Epi #42. The 4 BIG Lessons I Learned in 2022

👋🏼 Welcome back, Cycle Breakers! Today, I’m sharing the 4 BIGGEST lessons I learned last year that brought me to reflect, so that we can better serve you as a parent in 2023. Tune in to find out just some of what you can look forward to from HIC Parenting this year! 😁

Backstory

In 2020, we launched our Parenting With Understanding™ Podcast based on my experience providing therapeutic care for kids with HIGH behavioral needs, including mood disorders, cognitive delays, & multiple diagnoses: ADHD, ASD, SPD, & PTSD to name a few. My training as a therapeutic provider & positive discipline coach helped them to significantly reduce their aggression & better communicate their needs. 🙌🏼

So, I began sharing my knowledge with other moms in my community & they all reported positive changes in their children’s behaviors, too! This encouraged me to develop the Parenting With Understanding™ Program & share it with our online community, so I could help other parents experience the same transformations with their families. We’re proud to announce that we’ve helped almost 600 parents achieve their parenting goals with this program. 🥳

However, there was a big challenge many of these parents were facing. While they found the Parenting With Understanding™ Program helpful in discerning their kids’ behaviors, they also expressed a need for support in helping them work through their own strong emotions & reactivity. In other words, they found it much easier to apply the Parenting With Understanding™ principles, so long as they’re emotionally regulated. 🕊️

Helping parents is my passion, so I felt called to earn my certification in a parent-centric curriculum. Afterwards, in 2022, I did a test-run with a small group of Parenting With Understanding™ Program members. We met on Thursdays, where they were parent-coached from a parent-centric perspective. Their awareness was immediately palpable & contributed to them making parenting leaps & bounds, compared to their Parenting With Understanding™ counterparts who weren’t part of the test group.

The following were the 4 biggest lessons I learned last year:

1. Overcoming Our Parenting Challenges Doesn’t Start with Changing Our Parenting

This was when my epiphany happened: overcoming parenting challenges starts with understanding ourselves, triggers, attachment styles (& how it affects our parenting), & making peace with our past. Whether or not one has access to parenting tools, none of it will be effective if a certified professional doesn’t help to expose their blind spots. Once these parents had the complete package: tools to help themselves & their kids, they finally experienced the parenting transformation they were desperately seeking. 👏🏼

The Parenting With Understanding™ Program had always been child-centric & self-paced, but the weekly coaching session with a parent coach, who supported them, held them accountable, & held their hand through all of life’s challenges (not just parenting) like relocations, sudden deaths in the family, etc. made all the difference! 🙏🏼

This realization influenced us to expand the Parenting With Understanding™ Program into a fully comprehensive program that now includes a heavy, parent-centric portion. And, it’s launching at the beginning of February 2022! Get ready, because we’re celebrating it with our first free masterclass of 2023 very soon! 🎊

2. Information = Knowledge/Awareness & Parent-Coaching = Transformation

All of 2022, I trained with a parenting coach every week. I quickly realized that one thing was to read a great parenting book or attend a parenting class that gave me general information, but may or may not work for my kids or I, & another thing is consistently working with a parenting coach every week, who was trained to help me notice things about my family dynamic/kids/childhood trauma that I wasn’t able to notice for myself by simply reading a book. And, you’ll receive this same type of care & attention in our 14-week Parenting With Understanding™ Program, where your HIC parent coach will support you every step of the way. 🤝🏼

3. One Thing is Knowing Parenting Strategies & Another is Integrating Those Strategies

Allow me to explain exactly what I mean by this. Watching lots of parenting Tik Toks, getting online tips, & reading books are great starting points, but more often than not, only take you so far. Most parents find that when they apply what they’ve learned from these resources, it just doesn’t work as they’d hoped because they still lose their temper! 😢

So, what makes parents successful with gentle parenting? I found that the pattern of knowing parenting tips & applying them from your logic is one thing, but once you integrate this parenting style into your nervous system, you’ll finally get the results you’re looking for. According to Dr. Daniel Siegel’s research in interpersonal biology, when we relate to others, we pick up on their energy, feelings, & how they express themselves, & mirror it back to them. 🤯

4. Child & Parenting Development Isn’t Linear

I'll start off with a personal story: one of my twins, Santi, has sensory needs & wasn’t meeting his weight markers, so we enrolled him in feeding therapy last year for help. I’m glad to report that he’s made great progress, even going so far as to eat vegetables yesterday! It may seem insignificant to some, but had anyone told us he’d be eating vegetables this year, I wouldn’t have believed them! It’s important to note that his progress didn’t follow a straight line. There were bumps & multiple regressions along the way, but what’s important is that he’s continuing in an overall upward trajectory. 📈

Many of our test group members also experienced bumps, plateaus, & regressions with their kids & parenting. For example, a mom whose daughter’s tantrums decreased from 20 to 5 minutes, went up 10 minutes & stayed there for a while before dropping back to 5 minutes. Or, the mom who’d stopped yelling for a while, but life’s stressors got the best of her & she began to yell again for a few weeks, before returning to her calmer ways. 🧘🏻‍♀️

This is truly how growth & development work, so don’t give up on parenting with understanding, gentle parenting, or your parenting goals! These things will happen because ups & downs are a natural part of the journey. Stick it out & you’ll see your parenting desires come to fruition. You’ve got this! 💪🏼*