Are you struggling with burnout as a parent? Here's some help- Connected Families Podcast Episode#43

0:00 [Music] hello everyone welcome to the connected families podcast i'm stacey bellward and i'm so glad that you tuned in in today's episode i'm going to talk to a couple who before they had kids made great plans for how they wanted to raise their kids and then discovered nine years into child rearing that things weren't turning out exactly as they hoped the couple took the discipline that connects with your child's heart online course and found guidance

0:31 that changed key areas for them but before we get to that interview i'd like to invite jim jackson co-founder of connected families and the author of the course discipline that connects along with my beautiful wife lynn who's not with us today that's right he's present fully in the course yeah that's right welcome jim yeah well it's good to be here talking about this couple i can't wait who describes so much like so many couples that we talked to

0:57 and i'm one of them like i wanted to be a dad and i was so enthused and excited and felt so confident to be a dad before i ever was one yes and then i became one and that whole bravado was kind of out the window and now i'm gripping for control and i'm trying to figure out how to get my plan to work and it isn't and then i feel discouraged then out of that discouragement i parent

1:18 in a way that in order to get rid of my discouragement yes it is not helping my kids grow where i want them to grow isn't this the story of so many about so many of them so many people that we hear from yep amanda and nate said we knew we wanted to have a house where open communication my kids could come to me about anything that they needed any struggle that they had in life and

1:39 their child was i think eight or nine years old they said and they weren't having open communication and they were struggling in that area yeah and it's such a common journey for parents to have these really good intentions and then struggle to put those intentions into play and it seems like the harder parents try sometimes the worse it gets yeah well i loved talking with them because they came to connected families they took the discipline that connects with

2:06 your child's heart online course which is open right now registration is open for anyone to take it and they really got new perspective on how to open up that communication and build that with their kids in fact amanda is a physician's assistant and so when i asked her what she really appreciated about the course she said it was lynn's knowledge of occupational therapy and brain science that meant so much to her because it brought together the science

2:35 and also then faith and brought them together in a way that made it practical like what does that look like then to parent with both of them yes sort of speaking on len's behalf i know she works really hard to not overwhelm people with the occupational therapy brain science knowledge but to get practical and to illustrate it in a way that helps parents have these aha moments like the super highway in the brain powerful sort of image that lynn uses and the way

2:59 we behave and the way we think gets us going down these super highways and it's hard once they're established as habits to get off unless we learn to sort of back up yeah and get off sooner yeah and then when we do it how do we remind ourselves she talks about how the brain redevelops as we develop new habits yeah and and all of a sudden we're traveling down a super highway of more grace and less discouragement than what we were

3:24 you're teaching the content of the course well a little bit i guess yeah it's good and this is what amanda said that she appreciated so much because she takes that into her practice yeah and she passes it on to the families that come to her super cool isn't that cool her husband nate also he was just a quality a great guy but when i asked him what he appreciated he said do-overs do-overs now anyone who's been around connected families

3:48 might know what do-overs is it yeah and the do-over i just described it the super highway on the brain so we get in habits of doing things in a certain way and we remind ourselves after it's over that we want to do it differently next time but then next time comes and we don't do it differently and we wonder why well it's all connected to the brain but yeah the practical thing that lynn puts in place

4:07 and helps us understand is the benefit of a do-over of doing it again not later but like right in the middle of it cool down go back do it again that helps create a new brain pathway and this is exactly what amanda was talking about we were just mentioning is that that's the science of it the faith of it is that the do-over is such a beautiful example of god's grace of right we do something wrong we get forgiven

4:31 right that's the gospel that's the gospel and that's what nate felt was just so valuable in what he learned i love that i'm eager to hear from nate yes yes so let's tune in and let's listen to the interview well amanda and nate thank you so much for joining me on the connected families podcast um just so everybody knows we're meeting right now aren't we here we are welcome i'm so glad that you agreed to come on to the

4:58 connected families podcast and just kind of talk about your experiences with the discipline that connects with your child's heart online course that i know you took just a few months ago right so why don't we just start off with you introducing yourselves tell us about yourselves and your family so uh yeah we are nate and amanda we've been married for a little over 11 years and we've got three kiddos and one more on the way joshua is eight theo is six and lily is

5:25 three and a half so we've got our hands full another little boy coming in a couple months yeah hey yeah we're excited about that and yeah we've been figuring out this whole parenting thing together you know as these kids have come along and each one has a different personality and trying to adapt our style and figure out together combining our experiences in different families and figuring out what what parenting style works for

5:57 our family and so that kind of what drew us to connected families was a desire to do things better than we had been and employ some new techniques and really be on the same page parenting so amanda are you the one that found connected families yeah so years ago i had listened to a podcast that jim and lynn jackson were on on his mom and learned about the entitlement fix course we started to do that and i think our

6:26 kids were a little young for it at the time or we just weren't ready we were still like in the midst of like diapers but we really like just being able to sit down and have intentional time to talk about parenting which is not something that we had done before and so then a little bit later we had noticed that communication with our oldest was shutting down a little bit when he was about seven and this was something like before we

6:53 even had kids we knew that we wanted to be a family that we could talk about the important things and could be open emotionally and we wanted our kids to be able to come to us but we didn't really know how to do that and then once we became parents we became just involved in the details of the day-to-day details of parenting and we kind of lost focus and i think even to the point where some other goals

7:17 were getting in the way of that communication and so we felt like we were losing our oldest a little bit as far as communication and i remembered connected families and saw you know the discipline that connects course and i thought this is what we need then we started the course and i loved the idea of the framework and especially those first two message you are safe with me and you are loved no matter what and i thought

7:41 this is what we want for our family this is what we were looking for and now how do we get there it was such a relief to find a course that helped us get their practice too because we had done some other parenting things but a lot of it was like higher level things and it was hard we needed practical things in the moment we had young kids and we were just struggling to figure things out and so just to have those

8:05 couple ideas at a time to practice together and work towards work that's right so the discipline that connects with your child's heart course for everybody goes through a framework it's our connected families framework and it has four levels doesn't it and you need the first two levels and each level is communicating a message to our children and the first one you mentioned is you are safe with me and the second one is you are loved no matter what and then

8:31 third one is you are called and capable and then the fourth one the top one is you are responsible for your actions and so the whole course goes through that in fact there's two sessions for each level so there's eight sessions all together how did you find the actual like getting through the course the technology of it and it being online how did that work for the two of you well i think it worked really well for

8:55 us because we had the convenience of being able to watch the videos whenever we needed to you know whatever it matched our schedules but the first time we went through it we had the added benefit of being able to ask questions you know go through with all the other families online and that was neat to be able to read their input and their responses but we're actually going through it a second time now as a small group and that's been a

9:21 lot of fun to discuss it with other parents at the same time and also to re-learn some of the same things that we've gone through the first time so i have enjoyed doing it both ways the videos i thought were very engaging and funny too you know it wasn't dry at all we thought jim and lynn had great chemistry and yeah very relatable yeah yeah they were the right length of time for us to watch in the right like you

9:52 know just being about a half an hour per session but even those are broken up so we would have a night where we'd just have 15 minutes and we could watch it you know when you're tired as parents at the end of the day and so it was nice to have that that one thing and then it was like kind of like bite-sized pieces like okay we can practice this now it's been really fun to go through

10:13 the small group course we're about halfway through now and it's really great to do it with our friends and and just work through that together and have that support in person with each other yeah i found myself using connected families framework a lot like talking with my friends and doing this small group course but then also i am a physician assistant in a pediatric general practice so i spend a lot of time talking about parenting and um yeah and

10:42 i see a lot of the patients my niche is kind of like kids that have some behavioral health concerns and so this is kind of like what i love to talk about and connected families has given me a lot to help you know connect with other families and that's been a joy to kind of share what i've learned that way and i think that's one thing that i really appreciated about the course is lynn's background in occupational therapy and how she

11:07 explains you know just like developmental things like how kids brains are developing and what's appropriate and that is something that's really resonated with me and helped me to parent well like yeah i love the course for that because there is really such a balance of science i know we have a strong science background with what we teach and then super practical and it goes hand in hand and you know i don't know what you i feel like that makes what we present

11:38 quite unique in that world of parenting absolutely and in christian parenting courses it was just such a relief and a joy to find a course that put all of these things that are important to me together like you know the things that i had learned in my profession and then as a christian and it's sometimes hard to make all of those things come together nicely and so for me to have jim and lynn telling me how the

12:04 christian framework was working with this developmental framework was not something that i had done before and then even better it's actually it was practical and something that i could work on every day multiple times a day yeah so often it seems like there's a battle between religion and science and it's refreshing you know that they've gone through the effort and we've been able to i guess reconcile faith and science and see that god did create us as

12:36 a whole being and that we can we can minister to our kids both with faith and in ways that you know are scientifically founded as well yeah i love that like for example there's a lot of kind of science around the fight or flight reaction that we humans have or freeze you know yeah but then just how that biological reaction comes out when we as parents come across big large and loud and angry you can just

13:06 shut down kiss yeah and that is something we used a lot you know i said we started the course because our eight-year-old we felt like we were kind of losing him but at the same time we had lily was like two and a half at the time or two and lily is a spunky delightful little girl that she could throw some crazy tantrums you know we had experienced like a little bit of tantrums from the other

13:29 kids but it was our third child that really and so actually we ended up like really like what we were learning in connected families what we applied most immediately was like getting down to lily's level and speaking you know calmly and not exacerbating that fight or flight and i was surprised at how much it helped me i didn't realize how exhausting it is and how anxious i was getting upset

14:00 every time my two and a half year old got upset and so just even if lily's behavior didn't change even if she was still throwing as many tantrums when i got to the end of the day i had not gotten upset as you know spent all day getting upset and i was you know more rested at the end of the day and not as overwhelmed and that helped me be a better parent and that was a pretty

14:22 simple like i mean difficult in the moment but pretty simple overall like i could just stay calm and just get down on her level when she was you know losing her little mind you know i wasn't two and a half i i could learn to stay calm when she was not saying paul yeah it's not easy for everyone to learn to stay calm but that's such a good point you got to the end of the day with

14:43 a lot more energy because you have been able to stay calm than if you had kind of rolled the energy highs and lows of the tantrums throughout the day yeah yeah yeah i think that's a really good point because amanda mentioned that we did come home tired at the end of a work day or all of our activities and i think before our default was to just be really tired and just want the immediate fix and to

15:08 go right for that but i think the course really helped us to have a more long-term view of parenting and to focus on you know what what do we want our kids to be like and what does god want our kids to be like as well and what do we want to be like well that's right and it helped us focus on you know what are we bringing to the situation and recognize that we were tired we were

15:32 stressed and you know our kids could feel that and sense that so uh that getting low and getting slow practicing that over and over i think has really helped build relationships with our kids and and help us to manage the situation and like you said come out of the day even though we were tired we were actually feeling more energetic and feeling less stressed because of these techniques that's amazing like sign me up right now if that's what's

16:01 going on right but it is what we say about discipline that connects in the online course is that it really it helps us connect with our children's heart right in the middle of discipline that's what we're taught and you you referred to this earlier amanda but it's we teach the framework so that parents can walk through these steps almost we tailor it to our own personalities and the way we parent but it's kind of like a path and a guide

16:28 have you found that yes absolutely and we've used it like if we focused on different parts for different kids and and we have used it i had like a couple of stories well just one thing that i realized and something that was stressful in our family was that was picky eating and so i had said that one of my biggest goals before i had kids was that we would have this open like able to trust each other relationship but

16:59 then once parenting really started i got a little more down in the you know the dirty details and one thing that felt really important to me was getting my kids to eat really healthy things that themed it was easy to justify i worked in pediatrics i did a lot of nutritional advice and so it was easy for me to think this is something really really important to teach my kids and of course my oldest had been pretty

17:26 picky and i had not realized that the things that we're driving i wasn't thinking about what was going on inside of me i was easily justifying it but when i really got down to what was going on inside of me i was really anxious about the future i thought what if he's always picky even though he was young you know and you are not always going to be picky i took myself up to when he was an adult and i thought

17:50 when you're an adult if you're thinking it's going to affect you socially and this is why it's so important for me to do this to the point where i was ruining dinner every night you know yes and i would think that and then also i was embarrassed like my other friends had kids that would just sit and eat anything and they would say we would get together and they would say you eat your whole plate or you don't

18:12 get dessert but when i did that like i knew he wasn't gonna eat the whole plate you know so it was embarrassing but i wasn't really thinking about that when i was forcing you know really making dinner very stressful i wasn't reflecting on what those inner motivations were and so actually my desire to get him to eat a lot of things was getting in the way of what i would say was a more important desire to have this

18:38 relationship with him and i was actually make it i was losing a really important time of connection dinner time and looking back now i was causing a lot of anxiety for him and actually making the picky eating worse but i didn't realize that until i really started in the connected families course and really started thinking about what was going on inside of me and that is such a big part it's a big part of the course and it

19:04 it was at first we were like we are spending this whole time talking about what's going on inside of me like no we just need to fix our kids behavior but really that has been one of the biggest takeaways it's been one of the most important things because that has changed my parenting the most to realize what is going inside of me so now a year and a half after we have taken the course we're still working on

19:26 encouraging healthy eating and we haven't we don't just let him eat whatever he wants you know but we have changed a lot of things to bring down that stress at meal time and and we're not losing that good time of dinner for connecting and and getting in the longer term goal and i and i think i just have to keep checking myself like that's a common parenting struggle being embarrassed about what your kids are doing and just recognizing like okay this is

19:54 my own embarrassment and this is my own child and i need to parent them differently than other kids do and i think good families has been really important in helping with that and then also helping me to stay in the moment and not like taking these pro these things and projecting them like 15 years into the future you know yes catastrophizing disaster i love that story amanda it's fantastic because it's so practical every parent is dealing with eating

20:24 issues i think you know in some form or another and it's such a great example as parents of how we i think especially when our kids are really young because we haven't had the experience yet to know oh they actually grow a lot of things pretty quick yeah you know things change year by year yeah i love that and you mentioned the question what's going on in me it's like the foundational question you're right we do spend a lot of time

20:50 at the beginning because we feel like that's the foundation to be safe with our kids we're not talking about violence are we we're talking about emotionally safe yeah being able to come in with a listening ear with our child and then move up to the second level of the framework which is the question that we ask what's going on in my child yeah so then we can start to employ some empathy because we're kind of understanding

21:14 ourselves yeah so i love that story that was so so good nate tell me what were like maybe your one or two things that you still remember and try to implement in a daily basis oh my well we're still figuring this out i would say those like amanda said those first two courses or first two topics in the framework have been most instrumental and maybe as we as our kids get older as we continue to go through the course again

21:46 we'll start to get better at you know you are called incapable and you are responsible for your actions but for now i'd say we're working on those first two and you know we already talked about getting low and getting slow i'd say uh one thing that we want to practice more is the do-overs sure yeah we've tried that a few times and it's gone somewhat well but i think that one thing that we really liked about

22:11 that was how it preaches the gospel in a very practical way it's confessing to our kids that we are sinners too and we mess up and that there is grace to forgive and to start over it also encourages that openness with our kids that like amanda said that we we wanted to encourage you know all along but didn't quite know how so i really liked that and we want to practicing that as as our kids get older because i think it

22:41 has a lot of potential to just to show show them practically what we value yeah and our family are to make mistakes in our family and that we make them too that was the turning point was with do-overs when i told joshua that we needed to do the do-over because i needed the do-over that was a big thing yeah beautiful it's a beautiful beautiful picture of the gospel isn't it yeah well you guys this has been

23:07 fantastic i appreciate so much the time that you've given to tell all of our audience about the discipline that connects with your child's heart course what do you think here's the last question maybe one of you can answer it what do you think the parents that take the course this upcoming fall what do you think are the main things that they're going to get from the course i'd say it's a different perspective on parenting before i think i was looking for the

23:34 quick fix you know what are the the magic words i could say to change my child's behavior or to get the result that i was looking for but the new perspective that i've gained is something that i think a lot of parents can benefit from is that long-term view you know 20 years from now i want my children to be able to come to me with the really hard problems that they're worried about or they're embarrassed about

24:00 and and i want them to have that relationship with us so that they feel comfortable doing that and the course has helped us to learn that it starts now that building that relationship is done in a day-to-day discipline scenarios and you know that it's it's okay that it's taking a while it's not a quick fix but that we'll get there and we can build that trust and build that feeling of safety that's excellent thanks for being with us today

24:30 you guys yeah thanks for having connected families we've learned a lot from it it's been great for our family really a game changer awesome thanks for tuning in to the podcast today two times a year we open up our foundational online course called discipline that connects with your child's heart and we are at that time of the year right now registration for the course is open thousands of families have gone through the course and experienced practical tools that bring lasting

24:58 change if you are interested in getting more information about the discipline that connects with your child's heart online course go to [Music] connectedfamilies.org