Follow the show:
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | Everywhere else
It’s OK for your kids to be unhappy. It’s OK for them to cry uncontrollably when you leave them. Your kids are allowed to feel whatever they want to feel because it doesn’t mean that you’re a bad parent. When you try to make sure your kids are always happy, it leaves you feeling exhausted and out of balance because you are trying to control something (or someone) that is ultimately uncontrollable. In today’s episode I want to offer you another perspective to your kid’s emotions that will allow you to feel more connected and calm in the midst of their big feelings.
Topics in this episode:
A new way to think of negative emotions
Why it’s ok to not always feel happy
Why your mama bear instincts get triggered with your kid’s big feelings
The importance of defining what makes you a good parent
How your kids emotions effect your work-life
Show Notes:
Let’s start the process of redefining success as a working mom so that both your career and your life as a mom thrive! Click here to learn more and schedule a call: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/coaching
Enjoying the podcast?
Make sure you don’t miss a single episode! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or where ever you listen to podcasts.
Leave a rating and review in Apple Podcasts or Podchaser.
Transcript
Intro
It's okay for your kids to be upset. It's okay for them to be unhappy. It's okay for them to cry uncontrollably when you leave them at daycare. Your kids are allowed to feel whatever they want to feel. It doesn't mean that you're a bad mom.
I see a lot of moms try to create a perfect schedule or a perfect set of circumstances where their kids are always happy because they think this is what makes them a good parent. But in the end, it leaves them feeling exhausted and run down and out of balance because they're trying to control the uncontrollable.
In today's episode, I'm sharing with you why it's okay for your kids to feel negative emotions and why you should never label yourself as a good or bad parent based on how they feel. I'm preaching the truth in this episode, so you're not going to want to miss it. You ready? Let's dive in.
Welcome to the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Podcast, the place for women who want to balance their ambitious career goals with their life as a mom. If you're looking to feel more confident, decisive, and productive at both work and home, then this is the place for you. I'm your host, Rebecca Olson. Let's get to it.
Hello, working moms. I had a conversation with a working mom a couple of weeks ago, and it just was so exciting. It, like, blew my mind. I wanted to share it with you.
If you listen to the episode from a couple of weeks ago, I was talking about advocating for yourself and the importance of advocating for yourself and some tips on how to do that.
This amazing woman took what I said and marched into her boss's office the next day and essentially came up with a plan for how she was going to be promoted and get kind of everything that she's wanted over the last couple of years that they haven't just been giving to her. And she kind of realized she had to stand up for herself and ask for it. And so she did. And guess what? They said yes. I love it so much.
We wait around for someone else to do something for us to have the life that we want to have.
Oftentimes we don't even realize we are waiting around for someone else to do something for us to have the life that we want to have. But when we recognize that things are entirely in our control and it's our belief in ourselves and it's us speaking up for ourselves and what it is and what we want and what we value and why we're valuable, then all sorts of things become in alignment in our life.
And so I'm just excited for this particular working mom. Congratulations. I hope that you went out and advocated for yourself in a different way after listening to that podcast. So good.
It's just been so fun to celebrate the ways this podcast has impacted people's lives. As I've been sharing over the last couple of podcasts since we had our 100th episode, we're celebrating all of the amazing things that this podcast does and how it has brought breakthroughs to so many women. Thank you for sharing those stories with me. I love, love, love hearing them.
But today I want to talk about a conversation that I pretty much have with every client at some point in our six month journey together. And it feels like the right moment to talk about this here on the podcast.
Now, this is a podcast that talks about how to be a successful, ambitious, working mom. But a lot of what I have to talk about here, in fact, probably the majority of it, focuses more on you and your workplace and addressing overworking behaviors. Because most people, that's where they feel most out of balance.
Our personal life has a big effect on us feeling balanced.
Being career driven and ambitious, for most of us, means that we are struggling in prioritizing work over ourselves and our health and our family and our kids and our personal life. It's not usually the other way around, but it's not just our work and our thoughts about our work and our overworking behaviors that cause us to feel out of balance or unhappy or kind of skewed to that side. There are things that take place in our personal life too, that have a big effect on us feeling balanced and happy as well.
You are a whole human being.
I like to remind the women that I work with, or I often say it when I'm giving trainings or workshops, I like to remind people that they are a whole human being, they are a mom. When they go into work, that identity never changes - and they're a worker. When they come home, that identity never changes. It's not a light switch where you flip on and off, right? You're both all of the time.
Our kids' emotions have a profound effect on our ability to feel balanced and happy.
Now, again, for most ambitious women that are looking to find balance, the problem is usually found in too much of their identity being found at work and their inability to shut down and turn off when they get home. But there is one part about being a mom that I find many moms struggle with, if not all of us, really, that has a profound effect on their ability to feel balanced and happy. And that is your kids emotions.
Very simply put, when your kids are happy, you feel like a really good mom, and then you carry that feeling into your workplace. And there isn't any guilt for being a working mom because your kids are happy.
But when your kids are not happy and they're throwing tantrums all of the time and they're crying for you at drop offs and they're telling you that they don't want you to go to work and they're crying when you leave them at night to do something fun with your friends. Then you feel like a terrible mom and like you're letting down your kids. And it makes feeling balanced and happy near impossible.
Feeling like your kids are not just okay, but thriving is essential for us to feel like successful working moms.
But as soon as it feels like our kids have become like a secondary priority, guilt swoops in and takes over. And it's really hard to feel like a successful and balanced working mom when you have a ton of guilt on your shoulders.
I was having a conversation with one of my clients a few weeks ago, and she was considering going for a promotion. Her boss's job became available, and we dove into the subject in our session. And the real fear that was holding her back was the feeling of being a terrible mom, because she would inevitably have less time with her kids and she would have to hire more help, like a nanny to help her. And her brain told her that she would be a bad mom for all of that.
And of course, all of us struggle when we're making a decision where it feels like we're deprioritizing our kids, because inherently, as moms, we all believe our kids should come first. I like to call that our mama bear instinct.
We're not going to get into whether it's true or not that our kids should come first. I'm just explaining that we all have this instinct that our kids should be first. It's our mama bear instinct. We're designed with an instinct to protect our kids at all costs. And of course, if we were truly an animal like a bear, that would actually literally mean protecting your kids by keeping them alive.
But as humans, of course, it still means that we still need to keep them alive, but it also means protecting their emotional well being, meaning their happiness. It means protecting their mental state and ultimately their future. So it makes sense that when our kids are unhappy, the most natural place for our brain to go is: ‘something must be wrong, I'm doing something wrong. They shouldn't be unhappy, and because of it, I'm a bad mom.’
This is a part of our mama bear instinct to quickly label our kids negative emotions as being bad and then labeling ourselves as being bad as a result. Strangely, now that I think about it, it doesn't really work the other way around.
When our kids are happy, we instinctively label that as good, but not necessarily take that to mean that we're a good parent, which is just sort of interesting. But no matter how good you are at putting up boundaries and saying no and protecting your time and turning off your work brain, essentially, no matter how good you are at not overworking and deprioritizing work - all these things that we talk about here on this podcast…no matter how good you are at that, if you are believing that you are a bad mom, for whatever reason, you're going to have a very difficult time feeling balanced and happy.
Your thoughts about yourself as a mom are just as important and impactful on your ability to feel balanced and happy as your thoughts about yourself as a worker.
And the most common time that we as parents question ourselves is when our children are feeling some sort of negative emotion, right? Sadness, frustration, disappointment, anger, hunger even these are all very typical negative emotions that our kids feel, or really all of us feel as humans. And we like to label them as being negative.
But of course that word implies that they're bad. And so I don't like using that word. I'm going to try to avoid that for the rest of this podcast. I rather use the word icky feeling. Sadness, frustration, disappointment, anger, hunger. These are all icky feeling emotions. And as parents, it's hard to watch our children experience them.
Here’s the truth…
But this is the truth - It is very difficult to watch our children experience icky feeling emotions, but it does not mean that we are a bad parent. In fact, our kids' behavior never dictates whether we are good parents, because if that was true, our ability to be a good parent would be found completely in them, our children. We would essentially be delegating out our ability to be a good parent to them.
It would be the same as saying ‘you're only good at your job if the people that are working for you are successful, otherwise you're not good.’ Just like we can't delegate how good we are at our job to how our employees or our team behaves, because they make their own choices as human beings and as adults. And yes, of course, as their boss, we may have some influence over that, but whether they're successful or not, that doesn't mean we're good or bad.
That label is just not useful to us when it's based on somebody else's behavior. Because then it has us focusing on trying to control them and their behavior, which is ultimately never controllable, instead of ours, which is always controllable.
So, as I mentioned, this conversation around our kids emotions comes up with almost every one of my clients at some point in our six month journey. Because our brain likes to make our kids icky feeling emotions mean that we are a bad parent.
When we are feeling like a bad parent, we take that with us into our job. And then we don't perform at our optimal or we're distracted because we're replaying situations with our kids over and over and over again.
And then we make up stories or catastrophes like oh my gosh, they're never going to get over this, they're never going to get past this and our productivity goes down. Our ability to problem solve at a high level ultimately is sacrificed. And we lack an ability to feel really good or proud about our work because how we're feeling about ourselves as a mom is in the pits.
And usually this conversation goes a little something like this; They'll tell me something like, ‘well, if she doesn't get her 20 minutes of quiet reading with just me, with just Mommy in the morning, then she's going to have a complete meltdown, and it's going to throw off our entire morning.’
“...I don't want them to be upset, and it makes me feel like a bad mom…”
This is an actual example that I had a conversation with a client, and this is basically what she told me. And my response to her is, ‘why is it a problem that your daughter feels upset when she doesn't get her 20 minutes of reading, and she throws a tantrum?’ And she said, ‘Well, I feel bad.’ And then I said to her, ‘but why do you feel bad?’ And this is usually where they say something like; I don't want them to be upset, and it makes me feel like a bad mom. Bingo.
This is what we're talking about taking our kids icky feeling emotions, labeling it as bad or wrong, and then making it mean that we're not a good parent. None of us like to see our kids upset. None of us like to experience our kids icky feeling emotions, but that doesn't mean that we're a bad parent when they have them. We don't have to go so far as to label it that way.
Gaining a new perspective.
Usually after my clients have this realization that they're labeling themselves as a bad parent because of their kids icky feeling emotion, I will offer them a question to try to help them bring some perspective. I'll say something like, why might it not be a problem for your daughter to get upset? It's a simple question to try to just help them gain a new perspective of the situation. This new perspective is a simple shift in our way we view icky feeling emotions, or what we like to call negative emotion.
I talk a lot about thoughts on this podcast, the importance of mindset and the words that are going through your head. But another essential component to having a happy and balanced life is our emotions and developing a really healthy understanding of them, a love, if you will, for all emotions.
I don't believe that any emotion is bad or wrong.
It's okay to be upset.
It's okay to be disappointed.
It's okay to feel failure.
It's okay to feel inadequate or uncertain.
It's okay to feel like something is lacking.
It's okay to feel anger.
Every emotion is okay.
I could spend a whole nother podcast talking about how important it is for us to also feel all the good feelings as well and to receive those and allow those. Because just like we avoid feeling the icky feeling emotions that tend to be negative, we also tend to avoid feeling the positive emotions that feel good. But that's a whole another subject that we'll get into another time.
Emotions are simply a communication tool.
All emotions are okay. They're okay because we're human beings and we experience them all. I believe all emotions are useful to us in some way. They have an insight into what's going on. All emotions are okay because our emotions are simply a communication tool to our brain. It's the way our body communicates to our operating system, aka our brain.
It's okay because if we didn't have emotions, then we would essentially be robots. It's okay to feel icky emotions because if we didn't know what those felt like, then we would never know what the good ones felt like.
I could come up with all sorts of reasons to show you that icky feeling emotions, all of them are okay and not to be avoided. And if that is true for us, if we believe that we are allowed to feel all emotions, they're all okay. Then the same is true for our children.
Coming back to the example that my client gave to me about her daughter needing 20 minutes of reading time in the morning when I asked her what would happen if she stopped resisting her daughter's icky feeling emotions. If she just let her daughter have whatever emotions she wanted to have, and if she stopped labeling herself as a bad mom because her daughter is a human being that experiences icky feeling emotions, what would happen?
And simply put, she told me it would change everything. Because instead of trying to fix her daughter's icky feeling emotions, instead of trying to make her feel better, instead of every day trying to make the morning go perfectly so that her daughter never gets upset, instead of all of her energy going to either fix her daughter's emotions or trying to prevent them in the first place. Instead, she would just be with her in them.
She'd get down on her level and let her know that she's loved and understood. She would listen more intently to what her daughter was experiencing. She would feel more connected.
So I want to ask you a question. In which scenario would you label this client as a good parent? Is it the first where she tries to accommodate her daughter so that she never feels upset? Where she tries to make sure that the circumstances are such that her daughter is always happy? Or the latter, where she lets her daughter feel whatever it is that she feels and instead tries to simply connect with her in it? Which parent do you want to be?
For every woman I work with, and to be honest, any friend or mother that I come in contact with, all of them would say it was the second. Yet most of us operate out of the first. Most moms operate in such a way to avoid their kids being unhappy, whatever the cost. And it has them chasing a perfect set of circumstances where their kids are always happy so that we can be happy. And it's exhausting.
You get to decide what a good mom is.
Whether your kid is happy or sad, that does not dictate how good of a mom you are. Ultimately, you get to decide what a good mom is. And when you really think about it. It's likely not your kids always being happy.
It's not your kids getting all of your time and attention when you're not at work.
It's not spending every waking moment with them on the weekends.
It's not giving them every toy or experience that they want.
It's not always giving them candy when they ask for it.
It's not even a home cooked meal every night.
Instead, it probably has a lot more to do with always believing in their potential. It has to do with deciding when you're going to give your kids focused attention and then sticking to that no matter what.
It has to do with reminding them how amazing they are and believing in it. It has to do with curating experiences that interest them and push them. It has to do with teaching them healthy boundaries and demonstrating for them a life of ambition that doesn't end in burnout.
Your kids' emotions do not dictate how good of a parent you are. What would be different for you if you truly believed that?
One of the things I do with my clients in coaching is I help them to redefine success in this current season of life. Because likely success before kids looks very different from success after kids.
Success before kids was singularly focused with an emphasis on your career and being successful in your career. But now, as a mom, success in your career, it's not just the goal. The goal is twofold. It's to be successful in your career and to be a good mom. Which means if one of those is failing, then you're not truly being successful.
Redefining what success means in this season of your life is essential in creating the life that you want.
Because if your brain continues to believe that success is just found in your career, or success is associated with working more hours, or success is associated with always being available to everyone, to your team, to your boss, whenever they need you, or success is associated to what other people think of you, then your brain is always going to continue to prioritize work, doing more, working more, rising to the top, even. And it will downplay, or it will deprioritize your family and your personal life and your health.
Defining for yourself what success as a working mom means.
Don't get me wrong, success in your career, it's important. But it doesn't paint the whole picture for what success is currently. If you need help giving your brain a road map to success, to really defining for yourself what success as a working mom means and what you want out of your career since you became a mom, I can help.
I would love to connect with you over a free breakthrough call. This is a free coaching call where we talk about the vision that you want for your life, the challenges that you face in achieving it, and exactly how we're going to get you there in coaching.
If you're interested in scheduling that call, you can go to wwwrebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book to fill out a little questionnaire that gives me a little sense of who you are and what it is that you want to accomplish in coaching. And then there'll be a scheduler where you can find a time to connect with me in the next couple of weeks. I would love to connect with you on redefining what success means in your life, in your career as a mom. And let me remind you amazing, ambitious, working moms, your kids do not dictate how good of a parent you are.
In fact, nobody gets to dictate how good of a parent you are. Nobody gets to dictate how good of a worker you are, how good you are at your job, how good you are as a human. You always get to define that for yourself.
All right, working moms, I will talk to you next week, but until then, let's get to it.
