Ep 62: Empowering Moms, Empowering Kids: How to Raise Resilient Kids by Taking Back Your Personal Power!

Have you ever noticed that when it comes to asking for what you need, it can be a bit of a challenge? Almost like no one ever taught you how…

Well if you are like most of us moms, out here doing the work, the truth is, no one did teach you how. They also didn’t teach you that you had a RIGHT to ask for what you needed. 

This is why it is so important that you learn how to take back your personal power, and teach your kids through the practice of Empowerment to do the same. In this episode I share the best practices to get the ball rolling as well as the words you can use with your teens, pre-teens and younger kids to foster independence through empowerment! 

Personal Power is linked to:

👉 Positive view of self & Self-worth 

👉 Decision making

👉 Health in relationships

👉 Lower rates of depression & anxiety

👉 Secure attachments

👉 Reduced fear of rejection

👉 Boosted resilience

👉 Nurtures creativity

…just to name a few. If you are looking to increase this is your life, or in your parenting, this is the episode for you! 

FEEDBACK: 

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Thank you so much for listening to this week’s episode. Be sure to tune in next week.

WORK WITH PAM:

Join the Aligned Mom’s Membership, a monthly membership that EMPOWERS Moms, by teaching them to BREAK THE PARENTING PATTERNS of old, and clearing out the Limiting Beliefs related to Parenting, learning to regulate emotions, re-wire the nervous system, while teaching their kids to do the same and learning to SEE the BEAUTY IN IT ALL! JOIN US  → https://www.pamgodbois.com/enroll

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Be sure to connect with me more on Instagram @pamgodboiscoaching. I’d love to hear what you thought of this episode and your major takeaways.

🌟 Head over to my website to learn more about how we can work together to shift your thoughts, challenge your beliefs, & transform your life.  → PamGodboisCoaching.com

The best thing you can do for yourself and your kids is effectively regulate your nervous system. And a great place to start >> to wire the brain for gratitude. Research tells us that gratitude increases happiness and a peaceful mindset. Make the shift and watch how things in your life start to change. Sign up today! www.pamgodbois.com/gratitude

Transcript

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Hey there and welcome back to The Peaceful Home Podcast. My name is Pam and I am your host. And today we are talking about empowerment. So on this episode, I'm gonna dive into what empowerment looks like, how you can practice it for your, with your kids, how you can practice it for yourself, areas in which I might show up. All things empowerment we're gonna dive into today. So let's just dive in. Let's do it. Oh, empowerment. So if you were like me, a child of the eighties, maybe the nineties, maybe before that, maybe you're a child of the seventies or the sixties. For most of us, our parents, Didn't spend a whole hell of a lot of time worrying about if we felt emotionally empowered. As a matter of fact, they still tell stories about back when you guys were kids, we just kicked you out. You just went out for the day, summertime, forget it. Six o'clock in the morning, you grabbed your bike and you went off into the neighborhood and I didn't see you until the streetlights came on. Right. We foraged. I don't really know. What did we do for food? I don't remember, but that was the time that we grew up in. Nobody was really worried about whether you felt safe emotionally. Nobody was really worried about if you felt like you had agents agency over your own choices. But we care about those things now because we understand based on research. That that shit's important. We understand that US grown ass adults that are people pleasers and that have been in relationships with narcissists That have struggled with friendships and long-term relationships that struggle to regulate our own emotions. We understand that this is all rooted in how we are parented. Ugh. So that's both scary and empowering, right? Because we always say knowledge is power. Yeah. Knowledge empowers you to make choices that align with a person that you want to be in this case may be the parent you want to be. So if you are taking care of children in any capacity, if you are a mom, a stepmom, a foster mom, a grandmother, a primary caregiver of any kind, this information's gonna be valuable to you. And if you are somebody that is like, I'm not a mom yet, but. That's curious and interesting to me, and I'm so interested in the aspects of self-development and how I developed. It's probably also going to be very interesting to you. So let's talk about what it feels like to be disempowered. So I was talking to a coaching client today and we had this conversation about emotions. And one of the things that she said, which was really interesting to me was that when my emotions get really big, I feel like I lose power. And it was a really interesting selection of words because she didn't say, I feel like I lose control. She's not talking about screaming and losing her mind. She's talking about this internal sense of where I once held personal power. It escapes me. And this is a consequence or a result of not learning early in life how to regulate your emotions. So regulating emotions is one way in which we empower our kids. We first have to regulate our emotions ourselves because that's how they learn. Teaching them how to regulate their emotions is extremely empowering to them because it allows them to feel like they can hang on to their personal power. So how do we do this? What are some things that we do with kids? To undo some of the shit that we experienced in our own lives, right? So as you're gonna hear me say all the time, you have to do this work. This is important that you do this work. You have to do this work. It all begins with you. If you have another human being that is looking to you for anything, it begins with you. These, I'm gonna talk about these in the context of kids, but I want you to also apply these same ideas to yourself and you can apply them to yourself right now in this very moment. Like, how would I do this right now? Or you can look back and reflect on your own childhood experience and be like, Hmm, did I have the space to do this? What does this look like? So the very first thing I want you to think about is this idea of giving your child choice now choice as a young child. So if we're talking toddlerhood, right? Choice might look like the clothes they choose to wear, and it doesn't matter if they match. And as long as they're seasonally appropriate, it's not a big deal. Choice might look like the snacks you let them have or the food they eat. Like maybe you're letting them choose what they want for breakfast, or maybe you're going grocery shopping and yogurt's their favorite food and you're letting them choose the flavor of yogurt. And so you're saying you're not going to the yogurt wall. By the way, have you ever looked at the yogurt wall in the grocery store? Marley and I weren't in the grocery store side note here a couple months ago, and it was a store that we don't normally go to, but we were looking for the specific yogurt that she buys. And I'm standing looking at the yogurt wall, looking at all the thousands of yogurts. And I am not even kidding you. It was a full cooler case, an entire wall, like an entire back wall. The damn grocery store was yogurt. I was like apparently we like yogurt as a culture. This is crazy. So you're not gonna just say to your three year old, pick whatever yogurt you want. You've got thousands of choices. You're gonna say, here's the brand of yogurt we buy. Here are the flavors. Let me take two out, or let me put line up a couple on the shelf and you can choose which one do you want. Do you want the one with the blueberries, the one with the strawberries, the one with the banana or whatever. And you let them choose and you let them try'em out. If they don't know and you're saying, oh, actually you've never tried blueberry yogurt before. Do you want to try it? You're giving them agency. You're allowing them to make a choice now. Anyone that's parented, a toddler knows you can allow them to make a choice in the grocery store and you can get them home and they can freak out and be like, that's not what I asked for. That's okay. It happens. But what you're doing, what you're working to do is giving them the space to choose. And so if they're like, okay, I don't want the blueberry yogurt ebot, because yes, I said I wanted to try it in the store, but now I'm mad that you don't have my strawberry yogurt, no big deal. You then put your own emotions on the shelf, right? So do not react emotionally and you offer them other choices. And what's really important in this is that you're not reacting to their emotions. You're not, because reacting to their emotions tells them that their emotions are wrong in some way, right? It creates a sense of disempowerment, and so you allow your child to experience emotions. This is another way that you empower them. You let them feel their feelings. I talked about that in last week's podcast episode, so if you're like, huh, tell me more about that. That's in last week's podcast episode when we talked about holding space. Similar concept. In empowerment. You just say, yeah, feel your feels. You do. You let them guide you. The other thing that's really important that in this age of either parenting or free range parenting or whatever other things we're doing, is that you have to allow your child to take risks Now, It's important that they're taking risks that are appropriate for them. If you have a kid that's super physical, climbs everything and finds a new tree to climb, you give them the space to climb the tree. Now, there might be a consequence to that risk. That's okay. You let them make the choice, you let them explore and take risks as kids get older. This might be risks in friend groups. This might be risks in fashion and personal identity. This might be risks in academic classes or extracurricular activities. It's really important though, that you let them make the choice. That's what empowerment is. Making the choice for them takes away their power when you make a choice for somebody else. And you can think about this in your own life, when somebody else makes a choice for you, it takes away your personal power. Now, I don't care if that choice is where do you want to eat for dinner? And if you were like a lot of moms I know, then maybe just maybe you've had this conversation with your spouse. What do you want for dinner? I don't care. What do you want for dinner? I don't know. Where do you want to go? I don't know. Just pick something. This is often linked. To the fact that we were never given the space to make our own choices. So if you're someone that struggles to make decisions, chances are you struggle to make decisions because nobody ever empowered you to do so. now what you want for dinner might not seem like a big deal, but what about other bigger life decisions? I can't tell you how many moms I've talked to that say to me, I'm still trying to figure out what I wanna be when I grow up. Now, sometimes it's a tongue in cheek. We laugh about it. We've had careers before we had kids, and now we figure out what comes next. But very often it's because our experience in childhood was one of disempowerment. It was a timeframe when the adults in our lives took away our power and made the choices for us. So this kind of leads into our next thing that's really important, which is allowing your child. And yourself to decide what is comfortable for your physical body. Now, this means personal space. This means emotional output. This includes things like hugging for greetings, right? Some of us are really comfortable with hugging. Some of us don't want to be touched. So allowing your child and yourself to make the call about what is comfortable and what is not comfortable. And not worrying about what the other people think. This is where the empowerment comes in. It's not just being like my physical space, my physical body. You don't get to touch me unless I say so. It's also about. Not worrying about what the other person is feeling. Even if that other person is grandma, it does not matter. And most of us did not grow up that way. And I remember saying to my college boyfriend, Hey, just an fyi, my family is a bunch of huggers. And basically what I was saying to him was, You don't have any agency over your own body, they're going to hug you whether you want to or not. I didn't know that's what I was saying at the time, but that's what I was saying and that's because that is what I had been taught, that it's not my right to say no. Now, I'm sure you can imagine what are the problems that can create for our children? Because even if it doesn't seem like a big deal because it's grandma. Think about the message that you're sending, you're telling your child that they don't get to decide who touches their body. And while it may be fine for grandma to give them a hug. You're creating a mixed message. So what happens when they go out into the world and somebody that they don't want touching them is touching them. They're not going to come and tell you. And you're starting to wire their brains to believe that other people have control over their bodies. But if you teach them this at a young age, They start to feel more empowered and they actually will take control of their own body. Here's an example. I was watching this TikTok the other day and this mom was talking about parenting her toddler and going into a new preschool, and it was a timeframe where like mom was in there for a little while during a transition period. And another little boy came over and screamed in her kid's face and her child was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Using her, their words, telling the other child to back off. And it happened. She witnessed it happen four or five more times, and finally the kid came back over one more time and the her child said, no, no, no, no, no. And then put her hand on the kid's face and pushed him. And apparently she was getting a lot of shit about this being like, she was like, I was fine with that. She's like, I immediately wanted to tell my child to use gentle hands. This is what we do, right? Gentle hands be kind. Well, how about the fact that this other child was violating her child's personal space and they tried to use words, they tried all the things that you teach them. Use your words. Be gentle, right? All those things. Whenever a child reacts or responds in a situation, they're just trying to communicate something. So when you think of it that way, and you think of this idea of this child the other child's face back, get out of my face saying, no, no, no, no, no. And this little boy said to. The mom of the, of the child that did the pushing. They just pushed me and the mom said, yeah. And did you hear them say the last five times you came over and screamed in their face that they didn't like that? And he was like, yeah. And she was like, well, And I am all for it. And now I'm not saying go teach your kids to go around hitting and pushing other kids. What I'm saying is, allow your kids this space to problem solve and you teach them the things. Use your words, use your words. But sometimes words don't work. Right. Sometimes we have to do more than use our words. Sometimes we have to walk away. Sometimes we have to leave the situation. Sometimes we have to use our hands to protect ourselves, right? I have a daughter who's a black belt in karate, and she has learned since day one in karate that the first solution is never your hands. It's never your body that the best tool you have in a conflict is your brain. And anything you can do to get yourself out of the situation is the goal. And karate, the physical act of karate, the physical practice is one tool, but she's got a million others and part of the reason she has a million others is because for the last 14 years I've been empowering her to make her own call, eh, probably the last. Eight years, probably lost eight years. I've been empowering her to make her own call. And that was because for the first six years of her life, I didn't know any better. I didn't know. I just was like, yes, go hug that person. Yes, do this with that person. Yes. Interact this way. Yes. And I, I obviously knew things like give my child choices and, but the reason I knew that was to cut down on tantrums. Right. So we had an ulterior motive as to why we do these things, as to why we put some of these boundaries in place. So next, let's talk about words, the words that you can use. To empower your child. Now. These are the same words that you can use to empower yourself. And these work really well with teens pre-teens and that pre preteen age. You know that third to fifth grade. We're parenting starts to get a little more challenging. This is the time for everyone. Um, by what you say a hundred percent anymore. They're starting to challenge your, come up with their own ideas or get ideas from friends. And they're bringing those ideas to you and pushing back on what you say. This is the timeframe where you have an opportunity. To help them. With your language. The most empowering three words that you can say to your child. I trust you. I trust you to make this choice for yourself. I trust you to make the call. That fits. I trust you to seek support. When you need it. Those three little words. They mean so much more than just. I trust you in this moment. I trust your decisions. I trust you'll make the right decision. You're also trusting them to keep themselves physically, emotionally, and spiritually safe to the best of their ability. This is why all the teaching has to happen as well. This is also why we need to be modeling. Making healthy choices. I know in a blink of an eye, my now 14 year old is going to be behind the wheel, driving a car. Which means that she's going to be spending more time away from me. More time with her peers. More time out doing stuff, hanging out with friends. We go to shows all the time, but I know it's not going to be that long until she starts asking to go to shows without me. When she starts, this she's a child that wants to go to Paris for culinary school. She's a child that wants to during her high school career go spend 16 weeks in Las Vegas. So that she can work with a pastry chef there. This is all stuff that's on her. Vision board, right? It's all the stuff that she wants to be doing. Well, I have to trust her to be able to do that stuff without me. And I need to be able to do it. I need to be able to trust her with confidence and a big piece of that is me learning how to let go. But it's also creating an environment where she feels like she can come to me and say, Hey, I need this thing from you. Hey, I need this support ham, struggling with this thing. In those scenarios because you've laid the groundwork. Now they're coming to you. They get out of school and they're dumping all these things on you. And they're saying they have these problems. I have this conflict with a friend. And they tell you all the details of the conflict with a friend. And now they're trying to figure out what to do with it. And you can problem solve. You can. Try to get some ideas out of them. You can brainstorm lists, but at the end of the day, it's your child that needs to make the choice. It's not, you. So you need to be able to say, I trust you to make the best choice for you. I trust you to do. All that you can in the situation to. Work it out. I trust you, this kind of leads right into the next statement that I like to use, which is you've got this. Because the drama in your teens life and my team's life in the, those years of where emotions are big. And skills are small. The drama and the struggle is real. It's real to them. So a conflict with a friend. Which. Two, you might not seem like a big deal or maybe it does, or maybe you're like, oh, thank God. I hated that friend anyway. It doesn't matter. You have to help them understand that you trust that they've got this. That you can encourage them. To do the difficult work. One of the things where Marley is that she is a kid that will look at schoolwork and she says, this is stupid. Why are we doing it? What's the purpose of this? What am I going to learn from this? I mean, she is my child 1000%. And I go, well, I don't know. Let's figure it out. Let's see. Are they? They tell you what you're gonna learn from it. And sometimes I say, oh, look what they're trying to do here is they're trying to teach you. How to think. How to use your own brain. To think about this. And sometimes she'll go, oh, stupid. I'm like, I know. I know. I just don't want to do it. I'm like, I know, but you've got this. And oftentimes just those words or encouragement. Allow her to dive in. They empower her. To make the choice to take action even when she doesn't want to, or even when she's doubting, if she's capable of doing it. And if you're wondering about validation, which we talked about in the last episode as well, go back and listen. Because you definitely can use validation in this place as well. The third empowerment statement that the third empowerment statement that I like to use. Both with my team and with young kids and other adults is, is across the board. You can use this with anyone. This is what it is. How can I help? What can I do to help you? How can I be a resource? How can I be of service? One of the hardest things we do as a parent is step back and let our child make their own decisions. And sometimes when we feel like they're slipping away, when, because parenting gets harder in case you hadn't noticed somewhere between third and fifth grade parenting starts to get harder. And it depends on the child, but for most of them it gets a little more challenging because they develop. They start to have all these other experiences, internal experiences going on. They're not sure about they don't, they need some guidance on and we live firmly planted in denial that anything's going on. So we hang out there in that space of denial for a while longer. And we wait knuckle through and we go it's a one-off thing. That's my kids being sassy. They're talking back to me a little bit. They were pushing boundaries a little bit and and then we don't recognize that this is a collection of the pre pre-teen years. This is what I call it the pre pre-teen years. And. It's a magical time. It's also the time where like social groups start to solidify. So all of a sudden their friends are more important than you like. Well, my friend said, and you're like, your friend doesn't know shit. You're in third grade. How did, what is your friend know? But this is the timeframe when that starts to happen. Kids get cliquey. This is when, you go from the whole class getting invited to birthday parties, to only specific friend groups getting invited. This is also the timeframe when empowerment is so important because when your child is not empowered, when they don't feel like they can make their own decisions, then as they're sliding into these peer groups with friends that are maybe doing and saying things that they don't agree with or they're not down with, they don't feel like they have a voice and they don't feel like they can communicate that. So what happens instead is for the first time in your life as a parent, you're like, holy cow, I'm getting calls from the teacher, or I'm getting emails from the teacher. Or I found out at the parent teacher conference that my child had a little bit of an attitude. Or maybe you're seeing it when they're, when they're friends, you're seeing some behaviors that you're not loving. This is what I'm talking about. This is the importance of empowerment because if your child doesn't feel empowered at home to communicate to you what they need to put boundaries in place and to tell other people, no, no, thank you. Back up out of my space. No, no, thank you. I don't wanna act in that way. No, no, thank you. I'm not interested in getting in trouble. Then what is going to happen from there is they're gonna get sucked in by their peers. That are more than willing to be the leader, and it does not matter where the empowerment occurs. Now, the empowerment could be with peers, it could be with classmates. Now the empowerment could be with peers, it could be with adults. But empowering your child to make their own choices based on what is good for them when they are outside of your direct space. That's why we empower them at home. It's also why we have conversations with them when shit goes down. Now, when Marley was in third grade, now again, when Marley was in third grade, her teacher. Really did not get her. She really did not understand what Marley needed, and even when we worked really hard for Marley to communicate with her own words, what she needed, the teacher discounted it. For instance, Marley had been sitting in almost the back of the room in the corner, the furthest from the teacher, and there was one kid sitting behind her. So she wasn't the furthest student from the teacher, but she was the second furthest student from the teacher. And she said to the teacher, Hey, I'm struggling being that far away, trying to maintain focus and understanding and hearing what you're saying. I'm getting distracted. Can I move closer either to the front of the room? Or to the left, because that's where the teacher's desk was and that's where the teacher top from was like the left front corner of the room. Marley was in the right rear corner of the room, one seat from the back. And so teachers in elementary school, even in middle school, um, they're constantly changing desk assignments. They're like, oh, we're gonna move again. Oh, we're gonna move again. And so three days after this conversation between Marley and her teacher, and lots of emails from me, empowering Marley, To make these decisions and to communicate them and letting the teacher know, Hey, we talked about it. She's going to communicate these things to you. Marley requested to be moved. And the teacher told her, those seats are reserved for kids that have written plans. You don't have a written plan. I'll decide what's best for you. And she moved her to the back seat. She moved her back one seat, so she was now the furthest from the teacher at all times. And so as a way of supporting her, I went to Marley and I said, what can I do? Because it is our job as parents to not just empower them to have voices, but to help them amplify their voices when they're not being heard. And so that's what I did. What do you need? And she said, it makes no sense to me. This is what I asked for. This was her reaction. It was as if she punished me for asking for what I needed and instead of trying to come up with a reason to defend the teacher and say she probably has a good reason. I don't give a shit what the teacher's reason was. I don't care. It doesn't matter to me. You have a third grader coming to you saying, Hey, this is what I need. Can you help me with this? And the teacher decided to move her to the back corner of the room, the furthest away from the teacher, even though the student was asking to move closer. So, so what I said was, yeah, it seems that way to me too, Mar. I don't know why she did that. And then we were able to have a conversation about how ridiculous this was and how unfair this seemed. And I validated her and supported her, and I got in her corner and I was like, this is bullshit, basically. And at the time Marley happened to be reading whatever book it is of the Harry Potter, um, series that Dolores Umbridge first appears in when she's at the school as a teacher. I don't remember what book it is, but. Marley was reading that book and she had said to me, you know, at least my teacher is not Dolores Umbridge, so I guess it could be worse. And I laughed and I said, you're right, it could be worse. And for her, that was her trying to understand the adult world. She has this experience, this example elsewhere. She was able to pull it in and go, okay, well, you know, it's not, this isn't the worst case scenario. She's not the best teacher, but she's not the worst either, because there are worse people out there like Dolores Umbridge, even though she's a character in the book, doesn't matter. Didn't matter to her. This is what empowerment does. Because what I was saying to her is I hear you kid. I hear what you're going through. I hear your story. I hear your voice. How can I help amplify your voice? This is where secure attachment comes from. This is why empowerment is so important. Because you want your child to feel. Safe. And you want your child to feel like they have emotional. Control over their lives and that they have some agency that they get to make choices. My last tip on empowerment. Is the very. Big big job. Of teaching your child how to regulate their own emotions. And this begins with identifying them. Expressing them in a healthy way. And receiving support and guidance from you. So they can figure out how to manage those emotions. Because, like I said earlier, talking to that mom this morning. That was her number one, identifier. When my emotions get really big. I feel like I lose my power. So, If we know how to regulate our emotions, both as adults and teaching our children. It. Allows us to maintain our personal power. It allows us to have healthier relationships. To develop more independence because that's what we're moving towards. That's why we empower so that our children can feel like they can make choices on their own. And then we don't have to hover. Or helicopter parent or make all the decisions for them. And then as moms, when we say, oh my God, I'm so overwhelmed. Part of the reason you're overwhelmed is because you're doing everything for everyone. So when you start empowering other people, which is why this episode is before. The episode on reducing overwhelm. When you start empowering the people in your life to take. Control to hold on to agency to step into their own personal power. You're taking it off your plate. Now that doesn't mean you don't ever have to parent again. Your three-year-old knows how to choose what they want for a snack. But it does take some of the responsibility for those things off of you. And that's a good thing. And I'm not saying like being an irresponsible parent, not saying that all. I'm saying I'll allow other people to be responsible for their own choices. And teach your kids that as young as possible. As young as possible. That is today's episode. That is where we like dip our toes into this concept of empowerment. There is so much more. I could probably talk about this for three days straight. But these are the steps. This is the process that you need to walk through. This is where you need to put your effort and your energy. So that you can start moving in a direction where both you and your children feel more empowered. To take action to make choices and to have agency which just means the path to the happy, healthy, and whole child. And adult. Thank you so much for being here. I would love to hear your thoughts on this episode. As you're listening, take a screenshot of yourself. Listening Sharon on Instagram with me at Pam guide boys coaching. And if there's anything else that you would love to hear on the podcast, please let me know. I am in the process of developing content, so have at it until next time guys. Take care of yourselves. Be there for the people in your lives and be sure to empower those around you. To make their own choices.