Family Looking Up

Thanks for joining us on our very first episode of Family Looking Up. We want to help lift and encourage by discussing all things family. Today we talked about parenting, specifically raising more resilient kids with more teaching and less punishing.

We talked with Niki Olsen, a Clinical Mental Health Counselor.   She has spent over 16 years working with youth and families specializing in a modality called Mind Body Bridging which can help a variety of issues. She is married with two little girls in elementary. She currently lives in Utah but is originally from Oregon. Niki loves to spend her free time with her family, exercising, and sleeping.

We started our interview by discussing four conditions that have been identified as a common set of factors that predispose children to positive outcomes in the face of significant adversity.  These include facilitating supportive adult-child relationships (teaching v.s punishing), building a sense of self-efficacy and perceived control (effective consequences and praise), providing opportunities to strengthen adaptive skills and self-regulatory capacities (giving children independence now leads to becoming successful adults), and mobilizing sources of faith, hope, and cultural traditions (giving kids a sense of belonging and identity).

Research has shown that children who have these things in their lives tend to be more resilient.  The skills she taught also can help us stop being mad and frustrated at our kids and give them (and  us) space to feel all the feelings and still teach our kids and get the results we want.  

We finished by talking about not comparing ourselves to other moms. Niki pointed out that every family has their own issues.  Don’t compare your worst to their best!

Mom Squad Challenge: Practice reflective listening with your kids. Instead of responding or reacting, just listen and repeat back to them what they are telling you.  By doing this, Niki teaches that the child is more likely to talk to you and tell you more than if you react.

Books Niki loves:

The Child Whisperer by Carol Tuttle

Common Sense Parenting by Ray Burke Ph.D, Ron Heron, and Bridget A. Barnes M.S

How to talk to your kids about Sex by Richard and Linda Eyre

Where did I come From (I really don’t like it, but Camille loves it) by Peter Mayle and Arthur Robins

 

Can you really get your kids to listen to you? Or is that just wishful thinking? We talk about creating resilience, the five steps to discipline, and how to deal with bad behavior. Join us for laughter and learning as we explore this topic.