Have you ever paused during the holiday frenzy, amidst the torn wrapping paper and sugar-fueled children, to wonder where the joy in parenting went? Let's embark on a journey together, redefining what it means to find true happiness as a parent. This episode we are peeling back the layers of daily chaos to uncover the sweet spots of pleasure, accomplishment, and meaning in our parenting practices.
BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU’LL DISCOVER:
Re-define happiness,
Have the secret to atainable relaxation (*YES, even in your super busy life as a parent),
Increase Joy with 2 unconventional actions in your daily life.
As we toast to a fulfilling new year, I want to remind you that these days and months ahead of us are not just times we want to "get through." They're the moments for milestones of success in building character, fostering independence, and nurturing sibling bonds that last a lifetime.
With an eye towards 2024, I'm here to guide you through parenting with both kindness and firmness, offering strategies that promise a more sustainable and rewarding journey.
Join us as we commit to growing alongside our children, armed with love, patience, and an unwavering dedication to their blossoming into amazing individuals.
✨Want more?
1) If you are in a space where you REALLY DESIRE SPACE FOR REJUVENATION, join me on the DAY OPTION, or OVERNIGHT option of the "Rooted and Reaching - Sustainable Parenting Glamping Women's Retreat."
Have you ever paused during the holiday frenzy, amidst the torn wrapping paper and sugar-fueled children, to wonder where the joy in parenting went? Let's embark on a journey together, redefining what it means to find true happiness as a parent. This episode we are peeling back the layers of daily chaos to uncover the sweet spots of pleasure, accomplishment, and meaning in our parenting practices.
BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU’LL DISCOVER:
Re-define happiness,
Have the secret to atainable relaxation (*YES, even in your super busy life as a parent),
Increase Joy with 2 unconventional actions in your daily life.
As we toast to a fulfilling new year, I want to remind you that these days and months ahead of us are not just times we want to "get through." They're the moments for milestones of success in building character, fostering independence, and nurturing sibling bonds that last a lifetime.
With an eye towards 2024, I'm here to guide you through parenting with both kindness and firmness, offering strategies that promise a more sustainable and rewarding journey.
Join us as we commit to growing alongside our children, armed with love, patience, and an unwavering dedication to their blossoming into amazing individuals.
✨Want more?
1) If you are in a space where you REALLY DESIRE SPACE FOR REJUVENATION, join me on the DAY OPTION, or OVERNIGHT option of the "Rooted and Reaching - Sustainable Parenting Glamping Women's Retreat."
you're listening to episode 38 of the Sustainable Parenting Podcast and, friend, this is holiday week and right before going into the new year of 2024. And I want to address if this has felt like your only possible New Year's resolution is to just flip and survive. Friend, I want to talk to you about what could be different if you're feeling that way and the three key pieces I believe could help you to feel happier in your role as a mom or dad in 2024. Hello and welcome to the Sustainable Parenting Podcast. Let me tell you, friend, this place is different. We fill that gap between gentle parenting and harsh discipline that's really missing to parent with kindness and firmness at the same time and give you the exact steps to be able to parent in ways that are more realistic and effective and, for that reason, finally feel sustainable. Welcome.
Speaker 1:
Now I want to let you know that this is totally not at all a place where I'm just going to be polyanna about, like how to smile and just love these precious moments and know that they are going to go by so fast. I totally get that. No, it is a space in time, especially the younger your kids are, where, dang, it can feel like the days are so long and people say the days are long but the years are short. You will look back and even these most challenging days that feel like they last so long will feel like they've gone by in a flash. Well, I have an eight and 10 year old now. My oldest first baby just turned 10. And I definitely can attest to the fact that it now, looking backwards, feels like those years went fast, but I can 1000% also attest to how long the days felt when the kids, especially, were between like zero and five. So, friend, if you're feeling like you're in a place of just trying to survive it, I see you. I want to acknowledge you, I want to appreciate you. If no one else in your life has said thank you, I wanted to be the one that does. I want to be one that says, friend, thank you for caring so much to be the type of mom that listens to a parenting podcast, that is the type of dad that listens to a parenting podcast. Because you care that much about learning how to do this job, this part of your life, as positively and effectively as possible. I appreciate you so much. On behalf of your kids, I want to say thank you. Thank you for creating human beings in this world that are going to be filled with love and character because of all the work you're doing. Thank you, and friend.
Speaker 1:
If you would like to be able to move a bit towards the direction of more happiness and joy this year, instead of just survival, I want to suggest just three small things that I recently learned about happiness that I feel are actually quite attainable for all of us, even in the most challenging periods of parenting. I recently learned that the three key components of happiness are pleasure, enjoyment. Number two, satisfaction from accomplishments. And number three, a deep sense of meaning. Friend, let's hop from one to three and then back to two. So on that first one, pleasure enjoyment. I am not telling you to be fake about this, but I want to suggest two key things that really helped me to find more enjoyment in those most challenging, monotonous times of parenting, where it felt like it was Groundhog Day and I had been cast as the Neverending Wiper, the Neverending Meal Maker and Meal Cleaner Upper, the Neverending Referee between siblings. These two things really help me to find more pleasure and enjoyment.
Speaker 1:
The first thing is to take a secret from mindfulness that we know. That is also a key secret now in effective psychology, which is the ability to have your mind be present in this one moment at a time, can really increase your enjoyment and pleasure of that moment. So, as silly as it may seem, if your kid is asking you to play blocks with them or color with them, or go on a walk with them or go to the park, see what you can do to put your mind on just that activity. While you choose to do that activity with them, try to shut off your brain from running the grocery list and thinking about how you're going to schedule what's going on during spring break and be present. Research shows us time and again that the more we can be present in tiny moments, it can greatly increase our sense of joy, because there's something just symbiotic between a singularity of mind, a simplicity of your mind and feeling just kind of an exhale, and more presence leads to more pleasure. So let more presence in that moment lead to more sense of pleasure. The second thing that really helped me is to shift. Shift how you define relaxing.
Speaker 1:
My husband and I found that when the kids were little we often would get in these spaces where we just wanted to unplug from the monotony of childhood experiences with them. I was a stay at home mom. He was coming home from his work day and I was like, oh, we didn't really want to engage in dinosaurs and you know playdough. And yet if we were trying to unwind by getting on our phones and binging, kind of just scrolling, thinking that was going to be the most relaxing A it wasn't really rejuvenating. It just kind of gets your mind stirring and sometimes you just see stuff that either makes you more jealous of everyone else who seems to have it all together or makes you flooded with input of information that you think you should be absorbing and doing something with. Like you really don't leave any happier when you have taken your phone out as a way to try to unwind at the end of the day and relax, and also we would find ourselves just feeling like the kids were a distraction, pulling us away from this thing we deserved to get to do of being on our phone and quote relaxing and rebooting in that way. So when we both like experimented with resetting and redefining what it meant to relax and lean more into what the first part I was saying about mindfulness mindfully being present in order to experience more pleasure it involved putting our phones down and seeking that hour to three hours between picking the kids up and getting them into bed, and redefined it as more of a place where we were able to be present and find relaxation and rebooting through that mindful, just being present and playful. So for now, invite you to seek more pleasure, enjoyment in the present moment of playfulness. Try to put those tasks aside for those small windows that you have with your kids at the end of the day and then, if you want to binge watch something after they're in bed, perhaps you do that.
Speaker 1:
Second key thing I want you to think about in terms of how to have more happiness is the sense of satisfaction. Second key tool that can give you more happiness this year, friend, is having a way to have a deep sense of meaning, and one small, very doable way to think about how we could have more of this in our lives is to just seek a way to have an experience that involves a sense of awe. There's a lot of new research out that's telling us that if we can put ourselves in places where we feel a sense of awe, it gives us true, deep happiness. It adds into that bank. So whether that be participating in your spiritual community, or going out and looking at the stars and all their vastness, or in considering how big the universes are, or it means that you go out and walk amongst the big, large, ancient trees or just look up at the big, bright, beautiful blue sky. Look for some moments where you can let yourself feel small and stand in wonder and awe and appreciation of those things much bigger than yourself. These are the top two ways so far that I have learned through research and listening to other experts can greatly increase our sense of happiness.
Speaker 1:
And the third I want to offer you is a sense of satisfaction from your accomplishments. And I can tell you, especially in that phase where I was a stay-at-home mom and I put my career on hold, it was really really hard to feel any sense of accomplishment. Like the life of parenting has lots of cyclical, not moving forward type of experiences. We make something, we clean it up, we make something, we clean it up, we create, we clean up. Just on repeat, as soon as an area is clean, it seems like it's dirty again. So it can be really hard to feel a sense of satisfaction from accomplishment.
Speaker 1:
But I want to offer you something If you would like to feel more sense of accomplishment in your role as a mom or dad, in your effectiveness of how you are building character, how you are shifting them from a child who can't go to sleep on their own to a child who can. How you are nurturing and growing your child's palate for different types of foods, how you are able to help your kids, as siblings, get along better with one another. That, my friend, is something that can totally be improved and I would love to help you get there. I have helped over a hundred people in the last year in my highest level of direct consulting work and thousands in various channels where folks are coming to self-paced courses in this past year and I would love for you to be the next on that list that leaves viewing a workshop or a coaching session with me and is messaging me things like yes, we finally got a wonderful night's sleep and it felt so good.
Speaker 1:
Like a mom last night texted me and she's like not a creature was stirring, except for mom and the dog who are getting ready for bed because my kids were asleep, or another mom who just texted me.
Speaker 1:
Oh, my gosh, I finally did the things that we've been talking about and I'm realizing this is more about me than my child, and I'm starting to see how much more powerful I can be when I focus on myself and what I can change in the situation, and how powerfully that changes our whole family dynamic. I'm feeling so much more powerful as a mom. Friend, I would love for that to be you. So if you have been listening and you're going into 2024 really eager to be in a place where you feel more sense of accomplishment in your role as mom or dad friend, let's connect In the show notes. You can find a way to set up a clarity call with me or find more at my website, sustainableparentingcom, and I so look forward to seeing you again in the new year, in 2024, where we are all together going to be parenting with more kindness and firmness at the same time, so that parenting finally feels sustainable.