Ep 63: Unmasking the Myth: Challenging Parenting Stereotypes and Beliefs

“Preteens are difficult…” 

Have you ever had a thought that mirrors this one? Or really any other thought that lumps your kids and others into the same category? 

If so you might have bought into a collective limiting belief that is negatively impacting your ability to meet their needs. Beliefs like this, set us up to fail our kids. 

Like all limiting beliefs, they get in the way of your ability to achieve the goal, or intention you set out to achieve. 

Your biggest obstacle to goal achievement is your thoughts. And in this episode, we will unpack and talk strategy to uncover personal and collectively limited beliefs in parenting and take a new step forward in meeting your and your kid's needs! 

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

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Transcript

Pamela: 0:00

Hey there and welcome to the Peaceful Home Podcast. My name is Pam, and I am your host. And today we're diving into the understanding this concept of limiting beliefs. Now, you've probably heard this term before, but do you understand what it means and do you know how to clear them out? Our limiting beliefs are literally the thoughts, the stories, the beliefs that exist in our head that stop us. From achieving whatever it is that we are looking to achieve. So you could have a limiting belief around money, around relationships, around weight loss and health. Your story of self limiting beliefs exist in all parts of our lives. And today we're gonna look at that. But in particular, we are gonna look at how limiting beliefs are impacting your parenting. So let's dive in. First and foremost, let's look at how beliefs are formed. It's a really simple process, but it happens over an extended period of time. Essentially when you think the same thought over and over again, or when you are told the same thing over and over again, a belief is formed. So beliefs are simply a repetition of thoughts or stories that you've heard about yourself or someone else. That has you forming a story around them. We often think of beliefs as like philosophical, like what are my values and beliefs? Sure, that is accurate. But in that scenario, even we're talking about. The stories that exist within your subconscious mind. So this is where our beliefs are stored. So in our conscious mind, we think thoughts, we hear people tell us things, we take this information in, then our subconscious mind starts to take those thoughts and starts to drop them in little kind of vaults or little, um, pockets within the subconscious once they are there. And then they become beliefs. Then they become our truths, who we believe we are, our identity. Beliefs in and of themselves are not inherently good or bad. However, when the beliefs that exist within your head, when the stories that you experience stop you from achieving goals. Then they become limiting beliefs. Now, these limiting beliefs may stop you from finding a loving relationship, losing the weight that you wanna lose, taking care of yourself, going for that job that is maybe just a little bit out of your comfort zone. Limiting beliefs are the things that keep you stuck where you are in bad relationships, in negative patterns, in struggles, in jobs you hate in relationship conflict in parenting. Limiting beliefs often sound like I could never do that. That sounds really hard. That's a struggle. This is the way that it is. This is the way that it's always been. Limiting beliefs can have us making excuses for why we're not taking action. Everyone in my family is overweight. I've never had a healthy relationship and my favorite, I'll never make more money. And oftentimes these limiting beliefs come from stories that we've been told. They don't even come from our own experience. They come from our parents and grandparents saying things like, money doesn't grow on trees. You should be grateful you have a job. Or, back in my day, I had to walk three miles uphill both ways in the snow every day to school. You should be grateful the bus picks you up. My dad used to always say, you'd complain if you got kicked with a new boot. And when I said this to my now 14 year old when she was probably, I don't know, nine or 10, because I have not raised her with this collective limiting belief around money. That money is a limited resource and that it's finite and that it's going to run out. And instead she understands that money is infinite and it's always coming in. It's always flowing in. What I didn't realize was when I said this statement to her, she was like, I don't understand. Of course you'd complain if you got kicked, you're getting kicked, somebody's hurting you. I don't understand what grandpa's saying with this. And it was then that I realized what my father was really saying That's very similar to the statement of you've got champagne taste on a beer budget. The idea, the belief, you think you're better than everyone else, nothing is good enough for you. Wild, right? Anyway. We can even get more specific with these limiting beliefs, this understanding that I'm not good at something, I'm not physically strong or capable. I often hear limiting beliefs arise when I talk to other A D H D moms who say that they can't meditate because their brain is too chaotic and busy and they could never meditate. And this is based on a limiting belief that meditation means quieting the mind. Which is not accurate. We'll save that one for another day. So what exactly is going on here? If we've had these stories that have been. Told to us to communicate it to us. Why does our brain attach to them and hang on to them? Well, the brain likes to feel safe. The brain wants you to feel safe, and this is where the ego comes in. The ego keeps us exactly where we are so that we can be, what is the saying? A big fish in a little pond. The idea is that I'll do the best I can. I'm not gonna look at the struggles that are getting in the way. And if I don't look at the struggles that are getting on in the way and I just keep doing what I'm doing, then there's no risk. But we also understand that without risk, there is no reward either. This is where the conflict starts to come up, this desire to do better, to be better, to show up differently, and yet we're hanging on to these old limiting beliefs that are getting in the way. Have you ever spoken with somebody that's had a huge transformation in their life? Like maybe they've lost, you know, 300 pounds or something so big, so inspiring. You're like, wow, how did you do that? Nine times out of 10, what that person tells you is they changed the stories in their own head. We sometimes call this mindset. I shifted my mindset. I have a friend who has a coaching program that teaches women how to clear out their inner critical self. I know someone else that does coaching that spends a lot of time helping people get rid of what she calls the shitty committee. Same idea. And I, of course do what one might call mindset, work with moms to change the stories so that they can show up as the best version of themselves so that they don't put their own bullshit onto their kids and screw up their kids' stories as well. Right. We heal the intergenerational trauma. So that we don't put that on our kids. And there are thousands upon thousands of coaches and programs and resources and supports to help individuals. And communities change their internal dialogue, change their mindset. This is what the wellness industry is all about. There's changing behaviors. Sure. You get the result that you want and you go in saying, for instance, I wanna lose weight. But the way that you lose weight is not just going to the gym and eating what you should be eating. Most of us already know those things. If I move my body and I eat healthy, then I'm going to A plus B equal C, I move my body A, I eat healthy, B equal C, I'm going to lose weight. But if you've ever struggled with losing weight, you know that there's more to it. There are more things in there. That are getting in the way. And so often that's not addressed when we do the work ourselves. But one of the most successful weight loss programs that are out there right now is that, that app called noom, which was created by psychologists to literally address the mindset, the limiting beliefs that are getting in the way of your ability to succeed. So I'm not making this shit up when I say limiting beliefs are getting in your way. They are stopping you from achieving your goals, and until you look at them head on, until you take them from the subconscious mind and bring them into the conscious thinking brain where you can go, wow, this is what I'm thinking. I don't wanna think this anymore. I wanna have new thoughts Until that time, nothing changes. Nothing changes. Limiting beliefs impact your health. They impact your relationship, they impact your view of self, your relationship with self, your self-esteem, your self-confidence, your self-worth, your self-love. They also impact your relationship with your kids. what is that all about? They impact your relationship with your kids. How's that possible? There's this term called collective limiting beliefs, and what that means is that it's a belief that society as a whole believes it's something that is so commonplace that you just accepted as a truth. Now, many of these limiting beliefs develop based on where you grew up, your financial and economic situation in your family, in the community that you grew up in. So if you grew up in a really wealthy community, then you probably wouldn't have a limiting belief around whether you could have money, but maybe you grew up in an environment where nobody had a lot of money. So the belief is that in order to have money, you have to work really hard. You have to suffer, you have to sacrifice. Maybe a collective limiting belief that you've adopted, that you've bought into is a belief or an understanding that relationships are supposed to be a specific way. Sometimes this is like gender rules. Those are limiting beliefs like this belief that if you are the woman, you have to stay home and take care of the family and all that stuff. If that's something that that does not align with you and it's getting in the way of your ability to be successful. It's a limiting belief, and because that belief exists in more than just you, it's a collective limiting belief. Now, let's talk about collective parenting, limiting beliefs. There are a couple that are really, really destructive. The first one is that your infant is not. Going to or supposed to sleep, that sleep with your infant should be hard. That as a parent of an infant, you should be sleep deprived. So then if you have a really good sleeper, you feel guilty, you feel like maybe you're doing something wrong or you don't feel like you can say to your friends who are saying, my infant's not sleeping. Hey, my mind sleep's great. Another one is around toddlers being picky eaters. Now we hear from thousands and thousands of parents that their toddlers eat chicken tenders and french fries and nothing else. I mean, hell, I have a 14 year old and a lot of her friends, that's what they eat still at 14. And that's because we've bought into this collective belief that our toddlers, our young kids, are not supposed to eat healthy like we do in adulthood. That kids don't eat a ton of fruits and vegetables. And kids that do eat a ton of fruits and vegetables are somehow weird or wrong because of it. I mean, hell look at our public education system and what we offer for school lunch. On the off chance that my daughter buys school lunch, I'll say, so what did they serve for fruits and vegetables today? Kind of laughing. And she'll say something like, oh, we could choose between carrot sticks or pears. Our system is not designed to challenge our kids to eat different foods, and that's because of a collective belief that we have a collective limiting belief that we have as a society that kids don't eat that kind of stuff. And then Lunchables are born, right? So it's easy for us as parents to pack our kid a Lunchable. And this is a company that said, Hey, kids only eat these things. They don't eat all that weird adult stuff that you eat. They'll eat that eventually, but right now they want to eat pepperoni pizzas made on crackers with a bag of Skittles and a Capri sun. Just thinking about that makes me wanna vomit quite honestly. Then we get into those pre-teen years, and if you've ever had a pre-teen or child that's moving in that direction, and just to be totally clear, when I say preteen, I'm talking third grade, I'm talking eight years old because that's when things start to shift. Eight, nine, you know, third, fourth grade. Things start to shift, change, and evolve in their emotions, in their needs, in their relationships, in their relationship with you. They start to push back a little. They become more defiant. This is where this next limiting belief is born. This next limiting belief is born with the understanding that pre-teens are difficult. That it's them, not us. They're the difficult ones. And this gets reinforced when we talk to other parents who go, oh yeah, my preteen is difficult as well. They're talking back, they're pushing back, they're rude, they're being disrespectful. So then what do we try to do? We try to control them because our collective limiting belief says it's our responsibility. Not only are they difficult and defiant, and your life is going to be hell for the next 10 years, but it's your job to get them in check. And if you can't get them in check, you're a bad mom. I don't even feel like I need to tell you how destructive that limiting belief is, but I'm gonna talk about it a little bit. When you see the behavior, the actions, the experiences, the words of your child at any developmental face. If you see those actions as opposite of you or in opposition to you, defiant difficult, you are reinforcing a collective limiting belief. That is overshadowing your ability to see your child for who they actually are and what they're actually trying to communicate. Because everything your kid says and does from the moment they are born is them trying to get their needs met. Now, if your child is ineffective at communicating what their needs are and struggles to get them met, That is not on them. That is on you. But the beauty of it being on you or me. Is that. So is the healing process. We have the ability to move them away from this destructive collective limiting belief. By teaching them. Empowering them. To do things differently. But that begins with us. You wouldn't blame an infant because you couldn't determine if one cry meant they were wet and one cry meant they were hungry, and one cry meant they were tired. Right? You wouldn't say that's your infant's fault for being a poor communicator. But the truth of the matter is, is we're so tuned in to our infants needs that very quickly after they're born, we start to recognize the difference. We can tell what a fuss is, what a cry is, what's really going on. That's the thing that they do in the middle of the night when they don't actually wanna get up, but they woke up, so now they're making noise. But we don't go get them out of the crib because we know it'll disrupt their sleep and they're gonna fall back asleep on their own. We start to understand all of this because we make the choice to tune in and our subconscious starts to see the patterns without us having to put any thought to it. I mean, think about it. If you actually do have a infant that doesn't sleep and you are actually are sleep deprived, what is the likelihood that you are gonna be able to consciously think about? What does that cry mean? What are the nuances of that cry? What's the experience of that? What does that fuss mean? You're not, you're not gonna know. And there are so many parents that say to me, like, maybe their child ends up with a digestive health issue. And so the first handful of months of their life, they're okay digestively. And then things start to change and, and the baby may gets a little bit more fussy and struggles to settle. And parents will say to me, Something is going on and I know something is going on because my child is different. And then we do everything within our power to advocate to try to get their needs met. We change our diets. I can't tell you how many moms I know that have gone through this really intense elimination diet and it got down to the really basic fruits and vegetables as their diet as to what they're eating so that they can meet their child's needs so that their child who is breastfeeding can have a tummy. That's okay. So they don't, they're not gassy or uncomfortable. So we'll make that sacrifice, but we can't sit with our 13 year old who's giving us attitude, who's rolling their eyes at us or talking back. That's no different than trying to decode what's going on with your infant. You wanna know what the difference is. There's a collective limiting belief that says preteens and teens are difficult. Other parents say to you, oh gosh, you've got three kids that are all gonna be in that age range at the same time. Your life's gonna be hell for a couple of years. This is gonna be so hard. I don't know how you're gonna make it through. And then when we do make it through and you get to the other side, if you're somebody that's had multiple children close in age, kind of rolling through the 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 age range, other moms will say to you, I don't know how you did it. I don't know how you survived, and this is because of that collective limiting belief that says this age group is so difficult, they're gonna make your life a living hell. They're not gonna listen. They're gonna be disrespectful. But I wanna make this statement right now, that limiting belief is bullshit. And you know it's bullshit because you have seen moments in your own child, you've seen other people's kids where things go relatively smoothly. You know, you ask your 13 year old to empty the dishwasher, and they do, and you're like, whoa, what's going on today? That they're all of a sudden not resisting me. They're not fighting me, they're not pushing back. Here's the real thing that happens. Around this age, around 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13. Emotions get bigger and your child's ability to regulate those emotions goes down. Relationships become more complex, needs become more complex. They have their own thoughts and impulses and curiosities that maybe they're hearing from other people and they're bringing home and trying on. This is the age where your child is trying to figure out who they actually are. So we understand that personality is formed by the age of six based on early understandings of child development, this is when personality is formed. But once personality is formed, then we slide into identity. So maybe at six or seven you recognize your kids super outgoing, they're quiet, maybe they're super, athletic and wanna be involved in sports. Maybe they're musical, right? You start to see these things about who your child is as a human being, but then they move out into the world and they start to have more complex relationships. And that challenges their view of self. It challenges their identity, the identity that was formed in those first six years. Starts to unravel, they start to question, is this who I am? In? Another collective limiting belief that we have as human beings in the society that we live in is this assumption that our children are heterosexual. And sexual development starts around puberty, and it starts usually a couple years before puberty actually hits. So as. Your children are experiencing these stories of themselves in relationships, friendships more than friendships. They're starting to experience chemical reactions, and if you have walked through life saying to them, oh, my daughter, you're gonna marry the, the greatest guy in your class and you're gonna have babies together, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and whatever the stories are that we're watching on Hallmark. But it's not just you. It's not just what you are saying. Look at every single Disney princess movie. They all say the girl is the damsel in distress, and this prince comes in and rescues her and they live happily ever after. Disney movies are developed based on our collective limiting beliefs. And while I could talk about this all day, I wanna talk about what this does to your relationship with your child. You as the parent, the grandparent, the caregiver, when your child is at their most vulnerable, and I don't mean physically, I mean, obviously your infant is physically more vulnerable than your adolescent. But emotionally, when your child is at their most vulnerable, if you are telling them that you believe they are difficult, they're gonna rise to that bar. And what that's going to create is a relationship that was once maybe loving and supportive and caring becomes tumultuous and conflictual. Your child starts to view themselves as not being valuable enough, important enough, lovable enough for even their parents to see through the bullshit. And then they have friends that buy into the same collective limiting belief that we are difficult and our parents don't care. Or they're going to find evidence or help each other point out the ways in which their parents are not meeting their needs. And then they come home and they push back. They test the limits, and you clamp down tighter. You give into what they want, you battle it out with them and tell them to get out of your face cuz you don't wanna deal with it anymore. What you are doing is reinforcing the story that exists within them, that I am not enough. I'm not even lovable enough that my mom is willing to fight for me. Now you might think this sounds immensely dramatic. But you yourself are saying at this age, they are dramatic, they are defiant, they are disrespectful, they are difficult. And so if that's their truth, don't you think their internal response is also dramatic? Because it is now. As I sat in the therapy office for 20 plus years working with adolescents and hearing their stories, what I heard over and over and over again is, my parents just don't love me. They don't care. They don't care what I do. They don't care what happens to me. Now, on the flip side, I'd have a conversation with a parent who's freaking out and just wants their kid to be happy, healthy, and whole, but they're not communicating that to their kids. As a matter of fact, they're becoming more restrictive. Putting more consequences in place, more controlling. Not listening to what their kids are saying to them. Thus feeding the cycle. And they're buying into a collective limiting belief that this is the way things progress. This is how things work. This is what will happen in the world of parenting. There's nothing that you can do to change it. And if you happen to have a kid that's pretty easygoing through their preteen and teen years, you are the lucky one, which is so disempowering. You've put in all this work to get aligned with who you are, to do the deep personal development work and to look at your own scars, your limiting beliefs, your some scars, the stuff that's lived within you that has said you are not good enough, right? You've worked to clear that out so you don't pass that on to your kids, and yet here you are passing those stories onto your kids because you're buying into. The bullshit that is being handed to you from the people around you. And I'm not saying these people have bad intentions, they're not like mal intent. It's an example of they don't know what they don't know. They don't know that they're being ruled by a subconscious limiting belief that is telling them the story that adolescence is difficult. What if we just decided today that it wasn't? What if we just changed our language with our kids and we communicated to them effectively and openly? What if you said to your adolescent, to your preteen, to your teenager, I don't know what I can do for you, but I'm happy to try. Now, a big component of this developmental phase in their journey is that they have to start seeing themselves as separate from you. If they don't, if they don't get through adolescents and successfully see themselves as separate from the person who raised or birthed them, the relationships that they develop in life become co-dependent, and they go from relying on you to relying on someone else. Can you imagine what it is? Like maybe you can, maybe you're like, oh my God, that's me. But can you imagine what it's like to not even be able to trust your own beliefs and stories about yourself, your own instincts, your own intuition, your own thoughts to second guess yourself all the time? It is our job as parents to help our children develop this component of who they are. And there's a really clear path as to how you do that. And nowhere in that journey does it say, I tell you what to do. Nowhere. So when we're talking about limiting beliefs, your own limiting beliefs, your own stories in your head that maybe say like, oh, I've been overweight my whole life. Nothing I ever try works, so therefore I'm not gonna lose weight. Right. One example of a limiting belief that I hear from a lot of people, you can do a lot of internal work to clear out that limiting belief. You can bring it into the conscious mind. You can look at it, you can redevelop, rewrite the belief, write a new story, use the new story to replace the old, keep discounting the old when it shows up. So you have this thought like, oh, I've always been overweight. Nothing I've tried has ever worked, and so nothing's going to work Now. And you have a conversation with yourself and you say, no, Pam, that's not true. There's been lots of things that have helped to improve the quality of your health and wellbeing, but there are things that have gotten in the way, and one of the things that have gotten in the way is this belief that you can't do it. What if you just changed the belief? What if you just decided that losing weight was easy and that every time. You eat every time you move your body, you're fueling this belief that weight loss being healthy is actually super easy. And so you practice that. You practice that story and you practice it over and over, and every time your belief shows up, your thought in your own head shows up. You practice this new story. What will start to happen is there will be drastic shifts. You'll lose weight quickly. It will be easy. People will start to say to you, oh my God, how did you do this? This is how so many health coaches become health coaches. They shift their own story. They clear out their own limiting beliefs and write a new story in their head. Then they're like, oh my God, I gotta teach other people how to do this, right? This is the foundation of coaching in so many ways. But here's the problem. When you have a collective limiting belief, you're not just dealing with the story in your own head. You first have to bring it to the forefront and go, oh, hey, this is a limiting belief. But understanding that it's not just your limiting belief, that it's a limiting belief that is pervasive in the society that you live in. Meaning when someone says, oh my God, your kids are gonna be 11 and 12 this year, it's gonna be absolute hell. You have to not only combat the story that lives in your head, you have to combat that story. And this is where words come in, right? This is where you have to say to people, Hey, I appreciate your perspective. I don't buy into that. I made the choice because it was tearing me down and it was causing conflict in my relationships with my kids, and that's not what I want. So I've decided and said to focus on what I want, not what I don't want. So when you say, Hey, my 13 year old's gonna be so difficult, and I just hope they're not difficult, and I just hope there's no conflict around getting them to empty the dishwasher and getting them to do their homework and getting them to be a contributing member of society and getting them to be kind and getting them to be compassionate and getting them to be. I just hope they don't push back on me. And I've tried to teach them all this stuff instead. When you do exactly what I just talked about with the personal limiting belief and you say actually parenting, uh, preteen and teen is easy because all I have to tune into is what they're actually going through. And when I tune into what they're going through, everything gets easier. When I allow myself to tune in like I did when they were an infant, when I listened to the cry and I said to myself, I, oh, no, no, no, wait. Don't go get them yet. I think they're okay. I think this is the cry that is like the fussy before they fall asleep. This is it. This is the cry. It's about to happen. They're gonna fall asleep any minute, and then they do. And you're like, whew, did it. Good job. And we do that over and over again. All you're doing is tuning into their needs and so tune into their needs now and start to change that relationship. Start to shift the dynamic. And if you're not there yet, shift the dynamic before you get there. Let go of the collective liming belief that parenting adolescence, preteens, and teens is hard. And instead, embrace the ease and the beauty and the joy and the connection that can arise from these years where they need you most. And if you're wondering, okay, so I wanna do all this stuff, and why haven't we been doing it before? And what gets in the way? What gets in the way, along with limiting beliefs is your own experience, your own emotions, your own stories. So if you decide today that you've got, say, a 13 year old, and so there are a couple years into this, maybe there's been conflict for you with them over the last couple of years, and you're like, okay, now what do I do? When you lean in, And you decide to do things differently. They're not gonna immediately be like, okay mom, great. I'm on board. They're probably gonna resist. Which is why when I work with moms individually inside the membership that I offer to moms, we work on us first. So while one major barrier is limiting beliefs, the next one is the shit that shows up in you when they push back your emotions. Your stories, your beliefs about self, it would be great to say, here's this one limiting belief. Let me clear it out, and everything else will be easy. But the truth of the matter is we're way more complex than that. So today we start by unpacking the limiting beliefs and making shifts there. One step at a time. Thank you so much for being here with me today on the Peaceful Home Podcast, and I hope that this, and all the other episodes that you're listening to help you make the shifts clear out the limiting beliefs, challenge your own thinking. And empower your kids to do the same so that you can finally have the peaceful home that you've been looking for. If anything about today's episode really stands out, or if you have questions, please, please, please share them with me on social media. I would love to hear from you. The best way to do that is on Instagram pamgodboiscoaching. Thanks again guys, and we'll see you next week.