“If we aren’t being a proactive parent, we’ll be in a place of constant reprimanding.” – Dr. Heather Maguire
Let’s face it. Parenting is HARD.
It’s definitely one of the best jobs I’ve ever had (I have a 9-year-old daughter and 18-month-old son), but also one of the most challenging.
Not only do you have to be “on” nearly 24/7 for these little beings who need a variety of things from you, you have to tackle everyone’s opinions on how to do it “right.”
It’s a lot…and sometimes you’re left with not knowing what you should do.
You want to turn to your mom circles or family members for advice, but it seems like EVERYTHING nowadays is a taboo topic. Things that were once common practices like vaccines, circumcision, sleep training, puberty education and even discipline can trigger SO much emotion in people.
Even when you feel like you know what to do, in the moment, it can be hard to implement. You have so much on your plate constantly with all aspects of your life that parenting at times feels like it’s just too much.
As a result, you don’t handle things in the way you envisoned and then you beat yourself up for it.
You believe deep-down you’re a good parent. You fiercely love your children and work to give them the best, but you still wish you could better.
But…what if instead of wishing your abilities were better, you stood in confidence of who you are as a parent and KNEW the tools you were using with your kids were going to help them become the BEST versions of themselves?
You’d want to know those tools, right?!
I know I did and that’s why I invited, Dr. Heather Maguire, behavior expert and founder of Prism Behavior onto my podcast, Become An Unstoppable Woman.
Heather teaches a concept in this interview that’s called, proactive parenting.
Proactive parenting is basically what you can do in your child’s environment to set them up for success.
By being a proactive parent, you will prevent behavior struggles from happening in the first place! You won’t have to be reactive in the moment to your child anymore.
You’ll feel empowered and strong in your abilities as a parent and your children will be happier and better behaved because of it. (#WinWin)
Heather’s warm energy and understanding of parenting first-hand (she’s a mom of 2) combined with her parenting tips will help you take action immediately to become that proactive parent we all want to be.
SPECIFICALLY IN THIS INTERVIEW, HEATHER AND I COVER…
- Why parenting feels hard.
- The divisiveness of parenting today & how it impacts you.
- Why women have parenting guilt more than men.
- How we can make parenting easier and more enjoyable.
- What proactive parenting is.
- What reactive parenting is.
- Specific ways to make parenting easier for you and your kids.
- The topic Heather gets the most questions on.
- How to handle defiance.
- How to handle Mom guilt.
Be sure to listen to the “PROACTIVE PARENTING” interview via the player at the top of this page.
RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
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Full Transcript:
Episode 21: PROACTIVE PARENTING
This is the Become an Unstoppable Woman podcast with Lindsay Preston Episode 21, Proactive Parenting.
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Welcome to the Become an Unstoppable Woman podcast, the show for goal-getting, fear-facing women for kicking ass by creating change. I’m your host, Lindsay Preston. I’m a wife, mom of two, and a multi-certified life coach to women all over the world. I’ve lived through enough in life to know that easier doesn’t always equate to better. We can’t fear the fire, we must learn to become it. On this show, I’ll teach you how to do just that. Join me as I challenge you to become even more of the strong, resilient, and powerful woman you were meant to be. Let’s do this.
[music]
Hi there, Ms. Unstoppable. Thanks so much for tuning into today’s episode. Today, I have on Dr. Heather Maguire, and she is the founder and CEO of Prism Behavior. She is here to talk to us all about proactive parenting. From women I coach all the time, this is one of the biggest things we’re working on. Is there a mindset around parenting and how they can parent in a better way? I love Heather’s approach. I agree with everything she talks about in this episode. I apply it in my own life, so get the Lindsay stamp of approval.
I think she’s going to give you a lot of really great resources and tactics to immediately start to apply in your life that you’re going to think as you listen of, “Duh, why haven’t I been doing that already?” Sometimes we just need somebody else to say those things to us, to reassure us and show us exactly what we need to do to make parenting feel good for us and feel good for our kids. This is a great episode too for anyone who’s not a parent yet. I think it’s very important to start to learn tactics like these to work with any kind of children. We’re all going to be working with children at some point, right? Even if it’s just going to the grocery store and seeing a kid. It’s great life skills to have, great ways to develop yourself.
A little bit more about Heather is she has been studying behavior for over a decade and she’s working with children, parents, and educators. During that time, she is a proud mom of two kids, a professor teaching school psychology courses, and as I said, the founder of Prism Behavior which helps parents manage challenging behavior with confidence.
In this episode, we cover a lot specifically as I said, proactive parenting and what that is versus reactive parenting. We talk a lot about mom guilt. We talk a lot about mindset with moms and all that fun stuff. Without further ado, here is my amazing interview with Heather Maguire.
All right, Heather, I’m so excited to have you here today. I told everyone all about you in the intro, but I would like to hear it from your mouth. Tell us about you professionally and personally.
Heather Maguire: Awesome. Well, thank you. First of all, thank you so much for having me on your show. It’s definitely an honor and I’d love to tell you a little bit about myself. I’m Heather Maguire, my doctorate is in educational psychology, so my background is in school psychology as well as in behavior analysis which sounds really fancy but basically, I just have about little over a decade of experience working with families and educators on a variety of different topics, a lot related to behavior.
In terms of what I do currently, well, I’m a professor full-time, and then recently, I actually started prism behavior which I’m excited to talk to you guys about today, and then I have a prism parenting podcast as well. Prism basically, I started it because I really felt like I wanted to give parents resources if they were struggling with their kiddos’ behavior because there’s just a lot out there on the internet about behavior. A lot of it is really based upon opinion, and I’m more focused on evidence-based strategies, but I trying to provide it to parents in a very pragmatic and palatable way if that makes sense.
Lindsay: Absolutely. I love how you tap on that of basically what’s research space, is what I hear from that, about what–
Heather: I do, but I always have to– being a professor, I’m very always cognizant of that can sound, “Oh no, that research means boring.” I try to keep it in a way that parents can easily understand and also it’s more interesting and some things that they can do and implement with their kids right away, if that makes sense.
Lindsay: Well, where did we go from there, Heather? Parenting is such a grab bag, right? An overall thing is I still feel I do parenting really well. I think it’s something that comes naturally to me, but it’s one of the hardest things if not the hardest things I’ve ever done in my entire life. [chuckles] Why is that? Why is parenting so hard?
Heather: By the way, I have two kids. My son is in third grade. His name is Landon and my daughter is in first grade and her name is Addie. I love what you were saying because when I started working with parents before I was a parent and to be honest, as I think back on that now, a lot of parents at the time were like, “How do you know?” Honestly with my professional background, I’m going to be the perfect parent. Right? It is true. Parenting can be really, really challenging. I think this is what comes into play, it’s really hard to know what to do. Like what I was saying earlier about why I started my podcast in Prism Behavior is because there are just so many different opinions about every single topic. Right?
Parents specifically can be really divisive. I don’t know if you’ve experienced that, but there are certain topics that have become so taboo to talk about whether it’s sleep training. If you use sleep training with your kids, then you’re a bad parent from the perspective of some, but if you don’t use sleep training with your kids you’re a bad parent from the perspective of others. Right? Don’t get anybody started on the topic of vaccinations. That’s almost used to be like you don’t talk about religion or politics but now it’s like within the parenting or in the mom’s circles, you have to add in other things, as I said like sleep training or vaccinations.
Don’t talk about those things either, right? Everybody has such a strong opinion and honestly, sometimes it’s hard to know what to do. Even if we do know what to do, sometimes it is clear as parents what we should be doing, but we’re just people too. We’re humans, we’re human beings in the moment. Sometimes we do know what to do but it’s just hard to do it. I don’t know if that’s something that I experienced or what your experiences with that.
Lindsay: Well, and what I hear from that Heather is what I talk to my clients about a lot. You know within what’s right for you and the answers, but we hear so much noise from everybody, and it makes us doubt us, doubt ourselves, and criticize ourselves. Right? Like you said, all of these things that past generations didn’t have to deal with, especially now with social media, you can get circumcision online. Oh my God. Whoa. I realized that with my son was like, “Wow.” We cannot tell anybody what our choices because people freak out, right? It’s just polarizing a lot it seems like, right?
Heather: Yes. Even I started to experience this even when I was pregnant. I remember being pregnant and trying to figure out foods that I could tolerate eating. Right? Feeling sick and so I was like, “Oh, I’m going to make a sandwich. I’m going to make a Turkey sandwich”. That sounds good. Then you Google. You start to hear about “Oh, what about listeria”? You can’t even feel confident almost having a turkey sandwich because if you go on the internet, again, there’s such strong opinions about everything we do. I feel like as moms, that’s even more the case. I don’t know.
When I think about– so I’ve been married for 14 years to my best friend, and I have a great husband and what not, but when I talk about these sorts of things with him, it’s not something that he naturally feels. It’s the moms for whatever reason that I feel like we have that burden of trying to make everything perfect for our kids more so I think still even in today’s generation than fathers.
Lindsay: It is, and always raises a question mark of where does this come from, right? I know when I followed Brené Brown’s work and she was talking about one of the biggest things women feel is guilt or shame around their bodies and around being a mother even if they aren’t a mother. How interesting. Right? It’s just like in our innate DNA to have these feelings.
Heather: Even so, I have a six-year-old. Her picture came back recently from as we had the back to school, and pictures and whatnot. I noticed in her picture that she wasn’t smiling or she was smiling, but not with her teeth. She had a different style than I was used to. I said, “Addie, you look beautiful in your picture, but I noticed you’re aren’t smiling with your teeth, why?”
She’s like, “Oh, because I have a–” I don’t know, she thinks that there’s something– I’ve never noticed that there’s anything wrong with her teeth. I’ve never said this. I don’t know where it came from. She’s like, “Oh, I don’t like something about my teeth.” I’m like, “You’re six.” [laughs]
Again, it’s different, but I do think as girls, we get– As women and whatnot, it does start– it’s probably innate to a degree, but I think a lot of that has to do with culture because when I look at my son, they’re definitely just different people in general, but it’s a different level of pressure that’s put on my daughter than my son in a lot of these ways. I think a good point about our bodies and because as a mom, when we become moms, our whole lives change, but especially our bodies change, and it’s hard to know how to feel about that.
Lindsay: Yes. Well, with all the things being thrown at us, Heather, with parenting-
Heather: [chuckles]
Lindsay: – especially motherhood, how can we start to make this easier?
Heather: Yes. I think that when I talk to parents about how to make this thing, parenting, in general, easier and more enjoyable, one of the things that I like to mention and focus on is a proactive approach to parenting because I think so often it’s easy to be reactive in our parenting. Even myself, definitely, with the work that I’ve done, in general, I’m pretty proactive in my parenting, but even myself, I can fall into these traps of being more reactive in my parenting.
For example, this past summer, my kids went to summer camp a few days a week, throughout the summer. I live in Southern California, and traffic is a thing for sure. I’m sure it’s a thing everywhere, but especially in California. When I was picking my kids, their summer camp out, I was like, “Oh, it’s so close.” It’s not a time of the day and a freeway I usually take, and so I wasn’t thinking about how much time it was going to take me to get from point A to point B to drop them back and forth between camp.
Anyways, long story short, what I found myself in the situation I found myself in every time to and from camp was that my kids were arguing, being so close together in the car, being bored in the car, things like that. Again, coming back to the idea of proactive versus reactive parenting, in general, I’m very proactive, but in this one situation, I found myself getting very frustrated and repeatedly about the situation. I was like, “You guys, we need to get along,” and becoming almost legalistic, like, “Okay, you stay on your side, you stay on your side, and we need to get along.” Then, it would end in this situation where I’d be like, “Okay, now, nobody else can talk for the rest of the trip.” It was that type of situation where, as a mom, I had all the tools, I have all the tools in my toolbox.
I understand behavior, I understand all the things I can do to be proactive, but it wasn’t until one day I dropped them off, and I just looked at myself in the mirror and I’m like, “Heather, what are you doing? You need to actually do something proactive about the situation.” I went home, and I came up with just a list of strategies that we could use. Even knowing the things I could do wasn’t enough, it was really not until I had that mindset shift to shift from being reactive in that moment to being proactive.
I started using some just simple strategies with them where I would– We use a reward system, we’ll talk about that later, but in our home, we use a reward system. I incorporated that a little bit, I gave them a list of different activities that they could use during the trip, and those activities were novel and they only had them during that trip. Just by doing a few simple things, I totally changed the dynamic in the car, if that makes sense.
Lindsay: Yes. I think I understand what proactive versus reactive parenting means, but can you just break it down very simply, Heather, of what the differences are?
Heather: Yes. Honestly, I think in terms of the differences, there’s things that we can do in the environment to set our kids up for success, right? There’s several things that we can do. We can go through some specific ideas in a moment but those things that we can do. Basically, what happens is they help prevent challenging behavior, or struggles with the behavior that kids can have, they prevent those from happening in the first place.
Anything that’s prevention-oriented is going to be proactive. Then, reactive is like, okay, it’s the consequences that we have to give, whether it’s a timeout or more natural consequence. No matter what we do, sometimes, despite our best efforts, our kids are still going to act out from time to time, and we have to deal with it because there are consequences to the things that we do.
Anyways, what I like to think about it is like this, it’s like an 80/20 rule where, if we spent most of our effort on the proactive, then we are less likely to need the reactive. If we aren’t cognizant about that, what ends up happening is it’s the other way around, where we’re constantly reprimanding, or when parents reach out to me, they’re like, “I’ve done everything, I’ve taken my kids screen time away.”
I’ve had it before, where parents have said, “I took the door off my kid’s bedroom because they were slamming it,” and all these things that they talked about. Again, if we aren’t cognizant, what ends up happening is that we end up spending 80% of our effort being reactive. Think about it for a second. It’s about the same amount of effort, but if we put the effort in the proactive, then things don’t get like that, and we can have a more enjoyable atmosphere in terms of our home and with our kids if that makes sense.
Lindsay: Yes. Absolutely. I feel like without even having had known, proactive versus reactive in the past, anytime I’ve been in reactive, I’ve pushed my way out of that of, “This doesn’t feel good, let me get back to being on top of it.” [crosstalk] but as we’re on top of the behavior before it happens and we know how to handle it if it does. [crosstalk] Right, Heather?
Heather: Right. I think you’re totally getting it. Again, it’s more of what can we do? How can we support our kids to make the right choices out the gate, so that we don’t have to go to the negative of like, okay, now you have a timeout, or now you lose this privilege? I’m not a person– I don’t think it’s realistic to say that punishment is never necessary because I use punishment with my kids. I think it is necessary because I think there are consequences when we make choices. That’s true as adults.
For our kids, never get to experience some of those sometimes unpleasant consequences. I think we’re doing our kids a disservice. Yet, I think that there’s so much that we can do to prevent that pattern of challenging behavior that’s just really so easy to fall into because, again, it might even just be in one aspect of our lives, like my example, with driving. It could be, “Oh, my kids are pretty well-behaved, but oh, we just keep on experiencing the same thing over, and over, and over again, in one little facet of our lives.” Right?
Lindsay: Yes. How can we approach that in a more proactive way, right?
Heather: Exactly. If you want, what I think that might be helpful is to get really like pragmatic here because it can sound a little bit theoretical. In terms of being proactive or preventative, I think that there’s several things that parents can do to accomplish that, if that makes sense.
Lindsay: Yes, let’s talk through those.
Heather: Cool. Okay. One thing that is very helpful, and again, a lot of these things, they aren’t necessarily rocket science, they’re not hard to do, but well, they’re not hard to understand, they’re sometimes hard to do in the moment, but they’re pretty easy to understand. For example, one of the easiest things that we can do is really make an effort to catch our kids being good. It’s like catch them being good game if you will. It’s just constantly highlighting the things that they’re doing right.
I’m a professor, I teach grad school, and I teach behavior. There’s students who are studying to be behavior analysts. Basically, behavior experts, working in the school system and with parents. One of the first studies I talked to them about is one where there was– I think it was a first-grade classroom and teachers were experiencing challenges with their students, specifically their kids. They weren’t listening, they weren’t doing their schoolwork, things like that.
What happened is they took down information about how often the kids were engaged with their schoolwork versus goofing off basically. They also took down information about how the teacher was interacting without the students. What they found is that most of the time, the teacher was more guiding them back to the task. I think this is true for us as parents a lot of times we’re telling like, “Don’t do this, and don’t do that.” We’re guiding when but we’re noticing more when they’re doing the wrong thing, rather than the right thing. The only strategy that they had these teachers use is this, they told them to, when they saw students that were engaged with work, they would praise them, “Oh, Great job, Johnny.”
They help them change the focus to the students who were on task basically. Then with the kids who were not on task, they were less likely to reprimand those students. Of course, if there was in a situation where that there was sometimes you have to if a student was not being safe or was being overly disruptive. But for the most part, they just focused on highlighting the good behavior. What happened, the whole class started to engage with their schoolwork and be less likely to be off task, just by the teacher stopping, reprimanding, if you will, and focusing on telling the students who were engaged with their work in like giving them praise. That little thing can be so powerful.
It can be hard to do because like I’ll give you an example in my own home. My son, Landon, he’s almost nine, and he has a chore of feeding our dogs twice a day. Of course, he feeds the dogs in the morning, and he feeds the dogs in the evening. I don’t know about you, but the morning and the evening, especially the evening, I call it the witching hour, because everything hits the fan, if you will. In the morning, I’m trying to push the kids out the door for school, and then in the evening, I’m trying to cook dinner and all that. All that to say, sometimes my son would struggle with doing this chore without complaining, but what I found is that a lot of times, if you did do it without complaining, I didn’t even notice because he wasn’t acting out. I’m focused on what I need to focus on. I wasn’t even giving him that praise and that feedback of like, “You did such a great job.”
Really, I was only giving him the attention in the form of like saying, “You need to– It’s not good to complain about this or whatnot,” when he was not complying with what he was supposed to do. Again, it’s that proactive mindset of making sure that we’re noticing when our kids are doing the right thing and then praising them for it, it can be very powerful in terms of increasing the types of behaviors we want to see. You’ve really decreasing the types of behaviors we don’t want to see, if that makes sense.
Lindsay: When I hear you talk about this, Heather, really it goes back to me in a lot of ways of fulfilling somebody’s needs in a healthy way. Maybe kids are acting out because that’s the only way they get an attention or love doing significant. Instead of flipping that script and saying, “Hey, I’m so glad you’ve had the dogs today,” to give him that attention if that’s a need he’s wanting. Right? It’s powerful, and it feels so good. I know when I’m in proactive parenting, I just like feel more confident. There’s positive energy. I am rocking this parenting thing versus reactive and my daughter is having– [crosstalk]
Heather: It’s a better place.
Lindsay: She’s having a meltdown in the backseat. I’m like, “What do I do? I don’t know.” It’s just such a powerful and it’s so simple like you said. It doesn’t have to be this big rocket science things to do. It’s just very elementary, but we really just have to be aware and strong enough to handle them.
Heather: I think that’s a good point. It’s counterintuitive, but honestly reprimands even like saying like, “You’re doing this wrong.” That is still attention. If we find ourselves preoccupied and we’re not giving our kids a lot of positive attention, sometimes they would prefer that negative attention to no attention at all. It’s true. It’s all about what they need. They do need our love and affection. This does allow us to give that, and it does just result in a better atmosphere for everybody in a better relationship with our kids.
Lindsay: What are the biggest problems you see, Heather, overall, with just parents who are coming to you and saying, “Help me.” Is it this balance of proactive versus reactive? Is it something else?
Heather: I think one of the biggest things that I hear is that parents struggle, and it depends on the age, but defiance is a big thing. Parents, when they come, so one of the things I do for my listeners I’m always like, “If you email me, I’ll always respond,” if they have a question related to behavior, and parenting. I think one of the biggest ones I see is defiance. Honestly, there’s a lot you can do to prevent defiance. Honestly, one of the best things to do I find is actually to teach respectful negotiation skills to our kids. As parents sometimes in that moment if our kids are defiant, it’s really frustrating, and we become emotional. The reality is we don’t want our kids to follow with blind obedience in other aspects of their lives. We want to raise like you strong, and strong kids who become leaders.
We want to raise respectful kids as well. One of the things that I talked to parents about, and again, there’s other different things that you can do to help prevent defiance, but I think it’s worth saying that these respectful negotiation skills are appropriate and helpful to teach our kids. What I’ve done with my kids is teach them this. If I ask them to do something, I will never punish them if they come in a respectful way and say, “Mom, would you consider this instead?” For example, if my son is reading a book, and it’s before bed, and I’m like, “It’s time to go to bed, Landon.” Let’s say he’s on the last page of his book, it would be really frustrating if you’ve been reading a book, and you only have a few paragraphs to just stop reading your book.
I want him to have the confidence and the ability to say, “Hey, Mom, is it okay if–?” To engage in that respectful dialogue with me, and then if possible, my job as the parent is to if possible, allow them to, if it’s reasonable, allow them to do what they want in that situation. Also, part of teaching those respectful negotiation skills, another thing that’s important is teaching them that if they do come forward, they are not going to punish them for it. I still might say no. It’s that acceptance as well that sometimes, let’s say, it’s 15 minutes past bedtime and there’s something going on, and I have to whatever. Sometimes, even though it’s I’d rather him be able to finish his book, it really is the last moment he needs to go to bed.
It’s teaching them how to, except when no is no, but encouraging them. I wouldn’t want him to not say it to me. If he was just like, “Yes, mom.” That’s not what I’m looking for. I think that’s one of the important things I talked to parents about.
Lindsay: I love it, Heather. I’m so, with my hands like “yes yes”. I completely agree with everything you say. Other time that any of this is out of balance, either with the proactive parenting or the negotiations that when it comes to disrespect, that’s where I find with my daughter, I’m getting in trouble or we’re getting it was like, “You did not respond to that correctly, or on top of things or whatever.” I love it. Obviously, this is all the logical things of parenting. I’m glad it happened, but we’re emotional beings. Let’s go back to that mom guilt again, because this is something again that I hear from my clients, so very much of getting rid of that. How would you help somebody through mom guilt and diminishing those feelings?
Heather: Honestly, I think again, we were talking about before I think that in our culture, mom guilt is a thing. I think less so dad guilt. I don’t see that as much, but as you know sometimes, but I think more so, it’s a mom guilt. When I think about to my own life so far and mom guilt, it’s not something I struggle with as much now. If I look back, so I’m 35 and about 5 years ago, I went through a really hard situation. My daughter at the time was a baby. My son was a toddler and honestly, it should have been a really good time in my life. I had a dream job. I was running a certain division of a company. We helped kids at risk for autism, and I ran a whole region. I was hiring behavior interventionists and case managers. They go help those kids. We did amazing work with kids, but it was a really stressful job.
Then really like two months after I started that job– it’s a crazy story but basically, I found out that I had the breast cancer gene. It’s the BRCA gene. I’m BRCA2-positive. It’s a little bit complicated but if I go with the basic story of what happened, I thought that I was getting– I decided to move forward with a preventative mastectomy. We were done having kids. My husband and I, we had the two and people in my family were getting breast cancer at such young ages but more like in their 40s. Again, I was 29 almost 30, and I’m like, “I’m going to get this preventative surgery so that I don’t have to struggle with this in my life.”
I went into the surgery thinking that and I had the mastectomy, and then like three days later I found out that I already had breast cancer. It was a crazy situation and one that’s pretty even uncommon even if you have the breast cancer gene. Fortunately for me, the mastectomy was enough in terms of treatment because I had what’s called stage 0 breast cancer. It sounds weird but basically, the cancer was encapsulated in the milk ducts. It was hard on so many levels. I had a baby. I couldn’t hold my daughter. I couldn’t pick her up. She was only at the time less than a year, I couldn’t pick her up. That was really hard.
If I think about mom guilt, honestly, for a period of time there, I just checked out of me being a mom, because I felt like there are all these things that I was supposed to be doing as a mom, and I really didn’t feel like I could do any of them adequately. There was like a lot of guilt there. I think about later on once I even recovered from my surgery, even after that, I was so busy trying to run this company, and I’m trying to be everything to everyone. I felt like I had this weird notion that I was lazy. When I think about mom guilt, I think about the lies that we tell ourselves as moms a lot of times where, “I’m lazy or I’m not good enough or whatnot.”
I think in terms of how I look at that differently today is that those lies still come. I don’t know about you but for me, those lies still come into my mind but what I try to do is flip the lies within. I try to replace them with the truth. For example, that the laziness, if I wasn’t again in a place where I was so much able to do this at the time, but now whenever I start to think I’m lazy, I make a list in my mind of all the things that I am doing for my family and I realized that even if I’m not getting to all the things that I want to do with my life, I’m prioritizing certain things.
If I think back to the situation where medically, I wasn’t able to lift up my daughter and for me internally, that made me feel horrible but the reality is I have a great support system. My daughter was okay. She wasn’t experiencing any sort of irreversible damage. My husband was there to be supportive. My family was there to be supportive. When I could flip the script on that and start to realize that my daughter wasn’t being damaged and my relationship with my daughter wasn’t being damaged, and I’m not lazy, that’s how I was able to and how I would encourage other people to move forward and whenever you do hear those lies, stop the lies dead in their tracks and then try to replace them with the truth, if you will.
Lindsay: Again, I completely agree, Heather, with so much of this, but it does take an awareness to know what’s there first. For a while, I know I relate to your story is that ate at me behind the scenes until I was able to shine the light on it and say, “Whoa, what’s going on here?” Then like you said, when I do catch it now, flipping that script of, “Okay, what am I doing well,” or replacing it with positive affirmations or whatever that is. Right? I think the takeaway for me here is and hopefully for the listener out there is it’s normal. It happens, but we have to again be proactive about it, be on top of it versus just putting things in the dark.
I see so many parents especially peers of my daughters. They’re going through puberty right now starting at age nine which is crazy in my world but so many of the parents are, “Oh no, we’re not dealing with that. Oh, no, I’m not buying her the books. Or I’m not getting her the deodorant,even though she stinks” or whatever. It’s like what? We’ve got to be on this, my friend. We’ve got to be again, proactive not only with our parenting but our minds and everything we’re doing.
Heather: I think a lot of times, yes. I think it’s a good point. You don’t even realize that you’re lying to yourself in your mind. You just feel like that’s the truth of the situation. I didn’t at the time realize I was saying this internal dialogue was going on. I just owned the feeling of lazy, but I wasn’t realizing that there were lies going on in my mind, so I think it’s true. When you can start to realize that no, there can be this internal script and the internal script isn’t necessarily true and real, I think that’s a good starting point.
Lindsay: I completely agree. Heather, thank you for doing this today. You gave so much wisdom. How can everybody find you and tell us about your podcast as well?
Heather: I have a great resource for your listeners. One of the things that I alluded to is that with my own kids, we use a reward system. I think that in terms of proactive parenting, reward systems are key and there’s different ways to use reward systems with kids of different ages. I have a resource, so if you go to prism behavior, prismbehavior.com/freeguide, then listeners can download this guide to walk them through the steps of how to implement and use a reward system very easily in their own homes.
In our house, by the way, so I have kids in elementary, we use a system where my kids earn quarters, and then at the end of the month, they get to spend some of their quarters, they give some to charity and then also they save some. I teach them some of that financial responsibility to the older kids but there’s ways to do similar things with younger kids. I think that’s a cool resource for your listeners, so hopefully they like that. Then my podcast is called Prism Parenting. On it, I just check on lots of different issues whether it’s picky eating or issues with sleeping, things like that. Then I do interviews on my podcasts as well so that’s Prism parenting. Then you can find me at Prism Behavior via Instagram or also on Facebook as well.
Lindsay: There you have it, my friends. That is my interview with Heather. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you learned a lot. If you’re loving the show, I have just put it out there. Go leave a review especially if you’re listening on Apple podcasts. I would love to hear from you. I’m trying to get to a hundred reviews by the end of the year. Right now, we’re at about 70, so it’s a big stretch goal, I know, but I would love to make it happen. It takes just a few minutes. It’s totally free. Go leave a review. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Finally, I just want to say that we are approaching the last month of 2019, so I’m going to have two solo episodes this next month. We’re going to be talking about goals, goal setting because I know that’s on the minds of so many people. We’re going to talk about some strategies that aren’t just out there on the market, some things I teach my clients that really work to help them create massive intentional action in their lives. Join me for those episodes, until then my friend, you’re only as unstoppable as you believe you can be so believe in yourself. You got this.
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