Modern Parenting is hard: the things you don’t know you never learned and that makes you question what you do know!

Summary:

Just getting by in your parenting might be why things are so challenging and why things have slowly but surely built up to a place where you feel like you’re always chasing the snow ball.

In this episode I tackle a few different layers:

1. You are doing amazing
2. You don’t know nothing!
3. The things you don’t know, well you never learned them
4. It’s essential to take part two and put it together with part three to make informed choices

I'm building something new to support busy parents with tools and skills to show up the way they imagine.

Note: The transcript below may not be exactly the same as the podcast.

Just getting by in your parenting might be why things are so challenging and why things have slowly but surely built up to a place where you feel like you’re always chasing the snow ball. We all have those moments, anyone who says they don’t… it’s not true. I just passed through one myself. This fall was the hardest I’ve ever experienced as a person, as a parent as a small business owner. But here’s what I’ve learned, it’s not always like this and I have built in some things that help get us through this really tricky periods of time.

This is where I also fault a lot of parenting advice that’s out there, it lacks balance and it focuses so heavily on quick fixes that it winds up doing a bigger disservice in the long run.

I’ve been forced to do a lot of reflection recently on the state of the world, especially as it relates to parenting and my role in supporting parents with building tools and skills they never learned so they can show up in the way they want to. 

Coming through my recent Parenting Toolkit Bootcamp I had to answer ‘what makes your program different’ a lot. Most of the people who come through my virtual door have tried a lot of other things. Spent a lot of money and still come up empty handed. It’s hard for me to hear it because I know exactly why it’s happening. I know the marketing advice I could follow and I know the path I could choose, but I don’t choose it because it’s misleading and it’s giving false hope in the wrong areas. Parenting is awesome and amazing, it’s also hard and sometimes so unrewarding. It’s personal in the most personal ways and yet you have to also co-exist in a world where everyone is trending their own paths.

So, here’s what I know…

Step one. You are doing amazing. Here’s why I know this to be true. You don’t call people like me or listen to podcasts like this if you aren’t trying your best. 

Step two. You don’t know nothing! There are things you know about your family and lifestyle and commitments that no one will ever understand the way you do. 

Step three. The things you don’t know, well you never learned them so you can’t fault yourself here either. That’s the stuff I teach, things like why parents need to learn social emotional skills (and why parents before us didn’t have this skill and why you need to know it now), I also talk about understanding the stress cycle as it relates to parenting and child development. 

(My children’s comic-picture book about this is releasing this month!!!! I’ll put the link in the show notes for you). Anyhow, got distracted by my excitement there for a minute. 

It’s not about saying this perfect thing, doing that other thing… it’s about… here’s what’s going on, here’s why…  which leads me to the most important step. 

Step four. This is where you take part two and put it together with part three to make informed choices   Choices where you have a better idea of the outcome of your decisions. It doesn’t mean you’ll stop making some of them. It means you’ll make some of them knowing that you have to swallow the outcome whole. In other words, we can’t get upset with our children when our children do things as a direct result of our choices - I call this unintentional reinforcement. And there are some things our children do that we need to teach them to do differently, even if we are guilty of doing it ourself. 

But before you can get to that place… first you have to understand things like unintentional reinforcement, developmental appropriateness, the possibilities and limitations of relying on language. You need to better understand what behaviour means and what’s actually involved with emotional regulation. And I was asked this week, why do I need to know this stuff… my parents certainly didn’t know it and generations before that. 

The quick answer, emotions were suppressed in every space. Home, school, sports…. You don’t need tools and skills for feelings you aren’t really suppose to show outside of happiness and joy.

Something else I’ve learned in the process of supporting parents with developing an awareness about this as well as guiding my husband with understanding it. There’s no quick fix. Nothing you can say that will work every single time, nobody will get it right the first, second or even third time… because emotional regulation is a skill. Like learning how to swim, read, play a musical instrument. It’s become an essential life skill. And like all great skills you have to practice them outside of tricky moments in fun and engaging ways. Nobody likes learning things that seem pointless, it’s even worse when it’s not fun. 

I know Parents are being pulled in so many directions right now and I have to be honest, I’m tired of reading a lot of the advice out there.  The real world is messy, we’re all a little stubborn and admitting we are out of our element is really uncomfortable. There is no perfect. You will lose your cool, your child will too. BUT you can get better at it, and more understanding.  Mostly you can learn what skills are needed to navigate more effectively. 

And I’m gonna be honest. You are your child’s safe space. There will always be an element of trickiness at home. We need to get better with boundaries here too, but big feelings are gonna happen and if we aren’t suppressing them, we need to learn what to do with them. 

Now here’s the difference between manageable and unmanageable. When every single day is a tornado and the emotional hurricanes start to tip into other areas. That’s when things are not balanced. When things are more like waves that surge in and out with periods of calm between the surges. This is where it’s all more manageable because you can recover. But when you live in constant parenting T-Rex level of Dino brain. It doesn’t get better. It just keeps on whirling and usually this is also where children struggle more in general. 

So where do we begin. Well we need to think about where we came from and what’s happening in the world that makes Modern Parenting so different than anything that has happened to date..  I actually wrote a white paper along this topic earlier in the pandemic because many of the challenges being blamed on the pandemic were here before, not something created by the pandemic. It’s was just exacerbated, as so many things were. 

First there’s a lot of layers here. There’s the more obvious aka talked about layer which is how punishment and shame based parenting has been shown to be problematic. That emotional suppression hasn’t quite been working as well as it seems. 

The less talked about but also significant layer is that more people than ever are working long hours outside the home which has lead to more Children spending time in the care of others for significant portions of their day. This has transformed so many spaces, especially early education settings. Preschools used to be for social skill building a few hours a week, now they are full time care. KG was a transition to school at half day, now kids are full day plus before/after care (this is why some of your 3-5 year olds are struggling with regulation - the demands of the day are more than they can handle developmentally). 

This piece alone means that kids in general are required to have high level regulation skills to co-exist, especially where the spaces have a heavy focus on academic skill building versus play. There’s way less room for social learning in these types of situations because a lot of things are done in a very prescribed manner. As you can imagine this system works a lot better when you aren’t allowed to have feelings or when you do have feelings there are very few things you are allowed to do with them.

Tagging on this point, when we put this together with parenting that is trying to make space for feelings everyone is hitting a wall. 

And this is where I often see a lot of parents overwhelmed by their parenting guilt. They want to make space for feelings but the feelings are taking over everything. They are also trying to maximize their time together as much as possible because they are struggling to balance both worlds. 

So why do we need to build tools and skills for feelings. Well, the short answer is we are allowing ourselves and our children to have more of them. The longer answer is, as we are having more of them and navigating all these spaces where we co-exist, we can’t have feelings taking over or preventing from us from getting out the door or undermining our experience as adults. Children are awesome and amazing, but they are also children and this is often overlooked in advice around emotional regulation. The truth is, there is a limit to how we can express our feelings and safe spaces for doing so. I talked about this a couple episode back that unkind behaviour is growing as we make space for feelings, especially in how we are allowing children to treat us. This is a clear sign there is a lack of tools and limits on what one can do with their feelings. Emotional suppression and emotional free-for-all are equally problematic.

So I return to where this whole episode started. Parenting advice is lacking balance and a significant piece is ensuring we have skills for co-existence. Whether that’s within our family unit, at daycare or school and beyond. We co-exist and we co-exist in a way that requires we build tools for our feelings. 

Nobody wants to say it out loud, but crying, whining, yelling, snotty tones, kicking, hitting… and so on are really hard feelings to be around. And the truth is, as important as all feelings are, we can’t also teach our children that bigger louder feelings are the ones that get our best attention. Because guess what. The bigger louder feelings will become the ones that dominate. 

So ultimately why do we need to build skills and tools for feelings as parents, both for ourselves and with our children. Because we will be the ones who experience the biggest feelings. We are the safe space and this is HARD. And we will also be the ones that school and daycare look to for solutions when things aren’t going well. I know when I was a daycare provider I was sometimes expected to build skills for families, but it doesn’t work well because even if I help the kids build tools, it doesn’t work when the people they are deeply connected to, don’t have skills and understanding too. This was something that evolved in my daycare. How to build skills as a team. 

And this is where Building Resilience Through Kindness was born. I teach you how can you build skills to support your parenting and be able to show up as the person you want to be. Ultimately we have to pause and think, where can we make space to start building this new essential life skill and how can we do it in practical ways. As you know I love using books and intentional connection. And before you think… I just can’t… you can because it only takes 5-10 minutes a day and you can build it into things you are already doing! That’s another myth to bust in a future episode. Connection doesn’t mean showing up every second you are home together with your child.