Hey all! Sorry I know I have been MIA lately. I promised you an update on the parenting course I was taking to help with the yelling at home and I am just now getting around to doing it! One of the parts of the course was about connecting with your kiddos and so I made a conscious effort to get rid of some of the distractions in my life (which I will get into in a sec). With that being said, I really wanted to take the summer and focus on my kids which meant choosing not to write on the blog. If you follow me on social media though you could keep up with the fun and crazy things we did this summer. We had an absolute blast and love trying new things around us and I hope that it gave you new ideas on places to try with your kids!
So, as promised, I wanted to follow-up on the Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids Online course I took. I had SO many of you email me about this course after reading my initial post about my personal struggles, which is a great thing! We can all get overwhelmed with life and it takes some refocusing and reentering to get our happy back! That is exactly what this course did for me! It was LIFE CHANGING!
What I loved most about this course is it really changes your perspective when looking at and interacting with your children. We are so busy with the hustle and bustle of life that we can get sucked into the crazy and lose our cool because our fuse is short. We are tired, depleted and don’t make time for ourselves which is a recipe for disaster!
I could write a book about all the things I learned in this course! It was amazing! I decided to limit it to some of the main topics she focused on and if it interests you, then I suggest to sign up for her next session (I am taking it again, that is how awesome it was)! I will have deets at the end of the post :)
Stop, Drop and Breath
One of the first things Dr. Markham talks about is controlling our own behavior. Changing our perspective to “this child is a brat, why don’t they just listen” to “my child is acting out because he is hurting inside”. This shift in perspective will start to heal that negative talk inside and better allow you get control of your anger in the day-to-day chaos of raising kids. One of the take aways on this topic that really stuck with me is that how we act on a daily basis is what behavior we are modeling for our kids. So if we wonder why our kids are yelling at each other (which they will because they are kids), we should first look at how we treat them because they really do model what they see.
Connection
This topic was HUGE for me! Her take is that parenting is 80% connection and only 20% guidance, because until children feel connected they have no reason to follow our guidance.
I always felt like I had plenty of connection time with my kids. I quit my job to stay at home so I could tend to their every need for crying out loud! BUT, I quickly realized that a lot of the time was spent doing house work, tending to the schedule, cooking and cleaning up and then cooking again…. just the day-to-day stuff. When my kids needed me, I would say “in a minute” or “not now I am too busy”.
If you struggle with this, I HIGHLY recommend the book series Hand Free Mama. If you don’t mind the electronic version, you can get her first two books on Hoopla for FREE! I would just listen to it at night before bed. It is such an amazing book to help you focus on what REALLY matters in life and what doesn’t. I stole her nightly “talk time” routine and my boys now look forward to it EVERY night!!! If for some reason it doesn’t happen, they throw a fit and make us promise they will get it tomorrow.
I also enlisted some of her “hands free” rules of not being a slave to the phone. I am not big on social media anyways…. I use it for my blog and I like to hit up IG every now and again to see cute pics of my friends kids, but other than that I can’t get sucked into all of that. It gives me anxiety! I will say though, I did feel like I had to answer texts right away and I found myself checking my to do lists 20 times a day (which are also on my phone). I wrote down times I would not look at my phone and it really did help me when I was with the kids to not have all the distractions. I was totally available to them and they could feel that. I personally think it makes them feel like nothing is more important than them… which is true, but they may not view it that when we are constantly telling them to “hold on” or “in a minute”.
Special Time is something else she covered in the connection portion of the book. It may not be possible to do this every day, but she recommends around 10 minutes (or more if you can spare it) with each child where it is just you and them. They pick what you will do and you give them your undivided attention. Set a timer so it doesn’t go on forever, but be in the moment during their set time. I have found that this has been HUGE for my middle son. When we do it consistently, he is less defiant and more willing to do the things I ask of him. When I don’t make the time for it, his behavior isn’t as good. I also find that he asks for it every day without fail which means he really needs it!
Empathy 24-7
This is HARD for me. Dr. Markham teaches that until you acknowledge your child’s feelings, regardless of how minimal you think it is, your child won’t be willing to listen to what you are trying to tell them. The basic concept is don’t minimize their feelings. They are whining yet again about homework and rather than say “Oh stop crying, this will only take you 5 minutes”, say “I know how hard this is for you sweetie. Stopping what you are doing to finish your homework can be so frustrating when all you want to do is play with your friends. I understand”. The idea behind this is that this will allow them feel like they can have any feeling they want in front of you and that you will always accept all feelings which will, in turn, allow them to share more and more with you as they get older and have even bigger feelings.
Be a Playful Parent
Kids have a lot of anxiety and fears from the day. Getting kids laughing expels a lot of those fears and anxieties so have fun with your kids and roughhouse with them as much as you can. It will help you both!
I thought long and hard about how to write this blog post. There is SO much I learned and unless you take the course it is really hard to explain it all. These were just a few topics that scratched the surface of the course. I have 27 pages of notes from the course if that puts things into perspective for you! I wish I had found this on day one of being a parent. There are a few thing she teaches that I am still trying to figure out if they fit in our family (like discipline), but most everything she teaches is something I want our family to be apart of. This may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I honestly would recommend this to everyone who is a parent. You may not like everything that is in the course or even want to adopt everything she teaches, but I can guarantee you will find many, many things you do like and that will help you be a happier and more connected parent.
You can check out more on Dr. Markham and her teachings on her website. If you like what you see or what yo have read in this post you can enroll in her online course which is FAB! You can read more about the course here. What is even cooler is that after you have taken the course for the first time, you are a lifetime “member” so you will be able to repeat the course as many times as you want. I am taking it again as a refresher since there was so much info to cover when I went through it the first time.
Registration for the Autumn course ends on September 15th and the course starts on September 21! Let me know if you decided to take it! You won’t regret it!
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