Shownotes
For the first time, in this episode I bow out and and let listeners Jenny and Emma take over, who wanted to share how they’ve been supporting each other over the last few months.
They started from pretty different points: Emma wasn’t having parenting struggles, but often over-communicated with her husband and he would stonewall in response, agreeing to whatever she asked so she would stop talking. Then he would resist later, and she couldn’t understand why…because he had agreed, right?
Jenny’s sleep had been disturbed by her child for more than four years…she was exhausted, and had no idea how to deal with her rage-filled kindergartener who would hit her whenever he was upset.
Neither of them had much confidence that being on a Zoom call together for 40 minutes a week would help them.
Emma and her husband now communicate in a way that meets both of their needs, and can navigate the challenges that come up with their preschooler.
Jenny is sleeping! And she has learned how deep listening and true empathy help her son to feel really heard…and incidents that used to lead to 45 minute meltdowns that would disrupt the rest of the day are now over in 10 minutes, and are actually connecting for them.
Jenny and Emma did all this with a bit of information from me…but mostly by being fully present for each other in a small ‘village’ of parents, inside the slightly larger village of the Parenting Membership.
If you want help to break down the changes you want to make into tiny manageable steps and be held (gently!) accountable for taking them (or adjusting course if needed…), we’d love to have you join the three of us plus a group of likeminded parents in the membership.
Get the information you need and the support to actually implement it, all in what members call “the least judgmental corner of the internet.”
Click the image below to learn more about the Parenting Membership. Join the waitlist to get notified when doors reopen in May 2025.
Jump to highlights:
(01:00) Jenny and Emma came up with the idea to record an episode for the podcast to talk about how their parenting has changed over the last year.(01:55) Emma wasn’t having major problems, but wanted to be prepared for the challenges that may happen down the road.(02:36) Jenny was struggling because she hadn’t had a full night’s sleep in 4 ½ years…and now prioritizes herself through the support of Emma and the members of the ACTion group.(03:55) An open Invitation to join the Parenting Membership.(04:45) Because Emma is a high achiever, she imagined parenthood to be a breeze.(06:57) Jenny believed that if you are prepared and serene, and you bring this calm energy to your pregnancy, you will have an easy child.(08:24) The lack of understanding of our values is what causes us to be conflicted about becoming parents.(12:00) Our child’s big feelings are their way of letting us know that they are not okay.(14:30) It's great to have a community who we can trust, and who will support and respect our values(16:30) The ACTion group conversation once a week gives parents a foundation to parent more intentionally(18:26) Emma used the problem-solving method to find a solution for her child's resistance during nail cutting by trying to hypothesize her child’s feelings.(20:17) Needs can be met when you remove the ‘shoulds.’(25:31) Jenny’s parenting has been a lot less tense over the past year and a half, which was a wonderful surprise.(30:48) Jenny saw big changes when she used a deep listening technique with her son during an episode of intense anger and frustration, which ended the episode much more quickly than usual!(37:25) It's life-changing to see a profound change in our children and ourselves when both of our needs are fulfilled.
Emma 00:04
Hi, I'm Emma, and I'm listening from the UK we all want our children to lead fulfilled lives. But we're surrounded by conflicting information and clickbait headlines that leave us wondering what to do as parents. The Your Parenting Mojo podcast distills scientific research on parenting and child development into tools parents can actually use every day in their real lives with their real children. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a free infographic on the 13 reasons your child isn't listening to you, and what to do about each one, just head on over to your parentingmojo.com/subscribe. And pretty soon, you're going to get tired of hearing my voice read this intro. So come and record one yourself at your parentingmojo.com/record the intro.
Jen Lumanlan 00:46
Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. Today we're going to do something I've never done before in 150+ episodes of the show, which is that apart from this introduction, I'm not in the show at all. Two listeners, Jenny and Emma reached out to ask if they could record an episode about how their experience in parenting has shifted over the last year or so. And I gave a very cautious acceptance not really having much of an idea of what they wanted to discuss. I've interacted with each of them but not together. And I don't know much about their relationship. And I have to say it's a bit strange to say their names together because my full name is Jenny and my sister's name is Emma. So this is like a different Jenny and Emma show. And then when I listened to the recording of their conversation, I realized how close they've grown over the last year, they both happen to be in the parenting membership. And they're in the same ACTion group, which is a group of up to five parents who meet with an experienced peer leader. And I think that many parents think that that experience isn't really going to be very useful, especially when they're already pretty sick of being on Zoom calls. Jenny and Emma were in very different places in parenting, when they joined the membership, Emma's son was still pretty young. And she and her husband thought, well, we're not really having any problems now. So should we actually spend money on this. And they eventually decided to do it because they wanted to be prepared for challenges that happen down the road. And then challenges did go up. And they felt prepared for them because they'd already been practicing the tools. And when it turned out that some of their big challenges were actually in communication between Emma and her husband, because he was agreeing to do things he didn't really want to do just so she would stop explaining, we had a consult where we were able to identify some of those issues so they could really see what each other's needs were and how to communicate to meet each other's needs. I've seen them both on coaching calls since that consult, but I hadn't talked with them about that specific issue. And I had no idea until I heard this recording how transformational that experience had been. And Jenny sort of came into the membership with her hair on fire because she basically hadn't had a full night of sleep in over four years. And she had very specific ideas about what parenting was going to look like. And it was actually being in that group with Emma and the other parents that gave her permission in a way to prioritize yourself and take the actions that she needed to get sleep on the right track, which freed up her energy for other things, which sounds so incredibly simple, but she hadn't been able to actually do it without that extra support. Jenny tells us about a tool that she learned in the membership called Radical listening, and how such a simple yet profound practice has shifted how her child is able to be in their relationship. And the side benefit is that his big expressions of anger that used to take 45 minutes to work through and really interrupt their day are now over and done within 10 minutes. And they move on with the rest of their day. And now Jenny and Emma have grown so close, they're invested in each other's success. And they know they can show up in tears and looking at a complete wreck and know they won't be judged and they can share their successes and know it won't be a competition about who's doing better than whom because they care about each other so much, Emma certainly and probably Jenny to figure that most of the value they were going to get in the membership would be in the materials that I produce. And yes, they've certainly learned things from that that have helped them. But it's both humbling and wonderful for me to see how they've actually become skilled at using these ideas because of what they've learned from each other. If you'd like to really feel like part of a village and get this kind of support in your own parenting journey, the parenting memberships open for enrollment right now until midnight Pacific this coming Wednesday, May 25. sliding scale pricing is available and so is a money back guarantee. You can find more information at your parentingmojo.com/parentingmembership. And now let's hear from Jenny and Emma themselves.
Jenny 04:16
I'm Jenny and I grew up in the US but now live in Europe with my husband and we have a six year old son.
Emma 04:24
I'm Emma and I have a nearly three year old and I live in the UK
Jenny 04:30
Super. I do have some questions just to help kick things off. So I’m going to start byasking you Emma, what were your expectations of parenthood before becoming a parent? And then once you got there, what was the reality?
Jenny 04:43
I think I expected parenting to be a lot easier as an overachiever in life, I sort of thought well, if I do enough learning in life about it beforehand, then I'll just breeze into it. It'll be a breeze but it would be something more straightforward then it actually is, I'm a teacher by training. So I felt that having the experience with children would be beneficial. I think it has been in some way. But it's been quite a journey actually separating the way that I want to interact with my child from how I've been trained as a teacher, because a school is a very specific setup where the needs are not necessarily looking at the child. And it's not the focus isn't the relationship between the adults and the children, about the academic achievements of the children, as I've been a parent for longer, I have realized that my values don't necessarily align that closely with the goals of the school system. And so my parenting has diverged quite a lot from that as well.
Jenny 05:41
And parenting is at the end of it really all about relationships, right. And that's a very different goal. If you're looking to nurture a relationship versus trying to get a room full of 20 students to learn the same thing.
Emma 05:56
Yeah, absolutely. I think it was a big shock for us as well, my husband's a teacher as well. And I think he has a similar feeling that he thought it was just something that it'd be hard, but we'd be okay. And he sort of said before that his White male privilege, he sort of thought, Well, yeah, there's been lots of things in life that people say hard, but it's been okay. And then parenting sort of hit him in the face, like, oh, no, wait, wait, those things are easy because of my privilege. This is just hard.
Emma 05:56
Universally hard.
Emma 05:59
Yeah. How about you?
Jenny 06:01
A lot of what you just said feels familiar to me, although my background is really different. I was in the corporate worlds in finance, and my upbringing, and and my work experience, it was definitely this feeling of like, if you work hard enough, you're going to be able to achieve anything. And of course, that applies to parenting too. And for me, I have a track record of when things get busy, and the workload increases, I just sleep less and I barrel through and like depend on my stamina. And that set me up for a very unhealthy start with my child. I thought that if you are prepared and you are serene, and you kind of bring this calm energy to your pregnancy, then you're gonna have quote, unquote, easy child, and that an easy child is desirable. There was a lot of talk within my family circle about that, because there have been some easy kids and some not easy kids and all this value wrapped up with having an easy baby. And then my kid arrived and didn't sleep through the night for four and a half years, and was definitely not what I would qualify as the typical easy child. And there was a lot of shame for me in that like, oh, gosh, I must not have been calm enough or secure in my own approach to mothering or whatever it is. And yeah, I just I kind of set myself up for a fall with all of these ideas I had about parenting and and the reality is so different. I also just assumed that it being the 21st century, like, of course, we're going to be smashing gender norms in our family. And that very quickly fell absolutely down when my son was nursing and only wanted me and I ended up doing all the night feeds and all the night stuff. And like just getting to the point where I was so exhausted, I couldn't even articulate my frustration with that situation or do anything about it. So yeah, it was a pretty big wake up call once my son was here.
Emma 08:22
Yeah, I think that was me as well. I don't think I understood my values, and how much they conflicted on becoming a parent, because, you know, similarly, as a staunch feminist in the workplace, I had certain ideas about how I thought things would play out, you know, I thought I'd be back at work.
Jenny 08:38
Yeah.
Emma 08:40
Everything that I used to be that life wouldn't have much changed. And actually, the reality is that didn't work for us is a difficult thing, coming to terms with how much your identity has had to shift and realizing that actually, your order of priorities might be different to what you previously thought.
Jenny 08:57
Absolutely. I don't know if you had some of this too. But I also absolutely thought that I would be back to some sort of work within months, and just the total lack of sleep and constant nursing, put an end to that thought really quickly. And I found myself actually grappling with some inner misogyny and like lots of this kind of work and productivity above everything else training in me. Like I'd be out at the playground with the carriage with my son sitting like, Am I allowed to be here? Shouldn't I be in an office earning money? This feels really weird. feeling like I was playing hooky from life by with my child and things like we gotten to this very stereotypical situation where my husband has become the main breadwinner and for a while I couldn't work but then I was working just part time and me really thinking of it in terms of the financial side of things, valuing his time valuing his sleep and feeling like the work that I did do the sleep that I got, none of it was as important As him and having a lot of anger about that, but that wasn't what he was saying. That's not how he was acting. But it was always an internal process within me that felt like, Okay, now that I'm just a mother, I'm worthless, which I could see and I could feel that it was not a productive thought to be having. But I couldn't stop it for a while, like I was just kind of seeing it rise up in me and realizing that, oh, gosh, what does this say about my beliefs about women about caretaking about my own mother, it took me a long time to kind of get through just the negative feelings about it to someplace that I could think about it more objectively and change my perspective a bit. But that was also something I never expected to have to confront in the role of parent.
Emma 10:43
How long was that going on? Before you join the membership, what triggered it or
Jenny 10:46
it was something that I was dealing with for quite a lot of the time and it was compounded, I think also just by exhaustion, but that's not what triggered me joining the membership, I came to the membership relatively late, my son had just started kindergarten. And we were going through an acute phase of big feelings. I had another mother warned me that when my child goes to kindergarten, like the first couple months, you're not going to recognize your kid, because it's such a big transition for them, they're going to come home and just have horrendous behavior, because it's just how they process and she said, but like, just hang in there. And after a couple of months, it's all going to even out. We were four or five months in, it was just getting more and more intense. My son would come home at lunch time every day. And I felt like the smallest thing would set him off, he would color outside the lines. And there would be an explosion of anger pointed at me. Sometimes he would get physical, it would take us like a half an hour, 40 minutes, 45 minutes to get through, like where he could get past the anger. And we could reconnect and be okay, for half an hour an hour until the next thing would set him off. And it was like this every day. And I knew enough from the parenting content that I'd read about or listened to that emotions and big behavior like that. It's communication. It's your child letting you know that they're not okay. And I got that with my head. But even though I wouldn't show it to my son, I was really struggling not to feel angry back at him. Anger is a really tough emotion for me. Historically, I have never felt it. And suddenly I was feeling it every day, but swallowing it. And it was friggin exhausting. And yeah, I was trying different things. But nothing was really working. And yeah, just all this swallowing of my own emotion and all this frustration and all like seeing him struggle and being in so much emotional discomfort that was going on along with me also having some personal issues. I was kind of having a bit of a burnout at the same period. So I was basically a mess when I joined the parenting membership, how about you?
Emma 13:00
Ah, my story was quite different. So our little was still quite young. He was now 18 months-ish, and we were about a year into lockdown. I mean, obviously, it...