Episode 336 Transcript- The One Shift That Will Transform Your Parenting
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[00:00:00] You are listening to episode 336 of the Peaceful Mind Podcast. Welcome to the Peaceful Mind Podcast, a place where you can move out of overwhelm and into a calm, confident motherhood with God at the center. I'm Danielle Thienel, certified life coach, Catholic mom, and creator of the Cyclone Mom Method. I help you create emotional steadiness and peace of mind from the inside out so you can experience more balance and more joy in your busy mom life.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, let's get started.
Hello, beautiful mamas. Welcome back to the Peaceful Mind podcast. I'm Danielle. I'm so glad you're here with me for another episode that I am trying to keep on a little bit on the shorter side, right? For the time that it's coming out here in the summer. I hope you're having a wonderful one. [00:01:00] I am very hot, but full of some fun adventures.
But today, I wanna talk to you about something that has super impacted my parenting, and I wanted to share it with all of you. It's just, it's one shift. It's one shift that I believe has the potential to genuinely change the quality of your relationship with your children. And it's not through a new discipline strategy, or I'm not gonna offer you a new routine or even a new set of rules.
One shift, one change in how you show up for your conversations with kids. That's what I'm gonna offer. And I will tell you right now, the shift is simple to understand, and it does take real intention to practice. But the moms, myself and other moms I've coached, who start doing this consistently tell me it changes everything.
What will happen is your kids will open up more, conflicts will deescalate [00:02:00] a little faster than normal, and overall, I think you'll... it'll feel calmer in your parenting. Overall, your parenting will feel more calm, and the connection that you will have with your children deepens in ways that I don't think you would expect.
And this goes for moms with children of any age That means young, middle teenage, adult, and even older. So let's get into it. Okay, this is what I want you to think about first. When something happens with your child, when they come to you upset or let's say you learn of a mistake they made or they do something that worries you or maybe they share something that actually surprises you, what is your first instinct?
For most of us, and I'm including myself here, the [00:03:00] first instinct is to say something, to explain, to advise, to correct, to guide, to offer the perspective we have built over the years of living and learning and loving our child, and that is not wrong at all. But again, just today, wanting you to maybe look at your response in a different way, right?
Sometimes we will tell them that they should have done something differently or we tell them how we think they should handle it next time. We tell them what we think about the situation, right? Here's our wisdom, our opinions, and then we explain to them what we believe the right answer is next.
We perhaps reassure. We lecture maybe sometimes. But ultimately, I know we're believing we share our wisdom, which again, [00:04:00] none of this is wrong or bad or not good parenting at all. It's-- It really is just fine. I'm offering you, though, a shift that would just transform your parenting to another what I think is a more effective, satisfying level because I know that what I talked about the way that we normally respond, it all comes from love.
I do. I want to be absolutely clear about that. When we jump to telling our children, it's because we care. We want to protect them. We want to help them avoid pain. We want to give them the benefit of everything we know However, here is what I've come to understand. Again, especially after raising my own children and then applying this shift to my [00:05:00] parenting, and that is when we lead with telling, we often lose the very thing that we're actually hoping to create.
Because when a child, again, at any age, comes to us with something and we immediately meet it with our advice, our correction, our perspective, a few things happen. They feel like they have not been fully heard yet. And if they feel unheard, they stop sharing. Not dramatically and not all at once, but gradually, and maybe sometimes it happens dramatically.
They start giving us the short answer. They start saying things are fine when they're not. They stop bringing us the real stuff because somewhere in their experience, the real stuff always gets redirected back to what we think. There's also something that gets taken from them when we move too [00:06:00] quickly into telling, and that is the experience of thinking it through themselves, of working through their own thoughts, arriving at their own clarity, and building confidence in their own ability to navigate their life.
So when we tell them the answer, when they come to us before they've even had a chance to find it themselves, we accidentally train them to depend on us for the answer instead of developing trust in themselves. And I know some of you moms might be like, "Yep, that's what I want. I want to train them to be able to come with me."
And if so, that's okay. You can... This-- maybe this episode is one that you just pass on this week. There is just this piece that matters most to us in moments that I'm explaining, like when we're-- when our kids come to us with things, and that's we often do not actually know the full picture yet.
But with the little they tell us [00:07:00] our body might have this kind of like visceral reaction, whether it's like worry or fear or scared or, sadness, and we think we have the full picture yet. And then we start to assume that we understand everything that's happened within them or, what they brought us to tell us about, and we know what they were thinking, or at least we think that they do, and we definitely assume that we know what they need.
And again, sometimes the answers that we think they would need are what they end up needing. But most of the time, we work in our parenting with incomplete information. And the wisdom that we wanna offer, like the real good and helpful wisdom, it can only land well when it's, has that real understanding of what's actually going on for our child.
And so here is the shift. Just one shift. [00:08:00] Before you tell them anything, ask I want you to lead with curiosity instead of conclusions in your parenting. Lead with questions instead of answers. I want you to shift from being the parent who talks to being the parent who asks. And the reason why I want this for you is because I truly believe, and again, it's up for you on the other end listening to this, whether it's something that you want to take on if you want to believe could be helpful, if you want to step into an experiment about it.
That's because I do believe it will lead to more peace of mind for you as a parent, more peace overall in your parenting. And so what I'm asking you to do, it isn't a passive approach. It actually takes, it takes more [00:09:00] discipline, and your brain won't like it at first, right? Because it wants to just be the fixer, right?
It wants you to save them. And it will take discipline to not say anything, to not tell them or show them or go immediately into your own opinion or what you think is best, right? Because telling will feel like action. And for most of us, it-- definitely before I came to coaching, we feel like the way we need to first go and where we need to jump to change and get different results is our actions.
And ultimately, we need our actions for that change. However, it's really those thoughts and feelings behind those actions. And we can gather an arsenal of different, more life-supporting thoughts and feelings if we shift to that becoming more of a question asker with our children. So [00:10:00] again, that telling them or solving it for them or immediately going right into showing them what they should do or change, it feels like we're doing something.
It feels like we're fixing what they brought us or came to us about. It feels like that we're helping. But getting quiet and asking a question, that, that can feel like you as a parent are holding back, right? Like that it'll feel like you're actually keeping some- something from them, right? We know that we have all this wisdom to share.
But you're not holding back. You're actually doing something far more powerful You are creating the conditions for your child to feel genuinely seen and heard. You are sending a signal to them that their thoughts matter more to you right now than your own, and you are gathering the information you actually need to then offer the right kind of support at the right [00:11:00] moment.
So think about how this might play across the different, let's say age brackets. Say your little ones come home from school and something feels off, but instead of saying, "You probably just need a snack and some rest," you ask, "Hey, what was the best part of your day?" Or even just "How are you feeling right now?"
And then you wait. You let them answer. You follow their lead. Maybe your middle schooler is upset about a friendship situation, so instead of immediately explaining what they should do or reassure them that it'll all work out, you say, "Tell me more about that. Tell me more about what happened. Ooh, what was that like for you?"
Or, "What part of it is bothering you the most?" Do you see that line of questions? If your teenager makes a decision [00:12:00] that you're not feeling great about or not sure, feeling sure about, instead of listing all the reasons it concerns you, if they've brought it to your attention and you say this is, what concerns me about it," instead you ask what led you to this?"
Or, "What are you hoping for with this? Have you ever thought about what you might wanna do if things go differently?" Again, line of questioning And then you will actually want to listen to the answers they give. And then that might even prompt you to go into another question regarding what they say.
Can you take that as actually the best help and advice you can give our kids? Is even just a little quiz to yourself, like how far can I go with just asking them questions? It's quite [00:13:00] an experiment if you're open and willing to take it on. Maybe your adult child shares something with you, and it worries you a lot, or let's just say totally disagrees with you.
I know I had a couple of moments like that in my group coaching program this week where there was some things our, the children, adult children were doing that my client totally disagreed with. But instead of sharing your opinion right away, you ask, "How are you feeling about it? What does this mean for you?"
And again, can you imagine your child on the other end who is like them not being, told of all the reasons why you disagree with it, but imagine how they feel when you're asking those questions that really help them see, like you're genuinely curious and want to hear what they have to say All of these questions, I hope you've noticed, have [00:14:00] something in common.
They invite your child to go inward. It's exactly what I do with my clients. I ask a lot of questions, right? I-- When I meet in the coaching capacity, I meet we, we call it holding space and not having an agenda. And this is a little bit of what I'm asking you to try in your parenting when it's literally about not me telling my advice, "Oh, this is what you should do," but it's literally asking and finding them to go within to their own wisdom to pull out and to use and watch those shifts happen through this line of questioning.
This-- when they go-- when it goes inward, they communicate... these questions communicate that you're more interested in understanding them than in [00:15:00] delivering your message. And they give you something incredibly valuable, which is the actual information you need to have before you speak. Now, I do wanna talk about the parenting side of this, right?
Because the shift does not serve... it does serve your children, but I want you to see how it serves you, right? One of the biggest sources of our parenting stress is the feeling that we have to answer. That we that we have to have the answers all the time. That we have to know the exact right thing to say, the right way to handle it, the right response in every situation.
I know sometimes it feels like I'm walking on eggshells. That pressure is a little bit exhausting, yeah? And when we jump into telling too quickly, we are often speaking before we're ready from a place of [00:16:00] reactivity rather than this place of calm. But when you lead with questions, something settles inside of us.
One of the things too that I love we buy ourselves time, right? It grounds us a little bit. When we hear something or they've asked us something, when we return it with a question, it gives us a a moment to think you move from sometimes that reactive triggered place when you hear something instead of a more like when you pause and ask a question, you move into a more thoughtful, steady place, and then you end up saying less, but it means a whole bunch more.
The words you eventually do offer to your, to our children land differently because we earned that openness from them, right? We earned that a little bit of s- right of what we wanna say with them because first we listened. [00:17:00] So there, there is a question I love, and I have used it for years.
When my child is struggling and I feel that pull to immediately go into mom fix it mode, I ask myself Am I speaking from a place of love right now or am I speaking to make myself feel better? Because that is why we go into sharing our wisdom or telling them what they should do. It's really because w- our body is vibrating and maybe in something negative that they've told us and we want to hurry up and stop that feeling, or at least our brain is telling us that In general, asking questions gives you the space to answer that question of am I coming from love or am I, speaking to them to make myself feel [00:18:00] better?
And a- asking questions allow us to, to come from more of an honest place before we begin to respond to our children. So I'm just gonna offer you a couple questions that you might wanna just try out, right? A handful of questions here. Try using them right away, across any age, at any time that you've heard this episode, and start to put it into practice and see if this simple shift of being a parent that asks our children more questions than we do finding ourselves telling them or or just trying to again, fix it, solve it, show them our wisdom.
So here's a few of my favorites. This one isn't really a question. I can word it into a question, but I always... I say this a lot, "Tell me more about that." But you could say, "Could you [00:19:00] tell me more about that?" And that's the form of a question, but usually I just say can... Tell me more about that." Okay, that's a-- that's, I have that as my top.
Then, what felt hardest about it? What do you think you wanna do? Ooh, that's a good one. What do you need from me right now? And depending on the age, you might say, "Do you need my advice? Or you d- or do you just want someone to listen?" So good. That one is just gold. How are you feeling about it? Whatever they're talking about with you.
What are you most worried about? What would feel most helpful to you right now? Okay I'm gonna stop with those because I just... I'm gonna repeat them here again, but because I think just to keep it simple for you, just to see where [00:20:00] you can see the powerful of asking questions and I, so I want you to see the results of it.
So they were: Tell me more about that. What felt hardest about it? What do you think you wanna do? What do you need from me right now? Do you want my advice or just someone to listen? How are you feeling about it? What are you most worried about? What would feel most helpful? These are simple.
They're not... This isn't like a complex coaching tool. And what they are is they are open doors. And what happens when you open a door is that your child gets to decide what to bring through it. That's the gift. That's where real trust is built. So if there's one thing I would love for you to maybe be open and willing to take into your parenting, it's this: [00:21:00] talk less, ask more.
Not because your wisdom does not matter, it does. But your child needs to feel known before they can receive our wisdom. They need to feel heard. They need to feel seen. And the more you ask, the more they will share. And the more they share, the better equipped you will be to offer exactly the kind of support that actually helps.
This is peaceful parenting. It's intentional, it's connecting, it's curious parenting. All right, everyone. Thank you so much for being here. If this episode was useful to you, please either reach out to me personally through email at [email protected], or you can subscribe and leave a review to the podcast, and please share it with another mama you think might need a little injection [00:22:00] of peace into her life and I'd be so grateful.
You'd be helping me in my mission to be a channel of peace for Christ. All right, everyone, I am wishing you a beautiful week. I'll see you back here next time, and until then, may peace be with you always. Thank you for listening to The Peaceful Mind podcast. If you've been feeling a quiet desire for more peace and steadiness in your motherhood, I invite you to take the next step by scheduling a peaceful mom strategy call at daniellethienel.com.
You'll also find the link in the show notes. It would be an honor to support you at any stage of your motherhood journey
