Tag Archives for " parental stress "

One day, my children were mucking around. My husband was working away at the time and I was trying to get them into bed.

They were laughing and giggling and jumping about. At first I was playing along, but then I wanted them to settle down. I had a lot of work to do when they went to sleep and my focus was on doing that. I’d had enough of the play. It was time to sleep and I was attached to the picture of them calming down.

However, they weren’t playing the game and kept mucking around (as children do). My blood started boiling as the conversation in my head started to roll around in “they’re not listening to me”…I just want them to stop….”They need to go to bed NOW”….blah, blah, blah.

It escalated until I came to breaking point and shouted at them in my clenched-teeth way when I lose control. They instantly quietened down and went to bed, but I felt awful! That’s not the way to end the day. However I’d done it and I couldn’t take it back.

Knowing what I know in regards to the teachings of The Parental Stress Centre, I knew I needed to find the core belief that drove my anger to begin with. What was really going on to make me react this way? Was there any pattern to my thinking that causes me to react like this in other times?

I got to journaling, like I get my course participants to do when we’re trying to establish the beliefs behind our emotions, and after a while of looking at my ‘story’ behind my anger, it hit me. My core belief was:

“My children are an interruption to my life!”

WTF, are you serious? I couldn’t believe this is what I had thought. How terrible that was to think that way. But there it was right there on the page, and I knew that’s what I believed, because I felt it to the point of tears stinging the back of my eyes.

Oh dear, that was one belief I definitely needed to upgrade. I didn’t want my kids to feel like they were interrupting my life.

So here’s the upgrade:

Nothing can interrupt your life. Every experience IS your life. It’s just one event giving way to the next. There is no event that is more important than another. Everything is valuable. My children were in the moment, something I need to do more of. Parenting is a part of my life experience, too and I need to embrace every moment with my kids because, just like every other moment in life, it will rise and pass away. They will grow up, leave the nest and I will move onto other activities. My children are not an interruption to my life. They ARE my life, and a big part of it. Enjoy the moments while they’re here.

Change what you think about and what you think about changes…

Jackie

In my last article – Why Your Kids Disrespect You, we looked at some of the reasons why disrespect occurs between a parent and a child. Now let’s look at how you can turn it all around.

Your children will not respect you until you demand that they respect you.

By that, I don’t mean ranting and raving about how they don’t respect you and how they don’t care about what you do for them. I mean when you teach them a standard of treatment that you expect from them and issue serious consequences for them if this expectation is not met.

Human beings operate with the agenda of pursue pleasure and avoid pain.  If you set the standard and issue consequences for behaving less than the standard, and those consequences are painful (meaning they don’t like them or it means they have to lose something they want or experience something they don’t like), then they will learn not to behave that way.

This doesn’t just work for respect, this works for anything you are trying to teach your children (FYI, it doesn’t always have to be punishment either, you can motivate using the pursuit of pleasure – i.e., rewards for co-operation or good behaviour).

Just remember what you’re doing it for. What is it that you’re actually trying to teach? What is the life lesson or life skill you are trying to teach? Make sure it’s for those reasons, as opposed to just obeying so you get what you want…as tempting as that is, lol.

One final point….

Is it really disrespect? Is it really about you at all?

Keep in mind that often, our child’s behaviour has nothing to do with you at all. We can be so quick to make our child’s behaviour personal and jump onto the “My children don’t respect me train” but often it’s not because they don’t respect you at all, it’s because they’re learning how to deal with their frustrations, they are learning a new skill or using you as a venting board because they don’t know what else to do.

It’s important to take your self-worth away from your child’s behaviour and start to look at what’s going on in the child’s mind behind the behaviour.

When you do this, you might just see that they need your help to deal with a situation differently. You can still address the fact that they are treating you rudely or inappropriately, but make sure you give them some tools to help them deal with the actual problem differently too.

If you don’t know how to help them, then maybe you can sit down together and work it out.

Dealing with the problem by finding solutions….

If you would like more information on how to communicate more effectively with your child, change the way your family interacts with each other, or how to lower the stress levels in the home, our Stress Free Parenting program can teach you all that and more.

Warm Regards,

Jackie

I wish I had a dollar for every time a parent said to me “Why doesn’t my child respect me?”, so I thought I would dedicate the next couple of days to understanding some of the reasons why they don’t and how you can change them.

Here are three reasons why your child might disrespect you:

1. They don’t know how to respect! I know that sounds really funny, but often our children don’t know what respect is or how to show it, particularly if you have not had anyone specifically show them.Often, we are so busy complaining about what they’re NOT doing, that we aren’t showing them what we do want them to do. We just keep saying things like, “You don’t respect me,”  “You’re speaking rudely to me,” “Don’t speak to me like that.” But nowhere in there are you telling them what you want them to do. We expect it to be obvious, but the reality is, it may not be.
2. Do you deserve their respect? Whoa, I know that’s a confronting question, however, a valid one. Just because you do things for your children, does not mean they will automatically respect you. Respect has to be learnt and earned – often being earned because of the way you are treating them. Respect is a two-way street so sometimes that means taking a good look at your own behaviour.How is your treatment towards them? Are you treating them with respect? Are you recognising and validating their thoughts, opinions, suggestions and wants and needs as a result or are you just demanding they treat you nicely and obey your rules regardless of how you are treating them?

   The thing is, you can go down that road, but you won’t be getting respect. You’ll be getting compliance and a child who obeys you.

3. You teach people how to treat you! There are several ways we can unconsciously allow our children to disrespect us and then wonder why we do. Here is a few of them.

• You ignore them when they speak rudely to you, or there are no consequences. You merely say “We don’t speak to each other like that” and then go on your way, issuing no motivational reasons why they shouldn’t speak to them that way.
• You think that you have to do everything for them and you have your self-worth on them needing you, so you worry that if you take that away from them they won’t love you as much, thus you don’t want to issue consequences. This also goes hand in hand with “I don’t want to see them unhappy”. The reality is that pain is how we learn. I don’t mean you should go around inflicting physical pain on your kids, but I mean the pain of not getting what we want can often teach us how to get what we want.
• You don’t feel worthy of respect and therefore are used to people treating you poorly, thus your kids follow suit and you don’t think of doing something to change that. It has become the norm that people treat you like that. (They may even be following suit with how someone else in the family treats you and is copying them).

If you can’t relate to any of the above reasons why you are being disrespected, I urge you to think about how it got set up for your child to treat you this way. What was your contribution to it? What is your reaction to it? What might be going on for them to make them want to treat you this way? Is there another issue going on for them that might be resulting in you being the punching bag.

The bottom line is that if disrespect is a problem in your home, that is your reality right now. It’s time to figure out why, so we can then work out what to do about it.

More on this in the Part B – Eliminating Disrespect

Who on earth made that rule?!! Umm, I hate to say this…but you did.

We often hear in the parenting community that there is so much pressure on parents to get it right and do everything perfectly.

But who’s actually judging whether you’re doing it right or not?

The thing about judgment is that someone may have an opinion about what is right or not, but your reaction to their opinion comes from your beliefs, not from theirs.

No one can MAKE you feel any particular way. What they do though, is trigger something that already exists within you! They trigger the beliefs that you already hold about yourself and your life.

If you are feeling pressured, it’s because YOU believe you have to meet a certain standard in order to look good or be perceived a certain way.

YOU are the one setting the bar, so you can be the one to change it.

The only reason why other parents don’t succumb to the pressure of parenting is because they have a mindset that believes that they aren’t perfect. They know they are doing the best they can. They are continually looking for solutions to their problems. They don’t think it means anything about them if they can’t get it to be perfect or if they have an off day and they don’t believe other people’s opinions define who they are as a parent.

So when they hear about the ‘pressure of parents today’, it doesn’t trigger a response.

Adopt this mindset too, and your world will be a much more relaxed space.

Change your beliefs and you’ll change your reactions…

Jackie

Spinning back in time and I am observing me in the heat of arsenic hour when my kids were 2 and 3 years old.

They were whinging, clinging, the house was a mess, dishes everywhere, dinner trying to be cooked, I’m tired. I don’t want to be dealing with any of this. It’s been a long day and I’m hanging for my husband to come home to help take the load off.

Cue the telephone call from hubby.

“I’m going to be late.”  Those 5 dreaded words that no worn out stay-at-home parent wants to hear when they are so desperately needing a break.

“Oh, whatever then!” was my unappreciative, rude and short reply before I hung up in disgust, acting like he meant to be late from work. Like he didn’t give a damn about what I was going through. Doesn’t he know that I need help over here?!!!

Fast forward an hour or so and hubby walked through the door to a pissed off wife, a grunt as I handed over a child to be washed and as I continued to do the relentless amount of chores needing to be done.

What must it have been like to live with me back then? A nightmare! And my husband is not afraid to tell me so.

So today, I want you to think about what you are like to live with? If you work from home, or perhaps go to work during the day and at the end of the day you are tired, what is it like for the other people in your family to have to deal with you?

I want you to think about this because quite often, we look to others to blame them for how they are treating us and what they are doing to make us unhappy. But how often do we turn those pointed fingers back around to ourselves and see the part that we play in our relationships?

What if, today when you got home, or your partner gets home, you greet them with a smile, a ‘how was your day’, a “I really missed you today”  and a warmth that serves to mix things up a bit.

Make an effort and you might just find that those ‘feral’ times of the day, don’t have to be so feral.

Taking Responsibility,

Jackie

Quite often I read the posts of people introducing themselves on my Live programs, and I think “Wow, you’ve got so much going on.  Where should we start first.”

So this post is to help those of you who are feeling this way about your life and parenthood.

What do you want?

A seemingly simple question, yet one that is not often answered with specifics, or if it is, it is answered as more than a wish then a serious goal or expectation.

But this by far is the most important question to ask yourself when you feel like you’re drowning, because we often get sucked into the vortex of seeing everything we don’t have.

I can tell you that there are no solutions down that road.

What is it that you want in your parenting experience?
What is it that you want in your relationships?
What sort of relationship do you want with your kids, your family, etc.?
What does the ideal work/life balance look like?
What sort of person do you want to be?

Sit down with yourself and look at every area of your life and think about what the ideal would look like. What sort of life do you want to create for yourself? What would make you happy?

When you’ve done that, ask yourself whether you have been specific about these wants. When you look at those wants, would you be able to tell that you had achieved them?  Or can you be even more specific?

Knowing what you want is the first step to changing your life, because it gives you a direction to go in.  From this point, you can then begin to focus on how to get this information, where you can find the information that will help you to get there and who can teach it to you.

Struggles in life don’t mean a failed life. They just mean you lost your direction, or you haven’t yet learnt the skills required to get you there. Don’t waste time thinking about that though, just focus on what you want and how to learn so you can get there!

Free yourself and redesign your life.

Jackie

Because your perception is of being time poor, I’m just going to give you those 5 steps straight up.

1. What do you want? Be specific. What does organised look like? Write it down.
2. Write down everything that is in your day/week that needs attention and how much time that would take to get those things done.
3. Write down other things that you’d like to have time to do and allocate time for that.
4. What do you need in order to reach this goal? Support? More outside help?
5. What is your plan of attack? How can you get these things into a schedule that’s do able?

I ask you, in those five steps, how many times did I ask you to tell me:

• How much time you DON’T have
• What you DON”T want
• How everything else always takes priority and no one cares about you
• How you never get anything done.

Yet how often do we roll in that story? It’s time to get solution focused. There are organised people out there and you could be one of them. It all starts with focusing on what you want and then creating opportunities and planning your life to get what you want.

Create a plan and take action!

Jackie

Becoming a parent is a HUGE transition and often, we don’t deliberately take the time to mentally adjust to the change.

We get stuck in identifying ourselves with the past and what life used to be like, but the reality is (there’s that bloody reality again, lol) that life HAS changed and it CAN’T be the way it used to be.

You need to let it go and instead, focus on what you want for your life NOW and how you can fit it in around your kids.

Too often, we focus our attention on what we’re missing out on and I’d love a dollar for every time I’ve asked someone, “So what would the ideal be? What do you want?” And they’ve said, “I don’t know”.

Umm, well, how can you possibly expect to be enjoying your life when you keep looking for everything you don’t have but have no clarity on what you want?

Who do you want to be?

How do you want to construct your life?

What sort of parent do you want to be?

What experiences would you like to have?

Once you’ve established that, then you need to follow the great advice that a friend once told me:

“You decide what it is you want to do, then you plot and scheme around your kids to do it.”

LOVE IT!

The only reason why you feel you’ve lost your identity is because you are still trying to identify with a you that doesn’t exist anymore. Life has changed. You need to move with the times and get deliberate about life.

Redefining yourself…..

Jackie

“Nobody knows…..nobody knows but me that I sometimes cry. If I could pretend that I’m asleep when my tears start to fall. I peek out from behind these walls…I think nobody knows…..nobody knows, no….”
Pink

Every day, I put on the facade. My friends didn’t know. My husband sometimes knew. And to everyone else, I was easy-going, happy, friendly and coping well with my two toddlers only 16 months apart. To everyone else, I loved being a mum and had it all under control.

But inside was a war zone – with myself.

It was an endless cycle of loving motherhood, hating motherhood, being tired, pissed off, flipping out in anger, feeling guilty and hating myself. I threw things, screamed, swore, then would see the scared looks on my toddlers’ faces and then fall to my knees in a heap, devastated at the mother I had become.

I felt like I was everything I swore I would never be as a parent and felt I was failing miserably.

But there was no way anyone was ever going to know that. I was the achiever. I got things right! I was SUPPOSED to be a good mother. How could I tell anyone that I had failed? How could I even admit that to myself?

So I sat there and suffered day in and day out until finally, after getting so angry, I slammed a knife on the bench so hard in anger, that it bounced off and narrowly missed my (then) two-year old’s head, I finally realised enough was enough. I had to change, so I dedicated my life to doing exactly that!

After retraining myself to completely change the way I felt about parenthood, I began to educate other parents that YOU ARE NOT ALONE and you don’t have to go through this feeling alone.

You can turn all this around and I want to help you to do so. I don’t want anyone to feel the way that I did.

I want you to know that there are so many parents feeling the same way that you do, the way that I did, and I don’t want you to ever feel ashamed for what’s happening for you right now.

You are not a bad parent. You are a parent who just needs a shift in their mindset, an education in self-worth. A parent who is just receiving a wake-up call for their personal development.

On the other side of this you are a confident, happier, calmer and reality-focused parent who is able to share your new found wisdom with your children and help them avoid depression and anxiety in their futures.

This is, undoubtedly, the hidden good in all this. So when will it be time to learn how to change? Today. Don’t leave it any longer. You can do this.

Showing you the way…

Jackie

To find out how we can help you, head over to our Bring My Family Calm Program that will help you to turn it all around.

This morning was one of those chaotic, can’t find anything, running late, have to get out the door on time, kids have the shits kind of morning. You know the ones. They can potentially lead to you having just as big a meltdown as the kids.

Except, instead of just getting over it, like the kids do, these mornings tend to leave you feeling really guilty all day because of how you treated your kids.

These are the types of thoughts that went on in my head to change the default thinking that usually sends me into anger.

• This is just one of ‘those’ mornings. It’s not a reflection of the rest of my day (or my life).
• The reality is that Ryan can’t find his shoes so I’m going to have to help him look for them. Now where could they be?
• Jackie, stop! The reality is that Ryan (8yo) has woken up in a feral mood. Do you really think shouting at him and getting angry is going to get him out of it? Just give him a hug instead. Get out of the world of you and your ‘late-ness’ and focus on Ryan and what he needs from you right now. You know this is more likely to speed him up.
• Seriously, how much later am I really going to be. Is it really going to matter if I’m 15 minutes late. Calm down. Take a step back and focus on what we need to do. The reality is, this morning didn’t go to plan.  It happens. Move on.
• When I finally get out the door, these moments are going to be a thing of the past. It won’t even matter by this afternoon.
• Change the picture! I know you wanted the dishes done before you left, but today, it’s just not going to happen. That’s okay. Life will go on and that doesn’t matter either.

Oh yes, I’m going to say it again:

 All stress is conflict between beliefs (what you’re thinking) and reality.

Notice your thoughts that send you into stress and anger and practice pulling your attention into alignment with reality by accepting what is in front of you, looking at it from the perspective of the bigger picture and get solution focused about it.

In the grand scheme of things, will it really matter in one year’s time?

Keeping it real…

Jackie