S05|15 - The Secret to Gentle Parenting

Gentle parenting can seem elusive and hard to do in our own homes, even when we’re trying. In order to help our children find rest (safety, security and connection) in their relationship with US, we must give this to ourselves first. We can’t give, fully, what we don’t have. Come join us as we do this work… in person, information below!!

On the podcast today:

• What gentle parenting is and different names you may hear for it (attachment parenting, connection-based parenting, conscious parenting etc.)
• How positive parenting differs from this type of parenting
• Traditional forms of parenting: authoritarian (or force) and permissiveness (no guidance)
• How changing our self-concept can change everything in parenting
• A tool to use to become more aware of your self-concept
• Come join this work in person, for the first time ever!!

ANNOUNCEMENT:

In-person energy is AMAZING, and change can be accelerated when we come together and do this work in a retreat experience. Join me at the first ever Rest, Play, Grow: The Retreat, a Self-Mothering Soul-cation for Women.

Watch a quick video of what you can expect right HERE
Get on the interest list HERE
Direct sign-up link HERE

 

 

Episode Transcript

 

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Hi, I'm Crystal The Parenting Coach. Parenting is the thing that some of us just expected to know how to do. It's not like other areas of your life where you go to school to be taught, get on the job training, or have mentors to help you learn. Now, you can get that help here.

I believe that your relationship with your children is one of the most important aspects of your life, and the best way that you can make a positive impact on the world and on the future. I've made parental relationships my life study, and use life coaching tools with connection-based parenting to build amazing relationships between parents and their children. 

If you want an even better relationship with your child, this podcast will help you. Take my Parenting Quiz, the link is in the show notes. Once we know what your parenting style is, I'll give you some tips tailored to you and a roadmap to help you get the most out of my podcast. I invite you to help me spread the word by sharing your favorite episode on social media or with a friend.

 

Hello, I am excited to bring you this episode that is a monologue episode; it's just me, it's not an interview. I decided to just to break up the interviews a little bit with an episode of me because there is something that I've been wanting to talk about a lot and I've been talking about a ton in Parent School and just to really anybody who will listen, not even just my clients. I've been having a lot of conversations with this about people, with people.

 

So, I am going to bring you this episode, The Secret to Gentle Parenting. What I'm going to talk about first is what Gentle Parenting is and all the different names that you may have heard about it. So, there's loads of different names; Connection-based Parenting, Gentle Parenting, Conscious Parenting, Respectful Parenting. 

 

How Positive Parenting differs from Gentle Parenting

Positive Parenting is a little bit different, and I'll talk about that also. But any of these terms really mean the same thing, except Positive Parenting is a little bit different. 

But all of the other terms, as far as I can tell, mean pretty much the same thing; it's parenting from a conscious way, from an intentional way with kindness, with compassion, with connection – and instead of having rewards and punishments and trying to manipulate or coerce or change your kids' behavior, be the outcome. 

So, I'll explain that a little bit more. But first one caveat that I mentioned was that Positive Parenting's a little bit different. 

Positive Parenting also focuses on praise and sometimes focuses on rewards. And so, that's why Positive Parenting, I don't lump in the same category as everything else.

 

One more word that you may hear kicked around is called attachment-parenting, and that is also along the same lines. Now, everybody might describe it a little bit differently or talk about a little bit of a different approach, but in general, we're all talking about the same thing when we talk about Gentle Parenting, and that is this; 

 

Traditional forms of parenting: authoritarian (or force) and permissiveness (no guidance)

On the one side of the spectrum, we have what we call Permissive Parenting. Permissive Parenting is oftentimes what people think of when they think of Gentle and Connection-based Parenting. 

But Permissive Parenting is actually low on safety and low on security, and low on relationship because we are not giving our children much guidance…we're not giving them many boundaries; it's more just being friends with your child and kind of letting them do their own thing. 

And so, they don't feel the safety and security emotionally or physically within that relationship. 

Now, I want you to imagine a spectrum, and that's on one side of the spectrum. Now, if you go all the way to the other side of the spectrum or continuum, you have Authoritarian Parenting. 

Authoritarian Parenting is a little bit more like a dictatorship, like it's my way or the highway…like these are our rules, this is what we have to do. This might sound familiar as I'm talking about it because this is a lot of times the generation before us, how they parented and how the generation before that parented. 

It's a little bit more common in the past generations and still so now, I would guess that this is still mostly the way that people parent – and this is rewards and punishments.

So, punishment would be timeouts, spanking, yelling, grounding, taking your kids' phone away, taking their Xbox away, taking screen time away; those kinds of things or punishments. 

 

Another way that we can look at it too is rewards. And I lump rewards in here as well because it's actually teaching them external motivation instead of internal motivation. The goal from us is still to get them to change their behavior. We're focusing on trying to change their behavior. 

And so, it's along the same vein, in my mind, as punishment as well. So, it might be like sticker charts or bribing them to clean their rooms or to have good behavior or to do their homework or to be kind, whatever it is that you're trying to get out of them. 

The reason why I'm not a proponent of rewards, even though they might seem like a little bit more of a positive approach when it comes to parenting, is because it is not teaching external motivation. It's teaching them that they should do the behavior you want them to do so they can get something. 

I read in a parenting book, one time, an example that they gave was reading; and they cited a study, I don't have the citation with me, but they were talking about a study and they said that they took a group of kids who was learning to read – and they were reading and enjoying reading – and they decided that they wanted to help even increase their enjoyment in reading. 

And so, they felt like if they amplified, they could amplify this by giving them rewards. So, they would have some sort of like a sticker chart or something and you could, you know, gain these rewards through reading. 

And they thought it was going to be a positive thing, and that the outcome would be that kids would want to read more and they would enjoy reading more. But the opposite was…or the outcome was actually the opposite of that, in which they noticed that the internal motivation for them to read decreased. 

And then unless they had a reward or had an even more of a reward than they had in the beginning, they just weren't as motivated to read naturally like they had been in the past.

So, when I think of Authoritarian Parenting, going back to Authoritarian Parenting, I think of both rewards and of punishments. And again, this is low safety and low security, low physical and emotional safety within that relationship. 

If you're listening to this podcast, you probably already know a lot about this. I talk a lot about this, and you've probably read some books about it too. Some people that I look up to and love reading from are Dr. Gordon Neufeld, Dr. Deborah MacNamara, Daniel Siegel, Tina Payne Bryson, Kim John Payne. There's loads of people that speak on similar topics to this when it comes to parenting. 

Now, our parents parented typically in a more authoritarian way – sometimes in a permissive way. And we often find ourselves ping-ponging back and forth from Permissiveness to Authoritarian, or we might find that we have a partner who parents in an authoritarian way, so then we overcompensate by parenting in a more permissive way.

 

What gentle parenting is and different names you may hear for it

So, when I think of Gentle Parenting or Connection-based parenting, I think of it being in the center. And to me, gentleness doesn't mean like meek and submissive and just like soft-spoken all the time; but it's not using those harsher tones, those harsher energies and emotions when I'm parenting. 

And so, in the center here, I feel like the focus is on connection, which is why I've kind of coined the term connection-based parenting because I believe the focus is on connection over anything else – more so than behavior modification. 

So, one of my go-to phrases is connection over behavior modification; like connection is the goal, relationship is the goal; behavior modification is just something that kind of comes afterwards – and it comes afterwards because if you have a high…if you have a relationship with high safety and high security and high connection, your children will start to gain roots of attachment. 

And if you haven't listened to me talk about roots of attachment, you can go back. I have an episode specifically on attachment-based parenting. But what this means is; they want sameness, they want belonging, they want to be like you and close to you, they care about your opinion, they want to emulate what you are doing. 

And so, they are much more likely to listen to you and to listen to what you have to say – and also to look up to you to what you are doing, how you are being and how they should act.

So, the number one focus here is connection and relationship. 

And the number two focus is, how am I modeling or what am I modeling? How am I-- What kinds of behaviors am I modeling here? Because they learn so much more from who we are and how we are being than what we say to them, right? 

And you've probably had this experience several times; it's like you can say all you want to say until you're blue in the face, but if you're doing something different, that's what they're going to be learning. 

I remember when I was a younger mom, I remember yelling at my kids to stop yelling; and even as I was yelling at them to stop yelling, noticing the irony in that, because what I'm really teaching them isn't to stop yelling and isn't to yell, to not yell when they're mad…when I'm teaching them is that when we're mad or when we're upset or when we're out of control, we yell. 

And so, it really was, what they were learning was through I was actually being…who I was being and how I was behaving in that moment. 

So, the two focuses are number one, relationship and connection above everything else. 

And then two, the teaching happens through role modeling behaviors. This doesn't mean that we don't take moments to teach or we don't talk about them. Children love learning through play, they love learning through story; we can teach them through a multitude of ways that are helpful and healthy…but that the most of what they're going to learn is from who we are. 

So, that's what I think of when I think of Gentle Parenting. I think of-- I think of this whole approach – the center space of more calm, more connection, more regulation in myself so that I can then show up in the way that I want to and be modeling the behavior that I want to see…more focus on compassion and on understanding and on my relationship with my child than on anything else.

So, I wanted to give you this whole preamble of how I explain Gentle Parenting and what I think it is and connection-based parenting before I dig into what I feel like the secret is to it. 

So, I started coaching probably three years ago, maybe a little bit more than that. And in the beginning, I coached everybody on everything. I loved parenting and I always coached on that, but I coached on several other things as well. 

Coaching is really just helping people with emotional wellness. So, it doesn't matter if you're helping business people or if you're helping parents – if you're helping moms, dads everybody needs support within emotional wellness. 

And so, this is something that I was helping people with. And one; I noticed was no matter who I was coaching or what I was coaching them on, that similar themes kept coming up, right? Similar thought patterns, similar emotions, similar things kind of keeping us stuck and bogging us down. 

And over more and more and more time, I noticed that there's kind of like surface thoughts and then there's kind of like root thoughts. So, what I do is called Causal Coaching. So, it's finding the reason behind it. It's think, feel, do; our thoughts create our feelings, our feelings fuel our actions. 

A lot of parenting support and just support in general focuses on the do; it's like catchphrases and what you should do or not do with your kids…versus like, what am I thinking and what am I feeling and how am I responding? And how is that related to like the DO section? Like what's happening in the Think and the Feel.

 

How changing our self-concept can change everything in parenting

So, going back to Causal Coaching, I'm like figuring this out. I'm noticing that there's these surface thoughts, right? These thoughts like, 'Oh, my child's so frustrating', or 'They don't listen', or 'I'm not enjoying this', or 'This is really hard'. Like, there's lots of little surface thoughts that we have. 

But I noticed that when we started to dig down to more of those root thoughts, like, well, what about your child not listening bothers you so much? Or what about this thing this person said bothers you so much? What about this thing that this person did or texted you or didn't do that bothers you so much?

And it's never the surface thoughts that we think that it is. There's always something a little bit deeper down, that's a root thought. So, this is how I try to explain it to people; within that situation, whenever I'm feeling that more emotional charge or emotional reaction inside of myself – even if I haven't like, you know, blown up, I still feel that strong emotional charge inside – I ask myself, what am I thinking about myself in the context of this "problem"?

So, this text that somebody sent me, this thing that they said, this thing that my child's doing or not doing, what am I thinking about me here? How am I thinking about myself here? Because the secret to Gentle Parenting is in changing our relationship with ourself, changing what I call our self-concept. 

So, self-concept is my mood, my personality, my thoughts, my past experiences; it's how I think about myself. It's how I view other people thinking about me, how I think they're thinking about me, how I treat myself; all of that is wrapped up in this idea of self-concept or relationship with self. We have relationships with ourselves just like we do anybody else around us. And this, I think is above think, feel, do. 

And this is how I view it; we have these like glasses that we're wearing in the world; and if we're wearing like rose-colored glasses, we're going to see the world in a certain way. 

So, before it even turns into a thought, and then a feeling and then an action, right? Our thoughts create our feelings, our feelings fuel our actions. Before the thought even happens, it's being filtered through this lens…the lens of how I view myself, how I treat myself, what I believe about myself to be true. 

So, if that text happens or if somebody does something, or if my kid says something or doesn't say something, or my partner says something or doesn't say something…whatever is happening externally is being filtered through this lens, and then I'm processing it internally. 

And that is the secret to Gentle Parenting; when I can figure out how to not only access what my self-concept is or how I'm thinking about myself, but then learn to change and kind of heal and grow that part of myself…that is what changes everything.

 

A tool to use to become more aware of your self-concept

So, I'm going to give you a little tool for this; if you're kind of like, 'This is out there and I don't really know what you're talking about' or 'How I'm supposed to incorporate this?' 

I want you to get out a quick pen and a piece of paper; and I want you to write down, on a scale of 1 to 10, I want you to rank yourself in your relationship with yourself. 

And by that, I mean; how you treat yourself, what you think about yourself, how you feel about yourself, what do you think others might think of you. 

So, a 10 would be a really amazing relationship with myself; maybe I feel self-confident, I'm pretty kind to myself, I forgive myself…that's what I think of when I think of a 10. I think of, I'm not perfect there. 10 is not perfection. 

There is no-- Just so you know, if you haven't already been told that, there's no perfection. 

So, 10 would be; I'm still going to have errors…I'm still going to make mistakes, but I, you know, can move on from them more easily – I love myself, I have compassion for myself, I'm confident in myself. 

 

And number one would be the opposite of all of that. So, I want you just to give yourself a number; don't think about it too much, this is just a thought exercise. This number does not mean anything, you know, eternally about you or anything. It's just a number. 

So, the question I want you to then ask yourself is this, why is this number not a 10? Why did I not give myself a 10? 

Now, I've probably asked you to do this on the podcast before, and maybe you kind of listened and half-listened and didn't do it, but actually pause and do this because it will start to dig out in your brain the stuck beliefs you have about yourself when it comes to self-concept; and we all have these, everybody has these. 

Now you've heard me talk about shame and inner triggers, and all of that; this is kind of what it's going to be digging up. It's going to be like, 'Well, you don't do this', or 'You do this too much', or 'You do this not enough', or 'You should change this aspect of yourself'. 

There's going to be a lot of thoughts and a lot of beliefs that come up, and they might be enlightening. It might be interesting to see what's there and to maybe even see what you didn't know was there before. 

And the first step of healing, I think, is just that awareness of like, how do I treat myself? What do I think about myself? What really is going on deep inside my brain when I pause to ask myself? Because when we can intentionally work on shifting those and changing those beliefs about ourselves and healing, that relationship that we have with ourselves…that's when everything starts to shift and change. 

If you think about a relationship, it's always two people, right? It's always like me and my child, or me and my partner, or me and my friend, or me and my parents; and we can't change the other person. 

I mean, you've probably tried this; it probably hasn't worked, right? We can't change our kids, we can't control them; we can't change our partner, we can't change our parents. But we can change the relationship by changing us about it, by changing the us part that we're bringing to the relationship. 

If we bring in 50% and the other per person brings in 50% - if we entirely change our relationship with us, how we view ourselves…that's going to hugely change how we interact in that relationship, in any relationship. 

So, even if you are not a parent yet and you want to make these changes, this is still where to start; it's always this. Our self-concept was being developed in our formative years. And so, if we had parents who taught through a little bit more of these coercive, authoritarian type methods…a lot of times, this included large outbursts of emotion – like emotional reactivity.

A lot of times, it included kind of suppressing emotions like sending you to your room or, you know, telling you not to cry or...I don't know, whatever those little things are where big things were. 

A lot of times, there were shame in that parenting…even if your parents weren't yellers, they may have just like in their tone been more shame-based within their parenting. 

So, all of those kinds of things – and not even just within your relationship with your parents, but the people around you, the books that you read, how you saw other people parented, how you saw other people interact…all of that was shaping this self-concept that you have now, that we all have now. 

And so, it's working on changing how I view myself and my relationship with myself and on healing that so that I can find compassion and empathy and acceptance for who I am, for all of me, for the whole of me. 

Some people talk about like the shadow side; I think that came from Carl Jung, but I have not looked it up lately…but he kind of talks about this kind of dark side of our being, and we all have this like darker side – these thoughts that we have about ourselves, this more negativity that we have inside of us. 

And if we keep pushing it away – and if we keep not viewing it, not bringing it to light – nothing's ever going to change. 

So, I'm going to give you a quick example of how this can work. If I am parenting my kids, and one of my self-concept kind of deeper down beliefs that I've noticed is I'm not doing enough, I am ruining my kids, I'm trying to do this whole generational parenting healing thing, but I think I might actually just be adding to their baggage. 

And if those are some beliefs that I have that, that I hold really true to me before my kids even do or say anything…before they even wake up in the morning, if I believe this, that's the lens in which I'm viewing everything. 

So, then they wake up and I wake up and we go about our day and maybe they spill something on the floor, or maybe they fail a test or maybe they skip school, or maybe they lie to me, or maybe they talk back…all of the multitude of behaviors that we see in our kids, right? 

And we're filtering it through this lens of like, 'I'm ruining them' or 'I'm doing something wrong', or you know, 'This is my fault, their behavior is my fault', we're going to be filtering it through that way and it's going to really change our response to them. 

And if you, again, just rewind back to the beginning of that day, if your core belief about yourself was that you were doing your best, that best doesn't mean perfect; that best means that you're trying…that you keep trying, that you love yourself – that you believe in your worth and your inherent worth, your inherent value, your inherent identity, and that that never changes regardless of what you do, that you can love yourself anyways. 

If you have compassion and empathy and love for yourself, and then you wake up and your kids wake up and all of the same things happen, I want you to imagine how different your response would be; how different your thoughts, how different your feelings – how different the 'Do' part – Think, Feel, Do – how different each of those will be, because your relationship with yourself is different. 

This doesn't mean that you're never going to feel these negative beliefs about yourself; they still might pop up again. But from that healed space, Gentle Parenting comes; it flows naturally. 

When I'm hard on myself internally, I'm hard on the people around me. When I'm unkind to myself, when I'm judgmental towards myself, when I find it hard to feel compassion for me…all of those things are going to be reflected outwards also. I'm going to be the same way with the people around me, especially with my kids. 

But if I can find compassion and empathy and love and acceptance for me and where I'm at in my journey, regardless of my mistakes and errors, then it's going to flow naturally from me. And when we think of Gentle Parenting, we think of compassion and of kindness and of acceptance…of validating them and their emotions, of being there to just witness them and connect with them. 

Well, we have to give that to ourselves first. We can't give to someone else what we don't yet have for us, at least not fully, not in the way that we're trying to be. There's always going to be that dissonance between who we want to be and who we really are. 

 

Come join this work in person, for the first time ever!!

Now, I think this work is powerful. I've seen it transform the lives of my clients and of myself. I'm working through clients in Parent School right now; and I've seen changes and shifts happen with them as well, and it's pretty powerful. 

My dream is to bring this work in-person because I love the energy that there is in-person. The things that have helped heal me are coaching, digging into these beliefs, getting into my body like meditation and processing my emotions. 

Other things that have helped have been co-regulation; even just being with other people during this process, talking things out. 

There's so many things that have been healing for me – nature, play. And I want to bring all of those into one succinct place, succinct place. I want it to be an in-person experience where we do all of this together. 

My favorite parenting book – I talk about it all the time – is Rest, Play, Grow by Dr. Deborah MacNamara. And it occurred to me one time, it's called Rest, Play, Grow for Preschoolers or Anyone Who Acts Like One. 

And it occurred to me, one time, that this is exactly what we need to give ourselves; and that if we could give this to ourselves, we could give it to our kids. We're continuously trying to help them feel rest in our care, in that relationship with us. Well, if we don't have rest within ourselves, within our own relationship with ourselves, how can we give it to them? 

And then if we can find rest in that relationship and we can play again, do things for joy – even if there's no outcome, even if it's not productive, just do playful things, do joyful things – then the growth just happens naturally, then we're on the growth trajectory. 

So, I called it Rest, Play, Grow; The Retreat. I call it that. The interest list is already opened. I will have all the information below this for you. I would love for you to join us. It is in Alberta about an hour away from where I live right now, and it's at these cool fairytale cabins. 

You got to pick your own cabin, and just the energy of the resort is amazing; I just love it. And we're going to be doing yoga, meditation, emotional processing, spending time in nature, art, playfulness – all of these things that I've been talking about so that we can help to shift that idea of our self-concept, that relationship with ourselves. 

This is open to anyone, even if you were not a mother. And by anyone, I should clarify; this very first one is for women only. But you do not have to have children; everyone can do this kind of experience. 

There's going to be some inner child yoga, some archetypal yoga, some meditation and processing through these things that I've been talking about on this episode today. 

So, check it out. Join us if you can; if not, keep your ear open for the next time that we run this. I'm hoping that this will become a regular thing at this same location because it is such an amazing little spot that we have here. 

So, check it all out at all of the links. And I would love to hear from you how this episode landed with you, what you thought about it. 

Even if you disagree with me or if you're like, 'I don't know what you're talking about', I would love for you to send me a message and to chat about it. 

If you loved this and it resonated with you, and if you're loving these episodes and these interviews I'm bringing to you…I would love for you just to take a quick minute and rate, review, subscribe, because it really helps the algorithm know that people want to hear this…and it will help this message get out to more people, this secret to Gentle Parenting. 

So, thank you for being here and I'll be back next week with another amazing interview.

 

Thanks for listening. If you'd like to help spread this work to the world, share this episode on social media and tag me, send it to a friend, or leave a quick rating and review below so more people can find me. If you'd like more guidance on your own parenting journey, reach out.