119: Aligning Your Parenting With Your Values

Your Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive

Ever have a vague sense that your interactions with your child aren't quite aligned with your values...but aren't quite sure what to do about it? Have you been to a protest and shouted "Black Lives Matter! Fight the Power!"...and then gone home and forced your child to brush their teeth? Have you chastised Grandma for 'stealing' kisses from your child because it disrespects their body autonomy...and then pinned them down for a haircut? You're not alone. We're in this weird place where we know we want to do things differently than the way we were raised. But cultural norms are still telling us: we need to be in charge. (Because if we aren't in charge, who is?) A conversation with the hosts of Upbringing My guests today, Hannah and Kelty of the Upbringing podcast, see this dissonance more clearly than almost anyone I've met. In their podcast they explore how we live one way as people (who believe in freedom! respect! consent! empathy!) and another way as parents (timeouts, shame, control, consequences), and how we're unwittingly undermining the very skills and values we hope to promote. But blaming and shaming helps nobody (not us...and certainly not our children). By instead approaching the topic with compassion and optimism, we can get out of an us vs. them relationship with our children, and take back our parenting practices from our cultural conditioning, and parent in relationship with our children in a way that's deeply aligned with our values. Hannah and Kelty describe their RESIST approach (Respect, Empathy, Sync up, Innovate, Summarize, Trust) and also have a new guide to navigating sibling conflict (use discount code MOJO at checkout for 15% off!) on their beautiful website. If our conversation strikes a chord, I'd definitely encourage you to check out their podcast and weekly Q&As on Instagram.

Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits Workshop

Do you have a child aged 1 - 10? Are they resisting, ignoring you, and talking back at every request you make? Do you often feel frustrated, annoyed, and even angry with them? Are you desperate for their cooperation - but don't know how to get it? If your children are constantly testing limits, the Setting Loving (& Effective!) Limits workshop is for you.

Go from constant struggles and nagging to a new sense of calm & collaboration. I will teach you how to set limits, but we'll also go waaaay beyond that to learn how to set fewer limits than you ever thought possible. Sign up now to join the waitlist for the FREE workshop that will start on April 24, 2024. Click the banner to learn more:

[accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen 00:03 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives. But it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released and get a FREE Guide to 7 Parenting Myths That We Can Safely Leave Behind, seven fewer things to worry about. Subscribe to the show at YourParentingMojo.com. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us. Jen 01:01 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. We actually have two special guests with us today, but I wanted to record a separate introduction to give this episode some context. So my guest for this episode are Hannah and Kelty from the Upbringing Podcast, and I was recently introduced to their work by listener of Dana (Thanks, Dana!), and as soon as I started listening, I knew that I had to get them on the show. Their worldview is really similar to mine. And I hope that you enjoy hearing some of the ideas that have come up before on the show discussed from a new perspective. And if you find yourself nodding along to a lot of the ideas you're hearing about in this episode, but you see a gap between those ideas and the way that you're currently interacting with your child, then I also wanted to let you know that my Finding Your Parenting Mojo Membership is now accepting new members. In the membership we take a lot of the ideas that you hear about on the show and turn them into tools you can actually use and really implement to help your real-life family. If you want to learn more about it, you can find all the details at YourParentingMojo.com/MEMBERSHIP. Jen 01:59 Now, if you've looked at the membership before, but you haven't joined, then I'd encourage you to check it out again, because I've actually restructured it to make the content even more useful to you. I've broken it down so that you can just get the first three modules of core content if you'd like to do that, without committing to a whole year of the membership. I'm calling this the "First Aid Kit Option" because it has all the tools that you need to take care of some of your most pressing problems, and you get access to all of that content at once. In those first three modules, we dramatically reduce the incidence of tantrums at your house by focusing on the underlying causes, rather than just the behavior that you don't want to see, or by distracting your child from feeling their true emotions. After we've created a bit of mental and emotional space, we take a step back and we think about the ways our relationship with our partner is impacting our parenting. So where are we on the same page - and things are going pretty well - and where are we not on the same page and we need to be more aligned. And where is it okay for us to have different ways of doing things and how can we have a conversation about those things with our partners so it doesn't make them defensive, but instead invites them to share their real feelings with us so we can share ours with them, and figure out a way forward that works for both of us. Jen 03:11 And once we have those tools to interact with our partner, we can work on defining our family goals and values together, so we actually have an idea about what direction we're heading in. We're not just setting arbitrary limits and the moment and then we find ourselves giving in on them. We're setting limits that are grounded in what's really important to us. We now know how to have a conversation with the in-laws about something that's been really bugging us, because we've identified the fact that it's super important to us. Or on the flip side, maybe we even realize there are some things we can just let go and stop micromanaging. To make sure that you're able to put these ideas into action, you'll get access to short Q&A videos that you can watch anytime to get immediate answers to the questions that parents most often ask. For three months you'll be welcomed into our private community full of parents who have chosen to raise their children intentionally just like you. And you'll be able to work directly with a small group of them to translate the big ideas into the tiny steps you need to take to achieve what's really important to you and your family. And that is the option to get what is basically a parenting insurance. This option takes everything you get in that first aid kit option and says, okay, now we've got the basics under control. Let's see about doing things like raising healthy eaters, moving beyond the constant sibling squabbles to our supportive sibling relationship, navigating screen time, both parental and child anxiety. And let's take a year to really move the needle on those topics. So, you're looking at a total of 12 topics in total over the course of the year. And the reason I consider that first aid kit to be the core content is because without that, you can't really make progress on the other stuff that seems like they are more immediate problems like food and sibling squabbles and screen time. They may seem more pressing right now. But if you don't know how to have a conversation with your child that takes their feelings and needs into account, and looks for solutions that worked for both of you, you won't be able to understand why they're eating so few foods right now. If you haven't developed the skills to have conversations that don't get your partner's back up, you're not going to be able to talk with them about why they force your child to clean their plate at every meal. And if you haven't done the work on your values and goals, then you won't know whether this issue is one you need to address with your in laws before you next visit their house, or whether it's something you've just decided to let go. Jen 05:27 So, in the Parenting Insurance, you get all of that core content plus the nine additional modules the Q&A, a year in the private community, and the small group support. And once again, you can access all of this content as soon as your first login. You also get a host of bonuses like the Setting Limits Course that I ran earlier this year and a set of conversation starter cards so you can have meaningful interactions with your child and even your spouse over dinner that gives you some insight into their world. It includes the Getting Back on Track Pack which contains seven beautiful home screen images for your phone with mindfulness reminders. For specially recorded five-minute meditations to help you in those moments when your child's behavior is driving you up the wall, and you retreat to the bathroom to regroup. And there's a fantastic one-page infographic to summarize your plan of action for when that happens, you can post it over the toilet if you'd like. And it includes a discount on the Your Child's Learning Mojo Membership, which is also open for enrollment, which helps you to support your child's intrinsic love of learning, which I would say is more important now than it ever has been when our children are primarily learning in an online environment that's not supporting that intrinsic motivation to learn, as well as an option to get a 33% discount on a package of private coaching calls with me. Jen 06:40 And I actually didn't pick those names for the packages out of thin air. About 18 months ago a parent in the Finding Your Parenting Mojo Membership, so she started to think of it like Parenting Insurance for times when things get rough. And at the beginning of the COVID lockdown, so I hosted some calls for members where we didn't aim to brainstorm solutions to problems or to fix Anything, but we just held this space for all the difficult complicated things that we were all feeling. One parent who spoke was just in tears, and she explained that she was in full lockdown in a very small apartment in Madrid with a partner and two children. And it actually turned out the children weren't able to go outside at all for over a month. She was exhausted and very emotional but through the tears, she said she felt that she had been spending the last year that she'd been in the Membership in bootcamp, preparing for exactly that moment. She was able to acknowledge all of the things that she was feeling and be present with those things rather than stuffing them down and support her children's anxious feelings and find solutions to problems and have difficult conversations with her partner instead of having these little squabbles turned into major problems. Jen 07:46 And in that moment, I knew that this work that I'm doing to support parents is really helping, even in the most stressful conditions we can imagine. And the good news for you is that Finding Your Parenting Mojo isn't exactly like insurance, which won't take you if you have pre-existing health conditions. We welcome pre-existing parenting conditions. We meet you exactly where you are, and we help you move toward where you want to go with as much support as you need to make it happen. So, if you'd like to join us, just head on over to YourParentingMojo.com/MEMBERSHIP for all the details. And now let's go and meet Hannah and Kelty! Jen 08:22 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast! Today we have two special guests. Here with us is Hannah and Kelty from the Upbringing Podcast, I'm so excited that you're here. Thanks so much for joining us. Hannah 08:33 Thanks for having us. We're excited to be here. Jen 08:35 So, I wonder if you could start by introducing yourselves please because there are two of you and you look similar except for the hair. Your voices are similar for those of you who are listening on the podcast. So yeah, please, please go ahead and tell us who you are and about the Upbringing show as well. Hannah 08:50 Yeah, we usually introduce ourselves as twins, moms, but works in progress, feminists... Kelty 08:57 Tired people. Hannah 08:58 ... tired [people] and parenting coaches who are basically working to empower parents and empower one another, to grow up alongside our kids for what we call sanity and social change. That's our primary goal. So we do that through our podcast, which has been going for a little over a year, and through one on one coaching and then through our Instagram community where we do live Q&As and videos and have just a wonderful community of folks that we're growing up alongside. What about our trainings and backgrounds just so people can... Kelty 09:31 Yeah, we're trained in simplicity, parenting, and positive discipline, and RIE foundations training. Hannah 09:39 Then we have, we're currently parenting in captivity on a farm that we share with our partners. And then between the two of us we have four kids ages 3, 4, 5 and 6. And so that is another one of our biggest teachers, obviously, is our brood of children. Yeah. Mm hmm. Jen 09:57 Yeah. Okay. And you sound similar for those who are only listening. For those who are watching on YouTube. Who's Hannah and who's Kelty? Hannah 10:04 Redhead,[is] Hannah. Jen 10:05 Redhead, Hannah. Hannah 10:06 The hair. Yes. Kelty 10:07 Yeah. Jen 10:07 Okay, right we're clear on that. Hannah 10:08 The color is... Kelty 10:09 I'll answer to anything impossible. Thank you... Hannah 10:10 It's like an interesting pandemic Hombre situation right now. Jen 10:12 And we should give a hat tip to our mutual listener as well, Dana, right? She, she connected us, she reached out and said, hey, do you want to be connected? And I hadn't heard of your show before. And I looked at your website. And I said, Yes, yes, yes, I want to be connected. Hannah 10:33 And then Meanwhile, we've been fans of yours for years and never thought we would end up getting to actually talk to you on your podcast. We feel so lucky it's like we're pinching ourselves. I might wake up any moment. Jen 10:45 Well, thank you very much. That's very kind. So, so you describe yourselves as feminists, which can be difficult word. About 20% of my audience is male. And so, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about whether you've always been feminists or is this something that is more recent development. Hannah 11:01 I think that we call ourselves feminists because it is, in some ways a buzzword. Feminism is kind of a lifestyle brand these days and a lot more people are, are kind of moving their mindset and their thoughts about what feminism is from the bra-burning type... You know, yeah, that type of situation to the like, Okay, everyone is a feminist who believes in women's rights. And I think that we to expand on that. I mean, we're more like, humanists. If that's a thing, I think that we would identify as humanists because it, it all is about equal rights for everybody, not just women. So that's kind of how we identify I would say, but we haven't, I wouldn't say we'd always identified as feminists. Would you Kelty? Kelty 11:19 Man hating, yeah. No, I think, I think the way we we've explored it is that we our kids have kind of made us feminists. Having kids who, at a certain point, maybe in early toddlerhood began resisting us, at every turn, kind of made us look at our resistance and the things that we were passionate about and our outreach and our communities and what we really cared about, right? Hannah 12:02 Mm hmm. Yeah, I think that kids are born feminists in that way. They are fiercely able to advocate they're unapologetically advocating for themselves all the time. They haven't when we call really strong inner wisdom and inner authority to see to their needs. And I think that that's something that we are re-kind of-kindling in our mid-30s. I never remember how old we are. Kelty 12:23 It's closer than that. Hannah 12:24 Okay. And that raising them in this way and thinking about the ways we're raising them to be and stay connected to that inner wisdom and authority. That human spirit has allowed us to reconnect to our own human spirit, our own feminism, our own humanity in that greater sense of the word. Jen 12:42 Yeah, thanks for sharing that. I think it really speaks back to the patriarchy episode that I recorded with Dr. Carol Gilligan and one of my listeners who's a male and working on feminism and dismantling patriarchy and yeah, these we set these arbitrary boundaries room - this is a male quality and its valued and this is a female quality and it's not valued, and intuition and knowing ourselves and knowing our bodies really falls on that feminine side, doesn't it? And but there's so much value for all of us to understand these things that our children know that and it's through interacting with us in our culture that they forget it, they learned that it's that should be tamped down. And if we can, if we can actually listen to them for a change, then we can actually learn something.