Emotional Health + Gentle Parenting
Transcript:
Okay. Now we're going to be talking about our emotional health plus dental parenting. And this is all going to be connecting to gentle parenting because our emotional health is so important.
Gentle parenting needs you to prioritize your wellbeing because so much of gentle parenting really requires us to be available on an emotional level for our children, gentle parenting.
It needs us to be able to take a deep breath when our child is having a freak out and be able to go and talk to them gently and calmly and support them to be available to them, which means that we have to be emotionally healthy to do that.
We need that moment when they are fed up and they throw that bowl of cereal on the floor and there's milk everywhere for us to be able to actually handle that situation without yelling at them.
Because if we're not emotionally, well, then we're not going to handle those kinds of situations. Well at all. And do you ever feel like sometimes you're always on edge or you feel really high, strong?
It's really hard to learn how to calm down and relax, to be honest, Because if we're not able to become, then it's going to make it a lot harder for us to discipline our kids in a way that we actually feel is gentle and respectful towards them.
But this is obviously easier said than done, but we'll get into it a bit more. So why do our emotions matter so much?
Well, our emotions, they help to model appropriate reactions to difficult situations. So if you get angry and you express that anger by screaming and yelling and all of that, then that's telling your child that that's the appropriate way to deal with the feeling of anger.
Um, it helps us to stay calm and to think clearly if our emotions that's an important part of our emotions to be able to become and think clearly, um, it helps us to actually be able to use gentle parenting strategies rather than being played with era irrational reactions, because she know it sucks.
So many people tell me that they know dental parenting skills, but they don't use them because they are just so upset all the time that they end up just blurting things out before they thought of the best way to respond to it.
But I have a whole separate course, all about that called angry mom no more, but we are going to cover some of the details here.
And lastly, our emotions are important because it gives us the freedom to enjoy our children. But what happens if we neglect our emotional health?
Well, we're going to say things that we don't mean we're going to yell, shout, even spank. We won't make good parenting decisions.
We'll feel trapped by anger, guilt, impatience, frustration. You can start to feel like a monster. Um, you can find it challenging to reach a deeper relationship with your children or even the spouse.
And we can constantly feel stressed out, which can lead to sickness and other problems in our physical body. And the thing is children pick up on our reactions.
So when a parent knows how to be calm in a stressful situation, the child will easily learn to do that as well.
And children learn best through real life examples. So every time that we choose to react in a positive way versus a negative way, that's an amazing example for our children.
And if you want to succeed at dental parenting, you have to be willing to look deep inside yourself and address your scars and personal faults.
This is not easy, but the truth is that once you get into dental parenting, these things start to come up because you realize, oh, being patient is actually really hard and not yelling could, can be hard, whatever your struggles might be.
And it can take you back to your childhood. It can take you back to your own mistakes or things that you've struggled with for a really long time.
And we're going to get into that in the next lesson.