Welcome to today’s episode where we’re diving into a topic many parents wrestle with: setting limits the gentle parenting way.

It’s a balancing act, finding that sweet spot of setting appropriate limits - am I being too strict and controlling or am I being too permissive?

Today I explore how to navigate walking the tightrope of limits with intention and connection.

I talk about: 

Parenting and setting limits is a continuous work in progress.

Stay flexible, experiment, and most importantly, stay true to yourself.

Thank you for joining me today! If you found this episode helpful, don’t forget to subscribe and share it with fellow parents. I appreciate your ongoing support!

If you are ready to put these ideas into practice in your own parenting, come and work with me over in the Peaceful Parent School.  ⁠⁠Click here to find out more and book your place.⁠⁠

I would love to stay in touch! You can follow me on⁠⁠ Facebook⁠⁠ and⁠⁠ Instagram⁠⁠ @PamParentCoach. I always love to hear from my listeners.

Attunement is a super important concept in parenting, where your brain's limbic system tunes in and syncs up with the emotional energy of your child.

Of course, we deeply love our children and attunement is how children know they are loved. 

Children’s brains develop through relationships with caring, attuned adults. By being present, noticing their emotions, and responding thoughtfully, we help children feel seen and valued, fostering empathy and emotional growth.

Some things to think about when it comes to attunement:

In this episode I dive into attunement and share some practical tips to help you slow down and tune in to your child.

If you are ready to put these ideas into practice in your own parenting, come and work with me over in the Peaceful Parent School.  ⁠Click here to find out more and book your place.⁠

If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend and consider leaving an iTunes review. It will help this conversation reach even more parents.

I would love to stay in touch! You can follow me on⁠ Facebook⁠ and⁠ Instagram⁠ @PamParentCoach. I always love to hear from my listeners.

You haven't seen your child all day, you are excited to reconnect with them and find out all about their day - but you are met with one word answers at best or even a full on meltdown.

Why do other people's kids seem to be chatty and full of zest at school pickup and your kid is taking a huff and refusing to get in the car!

Or maybe your children fight relentlessly all the way home and you're at your wits end!

If any of these ring true, or if you just need some fresh ideas to reconnect after being away from your child, then this is the episode for you.

I talk about why your child might resist connection after school and how you can find your way in.

This episode is full of ideas to reconnect that work with your child's neurobiology and speaks their language of play.

If this episode was helpful, you might also like to check out the following episodes relating to school challenges:

Episode #085 Back to School Boost: 4 Big Ideas to Tackle the Toughest Challenges

If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend and consider leaving an iTunes review. It will help this conversation reach even more parents.
I would love to stay in touch! You can follow me on Facebook and Instagram @PamParentCoach. I always love to hear from my listeners.

Here we are in September and many of us are back to school. Or maybe you’re beginning a new term. Wherever you are in the school year, if you’re having a few challenges you aren’t alone and I’m here to help. 

Your child might be struggling with some aspect of school such as: 

In this week’s episode I am addressing all of these school issues and more. I’m going to talk about some big mindset shifts we can make when it comes to supporting our children with school challenges and I also have lots of practical, on the ground strategies that can turn your whole day around. 

School challenges aren’t easy, but I’m here to help you feel less alone and more supported as you keep figuring it out. 

Would you like my ongoing support to help you work through your parenting challenges?

Join my new course 

Or get in touch and see how I can help you.

Thank you for listening, and I hope you find these insights helpful. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave a review and share it with other parents who might benefit. Your support helps me reach more parents striving to create peaceful and playful homes.

I would love to stay in touch! You can follow me on Facebook and Instagram @PamParentCoach. I always love to hear from my listeners.

Today I talk about how you can keep on parenting to the best of your abilities when life gets challenging.

And let’s face it - life seems to continuously throw us huge curve balls. 

Just surviving in this world is tough enough - and then parenting on top of that - wow, it’s not easy. 

I’ve had a year of ups and downs and huge transitions but the one thing that hasn’t changed is parenting - we still have to show up and parent as best we can, even when life gives us lemons. 

So in this episode I talk about five great strategies you can adopt right away to help you navigate the challenges of life whilst still trying to show up as the parent you want to be. 

So here’s your parenting survival guide when life gets tough. I talk about:

The reality of parenting when life is challenging is that our kids pick up on it. We can’t fake it with them - especially our super sensitive ones. 

So I show you how you can mitigate that. I talk about why focusing on yourself in challenging times is never selfish. It leaves you, the leader of your family, in better shape to parent well, even when times are tough. 

You may also find these episodes helpful:

#080 Why we get angry with our children and the secret to staying calm in the moment

Blog Article: Why Every Parent Needs a Listening Partnership to Become an Emotionally Mature Parent

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the podcast, share it with a friend and consider leaving an iTunes review and/or a Spotify rating. It will help this conversation reach even more parents.

I would love to stay in touch! You can follow me on Facebook and Instagram @PamParentCoach. I always love to hear from my listeners.

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the podcast, share it with a friend and consider leaving an iTunes review and/or a Spotify rating. It will help this conversation reach even more parents.

I would love to stay in touch! You can follow me on Facebook and Instagram @PamParentCoach. I always love to hear from my listeners.

Does it infuriate you when people talk about self-care and it feels totally out of your reach?

You are stressed, your kids are fighting and some expert is telling you to take a bath??

Before we can even think about self-care, we need to do this first...

And that is checking in with our nervous systems, noticing whether we are in fight, flight or freeze and then finding ways to bring ourselves back into balance.

I talk about small habits we can weave into our everyday lives to slow down, notice and soothe our nervous systems.

Once we do that, we can think well again. We can feel more calm. We can feel more in control of what is going on around us. And then we can start to think about how to get our needs met.

This week's episode is an Ask Me Anything episode, where parents in my community submit their questions and I answer them on the pod. 
I have some wonderful questions to answer this week which I think will be relevant to so many of you.
A teacher and grandmother asks about the challenges of introducing connection-based approaches to children into the preschool setting.

I talk about how to deal with habits like nail biting and nose picking - what’s really going on under the surface and what can we as parents do about it.
And my final question is about smartphone use and the many, many challenges faced by parents around that.

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​If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the podcast, share it with a friend and consider leaving an iTunes review and/or a Spotify rating. It will help this conversation reach even more parents.
I would love to stay in touch! You can follow me on Facebook and Instagram @PamParentCoach. I always love to hear from my listeners.
If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the podcast, share it with a friend and consider leaving an iTunes review and/or a Spotify rating. It will help this conversation reach even more parents.
I would love to stay in touch! You can follow me on Facebook and Instagram @PamParentCoach. I always love to hear from my listeners.

Today on the podcast I talk about the small interactions with your child that happen many times a day but often don’t go so smoothly. A simple request from you turns into a standoff or an argument - and you just want your child to listen without all the drama. 

This is something parents ask me about all the time:“I don’t want to respond harshly to my children but I don’t want to be permissive either - what do I do?” 

The question is - how to approach discipline when you don’t want to use threats or punishments but trying to be gentle isn’t working either -  you are stuck in an endless cycle of trying to be gentle but your patience wears thin and you descend into arguments swiftly followed by you losing your cool. It doesn’t feel very gentle but the only alternative seems to be to allow your child to do what they want!

There is another way to set limits in a gentle way with your child, in a way that doesn’t use fear or control and doesn’t damage your relationship.

So I’m talking about how to deal with those small everyday interactions which cause arguments or conflict over and over again - like bedtime, like wanting a snack right before dinner, like turning the TV off. 

You want to say no but you don’t want the arguments.

I take you through Hand in Hand Parenting’s approach to setting limits using the “Listen, Limit, Listen” framework. It works like a dream and you can rest assured you are holding firm without using fear and whilst still leaving room for feelings. 

This episode I recorded outdoors by the sea, so there is a little bit of wind interference, I hope it isn’t too annoying. Here is a photo of my view so you can picture the scene!

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the podcast, share it with a friend and consider leaving an iTunes review and/or a Spotify rating. It will help this conversation reach even more parents.

I would love to stay in touch! You can follow me on Facebook and Instagram @PamParentCoach. I always love to hear from my listeners.

Today I talk about why parents get angry in the heat of the moment with their children and what you can do in the moment when you feel the anger rising in you.

This is a re-record of the very first episode of the podcast. The sound quality is poor in the original but it is such a great topic so I wanted to put it out there again in better quality.

And we need to hear this information over and over again because in the heat of the moment we can't think well and afterwards we tend to beat ourselves up about not being the gentle parent we want to be. 

​⁠In this episode I talk about my three strand approach to help parents who are losing their cool with their kids. 

We all want to be gentle parents. We don't set out to yell at our kids. We feel horrified when we yell and we know it isn't a good strategy. And yet we find ourselves flipping our lids again and again. 

So why exactly do we lose our cool? I talk about the big picture of trying to parent in a stressful society that doesn't support parents well and I talk about the physiological changes that take over our brain and lead to us flipping our lid - we literally can't help it, we are not bad parents and willpower alone can't stop the emotional brain taking control.

When we understand what's going on in our brain, we can be compassionate towards ourselves and then take responsibility and take action to keep our emotions in check.

We can approach this in 3 ways:

1. By taking care of our own needs we are more resourced and less burnt out. Then we are in better shape to take care of our kids. We can't pour from an empty cup. 

2. In the moment strategies to work with our nervous system to bring it back into balance when we lose our cool. 

3. Prevention is always better than cure - when we work on our triggers, we take the emotional charge out of the situation and we are less likely to lose our tempers. There is no quick fix but we can make progress over time to heal and grow as a parent - and shout less as a result. 

In this episode I talk about Dan Siegel's YouTube video where he explains flipping the lid. 

I also mention Episode 62 of my podcast: three things I ask myself when I lose it with my kids.

​If you would like to watch the replay of my Peaceful Parent Masterclass you can do so here. 

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the podcast, share it with a friend and consider leaving an iTunes review and/or a Spotify rating. It will help this conversation reach even more parents.

I would love to stay in touch! You can follow me on Facebook and Instagram @PamParentCoach. I always love to hear from my listeners.

In today's episode I talk about that dreaded scenario when you have your day planned out with work or other commitments and your child says (directly or indirectly) "I don't want to go to school today".

Your heart sinks. You might panic or try to persuade them that they do really want to go.

When we act from a place of panic or frustration, it usually leads to upset and conflict and rarely moves things forwards.

So today I talk to you about how best to proceed when you are triggered and your child is digging their heels in.

I talk about how to shift out of frustration and respond instead with empathy and curiosity.

Often that is all our children need.

I talk about the importance of acknowledging and validating our children's feelings (instead of gaslighting them or talking them out of their feelings).

And of course we need to look at the context: is the school or childcare setting meeting our children's needs and is there anything we can do to help support them.

As always, connection is the key to supporting our children with these tricky situations.

For more ideas to solve difficult mornings, check out the following podcast episodes:

I talk about how to inject connection into your mornings so everything runs more smoothly.

I talk about some fun games to try when your child doesn’t want to get dressed.

If you want more, join my upcoming free Why Your Kids Won't Listen Masterclass which is happening on 6th February 2024 at 8pm UK time.

Click here to register.

If you are ready to put these ideas into practice in your own parenting, come and work with me over in the Peaceful Parent School.  Click here to find out more and book your place.

If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend and consider leaving an iTunes review. It will help this conversation reach even more parents.

I would love to stay in touch! You can follow me on Facebook and Instagram @PamParentCoach. I always love to hear from my listeners.