The Juna Women Podcast is a weekly discussion where Juna Founder, Sarah Kuhn, talks to Moms about their health, work, parenting, and all the different ways they’re keeping it together.
This is Episode 036, Raising Respectful, Kind, Resilient, and Happy Kids with Hayley Goldberg, LMFT.
In this episode Sarah talks with Hayley Goldberg from the Heart of Connecting.
Hayley is a Mom of 3 who specializes in helping parents come together to build strong loving families. She does this through Parent Coaching, Workshops, and Speaking Events.
In today’s episode Sarah and Hayley get to the root of common parenting struggles and how to create strategies that are positive, collaborative, and help build warm and trusting relationships between parents and their children.
Hayley shares her approach to parenting and how it is our responsibility as parents to coach, guide, and teach our children how we want them to behave. We dive deep into discipline, where she explains the importance of encouraging behavior that we want and preventing the behavior we don’t, rather than constantly correcting/managing behavior.
This episode should be required listening for anyone who’s pregnant, or has kids under 10 years old. In fact, many of the strategies in this episode are beneficial to improving parenting/child relationships at any age.
Listen To This Episode
Show Notes
*02:25* – Intros and how Hayley became a therapist and started working with parents.
*05:44* – How to create an identity as a parent – how to discover what you want to be and then implementing strategies to make that happen.
*06:25* – Understanding your child’s temperament.
*07:07* – Establishing goals for your children. Who do you want your kids to be? How do you build life skills and characteristics for your children that will help them become emotionally intelligent and well-adjusted children.
*10:10* – Temperament scales and where do parents and kids fit on those scales.
*14:04* – The 9 buckets of child development.
- Social
- Emotional
- Sensory
- Language + Communication
- Cognitive
- Motor Skills – Gross + Fine
- Creativity
- Spirituality
- Resiliency
Learn which buckets your children need deposits for, knowing they won’t all be equal.
*19:05* – How to parent children of different ages and what is age appropriate?
Every time we are working on these buckets, we are creating neurological connections. For example, when we talk to our babies in utero and by the time they are born they are already familiar with language skills. It’s wiring the brain for them to communicate around 12-16 months.
*22:13* – Using positive discipline and calm, positive discipline. Punishment looks at our children in the moment and punishment uses shame, pain, pain, blame, fear, force, or threat. We want to control our kids and control their behavior. Punishment is concerned with a certain behavior in the moment. We are taking a much longer approach. It’s just not about changing a behavior or shaping a behavior in the moment. It’s about building skills. We’re not going to punish children for skills they don’t have. We’re going to coach them and teach them those skills.
In your parenting toolbox you need three tools – encourage, prevent, and manage.
70% encouragement + prevention of behavior(s)
30% managing behavior
Managing behavior is a very hard place to be.
Types of Consequences:
1) Natural Consequences.
2) Logical Consequences
3) Problem Solving
4) How can we re-do (do-over)
*26:59* – Natural consequences happen in the environment. We can’t piggyback on natural consequences. A lot of times a natural consequences will happen and then we will wind up lecturing our children on top of the consequence — it loses its effect. We want to have empathy for their feelings when a natural consequence happens. Hayley shares n example of a natural consequence involving a little boy and his basketball.
*29:59* – Why empathy is important. Seeing, hearing, and knowing that we are listening, but not always making it better. We don’t want to be too kind or too permissive because they won’t develop resiliency, but we don’t want to come at it from a place of frustration and irritation.
*32:39* – Logical consequences can be implemented when there is no natural consequence. These need to be related to the behavior whenever possible. They need be put into place respectfully. Reveal the consequence in advance and have them reveal the consequence in advance. Reasonable, respectful, related to the behavior, and repeated back to you.
“Punishment is not worried about our kids learning. If we focus on the learning and teaching and we follow this formula. Consequences become more remedial.”
*34:50* – Classic example of illogical vs logical consequences is the age old clean up your toys dilemma.
How many of us have said to our kids: If you don’t clean up we’ll send your toys to Africa or throw them away. The problem is, how many of us are actually going to follow through?
Logical consequences need to be followed through and be realistic. A better idea would be to say ahead of time.
“Whatever toys that Mommy or Daddy has to clean up become Mommy or Daddy’s toys for 2 days and whichever toys you clean, you get to keep.”
*38:40* – How to encourage the behavior we want:
1. The number 1 way is to model the behavior we want. Walk the walk. They are much more likely to do what they see than what do what we say.
2. Another method is to teach the behavior we want. You can role play with puppets or stuffed animals and teach them lessons. Use books, movies, role play, puppets, any combination. Intentionally teach the behaviors we want.
3. Feedback. Notice the good behaviors and provide positive encouragement. PDA is positive descriptive acknowledgement. This means reinforcing good behaviors.
*43:05* – A lot of times our kids will play so well for 15 minutes and then all of the sudden they are fighting and we wind up ONLY dealing with the negative behavior. We need to give the kids feedback when things are going right. Not ONLY when they are dong something negative.
*44:37* – How to create a yes space for our kids. We don’t always want to be telling them no. Especially young kids. We have to give them a yes space. Are you giving them the opportunity to try things, explore, and be autonomous.
*47:21* – Kids need freedom to explore. This might mean climbing things and doing things you feel are dangerous. It’s our job to provide them that opportunity in a safe way.
*48:08* – We don’t want to control our kids. We want them to make mistakes. One great way to prevent behaviors is to give them choices.
If you have a kid who is refusing a jacket we can provide them a choice of:
1) How do you want to bring your sweater to school today?
2) Do you want to carry it, put it in your backpack, or wear it?
Our kids need to make their own decisions.
Which do you think is more effective?
“It’s Time For Bed!” *OR* “Bedtime is coming up, do you want bedtime now, or bedtime in 15 minutes? “
*51:15* You can prevent behavior by using fantasy. Having a conversation with your kid about dessert. Rather than saying, No Cookies! You could say, wouldn’t it be amazing if we could eat all the Cookies and they provided our bodies the nutrition we needed to grow strong and healthy? How many would you eat every day. It provides an opportunity for connection, without giving in or caving to their desires.
*53:20* – The first step is always about connecting with the behavior and then we can worry about the correction.
Connection before correction.
*54:00* – Are timeouts are appropriate? How do we handle tantrums?
Hayley is not a proponent of sending kids away for timeout. We want to be sitting with them and giving them our time. We want to connect and validate and give them space around those feelings. You can’t go right to correction when your kids are in an emotional state. They are mentally incapable of working through anything when they are in a tantrum. It might take an hour or two until both parties are calm. Then we can problem solve, implement a logical or natural consequence, if necessary.
*01:00:00* – Fair does not mean one size fits all. Fair is that everybody gets what they need to succeed and that might look different for each kid. We may need to give our kids different things.
Connect with Hayley:
Web: https://www.heartofconnecting.com/who-i-work-with/about
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/heartofconnecting
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If you have feedback or know someone who would be a great guest on the show, please reach to Sarah@juna.co.
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