Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:01 Welcome to the Hand in Hand Parent Club podcast. I'm Emily Murray, a hand in hand instructor and a mom of two.
Speaker 1 00:00:06 I'm Kathy Gordon, a single adoptive mom of a now young adult son, a hand in hand instructor, and we are both moderators of hand-in-hand, awesome membership program, the parent club. Every
Speaker 0 00:00:17 Week we'll be answering a parenting question. You'll hear about hand in hand, parenting's, powerful, respectful parenting tools. We'll share how they help you work with your child's feelings, especially when their behavior gets harder, confusing.
Speaker 1 00:00:29 You can feel good about using these tools. They've brought warmth and connection to our own families and to many thousands of families around the world who are using the hand in hand approach.
Speaker 0 00:00:39 That's why hand in hand and the parent club exist. We're here to support you and your family so you have more good, sweet, fun times together.
Speaker 1 00:00:49 Hello there. Awesome parents. We've been riffing on this idea of why does parenting feel so serious and, and so high stakes. So that brings us to the question, what do I do with these feelings of parent guilt? You know, I feel like I never get it right. I never get it done. I'm never enough.
Speaker 0 00:01:13 It's so heavy and it's so pervasive. Um, and we'd like to propose that the parent guilt comes, you know, from, for the most part, from two places. The first is the world. There is no shortage of articles and talk shows and memes telling you now you need to be this kind of parent or that kind, or how you've been doing it is wrong or you're damaging your child. And even here at hand in hand, sometimes parents can walk away with this feeling. Um, I know it's something that's come up in parent clubs sometimes where someone will read an article that says, I tried this tool and this great thing happened, and when they tried it, it was a total flop. Or even the idea of it just feels too out of reach. And that parent is left feeling like, well, great, I'm, I'm, I guess I'm not enough or I'm not doing this right. Uh, really not a day goes by in parent club where we don't do something that is helping parents let go of some of this pressure. Um, we encourage parents to give themselves some grace and compassion, um, as, as they figure out this relationship with their child. Um, but this pressure and this guilt also comes from our own childhood hurts. And these early messages that we weren't smart enough, we weren't capable enough, we weren't good enough. Today, we wanna help you banish that guilt, uh, or at least help you lighten that heavy load a bit.
Speaker 1 00:02:41 Yep. You do not get to use hand in hand to beat yourself up.
Speaker 0 00:02:45 Nope.
Speaker 1 00:02:46 And the really cool thing is that, you know, we're the only approach I think, uh, out there that, um, has an actual tool to help you get out from underneath the parent guilt and in particular, uh, to heal those early messages you got. And that's our tool of listing partnerships. Um, we've talked in other episodes about the mechanics of a listing partnership. Uh, and um, so you can refer back to those. We won't talk about that today. We've got, um, lots of, uh, information on our website you can put in, um, listening partnerships in our search bar. Uh, and, um, but so, but today I just wanted to talk about like what, how you could use listening partnership to, um, heal some of those early messages that you may have gotten. And, and I'm telling you, I got it in space because my father, who I love dearly, um, because of his childhood, you know, everything that he said to you was said with this tone of like, how could you be so stupid?
Speaker 1 00:03:50 You know? And if you ask a question, uh, the no came with a snarl and, you know, so I got the message like, I, I am, you know, I'm not smart, I'm not capable, I have poor judgment. Um, and uh, so you can work on those in listening partnerships. You can actually stand up for yourself. You can blast the person that gave you those messages cuz your partner is gonna hold the truth that, that they were doing the best they could in the moment. So you can blast them. You can stand up for yourself, you can grieve that you got those messages, and then, then, then you'll, you'll be, you know, less, you'll able to think better than your parenting. You'll be able, maybe you'll be less triggered in the moment. And we particularly hope that it'll help you dealing with like those messages that you're now getting out in the world about, you know, that you're not good enough and all of the shoulds. Um, you know, when when we, when we hear those shoulds in our own head that like amplifies or perpetuates those early negative messages, you know, like shoulds, like, our kids should do this or they should be this way, or the house should look that way, the meals should do be this way. You know, we should take baths every single night. So one of the things we're gonna do in this episode is encourage you to throw out some of those shoulds.
Speaker 0 00:05:22 And that might not come easily. This is, this is not <laugh> an easy task with all of these messages that are hurled at us every single day. But it's partly because these moments can feel so high stakes and all of the, you know, the, the realm of of parent focused media, um, sends us these messages all the time. Everything, every decision feels so high stakes. But what if we can think bigger and kinder when we see our relationship with our child as a lifelong one that grows and develops, all of a sudden we have more time and we can see our process of trying to parent well as experiments and all of a sudden we're allowed to have fails. It's just data. We tried it, we got some data we can try again. We spend a whole month in parent club, um, offering, uh, ideas of, of using our famous fridge lists, extra listening time and support calls to help you throw away those old messages along with all those old shoulds. It's one of our, um, monthly experiments that we do, um, during the year.
Speaker 1 00:06:40 Yeah, we actually have the, um, one month we spend on just loving yourself, loving the parent you are. And then we have a whole other month that's towards the beginning of the year usually. And then in the summer when things are really tough with the, your kids being home a lot, uh, we have a whole month on lightning your load. So one small thing we'd love for you to try this week. What's one thing you're not gonna do? You might make a to don't list with all the things you won't do. You know, and this can be silly, like today, I'm not gonna change the weather <laugh>. Um, you know, today, you know, I am, I'm not going to, uh, fix the potholes in the road. Um, or you could let go of something real like, you know. Um, today we're not eating on real, uh, pla plates and silverware. We're using paper plates all this week. You know, today we're not taking baths. Uh, so choose one thing you're gonna let go of and then let it know. Let us know how it goes this week.
Speaker 0 00:07:45 So next episode, I, I wish I didn't have so much experience on this topic, <laugh>, but we're gonna talk about when we have a flop of a parenting moment, how do we get back up and reconnect and ideally be kinder to ourselves? Um, and we're compassionate with ourselves when we do have these parenting flop moments.
Speaker 1 00:08:08 Bye-bye.
Speaker 0 00:08:10 Thank you so much for tuning into the Hand in Hand Parent Club podcast. Please like and subscribe to hear more and to connect with us between these episodes. Come on over to hand in hand parenting.org to join the parent club where you can get coaching classes and live support.
Speaker 1 00:08:23 Come join our vibrant community of parents in the parent club who are committed to getting the support they need to be the parents they wanna become. We'd be honored to support you too. This podcast and the Parent Club are part of Hand in Hand Parenting, a nonprofit organization that supports parents all over the world. We are here for you when parenting gets hard.
