Everyday Parenting Hacks and Tricks That Will Improve Your Relationship With Your Kids

Just do some parenting hacks. Stuff that parent. Stuff that parents deal with on a regular basis. And maybe ways to kind of is.

That children learn how to choose not from a place of trying not to get in trouble or from fear, but instead they get to choose because it's their honest choice. And when there's this authoritative authoritarian style, it's aggressive and it creates more fear. Fear. And then that actually promotes inauthenticity. It makes the kid fake to try to avoid conflict or pain or whatever it is that they're afraid of.

Mix with a 2.5. The best mix from the 90s to now. Big pop in the afternoon. It's a mental wellness Wednesday with a life coach and published author.

Rebecca.

Rebecca Silence. RebeccaSilence.com and the book Coming Back to life. Available wherever you get your books. Rebecca, how are you?

I am so well and so happy to be here. I just had a birthday, so still celebrating.

How was the birthday celebration?

It was fun. It was really low key, but we had a just day of letting things unfold organically. I painted. We went to art galleries. I ate tacos. I've been cleansing for six months, so. So I hadn't had tacos in a long time, so I had tacos, which was very exciting for me.

When. When you go into like a celebration day, like. Like that.

Yeah.

There's two. There's two ways to really do it. You know, you either plan everything out and have all these big expectations, or it's just like, let's just see what happens and see how we feel. And it sounds like the second one is. Is what happened. And a lot of times, nine times out of 10, those work out better.

Oh, my God, it was so fun. And Mark and I are gonna have a weekend together in Vegas coming up.

Oh, geez.

Celebrate in other ways. And it'll be very fun too. But this was really nice. I haven't had a weekend of downtime in months and months and months and months and months. And it was just wonderful. Yeah. And I always think people should meet themselves where they are and not be thinking about what it should look like. And it'll be so much more enjoyable.

Well, happy 22nd birthday, Rebecca. Silence. So what I would. I figured we would talk about today is I was. I was going through and seeing what we had talked about over the last few weeks, last few months. And one of the things that we really haven't touched on a lot is parenting stuff.

Yeah.

So I figured that we could talk about, just do some parenting hacks stuff that parent Stuff that parents deal with on a regular basis. And, and maybe ways to kind of do that. I got. I got three. And so we can kind of go in on them. The first one is when parents use, like, an authority figure to help get the child to do whatever it is or act correctly. I'll. I'll. I'll call Santa. Oh, the cop is coming. That kind of thing. Is there a way to avoid that? Because that, That a lot of people use that, like, as their go to.

I think this is such an interesting point. And I think the other thing that can happen is the parent almost puts on this authority mask. Like, they become a version of the authority they think they need to be to get the kid to do xyz, or they bring in Santa Claus or the police or Easter Bunny. My family, Someone in my family used to tell the child, you will be put in the garbage can. You will be left in a garbage can.

That's funny, because my family. I was put into the garbage can. There's a difference between your family and my.

Nobody was actually put in a garbage can in this case, but you were. And Lord. Okay, so about it. What I think is so, so, so, so, so important is that children learn how to choose. Not from a place of trying not to get in trouble or from fear, but instead they get to choose because it's their honest choice. And when there's this authoritative authoritarian style, it's aggressive and it creates more fear, and then that actually promotes fear inauthenticity. It makes the kid fake to try to avoid conflict or pain or whatever it is that they're afraid of, and then the child isn't actually learning. I just had a mom this morning messaging me about my kid needs to be nicer and she's just not nice. And I need you to help with this. And my response was, if we train your daughter to be nice so that she's manipulating you so that she gets her way, that's actually not helping anything. So I'd rather be real and have to deal with consequences and not be nice, then be nice to manipulate and get her way. Right? So that's what I have to say about that. And the thing about choice is it's easy to be authoritarian in your parenting style, and that actually squashes your children's ability to even think about what they're choosing. They just react to survive. And we want our kids learning how to make choices and how to deal with the consequences, whether the consequences what they wanted or the consequence is one that they didn't Want all choices have consequences and we shouldn't be waiting until our kids leave the nest to help them figure that out.

So this may fall into the same kind of thing. I know parents have a hard time dealing with bedtime and getting, you know, whether it's getting them to, you know, in bed or start the routine or just to, you know, lay there. There's a lot of trials and tribulations in a lot of households when it comes to children's bedtime.

Absolutely. And I have a 7 year old. This has been a journey. And I have an 18 year old that, you know, bedtime. What's that? Self care. What's that? So let's talk about not just bedtime, but self care. We don't want self care to be this check off the to do list that the child learns to resent. Right. We want them to learn that there's a way to take care of yourself at night so that you can sleep well, so that you can feel better in the morning and have a better day the next day. We want our children learning how to take care of themselves and what it takes to actually be a fully charged battery so that they can enjoy life as much as possible. So I do a lot of asking.

Questions before, before you, before you go there. I see that that doesn't quite jive with, with what I'm thinking because a lot of times they don't want to go to bed because they're afraid of missing something or they're having too much fun and they're having. And they're playing. So bringing it to self care, I don't know if, if that'll resonate with, with a 5, 6 year old.

Oh my gosh, it will. It absolutely will. And here's why. So part of self care is having fun, but it's also getting enough sleep and it's also drinking enough water and it's also eating foods that give you energy and help you be healthy. And so it doesn't have to be a big dramatic conversation with the five year old, but it can be a simple explanation of we're going to have a bedtime routine so that you get to sleep well and so that you get to be feeling great in the morning. And then I give a lot of choices. This is so overlooked and it's such a great parenting hack. So do you want to do this, this or this? No more than three choices. Ideally two. Do you want to read first or brush your teeth first? Do you want to play together?

It's not one or the other. Or it's what do you want to do first?

Kids get to pick. And that is also self care. Right? Learning how to choose. Not just being dict. To learning the benefits of going to sleep feeling like you had choice and you got to do what you wanted to do right before bed. It's.

You're absolutely right. But the point I was making is you didn't say do you want to do this or do you want to read a book or brush your teeth. It was do you want to read a book first or do you want to brush your teeth first? Because both. Because you want both to happen. And the way that you're setting it up is they're choosing which one to.

Do first and you're teaching them self care without them actually knowing that's what you're doing. It's non negotiable. The teeth need to get brushed. And what you don't want is all of these tasks to do. Lists. Now do this, now do that, the dictator like parenting style to then have your children rebelling against self care. Because that's what will happen if they don't understand self care. They rebel against it. And that is dangerous. And how many of us, I mean, for years I had eating disorders, I drank too much. Self care didn't even occur to me as something that I deserved. And it starts with your kids making choices about, do they want to play first and then brush their teeth? Do they want to brush their teeth and then play? And then we do one book, two books, three books. You pick, do you want one long book, do you want two medium, do you want three short? Give them choices, let them be a part of it. And you can even ask them before you go to bed, said, what's one thing you want to do so that this day ends on a high note for you? Then they might say, take me out for an ice cream sundae. Well, that's not on the table. What's one thing you want to do at home that we already have available and that takes 15 minutes?

I think that this will really help people. Especially because when my kids were little, I didn't know what the hell I was doing. But you know, going through, you know, going, going through and, and seeing things and hearing things and obviously working with you and doing this for as long as we have. Yeah, you've rubbed off on me. Giving the child a choice and the child feeling like their opinion matters is huge to them. So if you're doing the dictator, ish. Okay, do this. Okay, go do this, go do this. They're just doing what they're being told because they don't want to get yelled at. However, if you ask for their input and the input is actually considered, that makes a huge, huge difference.

Right? And then their choices, they get to see how it feels. And if we're letting them just watch TV until they pass out, if we're having a TV in their room and they get to watch it until they fall asleep, that becomes the practice that they think takes care of them and it can make their nervous system go haywire wire and it just doesn't have to be that way and we don't want them rebelling. That's the other big thing we want them co creating with us. It makes your life so much easier when you give your children the power to choose.

It's a mental Wellness Wednesday Rebecca Silence's book Coming Back to Life available everywhere. Rebecca silence.com for all of your Rebecca Silence needs. Great stuff. We'll talk to you next week.

Thanks everyone.