Does everything rest on you?

Hey Parenting People!

Do you ever feel like everything in your family comes down to you?  Like, you’re carrying the load for everyone and everything rests on you doing a good job and the right thing?  

A mom in a workshop I gave a while back asked about her kids leaving their stuff all over the entryway every time they came home. 

“What can I say so they’ll put their stuff away? Can you give me advice on how to stay calm when they do that? I lose my temper every time!”  

It struck me how this mom was assuming that she needed to figure out how to just ‘be better.’  She needed to say better stuff and have more patience.  She told me later that my answer was a bit of a wakeup call:

“This stuff is like a 3-legged stool.  Right now you’re focusing only on being calmer and better.  You also need to have rules established, and your kids need to do some heavy lifting: they need to experience an outcome from a bad choice.  If those other two elements aren’t in place, it’s only going to become more difficult to stay calm, while you put more energy into trying to make yourself do it.” 

How we show up in our families is our work, and that’s one leg of the stool, but everyone else has their own work, and our family structure matters too. 

We might be trying our damndest to keep cool, use consequences, know exactly what to say when kids need us, stay on top of organizing and planning everything, and a million other things, but when those other legs are wobbly, we’re not in a situation that even makes it POSSIBLE to do that!!!  If we’re not letting our kids sit in their work, or if our lives are pandemonium, how are we supposed to be able to do anything ‘right’?

The solution isn’t to keep reinforcing that one leg by just telling ourselves to be better, and taking on other people’s crap.  There’s no such thing as a 1-legged stool!

Instead of putting more pressure on yourself to keep it together, get it right, not screw up...while everything around you is a dumpster fire that makes it harder and harder to do anything well, why not create a setting that makes doing stuff ‘right’ not only possible, but actually easy?!?!

This is what I do for parents every day, and it starts with a free Discovery Call so I can hear your story and know exactly how to help you.  Book it here and let’s start redistributing your load!

Love, Ann