Today’s guest is Jeremy Schneider. Jeremy is a Marriage and Family Therapist whose career spans more than 15 years of working with individuals and families focussing on parenting, relationships and mental health. He is the author of Fatherhood in 40 Minute Snapshots and has been featured on the New York Times, The Today Show and CNN. We will be discussing co-parenting and alignment with our partners. Join us!

"Every step that I take in my personal growth is one less step that they have to take.”

“A lot of parenting is about experimentation.”

“You just get better the more you do it. Just keep trying.”

“We don’t want to be the same parent. We just want to be parenting in the same direction.”

What you’ll hear in this episode:

-Journaling as a way to maintain perspective

-Examining our principles of parenting

-Deciding what kind of people we want to raise

-Personal growth and parenting - how they relate

-Co-parenting and being in alignment with our parents

-Fatherhood and parental involvement of dads

-Finding balance as co-parents in agreeing on a parenting approach

-The importance of parenting education

-Navigating parenting as a dad when you feel uncertain

-How Dads can model emotional expression for their kids

-Approaching our partners with curiosity about their parenting approach

-Parenting as a practice

-Finding harmony in parenting styles

What does Joyful Courage mean to you?

 Having survived a fairly traumatic childhood, I think about courage a lot. I don’t normally think about it in terms of myself and that’s something that I’ve been working on to give myself credit for how far I’ve come and what I’ve been able to do and the kind of relationships I’ve been able to build within my family.

I think Joyful courage is being able to enjoy, not the success, I’m trying to think of the word, being able to bask in this life I’ve built. It took a lot of work to get where I am and my wife and I have worked very hard to get where we are together. And we’ve worked very hard to survive as long as we have with our kids and get this far and I think, to me, one of the phrases that I play a lot in my head is happy chaos. I think of our life as happy chaos.

Chaos doesn’t have to be bad and that’s kind of the way we think about it. My life is chaos, it’s just straight chaotic, because having teenagers and wanting to be there for them and wanting to be there for my wife and build this business and so and so forth; it’s chaos. But it’s a happy chaos because it all involves things that I love.

And to me Joyful Courage has that same kind of feel, right? It’s the freedom, the sort of joyfulness of doing something that takes an enormous effort and overcoming anxiety and fear to be able to do it but that doesn’t mean that it’s bad. It can still be joyful in that experience of it.

Resources:

Fatherhood in 40 Minute Snapshots

Where to find:

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