ANN: Let’s just agree that parenting is a stressful journey. And for many of us that stress gets really cranked up when our kids become adolescents. It’s just too much, we want to scream – we do scream. We look around and we see other moms or dads seeming so chill like they’re just breezing through with no major issues – no complaints, no battle scars…while we feel like we’re walking around in a constant state of stress, our brains just buzzing with it.

Do other teens put their parents through the same things? Do they talk back, argue, lie, act out? Why is this so dang hard?

Well, it all boils down to emotions. Our emotions, our kids emotions, everybody’s emotions!

This is Speaking of Teens, the podcast that helps parents who are struggling to find peace and connection with their teens. My name is Ann Coleman; I’m an attorney turned parent educator and a mom who has been there - and I’m on a mission to help you build a stronger relationship and decrease the conflict with your kid so you can help them grow into the young adult they’re meant to be.

On today’s episode I’m talking to a mom who’s very familiar with that feeling of “Oh my God this is so freakin’ hard – how do people do it?!”. Like most of us, she had envisioned this perfect world of cute, well-behaved kids and blissful motherhood (you know – the kind the influencers have)…until she got a megadose of reality in the form of a fussy toddler. But frightened and ashamed by her own reactions to her daughter’s behavior, she turned to something she’d long studied and even practiced - mindfulness.

Hunter Clark-Fields, now known as the Mindful Mama Mentor, wasn’t quite a mentor yet, but she’d found her first bit of clarity; she realized she couldn’t control her daughter’s behavior, but she could darn sure control her own. That daughter, now 16, was soon followed by another, now 13, so Hunter is in the thick of it with you. And since her girls were really young, she’s studied, written about, taught, and podcasted on the topic of mindful parenting. She’s the number 1 best-selling author of Raising Good Humans and her latest book, Raising Good Humans Every Day (50 ways to press pause, stay present and connect with your kids) was just released this month.

Before our conversation I read this latest book cover to cover and absolutely love it – it’s almost an instruction manual in how to be a calmer, more connected parent with each of the 50 brief digestible stand-alone chapters, addressing a specific issue and backed by scientific research.

I started out by asking Hunter about a quote from Chapter 17. The title of the chapter is “My Parent’s Voice is Coming out of my Mouth” and in it she talks about how we were raised and how things from our own childhood inevitably show up in our parenting – usually as unconscious emotional reactions to things our kids do – things that can trigger these emotions. The quote I asked her about was, “What we don’t transform, we transmit”.

Hunter: Chapter 17, it's like my parents voice is coming out of my mouth. I, I, I really, um, I think that. What we don't transform we transmit is a really kind of pithy way of saying that, but I think another way of saying this is to kind of tell you a story of like something, you know, these, these things that, that aren't healed, how they're transmitted.

So my, my own mom, she's really actually very conscious, very self aware. Really wonderful person. And she's a human, like all of us. And at one point when I was like maybe 12 or something, I saw her look in the mirror and, and say to herself, like, Oh, you know, I'm so ugly. And she was having a real hard day and she was just, you know, she was just feeling really bad about herself.

And that may not have meant anything except that that was her inner voice, right? That was coming out and that comes out for all of us. And then of course, when I was then my late teens, early twenties, what did I do? I looked in the mirror and I told myself how ugly, you know, and that's. heartbreaking, right? To think about like either of us feeling that way. But it's just this idea that we, we tend to think like, Oh, I can hate myself on the inside. I can just, I can be, you know, I can not like who I am, but then I can on the outside be this other, this perform this role of being mom or dad. And, and that is what our kids need.

And it's too uncomfortable to look at what we're saying to ourselves on the inside. So we, we focus on performing this role to perfection and that's not really where the best place to put our efforts and attention. So we, we perform this role and unfortunately it's not the best place we can put our energy.

I mean, honestly, if we're being very practical, A, it's just heartbroken, breaking on a, on an, a level of, you know, a soul, a human soul that's suffering, right? Like to see that so many of us as parents, we suffer so much. And, and we, we don't want that for our kids, but we don't realize that like to, in order to transform it for our kids, to stop this cycle for our kids, we have to heal it in ourselves too.

Like it has to be like, those things have to be happening concurrently. Yes. Transform the language you're communicating with on the outside, but also, On the inside, right? So then we have to be able to see, we have to see these stories we're telling ourselves, see these beliefs, see these things that trigger us, right? To be, have outsized reactions with our kids. And then we have to, you know, start to really kind of dig in and understand these things that are driving us.

ANN (all narration follows): So, as the parent of a teen or tween, how do we become more conscious or aware of our inner voice – it’s been with us for as long as we can remember and many of us don’t even consciously notice it – it’s just always there, under the surface, driving our emotions and our behavior and we may not even realize it.

 

Hunter: Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, you're not going to get through your parenting career as you probably already noticed if you have are taking care of a teen or tween without like, you know, without kind of having a big reaction sometime or messing up and freaking out at your kid or having an outsized reaction to something, right?

And so most of the time, Kind of looking at where our emotional baggage is happens when those moments happen where we have a big moment and in those moments, we have to kind of start to reflect on, you know, Oh, wow. Okay. Big reaction there. We have to get curious and curiosity is really the one of the most essential components of mindfulness is kindness and curiosity and.

We get curious about what was happening with ourselves. These are things like when we, when we think about our triggers, if we want to, to deal with them either after the fact, or maybe we want to, you know, get ahead of them. We have to kind of uncover them, right? Because we can't deal with what we don't see, what we don't understand.

So, we can reflect some of the things we can do to do this. We reflect on our childhood, either with, you know, you. Either by ourselves, like in in mindful parenting, we have a whole set of questions like here's how you can some things you can uncover, ask yourself to uncover some maybe some baggage about yourself and your childhood.

It can be something you talk about with a therapist or a friend, right? How did your own parents deal with your big upset feelings? What are the attitudes that were passed on to you? It's not like super fun work. No one's like, Oh, please, I would love to like just dig into my childhood and understand more about myself and how I'm reacting with my kids.

But it's super essential if we don't want to be passing it all on to them. Um, yeah, I mean, so you're, you're diving into the, it's not like the most fun thing in the world, but we have to understand ourselves. Otherwise, we tend to our brains. The way human brains work is that to keep us safe to keep us in survival mode.

The brain tends to blame others for when we're feeling bad. Like we see that, we probably see that in our kids, right? Our kids are like, blame us for whatever's going wrong with them. Right. But our brains will say, brains will say, Oh, you did this. And that's why I'm feeling bad. And they did this or they didn't do this. And this is why I'm feeling bad.

And actually, we want to start to say, okay, well. The only place you have any kind of sense of control, any locus of control at all, is yourself. So instead, you do the work to understand what, you know, what is coming up for you and why. And then we have a chance! Of yeah, of then not passing it on.

ANN: Did you get that? We cannot control our kids’ behavior. We cannot control our kids’ behavior. Say it with me – we can’t control our kid’s behavior. What can we control? Our own behavior. That’s it. That is absolutely all that we can control. I know that’s a hard pill to swallow, but it’s even more true during adolescence. And the more we try to control, the harder we make our job as a parent. Controlling, changing, working on and regulating our own behavior – will, in turn, modify our teen’s behavior.

 

That little epiphany can change everything for your parenting. This notion that we can somehow make our kids behave the way we want them to, fix their behavior, force them to listen to us, it’s just mind garbage that we need to expel – it’s simply not true. And if you’ve been trying to do this, you’ve seen what happens. I was there just a few years ago and I had no idea that it was as much, about my behavior as it is about his. So, I asked Hunter, how do we explain to parents, who are still in the mindset of making their teen or child behave a certain way, without a clue that they need to adjust their own behavior. And if that’s you, hang in there and keep listening.

Hunter: Well, yeah, I mean definitely takes two to tango. I think I explained it to them I guess I tried to explain it to them sort of bit by bit over time so you can take it in all at once And not feel blamed and shamed yourself because you're only working with the you know, the information you have I was exactly the same way I was like my child will not disrespect me and I will not let them run, right you know and that kind of thing had these kind of mindsets and when it I think it takes time to understand, like, oh, you know, so one of the things I teach people is, like, how our language, um, affects our kids, right?

How, how kids respond to our language. And a lot of times, the language we use with kids and teens and tweens But really, especially little kids, is really like, um, we tend to talk to kids in a different language. Like, we're using all these commands. We're just ordering them around all the time. And there's a bunch of other ones.

In Mindful Parenting, we have six different, like, language barriers we talk about. And these are things that Frankly, no one likes to be ordered around, so one of the things I do sometimes is I walk parents through, like, imagine you're a kid, and I say this to you, and it'll be, like, one of the typical things that we say to kids, and, and just really imagine how that feels.

Say you're, you're hanging out, you're doing your thing, you've forgotten about your backpack on the floor, or whatever, and I say, Ah! pick that backpack up right now. I'm so frustrated. And you know, what happens in our kids is that that tends to trigger resistance, right? Cause no one likes to be ordered around.

So then as we start to kind of put ourselves in our kids shoes, then we can say, Oh, this is what I'm doing is actually like triggering the. opposite of what I intend, right? Like I want them to change their behavior and it's actually triggering them to be completely resistant to what I'm saying. So, as we can start to understand that, then we can start to get into it.

ANN:  You get that, right? No one likes to be ordered around. No one. Not an adult, not a child, not an adolescent. If your spouse were to walk up to you and say, “get your bag off the island please” – even that “please” is not going to soften what is clearly an order. Right? Would that statement, that tone make you want to do what they asked, or would it make you want to say, “kiss my ass”….Exactly.

 

Hunter: And I think that You know, a lot of us come from this mindset of like, we're moving from this, you know, culturally we've, we've been in this for like since the 1950s in this kind of behaviorist mindset like, like with, with kids, it's like we're, we're training dogs, right? Like we want to reward this behavior and discourage this kind of behavior, right?

Kids aren't dogs and they're humans and they become very resistant to us manipulating them. And so what we're I think we're in the process of transitioning to like understanding a more of a relationship model right than a power over model right where the old model we demanded instant obedience and then if we didn't have the old obedience, we would hurt them in some way with like a punishment or yelling or hitting our kids, right? We would try to hurt them just to discourage that behavior, which was not the instant obedience. But that's not what we want anymore. As parents, we all hated our parents as teenagers. We rebelled against it, right? Like the whole teen rebellion stuff that doesn't exist because kids naturally hate their parents.

It's because kids. We've naturally rebelled against the destructive techniques that parents were using. So, we're all realizing this and we're saying, okay, well, we want a different path. But at the same time, you know, my brain is like, it's stuck in the middle. Part of me is like, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna model respectful language with my teenager. I'm going to speak to her respectfully. And then the other part of my brain is like, she can't talk to me like that. What does she think you think she is? And I'm being disrespected, right? So, we get kind of like stuck in the middle. And it's hard. It's hard to be in the transition space.

But I think the more we understand, like, the science, the research, how our brains and nervous systems work, the more we can trust that, you know, that, that as we move from the model of discipline, that means to like punish and hurt someone to the model of discipline, that means to. You know, comes from the root word of discipilus, right? Which means to, to teach or to follow, right? Uh, like a disciple instead, as we move towards that model, we can, we can trust that more and more as we kind of surround ourselves with more information.

ANN: To dig a little further here, the behaviorist mindset Hunter is talking about here is what led to authoritarian parenting. Back in the 1920s 30s, the parenting experts of the day were telling parents to reward good behavior and punish bad – that would teach kids how to behave. They told parents not to show affection – it would spoil them – even “retard their development”. Most of our grandparents were raised in an authoritarian, obedience-focused, environment, they then raised our parents in a similar environment (what you don’t transform, you transmit). So, unless our parents transformed, most of us were also raised this way. And if we don’t transform it – that authoritarian parenting style – we’ll transmit it to our own kids.

 

Hunter: And it's frustrating because. It really does. It does the opposite of create connection, right? If we actually want to have a good relationship with our kids, the thing that drives it, the thing that drives what I want from my kids, right?

So, I want them to want to cooperate with me. Intrinsically, just because they love me, they care about me, we're in the same family. And in order for that to happen, we have to have a strong connection, right? It's that connection to each other that drives that cooperation. And we, um, if we don't have that connection, we're not going to have that cooperation.

And so that's, that's really kind of where we're kind of, we're moving from like, I mean, at least I'm moving from that. You know, when I first started parenting my kids, I was totally in that authoritarian mindset of, Oh, I will make my kids do be this way. And, and I've moved from that to a connection-based model, like with mindful parenting.

And I have to say that I actually. Like, okay, 90% of the time I like, I love parenting teens. I love, I like being around them maybe 88% of the time. I'll say that. And I, I believe that it's because. Like, we, life has its challenges for us. We have, definitely have challenges, but one of them is less and less and less is like parenting and having, getting things done and all [00:19:00] that stuff because we've kind of put in this work in the front end to, to be more respectful, model respect and create connection rather than use that authoritarian power over.

 

ANN: I asked Hunter what she thought it was going to take to get the word out and convince the many parents out there who still parent in this obedience-focused manner, who use tough love and corporal punishment and harshness – what’s it going to take to convince everyone that our kids are suffering and we’re just perpetuating this parenting style generation after generation.

 

Hunter: I mean, I don't know - that's a great question. Yeah. Cause I kind of live in my own little bubble. And then I recently watched the, uh, shiny, happy people documentary about the Duggar [00:24:00] family and the whole IBLP kind of thing. And I'm thinking, Oh my gosh, this has influenced millions of people. And that's just horrifying to me.

You know, that, you know, the. The so many people would be, um, violent, like that violent to Children. I mean, that really, um, yeah. And the thing is, it's like, I mean, I guess we have to just educate, you know? I mean, we got to do what we can do. I mean, when we understand that violence, but also even yelling, like yelling at kids, what, what it does to them is it.

You know, and I, I was yelling at my daughter. I could see her. I was scaring her and just, you know, disconnected when, when we were, when she was young, like really young. And, and, um, and what it does to kids of any age is that turns on their fight, flight or freeze stress response. And so when that is activated, that stress response, their nervous system is registering you as a [00:25:00] threat.

And when you're their nervous system registers you as a threat there, All right. It's cutting off access. It's preparing them to fight you back or flee to safety, and it's, it's bypassing the prefrontal cortex area of their brain, which is not fully developed until their early 20s. But that is the slower, logical, thoughtful, verbal ability, creative thinking, problem solving part of their brain behind their forehead.

And when the prefrontal cortex is cut off and they're just reacting, they're in fight, flight, or freeze, a child can't learn anything. They're not going to learn anything. You might get a child, it might work in the short term in that you'll get a child to submit because they're afraid of you, but they're actually not going to learn anything.

So, if we think about ultimately what we want our kids to learn. To do our teens any age as we want them to learn and what does learning take? It takes repetition. Right? And they also have to have their whole brain available if they're in survival mode. They're not learning. So, it's useless. It's not even it's not that effective. Ultimately, in the long run.

So, what we want to do is we want to if they're having a behavior that's affecting us in a negative way, we want to teach them how that behavior is affecting other people. And so they can learn a better way or we want to teach them a better way. Right. But if we're yelling at them, if they're in survival mode, they just can't learn.

 

ANN: And I just want to remind you here that an adolescent’s amygdala is hyper sensitive and even more susceptible to the fight, flight or freeze response than a child’s. That tiny little area of their brain causes them to mistake benign situations as threatening. So, when you add in a parent’s emotional dysregulation: scolding, yelling, punishing – it really sets off that stress response in a teen, cranks up the conflict and the emotional fallout, which then rolls into the next parent-teen situation. So, if you find yourself constantly in a battle of wills with your teen, Hunter has some advice.

 

Hunter: And if you have been, you know, using these authoritarian techniques and it's getting harder and harder, you have to raise the stakes higher and higher. It's getting worse and worse. It's more and more of a battle as time goes on. And That's incredibly hard. It's incredibly stressful, and it's incredibly heartbreaking to see your kid hate you.

I mean, that's so hard to see. And so when that happens, you know, to you're in a place of maybe battling, and it's hard to open yourself up to vulnerability, right, which is your real, real power, ultimately, and it's You know, I think just helping understanding, I think, how hard it is to parent and how kind of lost and at sea a lot of us are and also how little support we have as parents, you know, in our country of so, so, so little support we have, you know, especially compared to other countries like.

We are really, really stressed in a lot of ways. And also, then people are dealing with other levels of stress too. So, to, to have compassion for all the people who are saying, like, listen, I've, I've done this, this has to work, I have to, they, you know, they believe I have to control my child, right? And, And they're doing that.

It's driven from love, right? Like, I have to control my child because I'm afraid. I'm scared. I'm feeling heartbroken. I'm feeling lost. Like, it's the same thing as what we're trying to do with, I mean, really any relationship. If we see somebody who's really struggling, who's really, if we say someone has an issue that, you know, quote unquote, bad behavior, right, that we think is harm it harmful, or, you know, not meeting other people's needs. Then we can see that that person is in fact, like feeling really badly and something's going on with them. So, for instance, when my daughters have had like given me, you know, occasionally, like they've given me something like a teen attitude, right? Like we're on speaking of teens, you know, this is pretty common, right? Like we get the teen attitude. And so, what I want to do what I'm conditioned to do by my upbringing and my culture is to fight back, is to bring, you know, she's raising a fist is to bring the other fist up, right? That's metaphorical.

Um, but like, if she's giving me this attitude is to, you know, try to regain my power and, and things like that. And that's kind of like, that's my first kind of response. And what I have to realize is that. What I'm feeling in that moment is I'm feeling anger, right? But that's just the tip of the iceberg under the unconscious of the iceberg is like, I'm feeling kind of hurt that she wasn't, that she's talking to me that way.

And so when I dig under the surface and start to, you know, look with understanding and myself and say, Oh, I'm actually feeling really hurt. And so then when I say to her, Hey, when you talk to me that way, I feel hurt and it it makes me not want to You know, be around you or, or want to help you with stuff, honey.

Yeah. And I walk away. And you know, she doesn't immediately say, Oh, mother, I'm so sorry, that doesn't happen. But what can happen is like within an hour, we come back together. She's. Talking to me kindly and normally and respectfully and we're moving on because she's realizing how her actions have affected me and so you know what I've done in that moment is instead of fighting back is I'm actually opening my armor up.

I'm taking my armor off and I'm showing her. This is the wound that you've created in me. Be it just a small wound from talking, um, disrespectfully, right? And when she can see that she, she sees, oh, this is how my behavior has affected my mom, who I love. So. You know, this is not all conscious thought, but this is what happens.

And so it's much more skillful to, to lead honestly and from the heart. And then when we can model, then we can model the kind of. You know, to talk that we want to see back to our kids, we get more and more of that. You know, our kids need to see that like we're, we're not just this role. Um, there's an, uh, author, Annie Burnside, who wrote a book called soul to soul parenting. And she, she said, we need to be, you know, we need to move beyond role to role and go to soul to soul. Truly believe that because when we're in this role, we're not being real.

We're not being authentic and you know what our teens and tweens have Amazing BS meters. You know that so when we're faking it, they see our fakeness. They see that we're trying to manipulate them and they don't respond well to that We know that right so It actually benefits all of us if we can be real, if we can be honest.

Ann: So, this finally brings us around to mindfulness – the ultimate benefit of all mental benefits. If you don’t know about it and don’t understand it, it can sound so foreign and so lofty and just not doable. But it really is, and Hunter explains it for you here.

Hunter: Well, I think a great way to understand it is to understand first kind of what the opposite of mindfulness is. So when a lot of the time throughout our day, we're on autopilot mode. We're going, going, going, we're [00:36:00] doing, doing, doing right. We're checking the next thing off the list. You're listening to this podcast as you fold the laundry, as you drive your car to pick up your kid for do the thing and go to the next thing and then get dinner and then go home and then, you know, whatever, and on and on and on.

Right. We're like, we are. Often in the future, sometimes in the past, we're always going, going and doing, doing it's on, we're kind of on autopilot throughout the day. And what mindfulness is, it's a taking a small time to do, to stop going and doing, and just be, to practice being in the present moment, to practice just stopping.

And that's really the essence of what it is. And it's really, it's about So my definition is to, about mindfulness is we're putting our attention, um, into the present moment with an attitude of kindness and curiosity. And so this attitude of kindness and curiosity is [00:37:00] really important, right? So we're basically, we're stopping our doing, we're taking a moment to pause and we're consciously, we're cultivating an attitude of kindness and curiosity.

So, mindfulness. is mindfulness of something where you're putting our attention on something in the present moment. We can be mindful of our breath. This is a very classic way of thinking about it, sitting and breathing. We can be mindful of our, of washing the dishes. We can be mindful of walking, or we can be mindful of our child.

Our child can actually be an object of mindfulness. We can practice mindful listening, right? But a great way to practice is to practice You know, maybe setting a timer for two minutes, three minutes. I've got a, like a three-minute meditation on my website and meditation is just a way to practice mindfulness, right?

And there are other kinds of meditation too, but so when we practice, so for instance, you might sit down on a lazy boy in your house. And you, you play this, this guided meditation, or you just set a timer for two or three minutes and you practice just maybe feeling your breath come in and out, or maybe you practice putting your attention on listening to the sounds around you, maybe you're hearing bird sounds outside or something.

And what happens when you do that is five bazillion times, your brain gets pulled. out of the present moment and into, like, oh, I've got to do this later, or I feel anxious because of this, or, you know, like, I don't know, like, why stare me to heaven so long, right? Like, all this, like, random, you start to notice That your brain is like a little puppy that's not been trained, that can't walk on a straight line because it's going all these different places.

And then this is where a lot of people think to themselves, I can't do this. Yeah. That's what I thought. I thought for myself, I can't do this. My, I, this is crazy. And the thing is though, that's how everybody's minds are. Because the thing is the mind. thinks just as the ears hear and the eyes see. The mind just is spitting out thoughts to keep you safe and alive. Right? So, so, but when the, the thing about a mindfulness practice is the heart of the practice, the golden moment of the practice, the moment where you're doing the mindfulness bicep curl is when you notice. Oh, I've been thinking about stairway to heaven for five minutes. Let me bring myself back to listening to the birds.

Yeah. Oh, okay. And that's actually, that's when you've built you, that's like doing a rep and mindfulness. You're building your ability to bring your attention back to the present moment when you want it to be there. Because the thing is when we're on autopilot. Where we're going, going and doing, doing all the time forever in our lives, then we get to like, the moment when we're supposed to be able to be present.

We get to like Cancun with our teenager and you actually can't be present because you have trained your mind to go and go and do, and you can't relax and enjoy it. And so it really benefits us enormously. I mean, the, the benefits are, are enormous and very research. proven, but it benefits us in our relationships to be able to be able to just stop and be and rest for a few minutes every day.

And it makes everything in our lives easier. We get to focus a little bit more. We bring down our stress response. We You know, we can listen more easily to our family without getting so triggered. We start to understand ourselves a little better. It, you know, the benefits are enormous. It's like proven to be better than, you know, or at least as good or better than prescription, um, Yeah.

Hunter: Drugs to like reduce anxiety, reduce depression, increase sense of wellbeing, um, it [00:41:00] better your sleep, better your health outcomes, all those things. And just for, for us parents, super importantly, it really, um, improves our impulse control so that we can be more thoughtful and how we want to respond to our kids.

Ann: I told Hunter how I often see moms comment online about how they can’t just PAUSE and take a few breaths when they’re upset with their teen. So, I asked her, what if people haven’t yet started a mindfulness practice and don’t yet have that PAUSE button quite figured out?

Hunter: I would say I can completely relate, because I remember being like, How do you pause? I don't, you know, this is like, everything would start with step one, pause, and be like, how do you do that? Yeah, right. And really, that's where a lot of the chapters in the book are like, how do you do that? And it is a muscle that we build over time.

So, The problem is, is like, yeah, she's not going to be able to pause if she never, if she's always going, going, doing, doing every second of the day forever, right? No one's going to be able to. You can't just, and that's the problem for a lot of us, is that we think we can just will ourselves to do something.

I can just will myself to control my emotions. No, you can't. Your emotions come first, right? Like you can take care of them, but you can't control what arises, right? And Um, we, so there's, she can do two things. She can practice dealing with it in the moment, like that kind of triage emergency response. But then also it, it's not, that's going to be kind of worthless unless she does some things outside of the [00:43:00] moment and in daily life to help her reduce her reactivity overall.

And one of the biggest things we can do to reduce our reactivity to yell less overall It's not going to be an easy thing just to reduce our overall stress. That means get enough sleep, get regular exercise, have time with supportive family or friends, have downtime. Yeah. And we resist doing those things because we think, Oh, a good mother is self-sacrificing and does everything for her kids.

But actually, that all that stuff leads to burnout and resentment and not being able to hold your beat together. Right. Yeah. And so. All of those things that we need to do to have a little more ease in your life to, you know, to schedule in some downtime to get all those things. So, I know that's not like a fun answer.

It's not. And then on top of those things like of, of sleep and exercise and time with supportive family and friends, like, yeah. And then a mindfulness practice is like research proven after eight weeks to like shrink. the amygdala, which is the seat of the fight, flight, or freeze stress response in your brain.

Actually, brain scans have shown it to actually make it less dense and, and to make the connectivity between the amygdala and the rest of the brain nervous system, shrink it and make it smaller. And has actually been shown to increase the gray matter in the prefrontal cortex, which is the area behind our forehead, which is the area of our We have our impulse control and our higher order thinking.

It's amazing. So, if we want to have that, there are things we can do, and we can't just do it in the moment. So, we have to kind of build that muscle. You know, you can't, you're not going to be able to go, you're not going to send your kid to. the Little League World Series without them ever having gone to a practice.

Yeah. You know? Right. Right. You can't expect them to hit the ball. You can't expect yourself to make it into like your, you know, reactive equivalent of that if you've never ever practiced either. Okay. So, there's, there's building it in the long term. And then, yeah, in those moments, you can build a different response.

And actually in mindful parenting, we kind of take people through, uh, a visualization where we practice going through a different response and it includes tools like, like I have a bunch of tools in raising good humans, like tactical breathing and different breathing and things like that. And the breath is a cliche answer because it works.

You can think of each. inhale as a little mini stress response, each exhale as a little mini rest and relax response. So, if you have a longer exhale, that's going to help you get more regulated. Yeah. So, anything you can do to be more regulated, your breath, maybe you turn away, maybe you drink a watt, some water, maybe you splash some water on your face.

Maybe you shake out your hands. Maybe you put a hand to your heart. You tell yourself I'm safe. I'm helping my child. This is not an emergency, right? Yeah. There's a whole bunch of tools in Raising Good Humans Every Day that I share. Yes. But yeah, all of those, all those are things that will work way, way, way, way better if you practice.

That pause, if you practice stopping and if you really make reducing your own stress a priority in your life. Yeah, I mean, so yeah, mindfulness is a like a dose dependent activity, right? So, the more you do, the, you know, the better it's going to be more effective.

It's going to be for you, but you know, you don't have to like go for enlightenment. If you just want to go for reducing your stress, that's a super worthy goal. If you just want to go for not being so reactive and yelling at your kids. That's less. That's very, very worthy. And that can start with like three minutes a day, right?

And I promise you, you have that time because you have it on social media. Yeah. And the thing is like, yeah, it doesn't actually take a lot of time. I mean, it's like anything, you know, you know, that if you're sedentary all day long, you just sit on your butt all day long. it's going to be much better for you to then go for a walk around the block than it is to do that, right?

So, you know that that's actually going to help your health and your well being and all those things. And it's the same thing with mindfulness practice. If you can practice for three minutes a day, one minute a day, if you can, I don't know, like get up in the morning, pee, wash your face and then close the bathroom door and set a timer for [00:48:00] two minutes and then sit and breathe.

Quietly for those two minutes, that's actually going to make an impact on your day. And then you can grow it from there. It doesn't like it's not all or nothing. It's like build something like something super minimal. That's gonna get a toehold and what you're going to notice. What, what happens for people is that first, as they build a habit, I, I encourage them to like reward themselves after they've had done it for like two weeks or a week or so say they've done it for five days.

They go for every weekday and they've done it for five days straight. I say, get yourself some flowers. Okay. Do these things. You have to reward yourself and that's great. You're starting a new habit. But then eventually it becomes this thing that is the reward in itself. You crave that settling down and you notice how wonky your brain is when you don’t do it.

Um, and then you're like, Oh, that's why, that's why I do this thing.

Ann: Here are Hunter’s closing words of advice for you as the parent of a teen or tween.

 

Hunter: I mean, I guess I would say is that we need to remember that with teens, just like even when they were little, our emotions are contagious. Human beings are interconnected, right. It's not like we're these crazy separate human beings. We feel each other's feelings. We help each other. to stress each other out or we help to ground each other. So if you can practice to bring more ease and space into your life, if you can maybe do some practices that help you release your stress to help you become more grounded.

You can then be the support that your teen needs. You know, they don't need you to be crazy in yourself. Right? Like that's not, that doesn't help them, but if you can be like a solid mountain that they can lean on, that's an amazing gift and it's hard. It's so, so hard. I mean, my. teens, like, you know, there's stuff like we go through and it's incredibly challenging.

And I definitely have my times where I'm like, my heart is breaking for my teen and I'm crying. And what we need to offer ourselves is a lot of compassion because it's hard. And so if we can just say to ourselves, like, You know, we're doing what we can offer ourselves some compassion and offer ourselves some tools and practices that really ground us and make us more stable.

That's really, I think, the, the best we can do. We can't solve their problems, but we can be a steady, stable support with practice.

Ann: What a wonderful reminder to end on. Our emotions are contagious. If you want a calmer relationship with your child, calmer behavior from your child, you have to model that behavior, embrace self-compassion, mindfulness, reduce the stress in your life. As she puts it in Chapter 32 of her book, be their Calm Mountain, learn to calm your inner experience so you don’t add fuel to their already blazing fire.

 

You can find Hunter’s new book, Raising Good Humans Every Day (50 simple ways to press pause, stay present & connect with your kids) wherever fine books are sold. I will have links in the description right where you’re listening for both her books, guided journal, her podcast, Mindful Mama, and her website where you can find free guided meditations to get your practice started.

That’s it for Speaking of Teens today. The link for the show notes, our free parenting guides and our Facebook Group is in the episode description right where you’re listening.

And thank you so much for being here today – I really appreciate it and if you got something out of this episode, please consider sharing it with other moms or a group of moms. It will help me keep bringing great guests like Hunter on the show.

Speaking of Teens is sponsored by neurogility.com, where I help parents build stronger relationships and decrease conflict with their teens.

Our producer and editor is Steve Coleman; researched, written, and hosted by me, Ann Coleman.