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

I'm a life and parenting coach. And today on the podcast,

I'm going to talk to you about attunement. And really, I

was thinking about this thing that moms

will often say to me is like, oh my god. I traumatized my

kid. I yelled at them or I'm ruining my kid or I'm

you know, I'm gonna have a bad relationship with them. And we feel

really scared that we're going to mess

up our kids. Right? That's like a normal feeling that a normal

fear that we have as parents. And it's really because

you care a lot, and you wanna do a good job, and you

wanna raise emotionally healthy kids, and you listen to podcasts, and you watch

videos and maybe read some books and you're really

dedicated to becoming the best parent you can

and you want clarity on what am I supposed to do.

Right? And what happens when I don't do it?

So this is, in a 2 part series. I'm gonna talk

about this concept of attunement and then I'm

gonna also talk about repair. So this is sort of

what you wanna be doing. Okay? And I'm gonna normalize

that you're not always going to be able to attune

or connect as I think of it and

help you understand that when you don't, what are you

supposed to do in order to prevent trauma?

Right? We're so worried about traumatizing our kids and

ruining them and messing them up. And oftentimes, people are like, I don't wanna

fuck up my kids, which I get. Right?

So what is it that is like trauma

proofing your children? What is it that you wanna be doing? And I

wanna give you this concept of attunement.

When you are regularly

attuning to your child, which really

is about seeing them and soothing them,

they feel safe and they feel secure.

And then from that secure place, they

are willing to trust others to be vulnerable, to take risks,

to grow, to change, to self reflect, to have self

compassion, all these traits that are part of being

an emotionally healthy person. They are rooted

in having a strong attachment with your parent.

This more secure and more strong and more safe your attachment

is with your parent, the more likely you are to

have a healthy life, an emotionally healthy

life. Now there are no guarantees. You can be a

very emotionally available and attuned parent. And

because of mental health, because of neurodivergence or

whatever, because of circumstances that, like,

you know, environments that your children are in, they may still

experience trauma and hardship and pain. They may

still have mental health issues. So this isn't a

guarantee. And if you see somebody whose kids

are struggling emotionally or mentally or

in some aspect, we don't wanna look and be like, oh, well, that's

because of parents. Right? Oh, they must not have been attuned or they must not

have done a good job. No. This is

not about do a, b, and c and for

sure you're gonna get d or whatever. This is

for you as an individual person to look at yourself

and decide how do you wanna show up as a parent and

what kind of strategies do you wanna have in your family

and in your experience as a mom or as a dad.

So this isn't to this concept of attunement isn't

used. I don't want you to use it to judge others or to evaluate

others, and I don't want you to think, oh, I must

not have done something right because my kid is still struggling.

Like, struggle is inevitable. Pain is inevitable.

Uncertainty is the way it is in life. And

I just wanna kinda normalize that because I have been working in

this field for 15 years, and I've seen parents who

really do follow the comm mama process and have all these

years. And they have young adults and their young adults are struggling.

And that is a lot to do with the culture with post pandemic

fallout, with, you know, the pressures of social media,

overreliance on video games. There's a lot of,

factors that go into raising a person, and some of it is

parenting. Like, some of it is personal, and some of it is

more of a public, you know, responsibility.

Okay. So, that's all some caveats. Now, let me get into attunement.

So, attunement is really this process of

feeling seen and feeling felt. Right? We want our

kids when we talk about, you know,

emotional coaching them, gentle parenting,

compassionate parenting, connected parenting, call mama parenting.

What we're all talking about is really developing this

practice of attunement. So attunement is

the process of seeing and soothing.

In this process, you are aware of your

child's emotional state. So if they're

misbehaving, if they are crying, if

they are, you know, asking for something,

if they're whatever is happening, whatever you're seeing on the

outside, you are looking to try to figure out

what might be going on on the inside.

So this is like taking what's on the outside and

using the behavior or the facial expressions or the

body language as a clue to what could

be going on the on on the inside.

Attunement is that process of becoming aware

of your child's internal mental state.

And that the way you do that is really by just kind

of first paying attention to noticing your child's

emotional state, looking at their behavior, and

wondering what could be going on underneath here.

This is all in the Com Mama process, the step of

connect. So everything under attunement that I'm teaching

today is really under this the part of the calm mama process that's

connect. So the process remember is calm, connect, limit

set, correct. So calm is all about you and

your emotions. Connect is all about your child and their emotions.

So when we are talking about validating emotion to helping our

kids feel seen, helping our kids feel felt, we're talking about

attunement. We are attuning

to their internal mental mental state. We're understanding

that your child, they have an inner life. They have thoughts

and feelings and reactions, and they have a perspective on life,

and they're walking through the world experiencing something.

They are seeing the world through their eyes and through their

experience. And our role as a parent at

times is to come along and almost, like, try to slip

into their narrative coming into your child's

story, to their perspective, to their emotional state,

and then responding to that emotional state

by recognizing it, trying to,

at least looking towards trying to figure it out, you know, current trying to

help them. And then the second part of attuning, so you're seeing them

and then you're soothing. So with attunement,

when your child is in distress, that's when

they are needing soothing. So they have a

negative experience for whatever reason. And

when we come alongside of them, we recognize that they are

in some sort of internal distress. It's showing up through their

behavior, through their body language, through their words

that we are then looking and and seeing, okay, this person is

struggling. Let me come and support them.

We are going to communicate to them. You're not alone. I see

you. I'm here to support you. Now

soothing is not about solving problems. It's not about making things

better, fixing everything, fix it energy

isn't really soothing energy. Attunement is

really coming alongside someone and recognizing that they're having

an emotional experience and validating it as

as real and true and just being there

as an emotional support for them.

So we're we're listening to and we're reflecting

our child's experience, understanding and respecting their

state of mind, seeing the world through their your child's point

of view. Let me go through a couple of examples. Imagine

you have a child who's being hurt by a sibling or a friend.

They are having they're feeling sad.

Right? They're they're feeling frustrated by their sibling or they're feeling sad that their

friend is rejecting them or they're struggling on the schoolyard.

And so we're gonna come alongside them

and recognize that they might be feeling

disappointed, that they might be feeling confused, and you would

narrate the circumstance to them. This is all the

connection tool, you know. Yes. You went to school and you were thinking you

were gonna play with Jack on the yard and then Jack told you that you

can't play with him and now you're probably feeling a little confused. I

wonder if you're confused about what happened and feeling a little

sad. So this process is really

about giving language to

the thing that they're experiencing, giving them words

to understand what is happening. They have,

like, an internal awareness that something's not quite right,

but they don't necessarily know how to talk about it. Think

about when I define emotional literacy, how

it's these three parts. I know what I'm feeling. I know how to talk

about it. I know what to do with it. So

developing emotional literacy happens through attunement

by coming alongside your child and helping them

understand what they're feeling, know how to talk about what they're

feeling, and then coming up with strategies of ways to deal with that

emotion. Now, a lot of times, attunement

itself can be enough because most

feelings will all feelings they pass. Right? You just have to sit in

them, recognize them, acknowledge them, have somebody, you

know, sit by your side and wait. People are always like,

well, now what do I do when they're sad? What do I what do I

do? That's fix it energy. You don't have to fix

it. Attunement is enough. Now you

could offer perspective. Oh, would you like to maybe talk to Jack? Would you

like to talk to your brother? Think about little kids at bedtime.

Bedtime to us is like the best time of the day. Right? We

love it. It's like go to bed, kid. Go don't I don't wanna look at

you anymore. I'm tired. It's night. Go to sleep. But

to a child from their perspective, bedtime is the worst

time of the day. It's dark. There's no more playtime.

You're not around. They, you know, they feel sad.

They feel scared. They feel overwhelmed. Bedtime is

hard. Does that mean you don't make your kids go to bed? Absolutely

not. Of course, you still need to have limits. But

attuning and saying, yes, of course, it seems like bedtime is really hard. Is it

hard for you? Yeah. Do you feel sad when it's

bedtime? Of course, you do. Okay. And then you

can start to problem solve. Well, it is bedtime and I'm not

staying. I'm gonna stay for 2 minutes. So what can you do to

take care of yourself? And you start to give them agency.

So we come alongside and we offer

them co regulation. Right? We soothe them with

the idea that eventually they will learn to self soothe.

Not always. We all want attunement. I want

attunement with my partner, with my husband. I want him to be

able to recognize my emotional state, to

see it, to validate it, and to come alongside me and see if I need

support. This has been a constant

learning between the 2 of us that when

I am needy, sometimes it's hard for him to see

me that way and he doesn't want to attune to me. He wants to either

fix my problem so I don't feel that way. He wants to rescue me

from my emotion or he wants to minimize my emotion by

telling me it's not that big of a deal and get over it. It's like

that thing that I'm seeking can be really hard

for adults to give to other adults. So I'm

not saying this is easy, but it is a little bit easier with little

kids, not always. We're gonna get into the obstacles of what

comes up. So you look at these

circumstances being hurt by a friend, being hurt by a sibling,

bedtime. Going to school is another time where we

think, no. Go. It's fun. Like, go to gym class or, I mean, go

to, like, soccer practice. You love soccer. Go to soccer. You know, you love your

dance teacher. You you love going to art. Why why don't you wanna go?

You know, you love it. Right? We try to convince them instead of joining

them and attuning. Hey, I'm noticing you're not wanting to go

right now. Is is going a little bit hard? Do you feel

sad that it's time to go to school now? And

from your child's perspective, recognizing that going to school is

challenging, Going just like for you going

to work, you're like, oh, I gotta go to work now. You know, you gotta,

like, put your thinking cap on and, you know, perform and

right? There's, like, a very different doing your job versus

being at home doing nothing. And your children have the same

experience. Yes. They like school just like, yes, you like your job,

hopefully. And it's also a tax on you.

It costs you. It's hard. And sometimes all

we want is someone to come along and say, yeah,

that's hard. It's not great.

It's great, and it's not great. You love it, and you

also struggle with it. It's your favorite, and you also don't wanna

do it right now. Yeah.

I promise that a little bit of attunement goes a long way towards

compliance. You always wonder how do you get your kids to

listen to you? How do you get your kids to quote unquote obey? Right? Listen.

And I wanna suggest to you that the more

connected your child feels to you, the more compliant they will be.

It is a lot easier to do something hard when the

other people around you are recognizing that it's hard and that you're

frustrated and that you're doing it anyway. And, like,

having that be seen and validated is really, really powerful.

So not only do you get more compliance. Right? It's a good

parenting strategy. It's an effective parenting strategy. I've

also told you it's helpful for your children long term. But

attunement also is really helpful because it models

this process of emotional regulation. You come alongside your

child and you help them understand that messy middle, the

messy inside. You give them language to communicate

it, to to understand what it's called, to communicate it, and to cope

with it. And you do that over and over and over again,

your child will eventually be able to do that for themselves.

We use co regulation in order to create self

regulation. So attunement is the process of co

regulating, coming along, recognizing when

someone is struggling, helping support them, and then

eventually they are able to do it on their own.

When you help your kid with this attunement, when

you help help them understand that what's going on inside of them and

giving them language for it and tools, they build

up a lot more self awareness. And self

awareness is one of the keys to emotional health. I need to be

able to look at myself kindly, right,

compassionately, not critically, and evaluate my

emotional state, my behavior, my patterns, my

habits, like and gently wonder and get curious

why I behave the way I behave, how would I like to behave, and how

can I what do I need to change to get there? Right? That's this

process of self awareness. So when you help your

kids become more self aware, they become more emotionally

healthy. This is also super important

attunement because it normalizes the emotions and

it creates this shame free environment for processing negative

emotion. We want our kids to not be ashamed

of their feelings. Validating an

emotion and recognizing it and normalizing it is a

way to shame free emotion.

We don't always want our children to feel like their

behavior is acceptable. Right? Some behavior doesn't

work. It doesn't it's not safe or it doesn't support

the community. Climbing on the kitchen table

is not safe, and it also isn't what the purpose of

the table is. Right? We this is where we eat. This is not where we

dance. Okay? Unless you dance on the table. I don't know. You do your thing.

But if it doesn't work in your family, it doesn't work. So we

want our kids to we don't wanna validate their behavior, but we do

wanna validate their emotion and we wanna connect that their behavior makes

sense based on their feelings. Here is another way

to cope with your feelings, communicate with your feelings,

process your feelings, express your feelings is

through this process of attunement. Now,

how do you know when to attune and when not to attune?

Right? So your child

is seeking support from

you. That is their natural

state. The way that they are born is

to seek support from caregivers.

And so they are naturally going to look for the helpers and look for

the people that they feel will help them when they

feel sad, mad, scared, or

whatever the emotion is. And so we want our

kids to believe that we are in emotionally

attuned and safe, like landing place for

them. We are a safe Haven.

We are their home base. When you develop a

home base for your children,

they eventually take that home base with them.

It's funny. I hadn't thought about this till just now, but I grew up

pretty poor. We never owned a home. We moved a lot. We never had

a car. Like, we didn't have a lot of things that people have.

And my mom used to say home is where I

am and I love that. And

I believed that was true. I felt like no matter

what I could go home, Like, I could

be with her. And that's why the loss of a parent is so

intense because we lose our anchor in the

storm. The thing we are tethered to on this earth.

That's what you are. You wanna trauma proof your kids,

be their anchor in a storm, be their home base,

be their secure spot.

So we wanna offer our children reliability

and consistency in our caregiving,

showing up in this attuned space. Now we

can't always do it because we're not always

calm. So the obstacle to

attunement is really our dysregulation,

our emotional disconnection with ourselves.

If you aren't attuned to yourself, it is gonna

be very difficult for you to attune to someone else. If you're

not aware of your emotional state, how are you gonna be aware of

someone else's emotional state? So one of the

things that is really hard about doing

attunement is that we are not willing

to be vulnerable with ourselves. We're too critical of ourselves.

We have shut down. We're emotionally disconnected from

ourselves. We are not attuned.

So that is one of the challenges, and I wanna

invite you to start to explore yourself.

That's a big thing with the pause break is

and all the, tools around calm in the Calm Mama

process are really an invitation to help you

get to know yourself, to find yourself in,

in what who you are, especially as a mom, you've changed so much.

And it's like, what are you even thinking and feeling these

days and and getting to know yourself? And you can do

that it through self self reflection. I in the

Com Mama Club, I have the Com Mama journal. If you're in the club and

you haven't taken a look at that in a while, go to the portal and

download the Com Mama journal. There's a bunch of prompts in there. That's an invitation

to get deeper and to get to know yourself, to come attuned.

In the Com Mama course, in the emotionally healthy kids course,

I talk about, like, reflecting on when you've lost your shit,

what happened? Why do you act that way? So getting to

know yourself in a compassionate way is really important. Taking a

pause break when you find yourself overwhelmed, you wanna be connecting with

your kids, but instead you're yelling at them. Pause. Stop.

Emotionally regulate yourself. Pause and reset your nervous

system and your mental state. I say move

your body, move your mind. So it's hard

to connect to our kids when we haven't connected to ourselves.

And that's what is our emotional regulation

is important. You cannot co regulate

with your kid if you're dysregulated. All you're doing is creating more dysregulation.

I'm not judging you. I'm gonna talk about repair, remember, in next

episode. Of course, you are going to be dis dysregulated at times.

You cannot always be emotionally attuned to your child

nor do you want to be and I'll tell you why in a second. But

when you want to be and you are struggling,

that's because you're not calm, pause, connect with yourself,

reset your nervous system, and then connect with your kids.

Now another reason attunement is really hard

is because our child's emotional state

can trigger our nervous system. So we might start out

calm, but then our kids having a screaming fit and it's so

loud it's dysregulating to us or their mess is so

big in the house that our need for order and

peace is very disruptive and we don't we can't

attune. We end up feeling really overwhelmed by their behavior.

So maybe we're not angry, but we might be overwhelmed.

So our when our child's emotional state triggers our nervous

system, that is a lot about calm as well,

especially normalizing and figuring out what are your

triggers in your kids behavior. Like, is it messy? Is it loud? Is

it, when they say mean things, when they hurt

their sibling, kind of finding out why does it bother

you? Right? Coming to the club meetings and talking to

me about it and getting some support and getting some advice

on how to change your

perspective, your own mental state in the

midst of the behavior that's hard because our brain says, I've

gotta fix it, change it, stop it, solve it in order to feel calm. And

so we shut the child down and in that process of shutting down

their behavior and we're shutting down their emotions. We're not

attuning to their emotions. Attuning is

a better way of processing negative emotion versus shutting it

down. So it can be really hard because

sometimes we are just disregulated as as people because of our own

issues or our child's behavior can be really difficult for us.

And in both of those cases, it's important for us to get better

skills so that we can be calm.

Again, you're going you cannot be perfect with this and that's

okay. The third thing I see why it's

so hard to, do attunement

is this is really like a confusing thing about parenting that I

think people don't really talk about that much. But

we are the person who causes some

of the pain and then we're supposed to soothe the pain. Let

me explain. We tell our kids no.

Right? They have a desire. They wanna play with a toy that's too

loud. They want to eat a cookie when it's not cookie

time. They wanna stay at the park when it's getting dark

and you need to go because you need to get dinner started. There is

a constant tension in parenting

because you are the person who enforces the rules

and you're the person who soothes your child when they

are mad about the rules. And that can be really confusing

for you and them. You're, like, you're

sad that I said no to a cookie and they're, like,

yes, And then they kinda look at you like, just give me the

cookie, and then we'll both feel better.

And you have to, like, appeal to the future,

like, your higher ideals of, like, no. I don't wanna give in to

this. I don't wanna become permissive. I want to hold

the boundary so you can have a compassionate

limit set. Right? You can be empathetic

that bedtime is hard and it's still

bedtime. You can be empathetic that going

to school sucks and it's still time to go to school.

You can have compassion for the struggle

that, like, I wanna hit my brother. I wanna hit my

sister because they're being mean. You can say, of course, you

do and hitting isn't allowed in our house.

So having that attunement while holding the

boundary is possible and it's actually

easier to do when you feel calm and when you feel

compassion towards them. When you are attuned, it's easier to

be more firm, believe it or not, because you're not feeling

guilt. You're not feeling you're not in your own emotional state. You're not

in your anger. You're not in your frustration. You're not in your guilt. You're not

in your overwhelm. You're in their narrative.

Now I've said that it's hard to do this

at times, and it's the goal is to

be attuned. But I also want to let you know

that it is not expected that

you attend every

emotional big feeling cycle that you're invited

to. You don't have to be consistently

attuned to your child. It isn't

it's impossible to do that because that would mean you're

consistently absencing yourself to go into the

your child's narrative. Your nervous system won't let you do that,

nor is this is not possible, but it's also not

healthy. Our children and all of our

relationships are designed to flow in between

connection and separation. So

I attune with my partner and I get

support from him, and then I also

separate and sometimes problem solve on my own. And then I

come back with him and we are attuned together.

Sometimes I attuned to him and I don't need anything from

him because we're in a peer relationship. So

we, co regulate together. Right?

And then I also self regulate. I self soothe. Your

children need to have that too. If you

are, attuned too

much and that, like, anytime your child is has an emotional upset

that you feel you're supposed to solve it or soothe for for

it, you are kind of communicating to your kid, you

can't handle this by yourself. It's

like, can a baby cry for a few minutes

without an adult? Absolutely. That's inevitable.

Right? Then when you come to them, you're like, oh, baby. And you

sue them and you pick them up. You go, oh, you were so sad. I

wasn't near you. Yeah. I was in the potty. I had to go to potty.

Right? Kind of narrate and explain what was happening. And

it's also okay for a little kid to go

to their room and sulk and be alone and maybe, you know,

kick a little bit of a you know, kick their toys around and be upset

or for a teenager, especially, to go to their room

and, you know, close the door and turn on their headphones really loud

and just tune out the world. Solitude

is an okay state to be processing

emotion. It's okay if your child

wants to self soothe or self regulate and be alone.

We want our kids to go back and forth between

connection and separation. We wanna give them the

support they need while also communicating to them

that they also have everything inside of them that they need to suit

themselves, that we are available to them,

and they also are available to themselves.

It's so empowering for your children to have autonomy

over their own emotional well-being. We

want that. We want our kids to be able to calm

their own nervous system and to soothe themselves. And

that is ultimately the goal. And I just had my

friend and I were talking and she is a 20 year old daughter

and her daughter is away at college and is sick. And

she called her mom to tell her all about it.

How great, right, to have a mom who you can

call and tell all about it and who helps problem solve with

you and empathize with you and support you.

And we also wanna have a 20 year old who can handle it on their

own. So we don't need to always be available.

Sometimes, our unavailability

helps our kids become more resilient. Thinking about last

week's episode on resilience, It is good for our kids

to have time to be to struggle

alone and to find within themselves a solution.

So I don't want you to feel pressure that you have to constantly be attuned

to your kids, nor do I want you to feel that you

shouldn't attune to them. I want you just to see it as a rhythm and

a flow. You connect when you can and you separate.

You let them problem solve and then you also come to them. You

invite them into a conversation. Do you want some help and support? Are you

looking for someone to help you with this? No? Okay.

Yes. Great. It's a relationship you're

in. You're in a relationship with your kids and your

connection and separation is gonna ebb and flow, and it doesn't mean anything.

K? It doesn't mean that you're really good and, like, or really bad.

If your child is over seeking, then you wanna give them some more

boundaries so that they learn to process some of their

emotion alone. If your child is under seeking, then I want you to

build more emotional connection by doing fun stuff

and giggles and connection time so that they feel

back in a connection with you.

Alright. I hope that you learned some great things. If you love this

episode, please share it. I would love the podcast

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Because we wanna help as many parents as we can so that people

don't feel so overwhelmed and alone and isolated because

parenting can be very lonely, and this podcast is a

great way for parents to connect with some

solid support. And, of course, if you want even more

support, you're always welcome to join the CallMama Club. It's

$30 a month. Cancel it anytime. Join it anytime.

We meet on Tuesdays for our weekly club meeting.

I try to get to as many people as I can. You raise your hand.

You ask questions. You listen to other parents. Everyone's really sweet

and lovely in the group. And then you have access to all

the resources, the online resources, and the Calm Mama

handbook and the sibling class and, you know, all the things.

Calm Mama journal, so much good stuff. So we'd love to

have you in there. You can join right on my website, call mama coaching.com,

or you can get reach out to get a complimentary consultation. I

can tell you more about it. So thanks for

listening. I love this podcast so much, and I appreciate

anyone who listens. And I hope it's helpful for you,

and I hope you have a great week.