Getting the Support You Deserve as a Parent

0:00 everybody um good afternoon and good evening thank you for everyone who is joining me today today we're gonna talk about support so it's quiet apt that I should say thank you for finding the time out of your evening or out of your afternoon to come and get yourself some better support and some help I start by introducing hand-in-hand parenting hand-in-hand parenting was done at almost 30 years ago by Patti wiffler and

0:30 when she had the gift of being listened to by an objective warm-hearted loving listener who was just able to let her pour her heart and she realized that that was a cornerstone to being a better parent it was getting that support and having someone listen to you in such a loving and caring and wholehearted way so that formed one of her five parenting tools which is listening time the other

1:03 four tools are setting limits which is using a limit listen limit structure so we believe in empathically setting a boundary or a limit with a child by coming in close and listening with warmth being firm with your limit and then listening to the feelings that pour out as a result of having been told you can't do something or you know whatever that limit is and so that kind of leads

1:34 to stay listening which is another one of the tools stay listening is based on the understanding that children as human beings will experience the full gamut of emotions and that's normal and healthy but off-track behavior usually is a sign that there's some real feelings that have been stewing for a long time so stay listening is about listening to fears and pain on her that may pour out in the form of tantrums tears sweating

2:10 all sorts of things and so it's coming in close with warmth and contact and just holding space for a child we call that stay listening and then we have play listening which is using play to follow the giggles to help through certain troubles like separation anxiety or maybe just the morning routine of getting out the door using play to find the laughter in those situations and shift the the angst and the frustration

2:44 for us and for them and then there is special time which is one-on-one intensive connected play time with your child so you set a specific time frame so maybe 15 20 minutes that you're going to just give over wholeheartedly to your child let them lead you in play connect with warm air contact and just delight in them for that period and allow yourself to be totally led which is a great cup filler and it's a great way of

3:14 finding out more about your children and really connecting with them and it works really well for everyone involved so those are the five tools and so some of you might be thinking well that sounds awesome but like not realistic like maybe you have absolutely no support and so you're just thinking you know I am just trying to keep everyone in my household alive and that's the best I can do right now or maybe you are

3:47 actually kicking all those goals you managing to do the tools or you managing to really be the best parent you can imagine being but then there's someone in the background who's not making it easy for you so I want to talk about all of that today so first of all I wanted to talk about listening time is gonna be the main sort of piece of the puzzle in this it's gonna be about you getting support so if you're wanting to know how

4:16 to do that I will pop in the comments you're probably best off going to the hand-in-hand parenting Facebook page posting your time zone your availability and then waiting for someone to contact you in regards to being a listening partner for you there is also listening partner page that you can join as well and you can have a read through other people's requests and see if it works for you in terms of timezone and in terms of what the other person is

4:44 looking for and you can also reach out in your community or your friendship groups see if there is someone out there with that would be willing to be a listener for you make sure that you've both read the guidelines which will also put my comments it's really important you understand on both sides that when it comes to listening partnership it's very different to normal conversation it's uninterrupted it is just non-judgmental Wiese you're listening

5:16 you are just holding in your mind that that other person is strong and wise and that they have all the answers that they need and you're just going to help them get those out and there's no referring back when you finish listening you just ask a question that will snap them out of that emotional headspace back into the presence they might be known five things that are blue or something like that so yeah basically when it comes to

5:47 support that's gonna be the number one thing because it is such a life changer when you have somewhere you can just spew out anything horrible that you're dealing with it's all we can just process things in a different way to how you might with friends or family when you're trying to work through something you know the natural conversational sort of method we use is to give advice if someone's asking or talking about a problem you just want to jump in there

6:16 so it's so different from that and it's just something that you can't understand the benefit of until you've tried it so I'm happy to help you find a listening partner and as I said we'll pop all the links in the comments later on so the first thing I would do to get yourself some support is to have a listening session on the fantasy what would perfect support look by in your world and how would that change

6:42 everything in your world how would you be different as a parent with your dream support and how would your children be with your dream support have a little moment to just you know and enjoy the fantasy of what it could look like and then I would also use that time to think about if it's hard for you to accept or understand that you need support so you know as parents we are just not well

7:13 supported we don't have enough tonight your support we don't have enough physical support you know hands on deck we don't have enough mental emotional support there's too many other tasks in the modern world that we're concentrating on and it's just you know we need so much more than what we have so today we're gonna talk about getting a little bit more of that but the reality is that we are all under supportive no matter how great your

7:40 systems are and I know that there are some people who have like they're the total lower end of having health and support and there's some of us who feel like we should be pretty happy with the support the systems that we've got and I think it's a good idea to get some time on that and you know no matter how good you've got it it's still okay to need more and to know that you need more and

8:05 you know we some of us feel like are well you know my parents do that my parents before them do that you know no one of them needed help or you know they just got on with it but I'd like to say that if you just get on with the type of person I don't think you'd be here today we're not just getting on with that people we want more we're trying to do more and that's great so yes spend some

8:32 time working on that if it's hard for you to say yes spend some time saying yes to help in your listing partnership or you know going out into the world and the next person who offers to help you with something say yes and when people offer to help usually it's because they honestly from the bottom of their heart want to I know that when I for people health and support I really mean it and I enjoy helping and

8:59 supporting parents because I feel like that is the cornerstone of what's been helpful for me as a parent as well and things do come and around in a beautiful way like you know I may be able to support someone more than they're able to support me but then there's other people who support me more than I'm able to support them and I just feel like it's all swings and roundabouts as a friend said to me recently

9:23 so also spend some time brainstorming how you can get help in the long term and how you can get help in the short term so short term I like to put my hand up and say I'm willing to help if you have questions in your parenting if you are looking for listening partner my name is Chantal but I go by auntie ask is my page which are getting put in my comments later or the hand-in-hand parenting page go on there as well and

9:55 there's also the parent club now hand-in-hand parenting have a free newsletter that you can sign up for and that has lists of all our different talks and articles all our freebies but there's also the parent club which has next-level support at the moment there's a 30-day free trial so with signing up for that and seeing how you go because there's a lot more support available there as well and the other thing is if

10:29 you're self-care so self-care is another important piece of the puzzle which is again hard to do if you don't have good support so start small with self-care I used to simply have a cup of tea every day and for my 10 minutes less I drink a cup of tea I told everyone I just need 10 minutes and I'm gonna sit here I'm gonna read I'm gonna sit here I'm gonna watch something on my phone I'm gonna

10:54 scroll through Facebook whatever for 10 minutes I just had that space and I knew that was my time I intended to do it when the kids went down for their sleep and now from that little piece of so care gold I go out dancing once a week I have regular dinners with friends I guard troops and it's um yeah once you put one foot forward often the building blocks fall into place that you can do more but of course that doesn't work for

11:28 people who are doing this alone so you know my heart and all of my all go out to soul parents because that is truly hard you know even in as I said well supported structures such as I've got you know family around I've got a partner it's I'm in a really good position you know it's still hard so I can only you know I can't even begin to imagine what it's like for a soul parent so again the first thing is getting some

11:58 listing times so that you have an opportunity to vent to upload and then again listening time brings a lot of clarity so that may also be a great way for you to work out how you can build some better supports for yourself and I will suggest a listening partner who agrees to an in-between text or venting of a situation so that whenever you can steal that little part of time in your

12:29 week you do your one-on-one over the phone or in person listening but during the week if you're able also to just send texts or send little email dumps of whatever you need to get off your chest as well and I hope that would just take off that top layer of everything then the other thing is to reach out to your community groups so again go on the hand-in-hand parent support page and see if there's anyone in your local area or

12:58 look up on Facebook if there's groups with you know like-minded families so for me it was an attachment parenting group was the perfect group for me to find my tribe and find my religion I'm very grateful to have those guys in my life and that's yeah where most of my support comes from and also maybe playgroups particularly sole parent pray play groups where you can find other parents and similar situations with the view to working towards being able to help each other

13:27 out so once we've got those structures in place then you can start to do babysitting swaps or even as simply as getting all together in one location having one or two or however many of you look after and play games at the big bunch of kids well I see other one takes off each child one by one for some special time and that may be the only way that you can work special time into your routine and that will be as you'll

13:55 see still completely transformative to have that one-on-one time and also just be able to spend time delighting in your child because I imagine it is hard as a sole parent in particular to just be trying to get through all the things you have to get through there may not be a lot of opportunities to really spend one-on-one time with your children so again I'm happy to help spit ball ideas on how we can wire the

14:26 new networks but listening time I think is a great way to just talk it through with someone and see what comes out of that because you do have that wisdom within you so there's that and then there's also if you are not utilizing your support so those of us who have them but haven't been using them and I can be guilty of this myself as well so again get some listening around that listening around why you don't ask for

14:53 help and how certain people can help because often people don't ask you know they may have a parent that's not helpful so they don't ask them for help ever but there may be little things that they can do so maybe that person would be more than happy to take the children on an outing somewhere but they're not great with just looking after them at home or maybe that person you know what find the strengths in each different

15:18 member of your network and see what they could do and what you'd be comfortable with them doing sometimes it's just a relief to have another person there when you're doing certain things I found that as well just you know sometimes I'd have the house full of children you know look you know my family live upstairs so they come down they be like there's like 10 judging a house on that yes but there's also six adults and that feels

15:42 so good in that situation where it's not just me going through the dinner routine with my two but the sad thing I find as well is when people have other people in their life that are not willing to help and I think if it's the parenting partnership I think that's completely unacceptable and I think there needs to be some work done through listening and whatever other support you have around

16:13 the best way to approach that but if you're in a parenting partnership in one person's not pulling their weight I think that's you know that's not on it's a partnership and everyone's responsible for the children's well-being and anyone who doesn't have that balance they're missing out as well I think there's definitely it's definitely hard for some parents to be involved but that's something that it would be really great

16:45 to work on because it's such a shame for one person to miss out on that because they're unwilling or they've their circumstances having allowed them to have that same relationship with the children so I think listening time around how you can approach that in a tactful sort of comfortable way for everyone involved and then the other common thing is when we've been doing this type of parenting and we all made it have just been introduced to it or

17:15 you know we're somewhere in that part of our journey but our partner or other carers are not coming along that journey with us for whatever reason and that can be a huge problem for a lot of people so in those situations I suggest particularly in the beginning a and agreed-upon tagout system so if you discuss with your partner that look you're really wanting to give this stuff a go a proper go and it's really important and you can see how it's going

17:45 to work and that you understand that right now they can't but if then they're happy for you to just tap them on the shoulder when you can see it's becoming overwhelming or triggering and say look I can I can tag in now I'm gonna take over with this situation and have that system in place because a lot of people have said that that's the hardest thing is when they're trying to do this it's like you know they're making all this

18:11 ground way and that just feels like 10 steps back when the partner comes in and yells or the partner comes in and isn't coping so in that moment I know we can all sort of be like oh could you get out of here you you you know you're making things worse so if you'd agreed on it before and just simple tap on the shoulder smile they go off and recalibrate and you step back in I think

18:33 that just makes it more cohesive but it's just easier to get through that and then maybe once you've said that you're happy to put your hand up and do that but at least until they start to see and understand this style of parenting maybe then they can sort of understand that occasionally you might have to say look I'm just not coping if you can just simply sit with them why sigh go recalibrate as well and with

18:57 the same sort of tagout system so I think yeah those are sort of the main sort of ways I can see I can't see anyone specifically here I can see people coming and but if anyone's got any questions so does anyone have any specific issues they would like to sort of bring up and how can they get support around that sort of give us a minute or two to wait and see if anyone's got something they'd like to ask but yeah I

19:29 think just to reiterate the five tools that hand-in-hand parenting use when used together they're just they can I feel any situation it's within the realm of those five tools and of course yeah listening is the one that I'll keep going back to because if you're doing everything else right there's no right and wrong but if you're doing everything else and you're still having problems it's often something that's deep

20:01 it and I know that's been my experience or it's something that I haven't yet picked up on and so you're getting the listening time can just help shift that and you have so many Eureka moments in listening as well and the fact is there's a lot of stuff that we carry with us from our own experiences and and often our children's behavior is reminding us of some past pain and I've

20:32 got so many different examples that I've had through it in time of that and and you don't even realize until you go that distance I've had a couple of Eureka moments just sitting with her what would have been happening when I was you know at 7 when I was having trouble with my 7 year old and you know there's so much stuff going on that I can no longer deny that there's a huge connection between the past and the present and the history

21:01 so yeah as I said everyone can do with more support we live in a society that is fast paced there's a lot of responsibilities on everyone in the family and it's really hard at times so the best thing we can do for ourselves and for our families is to say yes to accept that it's ok to say this isn't the easiest job in the world

21:32 because all of us we we're trying to do a really really good job of it we're trying to do our very best to make sure our children are happy and healthy and have great emotional intelligence and you know they have resilience in terms of you know being able to to face whatever the world throws at them and that's important to all of us I know that because you're here today I know that that's in your heart as well so

22:04 let's all do everything we can to give ourselves the best opportunities to give our children a great Trinity's this is the hardest job we'll do but it's also the most rewarding and it's the most important work we can do because the world as it stands now is you know pretty at times unsettling place so we're trying to bring forth the change makers you know the the peace

22:35 makers were trying to breed a generation of wonderfully empathic human beings who will make this world a better place so let's look after us because it's a really really important job that we're doing so thank you I'm gonna put everything in the comments now please feel free to contact me through auntie asked which will be in there or through hand-in-hand parenting and let's get you all better supported thank you