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In this episode, I name five ordinary habits that most of us picked up without noticing, and I show you which pillar of the Resiliency System each one is quietly taking from. Then I walk you through what to do instead, including the three questions I run on a thought that feels true, and a four question tool you can use on yourself in a few seconds. 

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Do you ever pick your child up, ask how the day went, and get one word back? Fine. Good. I don't know. And then a few days later you watch that same child sit down next to somebody else and tell them everything you asked for. You're not alone, and it doesn't mean you've done something wrong.

In this episode, I talk about why asking more questions often gets you less, and what the research says about where a parent's knowledge about her own child actually comes from. It isn't what most of us assume, and it changes the job.

We look at why kids almost never open with the important thing, what your child is reading on your face before you say a word, and the four things that get in the way, all of which come from love.

Then I give you four things to do, and none of them are listening techniques. If your child has gone quiet and you've already tried every question you can think of, this episode will give you a different place to start.

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Do you ever have one of those mornings where you can feel it going before it goes? You are doing everything you are supposed to be doing, and somewhere around the second time you say the same sentence, you hear yourself using a tone you would never use with another adult. You are not alone, and nothing is wrong with you.

In this episode, I talk about why there is no perfect morning routine, and why even the people who study this for a living cannot agree on one. We look at what is actually happening inside a child's developing brain and nervous system in the morning, and why the strategies that work for four days keep falling apart on the fifth.

I walk you through four things that have to be true underneath any morning routine, and four small shifts you can start tomorrow. If you want mornings with less yelling and a little more sweetness before your kids walk out the door, this episode will give you something you can use right away. 

Back To School With Confidence (free through the end of September)

My workshop on the five needs children have when they move from one thing to the next. Fifty minutes with a workbook, and it goes much further than the episode can into what actually helps a child through a change. It applies at bedtime, at the end of screen time, and on the first day of anything.

👉 Get the workshop here

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The first day of school can feel like freedom and heartbreak in the same breath. You may feel sad that your kids are growing up, worried about how they'll adjust, relieved to have some time to yourself - and then guilty for feeling relieved. In this episode of the Leadership Parenting Podcast, I'm talking about how to handle back-to-school emotions without mom guilt. I'll explain why parenting transitions can feel so emotional, why your brain and nervous system react strongly to change, and why feeling guilt doesn't necessarily mean you've done something wrong. I'll also give you four simple emotional regulation tools to help you calm your body, understand what you're feeling, stop judging yourself for having mixed emotions, and move through motherhood transitions with more confidence. Because being a resilient mom doesn't mean having the 'right' feelings. It means learning how to hold more than one feeling at a time and keep going.

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Have you ever finished a conversation with someone you love and felt like something did not quite land, even though the words went back and forth and your intentions were good? In this episode, I talk about why the people closest to us sometimes go quiet, what we are actually doing when we think we are listening, and the difference between listening to respond and listening to understand. I share what Carl Rogers and John Gottman discovered about being truly heard, and I give you three simple places to begin practicing a different kind of listening, the kind that keeps a family close through every season. This is learnable. It is a skill, not a personality trait, and you can start today.

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Trust is one of those words we use constantly without ever defining it. In this episode, I break trust down into something simple and buildable: your words and your actions matching, over and over, until your kids come to expect it. I walk through why a vague "maybe later" can register as a broken promise, how we accidentally set traps for ourselves by attaching things we were always going to do to conditions we were never going to hold, and how to hold a line without any punishment in it. I also get into what a trustworthy person actually looks like, why the Two Jobs of Parenting are the architecture underneath trust, what to do when you're the one who dropped the ball, and how to start rebuilding when the person you trust least is yourself. Wherever you're starting from, and whatever age your kids are, it's never too late.

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If you have a child who decides things are ruined before they've even started, you already know that reassurance doesn't work. The more you insist he's doing fine, the harder he argues that he isn't. In this episode I explain why that happens, and why our instinct to talk a discouraged child out of his feelings so often backfires. Then I walk through three research-backed practices that build genuine, lasting confidence, along with what to do in the heat of the moment when your child is already spiraling and nothing you say seems to help. These are small, everyday shifts, and they add up to a child who learns to meet disappointment with resilience instead of despair.

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A mom wrote to me, torn between the pressure to start academics early and her daughter who just wants to play, and I have a feeling her question lives in a lot of us. In this episode, I answer it directly: yes, play is enough, and it's actually more sophisticated than most of the programs we're tempted to buy. I walk through what's really happening in your child's brain when she stacks blocks or plays pretend, why schedules and screens are crowding out play, and how to recognize the real learning that's happening right in front of you. Then I give you three simple things you can do this week to protect play in your child's life, and one of them is about protecting it in yours too.

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If you have ever taken time for yourself, the bath, the show, the quiet trip out alone, and still come back to your family feeling completely depleted, you are not doing self-care wrong. In this episode, we look at why so much of what we call self-care never actually refills an overwhelmed, tired mom, and the difference between numbing and soothing that changes everything. I walk you through the gap between the stressor and the stress your body is still holding long after the hard moment has passed, and the small practices that actually complete the stress cycle and calm your nervous system. If you're tired in a way that ordinary rest hasn't fixed, this is the gentle nervous system reset that will finally help you feel better.

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When your child's behavior feels confusing, the fix usually isn't a tougher consequence. It's a clearer read on what's happening underneath. In this episode we look into why a meltdown, an eye roll, or a kid who suddenly can't get out the door is almost always the tip of something bigger, and I walk you through a simple piece of brain science that makes it click. Then I hand you the two jobs of parenting, love and connection first, teaching second, and show you how to use them in real moments with a toddler at the park, a fourth grader stuck on homework, and a teenager who snaps the second they walk in the door. You'll leave knowing how to lead with connection without giving up your leadership.

If you'd like to get the show notes for this episode, head to:

 https://leighgermann.com