Welcome. Welcome back to become a calm mama. I'm your

host. I'm Darlyn Childress and I am a parenting coach and a

life coach. And I help you become

calm. Right? And part of being calm as a

parent is knowing how to handle our kids' behavior.

And I wanna talk today a little bit about this article

I read called The Rise of the Accidentally

Permissive Parent. And it was in the

Cut, magazine, And it came out, I don't

know, in December, possibly. Let me look. Let's see. Yeah.

December 12th, it came out. And I have probably read this article,

like, 50 times because it is fascinating to me

to see the trends in parenting. I talked about this a couple weeks ago

on the podcast about how I used to have to tell parents that

feelings matter. And and I would talk a lot about,

you know, stress stress regulation and and all of the

emotions and how to compact be compassionate with our kids and how to connect with

our kids and all of that. And then over the last 15 years of

being a parenting coach, I see the shift

towards there's a lot of validation, on

emotions, and I now have to talk about how important it is to

have consequences. And so we've come a long

way in terms of emotionally coaching kids, which I

love. And at the same time,

we may be becoming accidentally

permissive. And that's the title of this article. And I'm gonna talk about

the article for a few minutes and then give you some strategies. So

one thing I thought was fascinating is that,

there was a recent study that, you know, some

some, you know, researchers did on parents who were practicing

gentle parenting principles, and they said

that 40% of parents actually

don't know what they're doing. 40%.

And that's what I see. I feel like we have

a great value system around, you know,

identifying, feelings, staying calm, not

yelling, not screaming, not using punishment, and

trying to help our kids manage their emotions.

But what ends up happening is that

nothing there's no management of

misbehavior. There's not really language around

setting limits or having consequences. And there

there was this, this quote I wanted to read. It says,

parents who identified as gentle in our study

usually note 3 things. 1, they

regulate their own emotions in the middle of a conflict. K. In

our program, we call that calm. Right? They try to name

their child's emotions. That's number 2. And then they,

3, give the child coping skills, and that's connection.

So there's a belief system in

this philosophy around compassionate parenting, gentle parenting, right,

that our job as parents is to regulate our own emotions in the

middle of a conflict. Yes. 100%. And

then name the child's emotion and give them strategies to

communicate their big feelings in ways that work for others.

I love it, and I'm telling you it's an incomplete

parenting model because it doesn't have

limits or correction. And that's why

I developed the Calm Mama process, to be honest, is because I

loved like, when I learned this, it was called nonviolent parenting.

And I learned these strategies about

emotional coaching my kids through their big feelings and how to

manage temper tantrums and how to, you know, not just put them in a time

out. I was doing 1, 2, 3 magic. I would, you know, be like, that's

1. You know? That's 2. That's 3. Go sit over there. You're

4. Sit there for 4 minutes. Right? And my child

was not learning how to manage his emotions at all. He

we we were just talking about this as a family. We used to have this

chair. This is before I learned any you know, the parenting

strategies that I teach. We had this chair. We called it the time out chair.

And we recently got rid of that chair, and it still had the

bite marks on the arm. It was a wooden chair with arms, and

it had all these bite marks from Lincoln,

like, chewing the wood while he was in a

time out trying to regulate himself,

trying to calm down. And to you know, it's sad to think of

him doing that, working so hard at

self soothing and self regulating and using his body to calm himself,

which is not a problem. But he was by himself just, you

know, you know, building up with, like, I've gotta be good. I've gotta be good.

I've gotta be good. I've gotta be good. I've gotta be good. And that's just

sad to me. Right? I think co regulation is so beautiful. You instead

of putting your kid in the time out, you time in, you come alongside,

you give them some support. Right? So that calm, that

connection, when I first learned about it, I was like, yes. I

love all this. I definitely there's this art part of the article that

says, modern parents are simply

trying to be less punitive than their own parents and break up

the patterns, namely screaming and spanking, that

many of us gen x and millennial parents

have experienced. And that's what we're trying to do. Right? We're

trying to break cycles of of shame

and punishment and pain.

But what we don't know is then what to do with misbehavior.

Remember this struck me early on when,

like, my kids were just, like, being silly, and they

spilled popcorn all over the floor.

And they were just kinda like you know, to them, they don't think about

what is the results of having all this popcorn on the floor because they don't

know anything. Right? They're, like, 46 or whatever. And

they spill all this popcorn, and I just looked at it. And I was like,

okay. What am I supposed to do about this? It's not cool

that they're, like, spilling popcorn all over the place. And yet

what am I supposed to say? Oh, you guys were feeling so silly. Yeah. You

love popcorn. Yeah. It's fun to throw it. Uh-huh.

Aw. Then what? That's when I did that deep dive, and

I started to understand boundaries and limits and how to set limits. And that's why

I teach the limit setting formula, And that's why I teach this concept of

restitution, which is an, you know, restorative justice

type of model in parenting. When your kid makes a mistake, you

they have to fix it. And when

I put the program together, the Calm Mama

process, Calm is that part about

us, is emotional regulation ourselves.

Some of that requires healing from trauma, of course, and going deep dive

into our own narratives, and I've talked a lot about that on the

podcast. So calm, also stress management,

right, all the beautiful things that are just about being, you know,

a healthy whole person. So we have to do that.

Then connection, how do we emotionally coach our kids through their big healing cycles

within limits, with boundaries.

I was just talking to a mom who's in my program in the Com Mama

Club, and we were she was saying, you

know, how much she helped her child this morning with her big feeling

cycle, and the the daughter had, spilled some

so this happens. Right? You have a 4 year old. They just kind of can't

get through their feelings. And, you know, she was

leaving for work, and she had to drop her daughter off at preschool. And the

mom said, oh, you know, I felt guilty about leaving her in that

distressed state. And I think that's

so indicative of how we feel when our kid

is struggling with an emotion or struggling to move through a

big feeling. We feel like we can't set a

boundary. That if we do, we're doing something wrong.

If we go in and say, I'm leaving for work.

I I hear you're you're gonna go be at school and be

sad a little bit. It is okay

for our kids to process their

negative emotion alone. It's okay for them to

process their negative emotion with someone else,

and it's okay for you to shift out of it. Not every

negative emotion needs to be processed. Not every

meltdown, every big feeling needs to be evaluated

and discussed and teased out. There's not time

for that, to be honest. We have too much going on as

as moms and as as parents, as people.

So there are times when you say, you know, I understand that you're

feeling sad and it's time to put your socks and shoes on. Are

you putting them on or am I? It's okay if you keep

crying while you do it. It's okay to move moments

forward. There's another part of the article that I really

liked, and it says, this softer approach, this gentle parenting

approach doesn't necessarily get results. When a

kid misbehaves and you find yourself talking about that

feeling or taking a few deep breaths in the other room, it doesn't seem to

help. And then you end up being inconsistent with your

limits, and you have you know, the kids start talking back

to you. There's so much negotiation that happens

when you are not when you don't have strong boundaries, when you feel

guilty about having those boundaries and when you don't hold them

because it's tiring. Because what happens when you have a limit?

Let me give you an example of a limit. You know,

you are welcome to play on the trampoline once

you have cleaned up all of these balls. K. Or you're

welcome to go outside once you have finished your reading

assignment. And you are waiting, and

your kid is just playing around, and they're not doing the thing that they're supposed

to do. And so you just say, okay. Time's up. We're not going to play

outside. That's, you know, your limit.

Or, oh, the balls aren't being cleaned up. There's the trampoline is

closed, you know, and you stand in front of the trampoline. And

what happens when you are in that moment with your kids is

that they then have more feelings. Right?

When you have a boundary and you hold it, your

child is going to have emotion about that feel about that

boundary. It's gonna bring up uncomfortable feelings.

It's going to break be, you know, make them

mad, make them sad. Right? And then all of a

sudden, you're in another big feeling cycle. And

you will feel like, okay. Now I've gotta manage this big

feeling cycle, and I'll coach them and hold space and let them talk about

it. And the next thing you know, they start negotiating with you.

They're like, okay. What about if I pick up 2 balls? Can I go in

the trampoline? What about if I only read 1 page?

Can I still go outside? Mom, what about this? I'll read 1 page. I'll go

outside for 5 minutes, and then I'll come back inside, and then I'll keep reading.

And you find yourself almost, like, negotiating

every limit. And you are

probably training your child that you are open for negotiation

because you're trying to figure out a way to not trigger

a big feeling cycle. Because in this

model, it can be exhausting to always ride every emotion

out with your kids. And I wanna invite you to think

about the fact that you don't have to,

that they can be sad and they can be uncomfortable and they can

be disappointed, and that can just be true.

You wanna name it, but you don't need to manage

it. We don't need to manage all these emotions. We don't

need to shift them. We don't need to do things to get our kids to

feel differently. That's not what this is about. It's

really about acknowledging the emotion and

letting your kid learn for

themselves that they can handle it, that they know how to

overcome discomfort. I wanna

talk about this in another episode, but I'm just thinking about, like, how how how

helpful boredom is because boredom is extremely

uncomfortable. And when you are in a position

where you don't have a distraction and you're just you

know, you're gonna try to do some seeking or to start bugging your sibling. You're

gonna beg your mom for the phone. You know, you might start creating a

problem so to get to get that, energy out.

And if you can hold that line as a parent and not give

the phone, right, and and just not give

into the whatever the desire is and let your

child struggle a bit, they will move through the

emotion and find a way to satisfy their brain.

It's just trusting that temporary discomfort

and allowing for it. Now how we

get into this permissive parenting trap, right, is when

our kids misbehave because of their feelings. Right? They throw

the apple sauce. You know, this is an art from the article. It's like, you

know, kids on play dates who throw the applesauce up applesauce

pouch across the room after demanding graham crackers or

kids who hit with no punishment or kids who act as if there are no

rules. Right? A child slapping their mother.

We tend to have this sort of upside down

situation where kids are not

given firmer no messages. Like,

everyone stays safe here. That's not safe. Throwing things is not

safe. Not gonna let you do that.

Right? Just holding the boundary and

saying, you can have your big feelings, but you cannot hit

me. You can have your big feelings, but you will

not throw things. And

saying that sentence, It is okay for you to

communicate what is the boundary and what's

not. Now just saying it

isn't necessarily enough. We that's the

limit setting part. That's the boundary, and then following through on

that boundary is really important. And

I'm doing a workshop in a cup in, next week on Thursday

called managing meltdowns and misbehavior, And I'm gonna talk

about how to actually follow through with a consequence. Right?

How to practice empathy and compassion while setting limits

and following through with those consequences without feeling bad about

it. It's like connect, limit,

set, correct. All three parts of the comm mama process

are are important. So connection and empathy

and and emotional regulation is super important

within a boundary. And then if your child's behavior is outside of

boundaries, we bring in non punitive consequences.

And all of those pieces are important.

It's like, if you spend

most of your parenting energy on managing emotion and, like,

processing emotion with your kids, you are going to feel exhausted. I

talk about this a little bit in therapeutic parenting, the the,

podcast episode I did a while back. How

hard it is to stay present and emotionally coach your kids

because they're gonna have a 100 feelings a day. This

little 4 year old that I was using as an example, how many feelings

did she have in that morning? Right? So many. So if you're

gonna be present and coaching through each one, you are gonna end up

exhausted. And and that's

not that's not okay because then you're gonna have to be able to,

like, handle bedtime and, you know, make lunches

and, you know, get kids to get their socks and shoes on.

Right? There's so many parenting things that are required that

require our energy and get

devoting all of our time to emotional coaching is gonna give us

not as much energy. So I'm hoping that

by hearing this, that you are a,

convinced that that kids need boundaries. Right?

And that second, that you don't have to you don't have

to attend every big feeling cycle that you're invited

to. That as a parent, it isn't your

responsibility to coach every emotion,

but we wanna be empathetic for that emotion and then also

be able to trust that our kids can handle that feeling.

It's also okay sometimes to distract from a feeling.

Not, of course, if they very much are telling you this big story

and they wanna process, like, the about, you know, how their dress got

ruined or they didn't like their birthday present or something like that.

Of course, if you're getting some some real words and and you're in a

beautiful conversation, great. Stay present for it.

But sometimes it's just, I don't like that.

That makes me mad. I he hit me.

Right? I'm sorry. But you know what I'm saying. It's like, it's just a

little discomfort. And so we're not gonna discount it.

We're gonna be like, yeah. That's frustrating. I get it. Why don't you go ahead

and run upstairs and

boundary. You give them some some, a

container, and they're oftentimes able

to shift out of that big feeling.

So we don't have to, you know, stay

in those big feeling cycles for hours and

hours and hours, okay, or even minutes and minutes and minutes.

Sometimes, I when I when I'm in my programs, I teach, you

know, a little bit I teach about, like, connection,

a connection tool. You know? Oh, I you're screaming. You you know, you're saying

you don't like this. Are you feeling frustrated? Yeah. Okay. Well, I'm open to

listening to you talk about that for 1 minute, or I can help

you talk about your frustration after you have gone done you

know, you put taking your plate to the counter.

So you are saying I'm open for this within this boundary. I'm open to

helping with your feelings as long as you're not spitting on me. I'm open to

helping you with you know, talk about your frustration

after you have tidied up your table, after you put away these

toys. So it's within the boundary.

And the more you practice the limit setting with the connection,

the more your kids are able to honestly move through their negative

emotion a little bit faster, process it, label

it, that's usually enough. Just naming the

feeling, kinda giving them a little bit of room

within that boundary and then moving forward.

Now what do you do afterwards? Right? Like,

they caused a problem. That's consequences. I taught that on the podcast.

I'm gonna teach it in the workshop for sure. And,

that's the managing meltdowns and misbehavior workshop.

It's Thursday, March 7th at 9 AM Pacific, 12

PM EST. It's free, and you can sign up on my website or on the

show notes at com mama coaching.com. And,

you know, that's gonna be really great. I really hope you're there

because I'm gonna talk about, like, kind of how to do consequences in

a way that doesn't feel terrible. Because what happens a

lot of times is that when you're practicing gentle parenting,

right, you are, you know, trying

to get your kids to process their

emotion with the hope that then they won't have to use

behavior strategies like hitting, kicking, punching, spitting, throwing,

you know, all of those things. We want our kids to not

need to do those things. But, honestly,

the process of parenting, it takes a long time, right,

to to, parent a child to become an

adult. And so in the meantime, we have to

kinda bring in little ways to show them that, you

know, hitting your brother causes a problem. Here's how you can fix

it. You know, hitting mommy causes a problem. Here's how you can fix

it. Not cleaning up your toys causes a problem. Here's how you can fix it.

So we bring those impacts in

to our parenting. We just don't do it in a way that's, like,

threatening or if you don't do this, I'm never taking you to the park

again. It's like, why don't we flip that? I'm happy to take you to the

park, or we can stay at the park as long as you're

not throwing sand. And then they throw sand,

and then you leave. Now you're all thinking, wait.

I leave? Yes. But they're gonna cry. They're gonna scream.

They're gonna have a fit. They're gonna maybe, you know, throw something or

whatever, whatever. That's gonna be terrible. Yeah. It is terrible.

But having a kid throw sand at people is also terrible.

It is uncomfortable, and it is exhausting if you're

focused so much on their big feelings all the time and you're processing every

emotion. You will not have capacity

to follow through. You won't have the

capacity to hold your child accountable for their

behavior if you overindulge the emotion.

So we and I say overindulge, I mean, we're

not we're gonna name it. We're gonna acknowledge it. We're

gonna validate that feeling, And then we're going

to give them a strategy or a limit of how they can manage

that feeling or what they can do with that feeling.

Like, it's hard to teach it on the podcast because when I teach it in

my 6 week program, I you know, you're in the class and we're giving

example after example after example. But, you know, if you go

through all the other podcast episodes, you can kinda get the idea of how to

set a limit within and then how to follow through on it.

Now I wanna acknowledge that this

isn't necessarily easy either way.

Right? Spending time on validating an

emotion while while also holding a boundary is

not armchair parenting. Now what what's armchair

parenting? It's where you get to sit in an armchair and just tell your kids

what to do, and they listen to you. Now

you can get there with your kids with connection and limit set.

For the most part, your kids will learn that it's in their best

interest to follow directions because they're learning. When they

don't, there will be a consequence.

But it's not when you parent this way, you're not teaching your

child to be afraid of you. You're teaching your child

to think through their action and the result of

that action. And it takes

time for your child's brain to connect those dots.

It does not take a lot of time to connect fear.

Right? Because fear is a primal

impulse. And so you can trigger fear all day long with your

kids, and they will probably be very good listeners even

when they're really young because they're afraid of getting hurt. They're afraid of getting

emotionally disconnection from you, and, you know, you might get well

behaved kids. What you don't get, though, is kids who can

connect with their feelings and feel safe with you, unfortunately.

It just creates a lot of isolation and disconnection when

you use traditional fear based parenting.

But what do you do instead? How do you get your

kids to listen? How do you get your kids to follow directions?

Some of my clients call this, you know, the long game. They're like, oh, this

is playing the long game in parenting. And it's like, yeah. It's not that

long, but it is going to take, you know, 6

months or a year depending on their age. I'm not gonna give a timeline. I'm

just saying it takes a while because their brain has to develop, and you have

to show them multiple times that

if they misbehave, if they have an off track behavior, there will

be an impact, and they will have to,

repair that, that there will be a consequence. I'm not

afraid of the word. Consequence is not a problem for

me. It doesn't mean pain. It

doesn't mean punishment. It just means a result. I was

thinking about this the other day. Like, where are there consequences

in real life? And my example was thinking about if I

went to the grocery store and I filled up my basket and I

had all the food that I was gonna buy, and then I got to the

checkout and I realized they didn't have my wallet or my Apple Pay

wasn't working right on my phone or something. I

would not be able to buy those groceries.

Like, they the people who work there wouldn't be like,

you forgot your wallet? Well, here. Just take this $180 worth of

groceries with you to your car. Like, no. There would be a

consequence of my action. I'd have to leave the cart, go back to my

house, get my wallet, come back, and then pay for it,

or put it all away or they would put it all away. Right?

But the consequence would be I would not get my things. Now even if I

had a temper tantrum, even if I had a meltdown, even if I cried

and said how sad I am and and how upset I

am, The the people who work there would still

be like, that makes sense. It may that sucks, and

we're not giving you your groceries.

Right? So I I think

it's the same in parenting of, like, yes.

Your feelings make sense. They're totally valid. You are entitled to do

to feel that way. Can you yell at me? No. Can you

throw things? No. Can you break things? No.

Right? No. And you're not

following the rules. You don't you don't you're not, you know, keeping within the boundaries

and the the the sort of contract of of the way this family works,

and so that means that there's you're not going to go to

get ice cream with us or whatever the boundary is that you've

set. So I'm I don't want you to be afraid of

consequences. And when you have limits and

consequences and you have connection and

you're calm, you put them all together,

you are teaching your child how to

integrate all the parts of their brain.

So let me say what that means. You have your child and they

have their primal brain, their reptilian brain, their fight, flight, their stress

response. Right? So some kids, you know, flip into

that fight, flight, freeze, fate, fawn. And then you're off

you've got a big temper tantrum. Right? They're activated. In

that in that circumstance, when they're that activated, you have to

just ride it out. That's a big feeling cycle, and you just have to ride

it out. Be present, make sure everybody stays safe, and

wait. If you're calm, a lot of times it fizzles out

faster. If you offer compassion, fizzles

out even faster than just being calm.

So it you know, the connection and the compassion is huge.

So you have your kid's little reptilian brain, and then they have you have their

limbic center, and that's the emotional part of the brain. That's where

decision making is based on emotion. If it feels good, do it.

If it doesn't feel good, don't do it. It's not based on the future.

It's not based on time. It's not based on money. That

decision making process is just very much impulsive.

It's it there's not thinking involved. And then you have the executive function

part of the brain, which is the thinking part of the brain. Now little

kids 0 to 6 have a lot of trouble getting to that

executive function. They have not built a bunch of neural pathways

up there, and so it's very hard for them to

do some thinking. But that doesn't mean they can't. It just

means you have to do a little bit more work of showing how

cause and effect work, showing how time works. You

have to bring some more impacts. You have to have strong boundaries

to show them how how world the world works.

That's your job as a parent. And then over time,

what you're doing with this process, you staying calm,

you giving them connection, you're soothing their limbic center, you doing

limit sets, you're giving them the idea of cause

and effect, and you're activating their prefrontal

cortex, their executive function. And then you're having consequences

that are gentle and kind that also keeps them in their emotion,

their, thinking center of their brain.

And over the course of time, you end up

with a emotionally healthy person,

someone who knows how to manage their feelings in

ways that work for them and others.

That is our goal. That's what the goal is in my emotionally

healthy kids class. If you do the emotionally healthy teen class,

we start wherever your teenager is, whatever skill set they have, and

we do the same process. We set boundaries. We have compassion.

They just look a little bit different as they age. But the process

the calm level process is always the same. Calm yourself,

connect with your kids, set limits, and follow through

with correction. When you do that, you have a complete parenting model.

There was this this last sentence that I'll share

from this article. And we're of course, we're gonna link it. But it says,

what is most exhausting for parents is thinking there's an exact way to do things

and a wrong way to do things and walking around with the pressure that you're

going to ruin your kids. It says, we're

starting from an earnest place, but our intent on going

above and beyond, and we are killing ourselves to

curate the perfect parenting philosophy.

It says even though that doesn't really exist.

I'm not saying I have created a perfect parenting philosophy.

I would never use that phrase. I don't know if it's perfect,

but I do know it's complete. I do know

that if you combine your own self regulation and

connection with limits set and correct,

you won't feel so overwhelmed by misbehavior.

You won't feel so overwhelmed by big

feelings. It's really cool. 1 of

my clients, she said sent me this note. She said, the best thing you taught

me is that my child can be held accountable for the emotional drain

they have on me and our family. It makes so much sense to add limits

and consequences to calm parenting. It's the missing piece that

has changed our home dynamic over time. It's a lot more

chill, and I'm not so pissed off all the time.

This is what you can get when you work with me or when you sign

up some of my programs or you get my, you know, re free

resources. You can start to activate into

the four parts of the Comama process. So the first

the invitation to you is to come on March 7th at

9 AM Pacific, 12 PM EST to my free

workshop called managing meltdowns and misbehavior. You can sign

up, like I said, on my website, calmmama coaching.com

or in the show notes. And I'd love to see you there. It's

gonna be great. There's a good little it's a good work workbook or

worksheet that I've created. Very, very simple. I did

not I did not add a bunch of stuff because I was like, I wanna

give you something that you can read really fast and get understand really quickly

and apply. So this is a very simple parenting

workshop all about meltdowns and misbehavior.

Alright. I hope that this episode was helpful. I hope it

inspired you to, move

towards boundaries, feeling more comfortable, feeling less guilt

about doing them. And and if you do feel

badly, you should come to the workshop because they'll help you get out of that

feeling bad about it. Okay. Have a great week, and I

will talk to you next time.