Calm Parenting Tips

No matter where I go around the world teaching about parenting, how to help people learn self-government and self-mastery, there is one area that is probably the most difficult for most people, and that is calmness. Not only calmness for their children, but calmness as a parent. Because we know, just intuitively, if we can't be calm as parents, how are they going to ever learn the calmness that we see that they need? Humans need to learn calmness. In this video, we're going to talk about calm parenting tips that you can use in order to strengthen your relationships and your corrections. In this video, I'm going to share with you a story from my life about calmness and how I started learning that I could be calm, and then I'm going to share with you multiple calm parenting tips that you can use in your home. When I was 14 years old, I did not get along with my parents. That's probably not unusual. That's a pretty normal age for a person to start detaching from their parents some, especially because hormonally, with puberty setting in, the brain is expanding and growing, and suddenly they feel in their adolescent years like, I have to learn how to do things myself. They want a little bit more autonomy. I definitely wanted that, but I also felt my parents were being just a little bit too restrictive. Now, in hindsight, when I think about it, I think actually they were protecting me from some things they really needed to be, but when you're a child, you don't always see it that way. So anyway, I was really strong-willed. My dad was strong-willed. We bonked heads a lot. We would end up in power struggles, fighting. One time I remember I even hit my own mother. I mean, I was definitely not calm, so there was a time I was over at a neighbor's house, and the neighbor friend of mine and her mom were helping to plan a party with me. So all three of us were planning a party together. It was going to be at their house. It was going to be a boy-girl party, and when you're 14, that's really exciting, and then all of a sudden it hit me, wait a minute, it's a miracle I'm over here right now. My parents never let me do anything anymore. There's no way they're going to let me go to a party. So I looked at my mom and her friend, and I said, you know what, you guys have a good time at the party, but I'm not going to be able to go. My mom's friend looked at me and said, what do you mean you can't go, Nicolene? Of course you have to come. You just helped plan the whole thing. And I said, no, you don't understand. There's no way my parents are going to let me go. They never let me do anything. All we ever do is fight. They don't even like me. Like, I was convinced they didn't like me, and I just had to put up with that until I could leave the house. If my parents knew I had been thinking that at the time, they would have been mortified. But that is how I was processing it, and young people do start to jump to absolutes like that. Well, my friend's mom was wise. She asked me a question that challenged me, and it changed everything for me. She looked at me in the eyes and she said, Nicolene, have you ever thought of just saying okay? And I said, what? That would never work. That's what they want me to say. So then she looked at me and she said, Nicolene, I'll tell you what, we are going to postpone the party for two weeks. You go home, and every time your parents tell you to do something or not to do something, say okay and be okay. Now, I knew one of those was going to be harder than the other. To say okay, I could do that. To be okay, though, that one seemed harder. But I told her it wouldn't work. I told her she couldn't talk to my parents, and she promised she wasn't going to call them. And I told her I was going to go home and do exactly what she said, and I would prove to her that it did not work. So I went home, and that very night it was my dish night, which usually created a problem in our household, because I didn't like dishes, and I felt like I was always doing dishes that I shouldn't have had to do, because someone didn't do the other dishes earlier in the day. So when my mom said in her passive way, Nicolene, it's your dish night, I thought, oh, she's telling me to do something. So I said okay, and I stood up and I started doing the dishes. Now at that point, I saw my parents out of the corner of my eye look at each other like, what does she want? This is so weird, right? They were shocked. Here I was just following their instruction. I've got to be up to something, right? And I never asked for anything else. And then days went by, and my mom decided to try something. She came to me and said, you know, Nicolene, you really should clean your room. Now that was the big whammy. My room was so bad. It was that normal teenage room, clothes everywhere, never making my bed, all those kinds of things. And at that point, I looked at her when she made the request, and I said okay, and I started cleaning my room. She stood there in the doorway, leaning against the doorframe, looking at me for like 20 minutes in disbelief that I was cleaning the room. She had been walking by for months just shutting the door, because every time she told me to do it, I wouldn't. I had some excuse where I said I'd do it, but I didn't actually do it. And now here I was just doing it. They probably thought something was really wrong with their child. They probably wondered what had gotten into me. Why did I change? They didn't know I was making a choice. I was choosing to say okay and be okay. In the act of cleaning my room that day, a voice popped into my head. It was like my voice, but a little bit deeper. And the voice said, I am so powerful. Now we can discuss where this voice came from, whose it was, if it was made up, part of my imagination, whatever. But when I heard that voice, I went yeah, I am so powerful. I just chose to be happy. I picked it. And I'm going to choose to be happy every other time, because I'm going to get whatever I want. I had seen a truth there. I picked to be happy. I chose it. And I also realized there was a power there. A power that came from being calm. That power changed everything for me. So my relationship changed with my parents, and I ended up becoming a lot more calm in my youth. Fast forward that a number of years, and suddenly I'm a foster parent of troubled teens. I'm the mother of two babies, a baby and a toddler, later to have more babies after the fact. I had four of my own. But at this point, I was also raising foster children. They were all teens. I was doing therapeutic treatment care, bringing them into my home. They were very difficult. And I knew that I needed to be calm all the time. But I also knew that because I trained myself to say okay and be okay, because I had learned to conquer myself in a few areas in my youth, that I should be able to conquer myself in this area too. This area of calmness. So I started making a plan for myself and following through with that plan. Now what I'd like to share with you rapid fire right now are some calm parenting tips that you can use in your family. But at the end of this video, I'm going to let you know about a free gift where you can find out more. Tip number one. Your calmness will make their calmness. Calmness has a boomerang effect. So focus on getting calm before you take the steps to help them get calm. This means you might have to have a calm down moment for yourself. Tip number two. Know what to say to them when it is time to point them toward calmness. When they're going out of control, you need to have a plan for how to point them back and toward the direction of calmness. So that means that you probably need the same thing to say every time. If you say the same words every time, not only will you be able to use them, but it will end up pointing them toward calmness as well. It is okay to have a script and to even have it memorized. Just tell your children that during the moments when you need to point them toward calmness and using that prefrontal cortex so that they can think clearly again instead of being stuck in mid or back brain, you will use the same words every time so that they know that they need to also be choosing calmness. Tip number three. Deep breathing. So taking deep breaths is the number one thing that signals your brain that everything's okay. Once you take a deep breath, your brain chemicals start to adjust. Multiple deep breaths and you can adjust your whole brain pretty quickly, especially if you're deliberately focusing on telling yourself you're okay or to be calm. Teaching your children to take deep breaths and you knowing how to take deep breaths can be a game changer. Tip number five. Don't talk to them about something unless you are calm. If there's a problem that needs to be solved and you're feeling like you're taking it personal, your blood pressure's rising, you need to have a calm plan. What are you going to do to get calm? And it's got to be short. Anyone can get calm in five minutes or less if they want to. My grandfather's grandmother used to go into her room and sit in her rocking chair and go, mercy, mercy, mercy to get calm. I used to go into my closet, say prayers, sing a song, and then review the words I wanted to say and then come back out and talk to the children. There is no rule that says you have to handle something the second it happens. I mean, unless the child's in the street or they're going to be in some physical danger. But usually you can say, we're going to talk about this, but we need to first be calm, so I'm going to go do my calm plan, you do yours, and we'll talk in a minute. If they do their calm plan, great. If not, you've got to know what to do next. Tip number five is consistent follow-through. If you want to be calm and help them learn to be calm, you've got to keep consistently following through on correcting things when they're not calm. You've got to correct yourself and teach them how to accept corrections too. So that brings me to number six, which is you need to know the steps of doing a correction. And the corrections aren't bad, they're good, they're healthy, they're productive. In fact, people who can correct themselves are typically people who are more happy. They're confident, they feel in control, they're in the habit of seeing that making personal adjustments is a healthy thing. That makes them more wise and they oftentimes have greater influence on the people that are around them. Now there's so many more tips that I can share with you, but I think probably the best thing that I can do is just give you a free gift, which is my Calm Parenting Toolkit. My Calm Parenting Toolkit is on my website, teachingselfgovernment.com. If you go there right now on the homepage, the Calm Parenting Toolkit is for free. And we'll have 10 more tools for calmness that can help you, and this is a great way to get started on your teaching self-government journey. So go to teachingselfgovernment.com today. I'll see you there.