The Whinypaluza Podcast with Rebecca Greene Episode 112 The Balanced Parent

No need to whine, it's Whiny Palooza! Have some wine and join us on the Whiny Palooza podcast with Rebecca Green.

Welcome to the Whiny Palooza podcast. I'm your host, Rebecca Green. I'm a wife, mother of 3, and licensed clinical social worker. I also have 3 fur babies at home too. My passion has always been to help children and their families. I always dreamed of being a wife and a mother. Parents are always learning through their struggles, failures, and successes and joys. I am no stranger to this wild ride of parenting, and I know behind every great parent lies a team of supportive friends and family. I want to be part of your support system. I want you to know that you are not alone. We are in this parenting world together. Join me every week for insightful discussions with experts on parenting and marriage, as well as other parents who have found the secret to successes in parenthood. You'll learn tips and tricks to make life with your family better than ever. I hope you will follow along with me while we dive into what it takes to achieve a happy family.

This is Rebecca Green for the Whiny Palooza podcast, and I am so very excited because we have Dr. Laura Froye— Ah! Froyen?

Did I say it right? Yeah, Froyen.

I keep butchering her name. We've been practicing and I still did it. Anyways, thank you so much for being here with me today.

Absolutely. And you know, Rebecca, I mean, I'm a podcast host too, and it happens to me all the time too. So please, you know, like the self-kindness and compassion is the name of the game here. So we're just going to be all super kind. We're all super human and super imperfect and it's lovely. Oh, I love that so much.

Thank you. I laugh because I have to practice names before the podcast.

We all do. We all do because we want to be respectful and names are important. They matter. And at the same time, we're all human and we all, you know, it's hard.

I did better before we pressed record. You did great.

You're— I mean, but you were doing great now. And, you know, I don't know if this will get edited out, but I think it's really important for people to know that, like, no, we're human.

We make mistakes.

We can handle it with graciousness.

Yes. Yes, all of my marital and parenting advice, I say, listen, I am not perfect. I mess up every single day, every day, every day, multiple times. But I'm going to introduce you with your fabulous background, Dr. Laura. I'm going to just stick with that.

Just call me Laura. Laura is good. We're friends here.

Laura received her PhD in human development and family systems. With an emphasis in couple and family therapy from Michigan State University in 2014. While pursuing her doctorate, she worked as a couple and family therapist in the state of Michigan, helping families navigate difficult times. Her research focused on how marital and family relationships influence parenting and child development, which I'm so fascinated about. She continued this research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as an assistant professor of HDFS and UW Extension as an early childhood and parenting specialist. There's, there's more. I think we should say a little bit more. I'm going to say a little bit more because you have so much goodness. Laura helps individuals, partners, and co-parents become the parents they are longing to be. She helps overwhelmed and disconnected parents reconnect with themselves, each other, and their children. She helps parents bring ease, calm, and joy back into their hectic and chaotic lives. She helps parents stop yelling and start feeling confident in themselves. She does this through her unique approach to parenting that is grounded in research and driven by the overarching goal of restoring Balance and Compassion in Families. Yeah, that is, you know what, it's a wonderful mouthful of goodness. I mean, you're doing such good work, and we all appreciate the work that you're doing with families. And you have such a good story. Can you tell everyone what inspired you to become a therapist and tell us the road that led you to helping parents?

Yeah, you know, it's, it's I, it's interesting. I, we all have funny stories, right? Winding, twisting paths. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

You know, I, I grew up in a home where my parents had a really loving relationship. Um, they did a really nice job of modeling good conflict. Um, and I had friends who did not have that, have that home situation. I was really fortunate. Um, and so in high school, I, I really started noticing family relationships and how different outcomes were for for different families. And my family had our own struggles and there's work that I'm doing, you know, currently now as an adult looking back and, you know, good inner child work, good inner healing work. But I was really interested in how family relationships influence kids. And so when I got into my undergraduate, I started working with a professor there who researches marital conflict and children's emotional wellbeing. And as I moved into graduate school, I was, I kind of got more into the academic end of things, how, how the, the children's like early literacy and language skills are influenced by the home environment and family relationships. And then really though, so I was a professor and, you know, trucking along on this academic career and I was in a car accident with my second pregnancy and— Oh my gosh. Yeah, it just changed my life. It was a really hard, few years. I was really injured. Oh no. And well, you know, it's okay now. It's been a couple years since I've had daily pain. You know, she's 6 now. And so it's, we're on the other side of that really hard time. But I just started really getting frustrated with, you know, there was a breaking point. We all have them at some point in our stories, you know, and I really came to realize I couldn't be a professor, and a wife and a mother, all at the same time. I had these roles, and I couldn't do all of them. And so I was fortunate enough to be able to release that professor role for a little while and recover physically. And then I started thinking about how long it took my research. So, you know, like, my dissertation has been published in several journals. But not in a way that parents can access, you know, not in a way that parents can use in their daily lives. And, and so I really wanted to really focus in on working with families. I see myself as a child advocate. I think that children are one of the last groups of people where it's okay to hurt them in the name of what's good for them. It's okay to treat them like they're lesser beings. So, and I think my most the biggest impact I can have is by working with the parents who, who raise these beautiful beings that are, that are our future, you know. So that was a long answer. I'm sorry, I talked a lot.

No, I wanted the long answer. I read about the long answer. I was reading about you and I found it so fascinating that I wanted you to share it because you have been on such a journey.

Yeah, it's been a big journey, um, but a good, a good one, a hard one, you know, but hard isn't always bad. Sometimes it's good, the good hard stuff. Yeah.

Well, and when I was working with families, I used to laugh because they would be like, here's my kid, fix them. And I'd be like, no, no, come here, I want to talk to you.

The kid can go play.

I just want you. Come on, let's talk.

Absolutely.

So you talk so much about balance. I mean, I was just like eating up all of your knowledge about balance, and that's what we all want. We want to achieve some sort of balance in our lives. Can you help us? Can you give us some tips to have some more of that?

Absolutely. Um, so it— the— for your listeners, you know, wherever you are right now, I always listen to podcasts while I'm out on a walk. So when I, I'm talking to people on a podcast, that's— I, I'm— I, I feel like I'm picturing you all out walking. Um, but whether you're washing dishes or folding laundry, um, you making dinner or out for a walk, just take a second right now, and if you're able, if you're capable of standing on one foot, give it a try. Just see what it feels like to just stand lightly on one foot, right? So there's— you'll start to notice that there's these little micro-corrections that start happening in the foot that's on the ground that, um, you know, your ankle will twist to one side and then the other, and you'll never just be perfectly stock still balancing. There will always be, you know, little, little stuff that's happening in your leg, on the standing leg. And that's really what balancing is, is like in life too. It's a thing that you're doing. It's a verb, not a thing that you attain and then you're done with. Um, there, it's micro-corrections. It's noticing what feels off. It's noticing where am I leaning one way versus the other? What is feeling a little lacking or out of whack and what adjustments do I need to make to kind of get me back closer to center, all while knowing that it's a moving target and that we'll never quite be there. We'll never— it's not a thing that will ever be done. And you know what's cool is that we, just like our kids are always changing and growing and it feels like every new birthday brings new challenges and new delights, the same is true for us. We're still in development and in progress too. Too. And so what feels balanced, you know, when you're 28 and have, you know, just maybe a baby at home is very different than what feels balanced when you're 38, like I am, and I have, you know, a 9 and a 6-year-old at home. It's just, it changes over time. And we just, part, a big piece of it, I think, of balancing is tuning in and really learning how to listen to yourself. I'm really making good friends with yourself. We spend our whole lives being told to turn off our intuition, to shut down our desires, our needs, to serve others, especially women. And I, I don't know about your podcast audience, but mine is mostly women who are listening. Uh, it— and that is, it makes it really hard to know what you need. It makes it really hard to be, to be balanced, to be in that process of searching for and finding and coming to a place of where you feel more balanced. It It's really hard to do that when you're shut down and cut off from yourself. Again, really long answer. Sorry.

No, I love your long answers. I'm eating up everything you're saying. I often think of like these bubbles over my head, like I picture a woman with like the surrounding bubbles of like marriage and kids and work and laundry and dishes and driving. And I just feel like every day we're trying to just manage all the little bubbles, right?

Yeah, we are.

We're all, we're all doing the same things. That's for sure.

For sure. And it looks different for different people. Um, an exercise that I really love to walk my, my families that I work with through is called a balance wheel, and folks can Google that. There's lots of different examples of it, or you just make it yourself. So you just take a piece of paper, you draw a big circle on the piece of paper and make a going through it. And then you kind of list the things that are important to you, the roles that are important, the, the parts of your life that are important. So like, for example, on mine, I have my family, I have my, my career, I have my marriage, you know, so there's my kids, my marriage. I have creativity, that's a big piece for me. I have being able to have a spiritual connection with nature. Lots of people put spirituality or religion on there, finances, service is another one, community, things that are really important. And then you kind of put a line out from the center of the cross for each of those things and you just give yourself a rating where the, you know, on a scale of 1 to 10, how am I doing on that? And then if you put all the dots on all the lines and you connect all the dots in kind of a wonky circle, it will show you where you're out of balance. It will show you, you know, if you were really been pouring into our marriage and our kids and our family and our, you know, and really into those pieces of things. And it's been a long time since we've served our community. That might really serve us well to start putting some attention onto that, bringing some service back in if that matters to you. I don't know. I love that exercise and that's one that I do seasonally. Seasonally as just a check-in.

I think that's a fabulous idea, and I think that we feel off when there's areas in our life that we're not giving enough attention to that we want to. Absolutely. It's a good way to identify that. I like that a lot. Yeah. You talk about the Balanced Parenting Framework.

Yes.

I mean, I, I think you've nailed so much important stuff. And it's 3 components and it's super important. Can you tell them about it?

Yeah, you know, gosh, I haven't looked at that in a long time. But I mean, so there's, there's, I mean, I think one of the, it looks kind of like a teeter-totter, right? Is that the one that you mean?

I was looking at, you were talking about boundaries and compassion and mindfulness. And you were just talking about Oh, please.

No, I feel like I have an image that goes with it that helps me talk about it. Yeah. So, so yeah, absolutely. So if you think about yourself sitting on a teeter-totter with yourself on one end and others on the other, people who are important to you, your family, your family of origin, your current family of creation, your kids, your partner, friends, work colleagues. And then on the self side, this is things like your identity, creativity, purpose, growth, and healing. Then the, the bar of the, of the teeter-totter is connection. It's the foundational thing that we really want to be reaching out towards others. Folks, when that connection is, is, is too weak, we feel disconnected, we feel we feel isolated, we feel lonely. And when it's too strong and too close to, we feel overwhelmed and suffocated and isolated. So we want a nice healthy connection, one that where we are standing on our own two feet and our others are out there and we're reaching out towards them and they're reaching towards us. And there's this nice healthy connection. Nobody's doing more of the work than the others. It's just kind of this mutual thing. And then to allow that connection to flourish, we really need boundaries. We need compassion for ourself and for others. And we need mindful, intentional presence. So I talk about it from a mindfulness perspective. Some people feel like that that's, I don't know, that there's, I think about that from a non-spiritual place, but from a just a presence. You know, being with ourselves and being with others. Yeah, so I mean, boundaries are essential to all healthy relationships, boundaries with others, you know, what we are willing to accept from others, but also boundaries with ourselves, what we're willing to let in from others. And I do think that bringing a compassionate lens to it all is, is wonder— is wonderful, especially a self-compassionate lens. We're so hard on ourselves.

I was, I was just taking you there to compassion because compassion is one of your favorite words. Yes, you've actually taught me a lot about self-compassion.

Oh good.

Um, I think we're all way too hard on ourselves. I think if we could do anything, we need to help women be less hard on themselves and you know, I find we're so compassionate with everyone but ourselves. So the trick—

yeah, yeah. So the tricky thing with this is, and this is our tendency, we just pour compassion onto our kids, we pour it onto our partners, we pour it onto colleagues and strangers on the street, you know, oh, you cut me off, you must have somewhere to go, please go, go with grace and get there. You know, like we pour it out of ourselves. And it it's really draining. It can, it feels like we have this limited resource, this cup, this water, you know, water bottle that's filled with compassion and we pour it onto everyone else. And at the end of the day, there's nothing left over for ourselves. And we don't think we're deserving of it either. We think somehow, you know, we are unique in the world. You know, if we, if we thought about a mom friend who was really struggling would we think, oh, she's definitely worthy of compassion. Of course she is. But there's something unique about me that makes me unworthy, you know? And we learn those stories about ourselves in childhood as we're coming up, that there's the, you know, there's something fundamental about me that makes me unworthy. And so it can be really hard to offer ourselves compassion. But when we do, when we actually start starting with ourselves, we shift from being this water bottle of compassion that we're pouring on everyone else to being a font of compassion, that it's bubbling up from within us and overflowing into the other cups.

I love that.

Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, and that's, that's what we're going for. So, you know, here we have artesian wells that just kind of these, they're springs that bubble up from the earth. I like to think about myself that way is that I'm a font of compassion that is so full within myself that then it just overflows into others. Or if you think the imagery of a champagne flute tower, you know, like in those old, like, '20s movies where they would have champagne, the top glass gets filled and then it overflows, you know? And so I think that that's really important. It's hard though. It takes practice. You've spent your whole life being hard on yourself, and that has firmed up a lot of neural pathways that are, are really strong. And they're called neural grooves in, in kind of brain science. And it takes time and practice to make those grooves more shallow. You know, what happens is, as if the more we think a thought right, or think a pat— have a pattern of thinking, our neurons, you know, neurons that fire together wire together. They get wired really, really strongly together. And so then anytime we get kind of close to thinking something similar or close to a similar situation, our brain loves efficiency, right? So our brain is like, oh, we know what to do with a thought like that, or oh, we need to know what to do with a scenario like this. We're just going to be really hard on ourselves because that's what we've always done. And so they just suck you right into this, this kind of more self-destructive, self-critical path. And so by practicing self-compassion outside of difficult moments, just really training the brain that like, oh, we're going to be kind to ourselves. Oh yes. Remember, we're worthy of kindness. Oh yes. Remember, just like everyone else, I'm worthy of grace. Remember, just like everyone else, I'm an imperfect being. So common humanity is a principle of compassion-based mindfulness that gets really overlooked. And it's one of the most beautiful parts of it because I think when we really sit down, like, you know, are you really that unique in that you out of unlike all the rest of the people in the world are unworthy of compassion?

It could that be really be true?

You know, or think about like when, when you were born, when you were born, you came out this new being, were you worthy of kindness and compassion and grace? At that point? And then when did that change? When you were 3 and had to go to timeout for the first time, were you not worthy of compassion then? What about when you were 8 and you lied for the first time and got caught? Were you, were you not worthy of compassion then? Like, yeah, maybe lying's not that great, but you are still human. You still made a mistake. You still were deserving of compassion. And, and I think the, the more people really think about like, is— am I really that unique in my unworthiness? No, we're not. You know, we're all human and we're all worthy just by the virtue of our humanity.

Oh, I feel, I feel so relaxed listening to that. I would say that if we're not motivated to do it for ourselves, what I know— what I noticed is that I was being so hard on myself. And then I was being so hard on my husband and my kids, and I was like, it's, it's bubbling out to them how I'm treating myself. I'm like, I want to treat myself better so that I treat them better.

We always reflect on the outside what's going on in the inside. We always do. It's always that way. We, we absolutely reflect on the outside what's going on in, in, in the inside, and we try to change the outside first, and it's never as effective. As trying to change the inside first. Doing that internal work, it just flows. It just, it's so much easier.

100%. Yes. I totally agree with you. I'm just thinking about mindfulness. Mindfulness and conscious parenting are like the, I feel like they're buzzwords in our world. Yeah, they are. I feel like they're like the hot words right now.

No, but it's so funny, you know, conscious parenting. I think that that has really bubbled up in this past year. Like I think if I had said conscious parenting a year and a half ago, no one would have known what I meant. I hardly anybody, you know, it's, I agree though. It is, it's becoming more and more. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Sorry. I interrupted you.

Well, no, no, no, no. I just think that we get into, you know, and I'm guilty. Everything that I'm saying is not judgment. This is stuff that I'm guilty of. Like we get into these whirlwinds. Of the day. And we're like flying all over the place and getting wrapped up in the busyness. And I'll tell you, I don't feel mindful and I don't feel like I'm conscious parenting. I'm like shooting off this stuff. And then we get in the car and I'm like, I need to treat them with kindness when we get into the car. So how can we be more mindful in our day?

Yeah. So, you know, and there, there is a difference between mindful parenting and conscious parenting. I know that lots of those terms are kind of used interchangeably, but so mindful parenting is really seeing parenting in your daily life as an opportunity for a mindfulness practice, being fully present, having set times where you're, you're intentionally dropping into the present moment. So, For example, if that's a goal of yours is to be more mindful and fully present, like to be with your kids instead of kind of do with your kids, you know, drop into being instead of dropping into doing, having little triggers around your house and in your day that remind you. So for example, I have, I use the Reminder app on my phone. You can set it to be location, based. I have an iPhone, so the Reminder app on my iPhone, you can set it to be location-based so that whenever my phone perceives that we are in my car, that it sends me a ding to, to drop into the present moment.

Um, oh, that's awesome.

Yeah, so I mean, that's like the— I mean, so using good triggers. Um, yeah, you know, there's, uh, I— part of my practices are around compassion, and I want to be super clear, I know lots of people benefit from long meditations, you know, 20 to 40 minute meditations. It's never been something that I feel like I've been successful at maintaining a practice like that. And I, as a perfectionist, a recovering perfectionist, I've been really hard on myself. Like I'm going to do the self-compassion meditation and then be really hard on myself about the fact that I can't make it 25 minutes. It didn't make any sense to me. So, so I do, I do it in bites and bits. I do it in, you know, so I, Whenever I do a self-compassion meditation, I always put my hand on my heart. So I call these beneficial triggers. And I do that for 30 seconds while I'm waiting in the grocery store instead of scrolling Instagram, you know, popping out your phone. You can put a little, a short little one as a background on your phone. You know, all it really sounds like is, may I be safe and protected? May I be healthy of body and mind? May I live a life of comfort and ease. And that's it. Like just 3 sentences you can say a few times to yourself while you're waiting in the grocery store. And then I, when I'm overwhelmed with kids, I know I can just put my hand on my heart and my body and brain have been trained that when my hand goes on my heart, did you see how I just took a breath? Like it's, it, it, you train your body. To respond to those triggers. I have a client who has always been a wedding ring twiddler, and so she twiddles her wedding ring while she does her compassion meditations. And now that's kind of been paired up in her mind. So whenever she's twiddling, she just— her brain just gets sucked into the path of self-compassion, if that makes sense.

Makes so much sense. Such good ideas. I mean, if you think about it, whenever we're— we have a moment, I feel like we're picking up our phones. Yes.

Yeah.

Those are such better ideas, you know?

Yeah. And I mean, even if you pick up your phone, like, so I have on my— the background on my, um, thing, my phone, sorry, the, um, the case on my phone is a glitter case. And so it has this falling glitter and you can use that as a mindfulness practice too. So, you know, like kit. We hear that you can make a glitter jar for kids to help them, a calm down jar. I have a calm down jar on the back of my phone that's available to me. Yeah.

So awesome.

Yeah. I mean, so it's just building it into your life and it, and it doesn't, you know, I, I have a free 5-minute self-compassion meditation that is available and, and I don't think you need more than 5 minutes. I don't even think you need 5 minutes. I, so this is something that's available to everybody and I'm not talking about sitting on a You know, if you want to do the cushion sitting and the space, go for it. But I was, I found it was too hard for me to maintain.

Well, and you said something so important because the women that I talked to, the common phrase is, I don't have time. And I truly empathize. I know how busy we all are, but we all have 5 minutes to take some sort of time out for ourselves.

Right. And we all, we all sit at red lights. Why not? Why? Like, why not? As we're sitting at a red light and the other cars are going by, send every car that goes by grace and compassion. Just send them loving kindness, you know? And that, like, why not? And that, again, that's still training your brain to think about like, huh, when I'm doing some, you know, when my, I'm in this place of, you know, kind of maybe I'm rushing, you know, maybe I'm rushing it where we are late getting out the door to school. Oh God, we got stuck at a red light, but we know like, oh, you're stuck at a red light, compassion. By the time that red light changes to green, you are in a completely different mindset. And it doesn't take long. It doesn't take a lot.

No, it doesn't. Because the car— I'm in the car all the time for my 3 kids. It's a joke that I live in my car. But I was always racing. I was always like, rush, rush, rush, rush, rush. And I could feel my breath going. And I was like, okay, I have to slow down my breath. And now when I'm driving, I'm like, okay, breathe. Yeah, go slow.

You got this. Yes. Yeah. And you know, and it's— these are beautiful things to be modeling for our kids too. So it's not just that we— when we do these things for ourselves, um, and our— we're— our inner world is then reflected out in our outward behavior. So it makes us better parents but it also shows our kids that these are things that they have access to. You know, that if we— they see us, you know, working with a meditation bead when we're stopped at a red light instead of like trying to sneakily check our phone, that's what they're, they're learning. You know, they're— it— they see it. It's— modeling is the most impactful way to teach children, especially when it comes to our values. So if we want to teach kids values, they, they learn that through modeling, not through lectures. And so we really got to live into our values if we want them coming out of our homes knowing that it's, it's okay to be kind to yourself when you make a mistake, knowing that it's okay to be kind to others when they make a mistake, knowing that offering grace to each other is one of the best ways to show our love for them. Those are, I mean, those are all things that are learned in action, actively in a home.

Well, and you talk about being kind to yourself and that you're a recovering perfectionist, you said, which is, you know, a lot of us can relate to that. And I know the goal is to be imperfect and we still slip back to expecting Perfection. So how are you moving yourself away from perfectionism?

Okay, so we can't be perfectionists about becoming unperfectionists, right? So we just— I mean, and so, and that, that really is what it is. It's noticing like, huh, oh, there, there's that perfectionism again creeping in, and understanding that the perfectionism is there for a very good reason, and the perfectionism has likely served you very well in your life. So, you know, we, we come up with coping strategies and mechanisms very early on. Oftentimes when we're young kids, we come up with strategies that we needed in the moment to be okay, but they were children's strategies. They were not developed with a highly developed brain. Oftentimes they become maladaptive, then not so helpful as we get older. One of the things that's really important is that when our inner critic gets talking to us or our perfectionist parts get talking to us, that we meet them with compassion too. I see on social media people kind of being kind of rough with their negative voices, their inner negative dialogues in their heads, their inner critics, whatever you want to call them. Telling them to shut up or go away. And I get that. I get that kind of tendency. But no one ever does better by making— by being made to feel worse, ever.

Right.

And that goes for the parts of ourselves too. Same. And those little perfectionist parts, if we come at them with a bully attitude and we come at them with harshness, they're not going to trust us. That we've got things under control, they're going to think like, wow, she's really spiraling. I gotta even ratchet up the perfectionism even more because she needs me so much. And so if we can come from a place of like, hey, wow, perfectionism, thank you so much for all you've done for me. You helped me get through grad school. You helped me get a stellar job. You helped me raise beautiful kids. You help me every day. And at the same time, Sometimes it hurts me. Sometimes in trying for perfection, I start thinking I'm not good enough. And that's not good for any of us in our family, our little internal family, our inside family. And being really kind and compassionate, treating those though, because oftentimes those parts, they seem like they're old and big and bullies, and they're really not. They're usually quite young and scared. And so they need us to soften towards them so that they can soften and step back a little bit and let us run the show.

I think I need a recording of your voice as you're talking about how to talk to ourselves. And like, it's just, I mean, it has such a positive impact. I mean, I just love what, how you're talking to yourself and what you're telling us to say to ourselves.

You know, it's, it's easier to tell other people what to do than to do it to yourself. I just want to just, you know, and so I actually do quite a lot of this out loud because I know my kids are listening. Because if I just kept it all inside, it's much harder because I don't have any accountability, you know. And so, um, the, you know, spilling things was never punished in my home, but there was a lot of like heavy, like, ugh, you know, sighing and kind of just frustration if I spilled things when I was a kid growing up. And so like, that still happens to me. That feeling comes back when I like make a mistake or I spill something, that kind of self-frustration, self-flagellation of like, oh, you're so clumsy, you're such a klutz, you know, those types of things. And so I will out loud say like, oh, Mom, Mama, I know you're feeling really upset that you spilled that coffee, but you know what? Everybody spills sometimes and it's easy to wipe up. And I'll say this out loud. To my kids. And this past, um, this past winter, I, I had this— I did this thing where, because this was a thing that I really wanted to get out of my family line, that I wanted intergenerational change to happen. I didn't want that, that panic of, oh, I messed up, I made a human mistake, I must be terrible. I wanted it gone. And so I've been really consciously working with the, especially the spilling or the breaking thing. And so this past winter, um, I was taking a bath and I was filling the bathtub. It's one of my favorite self-care rituals, but I got a phone call from a friend and I walked away because the water was really loud to talk to the friend, um, and came back 30 minutes later and opened the door and the water just rushed out of the bathroom. It ended up being a really expensive mistake. And I just was frozen with like, oh my God, I can't believe I did this. You know, I turned, got the water turned off. My husband's like running down to the downstairs to go get, and comes back with hand towels. And my kids are like, oh mom, let's get the beach towels, which are right next door. And so they went and got the beach towels and cleaned it up. And they're like, mom, everybody spills water sometimes.

No big deal.

You know? And I, it was just at this moment of like, oh man, I did it. I got that generational pattern out, you know?

Oh my goodness.

But yeah, it's— I mean, they're always looking, they're always listening, they're always watching. And it's impactful what we're doing. I know your listeners probably have these things that they're trying to get out of their, out of their family lines too, that they, they promised to themselves as kids that they would never say that to their kid. And they've had the words words come out of their mouth that they promised they would never say. Um, and then I mean, yelling, the yelling that they don't want to do.

Yeah.

And it's, and there's no rush. There's plenty of time. Intergenerational change does take time. It takes generations to come to fruition. You know, when we think about my own family line, we were never spanked or hit. Um, but my parents were, and they used things like other, you know, punitive tactics with us, timeouts and, you know, harsh discipline and, oh, the biggest one, "I'm so disappointed in you." And, you know, and now with my kids, we're not doing any of those things. And so it takes generations for things to get out of a family. But taking a look at what is it that we really want and how do we go about getting that, and most of the time the answer is through self-kindness and through modeling.

Oh, so good. So good. Is there any— you have done so much research. I mean, your research is so fascinating to me. You talk my language. Anything from your research, from your dissertation that you feel is super important to share?

Yeah, so my research focused on parent depression and conflict and how that influences the emotional environment of the home. And basically what we found is that the emotional environment of the home is just as important, if not more important, than the educational environment in the home. So, you know, we know we're supposed to read to our kids, you know, at bedtime. We know we're supposed to have books available and have a library card, you know, all of those things. But the emotional environment is just as important, not just for kids' social and emotional well-being, but for their actual academic outcomes too. And so we are really impactful as parents in a lot of different ways. And this is not to put pressure on anybody, but to empower you, to let you know that you are powerful in, in your family. And of particular note, in my dissertation, and lots of the work that's coming out around paternal depression, so dad's depression, it really has a strong effect on families, on both the mother's parenting behaviors and on the kids' outcomes and the dad's own parenting behaviors. And so if you have paternal dad's depression kind of on your radar, that's definitely something not to ignore. And dads are much more likely to go undiagnosed. Um, uh, postpartum depression happens to dads just like it does to moms. The incident rate is estimated to be about the same, but they don't get the same screenings and they don't get the same treatment. Um, so, uh, yeah, so that— I mean, that's like, that's a big piece that dad's depression, um, often goes untreated. Um, and they're less equipped socially too to deal with it. So even when women are not seeking treatment for mental health issues, we have good social networks and we get a lot of support from them. And men actually really rely on their— if they're married, you know, so this study only had heterosexual couples, men were married to women, but men married to women tend to really rely heavily on their partner. And that has negative impacts for the dad, but also for the mom. It's really hard on moms. This isn't my research, but the longitudinal research on marriage shows that there is a net benefit in longevity for men. They live on average longer. And women who are married live on average shorter, less time than single women because the load on women in a marriage is quite a lot higher.

I did not know that.

Yeah. Yeah. So, so, I mean, we just got super research nerdy.

I love hearing about your research. Can you tell everyone about your resources and where to find you?

Yes, absolutely. So my website is just laurafroyen.com. If you go to laurafroyen.com/compassion, you can get that free meditation that we talked about. I hang out on Instagram @laurafroyenphd a lot. So Instagram is my fun place. And I have a podcast called The Balanced Parent, shocking name. But yes, yeah, The Balanced Parent.

Well, I just absolutely loved talking to you and hearing all your wonderful wisdom. I can't thank you enough for your time.

Oh, Rebecca, thanks so much for having me. This was lots of fun. I'm normally on the other side of the microphone, so it was really fun. Thanks for, for letting me come into your space. I know, I know that you care deeply about your audience and you think deeply about who you bring on, and I just feel incredibly honored to be invited to join you.

Thank you so much. I loved meeting you and talking to you. This is Rebecca Green reminding everyone to spend every day laughing, learning, and loving.

Thank you for tuning in to the Winey Palooza podcast. If you like what you heard, please be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. While you are there, leave a review. I love to hear your feedback. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time.

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