Attitudes are like smells. You can’t force them to leave a room when they’re bad, but they can force you to walk out. When they’re good, you can’t make them stay, but you sure don’t want to leave.

One of the greatest mistakes parents make, often unintentionally, is placing more emphasis on the beliefs they want to instill in their children rather than the emotional and attitudinal environment they create at home. Yet this is one of the most shaping forces in a child's life, not just in childhood but adulthood.

Children learn not only from what they are told but also from the emotional atmosphere surrounding them, which will shape their expectations of relationships and interactions throughout their lives.

We need to be as thoughtful in evaluating the attitudes we bring -- and allow -- into our homes as our children's food, toys, media, friends, and activities. But how?

Learn 10 ways you can put attitudes in their right place. Help your children grow their security, identity, self-control, self-awareness, and relational skills by putting these ten techniques into practice.

Empower yourself and your family to engage fully in God’s grand story. Subscribe to Hi(Impact) at Stephanie Presents for insights, encouragement, and practical resources!

Book Stephanie to speak to your women, parents, Christian educators, and students.

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#attitude

What is one of the greatest mistakes that parents make unintentionally, and yet it has a profound impact on their children, not just in childhood, but even into adulthood?

Well, stay tuned and you're going to learn 10 ways that you can avoid making that mistake.

If your desire is to become spiritually stronger, emotionally healthier, and relationally smarter, you're at the right place.

Speaker and writer Stephanie Smith inspires and equips you to achieve these three key aims.

If you're a parent, you also learn how to raise empowered kids ready for adulthood.

Let's get started.

Welcome back, friend.

I'm delighted that you are here.

And remember, by the end of the podcast today, or if you just are in a situation, you absolutely can't do this, as soon as you can, hit that subscribe button and then leave a rating and a review, that is tremendous feedback for me.

It really lets me know what's resonating with you and also maybe what's not.

And it also helps others to know that, yeah, this podcast is worth their time to stop and give it a try and maybe hit that subscribe button on their own.

Well, in the opening, I talked about one of the greatest mistakes that parents make, and it's unintentional, and yet it can have a profound impact on their children, not just when they're growing up, but even through adulthood.

You ready?

Here it is.

We put more emphasis on the beliefs we want to teach them than the environment that they are growing up in.

As a person of faith, I believe it is our great responsibility as parents to teach our children about what is right, to teach them the Bible, to teach them a moral and ethical code.

But you know what?

If the environment that our children grow up in is not one of joy and peace and delight, it's pretty impossible to separate the theology that we are trying to train them up in with the environment that they are being trained up in.

We are not just people of the brain in the sense of having content and thought.

We are people of emotion.

We are people with physical bodies in this integrated sense.

And the environment that we grow up in, and I'm not talking environment here in terms of quality of air.

And those are, yes, that matters.

But that's not what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about attitudes.

The attitudes that our children grow up and will have a profound impact on who they turn out to be and throughout their adult life.

You know, attitudes are the primary ingredient in your child's environment.

It's not toys.

It's not educational materials.

It's not activities.

Those things have a place and a purpose.

And we can have a responsibility to seek out what's good and right and suitable for our children.

But we must pay as much attention to how we are showing up with our attitudes and nurturing our children with their attitudes as we are anything else in their life.

If we had to pick up our attitude every day or throughout the day and we had to examine it as if it was an activity or a toy or an educational item that we were going to purchase for them, we might do a little different job in how we evaluate our attitudes.

But they will have more of an impact on our children and how they show up in life and how they come to expect others to show up in life than all these other things that we provide for them.

So what you can do is as a parent is to have that approach.

It is to be as intentional with the attitude that you are showing up in and you are exposing your children to as to the food, the air, the toys, the activities, the videos, the media and everything else that you are exposing them to.

Now, the second point is pretty close to the first, but I think that this is so important.

I'm going to kind of break this down into two parts.

So I'm going to give it its own number.

And the second tip that I'm going to give you is this is evaluate the long term impact of the attitude environment you are raising your children in.

You see, there might be an environment that kind of works for you and your spouse.

Um, and, and maybe you're a single parent and it, it works for you.

Maybe you, you know, you're kind of okay with, with just having this very mellow kind of eor ish kind of environment.

But think about your kids when they are adults.

Because here's the thing about environment.

We will not may, we will do one of two things.

We will either subconsciously duplicate or we will desperately try to escape the environment that we have as adults as the one that we grew up in by nature.

We don't seek out what is healthy, we seek out what is familiar.

We have a very strong drive for survival, as we should.

But like all things, it tends to become corrupted.

And it's corrupted to some degree because of original sin anyway.

But even if you're kind of like, well, that's not, that's not my worldview, that's not belief system, this is still true in the sense that we are wired primarily for survival, not health.

And survival means what am I familiar with?

Because if I have grown up as a child.

And if I have grown up in a home, let's say I've grown up in a home that's very happy, there's a lot of laughter, there's a lot of joy, forgiveness flows easily, then that's going to be familiar to me, and that's going to be how I show up.

And it's also going to be how I kind of expect other people to show up, because that is what.

How I have learned to survive.

But let's say that's not the home that a child grows up in.

Instead, they grow up in a home where there's a lot of stress and this doesn't have to be abusive.

So I don't want you to be thinking in terms of.

Of two extremes here.

Let's just keep this kind of in the middle.

And when I'm thinking talking about stress here, I'm not talking about the extreme of abuse.

And, and somebody is throwing kids around or they're punching holes in the wall.

I mean, that certainly has an impact.

But let's just think about it more in the middle.

And it's just kind of growing up where there's just.

There's a lot of conflict, there's a lot of grumpiness, there's just a lot of negative comments that becomes familiar.

And children learn to survive in that.

And they will subconsciously either seek for that kind of environment when they are older, because again, that is what is familiar.

Some of you are saying, okay, no, wait a minute, because maybe I've had the experience, or, you know, someone else who's like, there is no way that I'm going to have the same kind of environment in my home and my family when I grow up or now that I'm grown up as what I had as a kid.

That's true.

People also do that.

They also can make that decision to say, I am going to be intentional, to get away from and to create a whole different environment than the one I grew up in.

And that can absolutely be admirable.

But you know what?

It's still going to take a tremendous amount of work.

Because when you are making something that is entirely different than what you have become accustomed to, it is going to take a lot of work.

It's like you are going into orbit as a satellite, and you have to escape that gravitational pull of Earth before satellites can then go into their orbital patterns.

Well, that's kind of what happens to us as human beings is we sometimes have to escape this gravity, like pull into what is familiar in order to Go into a different orbit.

How much better if we don't set our children up to have to do that to begin with.

So the environment that you are creating for your kid, which is primarily your attitude, it's not 100% attitude, there's some other factors there.

But the main ingredient in all of that is the attitude that you're showing up with and how you respond to the attitudes of other people in your home.

It's more like carving granite than shaping modeling dough.

So we need to pay attention and be intentional to carve out something that's going to serve our children well.

Not just in our home growing up, but in their lives as adults now.

Children all come into the world with their own personalities.

You know, I'm the parent of twins.

I have five sons.

They're all grown now, but two of them are fraternal twins.

And when they were born, from the very moment that they entered into this world, their responses to their birth were, couldn't have been more different.

One cried and cried and cried and was inconsolable.

The other cried a little and then just was extremely quiet and just looked around.

And if you've been the parent of two children or you've just been around two different kids that are from the same parents very long, you know that they do come pre wired with some of their own little personalities.

So I understand that all of our kids attitudes aren't what they pick up from us because they kind of come with their own tendencies as well.

So here's one of the things that you need to keep in mind as you have as you are raising your children, you want to respond to your kids attitudes, but you don't react to them.

And this is just pretty good for anybody in life that we respond to people's attitudes, but we don't react to them.

What I mean by that is be a thermostat, not a thermometer.

If your kids are having a really bad day, yes, it's important that they see that you care about their struggles.

You're not just writing them off and you're not just annoyed with them because they're having a bad day and they're messing up the plans for the day.

But they also need to see that you're not going to be thrown off by them.

And this doesn't mean that you have to act like a zombie or a robot.

You know, kids can say hurtful things, they can wear on us, they can get on our last nerve.

And they do need to see the impact that they have on us.

Or on each other, because they need to learn to care about other people.

But there is a difference between their impacting us and their controlling us.

Now, for me personally, this is one of those things.

It's very easy for me to say, and I will tell you, it was really hard for me to do this as a mom when my kids were growing up.

I wanted them to all be happy.

I wanted everybody to get along.

I wanted them to be at peace with me.

And it was very, very difficult to not take it personally over the top when that wasn't the case.

And it's a process of learning that.

So you want to be intentional, though, that you ask yourself, am I responding to their attitudes or am I reacting to them?

Because here's the thing.

Kids are pretty smart and they can figure out pretty quickly when they actually can control us and push our buttons.

Number four is this.

Don't use a negative attitude as a substitute for confronting a situation.

Have you ever had that person in your life?

Or if you're really honest and you look in the mirror, are you like, oh, gosh, yeah, that's.

That kind of speaks to me when.

But let's just say it's not you.

Let's say it's somebody else that you know.

And they're going to go around and they're just going to be upset, they're going to be angry, they're going to be grumpy, they're just going to be down, but they're never really going to come out and tell you why or what's going on.

Isn't that just annoying?

And you know why it's annoying?

Because it's really manipulative.

It's saying, instead of me taking ownership, that I have something I need to work out with you.

Instead of me saying, hey, you've upset me, you've offended me, you've disappointed me.

It's.

I'm going to act in such a way that's going to create some dis.

Ease between us, some unease or dis.

Ease.

But I'm going to leave it up to you to be the one to come and diagnose this problem and then treat it.

And what happens with kids, especially with young children, but it's not just with young children.

It starts when they're very young, but it can continue throughout adolescence when they can sense that something's wrong, but they don't really know what.

It creates a question inside of, what did I do wrong?

What's wrong with me?

And even though they might not consciously even be aware that they're having that thought.

Or they may put up a defensive posture, especially as they get older.

And it's kind of like, well, good grief, what's wrong with you?

It really can leave them in a very unsettled state and they become very insecure and they grow up.

And what do they do?

They learn to walk on eggshells.

How fun is that?

Not.

And since I am assuming that you are not a parent who wants your kids to be one of those people who learns up and is either okay with walking on eggshells so they don't upset somebody, or they're the person everybody else has to learn to kind of try to walk on eggshells around.

Then don't use your attitude as a substitute for confronting a situation.

If you're upset or angry or sad, say so.

If you can't quite put your finger sometimes on what's bothering you or why, then it's okay to say that too.

Say, you know, I just am feeling kind of down today, or I'm just having an unsettled time today, and I don't really know why exactly, but I just want you to know you haven't done anything.

I'm not angry or upset with you.

This is something I'm just trying to figure out for myself and then go on with life.

The fifth thing that you can do is when your children have a positive attitude, applaud that as.

As their accomplishments.

You know, choosing the right attitude takes work, right?

I mean, have you ever just had to have a talk to yourself and say, okay, you know what, Stephanie?

You are going to choose to show up here with a different attitude, and it's like, okay, yes, and that's going to take some work to actually walk that out.

Well, kids aren't any different.

And so thank them.

Say, oh, you know, you've just contributed so much joy today.

You've just had such a pleasant attitude.

And especially for kids who might have a.

What we might call a naturally sunny disposition.

And we can get so used to that that we never take the time to tell them that we really appreciate that.

So you don't take pleasant pleasantries for granted.

Remember this.

What gets celebrated gets repeated.

Number 6.

Investigate the reasons for both negative and positive attitude.

Learn why your child has a positive attitude.

You know, try to ask them questions.

You know, what.

What makes them happy and joyful and relaxed and cooperative and peaceful.

You may discover there's something small that you never knew made such a difference to them.

Ask.

Don't assume you've heard me say that.

Before ask, don't assume.

And that's also true if they're, if your kid's going around and they have a grumpy attitude.

You know, if your 10 year old is just acting like they're put out with everyone, investigate, get curious about why.

Now the key word here is investigate, not interrogate.

You know, one of my sons went to a public school the second half of his second grade year and he just naturally a happy little guy, you know, kind of one of those naturally sunny disposition kids.

And he would go off to school in the morning and just as happy as he could be and everything.

And he would come home, you know, at 3:00 and he would just be like ready to bite everybody's heads off.

And it took me about a week to recognize that as an introvert he was so overwhelmed by having to be around all these people all day long that he just couldn't take it anymore.

By the time he got home now he's only in the second grade, he is not thinking, you know, I'm an introvert and I think I'm spending a lot of energy being around all these other people.

Now.

He had no awareness of what was going on inside of him that he could articulate.

So I needed to get curious and then being able to piece together it was up to me to figure out, ah, I think this is what's going on here.

And so what I told him was, you know, just sat down and had a conversation and I just explained to him that being at school all day long was just hard for him and that was perfectly normal and natural and there was nothing wrong with him about it.

Some people loved being around others all day and some people that was very draining for them and it was okay.

So when he came home, he had permission to go upstairs to his room to go outside and he didn't have to talk to anybody, he didn't have to talk to me, he didn't have to tell me what his day was like.

He could just go and be by himself until he was ready to come out and join the family.

And he started doing that and it was, it was totally okay.

And it usually would take him like maybe about an hour and then he would just kind of be able to decompress and come out and then he was usually happy to talk about the day.

So investigate, don't interrogate, don't assume, ask, but don't assume.

Number seven, don't demand your kid put on an attitude as if it was just a pair of shoes.

You know, you can't force anyone to, like, stop being grumpy.

You can say, it seems like you're just choosing to be grumpy, and I don't know why.

So you have a choice.

You can tell me what's going on or you can go.

You say where and do what until you want to tell me about it, or you want to have a different attitude.

Now, I put this one after the preceding one because again, you want to first investigate what's going on with an attitude.

But the reality is, you know, for all of us, it's not just kids as adults, sometimes we just choose to be grumpy or put out or gripey because we just choose to.

We are indulging ourselves and our selfishness.

It's not always because there's some big reason behind it.

That's, that's about some pain that we've experienced.

Sometimes it's just because we do have this real thing called a sinful nature that we have to contend with.

So when it turns out that that's what's really going on and your kid's just making a choice to be a grump or whatever, you can't just say, well, stop that.

That didn't work.

That doesn't mean that you just have to tolerate it.

You can again, you can have some consequences that come with that, which is pretty much like, well, okay, then you can, you can go work, you can go work off that attitude or you can separate yourself from the rest of us because we don't really want to be around that.

Now, that doesn't mean, you know, they get to go out to their room and watch TV or play video games or just indulge in what you know, because that's can be more of a reward than a consequence.

So, so think that through.

But don't demand that your kid put on an attitude like a pair of shoes.

You know, you can't demand that they're going to go somewhere and they're going to be happy and excited about it.

You take them to a special place, you take them to the party, you take them to a restaurant or trip.

And maybe you've made tremendous sacrifices and you've done a lot of planning and, and you really want this to be special thing for them.

That's only something that you can control for yourself.

And if you demand that your kids have a certain attitude about it, all you're likely to do is to make them not want to participate with you in the future.

Number eight, be mindful that sometimes kids can choose attitudes that don't align with what you want because they feel like they don't have much else that they can control in their life.

And that might be because maybe you're not really giving them enough choices in life.

Maybe, you know, you're picking out their clothes and you're doing their activities and you're, you know, telling them what they're going to eat and you're doing all this too much of that.

And it might not be that as a parent, it might be that there are other things going on in their lives where they feel that are, that are so out of their control that choosing their attitude is the one thing they can control.

So again, be thoughtful about that, get curious about that and then start examining, you know, is it possible that they are repeatedly choosing this attitude that doesn't align with what I'm conveying to them that I hope their attitude would be?

Because really what's at stake here is they're wanting to have a sense of control.

Not in a selfish way, but in a way that they feel like life is so out of control in other areas.

And again, this isn't about what you see when you look at their life.

It's about learning to see through their eyes and what they're experiencing.

You know, a five year old who has a, you know, a little sibling who's always coming along and knocking down the creations that they've built or you know, ripping up the pages in their color book or those types of things that can be enough to make a kid feel like they have very little control in their life.

So pay attention to how your child might be experiencing, their sense of choice and their sense of having control.

And again, I just make the assumption that you are a reasonable person and understand that choice does not mean, oh, would you like to color on the sofa as a way of expressing yourself artistically?

No, that's just dumb, okay?

We don't give children choices like that in order that we get them to be artistic and to have self expression.

That's just not the way the world works.

Number nine, give them language for the emotions behind their attitudes, both positive and negative.

You know, when you help them to have language to express their positive attitudes, what this does, it develops in them self awareness of, hey, this is what brings me joy.

And they learn how to express that and they learn how to ask for that.

And when you give them language for their negative emotions, it helps them to identify emotions and then to become aware of what can trigger those.

Whether it's anger, discouragement, grumpiness, irritability, you see, emotions and attitudes are abstract.

They are, they are like when there's something that we can't grasp in our hands.

But they sure do have an impact.

And whenever we take something abstract and we give it language, what we are doing is we are taking something that we can't grasp and we're making it in a sense, graspable.

I don't know, is graspable a word?

Here I am talking about language.

I don't even know if that's a word.

But we're just going to go with it.

So you have something abstract and you tie a concrete word to it.

It turn, it's like it takes something like an attitude that feels like the wind and it turns it more into a rock.

I can do something with a rock.

I can paint it, I can throw it, I can sit and stare at it, I can smell, I can do all kinds of things with a rock.

I can't do much with the wind except try to avoid it.

And so when we give our children language for emotions and I don't mean by that saying you've got a stinky attitude.

I'm saying by that helping them to identify what their feeling and then giving them ideas on how they can express that with language.

Oh, it sounds to me like you are feeling and you, you know, fill in the blank and do more than mad or sad, angry or glad right there.

There are more emotions than that.

And you can look online and there are all kinds of emotional word charts that you can get.

You can get lists, you can get very complicated diagrams and all that kind of thing or you can just sit down and kind of write up your download something to print those off.

But give your children the vocabulary of attitudes because really what you're doing is you are building emotional self awareness and expression and that is a big part of becoming an emotionally healthy person.

And number 10 is this.

Your kids attitudes is going to be an ongoing training and the most that they're going to be trained by is by how you show up with your attitude.

You know attitudes are more like learning math than spelling, right?

There are always higher levels of math.

I mean always like math is infinite.

Don't really mean that as a pun, but that's kind of the way it came out.

Spelling, however, I mean it does pretty much have a cap.

Yes, you can probably learn infinite numbers of how to spell a word.

But in terms of the rules, you kind of get to a certain point and you know all the rules.

Well, attitudes are more like math.

You don't just get to A certain point that by the time a kid is 5 or 10 or 12, okay, we've got the attitude thing down.

It's going to be something you're going to have to deal with, because as they grow up, they're going to go through these different developmental phases.

That's just what human beings do.

And so you're going to have to learn how to adjust your training of your attitude.

And also, what's the attitude that you're showing up with?

You know, if.

If you're.

If you show up with an attitude of fear for years or like when your child gets to be an adolescent or they're.

They're in that stage of adolescence and your attitude is one of fear, guess what?

That is absolutely going to impact your kid.

So this isn't just about your kids.

It's also about going back to the first thing, and that's always paying attention to how you're showing up with your attitude.

You know, here's one of the things.

There's a lot of things that we can sign our kids up for that they can do out there, right?

I mean, that could be ballet.

That can be learning to ride a horse, playing a guitar, parachute jumping.

I suppose kids get to a certain age that, you know, you might want to do that.

I don't know why, but, you know, to each their own, right?

But there's one thing you cannot outsource.

You cannot outsource your home's environment.

No way.

Certainly, children are impacted by other people's attitudes besides just their parents, but your home's environment is the one thing you can't outsource.

So be intentional about the attitude that you show up with on an ongoing basis in your home, because it will have a profound impact and not just who your kid is as a child.

It's not just about the fondness or lack thereof that they look back on their childhood with.

It's about the expectations that they're going to take with them, even subconsciously into adulthood, about how they're going to show up in life and how they are going to expect others to show up as well.

And after hearing all of this, there's something that you recognize.

Oh, wow.

I want to be intentional about that, and I'm going to get started on that.

You know, you could always go look up Patti LaBelle's song New Attitude, and definitely that can get you moving in the right direction.

All right, my friend, that's going to wrap us up.

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And you cannot afford to miss that.

You know what?

Because sometimes it's just one insight.

It's one resource that can make all the difference in how we move forward.

Remember this.

You have an impact that is immeasurable, eternal, and irreplaceable.

I'll see you next time.

Thank you for listening.

Visit the web stephaniepresents.com and sign up for High Impact to join the mission of building spiritually strong, emotionally healthy, and relationally smart women and families.

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