yourself as a parent through play and really being able to be honest with yourself and with your children so that you can have a true, authentic relationship–not one that is, builds on kind of hiding your true self, but one that is celebrating your true selves and their true yourself and finding that common ground.

So that's the first tip. If you can't authentically enjoy it, if it's going to lead to resentment, it's our responsibility to set those boundaries and to say no with grace and compassion. And then that leads us into finding some common ground and some interests that you do share.

I know a lot of you reached out to me when I was prepping for this play challenge and this is something that you can struggle with at times where maybe one parent shares a lot of interest with kids and it's harder for the other parent to get into those interests or sometimes kids have very specific interests.

Like my niece, for example, is really into some Japanese anime shows that are just not my thing. I'm not terribly interested in them, but my sister, her mom, is. And seeing them connect over them is really beautiful.

And so there's this piece of like recognizing when we enjoy the things that our kids like and what we don't enjoy, but there's usually an opportunity for common ground. There's usually an opportunity where some of the interests do overlap. We might have to get really creative to find those.

And then there's this other piece of it that if we don't if we really don't share in the interests and our kids are super into something. There's this piece of, we don't exactly have to be super into the thing that they're into, but we can be super into them. We can be really, really interested in them and that can give us a little bit more access to diving into a topic that is not necessarily our thing with them.

This is something that I do a lot with my niece and nephew and my niece is really interested in these anime shows and my nephew is super into Minecraft and Roblox and they just aren't something that I have experienced with, but when they want to talk about it or show me one of the things that they're playing, I drop into the present moment with them, I put my phone away and I really listen and seek to learn. Drop into curiosity and it's not that I'm interested necessarily in learning about Minecraft or Roblox, it's that I'm interested in learning about my nephew who's interested in those things.

And so that is a really powerful mindset shift that is important. So if you can't find that common ground, you're shifting your mindset into what are you actually interested in? It doesn't have to be the thing that they're interested in, but you can be interested in them.

Another aspect of shifting your mindset which is my third tip, of course, you all know me so well, hopefully by now, you know that mindset is everything in my opinion. So shifting again into this place of really focusing on enjoying them even if it's not something that you enjoy. Understanding that really what's going on here is that you are wanting to connect with them.

So Renee Brown tells us that in order to feel connected, we need to feel seen, heard and valued. And dropping into the present moment during a child's play is one of the easiest ways to help a child feel seen, heard and valued.

That's one of the reasons why in my 30 Days of Play Challenge, we spend the whole first 10 days doing nothing but observing our children's play because it really helps us drop into that present moment and communicate quite clearly how much we value their play and how interested we are in them and how much we see and hear them.

We're going to dive deeper once you've signed up for it, the Play Challenge. I have a private podcast that's just for the play challenge. So it's all in one place and we're going to dive deep into how to be a good observer.

But this is a big piece of it, shifting your mindset and really understanding that it's not about the play, it's not about what they're telling you what to do or you know, whether you're entertaining enough or if it's fun enough–it's about the connection is really what it's about and there is benefit in whatever play they're doing.

So oftentimes, I think that parents think that we have to play in a certain way with kids, but really usually what we need to do is step way back and let them lead the play and that they intuitively know what play is right and beneficial for them. And then if we step back kind of step out of the way and are just present with them, let them lead and direct the play, that's where the benefit really is.

And this is something that I know a lot of parents reach out to me on–that their young kids are super directive in their play and they don't really like playing with their kids because they just get bossed around or they get told that they're doing it wrong or you're saying it wrong or no mama don't do that, no daddy don't do this–and that isn't exactly as fun as what they were hoping to do, that, they want to be playing with their kids, but the way that their kids are in the play is a little off-putting.

And so that's something that is really important to wrap your head around, that if your kid is being directive in their play, that means that they've got some agenda for the play, that the play is serving a really deep purpose for them; one that we might not fully understand as grown-ups and if they're being that directive, they have the need to express themselves through that play or process something through that play and they want to kind of use us as a toy or as a play object to help them reflect on whatever it is that they're going through.

And so this brings us to the kind of, the fourth shift that I wanted to introduce to you is really shifting how you view your role in your children's play. I know I touched on this before, but so often we think that we need to entertain our kids and this starts really young–little babies. We shake a rattle in front of our kids’ face and we distract them from what they were focusing on.

I remember watching one of my daughters when they were little; observing flecks of dust floating through the light and I was just enthralled watching her watch this light. It was beautiful. She focused on it for so long and it was play, she was playing. That's what play is–a deep-in-the-moment experience; a developmental experience.

And so she was an infant. She was watching this it’s beautiful and my well meaning wonderful parent was there and she stuck a rattle in front of her face and shook it and distracted her. And in that moment, unintentionally, a child learns that what I'm doing isn't quite right.

You know, there's better ways to spend my time than where my intuition tells me to spend my time and attention. It breaks concentration. So the very skills that we want our kids to have when they're older, we get in the way of them developing naturally through play. And so I really want to encourage you as a parent to to start shifting your role from one of the person who needs to be directing the play.

Another thing that, you know, folks ask me, they think in this play challenge that we're gonna get lists of games to try with their kids or lists of activities to try with your kids, you know, setups and invitations and stuff. And I'm not gonna do any of that in this play challenge because I actually want you doing the exact opposite.

I want you stepping out of the play director role; out of the kind of the early childhood educator role–the role of the person who is setting up the play or making sure that the play is happening in the way that we as the adults think it's supposed to happen.

A big piece of this challenge, and I think the most transformative part of this challenge for listeners who participated in the past and feel free to let me know if this is true for you, is shifting out of that role. Releasing responsibility for your children's play by returning responsibility for your children's play to them.

They're the owners of the play, they're the creators of the play. They are the ones who benefit from it. They're the ones who know how to do it, why to do it. They don't need to be taught or shown how to do it. If we are consistently kind of stepping back, getting out of the way, projecting confidence in them and staying present with them as they lead the play.

So, a lot of us kind of step into the role of director in play and I want to stepping back into being an assistant and letting the child really be the director of the play. So are one of those parents who was like, oh my gosh, my kids always telling me what to do when I play, like that's a really good sign. That's what we want. You are already ahead of the game because they will know just what to do.

And this is the perfect time to be using one of my very favorite tools and I'll have you experiment with, and I'll teach you more about in the challenge on the Stage Whisper where you really return responsibility for the play to the child and they love it.

So your role in their play does not need to be active, it needs to be quite passive and the other piece of that, like that's really important to understand is that play, as beautiful and natural and the developmental process as it is, it's also a skill; a muscle that your kids can build.

So if you are struggling with getting your kids to play independently while you relax or or do other things around the house, just know that you need to take an honest look about how you are interacting with them in their play.

So if when you are playing with them, you know, one on one with one of your kiddos, if you're doing a lot of the heavy lifting in the play, deciding what to play, making suggestions for what to do, making you know, characters.

If you're playing with dolls, be really silly and fun and entertaining and you know, getting lots of good laughs from the kids. If you're doing those things though–that's the heavy lifting of the play, that's the work of the play. And when we do that, we take away the opportunity for the kids to build those muscles.

And so one of the beautiful things about this challenge is that, for just 10 minutes a day, I'm asking you to show up a little bit differently with your kids in regards to play. You don't have to change anything else. This challenge is very light; there's not a lot to do in it.

All I'm asking you to do is just to take, you know, 10 minutes broken up throughout the day and really think about the play that you are and the way you are interacting with your children's play. Observe them, observe yourself and show up just a little bit differently in their play. Then perhaps you currently are and then see what happens.

It's always amazing to me in this challenge–around the third or fourth day, I start getting floods of messages from people who are taking the challenge around, you know, my kid who never was able to play by themselves before now just played for 20 or 30 minutes while I clean the kitchen or while I watched them play. I mean it was amazing, it's amazing with just a simple little shift in how you show up to the play changes their ability.

And of course, you know, if we've been playing for them or doing some of the heavy lifting for a while, it can take kids some time to adjust to us showing up in a new way. It can be uncomfortable for these kids if they learn to expect certain things from their environment and their interactions with us and when we change things, there can be some growing pains as they grow and stretch and learn how to show up differently themselves in their play.

But it doesn't mean that's a bad thing. It's quite a good thing because remember, as I said before that when kids ask us to play with them, they might not necessarily want you really in their play and doing things for them. What they really want is us with them. They want us not doing, they want us being with them.

Okay. And so that brings us to our very last tip or kind of shift is figuring out how to create a practice where you are showing up for play with your kids in this really unique way and that you are doing a really good job of setting boundaries for yourself.

I know we talked a little bit about boundaries when it comes to kind of, if you can't authentically enjoy it, don't do it. And this is where we kind of take that to the next level. So making sure that you have a good sense of when you are available for play, how long you kind of can make it, how long is a good amount of time where you feel good while you're doing it.

And at what point does it shift into feeling like, oh, I'm done. I feel I'm starting to feel resentful. I'm starting to not like this. I think this is something that is really important. It's something that I teach in Respectful Parenting when I won my intro course. It's really important that we set boundaries for ourselves with our kids in a way to prevent there being stress or strain on our relationship that they can't possibly be responsible for.

So all relationships have times where there's tension or stress or strain on them–that's what builds resilient relationships, but it's our responsibility to set boundaries that set the relationship up for success.

And so for example, let's say we've had a really long day at work. We come home. We picked the kids up from school or from daycare and right away they want to play play, play, play, play play. We're tired and so we say, okay kiddo, I've got 10 minutes before I've got to make dinner. Let's you and me sit down and we'll you know, we'll play or maybe we'll read some stories; things that you like that you have the energy for. You sit down and you do those things and when the 10 minutes is up and it's time for you to go make dinner, they say no play with me more.

At that point, you have a choice to make. You can, even if you know you don't really have time, you know you're gonna be rushed later and you know that you're going to feel a little bit maybe resentful of having to keep playing. I mean you're done, you're touched out, you're tired from your day. They don't know any of those things. Right?

So if you've got a four or five-year-old, they don't know that you're playing for 5 minutes longer, 10 minutes longer, 20 minutes longer. It's going to make dinner late, it's gonna make you stressed, it's going to make them get to bedtime late and make everybody cranky the next morning. They don't have the cognitive skills to think that far ahead. So it's our responsibility to be in that place and hold a boundary that sets everybody in the family up for success. I know this is a lot of pressure on a family, on a parent but that is our role.

And so when they say no no no more mama. Five more minutes. Five more minutes. It's our job to be really settled and confident in that, yes, of course, my sweetheart, I would love to play all evening. And at the same time somehow dinner has got to be made and there's it's just me who's got to make it and if we don't make dinner now, we’ll be late, getting to you know, eating dinner, you'll get hungry.

It's hard for you to play with your sister when you get too hungry because then you everybody gets a little cranky and so I've got to go make dinner now. I would love to be able to keep playing with you. I just can't right now, let's make a date for after dinner.

What what what type of, you know, what books do you want to read together after dinner or after dinner? We'll have, you know, we usually have about 20 minutes to enjoy some playtime in the bath. What toys do you think you're gonna want to play with in the bath?

So making a little bit of a plan for later, filling up their connection bucket first before they, you have to separate while your attention is directed elsewhere. Really holding that boundary firm. It doesn't do your kids any good to waffle on a boundary that, you know, you should set when, you know, they don't have all the information.

They don't know that if you say yes to five more minutes of playing or yes to 10 more minutes of reading at bedtime, they don't know that you're gonna end up kind of feeling grumpy with them or frustrated with them or that they might end up tired. They don't know those things. It's our job to kind of project into the future and protect the relationship.

So setting those good boundaries with your child, but also when it comes to playing with your kids, it's important for you to set boundaries with yourself. So for example, during these, you know, 10 minutes when the kids come home, the first really for at our house, it's about the first 30 minutes that they're in the house.

My husband and I put our phones away because there's always more emails to check. There's always more messages on Instagram from you, wonderful folks, to check. And that really pulls our attention away from the kids when they need us to pour into them connection wise. And so we just put our phones away. And that's a boundary that we set with ourselves to set ourselves up for success.

So figuring out what boundaries we need in place in order to be able to fully be present and fully enjoy playing is so important. And you know what the boundaries that I've been stating right now, those are the ones that work for me. The ones that will work for you are likely very different.

You all have wonderful families and wonderful circumstances that make your lives incredibly unique. And your children are unique–they have unique play needs that mine might not have.

And so really sitting down and carefully taking a look at–what do I need in place in order for me to be able to enjoy being fully present and playing with my kids.

And one thing for me that I've noticed is that if I have clients, my wonderful one on one clients are classes that I'm teaching in my membership that bump up against when my kids come home so that I end the class and then they're like walking in the door. There's no buffer for me to kind of drop into presence with myself. Take a little bit of a relaxed, you know.

The work that I do is quite emotionally–there's an emotional investment in it, giving myself some time to bounce back. I'm not able to be fully present with my kids and so that boundary comes earlier for me. I have to make sure that in my calendar where I'm scheduling things, I'm leaving that buffer of time for myself before the kids get home so that I can be fully present. And I was working outside the home that looked like getting to daycare five minutes early, sitting in the car and doing like a five minutes self compassion meditation before I went in.

So these buffers don't have to be very big. You're the one who's working outside of the home and you're coming home and the kids are waiting for you at home, sitting in the garage for a couple of minutes just to kind of get your head on straight, can be really great to give you that buffer. But again, you know best what you need in order to be successful.

And I guess I hope in this conversation I've relieved some of the pressure, like it's okay to not always want to play with your kids and you know, I guess I think I was about to confess this at the beginning and I never actually did.

So I don't play with my kids most of the time. Most of the time my two kids, they're 6 and 9 and once they were maybe two and a half, they play pretty much independently or together most of the time. They will still, you know, sometimes ask me to play a specific game with them, but most of the time, if we're really connecting together, we will be doing it through art, coloring–which I really enjoy, baking, playing board games.

But a lot of the imaginative play that is so good for kids and that we kind of think we're supposed to be doing, really happens just between themselves or just on their own independently. And that's something that is, again, it was on purpose because I wanted my kids to be able to play independently, it's by design.

We've worked really hard to build those skills and a lot of the things again that I'm teaching in the 30 Days of Play Challenge which is entirely free, they’re the very things that will set you up to kind of get on that path. So let me just introduce the Play Challenge to you a little bit.

And so this Play Challenge really is designed to help you get to know your child and connect on a deeper level with them through play. Again, there won't be any lists of games or activities to play. We're really focusing on learning how to let your child lead.

So the parent is really learning how to kind of lean in and exercise that skill of standing back, of sitting on your hands, biting your tongue, and really accepting, fully accepting how the child shows up and play. And then we're giving space for the kiddos to build those skills and exercise those independent play muscles.

And I just want to just wrap up by saying that, you know, playing with our kids often feels hard because we feel responsible for it. Like it feels like it's a job, that's something that we have to do and make sure happens just right for our kids.

And I just I guess I just want to make sure that you know that you can release that responsibility, that's one that you can let go and fall off of your shoulders. And it is my hope that in joining this Play Challenge, that's exactly what you will learn–that this challenge really is designed to get you out of that role and out of your kids' way so that they can access deeply immersive healing play with or without you.

In the challenge, it's broken up into three parts. In the first part, you will learn how to observe play like a social scientist and you'll learn how to nonjudgmentally observe your child's play in a way that makes them feel truly seen and heard and helps you get to know them better. It's practically a mindfulness practice. So it's really good for your stress response system as well.

In the second set of 10 days, you will learn how to reflect and process what you're observing like a therapist would. You will reflect on the purpose and role that play serves in both your child's life and your own life–we have a couple of great episodes on the podcast to kind of go with this aspect of it too and you'll be getting crystal clear on any blocks that you have around play; play with your kids and play just on your own as well.

And then in the last 10 days of the 30 Day Challenge, you will learn how to take action like a play therapist. You'll be supported in taking direct and specific actions to support deeper, more meaningful play in your child and a richer, more joyful connected relationship for the two of you.

So that's my hope and intention and then we wrap the whole thing up with a webinar on where I teach you how to connect more deeply with your children through play. As a part of this challenge, I always do invite folks to, you know, if you're wanting to learn more about play and the impact it can have on your kids and on your relationship,, I do have some courses that are available.

So, I have two play courses. One is called Purposeful Play where I teach you how to use play really intentionally throughout your days with your kids to help them prepare for new things, process hard feelings and kind of events that they might, you know, be going through and really like use it with purpose. So it's a fun course; it's very light. I do a lot of playing in it, a lot of play demonstrations.

Ad then I have another course called Playful Healing, which was really designed to help you build a practice of holding healing play sessions with your child and that course is really good for you if you're feeling disconnected from your kiddo, like you don't really know them, they're growing up, they're slipping away. It's been a while since you felt really connected with them or if there's lots of big feelings happening in your home–that's a great course.

So you'll be hearing more about those courses in the coming weeks, but I'm hoping that you'll join me for this Play Challenge, it's one of my favorite times of the year in The Balanced Parenting Community.

So go ahead and follow the link, get signed up the daily posts, reflection posts will be posted on my Instagram page, and in my private Facebook group, and of course there will be the private podcast to go along with it, where you will be getting all of the trainings that go along with the Play Challenge.

I know that it can be kind of confusing to have two podcasts of mine going on at the same time. So this podcast where you're listening to, this is just going to be kind of general content. We are focusing on play, but none of the trainings for the play challenge are here. This is kind of just bonus material that everybody can access and find beneficial even if they aren't doing the play challenge.

But if you want to dive deeper, you want to learn more you want to build these skills that we've been talking about today, that's what the Play Challenge is for. It's created for you with you in mind and I love supporting you and learning how to connect on a deeper level with your kiddos through their most natural language, play.

Alright, so I hope to see you in the challenge. If there are any questions you can always feel free to reach out to me or my team at laurafroyen.com. Alright, see you in the challenge.

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 parenthood that we don't have to escape from and creating a childhood for our kids that they don't have to recover from.

December 28, 2021

Episode 97: Becoming Unbusy with Monica Berg

December 28, 2021/ Laura Froyen

As we settle into this space between the winter holidays and the New Years, I want to invite you all to slow down and drop into the present moment with yourself. Let's just take a minute to check in. How are you doing? No really, how have you been.

I don't know about you, but I've been feeling a bit harried, overwhelmed, and honestly, burnt out. I always have this big push in December as I prepare for our annual 30 Days of Play Challenge, the winter holidays, and everything else, and this year has been no different. And with the added layer of another Covid Christmas... It's a lot. But one thing I have been doing that has made it all a bit easier is to take short, simple, self-compassion breaks. I would love to invite you try it with me, right now!

Place your hand over your heart and repeat these words (aloud if you're comfortable):

May I be safe & protected.

May I be happy in body, mind, & spirit.

May I live in comfort & ease.

That's it! Repeat these words (or similar phrases with the same energy of self kindness and grace) as often as you need to. A mindfulness practice does not need to be big or complicated to reap loads of benefits! LET ME KNOW IF YOU TRY IT!

And if you're looking for another way to invite more mindful presence, and connect with your kids at the same time, I would love to have you join us in our play challenge this year. I know you're likely thinking "Laura, what does mindfulness & kids play have to do with each other??" The answer is, EVERYTHING when you approach it in the way we do in my Annual 30 Days of Play Challenge.

In the challenge you will learn how to drop into a mindful, nonjudgmental and presence-filled state with your child and it has the potential to not only improve your own and your child's wellbeing, but that of your relationship too. Plus, folks who do this challenge see a dramatic increase in their children's ability to play independently, which is 100% my number 1 secret for taking good care of myself and staying balanced as a parent. As we know, to a child "love" is spelled "T-I-M-E"(Zig Zigler) and this challenge helps you figure out how to get the time that everyone needs to feel balanced & connected

As we discuss in this week's episode of The Balanced Parent podcast with guest Monica Berg, our relationships with time and how we spend it is of vital importance to our feelings of satisfaction and fulfillment in parenting.

Here is an overview of our conversation:

Reevaluating the way we spend not just our time but our life
Reconnecting with our old selves and finding non time as busy parents
Relationship between non time and un-busying our selves
How to get unstuck and un-busy

To get more resources, follow Monica on social media and check her website.
Instagram: @monicarberg74
Twitter: @monicaberg74
Facebook: @monicaberg74
Website: rethinklife.today

TRANSCRIPT

Laura: Hello everybody, this is Dr. Laura for again and on this week's episode of the balanced parent podcast we're going to be talking about how to become unbusy and to help me with this conversation I'm bringing in a guest and colleague, Monica Berg, she is a speaker thought leader and author of Fear is Not An Option and Rethinking Love and the host of the Spiritually Hungry podcast Monica, Welcome to the show. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do?

Monica: Thank you for having me. It's good to join you today. Basically I live my life with the intention of helping people rethink almost pretty much everything they think they know with the hope of people living their best life and finding their purpose and their passion and living a life where they're first and foremost honest with themselves and have no shame or guilt in pursuing the things that they truly desire.

That's why I'm really excited about the topic today because I think often we can get busy with the wrong things and distracted really by other people's desires and needs demands and that is a formula I think a recipe for a bit of unhappiness.

Laura: Tell me more about the piece where the getting busy with things that are not our actual priorities or goals. Why do we do that? Why did we get bogged down in that piece of things?

Monica: Well, I think it happens more with women to be honest, although it can happen to both sexes, but I think that women are raised to be caretakers and nurtures and you know, to really be in touch with their feelings and be empathetic with others. And so and that's okay. But if you don't find a time in your life or make it really a priority to really get to know yourself to hear what you desire to not be afraid to go after it, then that voice, that internal dialogue becomes almost muted.

And then what you really do here is the external demands, opinions, expectations of others. And then once you're in that kind of loop, it's hard to get away from it and it's hard to navigate, you know, because the voice that's really loud is somebody else's and then you find yourself and kind of a rut maybe you know, 20 years down the line, it doesn't happen right away.

Laura: Everybody struggles with this. I see it with the dads that I work with a lot too. So their partner will say like you focus on things that are not that important to our family. I think it's all of us get bogged down into kind of what we think we're supposed to be doing in the should, you know, and very much less on what actually would bring us lasting happiness and fulfillment, right?

Monica: Yeah. And I also think it has to just be as simple as you know, how we view time. I mean it's something we all have the exact same amount of right. You and I both have the same minutes in this day, but unless you are really a timekeeper, right, and you manage your time, you guard your time. I'm gonna have a bunch of different tools and tips I can give you as we go through our conversation today.

But unless you really understand that the importance of your time, it's easy to say, okay I'll do this other thing right now and I'll get to the really important thing later, I'll do these five things on my to do list first and then I'll get to the other things later and before you know it, you know, the day is gone and the day becomes weeks and months and years and that's just your reality. And then you're like, how did I get here? How is it that I'm not actually manifesting, achieving or accomplishing anything that I truly desire?

Laura: Yeah. And so what's the solution? What do we do to not get caught up in that?

Monica:Well, there's a few, so let's go because I have a bunch of, I'm really a kind of person that, you know, immediate action. So you have first thought, right, you change your consciousness and then you follow up with immediate action because if not then, you know, it's a great conversation, but no real change occurs. And as you know, I call myself a change junkie, very much addicted to change, which was not how I came into the world. That was also an evolution.

So the first idea is something called non time, you know, it's very uncomfortable at first, especially if you're a type A personality because you're like doo doo doo. But non time is where you give yourself like fire to ask you to do nothing or think about nothing for 15 minutes, I would say that would really be a hard challenge for most of us. And in fact, if I asked you not to think about anything at all.

The first thing you're gonna think about, like the one thing I tell you not to think about right, if I say, please don't think about pink elephants, chances are, you're only the thing about pink elephants, but non time is something that actually very successful people do. A time or space you give yourself that is not with the demands of the world, it's not with all the noise of the world. You give yourself a task to do nothing.

So Albert Einstein obviously we all know about Albert Einstein how successful he was, but his non time was sailing and some of his greatest ideas came as he said, feeling the wind on his face being on a sailboat, right? Steve Jobs, we know how innovative he was, but he was also known to be a procrastinator and somebody who daydreamed a lot.

But in his day dreaming and his doodling, he found a great balance between finding work and play right in technology. My non time is exercise and for some that might not be might sound really tragic, but I work out two hours a day, six days a week. But in that time of not thinking and using my body, most of my creative thoughts and ideas actually come to me and I have to run to my phone after the workout and write them all down.

So non time is actually a way that you find something that you enjoy doing, that you're not giving yourself a task or a goal or, you know, something specific to do. And scientists have found and proven they've done numerous tests with different groups on giving them something to do and then nothing to do and then to see who was more creative and it's always those who were in a space of non time.

Laura: Interesting. Okay, so then how do we find the non time for ourselves? You know, I know that, you know, anybody who is a runner, I most likely identified with the exercise piece that you just said, I know that, you know, my dad was a runner that was his non time all the time. He had his best ideas, all of those things when he was running.

But how do we find that especially I don't know about you, but for many of the families that I work with as you transition into parenthood, you, it seems like you lose a lot of time for yourself and you almost lose the parts of yourself that did those non time activities. So like one for me was when I was before I was a parent,I would spend time just doing art for myself with no purpose and I just don't make as much time for that now as a parent. So how can we figure out and reconnect to that to our old selves and find non time as busy parents.

Monica: Yeah, it's interesting. I'm also a marathon runner and for sure that's, you know, people like I do it, I would get lost in that space. I think parents make that mistake though. They think that, You know, now I'm taking care of a child or four children are so clearly you do have less time in the day to do things that feed you.

But you know, that's the trap because, you know, my oldest is 22, my youngest is eight and the ways that they need you changes so much through time. And if you devote all of your energy and all of your purpose, just just raising children as that relationship changes, it can be really hard for you to find yourself. Then I really encourage you to go back to your art for sure. I think we have to be flexible about how we approach it.

So if, for instance, I call it like a modest spark, let's say that there's something you enjoy doing, but it's not like your ultimate end all be all but you enjoy doing it. So before I started public speaking, I used to, and I still do, I enjoy baking very much. Baking was something I could do at 11 o'clock at night or nine o'clock at night when the kids were sleeping and as I was creating things with my hands again, doing something. I was thinking about lectures, ideas, concepts, books and I was formulating them in my mind.

So I think that, you know, even if you need to do it at a weird hour or you know, or you need to wake up a little bit earlier, you need to ask your partner to fill in this time or maybe the kids have pizza for dinner and they don't have all their food groups in that one night, you know, that's okay, but just to find that and create that space because it will allow you actually even to be a better parent, you know, for so busy on our children and and focused on making them happy and being the perfect parent and we're running them from karate class and the other one has ballet class and the other one has soccer practice and you're yelling in them in the car because they didn't eat healthy at the birthday party and you want to, you know, you want this balanced kind of life and really your goal is to be a great parent.

But you're not actually giving yourself that non time, how are you going to think differently about approaching parenting, you know, while trying to do all these great things for them, you know, are they gonna remember what you did or how you made them feel?

So I think giving ourselves that space just to be, there's no reason not to, you know, I often say to people because that's a question I get a lot like how do I have time to focus on my growth or change my consciousness or whatever we find that's important to us that we want to work on, but we just don't have the time. If you stop and ask yourself, how many times did I think a negative thought today or did I break myself about not being good enough in this or that area? Or I spoke bad about somebody like how much of our time and energy goes towards something negative. You know, if we actually cut that out of our lives, I guarantee you'll have time for non time.

Laura: Yeah. So what is the relationship then between non time and being kind of unbusying yourself? How are they related?

Monica: So non time you're being busy with something, but you're not being distracted I think right? It's very much something that you enjoy doing, like vigorous exercise or you're like coloring or like it's something that you're actually participating in. It's giving you the space just to absorb your surroundings that you want, right? Sitting by a window and looking out at the trees are looking in nature. It's that space.

Unbusy means you stop participating in things that just don't serve you and that's a different thing, you know? And so I think that, you know, often people ask another question about anti goals, which is the opposite of having goals, right?

And I like where this conversation is going because it's like they seem so similar and they seem that they contradict each other at the same time, anti goals or when you write down things you don't love doing and you just stop doing them. So for instance, if you hate having board meetings and you don't feel that they're effective, then you just stop doing it.

It's like and by doing that, you're going to find a solution in how to spend more time with the things that you love because you've removed so much of your energy and participating in things that you just don't enjoy. Like if I were to ask you, you know, solve hunger in India, right? That's a big question. But if I said to you, why don't we look at what's not working in India in terms of poverty and starvation and let's stop doing those things, then the solution will be a lot clearer.

Laura: Sometimes I channel I feel like my listeners as they're listening to these things and the question that's popping up in my brain, I can't just stop doing laundry, you know, like the laundry has to get done.

Although in my relationship in my house, I at one point I did just stop doing it and it got done by my partner who is wonderful and great, but like there's a certain level, like there are things I do have to get done, you know, as parents, so how can we approach them in a way that is more conscious and intentional and fulfilling?

Monica: Absolutely. There are some things that we have to do. I do find though, that we, we have to check ourselves that we're coming from a controlling place for this idea that we have to be a perfect parent. That pressure that we put on ourselves means laundry has to be done every Monday Wednesday Friday has to be folded, put it back in place organized.

If somebody comes over, they're gonna see how neat my houses and I have everything under control. I don't think we have to do all the things we say to ourselves that we need to do. You know, kids can use a towel more than twice, you know, uh, they can make their beds to the best of their ability. It's okay if they get into a bed that maybe isn't made, if it doesn't bother me, if it bothers them enough, they're going to learn how to start making it right?

It requires more effort in a way because you have to be disciplined. You have to kind of repeat yourself. But that effort that you put into the beginning actual payoff. So I think a way to get around this, it's another tool, it's called create your to be list before your to do list, but to do list is one that is long. It's usually things again like laundry is on there or pick up vacuum cleaner bags or, you know, a bunch of to do’s and again we do need to do some of those things.

But do we have to do them when we think we have to do them and that, you know, detail of every, you know, these schedules that are so regimented. So if you create your to be list first, right? Let's say on your to be list was to write a children's book. And so if that was important to you, then on your to-do list would be, you know, take an hour a week, let's say, if you're really, really busy with kids and schedules in a lot for one hour a week to writing. Surely you can find an hour, right?

Laura: Can I just ask a question just to clarify? So is the to be list kind of your goals for who you want to be?

Monica: Yes, exactly. And based on who you want to become, you create your to-do list. Okay, so again, you will have the other things on there. But when you have that list combined with your to be list, right, then all of a sudden it becomes really apparent like is this really important or maybe I won't do it this week.

Or like let's say, you have to prepare food and you want to find a few extra hours in the week. Maybe you do your fruit prep on Sunday. You make your menu, you do your shopping, you already cut all the vegetables, you put them in mason jars and you set all that up. So Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, you've now gained a half hour for an hour in that day because you're not prepping on those days, you're just cooking, but you've now you can put that to something else that's really important to you. So I think a lot of it is just shifting your perspective.

Laura: Yeah. And and I really do, I feel like we've kind of been screwing around this a little bit, but it seems like a big piece of this is letting go of the expectations that you hope for yourself or the expectations that maybe you've borrowed from society and culture and the big piece of this is letting go of those things and instead intentionally choosing what matters most to you.

Monica: 100%. You know, my husband and I, as you mentioned, we have a podcast, it's called spiritually hungry and we did an episode parenting and, you know, there are many doctors, I can't remember the one specific one way we had quoted right now, but saying this idea that you know, you just want to be a good enough parent.

Because if you're a good enough parent, right? It means that you of course you care and you're trying to do your best, but you're also well aware that your children will have their own process. They're going to have their own journey in life and it's not our job to control that process for them and by doing that, you really kind of let yourself off the hook a bit.

Laura: Yeah, the good enough parent is absolutely so important. It's from Winnicott, the researcher from the 50s who coined this term. And it's so, so important to embrace that idea of being good enough.

Monica: Again, I think a lot of ideas like letting go, that could be so field, so difficult to master first. If you just shift your consciousness right, then everything will follow. You have to just decide that that really is ok to be a good enough parent and from there, you're okay. If that's really what I think, then that means I'm going to make this other decision on this day. I'm going to let go and that area on that day.

Laura: Yeah. And how do you do that? Like how do you just decide? I think that lots of people, parents and non parents struggle with that aspect of it, of can you just decide? And if limiting beliefs linger in there, what do you do with them? Why?

Monica: I think expanding your consciousness, it's like a muscle, you have to work, right? It's not just something you do want something you choose every single day. I think that if you wake up in the morning and you really have this conversation with yourself, right? I want to be a conscious person that really directs my day, the way that I wanted to go, the way that I intended to, the way that I'm enjoying it and then I'm driving purpose and meaning, right?

So if that's how you start your day and that means when things unfold in the day and they don't go out the way that you want or things didn't happen the way that you want, you're able to stop and say okay, it's not what I expected, but how can I make this work for me? Once you start to do that right, you start to change the way that you look at life, the life happens through you, not to you, you've become part of solutions, everything is purposeful, even the things that are not what you had intended or wanted.

So you know, and if you find it really hard to do that, then you're gonna, those negative belief systems that we created long ago will come up. You have to listen to them and then you have to challenge them. It doesn't have to be that hard. I mean the simplistic answer is you know, how do you let go of a piece of hot coal in your hand. I mean simply you let it go, you drop it, how do you let go of heavy baggage, you've been caring come home from the airport, you just drop it and let it go right, simply we understand that.

So if the decision is I don't want to be such an angry parent anymore or I don't want to be such an upset spouse or I want to, you know, then you have to say, okay if I don't want to be those negative things anymore, then how will I change my experience in those roles? That's the choice you make right?

Laura: What do I need to let go in order to step into who I want to be,?

Monica: Right. So if you're fighting with your partner all the time because they don't acknowledge you, why is it important for them to acknowledge you? And you have to be able to to be honest with yourself about what the challenge is. And then ask yourself the question why do you need that outcome by asking yourself those two questions with an answer yourself with honesty, then you'll have the information in front of you and from that space you can choose something else, but you really need to be able to put that lay it out in front of you to be able then to say okay. Like that's why I named my book Fears Is Not An Option.

When fear is no longer an option, you need to look for other options. It's the same thing here. If being that whatever it is right that is upsetting you is no longer an option for you in your life that you don't want that. We're gonna look for different options.

Laura: Yeah. And I almost like would feel really good to me to, to frame this as a, like almost like from a place of curiosity, like if fear was no longer an option, what would you be? You know, if being defensive with your partner in the midst of a disagreement was no longer an option for you, what would you choose?

Like that curiosity piece feels really good and I really appreciate the reminder that it's an active practice that it's a muscle you have to exercise, that it's not a set it and forget it kind of one and done, you look at it once you're like open up there it is and then you move forward. I think that's what people are hoping it will be and it's not, it's a conscious active choosing each and every day.

Monica: We become more part of a quick fix society. You know, you don't like your butt you know, there's a solution for that, you know, like your whatever, you know, we can, we can fix that too and it's just like in a heartbeat, real joy fulfillment that comes from everyday choosing that, you know, and we understand this when it comes to physical activity, you'll get really fit, you work out and then you stop working out and you eat like differently well your body is going to change also, that's just the way that it is.

So I think having help with the understanding that you really need to participate in your life. I think that people forget that, you know, while you still care about it, by the way, so after people like, oh, you know, I'm going to do this first, it's the kids or the priority or you know, I'm just gonna keep doing these things, I don't love it, but I know like five years from now, I don't have to do it, it doesn't work like that, you don't know where you're gonna be in five years, right? So you have to really say, okay, I care enough about me and because they care about me, I'm gonna do something today to change things that I'm not happy about.

Laura: Yeah, I always say like our lives are not waiting rooms we’re in them now, we're living our lives now, we have to be actively participating and choosing our lives. And you know, I think that oftentimes as parents, we do feel like we don't have a lot of choice that we don't have a lot of power. We are at the whims and mercy of our kids' developmental stages and what's going on in the world and it can feel quite empowering to recognize where you do have the ability to choose.

Monica: I mean, honestly, I can understand why people are terrified if they think in that way, like, just hearing you say that I'm like, my heart's beating because that for me, sounds like suffering. I mean, I would never want to live life like that. I think, you know, as far as your Children's development and being part of that at every stage, there needs to be room to allow something greater in. I believe in God, I believe in something far greater than us.

So I think it's about having certainty in the process of life and stop trying to control it and I'm you know, I was very much a control freak, I was very much a perfectionist and I think that's why I've gone the extreme the other way and really embracing change because I was miserable in another version of myself then life was not working for me, you know?

So I started to really challenge the things, you know, exactly like what I shared a little bit earlier in the show and also, you know, with children, you want to raise them I think to be able to think for themselves, So if you're controlling every stage you're basically teaching them to follow authority. To follow other people's beliefs and opinions, to be a follower and guess what, when they enter high school and you're not the voice in their head anymore, you're not the strongest influence then they will follow their peers that are now greater influences over them.

Laura: None of us want that. We want people, grown-ups. We want to raise people who when they're grown up and they yeah, they're independent, they know what they want. They know how to advocate for themselves, you know, they know how to stand up for themselves, they follow their hearts, they define their own success, this is what we want for our kids and it's so important to remember that like that starts at birth, like that starts now.

Monica: You know my kids ask me for advice or they share a problem with me, I don't try to fix it, what I do is I say to them, what do you think your options are? You know, what do you think you should do about that or you know, if you did x, y and z, how do you think the outcome would be, you know, to really get them to and dive the way that was a restriction on my part when I first started learning how to do that over a decade ago or more. Now, it's just the way we speak, but I would really encourage people first of all, that needs to be the voice you have with yourself, right? And when you do that then you can offer that to your children.

Laura: I so agree. It always starts with us always Yeah, and we want to be modeling this for our kids too. I think that that's something that's really powerful to remember in this conversation of kind of unbusying our life, like we are an advertisement for adulthood for our kids, you know, and we have to be really conscious of that of what we are modeling for them.

Monica: 100%.

Laura: Well, Monica, thank you so much for this conversation, it was really fun to talk about this kind of broad topic. I feel like we win a lot of different places, but it all connected. It was really a great conversation. Thank you.

Monica: Thank you.

December 21, 2021

Episode 96: Understanding Your Child's Personality for Ease in Parenting With Sandra Etherington

December 21, 2021/ Laura Froyen

A key part of being a conscious, attuned parent is deeply understanding your UNIQUE child and adjusting your approach in a way that works for THEM. This is where understanding more about your child's temperament and personality can be SUPER helpful! And for that reason, I am bringing in one of my friends and colleagues, Sandra Etherington. She is a mom of two beautiful kids and is the owner of Family Personalities and the co-host of the Family Personalities Podcast, a fun and sometimes cheesy podcast, that uses personality type to help change the way you see your family. Sandra uses her experience and training in Myers-Briggs personality type, to work one on one with families, helping them parent more effectively and compassionately based on their children's unique wiring and needs.

I hope that through this episode we can better understand our children's needs and find ease in parenting.

Here is a summary of our conversation:

Introverted Kids vs Extraverted Kids and Their Differing Needs
Tips to support The Differing Needs of Introverted and Extroverted Kids
Using Personality Type to Understand How Your Child Learns
Understanding Your Child’s Behavior through the Lens of Personality

To get more support, follow Sandra on Instagram @familypersonalities and visit her website www.familypersonalities.com.

And if you are interested to know your child’s personality, enroll to her online course:

Find Your Child's Myers-Briggs Personality Type

TRANSCRIPT

Parenting is often lived in the extremes. It's either great joy or chaotic overwhelm. 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 we're back with another episode of The Balanced Parent Podcast. And today we're gonna be talking about personality types with a personality type practitioner, Sandra Etherington.

This is her wheelhouse. This is her gift that she brings to the world and she's going to help us understand how our personality type of parents and kids personality types like how understanding those things can help us have more flow and ease and joy in our relationships and in our home. So, Sandra, thank you so much for being here with us. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do?

Sandra: Sure, I'm so grateful to be here. This is my favorite thing to talk about in the whole world. So I first discovered Myers Briggs type when I was in the corporate world. They used it a lot in the corporate world to deal with teamwork and working better as a team and more smoothly as a team. And when I discovered my type, which is INFJ. So the Myers Briggs types are denoted by four letters, and they each stand for something, and INFJ stands for introversion, intuition, feeling and judging.

And when I discovered my type, I remember reading the description on the internet. Some random site that I found and like, kind of tearing up a little bit. I was like, oh my gosh, I think that this internet site description understands me better than anyone has understood me my entire life. Maybe even better than I actually, definitely better than I even understood myself at the time.

Laura: Sandra I'm an INFJ too and I felt the same way. I felt so seen and heard when I found out my type. Yeah, and INFJ is a very rare type. So I think a lot of us have that experience when we discover it because not everyone is like, as most people are not like us. And so to hear someone kind of validate is the right word. But just kind of like, see you as a really amazing experience.

And I was like, I was wondering how does this, like, seemingly choice, like, four choices of letters get at the core of who I am? And obviously it doesn't get at everything. It doesn't know your life experiences, how you were brought up, all that sort of thing. But how does that understand me?

And so I was just so fascinated that I just kind of dove in and learned everything I could about Myers Briggs. And it was really just a hobby for a long time. And then fast forward I had kids. I decided to stay home with them and I just started wondering because I used Myers Briggs in all facets of my life from understanding my relationships with people.

I would type everyone around me, and I just started wondering, Wait, do my kids have a Myers Briggs type? And what does that say about them? And can I use that in my parenting? And I became just personally interested in it and began to research it and read about it. And I would tell people about it, you know, like, oh my son is, have you heard of Myers Briggs? My son’s an INTJ and that means yada, yada, yada. And so I try to approach things like this with them and they'd be like, what? Can you do that with my kids?

Laura: Right. It's like a secret code almost. Understanding them on this deeper level. Okay, let's rewind just a little bit, because I know not everybody listening has heard of the Myers Briggs, which is the personality assessment, or even like personality typing in general. Can you tell us a little bit about, what is personality typing specifically the Myers Briggs and just give us a little bit of an intro?

Sandra: Yeah, so Myers Briggs, the surface of level of it and how you kind of type is there are four different pairs of opposites. And so the first one is: do you prefer introversion or do you prefer extroversion? And that's really the easiest entry point into Myers Briggs, because we all have some idea of what introversion is and extroversion is.

And the important thing to know with Myers Briggs is that it's not absolute, right? Like I am not only introverted, I am not only extroverted, we are human, we are dynamic. We have the ability to do everything. But there's one that we have a natural preference for, a natural wiring for, and there's even research being done now.

I recently had Dario Nardi on my podcast, who has done work in the neuroscience world doing EEG scans of people's brains. And it's finding that, yes, we actually have a favored pathway through the brain that shows introversion or extroversion.

So the idea is you have a preference for one or the other. You have one way that's kind of more automatic, more comfortable. It fills your bucket. And then when you're used, trying to use the opposite, it's just more exhausting, more frustrating, maybe a little more awkward to use.

Laura: Almost like handedness.

Sandra: Exactly. Yeah, like you can compare it really well to being right handed or left handed.

Laura: Cool. Okay. And so the first two on the Myers Briggs end or the first pair is introversion and extroversion. What are the other ones?

Sandra: So the second pair is something called sensing or intuition, which is an S. And then they use N for intuition since the I was already used for introversion. And that has to do with how you take in information from the world around you.

So people who prefer some saying they tend to take in more concrete detail information, and people who are intuitive tend to take in more big picture type information from the world around them. And again, it's the same thing as introversion extroversion. We can do both, but we just have a natural preference and natural leaning towards one or the other when that's more comfortable, one that's more natural, one that's more automatic.

Laura: This is the one for me that all of my letters, you know, feel right to me. But this one was the most helpful in helping me understand, like how I move through the world. How sometimes I would know things are not like, you know, understand things and know things about people that they never said out loud that there was no tangible evidence for. Like it was very validating to have, like to know that that's a thing, you know?

Sandra: Yeah. Yeah, Some people make nicknames for the different processes, and so if you're an intuitive and a judger like you and I are as INFJs, it's a process that's called introverted intuition. But the nickname that Dario Nardi, who I already mentioned, uses for is keen for seeing. And so it's just this ability to have this insight into the future and know, and if you combine it with your feeling, you can know, like what people around you are feeling or needing. It feels like magic sometimes, but it's not.

Laura: I know, but it does because I mean, it's what made me such a good therapist. Like it made me a very good therapist. It was also incredibly exhausting. Yes, yeah. Okay, keep going. Keep going. This is so good.

Sandra: So then the next letter pairing is thinking and feeling, which is the T or the F and Myers Briggs. And a lot of people get caught up in the name labels for this one. Like thinking sounds like I think and, you know, feeling sounds like I have feelings and I'm emotional, but it's really not about that.

Thinking or feeling has to do with how you make decisions. So every little decision you make throughout the day, are you thinkers prefer to step outside of the situation emotionally or values wise leave that all that stuff confuses and these up the waters and making decisions, and they prefer just to look at the objective, logical data around what they're trying to do.

Whereas feelers like to step into a situation emotionally considering their values and feelings and other people's values and feelings around them when they're making the decision. And again, we can all do both of these things and generally to be a healthy, functioning human being with relationships with other people, as well as making smart choices in our life. We have to do both, but there's just a natural leaning one way or the other.

The last one is judging or perceiving, which is the J or the P. And this one has to do with how you orient yourself to your outer world. And so this one's a little more confusing to understand and it's also the most complicated one in Myers Briggs, because it actually affects how you use your other functions.

But it is basically, people prefer judging, prefer to put their outer world in order using like planning structure organization. Whereas people prefer perceiving, they tend to take life more as it comes, and there'll be a little more open, flexible and spontaneous.

Laura: Cool. Okay, and so I feel like I'm having a really good understanding of how knowing this about yourself can really help you understand struggles in your life, struggles in different relationships are different things you need to be able to do. What are some of the ways that you see it coming out for parents? Like where it's really helpful to know this about yourself in parenting?

Sandra: Yeah. For one, it can really help us self care. Even just knowing I prefer introversion helps me know like, oh, this is why I'm getting so angry at my children because I've been having to interact with them nonstop all day and I just need some time to myself, some quiet time to myself. Something as basic as that.

Or this is why my husband and I are arguing about, you know, what to do for the family vacation, because he's completely stepping out of things emotionally, whereas I'm stepping in and thinking about, what is Aunt Karen going to feel about our vacation plans and trying to please everyone else. Even just those little things and then with your kids? This is where, like this work really calls to me, is understanding where our kids are coming from and how they're seeing the world.

Because I don't know how you, you know, have your background in psychology and so maybe you came into parenting with a different idea than I did. But when I came into parenting, I just thought I was going to get little mini versions of me and that I would just parent them the way that I wish I had been parented and that would be the perfect way to parent them. And turns out my kids are nothing like me.

Laura: You know, it's funny. There's that quote that says like, be the parent you needed as a child and I always like to disagree with that. Liike, no, you like, you can be the parent you needed as a child to your own inner child, but you need to parent the kids that are in front of you. They might need something completely different than what you needed as a child, you know?

Sandra: Yeah, exactly. And I learned that lesson really hard with my son who just works very differently from me. And to be able to understand that and really cater the way that I'm communicating with him, and catering what I'm providing him based on what I know about him personality type wise is really a gift that I found and that I want to bring to other people as well.

Laura: Okay, so I have two directions my questions can go right now. I'm going to say them and you get to choose which way we go and hopefully

Sandra: It's like a choose your own adventure.

Laura: I know, right? That's what I was thinking in my own head too. Oh man, those books are so good, right? Okay, so on the one hand, I'm thinking like okay, so then how do we figure out what types our kids are so that we can start figuring out where the mismatches are and how to communicate with them better.

But then I'm also thinking about, so I know there's lots of other ways to conceptualize personality types like there's the Enneagram, there's Human Design, there's a bunch of other ones, and I feel kind of curious about, like how the Myers Briggs relates to some of those. Is it just that you find the one that speaks to you most and stick with it like, what do you think about the other, like kind of, avenues of personality typing?

Sandra: Let me answer the other personality type models 1 first, because I'm sure a lot of listeners have heard of other ones and Enneagram is so popular right now. So just to give context as to what Myers Briggs is versus those and then we can circle back around to.

So basically all the personality type models are just looking at different things. And so, like, we're very complicated as people. We do have more to us than those four Myers Briggs dichotomies, right? And so the Enneagram, so Myers Briggs measures those four things that we already talked about.

The Enneagram really is about kind of a defense mechanism that you have in place from early childhood to help you move through the world. And so, like, I'm a type 1 on the Enneagram, which is the perfectionist reformer. And my defense mechanism is to be good so that I can be beyond reproach and I can be lovable, and I can be likable. And so each of the types, I know right, every time I read about that

Laura: It makes me want to just hug your inner child and be like you are good enough.

Sandra: Every time I read about that core like defense mechanism that comes from childhood on the Enneagram, I just want to hug someone. I'm like, oh my God. And so that layers on top of your Myers Briggs personality type. So they're measuring completely separate things. There are some like correlations, you know, like INFjs, for example, like you and I tend to be Type 4s, which is like Type 4s are like the individualist who are very tight up in the emotional experience of things or Type 2s, which is like the helper work they've, in order to feel love, they need to give to other people.

So you have, like, some tendencies that certain Myers Briggs type will might be more likely to be certain Enneagram types, but it's definitely not a rule.

Laura: Okay, so there's definitely room for understanding both in about ourselves and in about our children.

Sandra: And they work together so well, but it's too complicated to kind of put it all together for intro so I

Laura: Are these things that you discussed on your podcast? Because I know you have a podcast on this topic.

Sandra: Yeah, we do. I have a few episodes on Enneagram, but it's mostly Myers Briggs centric, but both my co host and I love Enneagram so we bring it up just from time to time.

Laura: Why don't you, like, just tell us that a lot of the name of your podcast that people can go and find you and binge listen.

Sandra: It's called Family Personalities. I'm about 33 episodes and as of today. So if you've got a lot of time on your hands, you can definitely still binge it.

Laura: Awesome. Okay, so now the question of how do we figure out our kids' type so that we can meet them where they are and figure out kind of why maybe we're having some some conflicts or tensions.

Sandra: Yeah, it's, so depending on the age of the child, if they're kind of younger than seven, say, it's just going to be based on your observed behaviors of them because they're not old enough to really participate in that conversation yet. And I always say that if they're that young, we call it a best guess type, which means we're just based on their behaviors. We think that they tend in this certain direction and then we can tailor our parenting to that.

As they get older, they can participate in the process. So if your child is a second grade reading level or above, about 7 to, say, 12 or 13 then I do kind of a combined approach where I ask the child questions and do kind of an assessment with them and then the parents’ observable behaviors. And then we kind of arrive at a type based on that, and then once 13, 14, they own the process themselves.

And the best way is to really understand those two dichotomies to understand what is introversion? What is extroversion? What does that look like in a kid? And actually, if people are interested, eventually we'll have downloads for each of the four pairs. But right now I only have introversion-extroversion, but if you go to familypersonalities.com/downloads, there's a free download that will tell you, you know, just very briefly how you can determine if your child is, prefers introversion or extroversion.

And there's just like a list of observed traits. So, for example, wait time. If you ask a child a question, do they sit and ponder before they answer or they talking as they're thinking and like that is their thinking process? So wait time is really common in kids with introversion that they just need to process before they speak or process before they act.

Like I know with my own introverted children, when they take them to activities like gymnastics or whatever, especially if it's new, but even if it's not new, they just. If you arrive late, that can be really tough for them to just jump right in. They need some time to observe and think and see what's going on before they can pull themselves out into the outer world and extrovert themselves. Whereas extroverts are more just likely to jump into something or, you know, speak before thinking.

Laura: Yeah, you know, it's funny. I definitely have one who is very introverted. I mean, she was slow to warm, even as a baby, you know. My other one is much more outgoing and gregarious. But there's moments of time, too, though where she is reserved and you know and holds back and she's and she's a homebody too. Like, so she doesn't like to go. She wants to stay home with us, you know? It's so hard. I can't

Sandra: Yeah, and there's a lot of factors that go into it. Like right, like, for INFJs like us, we have, we're introverts overall, but that feeling process when you combine feeling with judging, we really like connecting with people. That's a really important part of our lives and so a lot of times we can come off as extroverted because of that process.

So it's really important to look at the personality as a whole and, like some kids if they're extroverted but they're sensing they may be wary to jump into things because, like I had a client, for example, who was having a difficult time choosing introversion or extroversion because her child was really shy when it came to certain things and like when she would go to this child care that had mostly older kids at it, she was shy.

But when she would go to some other group, she had no problem. And it with sensing kids, they tend to have sort of a hierarchy in their mind of, you know. Like older kids,they're very much about society in the way that structure is held up, and so they don't have as much confidence with people that are older or more experienced than them, like they feel like they need to take a back seat to that.

And so she was shy in those situations, even though she was an extrovert overall with think out loud and do everything else that an extra child does. So it really like all the pieces kind of work together, and it's more complicated than just the either or dynamic. But the either or dynamic is the place that you start.

Laura: Okay. And so then the like, maybe once you have a sense of your own type and your child's type then how do you start using that in your parenting?

Sandra: Yeah, and I should mention that this is what I do, by the way, is I type kids and I type families. And so if you're interested in working with me and understanding your child's type or your own type, just head to my website familypersonalities.com, and you can click on services and then I've got everything there.

Laura: It sounds intimidating to me to imagine trying to type my own kids and the perfectionist in me would feel really nervous about getting it wrong. And so I do kind of, you know, I like that you call it your best guess. You know when they're little to before they're old enough to really start participating in that process.

Okay, so then how does this filter down into the communication we have with our kids or the approach we take with our kids?

Sandra: My favorite one to talk about, let's go into thinking versus feeling. This is my favorite one to talk about because I feel like there's the most judgment from one side or the other. Like feelers feel like thinkers are doing it wrong, and thinkers feel like feelers are doing it wrong, right? And I think that we can tend to place this judgment on our kids, too. And maybe I'm just projecting here.

But I know with my son, who prefers thinking, he can come off as blunt. He can come off as like he's not considering other people's emotions, and I've noticed a tendency in feeling parents to sometimes label their thinking child is mean, or maybe label their actions as mean, which can sometimes lead to, you know, I mean, kids are going to internalize that, even if they don't seem emotionally a sentence sensitive. So we want to be, we want to be careful about that.

And so it's really understanding that they are just approaching their decisions in a different way and that they are naturally wired to do this and that it's actually hard for them like it's a stretch. It's like instead of using their right hand, they have to use their left hand when they have to consider the emotions of others. And that doesn't mean it's an excuse for your kid to go around being an ahole, but at least having the empathy to understand that this is actually more difficult for them than it is for me.

And how do I approach that? And so, with thinkers, it depends. Are they thinking judger or are they thinking feeler? But with the thinking judgers, like my kid, for example, they’re really rules based. So they really understand, like rules, especially if they can understand the reason behind the rules. They will follow the rules.

And so when I have an issue with my son, like, for example, like a year ago, my son was seven, my daughter was four and they were coloring together, and my daughter said, hey, do you like my coloring? Do you like my drawing? And my son said, uh, no, I don't like red, so I don't like it or whatever. And then she started crying.

And you know, my immediate reaction is like, why would you do that? That's mean, you know, but, you know, holding that aside, okay, he's coming at it from a just like, what are the object, what's the objective logic here? I don't like red. Therefore, I don't like the coloring right? And it's a stretch for him to have to think about how someone is going to take what he's saying.

And so I had to break it down logically and say, hey, do you understand why that made your sister cry? And he's like, no. When she hears that someone doesn't like her drawing, it makes her feel like she's bad at drawing. And then that makes her feel bad about herself. Do you know what that feels like? And he's like, yeah, I know what that feels like, And then I can, and then once he understands that, then I can take it to a rule.

Okay, so when someone asks you if you like their thing, you don't tell them you don't like it. You know, you tell them what you do like about it, and then you can give your criticism afterward if you have something.

From that point forward, he just got it. Once he was able to put it into a logical, if this happens then do this rule and understand why he does that, he got it. So there's just like, little tips and tricks you can get from understanding some of their preferences.

Laura: Absolutely. And I love how the way you're framing this really lines up with a kind of a guiding principle here that kids do well when they can. And that if they're not doing well, it's not because they're jerks or bad kids, it's because something's getting in the way of them being able to meet our expectations. I love this. So helpful.

Okay, so now I'm thinking about two questions. One is like, so this is helpful. And like, the more we understand our kids, the more we can meet them where they are and tailor our approach to them. I think that that is so important. What you mentioned in kind of our prep to that, there's a way to kind of in understanding our kids personalities, we can kind of find their superpower. I feel curious about that. I was hoping you might touch on it a little bit for us.

Sandra: Yeah, this is another thing I'm passionate about, because if anyone listening is in the Myers Briggs, you can find a lot of like type patriotism where people are like I'm an INFJ, that's the most superior type ever and like everyone else, is doing it wrong.

Laura: There's a lot of pride in those types sometimes.

Sandra: Yes, which is the first step, honestly, is finding out that my type is actually really cool because all the types are really cool. But then, if you sort of internalize it as mine is really cool, to the exception of all the others, that's where I feel like people get steered wrong with it. And so I really like to point out what is the superpowers that each type has so that you can see those in your kid and understand that they're not doing it wrong because they're doing it differently from you. They have something else to add to the world because of the fact that they're wired differently. And how can we look at that and hone that instead of trying to turn them into something they're not?

Laura: Oh my gosh. I think this is such a powerful message. You know, growing up as an intensely sensitive and feeling, an empathetic kid, I got the message from parents and teachers just all through that I was too much, too sensitive that I needed to relax. You know, it was all of these messages that the way that I was the way that I was wired made me hard to be around, like, made me difficult.

You know, all of those things, all of those messages. And as I moved into my professional career and became a therapist, I found that those exact things that I always got the message that we're not good at, you know, that made me not good enough. That those exact things were my superpower, that they were the very thing that helped me connect to people almost instantly help them feel seen and heard.

And I just you know, it's so beautiful. The work that you're doing, helping parents see that in all of their kids that each kid, no matter their struggles and things can, like, there's aspects of each type that probably makes them hard to be around too.

Sandra: It's hard to parent

Laura: It’s hard to parent, right, you know, but focusing in on the unique gifts that each child brings to a family. I think it's just a beautiful message.

Sandra: You said that, perfect. I received a lot of the same messaging growing up, and I think on the other side, kids who aren't as naturally sensitive can receive the messaging that especially girls. If you have a thinking girl, they can receive the message that they're too blunt, that they're not kind enough, that they're bossy, that they're whatever all sorts of words that get attached. And so really being able to understand, why is my kid being perceived this way? Why am I perceiving them that way? And it, can I look at it in a different way?

Laura: Yeah, it's becoming aware of the lenses that we have over our eyes as we view our kids is so important. Thank you for that. Okay. And so then I do want to just touch on a little bit of the like, how we can use knowing our type for our benefit as a parent? So one of the things that we talked about a lot here at The Balanced Parent is taking good care of ourselves.

And you mentioned before that can help with self-care. Can you help me understand a little bit more? I mean, as an introvert, I know and a big feeler. I know that I need time where no one is talking to me where I don't have to hold space for anybody else's feelings, but my own that I need that for a reset. I'm wondering for other folks for other types, like how they can use their type to identify specific, you know, self-care that they might need.

Sandra: Yeah, there's all sorts of things that different types can do, and understanding where your preference lies, that's where you fill up your bucket. And, yes, we all have to stretch the other side, especially as parents like, no matter what your type you've had to stretch, I guarantee it to your opposite preference. And in some ways, like I would say, some types have to stretch more than others. Like I would say, intuitive parents probably have to stretch way more to the sensing side than vice versa. And that can just be very, very exhausting.

And so understanding what fills your bucket and maybe you've already discovered some of that on your own, but using type, you can, it can give you ideas of other ways of understanding how other people of your type fill their bucket can sometimes help. Like I know I have a couple of ISFP parents, so that's introversion, sensing, feeling, and perceiving who have found getting creative in a hands-on physical way.

So, like sketching or calligraphy is one of my ISFP parent friends will just like at the end of the day, she'll just, like, tune out everyone else, go into a quiet room and watch like calligraphy videos and practice her calligraphy and just SPs really are getting in their bodies. It was really great, and especially when they combined with that F then you kind of have that creative like beauty type focus.

Laura: You know, I didn't know that other people watched calligraphy videos. I do that. I didn't know that that was a thing, though. Like, yeah, we watch calligraphy videos. It's so beautiful and soothing.

Sandra: Yeah, and that function that it's called extroverted sensing. That function, that ISFP is used. INFJ is actually use that too. It's our most unconscious process but sometimes that can be a place of fun and stretch and play to go to for us, too, but we certainly don't want to do that as much as ISFPs do.

Laura: Interesting. Okay. Do you have other examples of, like, self care options that are depending on types like I do? When I think about self-care, most of it is alone. And that's my strong introversion. Like what, like what's the flip side of that? If you are an extrovert like you know, what does that look like? Does that mean like hanging out with friends, like, what does that mean?

Sandra: Yeah, so I would say definitely for EFJs, doesn't matter NRS, but if you're an E and F and a J, probably hanging out with people is what you're going to need, like there's very much a connection aspect. Your main drive is to connect with other people. And so just being able to get out and connect with someone where there's not conflict, either, where there's like a creating rapport with one another is a really great self-care.

Laura: Cool. Yeah, okay. And so just popped in my head. What do we do when we got introverted parents and extroverted kids or extroverted parents and introverted kids? I'm so sorry. I'm kidding. There's nothing we can do.

Sandra: Our whole family is introverts. And I'm like, thankful for that every day. I have an extroverted stepdaughter who doesn't live with us. She comes to visit from time to time, and I just remember when my kids were like little baby toddlers and she would come to visit and we would have, I would read all these plans to entertain her, right?

I'd be like, she's only here for a week. So on Monday, we're going to the beach. On Tuesday, we're going to the Children's Museum or whatever it is. And, but I had a baby and a toddler, and I was just kind of like in over my head. And so we would go to the beach and we get home around two. You know, like we went, we went at 10, we get home around two, and that would be like okay, that was like I was like, that's more than we do in a month and we just did in a day.

So now we're just going to sit around and she'd be like, What are we doing next? Like, Are you kidding me? A child? Like she just needed interaction and something to do all the time. And so that's hard. And a lot of what I will tell parents who have a big mismatch in type in their family, which a lot of families do. It's not uncommon at all, is outsource. Like you know what I mean. Like if you have a really extroverted child, make sure there's other people who can interact with them. Make sure that they have lots of playdates. It's so hard right now.

Laura: I think this whole time period of must be so hard on extroverted folks. As an introvert and like in a family of mostly introverts, like we're fine, like, not much has changed. We pretty much just hang out by ourselves anyway. For extroverts. I've been really feeling for them.

Sandra: Yeah, especially our EFJs. I think they're probably struggling the most right now. Although I definitely have felt lonely over the past year. I'm not getting the type of connection that I need, but absolutely, Yeah.

Laura: There are times where I feel lonely when my family is all around me too. Like, you know, loneliness, I don't always think has to necessarily be about numbers of people that you're with, right? But yeah,

Sandra: it's about that, especially for INFJs. For us, it's about that deep personal connection. It could be, and you if you're not feeling that when you're with people, that can still be lonely.

Laura: Yeah, that is actually quite just almost disturbing to me. When I'm with people and we don't have that deep connection, it's like, hey, there's this, like, I don't know dissonance or something. That's not Yeah.

Anyway, that is super interesting. Okay? And so, you know, I have this memory of my childhood where my mom and dad and I were all introverts. We were sitting around reading and my sister is there, who's, I think it is extroverted. I think I've never typed her.

You know she's sitting there. She's got a book in her lap two and we're like, we're this happy family all just like reading together, but she's like narrating everything that she's doing just like like, just talking like and not getting a lot of input. You know, I just I think it must have been hard for her growing up in a family. All, everybody was just kind of comfortable.

Sandra: Yeah, and understanding what type of extra child you have makes a big difference to, like, different extroverts need different things like my ESTP stepdaughter is very like physical, like exponential type stuff like she needs to be doing something, participating in something not necessarily the connection like EFJs might be like where they really need to connect with you and talk with you.

it's a different type of need and so understanding that can help you get them in the right activities or outsourcing the correct way, or if you can't like, right now in the pandemic, so your hands are tied and you can't do all those things understanding like when I do have the energy to interact. How is this? How can I fill her bucket the most to get the most out of this hour that I have with her right now?

Laura: In the way that's least draining for me too. How can we find that middle ground, that balance, right? Yeah. Filling for her and not as draining for me. Yeah. Okay. So I know you've already mentioned your podcasts and your website. Is there anywhere else where folks can go to learn more from you?

Sandra: Yeah. So let's see. Check me on Instagram. I actually have taken a break from it for a couple months here because we haven't had any child care and my kids have been in school for 10 months and I'm homeschooling them and someone send help.

No, but follow me on Instagram @familypersonalities. My kids are actually going back to school on Friday, and then the podcast is called Family Personalities, that's on any podcast platform, and you can check out the website for. if you are interested in working with me or finding out more. It's familypersonalities.com.

Laura: Cool. Well, thank you so much, Sandra. This was so much fun to like, geek out about this and I think it'll be really hopeful for folks to know that knowing this about themselves and about their kids can bring a little bit of more harmony and understanding to their homes. So I really appreciate that.

Sandra: Yeah. Thanks for having me.

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. 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.

December 18, 2021

Episode 95: Honoring Your Unique Child with Ryan Haddon

December 18, 2021/ Laura Froyen

For this episode, I am so excited to be joined by Ryan Haddon. She is a certified Life and Spiritual coach, clinical Hypnotherapist, and certified meditation teacher with over 16 years of experience with clients around the world. We will be diving into how you can use parenting as an opportunity to grow and heal through crafting healthy, well-differentiated relationships.

Here is an overview of our discussion:

Honoring Your Child's Uniqueness - and accepting that they aren't an extension of you
How To Grow Alongside Your Children with Conscious Parenting

To get more resources for this topic, follow Ryan on Instagram @ and visit her website.
Instagram: @ryan.haddon

Website: https://ryanhaddon.com

TRANSCRIPT

Parenting is often lived in the extremes. It's either great joy or chaotic overwhelm. 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. With this week's episode of The Balanced Parent Podcast and in this episode we're going to be talking about how as parents, we sometimes need to step back and let our kids live their own life and honor who they are as individuals.

And I'm really excited to have this conversation with my new friend and colleague, Ryan Haddon. She is a life coach and a clinical hypnotherapist and a certified meditation teacher and so we're gonna be having this conversation over the next little while. Ryan, thank you so much for being with us. Welcome to the show. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do?

Ryan: Well, hello, Dr. Froyen, nice to talk to you and nice to be here and hello everyone. It's a pleasure to talk to other parents in the trenches on the field, you know, we're doing our best and I just want to give everyone a high five today for showing up.

Laura: It's so important, right? We are just doing our best.

Ryan: Yeah. And the fact that you tune into someone like Dr. Froyen to get a sense of what's out there and other sources of wisdom and insight. It just says a lot about who you are, right? And how you want to expand and develop.

And that's really, I think generational, I think that's our generation that really is not expecting to know everything, not knowing that it's okay to admit I'm fumbling my way through this, but my heart's in the right place and I want to be my best self modeling that for my child and I'm going to make mistakes and it's going to be okay. So I love who we are as a parenting segment me to say that

Laura: Isn't, it's such an honor to get to walk alongside parents in this journey of figuring it out and I have kids who are eight and a half and six and you have four kids. We're in this together, right?

Ryan: We are, we are and I will say having, you know, a first set of kids and the second set of kids. Even back in the day, I mean my kids are 22 and 19, those older ones. I do think at that time it was really hard to find parenting groups. It was hard to find, you know, real conversations happening.

I had a mommy group that we were pregnant together and had our babies together. We would meet all the time and I can't tell you that was like such a tall drink of water in a desert to just be like, what do we do about this? How do we handle that? What do we do about tantrums? How do we, you know, so I just think that we're the swath of parents, even one, you know, 10 years apart is there's just so many more resources, so much gratitude for that.

Laura: I agree. You know, I was just talking with my membership community yesterday about finding that community, finding that support network for yourselves as parents and what a struggle it is for some folks in some settings because their parenting differently. The folks who are listening to this are attempting to parent kind of against the grain. It's not necessarily mainstream parenting.

And we were talking about how they've, a lot of my group has been learning about respectful parenting and conscious parenting solely during the pandemic, solely during quarantine. So they've been really kind of in their bubble, do practicing this and parenting this way and they love it. It's life giving, it's joyful. There's deeper connections than ever.

And now they're going back slowly out into the world and they're realizing like, oh how do we keep this going with intention and consciousness in a world that is different. I know that that's not exactly what we were going to be talking about, but it speaks to consciousness, intention. What, do you have any advice for families who are moving into that space?

Ryan: Well, I want to say that those parents that you're describing really made the most of this time. You know, they really did. So you know, props to you. Bravo because you went deep. It's like you know, a natural childbirth when you're using your breath or even if you're assisted childbirth, you're using breath to go under the waves of intensity, you know, in those contractions and those you know that because there is a level of intensity being home with your child all day long and this home schooling and like let's just call it what it is.

I mean it's unrelenting in a way and it does feel like a bubble. So it can be glorious and there's also keeping it real moments where you're just pushed against the wall of like I don't think I can give anything else. And then you find that reservoir deep within to give more or understanding I have to pull away now to practice some self care and it might be some breath work, it might be some journaling, it might be those quick fix things to be able to then come back to it and offer something from a place of overflow because it's not easy to be on duty all the time.

It's hard for us to be on duty for ourselves all the time. We want to check out, you know? So it's then to do that with another little being who's just looking solely to you? It's like I said, I think the intensity of the pandemic and is beautiful. Those parents that you're speaking of, who have had an experience of a full immersion of going deep under those waves, calling something within themselves to be more available through themselves and their offspring. They really took that ride, you know, in a beautiful way, instead of treading water. And just when you get a break, when I get a break, you know what I mean?

Like that's like that's why I referred to the childbirth paradigm because it's a lot like that. You're not going to make it through if you're just going to stay on the surface of things treading water and taking little sips of air. It's when you deep dive under those waves of contraction and pain that you're able to really roll with it and come out another version of yourself and with a little being, you know, so I mean there's no one great way to give birth, let's be honest. It doesn't matter.

But I just know I've done both and when I have thought of those images certainly with my children when I'm in a face off with them, but also in giving birth, I was able to transcend and transmute those moments and integrate, you know the pain, the suffering, the contraction because there's all of that. And if you're not having that in your parenting, I don't know that you're doing it. I don't know what you're doing but that's our contracts with each other, right? They're going to help, we're raising them and I'm doing air quotes for those of you that are listening. But we're also you know, that's what it looks like from the outside. But yeah, go ahead. Say it.

Laura: They're raising us, too.

Ryan: Exactly. Exactly.

Laura: Rather they're giving us the opportunity to grow up alongside them. I never like to put the responsibility for our own growth onto kids, but they invite us and it's our choice and responsibility to heed that call to healing that they invite us to.

Ryan: Well they're mirroring, those darker places where they were not healed.

Laura: Yeah, they're showing us. I like the visual of a geode cracking open, that our kids crack us open and show us the part that have been hidden and then it's our responsibility to shine the light on them and let the shadows kind of fall away and step fully into ourselves.

Ryan: Yeah, for sure. And I think that's the healthiest way to look at it. I really do. And I think it's the most spiritual way, honestly. You know, so then it puts you off the hook of having to perform or be something you're not. You're intuitively moving through while keeping that focus on yourself in an unselfish way. Like, oh, what is this activating in me? Wow, you know, I have a special needs kid. So it actually had two of them and that kind of ratchets things up another level as well, because the tools that work with the others don't work with that one.

So I might seem like an expert with my four kids, but my fourth one, it's like everything went out the window and I have other experts that I work with to really learn these new ways of being, these new acceptance for what is. You know, I can't put her through a square peg; a round hole is one of the one thing I can't, it's not going to happen. So we all have to work with where she's at in any given moment.

And the truth is, is that's radical acceptance and when I can apply that to her and I can apply that to me, that compassion that we're not trying to move things along in a certain linear way, then we all benefit. You know, so those are her gifts and in the moment I don't see it that way. So I want to be fair and clear in the moment. I'm like, not always, but it does.

Laura: it's there. I feel like there's this like thread through what we've been talking to and I just feel like I want to say it. So I think oftentimes people worry that focusing on yourself and your own growth is selfish. But in actuality, it allows you to be more selfless with others because if we are focusing on our own growth, our own stuff, the stuff that our kids activate within us, we take responsibility and ownership for that and we allow them to not be responsible for it.

So rather than asking them to change themselves to make things more comfortable for us. We're working within ourselves to allow them to be who they are. You know, I think we often as parents, when we're in those stressful moments and we're uncomfortable, we're feeling our emotions, we just want our kids to listen or do what we say or be a certain way to make things less more comfortable for the world around them. And it's not their responsibility that when we focus on our work, then they can, we release them from the responsibility of any of our expectations and allow them to fully step into who they are. We accept them.

Can you talk about radical acceptance? What does that mean to radically accept a child?

Ryan: Well, first of all, want to say what you just said was so beautifully said. And so thank you for the clarity around that. And I think you're right. What happens is, is if we're not taking ownership of the activations, then we end up projecting onto them. And then there's those little voices, we have that say we're not doing this right, because they're not behaving a certain way.

And so it becomes like a self esteem pipe to the knees. You know, I'm right, I'm not doing this right. If things were, they should be behaving this way, that should look like that, they don't respect me. I'm not, you know. I can only speak to who comes through my practice and I know my own little voices like that that pop up that committee that pops in there in those emotion mind moments when everything gets really intense.

Like it just goes that primal and you're not thinking, oh, this is all happening as it should. Like, those are not the, that's not the voice that pops in unless you keep curating it. This is absolutely okay. So it's that self talk is so vital in those moments, but it's something to practice because otherwise those unconscious understandings of what should be happening instead.

And I'll segue right into radical acceptance, are what caused us so much pain as a parent, right? And so we move into radical acceptance for me means we stop spinning our wheels around what's actually unfolding in the moment, who someone is and that's where the pain is. The pain is in fighting reality. It shouldn't be this way, why didn't it happen this way? They should have done this, I should have done, like it's the spinning around something. That's how I see it.

The spinning around it is where the pain is. When if we can just say it is what it is and from that place of accepting the way it is. Then from there, I can come up with solutions of how it could go forward next or what I might do next time, but it's not fighting reality as it currently is presenting.

Laura: It’s the fight that causes the pain, not actually the thing that you think shouldn't be happening. It's the ship and we,

Ryan: I think it's like a defense mechanism, we do that. Like if a job, we miss it, lose a job or we miss a promotion or something and why did they do that? I should have got it. I worked hard. Like that's all the leak. It's an energy leak for us instead of, you know, we feel our feelings. It's not that we're doing a bypass, like we can feel all that, God, I'm disappointed. God, I really thought I was going to get it.

So we stay with the feeling around it and what it's activating versus trying to make reality go in a different direction and wanting it to be different and fantasizing how it should be different and digging in our heels around it, that's where that spinning happens.

Laura: I think you're hitting on something that is so important to understand. I think that lots of people here, the phrase radical acceptance, think that it means like we have to like it or that we have to pretend not to have feelings about whatever it is that's happening.

I love that you just differentiated those two things because radical acceptance is not about having any feelings towards it, like even positive feelings towards it. It's about acknowledging what is and separating our feelings from reality like that we can be disappointed about what is happening and at the same time accept that that is what's happening, you know, we can feel all the feelings about it and claim them and take responsibility for them. Own them versus disempowering ourselves by putting our responsibility for our feelings on the circumstance or on our child, or on radical acceptance comes up a lot in my interactions with my parents or my mother in law, you know, where I have to kind of just accept who they are except that they will not change and and then work with the situation as it is, you know?

Ryan: Yes, and it doesn't mean we condone it. Do you think that's important because if it's an injustice or traumas happen and we're not saying, oh, it's all great and wonderful, just like, you know, both of us are saying the same thing, it's just saying I don't necessarily like it. I don't agree with it, but it is what it is, you know? And I think that, and then we get to decide this is the empowerment piece who we want to be in relation to that. And I think that's always and it comes up with me with my little one, you know, it is what it is, and I find the resistance comes in like why is she still doing that? Why is this still happening? Why, we tried this or this? Why is it?

It's the why that really is what pulls me out of present time and keeps me out of the gift that's unfolding in that moment. Instead, I can just feel like I can just go back right to my feelings. God, I'm so frustrated. I feel so pissed and I find myself saying that to her sometimes I feel so frustrated and I'm modeling for her because she doesn't have the verbiage, you know. When you do this, I feel this, you know, and I think she understands that I don't say you're making me feel this. I'm very careful about that. I take and try to really take responsibility.

And I think that's and then I'm starting to hear her say that mom when you do this, I'm mad when you do this. I think that's all this good modeling that I'm learning for myself and that's the part where we're taking ownership and responsibility while modeling all the range of our feelings.

Laura: Yes. And reading in our generational change, you know, shifting the trajectory of our family. It's our legacy, it's beautiful. Okay, so I feel like this was perfect framing for what we actually wanted to talk about today because these are all involved in the idea of honoring who our children are, right, honoring who they are and accepting that they are not an extension of us.

This is something that comes up with my coaching clients frequently where the parents want the kids to do things or be a certain way and they simply are not there, it's not them and there's living through kids that happens. And so do you see that in your practice?

Ryan: Absolutely.

Laura: What are some of the things that we, that parents need to know about? This piece of honoring our kids of accepting our kids that we're not them or they're not us--they're not our extension, they're not our second chance, you know, all of those things?

Ryan: Well, that's just like you said, we'll go back to intergenerational healing because I do think our generation is different and I think a lot of people are hip to this idea, you know, these are souls that come in through us and they have their own contracts. They have their own experiences that are laid out for them and that sounds really great on a t-shirt and then a meditation retreat, but in reality these are places where we can get tripped up--places where if they're not doing something, it's a reflection again that we didn't do something right, or we didn't prepare them for the world or we didn't set them up for success or we didn't, you know, do this.

That what they accomplish somehow; this is the selfishness of it is somehow denotes our ability to parent in a good way because they have these accomplishments or because they are moving on a track forward. You know, that looks this way that we've all agreed societally, you go to college, then you have this kind of job and then you this and you get married. therefore you've raised a child that's successful and I want to say, and this might not be for the listeners, but I just feel like those paradigms are crumbling.

This old idea of what it should look like and what success looks like and the white picket fence with the, you know, 2.3 kids, like whatever it is in this bank account, we're all kind of in agreement. This is not necessarily what creates a successful human and we're renegotiating that and I do think that our group, our segment of parents is renegotiating that I'm hearing a lot of other parents say, I just want them to find happiness.

And that wasn't what I grew up with. You know, it was, you get to college and you have this, you get your degree and this happens and that happens. And then I remember getting out of college and being like, I am so ill prepared for the world. I do not know how to balance a check, I don't do this, I don't want to file taxes. I think that more and more, I have two kids that decided not to go to college.

My older kids or they started and decided not, it did feel resonant to who they are. And my first reaction to one of them was, oh my God, this was, I was like, oh my God, what have I done? You don't know, this is important and then to the other one, I could completely see this isn't a good match for you, you know? So I had both reactions to both and I had to make an apology to my other child for saying that because that was a slip on my part. You know, that was my fear that just came out, out of my mouth before I could catch it.

But that's the beauty, is that they know that I'm going to apologize, I'm going to contemplate and I'm going to come back and say, you know what, that was totally off, this was an old voice that I have in my head. I have to make peace with it so I apologized and she was like, no biggie mom, I know where you really stand. You know, she's making her way and it's fascinating to see that it's not what it was. So we get to pull in all our expectations, all our projections, all our old ideas and you know, that's true for my bigger kids.

Laura: I want to just sum up what you've said here. So we do this sometimes. I mean most of the time unconsciously, right? So we do this unconsciously because one, we kind of have this understanding that our kids' behavior reflects poorly on us or reflects on us at all. Really, that has something to do with how the society or the world will see us. And there's legitimate concern about wanting to be loved and accepted. So there's this one piece of it.

We also have deep concerns for them and their well being. We want them to be loved and accepted. We want them to be successful. So we have those very valid concerns that lead us to perhaps push them where we think they should go.

And then there's this third one that I think that is kind of the projections and the living through that happens at times with kids. Those three pieces are so important and they're in crucial to consider as you're making conscious decisions in your parenting, right?

So conscious parenting is about releasing the our unconscious default responses and choosing with intention, how we interact with our kids and we don't do perfectly like, you know, when we make our mistakes, we acknowledge it those three ways that we do this or the three kind of reasons that we do this are so important to be aware of. Like what is my motivation? Why am I pushing my kids this way?

Ryan: Yes, and trusting that they have an inner compass. It's everything; you stop parenting, you stop. It becomes like hopefully, I mean they say it never ends, but hopefully you're always, you know, that safe harbor there comes a point where they're just like done with input and it becomes a friendship that it's not two way.

Because it's not like it's like, oh, hey, I'm going through this right now. Like I mean we do speak openly like that, but it's not, I want to get clarity around that and speaking it, it's not like we're besties, you know, we're still, I'm still holding that line where I have this whole inner life that you know, they're not actually privy to because it would be a burden to them, right? I'm still holding the line as a mentor as a person in their life who's anchored into herself and so they can come to it's a safe harbor. They can, they can tie their boat too when they need to, but they go back out to sea and then they come back to me.

And it's an interesting thing when you're raising teens to find out when that point is because you don't want to burn bridges, well I’m just full of metaphors today, I apologize. Burn bridges, boats out to harbor.

Laura: The safe harbor one was beautiful. And now achieve of what secure attachment looks like in the teen years and in the young adult years because we still have an attachment relationship with our older kids throughout the lifespan. It's still there and that's what attachment looks like in the older years. Yeah.

Ryan: Yeah. It's finding those times to really, it is not an easy road to press in and to pull back and it is a total dance with them. When do you give advice? When do you say this? How I'm seeing it? Do you see it this way too? Because I'm hearing you say this, much like we do in our practice. You know when we're listening it's just that really holding space in that sense. And also, you know, but with parenting, it's it's harder to cultivate the detachment. My kids are like, mom stop coaching me. I'm like, okay. Yeah, they know that voice.

Laura: My kids call me a feeling doctor. And they will say mom, I don't want a feeling doctor right now, I want my mom.

Ryan: You know, I know that's adorable.

Laura: I know, it's good boundaries set good boundaries.

Ryan: Yeah, they do have a sense. They're like, she's got the voice. Yes, it's happening. But I love that and what a joy that they know that we have that wisdom that we're sitting on and that we're also using in our own life. You know, that's really like you can say everything, but it's what you're doing that's in a full observance. So they both have to have to be congruent.

Laura: They do. There has to be coherence there between what you say and what you do. Otherwise that dissonance can be really confusing to kids. Okay, so I feel like so, what this looks like then honoring your child, trusting your child, accepting them as they are. I feel like looks different at different ages.

And so I would love to just kind of touch on some of those different places, tight? And so we were talking before we started recording about this a little bit that with your young ones, they still need more guidance. They, you have information that they don't have the fully developed brain that can make rational decisions and you need to help them.

But when do, you, know like a moment where you need to let go and step back. How can you tell when those moments with younger kids? Because I think younger kids have that internal compass. I think they have it, I think they're born with it.

Ryan: Yeah, I mean if I lined up all four of my kids, they each came in with their own specific personality, their own mission. I know that their own, you know, I believe in reincarnation so I believe they're all at different points of development in the spiritual world. And I can see that, it's very clear and I feel like they help each other. Does with the agreements they have, their soul agreements. Four of them absolutely see how fully formed they actually are and their sense of who they are.

And so my job, I feel like is to really allow them each to bloom and grow at the pace that they do and the way that they do do that because I don't want to close anyone's ability to flow and bloom and say it has to be this way. It has to be that way, this is how we do things. Although I do, you know, say those with honesty and you know, apologies and this is what our family does and this is how we, you know, show up for each other.

And you know, I do say those types of phrases, but essentially I find myself explaining each to each other. She's doing that because of this. Do you see that? And they're like, oh yes, I do. That's the part I do get in there a little bit. Certainly when they're younger, when they're older, I had the other to understand each other quite, quite well.

Laura: Because they’ve done that work when they're younger

Ryan: Probably and they each kind of are so different that they look at each other and they're like, I can't believe that's how you're coming at this. It's like what, you know, it was fascinating because they're both oil and water to each other a little two and the older two. So that that's fascinating to see how they made that agreement to do that this round.

Laura: I have a story of a moment of this with my oldest daughter. So swimming lessons, she spent two years in swimming lessons when I knew full well that she couldn’t swim without ever leaving the wall or leaving her instructor's arms. When she was older, she was five during this, you know, so she, between four and almost 6.

Two years of swimming lessons, clinging, scared, unwilling to do what the other kids are doing just but wanted to keep going. She wanted to go every week. She was strong, she has an athletic body, she's beautiful. I knew she could do it and then one day, her grandmother's pool and she just swam across the pool, she just was ready right when she was ready.

And so it, that watching the swimming lessons, like I'd sit on my hands not saying anything. I'm confident you'll do it when you're ready. If the teacher started to pressure her, remember she's going to do it when she's ready, you know, like really holding that boundary of she will bloom when she's dang well ready to. She will and that's her personality. If there's an ounce of pressure, she won't do it. And when she was ready she swam across, I mean, she's a beautiful swimmer now, you know.

Ryan: What a beautiful story. Yes, that is that it just shows you held that line for her knowing that she would get there and, you know, her personality that's really intuitive parenting. I think that's what we're speaking about is really clawing into the personality, the soul, the person and saying it doesn't have to look like this to be successful. Knowing this is part of her process and putting so much value on the process versus the end result.

And I think that's what I was speaking about the college and how that's shifting, you know, it was so about outside appearances. I think that's what a lot of our parents we grew up with do this because this is how it's done, this is how we do it. And we're more about process. How do you feel? What is your soul telling you to do? What's your guide? What's your inner guidance? How do you feel about this?

You know, I find that's something I've had to really work with my kids when they come and ask me for advice is just to push it right back. What is your take on it? How do you feel about it first? I get that read and then, you know, to put value on their own process through their own filter, their own perspective. And I think that's what we can just keep pushing, put that back in their court and then offer up. Yes, that makes sense. That you'd see it that way. I totally understand that. That's good reasoning right there. Yeah, absolutely.

But also how about this thing? You know? And so I think that these are just ways where our parents are. I'm thinking a little older than you, but our parents were like do it because I said, so do it because that's how we do it. That's how it's done. This is, you know, it's a lot of that

Laura: Or even so I was on the receiving end of a parent who is living through me and my sister. So those kind of those three things that we were talking about, you know the way our kids will reflect on us kind of looking out for their own well being or the living through, you know, those kind of three things that we've hit on here. I was on the receiving end of a living through parents. And so I mean I went to a college that had, did not have the major that I wanted, that I could go and have the career and profession that I wanted to be. And I'm, I like I'm doing this work, which is beautiful and a beautiful calling for myself. But I'm doing this work because my dad wanted me to go to a specific college that didn't happen to have my major and he convinced me to and I wanted to please him.

Ryan: Yes. Oh my gosh, what a huge healing you had. What was that moment where you decided to follow your own path?

Laura: Much later. So I wanted to be a marine biologist. I still fantasize about going back to grad school and doing that work or you know, but I didn't and there's a piece of accepting what is that's ongoing in my life.

Ryan: And how have you made peace with that parent? How does that show up today?

Laura: He has acknowledged some parts of that at various times and there's acceptance that he has deep wounds and fears about his own inadequacy and having his daughters go to a college that he wouldn't have been able to attend in his wildest dreams was his attempt to heal himself.

Ryan: Yes.

Laura: Misguided attempt, but it was still an attempt.

Ryan: Yes, yes, for sure. I get all that I really do. It's so amazing because I'm listening to you and you are so good at what you do. So that’s a part of me that's like thanking him and I had tears in my eyes right now. You have a very specific insight about how to, that's your gift. You know, that you're listening for that and other people.

And I'm guessing all your clients benefit from you helping them find their voice and pushing against a parent's projection and and I'm sure you're raising your children to make damn sure like you did with your daughter because of that, you know, correction that you're making that course correction through your parenting. I know I've done that too, inversion. So we try to make sure our kids have a different experience and that really speaks to who you are and your path.

Laura: You’re making me cry.

Ryan: No, it's true. My goodness.

Laura: But it's not easy. So because of that, you know, it's, I am so grateful I get to do what I do because in teaching every day I do my own work, you know, and doing this work, I do the work for myself. I don't know if you experience that, but it keeps the top of mind for me, you know, allows, it invites me to be conscious throughout my whole life. But it's not easy.

Like there are moments where like my dad's voice comes out of my mouth, There are moments where I'm stuck and attached in the way that he was and I see myself going that path. It is a conscious effort to undo and unlearn that so that I don't pass it to my kids. It's not easy.

Ryan: No, it's not, it really isn't. This is as real as it gets and I know everyone listening has that voice or a version of that voice that they arm wrestle with. You know, I know I do too.

Laura: So it's and there's this is the work. Yeah, it is the work, there's a piece of it too, that is the understanding that I'm going to do this work, that's my work and there will still be stuff that comes out the other side that our kids will have their work to do, that is just the nature of it. You know, there will be mistakes that I make, that they all need to work through as they become parents.

You know that it's just how it is and I think that a lot of people go into respectful and conscious parenting with this deep fear of I don't want to screw my kids up the way that my parents screwed me up. And of course you don't, but there's a piece of it again on this acceptance and of things as we do have to accept that they will have their life and their life will have ups and downs and have pain in it and they will have work to do just like we do.

Ryan: And the spiritual blueprint is that this, this is earth school and so we're here to work things out., So there's nothing wrong with working things out, right? And so like I truly believe that those souls, they choose the exact parent who's got that exact set of lessons and things that have to be overcome and you know, and your kids chose really well because their mom is totally committed to this path and this journey and you're transmuting on the ground in the moment that just takes a special level of commitment, you know.

Laura: I think that true to every, for everybody who's listening, everybody who's listening, your kids chose you for a reason and they chose well.

Ryan: Really well and you can't f*** it up. You can't and that's not just like a dismissive things to say, but I think if you're someone whose heart's in the right place and to say, I don't want to f my kids is a beautiful thing because somewhere there's a knowing that you're going to be, become another version of yourself growing up alongside them.

And so that's, if you keep coming back to that, you're winning. That's it. Every time you notice and you say, oh wow, there's my stuff, wow, look at me projecting. It's not about this idea of perfection. We're smashing that to the ground. It's over. It's just about, that can get messy and just knowing it's not them, it's you.

They're doing what they're doing; come back to you, come back to the feelings that this is bringing up in you and then come back to them and keep offering from that place of that willingness, that devotion, that self love. That's keep growing that out and you're doing everything you can possibly do.

Laura: That's where true, deep, authentic connection happens when we get all of our stuff out of the way so that we can see our kids clearly and see ourselves clearly and connect on this true self level. Beautiful. Thank you, Ryan, for that.

Ryan: Thank you. What a beautiful conversation we've had.

Laura: I so agree. Thank you so much for being here with lots of directions I wasn't expecting, but it was all beautiful and so necessary. Thank you so much, Ryan

Ryan: Same. Thank you.

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. 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.

December 14, 2021

Episode 94: Racial & Educational Equity & Advocacy with Sonia Lewis

December 14, 2021/ Laura Froyen

In this episode, I am joined by my friend and colleague Sonia Lewis. She is a California native, wife and mother, former high school history teacher, turned entrepreneur. She is the visionary and founder behind ASCRIBE Educational Consulting, where they lift and center equity, humanity, and belonging. Long story short, Sonia is an Anti-Racism Impact Strategist, ready to face challenging topic without blame and shame. Here is a summary of our conversation:

Family life and how to be balanced and give children agency
Blended families and being the BONUS in someone's life (child and parent)
Raising Anti-Racist children
Educational Equity

To learn more about this topic, follow Sonia on social media and visit her website:
Instagram: @ASCRIBEsuccess
Facebook: ASCRIBE Educational Consulting
Twitter: @AscribeEd
Website: www.ascribesuccess.com

TRANSCRIPT

Parenting is often lived in the extremes. It's either great joy or chaotic overwhelm. 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 a topic that is near and dear to my heart and so important. We're gonna be talking about educational equity, how to advocate for our kids and everyone else's kids, and how to raise kids that know how to stand up for themselves and advocate for themselves and others.

And to help me with this broad and important conversation, I am so excited to welcome in a new friend and colleague as my guest, Sonia Lewis. And I'm gonna let her introduce herself. So she's a mom to multiple kiddos as a big extended bonus family and I'm so excited to have her on the show Sonia, welcome to the balanced parents. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do?

Sonia: Fabulous, thank you so much for this opportunity and to share with you all today. I am Sonia Lewis as Dr. Froyen mentioned and I am the owner and creator of Ascribed Educational Consulting, but more important, the reason I got into this work is because I have Children of my own and I spent many years in the education system doing work around equity and as a high school teacher, you get to see lots of things. And one of the things that's super important to me is the fact that when we see that they're broken things in our system, we as educators and parents and all stakeholders involved can really and truly lean in together and try to find solutions to those problems.

Laura: Which direction would you like to go next into this?

Sonia: So let's go into, you know, like family life and how to just be balanced and give them agency and stuff.

Laura: Yeah, okay, So Sonia, I know that you've just written a book and I'm really intrigued by this book, not just because it's the topic, but because you kind of wrote it for your 7 year old self. Can you tell us a little bit about the story and what you're hoping to accomplish with your book?

Sonia: You know, my seven year old self, she teaches me a lot. I've just embarked on my 50th birthday recently and I still lean on lessons that I can learn from my seven year old self. So at seven, I realized after experiencing a lesson on the statue of liberty that the last line in the pledge of allegiance just in my opinion didn't apply to myself in my community and I recognize that at seven. And I don't know you know where it came from or how I made the connection, but I just felt like liberty and justice for all wasn't really for all.

I was, I've always been that person who was very super literal about things and so I went to school one day, second grade in the bay area of California And I sat during the pledge of allegiance and this is in the 70s. And so that was almost like a no no.

And I was punished really heavily because of that decision, but I was steadfast and why I made the decision and it took probably a good three or four months for my teacher to accept the fact that I wasn't going to say the pledge of allegiance and then she, you know, she was known on our school campus as the meanest teacher, you know, ever to walk the campus and eventually she retired that year.

And the principal that you know, dealt with the situation, she was very kind, she was very progressive and she wanted to understand why I had come to that decision and she helped me shape the words and articulate what it was I was trying to express. And so seven year old Sonia oftentimes is my beacon of courage. And so when I just need a little bit of courage juice, I think about myself at seven and how I stood up to the quote unquote, meanest teacher, you know, that I had ever had and you know, who previous students who had warned us, you know, a little second graders like she is so mean.

But writing this book, I wanted to inspire young people that you too can recognize things in the world because what we do know scientifically speaking is that young children know right from wrong between the ages of three and five and they begin to start to see how they fit in the world at around, you know, 5 to 7.

And so it makes sense to me now, looking back that, okay, I was seven and it seems like a very young age, but it's very appropriate when we're talking about, you know, mentally and developmentally wise, what young people aren't capable of. And so that's why I wrote the book is to inspire young people that you have a voice. It's important and to lean on those people who are around you to help you center your agency and voice because it's important.

Laura: It is, it's so important. I think I so agree with you that kids have such a keen sense of justice, they have such a keen sense of fairness, they're very good at noticing differences, noticing discrepancies when our words don't align with our actions are very good at noticing those things. And I don't know if you know this about me and our podcast, but we talk a lot about reparenting and inner child work.

So really using our reconnecting with our inner children, healing old wounds, but also using them for good in our life, letting them inspire us and you're just you're modeling that beautifully for my community right now. I appreciate it so much.

Sonia: Absolutely. Especially important when we look at just the studies when, you know, young people are approaching that those years of transition from childhood to adulthood, right, and what are we leaving them with to like figure out?

And so one of the things that I've been, you know, thinking in my mind and just posing like, wouldn't it be amazing if young people didn't have to heal from trauma? Right, just that sure ideation and thought all in in and of itself is like how do we prepare young people so that they can understand and be as healthy as possible when they're dealing with any kind of relationship, be it friend or romantic or at work or in community, right?

So that they don't have to heal from in those wounds that they've experienced don't show up based on triggers are faced with on a daily basis. And so I'm very interested in that those kind of works and conversations because it's important that we give them more than what we were given.

Laura: Absolutely. And this is true at home and our families with our kids, but also in school and educational settings too, right?

Sonia: Absolutely.

Laura: Can you tell me a little bit about your educational advocacy and equity work?

Sonia: I spent 20 years teaching high school history, a couple of those years in middle school and I realized middle school, it's just the whole ball of wax that is just like, yeah, no, I can't do this, this is a lot. But what I loved about young people in general is that one, they keep me young, right? But two, they are so inquisitive and if you give them just a little bit of, you know, something that is a spark, they will run with it.

They are just amazing when it comes to thinking outside of the box. And so in teaching high school history, I've always been approached that history is so boring and history is not my, you know, funny subject and when students left my classroom best believe they had a better understanding and a better appreciation for why history is important.

And so when we think about just that experience in and of itself and being able to be a conduit for young people. Being able to be an advocate for young people, I like to sit back and let young people share, you know, the things that are on their mind so that they feel like they are part of the equation and it's not just adults regurgitating and throwing information at them. It's important when we're talking about advocacy that we recognize who in the room is has the least amount of resources or are suffering the most based on the system the way that it's designed.

And unfortunately we've lived for so many years in a country where by design, some kids are going to have the resources and other kids are not going to have the resources. And so part of my expertise and my experience has been to recognize those demographics that are lacking in resources.

And to provide pathways and by creating programs or writing curriculum, whatever it is to make sure that those resources are allocated to those who are most disenfranchised by the system. So that kind of speaks to the advocacy work that I've done as a teacher as far as profession is concerned, I left the classroom probably about 10 years ago and I started in the educational consulting business and it really and truly was about the things that parents were calling me about that were outside of the scope of me being a teacher in the classroom. Can you help my kid fill out this college application?

Can you help them be ready for a job interview? Right? And then that translated to administrator saying Sonia, can you come in and write a program for this group of students because you're doing, You know, that work on transition, there have been so many pivots in my business over the past 10 years, but that then led to me doing a lot of culture and climate work on campuses when I see, you know, some things that are maybe not going so well coming in and giving some fresh eyes to solutions.

And then now because of the time that we're living in, I call it the collide of two pandemics, the pandemic of covid and the pandemic of racism. I'm able to go into school settings and say, look, let's create an anti racist framework so that all students, regardless of where they come from who they are as individuals, humanity is centered around how they are belonging into the equation.

Laura: Oh my gosh to humanity centered approach to education that just like makes my soul ring. You know, we were talking before we started recording about how we are in this unique period of time where we have the opportunity because schools have been closed, they've been shut down and we're in this place where we have a chance to do things differently to really look at the systemic inequalities that are baked and not accidentally but intentionally baked into our systems and do things differently.

And so if a family is looking to advocate for that, some of those structural and systemic changes to take place in their school environments where they're sending their kids, how can we go about as parents with power differentials, right? We don't have a lot of influence often as parents like how can we go in to start working for change in our own school systems.

Sonia: I really have appreciated this moment of being able to re imagine, you know, the structure of the educational system. So when this just learning first started, it was very like disorganized and not to the advantage of students or parents right? And so we have to figure out how do we do this and how do we manage?

And so one of my first things that I did, I put back on, my teacher had for the first time in a long time and I started a virtual classroom where students from all over the country can log in and we really, it was a very inclusive environment, but we we focused on the things that I was never able to teach in the traditional classroom. So even though it was black and brown centered and marginalized student centered, it was those things that were allowed students to connect the dots about, you know, the struggles.

And while we did not lift the and I hate this ideation of the oppression olympics, we talked about what struggles we have in common as communities. And I think that when we see those commonalities that people can then show up in spaces and say I'm going to fight on behalf of someone who is not necessarily mine, but because I want better for all of our children and when our children show up in spaces and they know how to recognize that they have voice and agency, then they will feel more comfortable coming home telling mom and dad, grandma grandpa, whoever their caretaker is, I witnessed this, I experienced this and I need your help.

And so ways that parents can show up, in my opinion, it's still the same thing. Show up in the classroom as a volunteer, right? And just be those eyes and ears if it's a kid that you're seeing that is you know, alone or a loner or is quiet and more reserved, you know, give that friendly high in that high five or that fist bump or you know that smile but make sure that they feel welcome and invited in those spaces.

And then the other thing that I would say is even though some parents don't feel like they are part of the equation when it comes to things like school site councils or PTAs and things of that nature in those organized spaces, make sure that you have a relationship with, I say, the key people on campus, of course your principal, right? But like the secretary and the janitor or like the people on campus who know everything, everything,

Laura: There's some plugged in.

Sonia: Right? And so get to know those people because not only will they give you insight about how your child is matriculating through their school life, but they'll give you insight about you know certain teachers and and certain dynamics as they show up on school campuses. And then finally when we're talking about ways to think reimagining about how the school system is just has had historically some inequities embedded in it, is that we can fight for things like but not limited to ethnic studies being a thing around campus is right?

And I say from K. to 12 and beyond because like me teaching this teaching that I you know designed when the pandemic hit, I realized that I love elementary and I never taught elementary before and I it was the younger kids that made me fall in love with teaching again. And so we're like entering into our second iteration of the teaching this summer and we're going to be teaching like financial literacy components.

And so they're motivated by knowing where their dollar is spent, how to make money and so we're going to talk about how to grow a home garden to fight a food desert depending on the neighborhood you live in. They're going to learn about entrepreneurialship, but from the sense of what are the problems in your community and how can you turn that into a business or nonprofit?

And then finally they're going to learn about the stock market and at the end of the program they're going to get $100 So that they can invest in one of those three so that they can build their own generational wealth; they can experience what it means to be in control of something. And so I just say parents think outside the box, like get with some other parents. I don't care if it's two or three or five or 20 parents that you know, think outside of the box and really think about ways where you can leverage your skills and expertise and bring them into the classroom

Laura: Oh, I love that. I hope that you will send me the links for those programs. So listeners can either join or support you in those amazing endeavors. Okay, so can I ask another question too. Okay, so from an educational consultants standpoint, a lot of my listeners have kids who are kind of out of the box.

Maybe they identify as being neurodiverse on the spectrum or just have some behavioral challenges, some delays in emotional and social development and parents who listen to this often have to advocate within school systems for their kids. Do you have any tips or advice for how to show up for your kids? A lot of them are afraid of being the squeaky wheel in the system.

Sonia: Yeah, unfortunately it does require a lot of showing up and and being on top of things, I always say introduce yourself at the beginning of every school year, as you know, being very upfront and transparent about this is my child, I am here at any time, make sure that you keep me in the loop of what's going on with my child because it's important. I would send, you know, I don't have children that are on the spectrum.

I have a couple who have been diagnosed with A. D. H. D. and things of that nature. And so but my kid that was A. D. H. D. was also tested gifted and talented. So there was this huge, like how do we serve this kid who may have these behavioral issues and challenges focusing, but it's so like brilliant and artistic, how do we serve a kid like that? And a lot of times teachers are not prepared for the nuances of what that looks like in the classroom. And so like my fifth grader right now he slightly has a little bit of A. D. D.

He's not quite on the spectrum of A. D. H. D. but just a little bit of A. D. D. where he has challenges staying on task, but I would say, you know, as a parent, your voice and your place as a stakeholder is super important to your child's experience in the classroom. And so from the beginning, laying out the importance of who you are in your child's life is supercritical. And so from that first day, like sending an email or a letter or a phone call saying these are the things that are my expectations, like list them out.

If there are things that you've experienced in the past, you know, be honest about, I don't want to see this happening with my child because we have this experience and this was what the outcome was, but be very transparent about those things, you know, also be very transparent about your capacity to show up in spaces like IEPs and 504 is right because in those spaces, these are the opportunities to shape the next year's educational plan for your child.

And be honest, if you don't know something and ask for help, like really and truly it is the education system job to provide resources. Unless we say, Hey, this is a problem, or this is a thing that I don't necessarily understand. Lots of kids fall through the cracks and they don't receive the resources that they deserve.

And I think that all kids deserve the opportunity to excel and there's a way to push him without being forceful and being that thorn in the side, but I am also not against being a thorn in the side, you know. Unfortunately we live in a time where folks are stereotyped by the way that they show up in spaces.

So I am a darker skinned black woman and you know, we have stereotypes, you know, that when you show up in spaces, you know, people might perceive me to be one way and it is those opportunities where I'm able to use my privilege, my proximities to whiteness, or my proximities to power to advocate on behalf of maybe a parent who is black or latinx, or you know, indigenous, and they don't have the words to articulate what their child might need.

Laura: Yeah, I think that's so important to that, especially for those of us who are in privileged positions or positions of powers to understand that when we are advocating, you know, and making changes for our children, you know, advocating for for example, reducing policies of removing recess privileges, you know, getting rid of that policy that when we advocate for a policy wide change versus just for my child, then we're supporting all of the kids in the classroom. There's no child benefits from having recess taken away, you know? Yeah, yeah. Thinking about those things, that's really important.

Sonia, I really appreciate you bringing this perspective to our podcast and helping us think through some of these changes that are happening. And I think it's really important to remember that like as we, you know, we started out talking about how we can help children learn to advocate for themselves, and now we're talking about how we can advocate for children, and they go hand in hand, right? They we have to practice what we preach and model the advocacy that we want to see them stepping into and not squash them as they start advocating for themselves.

Sonia: Absolutely. You know, one of the tenets of my teaching is that I want to give you the tools to make sure that you can lift your voice yourself. And so teaching kids, young people to really just look at a situation, develop, you know, an idea with their peers themselves around what possible solutions are is so much more powerful than someone coming in and say, okay, you've got this problem, here's what you need to do.

Like as an advocate, one of the things that I am very steadfast on making sure that when I'm organizing and I'm doing, for example, social justice work, right? That it's not a matter of me being an experienced social justice advocate to show up in spaces to shake up the norm, that we've been all accustomed to, right?

It's a matter of seeing who is most disenfranchised by the system and allowing, not, not necessarily even allowing, but having the privilege to center those people who are most disenfranchised because when they see the thing that they are most disenfranchised by and how it impacts their life when they see their voice and hear what that experience does for everyone else, oh my God, it's powerful right? It's powerful to see that revelation as it takes hold of their body and it just gives them courage in a different kind of way to make it out of a situation that maybe at one time or another they felt like there was no way out of.

Laura: Oh yeah, I think that's so beautiful. It's so and thank you for sharing that that decentering of your own experience and looking around to whose experience needs to be actually centered. Yeah and I mean then that applies to parenting too, because the little ones are you know within the power structure of a family, the little ones are the most disenfranchised. You know they are.

Sonia: Absolutely and not only are they the most disenfranchised, they're watching and absorbing those things and then they become adults and they take on either the role of, you know, what they witnessed or they become the victim of what they experienced, right? So the cycle continues. And so it's a huge thing in all families where you begin to say, okay what am I leaving that child with?

What am I leaving with them with? And then you look up 20 years later as they're an adult and you say oh I left them with that. Oh I'm so sorry I can remember my mom and I having this cantankerous relationship, especially in my teen years I considered myself a black sheep and I love my mom to death. She is like the most beautiful soul and has been my biggest cheerleader and fan, but at the same time she was for a lack of better words--she wanted to make sure that I was stronger than her.

And so she didn't necessarily know how to go about doing that. And so it was you do this, you do what I say, but not what I do. It was one of those kind of scenarios. And so often times I would look and I would say, but that didn't work for you. And so why are we doing this again? And my outspokenness, she would tell you that I knew that I had trouble on my hands when you know, seven year old Sonia showed up with a note from school saying that she refuses to say the pledge of allegiance.

And so she had to put on her learn her advocacy had on behalf of her child at a very early time in her parenting. And so you know, I can remember being 18 and writing her this long letter. I think it was like about 15 pages and I was like, this is what I liked about my childhood and this is what I hated and I hated this and I hated this. And I hated this.

And I need when my children to grow up and be your grandchildren for those not to be the experiences that you leave them behind with. And she recognized like, yeah, I did that, I left you behind. So that goes back into what I said at the beginning, like imagine when young people don't have to, you know, seek therapy when they're adults because of the things that the adults in their life left them with.

But that was therapy for us. You know, I was quickly able to forgive her and and we've had a very beautiful adult relationship. She's like one of my biggest cheerleader. She's one of my employees with my business. I couldn't do what I do on a regular basis without her. So, but get to those points where we can have those kind of relationships and boundaries with our parents.

Laura: It was a beautiful modeling for all of our listeners who are many are looking to do that exact same thing with their parents and perhaps you know to your mom who was able to take that on. That's not an easy thing.

I know you're a grandma now and so your phase two where you're starting to look at, you know, you've got older kids and you're starting to take a look at those new boundaries, navigating those new waters. That's not an easy thing to do. So, wow, congrats to your mom for being able to handle that well.

Sonia: Yeah, I appreciate her. I mean she has taught me. I used to as a kid, I would be like, I am not going to be the parent that you were and then when I became a parent, I was like dang it, I'm doing some things that my mom was doing.

Alright. I said I wasn't gonna do that. And as a grandparent it really gives me a complete different, you know, lens and scope to look from and my three granddaughters, they will say, you know, Nana is the strongest woman I know because Nana is doing, you know, this and Nana makes sure that we are all taken care of.

And so when my oldest grandchild, when she comes to see me and she's an adult now she's 20 and she says, Nana, I miss you so much. I'm like, all I am is a phone call away and you just don't use your phone, you know so?

Laura: What a beautiful life and experience you've had, thank you for sharing it with us. I really appreciate your time and expertise.

Sonia: Absolutely. It has definitely been a pleasure.

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. 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.

December 10, 2021

Episode 93: How to Help Your Child Have a Healthy Relationship with Food with Jennifer Anderson

December 10, 2021/ Laura Froyen

I have an amazing guest for this episode. She is Jennifer Anderson of the amazing Instagram account @kids.eat.in.color. She is a registered dietitian, a mom of two very exciting boys and a cheerleader to hundreds of thousands of parents feeding kids through the Kids Eat in Color social media movement. She helps parents let go of mealtime battles, reduce their stress, and get their kids on the path to eating better.

Here is a summary of what we talked about:

How to have a balanced and healthy relationship with food
How to teach kids to listen to their bodies’ hunger and satiety signals
Setting boundaries around food particularly sweets
Picky eaters and how to get them eat veggies

Find more resources on how to end your food battles with kids by following Jennifer on social media and visiting her website.

Instagram: @kids.eat.in.color

Website: kidseatincolor.com/links/

TRANSCRIPT

Parenting is often lived in the extremes. It's either great joy or chaotic overwhelm. 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, I have a really, an amazing guest that I'm so excited to share with you. I'm bringing in Jennifer Anderson of the amazing Instagram account @kids.eat.in.color.

She is a registered dietitian, a mom of two very exciting boys and a cheerleader to hundreds of thousands of parents feeding kids through the kids eating color social media movement. She helps parents let go of mealtime battles, reduce their stress and get their kids on the path to eating better. And I know everybody listening is so excited to hear from you Jennifer. So welcome to the show. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about yourself and what you do?

Jennifer: Thank you so much for having me, Laura. It's great to be here. So yeah, I mean like you said, I'm a mom, I'm a cheerleader to hundreds of thousands of parents and now millions of parents all over the world and I really deeply believe that parents are doing a great job and when we believe that, we can do a little bit better and we can solve our problems even better.

Laura: Oh my gosh, I agree with you. Aren't parents amazing?

Jennifer: Yeah.

Laura: Yeah, right? Just a shout out to all of the listeners here, if you show up for your kid, your families in a way that is just so inspiring. I feel, I don't know about you, Jennifer, but I feel so blessed to get to do this job in this work and work with parents in this way.

Jennifer: Absolutely. I mean parenting is no joke to pay out things that never ends and you know, we have to keep showing up. It doesn't matter what's going on. You know, sometimes we show up barely dragging ourselves to the game and sometimes we are kind of on top of it, but it's tricky to be a parent. It's tricky to feed kids.

Laura: It is, you know, so just a little bit about my own journey around food with my kids, I had a pretty traumatic birth and felt pretty out of control and so attempted to control what I could and food is something that I could control when I had my first baby and we had some feeding issues right at the beginning because she was a NICU baby and so I was really controlling with food for her first two years and then we were at a birthday party and she just had no control around sweets that were there, it was her first birthday party.

I was like, wow, this isn't okay. And so I started looking into intuitive eating and how to raise healthy eaters because I grew up feeling out of control around sweets as a kid and I didn't want that for my kids and I found your account and you're really, really helpful in helping me figure out how to have a balanced relationship, especially with sweets and treats.

And so this is a question that I get a lot from the families that I work with the families who follow me on Instagram and I know my personal story what I did to help my kid, I kind of almost heal her relationship with sweets and now both of my daughters have really healthy relationships with sweets and treats where there's not a lot of pull.

They've got lots of experience self regulating, but can we talk about this for a little bit, you know, okay, the question that I get is kind of, how do I help my kids have a healthy relationship with food where they're not feeling, I don't know, one of the moms wrote in and said they don't have a complex around seats, which I totally had, I can still remember the first time I binged on sweets, it was on like sugar cereal at a friend's house. I just ate bowl after bowl after bowl because we, we weren't allowed to have it at our house. You know, what do we do? Where do we start?

Jennifer: Yeah. Well, first of all, I just want to say there's no one perfect way to do this, where if you do x, y, z, your kid will also somehow be a quote, perfect to eat or whatever, that, you know, kids are so different and I know that I've read plenty of books and you know, they didn't work for my kids at all. So you always have to find the right thing for your family, for your kid. And every kid has different health needs and all of those things.

But one of the things we have to think about is as our kids get older and they're exposed to sweet and you know, maybe we've just not exposed them and that's fine, you know, delaying exposure is a great way to reduce their consumption of sweets without making a big deal, especially if they don't know about it, you know.

So all of a sudden they go to a birthday party and they learn about birthday cake and their life is changed forever where they go over to grandpa and grandma's and they have M and M's for the first time or whatever and all of a sudden the world changes for you and for them because now they know that thing exists and they're going to go to the more birthday parties and they're going to go over to grandma and grandpa's again.

Maybe they're going to go trick or treating if that's something your family does. All of a sudden you have a choice at that time to continue to make it a big deal because we all, we've all had sweets and guess what they taste delicious and they feel good and you know, all these things. Right? So we have a choice are we going to go down the path of, okay, so we are now part of our life or are we going to go down the path of, oh my gosh.

I have to protect my kid from this at all costs. This is poison that I'm putting in my child's body, we have a choice of how we're going to kind of try to navigate this. I have a close friend whose mother was extremely concerned about and he's perceived quote junk food and you know, her kids had allergies and so we've got cause, right?

I mean none of us have bad intentions as to our kids? So she never ever allowed any soda, no, can soda consumption whatsoever under any circumstances. Fast forward he goes to high school. She never have any more control over what he drinks. He drinks so much soda every day.

Within a year, he has a cavity in every single tooth. You know, there's these extreme stories where when we are extreme with our kids. They don't always do what we want, but if we can actually kind of navigate the gray area where no, we're not feeding our kids tons and tons and tons of sugary foods, not a best practice for their teeth or their health or anything else.

You know, we need some volunteer, but if we can try to navigate that gray area of yeah, we do have sweets and they are part of our life, but we're trying to decrease the fascination, the obsession, the curiosity with them so that it's just part of our life and also broccoli is part of our life and that's an important, wonderful part of our life. We can try to normalize sweets to the level that we try to normalize vegetables with just totally different experience with the kids and with feeding.

Laura: Yeah. Okay. So there were two things that I feel like I wanted to pull out there and so we can go down to pass. But when you said “junk food”, I feel so strongly about labeling foods. And so I hope at some point we can talk a little bit about how to talk about food. But I also want to talk about like big thing that I heard you saying there was that kids need opportunities to experience and practice the skill of regulating themselves around food.

That we've been applying all of the control. We've been their willpower for just a lack of a better word, their whole lives and then they go into a space where we no longer have control. They don't have it either because they've never practiced restraint. They've never practiced balance with any of these things.

Jennifer: Not only that, but you've created a fascination. So there's plenty of studies. So if you call something bad and if you restrict it heavily, your body feels restricted and therefore you're obsessed about it. You want it a lot. Not only that, but a lot of us, maybe we grew up with eat your food and then you get dessert Philip.

I've worn by, it's a broccoli and then you get your ice cream. The problem is every time, every single time we use food as a reward, we decrease the value of other food and we remote the value of that. So we have the best intentions. You know, parents have the best intentions.

Laura: Okay, so parents have the best of intentions. We want our kids to learn.

Jennifer: Yeah, we want kids to learn and we think if we teach them that they have to eat their broccoli first and we're teaching them that broccoli is more important. Actually teaching them is that dessert is a reward and it's better and therefore broccoli is worse. And so we actually are teaching kids to be very opposite of what we want them to work.

Laura: Yes, it's the same thing as with chores, when we reward them for doing something, we teach them, you're not supposed to want to do this without this reward.

Jennifer: And it's because I have definitely rewarded my kids to do various things, you know what, I need you to do this or not, I need you to do it right now, but the more you do it, the more you don't want to do it.

Laura: Yes, these messages, these unintended kind of under between the line messages that kids get were saying this a lot overtly through the best of intentions that parents, we're all just doing our best. We are every single one of us who is concerned about what our kids are eating are concerned about because we want our kids to be the healthiest, balanced kiddos and grow up strong and healthy, right?

Jennifer: Absolutely has some intentions because we grew up where the, this is how we grew up. So of course we're going to do that with our kids. There's no reason I don't believe that we should ever give a parent a hard time for what they're doing, They may not have heard of a new method, they may not feel comfortable with a new method, they may not understand why it makes sense because so much feeding kids especially now where we're actually growing up in a different world than we grew up in or that our parents grew up in or that their parents grew up in.

We actually need some different parenting techniques and we need some new ways of teaching kids how to navigate a life. You know, they're going to go out into society into a world that's just kind of like sugar is all over the place and it's in everything.

So how do you navigate that? How do we teach kids to really listen, new their body over time to become comfortable knowing when they're full and when they're hungry and when they had enough cookies and when they haven't and how that's different on different days. We don't have to give our kids a two cookie rule, you know, which is something that a lot of hair as well to cookies any more than that, you know, not enough. The problem is that they always eat two cookies. Always, always, they never have a chance to get their bill of cookies and they also can't stop at one cookie if they're satisfied? Right?

Laura: Oh yes, Absolutely. Okay. So I'm dying to know then what are the things like that we can do, what are some like concrete things off the top of your head. Sorry to put you on the spot.

Jennifer: The thing that I recommend is if your family has dessert and you've been using it as a reward or you know, two more by CIA dessert, stop doing that. Start putting a small child taste portion of dessert on the plate. Some debate. Should you let kids have as much dessert as you want at dinner? I don't think so.

There's no like study that shows what the best thing to do is hear dinner, a small child sized portion is fine and if they ask for more, you can say, well there's no more available for this meal will have more on Tuesday or you know, whatever it is, the thing is you have to stay cool and you need to remember your kid is probably going to freak out if they've been obsessed about this for like what do you mean?

I can't have more because I'm all about dessert right now and now I can't have more and then they're throwing a tantrum or you know, whatever you wanna call it, they're really freaked out because you can't have more, you have to just climb over that mountain, there's going to be a couple of weeks where you're feeling uncomfortable and you're wondering if this is working and and all this sort of thing. But once they realize this is all, but we're also going to have it another time you begin to build their understanding of Oh, okay. It's just the same as broccoli. Really?

Laura: Yeah.

Jennifer: And you know, there may be times when you run out of broccoli and guess what? There's no more available for this meal, that's just part of life that sometimes various foods are not available in unlimited quantities. Right? So it's a lifelong skill sometimes where kids can eat as much as they want and that's a really hard one for parents.

Laura: Yes, it absolutely is. So what you're talking about is holding a firm compassionate boundary, a limit that all of the parents listening here, working on learning how to do, you know, I'm practicing with her kids and it's no different with food. What was interesting for me when we started serving desserts with meals.

So my youngest is almost six and she's only ever experienced that, but my oldest was I think probably two or 2 and a half when we started it with her. So if we're having a dessert served with the main course and it was so interesting to watch their different strategies. So when she first started that she just immediately ate the whole thing and then it was gone and then she ate her other foods with no problems.

That was really anxiety-provoking for me that like, you know, because I was in the midst of my own work with sweets. I think that this is something that is so I mean the food is a microcosm of the parenting relationship as a whole, right? So when we're working on parenting, we have our own work to do and then the work that's exterior with our kids. It's the same with food or at least it was for me, I was going through this food journey with my daughter.

So that was really, I had to do a lot of like self regulation watching her eat like a child-sized cup of putting or whatever it was that we were having. But their strategies on how they eat their desserts are so funny and they still are consistent of my oldest is eight now and she will eat almost all of her sweet treat her dessert, eat the rest of her food and save one bite of the sweet and then just sit with it in her mouth for like 10 minutes.

Yeah, that's whereas my other one, well she's always just done that, gone around in a circle and usually ends, you know? But their strategies are so interesting. It was once I got over my anxiety, it was interesting to watch that develop.

Jennifer: I love what you're saying is like once you get over your anxiety, you can just kind of have this curiosity and your own kids. Like when you're not obsessed about whether you're doing it right or doing it wrong. Obviously you could just be our kids for what they are which is these creative little beans that are sitting at the table and they're just learning to be themselves. I remember watching my first child teach himself how to eat.

I didn't know about baby-led weaning. I was basically just just following his lead, which is he wanted to feed himself. And we mostly had pureed ish type foods at that time. You know, my husband and he felt this like a little method of scooping up the puree and pushing it through the top of this little fist and feeding himself. It was so adorable from what I think is so amazing is at that time I truly didn't care whether I was doing weaning right.

You know, it was following the best practices with responsive feeding for your kid and so it just didn't matter. And so I was really able to enjoy what he was doing, which was so adorable. And my second kid burned it, taught himself to eat totally differently.

Every kid, it's so different and when we can just step away from, you know, the societal expectation that we're going to have Mommy Wars over weaning and we're going to Mommy Wars, like what we're feeding our kids all these things, We lose our ability to appreciate that moment when our kids are just being adorable and learning and growing and you know, all those things.

Laura: It's so true. The stress and anxiety and the worry about doing it right takes us right out of the moment and out of presence and keeps us from enjoying these times with our kids.

Jennifer: I mean that said when I went to the pediatrician and my son had birth issues then all of a sudden the anxiety of course are over there. So there are times when you know other information comes in, you can no longer enjoy the moment because you're freaking out that your kids are growing up.

So are those two, I don't want anybody to feel bad that they are concerned because there are real concerns that are real feeding issues that come up and there are real picky eaters and there are all these things feeding kids can be really tricky and if you aren't able to enjoy the moment, it doesn't mean that you're a bad parent. It just means that you have a tricky feeding situation. Like many of us do.

Laura: Yeah, thank you for that very balanced perspective. We really appreciate that. Okay, so I'm trying to think, should we go to talk about kind of unrestricted access to sweets that happens sometimes at like holidays, like we're recording this, um kind of close after the Easter and Passover holidays, would that be helpful? You think do parents need to know about those things?

Jennifer: Here is something just try to not get worked up over it. There are holidays, they will happen, your kids will have more access to sweets, then you will be able to control. Grandparents will be seeing the kids feeds or relatives behind your back. All these things are going to happen. I'd prefer to just go into it with a very realistic perspective my kid is going to eat enough sweets today that they are going to be very grumpy tonight.

But you know what tomorrow is another day and we will move on. Just like to take a really realistic perspective and not try to over-control it now do I take the opportunities to decrease their access? Sure. You know, I just didn't put that much Candy and Easter but guess what? They complained about it. I was like, well they complain that there's one jelly bean in the egg and stuff.

i don't know what they were expecting, maybe like four, I don't, I don't even know, but the reality is you know candy is a wonderful and joyful thing for kids to experience at holidays and we can allow them to choose how much to eat and that is a learning experience for them. I remember when my son was six and it was the first Halloween that he was really into the experience of candy.

Like he prior to that he just really didn't care that much. Something about six was a big shift for him and he ate so much candy and then he sat on the kitchen floor and he said, oh I think I think I ate too much candy and you know what, he taught himself that. I never said anything, he was able to internalize for himself and put it together. But a lot of candy made him feel sick and that experience is worth.

I don't know, I thought much more than if I had told him, hey, if you eat too much candy, you're going to get a stomach ache. You know your, when your kid realizes that for themselves and they can begin to understand, oh, if I eat that much, I feel sick if I eat this much, you know, it doesn't mean that your kid is never going to eat too much candy again, but it does mean that your child is on the road to being able to regulate themselves over time, right?

Laura: So all adults have times where they over-consume certain things and people-focused with healthy relationships with food, just know like, oh, I overdid it and with no guilt, no shame, no blame, no self judgment around it. That's what we're creating an opportunity for our kids to do to.

Jennifer: Absolutely. And you know what the next day, I'm always amazed when my kids eat more vegetables than usual. It's always fascinating. We don't push veggies. I, you know, I have a very like veggie positive environment at home and they're around pretty frequently, but I never forced them to eat it.

And it's always interesting to see after a big holiday where, you know, they didn't eat that many vegetables and they had a lot of candy, just like we kind of feel gross, might gravitate more towards those foods that are going to make us feel better. The kids do the same thing if you know, depending on their ability to eat a variety of foods?

Laura: Yeah, I've experienced that too. I like to put just veggies in a tray out on the kitchen counter. Usually in that time period between school and dinner, you know? But yes, I see an uptick in how much of that platter is emptied on the days after.

Okay, so that was really helpful. So what about for the families who have some picky eaters, some kids? And what is the definition of a picky eater? Because that's something that, like, I work with some families who say their kid is a picky eater and then they come to me with a list of like 50 or 60 foods that their kids will eat, you know? And then I have some families who come and say their kids a picky eater and they've got like 5 to 10 foods. And so what is the definition of a picky eater?

Jennifer: And interestingly there actually is not an agreed upon. Okay, there are a whole bunch of definitions in the literature and I think it's more of a subjective thing. Now, there are some objective things. Does your child eat less than 20 to 30 foods? Does your child have a physical problem as a result of not being able to eat a variety of foods?

Does your child not eat all of the food groups? Like are they completely unable to eat fruits and vegetables? Those three in particular are really big red flags that not only is your child a picky eater, but their ability to only eat a small amount of foods has the likelihood of having a physical or nutritional improvement on your child.

Well, then it's more of a time to get in there and start trying some new strategies because then usually do need more support if you have an extremely picky eater and that's more along the lines of what I call an extremely picky eater.

But here's the other thing. If you're going into meal to them, then it feels like a complete battle and you're pulling your hair out and you're feeling defeated and you're so frustrated and I don't care if your kid is eating 32 foods or 35 or 50, something is wrong for you and your stress levels and you need some support because it doesn't have to be like, you don't have to be have your blood pressure going up, going to the table and feeling like you're going into a war.

Laura: Even if there are some health concerns, there's still room for taking care of you in that process.

Jennifer: Oh, absolutely. I mean, the first thing I do in my better vice program, which is the program for the families of the eaters. First thing I do is work on reducing your stress because you can't do anything to help your child if you're completely stressed out.

I mean, I've been there, I live this to you know, I have a selective child and one who tends to not eat enough. So stressful. And if we can find ways to reduce our stress, we really open up just an enormous number of possibilities for ourselves and for our child.

Laura: Yeah. I think we can't be overstated that our role, our approach, the energy we bring to the table really makes a difference for kids to it really.

Jennifer: It really does. And for you too, I mean, I don't deserve to be like super, super frustrated. I mean feeding kids is Six times a day, 5, 6 times a day we got it so much always happening. So it's feeding your child is your biggest stressor, what it means you're becoming stressed to your max, You know 5, 6 times a day. I recently heard mom say 90% of my stress is due to feeding my child.

And I think that's totally accurate. So if you're feeling really stressed, you are not alone. In fact, I started feeding kids color because I was feeling super stressed about feeding a child who didn't want to eat enough and I was making these cute little lunches to get them interesting and interested in meals and I thought, you know, I can't be the only parent struggling. You are not the only there are millions of parents struggling all over the world. And then I thought, oh maybe it's just the United States saying no all over the world, all over the world.

Laura: Yeah. Oh, that's really interesting. So do you have any resources for folks who have a picky eater and they're looking at?

Jennifer: I do have a good starting place. So my friend picky Eater guide is 14 pages of help. Like understanding how do you kind of get a get full of your mealtime environment and get really clear on what is your job as a parent versus what is your child's job as the child? Because that is a huge stress reliever when you're doing your job and your child is doing their job when you're able to then work together in much healthier ways. That opens up a load of possibilities.

Laura: I love that. That's something that I have to remind myself of all the time, that there's certain parts of my kids eating, that is not my business, that you know, that is their job and no one likes to be micromanaged in their job. No one does.

Jennifer: Actually like toddlers or children. My kids have yet to grow out of the phase in which they want to be in control of their body.

Laura: Hopefully they never happen. It's human nature to want to control your body.

Jennifer: We really want to, we want to raise our kids right? We want to raise them to grow up and be able to take care of themselves and part of that is starting really early teaching them that it's their job to be in charge of the food that goes into their body and how much they eat and all that stuff. I know recently my kids were in a situation where a relative trying to pressure them to finish their meal. Just remember the look on my five year old’s face, which was, you are crazy and then he looks at me like, what's up with this person? Like, oh, that's how much she wants to eat

Laura: Yeah. Oh my gosh, You know, so the, my one daughter has always been really good at setting boundaries with people. And so she has her very loving bop sha she's polish and food is love and there's lots of pressure for everybody to eat more and more. Her parents were rushed with survivors. There's just a lot with food, there's a lot I'm there.

But she will ask my daughter if she wants more and from when the time and she was really little, she goes with the food that's on my plate is my business. I adore her boundary setting. I admire it so much. It's so good speaking though of relatives or other people's other influences in our kid’s lives.

I did have a couple of people who wanted me to ask you how to handle folks who maybe have a different perspective on how to handle food and so they are embracing kind of the kids eating color approach and it's different. It is different. It's a bit radical than what the mainstream folks are doing, how to approach that with well-meaning loved ones. And then also I've had a couple of questions about how to handle some fat-shaming that might happen and crop up in homes. And so I just was hoping we could chat about those things.

Jennifer: Sure. You know, talking with family is very, very difficult and I find so much of this comes up with partners like my partner isn't on board. My partner is really very on pressuring my child to finish their plate. You know, my in-laws, my mother, my father, my destiny. Boundary setting with family, you know, extended family is just so tricky. It's so tricky. And I don't have any one size fits all answers.

And the reason for that is this. I don't know if your mother has a mental illness. We don't know if your relative is abusive. I don't know if your relative is completely wonderful and wants to do the best and just doesn't know about new techniques. I don't know if you're reliant on living with your family or you're reliant on your aunt and uncle for childcare and if that's the case, you know, you may have to just do abide by their rules because you can't make any changes.

You know, so there's obviously, I think the best case scenario would be probably like my mom. She remembered being a mom and she had five kids and she didn't want us eating a ton of sugar, although she, you know, it was around and she loved it, but I think she remembers setting boundaries with her parents and saying no, you can't send bags of candy for every holiday.

They were just sending bags, bags and bags and she said no, can you please send this? And she told them what to instead. And so with her, we actually had a conversation, it's like, okay, how much can I send, how much candy and how much this? And she's just done a wonderful job of providing toys instead of candy.

And I find this talking with parents who are rational and reasonable and who you have a good relationship with. I don't know exactly what you want. I want you to have ice cream with her once a month, but not every single time you get together because you know, we need to have ice cream too and not in a judgmental way, but say this is best for my daughter. Can you please take her out for ice cream once a month. And the other times can you please go to this part? Because I know she loves it and I know she really appreciate some time with you.

Laura: Yeah. So giving them options of what they can do.

Jennifer: Exactly what they want because they really want your child to adore them just fine and they want to do whatever they want, right? So if you just kind of give them suggestions. Oh, they love going to get a balloon. Oh they love going to the special part of the slide. Oh, they love it when you bring the dog over. Tell them how your child can adore them without the extra candy. And I think that's the best case scenario right now. I have other relatives, but I have to have that straightforward conversation with.

In fact, bringing it up with them would actually come back to bite me. It would mean that other people I know they would then feed my kid more candy just to make me mean, right hoof, right? Not all of us have wonderful relationships with all the people around us and we just have to be very aware. So that's what I do with that person and don't ever say no because I know that that would result in a bad impact for my kids and myself. I don't say, oh you can't, I just say I want you to tell me before you do it right?

Because that's that's the most important thing for me, reducing harm is don't go behind my back because that's not good for my kids, but I want you to be really forthright with what you're going to do and I always say yes because I know that is going to lead to better outcome. So we have to like really look at who we're dealing with and how we’re talking when we're dealing those relationships around us because we can be flexible. We can be flexible with how much candy our kids can eat, but sometimes we have to focus on their safety first.

Sometimes we have to focus on child care and being able to keep our jobs. Sometimes we have to focus on the relationship. And having extra candy is not going to kill them, it is not. And sometimes there is much more important things for us to focus on for the overall safety and benefit of the family. So we have to go in with some flexibility and with some grace for those other people for ourselves. We just have to kind of walk that messy, gray area of relationships, you know.

Laura: Yeah, that was such a beautiful kind of crash course in balanced boundary setting with family. Thank you for that. And I think that that applies to you know, again we're talking about food, but really food is kind of this microcosm of all the things that we deal with as parents and it applies to gifts at birthdays and all sorts of things that you need to set boundaries with so?

Jennifer: Right it's true, there's so much food, you know, it can be culture, it can be politics, it can be are we preparing for ourselves, it can be our way of hurting other people, you know so much is wrapped up in food. I agree with you, it is just a microcosm of so many other things.

Laura: Yeah. And if we really want our kids to just have a simple relationship with food, then sometimes we have to be realistic about who we're dealing with and how to where our power is in our overarching goal is for our kids to have a healthy simple relationship with food.

Jennifer: The other thing to remember is parents modeling the way that they want their kids to eat is probably the most powerful thing that you can do. Now. It realized some parents are picky eaters themselves and they can't always model everything. They have allergies. That's okay. You can eat the way that you want your child to eat.

That is going to have more of an impact on them than what they see grandma and grandpa eating then what they see, you know? And so your aunts or uncle is eating obviously what those other people eating are going to have an influence on your child, but you, as the parents, you are going to have the biggest influence on your life.

Laura: I so agree. I so agree. Okay. I just wanted to ask one more question, I feel I want to be respectful of your time. So we've been talking about food a lot and having a healthy relationship with food and I think that food gets really our relationship with food gets really distorted when we're embedded in a culture that prioritizes thinness and prioritizes dieting and I know that I've had to have conversations with the other adults in my kid's life around negative self talk about their bodies and diet talk.

And so I was just curious if you have any recommendations for families on those conversations or even if like we can't control what other people say. How do we reframe it for our kids or help our kids make sense of maybe what grandma said when she was over.

Jennifer: Right, so tricky again. Yes, so difficult. So, first off, as a parent again, you're gonna have the biggest impact on your child, choosing to not talk about your body and your weight around your child is extremely important. The American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended that there be no weight talk, especially around older kids starts young too. We now have three year old girls dieting three.

I mean that's like just out of toddlerhood and they're dieting and it's not like 1-3 year old is dieting. This is a thing now that's being measured and observed. Three year olds are saying, oh, I need to lose weight, Oh right there just mimicking us. They're just internalizing what they're seeing around them.

So the more that you cannot talk about your weight and not say negative things about your body around your child, the more powerful that is because again, you're going to have the biggest impact on your child and if you I've been talking negatively, switch it up. You know, start talking to, you know, not the person who's going to say you're an adult, you should never go on a diet. I don't care. Like if you're an adult, you can do whatever you want. No, I just believe that it's your body. You do what you want.

Now I could make evidence-based recommendations which actually wouldn't really include, we lost diet based on the evidences created. But you know, you're an adult, you're free to do whatever you want. But if you are going to choose to try to lose weight around your child, you really, really, really need to come up with a new way to talk about that.

I just wish for every child that they can be in a home where families talk about their bodies being strong. Oh, I'm I'm lifting weights so that my body can be strong. I want to be able to pick you up and throw you up in the air. I want to be able to run around the block and feel good. I want to be able to be strong and due to, you know, vacuum the house more quickly.

There's so many ways that we can talk about our body being healthy or let's say you have a health condition, let's say you have high cholesterol and you're therefore going on a medical diet to try to, to feel that you can actually talk about that with your child.

You can say, oh, I have high cholesterol, this is what that means. I'm okay, but also that to take care of that body, that means to take care of my body. I need to change the way that I'm eating. And you know, that means I'm gonna start eating more soluble fiber. Let's talk about soluble fiber. You can go down the rabbit hole as far as you want. But I think we need to change the conversations with our kids from size, which is something that most people cannot control. And that doesn't necessarily mean that someone is unhealthy. We need to change that conversation away from size and really to help.

I mean, if you have diabetes and yes, I would highly encourage you to learn about taking care of your body and that is going to change the way that you eat. If you have a heart condition, if you have high cholesterol, if you have an eating disorder, if you have absolutely anything, there is going to be a way for you to take care of your body that may include what you eat and it's okay to talk to your child about that, you know,

Laura: Yeah and we can do that without moralizing or judging food categories.

Jennifer: Absolutely, Absolutely. Now my kids know that I'm allergic to salmon right, Which is a really poor food to be allergic to if you're a dietician because dieticians love salmon, you know, I'm allergic to it. My allergist recommended that I not eat it and therefore I don't eat it.

So they actually, they know that, but they know that their bodies are not allergic to salmon and therefore they can eat it. So I think we can introduce our kids to nuance. You know, some foods are good for you. Some foods are good for me. Some foods are bad for me. Some foods are bad for you. Actually understand that kind of nuance early on. What they cannot understand is sugar is bad. Mcdonald's is bending that they, you know, they cannot understand because before they go to their friend of preschool and this has happened, I would guess most preschool teachers have a story like this.

They go to their friend and say, oh, your mom is poisoning you because you have candy at your lunch. Oh, that's what relationships are ruined, that kid feels horrible. It's so much judgment when we categorize foods, just say this is them. We didn't franchise so many people. I mean, there are extreme picky eaters out there, they have 5 to 10 foods that they can eat and then they go to school and the school has them do a sorting activity that says, you know, these foods are good for you.

These foods are bad for you and beyond that some of that child-safe food during the bad category and now because they had an anxiety-based eating issue. Now they can't eat one of their safe foods and that literally puts them at nutritional risk and risk of, we're looking bad consequences, all the best of intentions.

But when we categorize foods, we do not understand what we're doing. Take a mom who are a family right times, they are going to the food pantry, they are using their snap benefits, they're doing all these things very tight budget, they're going to put what they can afford on their child's plate and if their friend comes over it's like, oh, that's junk food.

Guess what? They have just judged that family in an unfair, inaccurate way. We can teach our kids to judge other people for what we mean. And we can also teach our kids have curiosity and understanding that all foods are good, even if all foods are not good for our family. All foods have a purpose and all foods are good and I'm gonna put my money behind that. I will go as far as I can teaching my kids to never say somebody else's food is bad.

Laura: Yes, it's so important to, to understand that kids, especially kids in the six and under range are involved in categorizing and labeling things that that's part of what their brain is doing right now. And so they're very sensitive to what we label things as it becomes very firmly cemented in the neural structure of their brains. It's very hard to change what their brain is doing right then. Right, they’re forming the structure of their brain and how things are categorized and labels is a big piece of that too.

Jennifer: The real challenge is, okay, let's say you really believe that you want your child to think that sugar is bad. I don't judge you or you know whoever for thinking that there are so many messages out there and there's so much diet culture out there and there's extreme eating pattern culture out there, right? We're constantly hearing all kinds of messages.

The problem is what happens when your child has to eat a food with sugar in it? They go over to a friend's house, they are in a situation where they don't have access to food and all the food that they have access to has sugar in it. All of a sudden your chances in a situation or maybe they eat it because it tastes good and they're in a situation where they like, does this make me bad because this is a bad, What does this mean for me now that I'm eating a food that's poisonous, now that I'm eating a food that is bad for me? What does that mean?

I think there is a real internalization of these labels foods onto kids themselves when they're younger and then you bring in this whole moral component to eating and that brings an emotional component to eating. Now you've really complicated that child's relationship with food. Again, don't do any parent for doing this because we are just awash in diet culture and food culture, it is everywhere.

And if at the same time, if you think you can raise your child even without getting them exposed to diet culture, even that is impossible because you gotta, you know the family dinner and everybody's like, oh I lost this much on my latest diet nights of this and and you know, so we do the best we can and then our kids go to preschool and they hear all kinds of crazy stuff there and then they go to school and then they’re hearing crazier stuff.

I think we just want to focus on what you can control at home and what is the best I can do. Yes, I'm definitely going to make a mistake because I didn't grow up with this stuff and that's okay. I mean the parent who doesn't make a mistake, good luck. You will, you will have no, are they were how to relate to you. So yeah, we're always making these mistakes. But I think we can, we can work on it. We can work on having these conversations where we learn about what foods do in your body and teach them to our kids.

You know, one of my kids, he went to he went to school one day and he had, I think he had a small piece of chocolate in his lunch or maybe a couple of chocolate chips in his muffin and the kid said to him, chocolates unhealthy. And my son came back, he was six and he said, you know, so and so said chocolates unhealthy.

But it just does a few things in your body, right? And what he was referring to is a conversation that we had had, where, you know, some foods do a lot of things in your body and some foods do just a few things in your body. Doesn't mean you're being that it just means that they're different. Broccoli, it categorically does just an extraordinarily large number of things in your body that are helpful, Right?

Piece of candy largely does one thing in your body. And that is to give you a quick shot of energy. That's it. And that's how we talk about it. It doesn't have to be wrong to eat something that just gives you a quick shot of energy. What's not wrong? It just is. It also isn't morally superior to eat broccoli, which doesn't give you a quick shot of energy, but does do a whole host of other wonderful, wonderful things in your body.

People draw attention to the fact that foods are different, but they do different things in our body. And as they get older, we can start to slowly introduce things like, well that quick shot of energy is gone. So you notice that your brother is crying on the floor over there.

That's because he he decided to only eat his candy of lunch and he didn't have any protein in fact to keep him going, right? Draw these opportunities come up. We can draw the connections of how foods work in our volume. We can absolutely do that without judging and without saying therefore you are wrong or therefore you are bad.

Laura: Yeah, I love this. I love how you're bringing this nuance and curiosity so that kids can have a really like, I think that that's always been my goal for my kids is that I want them to have a very uncomplicated and very curious relationship with food. They get to just play and see what feels good.

You know, having done this for years with my girls, they are so good at listening to their bodies. If I have just two more pieces of candy, I think my tummy is going to hurt so I'm going to stop now. You know, I had it too much and it hurts and I won't do that again or you know like my tummy feels a little sick. I think I'm gonna go get some broccoli out of the fridge. You know, just they do it. The approach that you teach is just so wonderful and I've benefited from it so much and from this conversation, thank you so much for your time.

Jennifer: Your dear Welcome. Yeah, my pleasure to help parents and to talk about this stuff. I mean I'm so passionate about it. Like any opportunity I always have to like kind of like, you know, turn the flow down because otherwise it can be like a fire hose.

Laura: No, it's so good. We are so passionate here and I love it when folks come on and talk passionately about their topic. It's, I really, really appreciate your time and your expertise here. So everybody is listening, make sure you go and follow Jennifer. You probably are with her. Just amazing Instagram account.

But I really, really, oh and I'll put the link to your picky eater guide in the show notes. So has there fore you everybody who needs it. But I really, really appreciate the time that you took out of your day to talk about these topics with us.

Jennifer: Absolutely, and it's great to be here. Thank you so much.

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.

December 07, 2021

Episode 92: How to Use Logical Consequences with Wendy Snyder

December 07, 2021/ Laura Froyen

In this week's episodes on The Balanced Parent Podcast, we are going to talk about getting into a healthy mindset with two of the biggest issues parents face: Discipline and Food!

For the first episode, I’m bringing in a friend and a colleague, Wendy Snyder of the Fresh Start Family Podcast. She is a Positive Parenting educator, family coach, and advocate. She is also certified in Redirecting Children's Behavior & The Joy of Parenting Program.

Here is a summary of our discussion:

Ways to tell we slipped into the punishment mindset

Firm boundaries and good limits (without punitive measures)
Logical consequences that work and connect us to our child
Natural consequence vs. logical consequence
Tips in communicating our change of parenting style (and apologizing for the past)

To know more about logical consequences, follow Wendy on social media and visit her website.

Instagram: @freshstartwendy

Facebook: Fresh Start Family

Website: www.freshstartfamilyonline.com

TRANSCRIPT

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 Balanced Parent Podcast we're going to be talking about a topic that I think you're really going to love. It's one that I get asked about a lot. So we're going to be talking about how to move away from a punishment mindset and embrace more respectful, related and reasonable discipline.

So I think there's a big misconception that you know respectful, positive parenting is permissive and it is not and so we're going to bust that myth today and help you figure out how to actually have limits and boundaries that are respectful and empathetic and compassionate and that work for your family.

And to help me have that conversation I'm bringing in a guest and colleague, Wendy, Snyder of the Fresh Start Family Podcast and so we're going to have this conversation. I'm really excited to have her here Wendy, welcome to the Balanced Parent Podcast and why don't you tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do?

Wendy: Thank you, Thank you so much for having me Laura, it's just so great to meet. I've admired your work for a long time and I'm just really excited to be here. So yes, I'm Wendy Snyder, I'm the founder of Fresh Start Family. We are a digital education company where we help families all over the world expand their parenting toolkit, I like to say.

So they are truly a choice with how they raise their young little human souls and they feel confident in a way that they can do it with confidence and with firm kindness. Connection, confidence, and with firm kindness. So really finding that middle ground between that too firm and too kind, which really too kind never exist, but you know the permissive side of things and doing things like too heavy handed.

So a lot of parents have trouble finding that middle ground, so that's what we specialize in. And I just love being an educator of this work and as you mentioned, I also have a podcast called the Fresh Start Family Show.

So yeah, it's my jam to encourage families and I love it. I just, I love love, love being able to expand our parenting toolkit so we can really do things by choice instead of just relying on a lot of the hand me down parenting tactics that most of us inherited, right?

Laura: Yeah. Okay, so let's jump in right there because I think lots of us came up in families where more punitive punishment minded measures were used on us and we know we don't really want to do that. We want to do something different with our own families.

So we don't have a lot of models for what that is and it's easy to slip back into it. The thinking like, well they need to learn a lesson here. So what is a punishment mindset? Just kind of what and how can we tell if we've slipped into it?

Wendy: Yes, Well it is so common and it is so I don't like to use the word heart. I've actually taken the word hard out of my language and it's been so fun over the last year to purposely replace it with other words, but it is such a journey to replace a punishment mindset with a compassionate, disciplined mindset and gosh.

I mean you empower your community and your listeners so much with the ability to have grace on yourself and to be able to give yourself some time, right? Because it can take awhile. It's such a knee jerk reaction type of thing because I think a lot of it just has to do with limiting beliefs we believed from a very young age and it's kind of this idea that where do we get the notion that in order to make children behave better, we must first make them feel worse. But many of us who grew up, you know, with parents who loved us so much and they just didn't have more tools in their tool belt.

So they really thought that you, you do have to make a child feel worse in order to make them behave better. And so we kind of started adapting and thinking that was the way from an early age too. So then we become adults and realize, gosh, we do have another option and we don't want to believe in that myth. We don't want to have that, that scarcity thought or whatever it is and it can be really a journey to shift out of it.

So a punishment mindset to me is the idea of thinking that a child has to pay the price or that there has to be some type of pain or shame inflicted in order for them to really learn the lesson. And I like to think of punishment is really rooted in the past. So if you were to just do a quick google punishment comes up with words like retribution, making sure the price is paid or someone is like doing their time, things like that. Whereas when we shift into discipline, it's more future based.

So punishment is about the past, in my opinion and discipline is about the future and looking at it, Yeah, What do you want to build for your kids instead of teaching them or telling them what they did wrong? It's like, here's what we want for you and here's how you do it. So instead of like the stop it, which is the punishment mindset, it's the how to, which is the discipline mindset.

Laura: Oh, that's beautiful. So I don't know about you but I feel like I've seen a lot, you know in my own growth and work and in the families that I work with as they are releasing a punishment mindset that they also have to release a control and obedience mindset. Have you seen that too?

Wendy: Heck yes, yes. The idea like that there needs to be instant obedience, right? That's something that I think Jax is up so much as humans because in my work, it's like, you know, I see mistakes as opportunities to learn. A lot of times that is the best way we learn as human beings, as kids, as business owners, right?

I mean I love your thing you did the other day on social where you were talking about the the like the encouraging voice that we all have inside and then the discouraging voice inside and that's like comes up with me all the time in business, I'll make a mistake or something and right away it will be like, oh my gosh, you're such an idiot, why did you do that? That was a waste of money or you did that wrong and you have to retrain yourself to be able to listen to the other side, which is, this is just an opportunity to learn mistakes are great chances for that.

And a lot of human beings, especially kids they learn by doing, especially are kinesthetic kids who are always the ones who are moving, jumping, kicking, hitting like all those things they actually learn by doing. To become more comfortable with the idea of a failure so to speak or a mistake not being the end of the world, but just an opportunity to redirect a child teach an important life lesson show unconditional love and you can do all that by holding strong boundaries.

Laura: I think that that's the thing that a lot of people have difficulty believing when they're new to this world. Can you dig into that a little bit? So how can you have firm boundaries and good limits and all at the same time not use punitive measures like, “What does it actually look like in practice?”.

Wendy: Yes. So one of my favorite things that I teach my students inside of my bonfire support program is what I call like a Cookie Formula Sandwich. I don't know why, but I picture a cookie with like icing in the middle. That was my favorite cookie when I was little from the mall, I grew up in on the east coast in Maryland. But I like to say you know the boundaries hug it. So it's like we definitely need to be firm with our kids.

They need to see us with confidence around our boundaries and our limits and that's a whole journey in itself, right to have that confidence. But when you show up with confidence of like, “I am not okay with you hitting your sister.”. Your shoulders are back, you are firm, you are confident that in our home we do not hit, we do not use our hands to solve problems and then you the middle of the little cookie sandwiches connection and mentorship.

So it's like it's that feeding into that child's belonging, that sense of belonging or that need to belong which is you're not an alien. I can see why you're so mad. I know your sister sometimes it's in your stuff. I get you you're not alone and here's how I'm going to mentor you and you're gonna learn, you need to learn, I will help you learn how to express what you want or share how you're feeling with your sister or tell her to get back out of your room, I will be there with you connection and mentorship and then it's and I will not allow you to hit your sister.

So we all need to take a calming break but that's kind of an idea of like what the approach looks like. It's like firmness but that its connection and it's teaching combined with a lot of self regulation and calming which is what I find for my parents, the parents I work with, that's a huge part of where we spend our time is just the parents developing the self regulation to be able to show up in that capacity in the first part but then we come in with like what are the actual tools and that's what we teach the four R's which is when it comes to logical consequences which is part of what we teach inside of our compassionate discipline toolkit we like to call it.

The four R’s is when you use you know a strategy or a tool with a kid when it comes to disciplining you want to make sure it's related, it's respectful, it teaches responsibility and it's reasonable. So a lot of parents like right away you'll know if you're in a punishment mindset if it has nothing to do with it. So big sister hits little sister and right away they get their ipad taken away like what does that mean?

That's just about control, that's just about feeling like in order to feel powerful, you have to dominate over your kids or there's a whole bunch behind it, but that's actually not going to teach a child self regulation around her hands to herself when she's PO-ed at her sister. So that's just one example within there we have a few different favorites. Role plays is one of my favorites with kids actually like sitting down especially with littles and having puppets or with my little guy, used to be matchbox cars.

Like if you got in trouble for talking in class, we'd line up the matchbox cars and we practice all right. So when you're at an assembly or so and so we actually a lot of times do it the way he got in trouble. And I'd ask him, how did you feel? What did the teacher say? Like, you know, were you embarrassed? What do you want to do tomorrow? Like how do you want, how do you want the day to go and then you redo it with the puppets or the role plays or the legos because kids learn so well through play. They love play.

So that's one idea and then redos as one of my student’s little girl called it rewinds where you actually like stop your kids and you're like, whoa, I'm not okay with you saying that to me. So let's back up and we're going to try that again. Again, connection, empathy, firm boundaries. I love you and I don't think you really meant to say you hate me. I think what you meant to say is you feel really mad right now or you feel hurt.

So I'm gonna give you an opportunity to try that again. We're gonna do a redo and and in the middle you might need to go do some self calming because not everybody can learn when they're in like a freak out mode but redos are spectacular for leaving new imprints on the brain. So instead of dropping your kids off for school and everyone's like mad at one another and you're like get out, we'll talk about this later.

You do a quick redo and they walk into their day with a fresh imprint on their brain with you asking for what you want and showing what you want. Those are just two examples of what logical consequences that are firm and kind can look like.

Laura: Yeah, I love those. And those are really careful teaching moments too. I think that logical consequences I think that the related and the reasonable peace and the respectful piece, what was the other R? Sorry. Related, reasonable, respectful

Wendy: teaches responsibility

Laura: And responsibility. Yeah. So I mean like I'm thinking about, you know for younger kids who like if a mom or dad finds their kid drawing on the wall, you know a great logical consequences that crayons get put up high until mom can actively supervise like that's a beautiful logical consequence.

Wendy: Yes. And you frame it as we're taking a break, we're going to take a break until we develop the skill set around this and you take responsibility for not having the time to teach it yet, right? Like that's a big thing I love to empower parents with is like the responsibility portion. Is it? I know it sure seems like it, but it's really not all their fault a lot of time.

Yeah, maybe they're modeled it or we just haven't taken the time to like teach them the self control lesson and sometimes they just are curious and they mess up, but I like that language of, let's, we're going to take a break. Not all right, that's it you're done no more crowns for you--crayons. I said crowns.

Laura: that's totally fine. I agree so much and I love that framing the responsibility, like recognizing where our responsibility lies. Like if we don't want permanent marker on our floors, we don't leave permanent marker accessible. And you know, I mean in those like, so there's lots of different ways to stay a limit around those things, but just saying like, oh! I see you're having a lot of fun drawing with those crayons, I can't let you draw on the wall and I can't supervise you right now.

So I'm gonna put the crayons away just temporarily until I can be with you and then there's also this piece of like recognizing the underlying need that they are communicating to you that drawing vertically like while you're standing. And those big arm movements on a wall, that is a thing that kids need to do. That's a gross motor movement that they need access to. So there's lots of ways that kids can get that without messing up your paint job on your wall. Although not all parents care about those things too.

And that's the other thing like I think is so important is that we get to choose what our limits are. Not all parents care about art on the walls or they might, you might redirect a kid to be like this. You can't draw on your walls, the walls in the living room if you need to draw on walls then go into your bedroom. You know like those are some parents are fine with those things. I guess we get to choose our boundaries and our limits.

Wendy: Yeah. And the drawing on the wall is a great example. I mean we could go like so deep into this, I love this subject so much but another logical consequence is that they have to clean it up, they have to help you know, so they figure out, you know, they might like crayons for me that I love those magic erasers that you know maybe they have to do a few jobs around the house and they have to save up a little bit of money to contribute to the $2 purchase the next time you go to the grocery store of the magic erasers which work really well on crayons and then they help you, they help you clean up.

But lot like again it's it's related and they're actually learning the responsibility piece. So if you make a mess you clean it up. It's just so clean when you're teaching your kids that way. And it's such a journey to get out of the freak out point because a lot of times like I have clients who they've been, they've been working with me for a long time and they'll still, you know, eight months later be like, what is this piece of me that just when I yell or when I see the crayons around the wall.

It's like I feel like I have to make sure they know how upset I am and it's just something we get to shake overtime if we're willing because you can let a child know that you're not happy and you don't need to scare or intimidate them or feel like you have to create an unsafe environment in your home.

Laura: Right. And teaching the healthy boundary of emotional responsibility that we're responsible for our own emotions when this. “Yes, I'm frustrated and it's my job to take care of it. It's not your job to fix that for me”. So important. Yeah. Okay.

So something that I see a lot and I've never been able been able to really have this conversation on the podcast before, but I see people mix up natural consequences and logical consequences. Can we just clear the air a little bit on those? Do you have a way that you teach parents the difference between a natural consequence and the logical consequence?

Wendy: Yes. So natural consequence is when you don't have to intervene and life does the trick, which is always going to be the best way. So whenever we can, so this is when we resist the helicopter parenting and we actually like, we always say, you don't want your child to get hurt for sure.

And like if you've asked them to put on their shoes 50,000 times to scooter and they're finally comes a time when they stub their toe a little bit, that stubbing of the toe is actually going to teach them way more than your nagging threatening bribing and all the things to put the shoes on. So yeah, so, natural consequences again is always our first go to if we can, but you have to have the courage to allow your children to fail and then not rub it in their face. So it looks like instead of saying, well, see I told you that's what happens, that's what happens when you mess with your brother.

That's what happens when you pull the dog's tail? No, I told you so it has to be like, ah the dog just bit, you looks like it hurt. What did you learn from that? And I just actually wrote about this yesterday on instagram like what different choice can you make tomorrow? Not a better choice but a different choice, like, what different choice can you make tomorrow so you don't get bit by the dog? You know, just about last week in our membership we had a real life example of a perfect natural consequence that was intense but it was good.

One little boy whose whose family is really diligently working hard to end painful generational cycles in their home. But they have reactivity going on and it is deep and this little guy, man, what a journey he's on. I love this kid so much, but he's eight now and he was at the pool and they were his friends were like playing pretend dunk, you know, I hate that game in the pool.

And he got so mad that he came out of the pool and he said F you to one of his friends and later like he went to knock on the door the next day to play and the mom was like you can't play with my kid. So the mom didn't have to do anything even though it didn't didn't quite unroll as cleanly as it should’ve because it became a pretty dramatic in their home. But that is an example of a natural consequence because your child messes up and he's not allowed to play with another little boy for a while and you get to support him through those really intense feelings and help him learn the self regulation skills.

So when he gets angry at someone trying to dunk him, which please child do get angry, don't let someone act like act like they're gonna drown you for fun. Speak up for yourself and let me teach you how to do it in a way where you're not going to lose friends over it, but mom doesn't have to intervene.

You don't have to double down on the--whereas logical consequences is when you do need to step in and you're supporting your child to learn the lesson because life is not necessarily going to be able to do it just instantly.

Laura: Yeah, I think that's something that's so important. And so you know, important I guess to highlight and to understand is that there's not always a logical consequence available for every scenario. There's not always a logical consequence that we're willing to tolerate. Like the or sorry, a natural consequence that we're willing to tolerate.

Like the natural consequence of a kid consistently running out into traffic is that that kid is going to get hurt. We could not let that happen. The logical consequence is that if you've got a runner, that runner is holding hands, that runner is strapped into a stroller, that runner is strapped on your body. You know, there's, those are the logical consequences there, you know, and then there's also natural consequences that take too long for young brains to remember and tie together, you know,

Wendy: Like the cavity.

Laura: Yes, a cavity. Exactly. My favorite example of a natural consequence in my house--we used to do bedtime snacks with my little ones as they were weaning from nursing. And so my youngest was about to, she just finished weaning and she was having a banana. Her bedtime snack most nights she was eating a banana we would be reading, should eat the banana and she just drop it off the side of the chair.

And every night, you know, it was a situation of like we can't just throw the banana on the floor, let's pick it up, let's throw it into the trash. You know, every night looks the good logical consequences. But one night I forgot that she had done it. She ate it quickly. We read a long story, I forgot that it was on the floor and we have hardwood floors. And so she popped up to go brush your teeth running out boom foot on the banana.

And it was like watching a cartoon, it was the whole like, you know, and I would never, it was never, it wasn't on purpose. It was a complete accident. Yeah. That child has never, ever forgotten to throw away any trash ever. You know, and I was four years ago, she still like whenever she finishes anything up, she hops into the trash, it goes, she's never forgotten it ever.

Wendy: It's such a beautiful example Laura because as parents, we have so much power whether that turns into like that's what happens when you make a mistake, that's what happens to you. And lots of us got that message when we were young, right? And it's like you go up to an adult and you're wondering why, like it's so hard to take risk in your business or with life for a conversation and you're like just the fear gets instilled young from like you better not mess up.

You know, when you're when you have this beautiful knowledge that we have access to today and you realize that you can just come beside a child and say, gosh, that looks like it was hard for you. What kind of different decision can you make tomorrow because you've got this and let me help you take care of you. What do you need to take care of yourself? Do you need an ice pack for your head? Thank God you didn't break a bone. I mean it's beautiful.

Laura: And like, I don't even know that it even has to be that overt even for some kids. Some kids do need help making those conclusions, but for some kids it just is a wow, that was scary qhat happened? Like I slipped mama Yeah, you slept, you slipped on the banana peel, I throw it away like and that's it just it like yeah.

I get up and throw it away and it was over, you know, and it doesn't have to be complicated and I think one of the things that really these natural consequences help us do is to do take heaviness and weight out of our relationship that we don't have our relationship does not have to bear the brunt of like negative learning.

Right? So the example from your community, her that child got to experience compassion and support from their parent. Their relationship did not need the burden of an extra punishment or an extra, you know, you said that word, we're losing screen time like they didn't that relationship didn't need any extra burden at that point in time.

Wendy: It didn't and in my experience that's what allows children to actually learn it because when you bring in the extra double dose shame get introduced and as soon as shame gets introduced, it freezes us as human beings and then you have whether it's a child or a parent, they're not able to make a different decision tomorrow because they're stuck in shame. Like what's wrong with me?

I'm so stupid, people hate me, No one likes me and it just like jacks up our system. So that family is a perfect example of like they are not going to give up, they didn't quite nail it on the head that day. They turned into a big power struggle and all these things and I'm so passionate about coming back and supporting families and saying, yeah, you can when your child makes a big mistake out in the world and there's a possibility the natural consequence might be there.

You can support them and you can help them through like the really intense emotions they might have around it because this little boy had like a flipped out about it and he wanted his mom to like go over there and make them play with him. I mean, he's really working hard to develop his self regulation skills just like his mom and dad are.

It's just some kids can like, you know, there's big emotions involved and I think the more practice you have, you can support them because it's not always so pretty and in a box of like, you know, a lot of times there's a lot of emotions involved and there's they're learning, they're still learning, but the more we can come beside them and make it about, what are they learning? We're here to support them. And that's that's how it works, is like really can be clean.

Laura: Yeah. And it doesn't have to be perfect. I think that that's something I just want to say like over and over again, you are allowed to be human, You're allowed to screw it up. It's never too late to walk something back to like there are plenty of times where I catch myself three minutes too late in a punitive mindset too, right? I'm like, Oh man, you know what that was a threat. I'm sorry. That's not what I want to do with you girls.

Let's give me a second. Okay, all right. This is what we're going to do. We're not going to do that. We're not going to, you know, that didn't feel good, that didn't feel good to you. It didn't feel good to me. That's not how I want to show up with you guys. It's never too late and it's never done.

Especially like you are saying some of your families are in doing big multi generational patterns. They're really doing a lot of healing for, not just for themselves or for their immediate family but for their entire lineage. A lot of healing happens in parenting and I think we've got to be really patient with ourselves.

Wendy: Yes. I mean it's literally like I have a tendency to get really intense about it, but I don't care. I mean when parents step into this and like really show up, it just lights me up because it is like big stuff. I just had my neighbor yesterday. She lost her best friend three years ago to a domestic abuse situation where both of them lost their life.

The husband came in and took her life and then took his own and I was just thinking about like how many families are never able to break that rage cycle-- that rage, right? Like that's just one example of like when a family shows up to do things different, especially when it comes to punishment. Like it's like literally changing the world.

I just think of like that same family of like this little boy has experienced really intense rage in his life and so has his parents and I just get to support them. We all get just like you and I are, it's like to support families who are like, I'm going to change this, like the buck stops here, like we're going to learn what to do with anger and we're going to learn how to process it effectively.

We're going to be in this together, we're never going to give up on one another and sometimes it's going to be really messy and we're going to keep starting fresh as many times as we need to, we can do this, we're together and we're just gonna keep learning.

But I just that story like was like, man, there's a lot of people who don't get that opportunity so what a blessing it is when you do hear this message and you do say yes and you do say yeah, I've got some stuff going on that I want to change. I don't want to react to my kids anymore like that.

Laura: It's so brave. I don't know about you, but I feel constantly just, so just in awe of the parents I get to work with you. They're so brave, they're so brave, so willing to look at themselves, even when it's hard, you know man, I just uh we're so lucky. Sorry listeners. I think you're amazing. We're just gushing for a second about how wonderful you are. My dear, beautiful listeners.

Wendy: Yes, I agree, Laura, it's just such an honor right to empower families and support them.

Laura: And I think about this like we're doing this to like, I think that it's so important. I don't know for me, it's really important that my community know that just because I teach this does not mean I get it right all the 100% of the time, you know, that's why compassion for yourself is just as important as compassion for your kids.

Wendy: Yeah, me too. I mean every time I mess up I'm like dang it, I got to go till the bonfire. Like just last week I came into my weekly support group and I was like, so I slammed the door today and like, and I like hit the gas, like aggressively in my sequoia after the kids were like fighting and we didn't get juice and that was more of a comical one. I can like laugh at myself now and I just always share with people.

But I mean I've written articles about how I've left bruises on my little boy's arm once and it still to this day, never like never feels good to tell you, keep telling people that, but it's important that I wrote about it and people were like, thank you and that was my easy going one. All my stories are about my strong-willed, beautiful little girl who's 13 now.

And Holy smokes like I have another article on the night I threw a book at her. Thank God it was soft cover and she did not get hurt, but yeah, I think that's so important when you are spending time with an educator or an encourager is that I just think it helps people when they realize you don't have to be perfect.

Everyone's on a journey and everyone has different things are working on, but you just have to have the bravery and the courage to show up and you get to decide what needs to change in your life. Painful generational cycles you want to break because it's not always about squeezing wrist too tight or shaming kids.

Like sometimes it's about just never being able to speak up for yourself. Like your mom never could or to never like in our home, peaceful conflict resolution did not exist. Like there were big blowups, there were big fights and then the next morning it was like, hi do you want syrup on your pancakes and it was like, no one's going to talk about this? Like, that to me is another generational cycle.

You know, it's like, well we can do it differently with our kids. We can have a rough moment and then take responsibility show up with humility, do redos, repair relationships, make amends and then do the work that we need to do to make a different choice tomorrow and then that trickles down to the next generation and the next generation.

Laura: Absolutely. Can I ask you a quick question about, I do get asked a lot from families who have, you know, are moving away from punitive measures, are moving away from hitting or spanking or timeouts, you know, they're yelling, they're stepping into more respectful and compassionate parenting.

And one of their big questions is how do I explain the changes that I'm making to my kids and how do I apologize for the past? How do I make it right?

Wendy: Yeah.

Laura: You have anything for those families?

Wendy: Yes, you make it right by keep showing up with an open heart to learn and grow and I believe that kids learn just as much from what we get so called right then like, so like just as much from the things we do that we then change and take a responsibility for as like the times when we're like, oh we nailed it or we always set that limit and followed through with respect or whatever.

So what you're teaching a small human when you say, hey look, I want to show you where I messed up and how I realized I'm not okay with that and I'm taking responsibility and I'm actually possibly even dropping to my knees and I'm telling you that like I'm going to change, I'm showing up. This is what was done to me in my home and I'm not gonna do it anymore. Thank God I found a new teacher and I want to introduce you to her.

This is Miss Laura or this is Miss Wendy. I listen to them every week and I spend time with them and they're teaching me how I'm going to teach you without hitting you and so I need your help and we're going to learn together because I believe we are learning together. Like I always say to families that our kids are often our greatest teachers. My daughter has been my greatest teacher in life, one of them, and we're learning this together and it's gonna be amazing.

So that's kind of how I encourage people to show up. Show them the books you're reading, show them the courses you've invested in, show them how to push play on the podcast when you put your earbuds in calm air buds. My kids are like “Mom, they’re airpods”, but like show them like, this is Mrs Laura's face, this is who I listen to each week, she's helping me love myself, even though I've made mistakes with you in the past.

But that teaches a child so much. It's more about the like you're not damaged goods just because you spent five years spanking your kid. Like it's so much more important that you show your child what it looks like to learn a new way and pivot and be willing to do that. So those are some thoughts about that.

But the thing is, parents need to know is that sometimes it does, it can get tricky and when you're moving out of it, because if a child has been used to external control methods and they haven't been controlled themselves a lot of times, they will start like either kind of freaking out a little bit and pushing pushing pushing even harder to get you to have that response because they're used to it. It's like an unhealthy dance that as soon as you break away from the dance, they're like, wait a second, you're supposed to now come in and yell at me and then you're supposed to threaten me.

And then if I don't listen, you're gonna make me listen by smacking me or whatever. And when you say, no, we're not doing that anymore. I refuse. I have a podcast episode called The Old Way is Dead and it's like, I believe parents, you have to look at it is like it's just no longer an option. It's 100% out. It can be tricky.

And sometimes kids will flare up a little bit more just to keep pushing and testing and you have to remain, stay the course and then with support and then you come out of it just so strong. So just know that families that you know, it's important that you have a support system.

Laura: Absolutely. I think something you alluded too much earlier that I feel like it's a good time to circle back to it. What about that self regulation piece? So if we grew up in homes where we were obedience punishment control was used on us, we likely didn't have a lot of opportunity to develop our own self regulation, right?

And so now we're giving kids the opportunity to develop those things by leaving those methods behind, but we also have ourselves to look after. And so do you have any recommendations for parents who are looking to gain those skills as well. So that they can get the space to parent their kids differently?

Wendy: Yes. So I think there's tactical things and then there's mind set things, right? So it's like, I always like to envision the like neuro pathway being formed by like actually walking through a forest and like you come to the fork in the road or whatever and you're like, okay, there's the path that gets you to the river where I want to go for afternoon swim in the sun--that path sure looks easy. Like it's pruned, it's open.

I know how to get there. It's like a seems like a straight shot this one over here though. I've heard there's like waterfalls and there's like all these amazing things and there's like deer on the way, like bunnies and like beauty just like exotic flowers and it takes you there too, but it's kind of unknown and I'm going to have to prune the way that I like to envision, like that's what you're doing when you're choosing the new way of self regulation and self control, especially if it was, it was not modeled to you.

So when someone triggers you and you are like, now I'm gonna take a deep breath, put my hand on. I mean we teach all these tactical things like pause buttons and heart connectors. You take a deep breath, you find a healthy intention. We teach families to make like calming bags where they have calming bags, their kids have calming bags; teaching to walk outside all these things, but like when you do that and it feels so weird, it feels permissive.

It feels weak like you're just going to let your child spit on you. Well when you're developing self regulation, you might need to walk in that backyard for four minutes and for that four minutes you're going to feel so permissive because you're literally going through the forest and there's like precursor, it's just, it can just be painful in the beginning.

So you just have to have this mindset of by the time I prune the path and every time you do it, you get a little bit more confident that you can come back in five minutes to a child who is made a big mistake or had this big emotional outburst and for that four minutes you just successfully taught what self-control looks like.

So it's things like you're calming your own self nervous system which is good for our bodies. It is not healthy for us to have hearts coming out of our chest and heart palpitations and all these things. So you're taking care of yourself, but then you're also teaching your child like you can be strong, firm and kind and not be okay with someone spitting on you or hitting you or saying something unkind or even like simple things it can like I have a neighbor who was like we had to start spanking our kid because he was like rolling his eyes and that's blatant disrespect. So like some families are like whoa you can't just walk away or self calm when a child rolls his eyes. So that is the only way to teach a child how to self regulate and self calm.

Laura: is by modeling it.

Wendy: It is. To me it's the only way.

Laura: Yeah, you know what, you know and what you see kids are learning from us in that way.

Wendy: Yeah, it is a journey when you are triggered and but the cool thing is as kids, they just give us all these opportunities. like the same thing happens with our neighbors and our colleagues or things but like our kids just give us all of our opportunities to practice the self calming is actually like the biggest thing we teach and a compassionate discipline toolkit. It's the number one thing I make sure parents understand: Has to be what they work on 1st.

Laura: Always, it has to be, it has to be first because otherwise you're just going to go down that path that's so deeply ingrained in you. You're just gonna get sucked right back into it.

Wendy: Yes and it's so strong if you can just remember, like how strong it is like it is just not, it's just a myth that it's weak because later is always the best time to teach when emotions are heightened. Nobody can be a teacher, no one can be a learner just doesn't work well. So the teaching needs to come when the brain is like stable, right?

Laura: When the brain is in a state where it can learn. Yeah, and that goes for both people. The brain that is doing the learning and the brain that is doing the teaching; they both need to be in a nice synced up calm space where they can both be available to each other. Like both of the brains need to be calm.

Wendy: Yeah but in that midterm while you're doing it you just have to think of your favorite mentor or think of this conversation and just maybe have some affirmations or something I am statement of like, what actually makes you strong because culture will tell you that strength is when you puff up on a kid and put your finger in their face and make sure that they know they are not allowed to talk to you or else there'll be a big, that's what culture will tell you strength is and it's actually not strength.

True power comes in influencing and motivating a child through connection and all those things that doesn't come through just overpowering because you're bigger and you can take away more and scare them into complying.

Laura: Thank you, Wendy, for this conversation. This was beautiful and lovely and I so appreciate it. Why don't you make sure everybody knows where they can find you on social media so they can follow you-- and this is something too that I feel so called to say and I think you probably join me in this is that these tools, what we're talking about here are something that I want all parents to have access to and to learn and I don't care who they learn it with. So it sounds like you've got a membership in courses, so do I, I don't care who you take the courses with, go to.

If Wendy is speaking to you, go take her courses. You know if if you want to take them with me, take them with me, I don't--go to find the teacher that resonates with you that is going to hold the space for you that you need to step into these changes. So and with that spirit in mind Wendy, where can they find you if their hearts are calling them to work with you.

Wendy: Thank you, Laura. The best way I say is right away, just grab a free guide that I have. I love love love supporting families with strong-willed kids. My little strong-willed, amazing little girl like I said, I found this work when she was three--she is now 13 and I just get so fired up to help parents really see these kids in a light where they can have joy and peace by raising these amazing human souls. So you can grab that free guide to Raising Strong-willed Kids with Integrity over on the website. But it's fresh startfamilyonline.com/strong-willed-kids. That's the best place to start. And then I'm @freshstartwendy on Instagram and I'm the Fresh Start Family show over on Itunes or wherever you listen to Podcasts.

Laura: Awesome. Well thank you so much, Wendy. This was such a good, heart warming, kind of life-affirming conversation so I really appreciated it.

Wendy: Well, thank you for having me. You are such a light Lord. I'm so grateful for the work you're doing in the world. Thanks for being a light spreader and thanks for having me.

Laura: Yeah, absolutely.

And if you're listening, grab a screenshot and tag me on Instagram so that I can give you a shoutout 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.

December 03, 2021

Episode 91: How to Find Ease & Flow in Parenting with Kiran Trace

December 03, 2021/ Laura Froyen

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

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.

Laura Froyen, PhD

Laura Froyen, PhD

Balanced Parent Podcast

Laura Froyen, PhD

Welcome to the home of The Balanced Parent Podcast!

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Episode 109: Challenging Behaviors Re-Imagined with Dr. Mona Delahooke

Episode 108: How to change your brain patterns to achieve your goals with Adele Spraggon

Episode 107: Supporting Yourself Through Hard Times with Tanisha of MedicalMomsofNICU

Episode 106: Making Meditation Accessible for Ourselves & Our Kids with Keli Carpenter

Episode 105: Recovering from Adverse Childhood Experiences with Dr. Bre Gentile

Episode 104: How to Release Negative Self-Talk for Yourself & Your Child with Dr. Anjani Amladi

Episode 103: Helping Kids with ADHD with Arti Kumar-Jain

Episode 102: How to Heal Our Own Wounds with Sonnet and Veronica

Episode 101: Helping Kids Simplify for Better Quality Play with Allie Casazza

Episode 100: Reconnecting to Play for Our Own Wellbeing with Amanda Evans

Episode 99: Mindful Tech Use for Parents and Kids with Sophie Brickman

Episode 98: How to Actually Enjoy Playing with Your Kids

Episode 97: Becoming Unbusy with Monica Berg

Episode 96: Understanding Your Child's Personality for Ease in Parenting With Sandra Etherington

Episode 95: Honoring Your Unique Child with Ryan Haddon

Episode 94: Racial & Educational Equity & Advocacy with Sonia Lewis

Episode 93: How to Help Your Child Have a Healthy Relationship with Food with Jennifer Anderson

Episode 92: How to Use Logical Consequences with Wendy Snyder

Episode 91: How to Find Ease & Flow in Parenting with Kiran Trace