Tapping Into Your Parenting Superpower

Sam and Jon back with you again for lesson three in part one of our Mindful Parenting Collection. In this lesson, we're gonna focus on tapping into your parenting superpower. Sounds magical, right? As a parent, you've probably experienced and will experience a number of occurrences in which you might feel completely powerless. The situation might change as your child grows and develops, but no matter what the situation is, it's important to remember that you, the parent, have more power than you think. We're gonna talk about what exactly we mean while exploring the benefits of having affirmations or mantras as part of your parenting toolkit. So, Jon, walk me through this. What kind of power do parents have exactly? A child's most consistent and important teacher and educator is their parent, and your children are always watching. So when you're providing praise, it's noticed. When you're frustrated and providing other feedback, that's noticed. Absolutely. I guess I'm just wondering how you maintain your energy as a parental role model. Yeah, noticing that you don't have to shower them with praise every single moment, it's that when you're in the moment and you notice something that you wanna see them repeat, to just name it, like you did a great job quietly reading while I took that work phone call. When we provide that feedback, we're using our power to help shape their behaviors. We're showing that we see their great efforts. What are other things that you do, little behaviors day to day? You know, I can think of a recent yard work moment, and it required what looked to be a very simple task with a screwdriver, and, well, it was not proving as simple as I would've liked, and so found myself fidgeting with longer than I felt was, you know, appropriate for the task, and I was finding that frustration build inside, and it just happened that it was very close to where one of my children was playing with a water table. I used that moment to just name, wow, I'm feeling very frustrated by this hose right now. I feel like I should be able to do it and I can't. Ugh! I need to take three deep breaths, may feel a little hokey it may feel a little strange, but you better believe that your kids are looking and listening. In that moment of modeling, I was modeling, one, that a parent could have moments of frustration, and the last part is the persistence. Like just because I felt that emotional, that doesn't mean I was not going to attend to the task, but can we use life's day-to-day frustrations to model what we'd like to see our children do when they face similar challenges in this world? I'm curious, could you tell our listeners a little bit about mantras and affirmations? So just thinking about this conversation, you know, we talked about modeling, and then, as we have this aspiration to be...