Consider how you feel when someone speaks to you in a calm, clear, and confident manner that conveys warmth and caring. For me, I imagine feeling safe and respected. When our children feel this way, they are able to relax into learning and cooperating with greater ease. Their nervous systems sense a loving connection with the other person.
Every parent needs to learn to model calm if they want a calmer household.
Your calm energy has a magnetic force that attracts your child into calmer behavior.
The positive attraction that your calmness creates within your family will allow you to feel more clear and confident as well. Because our children learn far more from what we do than what we say, you will nurture these qualities in your children as well. Check out these essential parenting tips to nurture connection and cooperation.
Calm
Use your parenting superpower of calm, magnetic energy to communicate with your children.
Many people who schedule calls with me reach out because they want to feel calm instead of angry, anxious, or aggravated in response to behaviors of their kids and other people. They feel shame, frustration, and overwhelm and want to feel better. All of us feel this way as parents at different times of our lives. I know I did, and still do from time to time. It’s part of life.
Within just a few sessions, my parent coaching clients start to feel more aware of what’s happening inside of themselves and their children, and gain the ability to be more calm – not every time, but more and more often.
As we attend to their parenting needs and feelings, they:
- learn to use their calm energy
- communicate more clearly
- feel more confident and at ease.
Parents report that their kids’ behavior improves dramatically when they, as parents, stay calm. Your inner calm serves as a love magnet that attracts your whole family into being more calm. Your children will feel more connected and cooperative.
So, how do we get calm in the face of hard moments with our kids and partners?
1. Tune in to your body. Our bodies register emotions before our minds catch up. Practice noticing your body’s feelings at different moments of the day when different emotions arise. Where do you feel tension, excitement, sadness, love, anger, delight?
2. Notice and practice what works to change your emotional state. I’ve written about many practices you can use in other blogs, which I’ll link to at the end, but here are a few of my favorites to try:
- Pause and notice what you are experiencing with each of your 5 senses – sight, hearing, smell, feeling, and taste. After you do this, notice your internal body with your 6th sense – how does the inside of your body feel now?
- Close your eyes and take a breath. Shutting off the stimulation of an angry child’s face or an irritating situation and taking a breath can help you to pause and calm your nervous system.
- Zoom out to see the bigger picture. What do you each need? Giving ourselves a moment to get perspective is often enough to help us calm down and regain access to our wise mind and deeper priorities.
3. Try repeating a mantra that helps you calm down. Here a few my clients and I have found to be useful:
- “My child is/children are not out to get me. He/She/They are having a hard time and need me to be strong and calm.”
- “I am a grownup and I can handle this.”
- “This is just one moment in time and this, too, shall pass. We will be ok.”
- “What does my child really need and want right now? How can I attend to that need?”
- “Everything is going to be ok. We can get through this together. I am ok. My child is ok.”
When you model ways of calming yourself down, your children benefit in two ways. They feel more calm from your shift in energy AND they learn what to do to feel calm by watching you calm yourself.
They learn much more from what we do than from what we say.
Remember that you have the superpower of being a magnet of calm. When people are calm, they feel more loving, connected, and cooperative, which brings about greater peace and harmony in your family.
Clear
Clear communication improves parent-child relationships.
Many of us talk more when we get anxious about time or upset with unpleasant behaviors. If our kids are already overstimulated, they will tune us out. Or, worse, they may hear us speak in ways we would never want them to repeat back to us. (“Get in the car now!!! Why are you always so slow? What is your problem?” or expletives we are not proud of…) Then we are stuck in a cycle of having to apologize and feel hypocritical when we tell them to stop acting the way we act when we are upset. Every parent needs some calm to get clear so we can step out of this cycle.
It’s worth taking the time to get clear on what is most important. When we focus on the essentials, our kids know what to do. In this way, we help everyone feel more calm. And as Brene Brown says, “Clear is Kind. Unclear is Unkind” When we are unclear and then blame our kids for not cooperating, we are being unkind.
Try these 6 communication strategies to be more clear with your kids:
1. Less is more. Use only a few words to express yourself. Kids can understand and remember what you said better this way. Think about what really matters and just talk about that.
2. Do one thing at a time. In Your Brain at Work, David Rock talks about how important it is to consciously focus on one thing at a time to feel more calm, clear, and effective at whatever you are doing. We can help our kids feel more relaxed when we focus on one thing at a time rather than listing all the things they need to do. We can write those things down, but talking about all of them works against our purpose of getting cooperation and focus – both for us and our kids!
3. Use the power of three: Share basic tasks in groups of three short statements so that they become internalized. While we ideally focus on one thing at a time, we also need to teach our kids systems to reduce how often we need to share reminders. Using three short statements helps any of us keep those ideas clear and actionable. You can make up a song to go with these statements to make them even more memorable.
- Shoes off, hands clean, backpack unpacked
- Water bottle in sink, lunch on counter, papers out
- Brush your teeth, pee, and wash your hands
- Safety first, look both ways, pay attention
4. Choose what is most important. Let go of what is not. Everyone benefits.
5. “When…/then…” This pair of phrases can help you shift from the language of threats to incentives. This is positive parenting and it works much better to get calm cooperation.
- When you have…, Then you can…
- When we…, then we can…
6. If something isn’t going well, be brief and clear about what you want for the future. This way your child or partner can collaborate more easily. Plus, you avoid slipping into passive aggression, which deteriorates relationships.
- “When you pour the water, please clean up any spills.”
- “I appreciate it when you wipe the counters down after doing the dishes. That makes the kitchen feel ready for the next meal.”
- “When you come inside, I like it when you say hi and let me know you are home.”
As I said in point #2, focus on one thing at a time. Choose one of these strategies and practice it for a week. Write it on a Post It note and put it on your bathroom mirror or a window to remind yourself of your commitment to staying calm, clear, and confident.
Confidence
Like your magnetic sense of calm, your confidence attracts your child into being more cooperative. You might imagine an image that conjures up the idea of confidence for you and hold that image in mind. When you communicate with the energy of that image (a serene lake, a bird soaring overhead, blue waves…) and share your calm, loving, confident energy, your children will listen and cooperate more easily.
During my Inner Counselor Process sessions with my parent coaching clients, people have come up with powerful images that help them to stay calm, clear and confident. You learn to realign with your inner power so that outer triggers bother you less. As parents, we need to stay centered and aligned with our best selves in order to express calm and confidence in our parent-child AND our adult-to-adult communication.
Email me or schedule a Clarity Call to request an Inner Counselor session with me if you are interested in learning more. I can help you come up with your own powerful image and mantras that speak personally to you. The power of these sessions is long-lasting, based on my own experience and that of my clients.
Experiment with these 3 ways to grow your confidence:
1. Believe in yourself and know that you are trying your best. All we can do is the best we can do in a given moment. You are human and always growing and learning. So is your child or teen. If you mess up, apologize, own your behavior, and figure out how to step in earlier / let go more/ set your child and yourself up for more success. Schedule a Clarity Call with me if you need help.
2. Play/ make it fun. When you can be playful and melt your child’s resistance through your warmth and fun, you will feel more confident, loving, and happy.
- Create a race if your child enjoys that.
- Talk and be friendly and interested in your child’s world while your child does their tasks.
- Accompany your child or teen and hand them the next thing for them to do without talking if they are sluggish or resistant. Keep it light and use as few verbal commands as possible.
- Act silly if your child finds that entertaining (and not annoying 🙂).
3. Ignore grumbling if it happens and offer thanks for the contribution being made. Your staying unruffled and calm shows confidence that breeds cooperation.
- If your child grumbles through a task, it’s annoying. However, it will be more likely to get done if you keep your own mouth closed and focus on doing what you are doing so that they can focus on what they need to do. Focus your energy on the tasks that matter to you and keep moving forward.
- After your child completes that task, you can simply say, “Thank you for…” and leave it at that. Your child will have a harder time resisting or staying grumpy if you don’t “bite the hook” (Pema Chödron) of their irritability. Keep on swimming towards what needs to happen.
The more you practice being confident, light, and above the annoyance of grumbling, the more you will feel confident as a parent. You will learn to ride the waves more gracefully as you feel more calm, clear, and confident. Surfing the ocean of life will feel more fun!
Related Blog Posts:
Easy Ways to Get More Cooperation on Chores
How do we inspire our kids to take initiative in preparing, cleaning, organizing, and dealing with the stuff of life?
7 Mindsets for Parental Balance
What you do and how you live your daily life matters more than you realize. As a Zen proverb says, “How you do anything is how you do everything.”
Loving Well: Seven Paths to Connection
We need to connect with ourselves, our children and teens, and each other. How do we do this when we are blazing mad, feeling alone, exhausted, or sick of a familiar pattern?
