Whether we’re aware of them or not, our expectations have a tremendous impact on how we feel.

When we expect that we can get 10 things done in a day and we only complete 6 things, we may feel unproductive or ineffective. When we want to spend more time with our kids but when we aren’t able to, we may feel guilty or overwhelmed. 

But none of us want to lower our expectations; we fear that if we do, we’ll never get enough done, or we’ll let our kids down, or other bad things might happen. The solution, then, is to revise your expectations -- making sure that your expectations are working for you rather than against you.

Welcome to the first on-air coaching episode! (There will be many more to come.) In this episode, I coach mom Audrey, whose daughter, when she gets upset, tends to take out her Yuck  on Audrey. In this episode, we focus on how Audrey can help her daughter cope differently. Just as importantly, we also discuss strategies for how Audrey can help reduce her daughter’s Yuck to begin with, and she creates a plan for how she can respond to her daughter in the moment.

(Note: This episode is not COVID-19 specific. If you’d like more time-sensitive support related to your kids’ or your own behavior and emotions, feel free to join us in the “Your Parenting Long Game’ Podcast Community” where I’m offering more live, interactive events and other tips and support.)

You may already know that it’s important for kids to express their feelings. But what do you do when they express their feelings in a way that seems unhealthy -- if they become aggressive when they don’t get their way, become disrespectful when you set a boundary, or become fearful when they’re faced with change? The good news is that even though coping in a healthy way does not come naturally to most people, we can teach our kids to recognize their feelings and respond to them in a more mature, productive way. 

Fear and uncertainty... It feels like those feelings are growing every day. And often with those feelings comes negativity. Just like we do with our kids, we also have to understand what’s causing OUR feelings and behavior. When we recognize how our current situation is “withdrawing” from us, we can find solutions -- not only for feeling more in control, but also for being a model to our kids of how we can feel and act better, even in times of uncertainty.

Many of us are exhausted and would love to find ways to save time and energy. Although it doesn’t seem like it would be true, one of the ways we truly can save time and energy is to stop addressing negative behavior and big emotions as they’re happening. Instead, when we proactively give kids and teens what they need, the negative behavior and big emotions -- that take so much time and energy to deal with! -- simply don’t happen as frequently or intensely to begin with. In this episode, you will hear why, although it is possible to experience positive long-term results using in-the-moment strategies, you will save so much precious time and energy by using proactive strategies instead. I’ll also dissect a specific scenario to demonstrate the difference between in-the-moment and proactive strategies so you can see for yourself!

Although it is more effective (and less exhausting) to handle kids’ big behaviors and emotions proactively, sometimes we simply have to deal with them in the moment. Unfortunately, our in-the-moment responses often make the situation worse -- especially because both we and our kids are in Yuck. In this episode, we’ll discuss an in-the-moment strategy that focuses on giving kids what they need and addressing the Yuck (ours and theirs!) so that we can experience the positive results that we all want. 

For many of us, life is stressful. But what makes us feel even more overwhelmed is when we want things to go a certain way -- we want our kids to act a certain way, we want our spouses to do something different, we want our plans to go smoothly -- and they don’t. So we try new and different strategies but when nothing works, we feel helpless and out of control… which only contributes to our stress and overwhelm. In this episode, we’ll talk about why we feel so out of control and how to shift your measure of success so that you can genuinely have more of a positive influence on what’s happening around you.

Raising a strong willed child is not easy. Strong willed children tend to try to control situations so that they always get their way. They melt down or act out when we ask them to do something. They negotiate and resist even the littlest things. And in response, we tend to try HARDER to make them see or perspective or get them do what we want them to do… which only leads to more power struggles and negativity. But the reason we don’t see long-term results is that we don’t usually consider or address the cause of strong-willed kids’ behavior. When we understand why kids are being so “stubborn,” and when we give them what they need (not what they want!), that’s when behavior and moods change.

We’d all love parenting to be a little easier, and fortunately there are times when parenting does seem less difficult. Often during those easier times, our kids aren’t acting better; rather, WE’RE IN a better place and their behavior doesn’t affect us as much. But when we’re NOT in a good place -- when we’re triggered by our kids’ behavior, or when we’re stressed or overwhelmed with life in general -- everything kids do seems to be an extra burden that we have to deal with. If we want to spend less energy in the negativity, it’s important to realize how our own past and present actually make parenting harder.. so that we can start to relieve this burden.

It’s incredibly frustrating when we ask our kids to do something they don’t want to do… or we tell them something they don’t want to hear… and they whine, complain, melt down, or become disrespectful. Not only is it exhausting to deal with the response, but their reactions make us worry about their ability to handle the fact that life is hard sometimes. Worse, the strategies we use to try to help them handle disappointment and frustration don’t usually help. In this episode, we’ll discuss what you can do to help your kids handle the fact that things aren’t always going to go the way they want them to.