 Today is Halloween, time for costumes and candy. For some kids it’s all about the costume. For others it’s the candy or the fact that you get to be out in the neighborhood after dark. And for others it’s about the scare factor. It’s the one day of the year where we look forward to being afraid to the point that we seek it out. Where being afraid is part of the holiday tradition. (It’s a little weird when you put it that way, because most other days we avoid being afraid and if we are afraid of something, we would certainly never admit it.)
Kids, like all people, have varied tolerances of being scared. A game of hide-and-seek is an acceptable, mild scare level for all kids of all ages. There’s the anticipation of the seeker not knowing who they will see when they turn the corner. It’s not scary per se, but it will make your heart beat a little faster in anticipation. Then there is the opposite end of the spectrum, the extreme scare that haunted houses thrive on. Scary music, black lights, frightening costumes jumping out at you triggering the fight-or-flight animal instinct that lives within all of us. Older kids love this extreme scare, while others want to prove how grown up they are by making it through such a scary experience. Somewhere in the middle of the scare scale is being afraid of the dark. On Halloween it’s fun to be outside in the dark walking from house to house, making up stories of what might be lurking in the shadows. In costume the kids feel invincible, but once you get home, the shadows of the dark rooms can be too much to overcome. My kids do not like to go upstairs alone. In fact they will pull out every stall tactic in the book to not have to go upstairs by themselves. If they go together then it is moderately better, but they really prefer to have an adult up there with them. No matter how much we try to rationalize with them and explain that there is nothing to be afraid of, the fear is still there. At the end of a long day it can be very frustrating. It’s hard when you know for a fact there is nothing to fear but you can’t get them to believe it. Who knows what is running through their brains? Who knows why they feel this fear? They may never be able to explain it in words, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not real. So for now that means we go upstairs with them. It means there’s always a light on in their room while they sleep in case they wake up in the middle of the night. If that’s what it takes, then we’ll do it. Growing up is scary enough, home should be the one place where they don’t have to worry about being scared. Have a happy and safe Halloween! Frightfully Yours, Kacey p.s. You may be thinking, the blog is great, but I could never do that! I disagree and am here to help! Let’s schedule a 30 minute consultation to define what matters most to you right now and create a plan on how to spend more of your time doing that. Email me at balancedheartcoaching@gmail.com and we’ll work out the details. p.p.s. You can now get my blog in your inbox whenever I post! Sign up at the top of the page with your email and my blog will be delivered directly to your inbox.
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 When your children are babies, it’s easy to know when they are tired. There are outward signs and rhythms that are easy to tune into. You know they are tired so you put them down for a nap. As your children grow older, it’s easy to lose sight of those signs. Signs of fatigue are often masked by outbursts of frustration, anger or hunger. (In fact, we all often mask one emotion with another, but that’s a blog for another day.) It took me a long time to realize that the outward emotion is often a cover for a really tired kid. Once I realized this, my whole approach changed and we’ve avoided many melt-downs as a result. Unfortunately this week was not one of those times.
Monday’s are hard, especially the Monday after a slumber party. I picked the kids up from school in a bit of a hurry as we needed to get home, get changed and get to softball practice on time. The tears started before we even reached the car. “But I have so much homework…I just can’t go to practice today!” my daughter sobbed as we drove home. I knew that some of this was lingering from lack of sleep over the weekend. I proceeded to explain that she made a commitment to her team and her coaches. We couldn’t possibly call them ten minutes before practice and let them know she wouldn’t be there. She would have plenty of time for homework after practice. The tears continued. I tried to stay calm, this was not the first time we had had this conversation. I continued to try to talk through the situation in an effort to make her feel better. Nothing I said made a difference. After a quick change and snack, we were back in the car riding in silence. When we got there, I helped her unload her stuff and she walked off without saying a word. Fast forward an hour and a half, luckily practice had been ok. We got home, ate dinner and all that homework didn’t take so long after all. Major melt-down number two had been avoided but the distress of the first one lingered in my mind. On Wednesday morning, I reminded her she had practice that evening. She promised to work on her homework after school so that she wouldn’t have so much to finish at home. I felt good that we had set expectations in the morning and was confident that would make a difference. When I picked them up, she started immediately “I just can’t go to practice. Study hall was cancelled for the assembly and I have a huge math problem that’s going to take forever to finish.” Tears rolled down her face. I knew she was tired, stressed and hungry. I also knew that she just had to vent, so I let her. I reminded her again that we couldn’t cancel at the last minute, but I would sit and help her with her homework if she wanted. After that I said nothing else on the subject. I got her something to eat and helped her gather her stuff. It was against every grain in my body not say more to try to console her and let her know it would be ok. The tears started to slow down. I continued to fight the urge and stayed quiet. Much to my surprise, it worked! She went off to practice without another complaint. She came home her normal silly self after having a great time with her teammates. Her homework even ended up to be simpler than she had anticipated. As parents we are always ready to go into fix-it mode or teacher mode. For me, those are my defaults, I automatically go there and it’s hard for me not to. But this week I was relieved to realize that sometimes it’s best just to say nothing. Heart-FULLy Yours, Kacey p.s. You may be thinking, the blog is great, but I could never do that! I disagree and am here to help! Let’s schedule a 30 minute consultation to define what matters most to you right now and create a plan on how to spend more of your time doing that. Email me at balancedheartcoaching@gmail.com and we’ll work out the details. p.p.s. You can now get my blog in your inbox whenever I post! Sign up at the top of the page with your email and my blog will be delivered directly to your inbox.  “So, how was your day?” “Fine” or “Good” is usually the typical response. In spite of all the articles floating around Facebook with better questions to ask your children at the end of the day, I just can’t seem to remember any of them and always end up resorting to the old standby. Many days the kids are excited to tell me about something that happened like whose birthday it was or something unexpected that happened (rainy day schedule!). Other days I settle for fine/good and hope that later on we can have a more meaningful conversation.
Parents want to know what is going on with their kids. It’s a very interesting transition that occurs when your child starts to spend more time away from you than they do with you. As a parent you think about them and wonder throughout the day, what are they doing. Naturally when you pick them up you want them to fill in the blanks of what happened while you weren’t around. But it’s not always easy. At the end of the day kids are tired. Like you, they just want to get home to a safe, comfortable environment where they can relax. Recounting the details of their day is not a high priority for them. What’s a parent to do? I recently read an article that encouraged parents to spend 10 minutes a day with their child doing whatever the child wanted. If you have multiple children, you’d spend 10 minutes with each individually. I found this interesting because if it had said “find time every day to spend one-on-one time with your child”, I would have thought there is no way we have time for that. But 10 minutes a day – that at least seems in the realm of possibility. The important part of this exercise is that it is the child’s choice. (If that means you spend 10 minutes watching them build another block house in Minecraft, then that’s what you do – just try not to get too dizzy.) Even if you are not able to do this every day, allowing your children to take the lead and show you something important to them will open up the lines of communication. A few months ago, someone sent me a link to The Key Jar. The key jar contains thoughtful questions that have become a staple during Sunday night dinners at our house. Everyone at the table has to answer and it has led to some very interesting conversations about what we are afraid of and why, or what things we want to accomplish before our next birthday. At first I thought the questions might be too difficult, but I was wrong. I have been surprised at the thoughtfulness of my children’s responses and the in depth conversations that we’ve had around these topics. Of course these activity ideas are all good and work in the moment, but what many of us want is for our daughter/son to come to us in the unplanned moments. We want them to open up to us about the challenges that they may be having with their friends or their fears/insecurities that are creeping into their thoughts. All of our children are different. There is no sure fire solution that is going to get them to talk to us and what works one day, may not work the next. Often it’s the quiet moments in the car or right before bed that allow the opening for the conversation to begin. Opening up and sharing about your day and your feelings could also be the green light they need to start a conversation. Your efforts are not going unnoticed. They see that you show up for them every day and are there to support them. When they are ready to talk, they will know where to find you. Heart-FULLy Yours, Kacey p.s. You may be thinking, the blog is great, but I could never do that! I disagree and am here to help! Let’s schedule a 30 minute consultation to define what matters most to you right now and create a plan on how to spend more of your time doing that. Email me at balancedheartcoaching@gmail.com and we’ll work out the details. p.p.s. You can now get my blog in your inbox whenever I post! Sign up at the top of the page with your email and my blog will be delivered directly to your inbox.  Today is a special day. It is the day my life changed forever. I knew at the time it was going to change my life as I knew it, but I had no idea the extent. It is the reason you are reading these words. Today, October 10th, is the day I first became a Mom.
I could recount for you all the obvious ways that my life changed – the lack of sleep, the increased laundry, the irrational worries and the indescribable feelings of love. I could talk about how my relationships and responsibilities changed in one way or another, but those are all blogs for another day. Today I can’t help but think about how much I’ve changed. There was not one situation that started the ball rolling. Instead it was a series of small things that all started to add up for me. If I had to summarize it into one thing, I started asking more questions. The first and most common question seemed to fit every scenario - what should I do? I turned to parenting magazines, which led me to online articles and books. I shared stories with select close friends, guarding myself from moms I didn’t know well out of fear of judgement and criticism. What turned to why? Why did I feel so strongly about a good night’s sleep or a solid routine or a way of disciplining? There were certainly other ways of doing things that other people believed in and saw results in, why was what we chose the “right” one? A few years later, I read The Conscious Parent, where Dr. Shefali says it best: “We each enter the parenting journey with visions of what it will be. For the most part these visions are fantasies. We hold beliefs, values, and assumptions we have never examined. Many of us don’t even see a reason to question our ideas because we believe we are “right” and have nothing to rethink.” I had questioned few of these beliefs, values and assumptions, just accepting them as truth. These “why” questions started out as parenting questions, but very quickly led to internal questions that only I could answer for myself. I started to realize that to be the best Mom I could be was less about the best way to handle the behavior of my children and more about handling my own behavior, mindset and perspective. The why questions led to how. The most powerful question for me came from author and motivational speaker, Gabrielle Bernstein. During an online webinar she asked “How do you want to feel?” I knew I didn’t want to feel tired and stressed out, but how did I really want to feel? This question became a both long term and a daily question I asked myself. When how I wanted to feel didn’t match what I was actually feeling, I went back to why. The thing about questions is that there is always another one waiting to be asked. Eleven years ago I knew I would be watching my child grow, I just never imagined how much I would be growing right along with her. Heart-FULLy Yours, Kacey p.s. You may be thinking, the blog is great, but I could never do that! I disagree and am here to help! Let’s schedule a 30 minute consultation to define what matters most to you right now and create a plan on how to spend more of your time doing that. Email me at balancedheartcoaching@gmail.com and we’ll work out the details. p.p.s. You can now get my blog in your inbox whenever I post! Sign up at the top of the page with your email and my blog will be delivered directly to your inbox.  Beep. What was that? You listen for a while and don’t hear it again so you figure it was nothing. Fast forward 40 minutes and the beeping is now happening every 5 minutes. You know exactly what it is - the smoke detector battery is running low. It does you a “favor” by beeping every few minutes so that you can replace it. However it is 10 pm. Everyone is asleep except for you. And you know that there is no way you will sleep listening to that beeping (which always seems to echo throughout the house no matter where the actual detector is located). And to boot you know that you don’t have any 9v batteries (who keeps stock of 9v? AA, AAA, C, D, you name it, but 9v is never in the junk drawer.) Some detectors will give you a break if you don’t happen to have a 9v and will stop their chirping if you remove the battery. It allows you to ignore for a little while until you can make it to the store.
In contrast, we are all acutely aware of the battery on our phone. We know exactly how long we can go without plugging in. We take steps to make sure that it is fully charged before we head out the door. If we forget, we have a backup plan in the form of a car charger or portable charger that can fit in your purse. Charging stations are popping up everywhere, in the mall and in stadiums to help people recharge when they are on the go. Letting your phone battery run out is unthinkable and for some may cause a minor anxiety attack. Why the contrast? Why are there some batteries that we diligently check, while others are so easy to ignore? I equate the phone battery to your immediate needs. It is your to do list. Every day you expend most of your energy running from place to place, checking items off the list and moving on to the next one. You take time to recharge this battery so that you can check more things off the list. The smoke detector battery is more like your personal needs. It is the battery you need to recharge in order to feel your best physically and emotionally. It is a battery that is easier to ignore, but if you ignore it for too long the consequences could be costly. Which low battery will you recharge today? Heart-FULLy Yours, Kacey p.s. You may be thinking, the blog is great, but I could never do that! I disagree and am here to help! Let’s schedule a 30 minute consultation to define what matters most to you right now and create a plan on how to spend more of your time doing that. Email me at balancedheartcoaching@gmail.com and we’ll work out the details. p.p.s. You can now get my blog in your inbox whenever I post! Sign up at the top of the page with your email and my blog will be delivered directly to your inbox. |
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AuthorI started writing this blog because I wanted to have deeper conversations beyond "How are you?", "Busy", with other parents. Over the years I've shared personal stories, articles, authors and topics to facilitate conversations with parents about the joys and the challenges of parenting. |
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© 2021 Balanced Heart Coaching
Disclaimer: I may receive affiliate compensation from the resources and websites mentioned on this website.
© 2021 Balanced Heart Coaching