Parental Development

This episode is a little all over the place, but we talk through triggers, doing our personal work, and learning how to respect the opinions and ideas of others. Subscribe, rate, and review us on Podchaser , Apple ,  or wherever you listen to podcasts! Follow us on social media to join the conversation!!! Facebook Instagram

This conversation talks about grades and how we use them in school. Alfie Kohn, a leading researcher in behaviorism and rewards has articles posted here and here . Our education system puts a lot of focus on grades and achievement, regardless of the research showing that they may not actually accomplish what we think they do.  So how do we deal with or talk about grades as parents without projecti...

How do you validate your kid's feelings without validating their negative beliefs about themself? How do you remain curious and compassionate while also managing your own regulation?  Ultimately, we need to be detectives and get to figure out the underlying cause of the behavior. This can be easier said than done... Subscribe, rate, and review us on Podchaser , Apple ,  or wherever you listen...

Subscribe, rate, and review us on Podchaser , Apple ,  or wherever you listen to podcasts! Follow us on social media to join the conversation!!! Facebook Instagram

What do you do when people start talking to you kids about things or in ways you don't agree with? This episode explores when Lincoln's pediatrician made comments about his weight in front of him.  Say it with me: we do not comment on people's bodies!!! There are absolutely ways to talk to kids about health, nutrition, food, and more in ways that shares information and guides behavi...

We're back, baby!  We needed some time away for our own sanity, so now we're back and ready to keep sharing our conversations! Subscribe, rate, and review us on Podchaser , Apple ,  or wherever you listen to podcasts! Follow us on social media to join the conversation!!! Facebook Instagram

We cut last week's episode short, so we needed another one to finish our conversation about expectations. In last week's episode we talked about the need to lower expectations if our kids are showing us with their behavior that they can't do the task. But what if your kid has done it in the past and now all of a sudden they are refusing or saying they can't do something anymore...

This episode talks through the expectations we have for our kids, how to make sure they're realistic and look at them differently, through this new parenting lens. Can we differentiate our DESIRES for our kids from the EXPECTATIONS of our kids. Expectations feel like boundaries or rules, which can lead to the punishment, control, shame, or coercion we're trying to change in this type of...

The moral of this week's episode: Nothing matters other than your relationship with your child! What doesn't matter: grades; behavior; attitude; sports What does matter: Our relationship   My job as a parent isn't to control my kids' behavior, get them to act a certain way, make sure they're making other people comfortable. It's to show them love and acceptance and sh...

How do we treat our kids like full human people without treating them like adults and forcing them to grow up too quickly. Let's talk about it! Treating our kids like full people simply means that we welcome all of their humanness and don't try to minimize or talk them out of their experiences. It means that they deserve as much respect as any adult. There is not a topic that's off...

This episode finishes our conversation about bias, inclusion, and how our brains are wired for sameness , making these changes hard. In order to start to change our unconscious beliefs, we first have to bring it into our conscious awareness so we can then override those that are unhealthy, dangerous, wrong, etc. We have to consciously choose to access the parts of our brains that challenge our bia...

This episode talks about what can sometimes be a taboo or hard topic: bias, diversity, and race. We utilize science to talk through how our brains are wired for sameness and build bias into our system, in order to protect us. For more information about this topic, check out this book , that we used to start our conversation. Understanding the science can help take the shame and judgment out of thi...

Guess who's back!!! We're slowly getting back into the swing of things with our first episode of the new year! This episode talks about several topics and situations we encountered over the last few weeks and different approaches and suggestions for dealing with them. Anxiety isn't something that we can simply overpower. It has to be managed and processed in a way that honors it, va...

It's our last episode of 2023!! This one talks through various topics, including lying, managing big behaviors, and managing different opinions of family members. You can hear our episode on lying here and the episode when Lincoln had a hard interaction with his teacher here . Bottom line: Give people grace and approach behavior with curiosity. If you're looking for more information on p...

Last week was all about learning what our attachment style is, now this episode takes about what to do about it. We have no control over how our attachment is developed. We do have control over how we adjust moving forward. Attachment healing can only happen within relationship. To change attachment the patterns first have to come into our awareness. Subscribe, rate, and review us on Podchaser , A...

This episode talks about adult attachmen styles, which is important for us to learn, so we can understand how we relate to others, including our children. We need to normalize all attachment styles, while also understanding that we can work toward being secure. Our comfort level with and willingness to allow  closeness and intimacy determines our attachmen style in adulthood. Recognizing how our i...

This episode dives deeper into the relationship between parents and adult children.  What do those relationships look like now? What if parents aren't able to do what you need? How do you know if you're ready to have hard conversations? For adult children, true healing can only come when we stop being dependent on our parents for our validation, regulation, and wellbeing. If our parents...

This episode is a little bit of everything, all based on situations happening in Leah's house. How do we validate anxiety without contributing to it? How do we challenge unhealthy thoughts without being invalidating? How do we just sit in the discomfort with them? Subscribe, rate, and review us on Podchaser , Apple ,  or wherever you listen to podcasts! Follow us on social media to join the c...

All parents desperately want to protect their kids, which is a great and noble goal. At the same time, overly protecting our kids in certain areas can stunt their growth and development in important ways. Many times the concept of protection allows us to control behaviors in ways that make us feel more justified. Areas in which we protect our kids in inappropriate ways: Physical - find ways to let...

This one is for parents of adult children, who might be learning about this type of parenting and information for the first time. How do you talk about what you wish you'd done differently? How do you repair what you now see as ruptures? Ultimately, everyone wants to be validated, which is not the same as acceptance. We all have our own experience, and just because it's different than yo...

Adoption is beautiful, necessary, and important. It's also hard and often misunderstood. This episode talks about some important ways adoption is misunderstood and how to think about it in a way that might be helpful. Subscribe, rate, and review us on Podchaser , Apple ,  or wherever you listen to podcasts! Follow us on social media to join the conversation!!! Facebook Instagram

In this episode, we FINALLY talk about attachment, Leah's first love and truly what guides everything she does as a parent and a person. Attachment is a reciprocal relationship between people and begins to develop in utero and continues throughout childhood, but particularly in the first three years of life.  As we respond to our babies in distress, we start to hardwire their thoughts and bel...

This episode talks about consequences, which usually means punishment and often doesn't address the actual problem or behavior. People use these words interchangeably, but they actually are very different. Many people only know two ways to change or manage behavior: rewards or punishment. We believe that misbehavior is a sign of a need or a missing skill or a desire for connection, which mean...

Last week we talked about what zaps our resources, and this week we build on that conversation talking about how to build resources and think of resourcing as a verb. In the therapy world, resourcing someone means we're giving people tools to be able to manage the stress and dysregulation that often comes from stres and trauma. Effectively, we want to do the same thing with our kids, giving t...

We all know when our kids are out of resources and can't handle anything. It can be challenging though to know how to respond in those situations. Things that zap our resources: Hunger Fatigue Pain Decision making Heavy effort Punishment Lack of connection It's ok to lower demands and expectations when you see your kids are out of resources. When they're out of resources, we want ou...