EPISODE 266: The Mistake You’re Making Trying To Be A “Good” Parent

00;00;01;22 - 00;00;27;13
Lisa
Welcome to the Full Frontal Living podcast. I'm Lisa Carpenter, master life coach to driven, ambitious humans who want more out of life without having to sacrifice themselves to achieve it. I'll share how it's possible to slow down. Take better care of yourself. Find more peace and ease. Create sustainable energy. Stop procrastination and overwhelm and fall in love with your life, your business and your body.

00;00;27;16 - 00;00;46;04
Lisa
This podcast is for you if you're ready to learn what it takes to thrive as a high performer, do less, but achieve more. Make you and your well-being a top priority, and create your extraordinary life. I'm so glad you're here.

00;00;46;07 - 00;01;07;28
Lisa
Hey, hey, and welcome to another episode of the Full Frontal Living podcast. And you can see I'm not in my office and not even in Canada. I'm actually still in Bali, and I'm recording this live while I sit on my patio in the morning. Warm air. This is my favorite time of day, the morning and in the evening when things cool down.

00;01;07;28 - 00;01;33;18
Lisa
But it's still warm. I absolutely love it here. This trip has been amazing, and there's also been a lot of things, behind the scenes that have come up for me. And I think I'm going to have to record a second podcast episode on that. Because today I had something that I want to talk about that happened yesterday and some stuff that has been coming up with my clients.

00;01;33;18 - 00;02;02;12
Lisa
And I think it's really important to address. And, most of my clients are parents, not all of them. And that comes with its own special challenges. And, you know, most of my clients can be really hard on themselves as parents, and I can be as well. You know, I've been very open and honest about my journey with motherhood, throughout the years.

00;02;02;15 - 00;02;24;26
Lisa
So if you are new to this podcast, I have two older sons who are going to be 24 and 22. They 23 to share. And then I've got my hands straight who is 12. And they've taught me a lot, has learned a lot, and just see if I can figure out a better way to hold this camera. Here we go.

00;02;24;28 - 00;02;56;20
Lisa
And, I'm still I'm still learning as a parent. And I'm also, in the process of really exploring things in my childhood that impacted me and how they continue to impact me in adult. So what you may or may not know is that so much of our programing starts when we're children. Things happen to us, and we take it into the lens of being a child without a lot of filter.

00;02;56;23 - 00;03;22;13
Lisa
We give it meaning, and then this starts to create our identity over time. And it creates our beliefs, it shapes our frame of reality, and we carry on to life kind of not realizing that we're running on this really, really old programing. Now, I am a God who was born in 1972, so I'm 5051 and, parenting back in the day.

00;03;22;16 - 00;03;52;29
Lisa
And this is no shade of my parents, but parenting back in the day was, interesting. Now, looking back, compared to how we parent today, some of the things that our parents, got into, which was totally normal back then, is stuff that, nobody would do today, you know, from, spankings, physical contact to, you know, my parents would often I'm laughing about it, but like, funny, not funny.

00;03;52;29 - 00;04;19;28
Lisa
Right. My parents would, say that they would leave me and my brother at the side of the road because we were arguing so much in car rides, stuff like that. Right. And as I recently had a visit with my parents, I was really contemplating on how those stories have impacted me. And as an adult now, taking them in through a child's lens, what stories they would have created in me and most of my life has been working through attachment.

00;04;20;00 - 00;04;42;07
Lisa
I have attachment things. I get attached to people, places, things. We all have certain levels of attachment and I get into it. I can get into control as well. And a lot of it stems from these kind of times in my life where the person who was responsible for taking care of me was, in essence, threatening my safety.

00;04;42;10 - 00;05;04;07
Lisa
Now, of course, I know my parents. My parents love me. Your parents love you. My parents were never going to just, like, abandon me at the side of the road. But when we're children on a subconscious level, we take that in, in such a different way. And like I said, it does shape our reality. So now it's happened to many of us, like kids of the 80s, right?

00;05;04;07 - 00;05;24;19
Lisa
We were we were out to vote. The lights came on. We were told to like, not come in the house to strengthen the fire hose if you were thirsty. We were left alone a lot. And now we've grown into adults and we're getting into overcompensating for our for our kids. You know, it's a different time now. We want our children to be able to express emotion.

00;05;24;19 - 00;05;54;25
Lisa
Whereas back in the day, you know, my feelings didn't matter. You know, it's like we're doing this. We're going here. You're coming with us. You don't have to say, stuff like that, right? And I'm not going to go all into it, but these were the type of things that regularly happen. And now, as parents, we really are striving to acknowledge our children's feelings, allow them to be heard, give them a voice in their experience of life.

00;05;54;28 - 00;06;18;26
Lisa
And the problem is, most of you are still avoiding your discomfort and your emotions. So you're trying to fix the feelings that you've suppressed by overcompensating through your children, and you probably don't even know you're doing it. So,

00;06;18;28 - 00;06;39;00
Lisa
One of the most powerful things my oldest son said to me one day, and I probably talked about this on a previous podcast. I was talking about how he had so much more freedom than I did in terms of, you know, like I really gave my kids, when they were growing up, a long road. I'm just going to have a sip of my coffee.

00;06;39;00 - 00;06;46;02
Lisa
So if you're watching on video, I'm having some of my coffee. If you're listening, I'm just going to take a sip of my coffee because.

00;06;46;04 - 00;07;10;07
Lisa
Not many more days left where I get to have coffee outside. So so good. Anyways, I gave my kids a long rope and I remember saying to my son Colton, you know, like, you just you don't understand how good you've got it. Like, you know, I let you stay out later, you've got all this freedom. And he said, well, mom, like, how could I know any different?

00;07;10;07 - 00;07;31;09
Lisa
Like, my life is like my life, and your life was your life. Your life expense was your life. And I've never forgotten that conversation. My kids are so wise. I'm always learning stuff from them because he's right. As much as I wanted him to have gratitude and value and appreciate the freedom that he had, that was his only frame of reality.

00;07;31;11 - 00;07;56;14
Lisa
So I have my frame of reality. I'm observing his life and his reality, but his reality is different from mine. His experiences are going to be completely different from mine. And often as parents, we project our experiences of life onto our children and then we wonder why they don't get it. But why would they get it? How could they ever have that, perspective?

00;07;56;17 - 00;08;24;11
Lisa
So in traveling with Jake, Jake is on this trip with me. He's 12 and, you know, so like a preteen boy, which, you know, that comes with his own challenges. And he's a great kid and I love him deeply. And he's also very, you know, there's there's lots of layers to him. Kids are coming to the planet nowadays, I believe so much more advanced then than we ever were.

00;08;24;13 - 00;08;44;18
Lisa
And maybe it's just because we have this greater awareness of our kids, and we want to provide them and see them differently than our parents saw us. Right. Like, I believe that to our generation now, we really want our kids to feel like they matter. And in our generation growing up, it's not that our parents didn't love us, so we didn't matter.

00;08;44;21 - 00;09;03;18
Lisa
But but most of us, I think, probably questioned like what our role was because we didn't really have a role. Right. Again, in my family, it was kind of like, do as you say, and I don't want to paint with a broad brush because it's not like that for everybody. So I don't want to project my life. On to all of you who are listening.

00;09;03;20 - 00;09;31;26
Lisa
But, you know, in thinking about Jake, you know, here he is, 12 years old this year, he will see two different continents. You know, he's with me in Asia right now, and then we'll be going to Africa later this year. And here I am at 61. And I'm just like, this was my first long haul flight. This was my first time leaving, North America.

00;09;31;29 - 00;09;53;18
Lisa
It's wild. It's wild to me. You know, it took two this year for me to have my first, business class, you know, like, lie, flat seat. And I'm not saying that to brag. I'm just simply saying, like, it's taken me my entire life to be able to travel the way that I travel in the way that I want to travel.

00;09;53;20 - 00;10;12;07
Lisa
I had to work really hard. And Jake at 12 is knows a life of luxury and wealth. He doesn't know any different. And in coming to places like Bali, he gets to experience how other people live. But even in experiencing that.

00;10;12;09 - 00;10;37;22
Lisa
His frame of reality in terms of what it's like for him growing up is so different from mine. So is he going to have to learn how to, you know, work and do all the things that we have to do in society and, you know, gratitude and all that stuff? Yes. But the truth is, he's always going to have a certain he's always going to have a certain amount of ease in his world when it comes to money.

00;10;37;22 - 00;11;02;18
Lisa
That was not available to me, because that's the kind of privilege that he was born into. So I can't make him see the world differently than what he's experiencing. And I have to trust that he is going to have his lessons, whatever they may be, so we can go on and on as parents anymore. We have to teach our kids about gratitude, and we have to teach our kids about hard work and all of those things.

00;11;02;18 - 00;11;27;25
Lisa
And I agree, but we cannot force our frame that we grew up on onto our kids because their frame is different. And trust me, like both sides of the coin, have their pros and cons. Jake, your kids, however they're growing up, they're going to have their lessons, and often their lessons are incredibly different from the lessons that we had.

00;11;27;28 - 00;11;51;24
Lisa
And that's great. That is absolutely great. But it is so, so important that you look that you're not projecting your limitations and your ways of being. So yes, we want to our kids to, we want to educate them around our value system. And even then, they may or may not adopt some of the values that you have.

00;11;51;26 - 00;12;20;29
Lisa
And that is okay too, because they are sovereign beings and we must, must remember this. So, you know, when we start to overcompensate for our kids, when we're constantly trying to, like, create this frame of reality for them, or we're trying to make sure that they don't go through the things that we went through. However, that may be right, which is a lot of us are doing this.

00;12;21;01 - 00;12;45;13
Lisa
What ends up happening is, again, we avoid our own emotions. We get into critical voices. So many of my clients will become very critical of themselves as parents. Like, I'm not doing enough, I'm going to ruin them. Or, you know, they're having this experience, they're hurting, they're in pain, whatever it may be. And they exhaust themselves trying to fix a problem that's not really theirs to fix.

00;12;45;13 - 00;13;11;09
Lisa
I hope I'm making sense here. And again, it's it's so comes down to avoiding our own emotions. So I wanted to share a story of what happened, with Jake yesterday and what I experienced to my own body as I had my own experience of witnessing him having his experiences. We went to, water park here in Bali.

00;13;11;10 - 00;13;32;01
Lisa
It's called a sea walk. It's really cool. They put one of those, like, giant scuba helmets on you, so they pump in air from the surface, and then a scuba diver takes you down and you, you know, grip on to this post and you walk along. And so you're about 15ft down. And, I was nervous about it.

00;13;32;03 - 00;13;52;23
Lisa
My girlfriend, who I was traveling with, was nervous about it, and Jake was really nervous about it, and he really struggled with wanting to do it, not wanting to do it. And ultimately he said, I don't want to do it. So we had a conversation about it and said, are you sure? Like, how can I support you through this?

00;13;52;29 - 00;14;11;13
Lisa
I know you're afraid because we also had an experience, one of the rice fields where he was afraid to get on the swing that swung out over the rice field, and we ended up doing it together. And it was super fun. And he was proud and I was proud, and it was a great experience. So I said, you know, we've we've done things that scare us before.

00;14;11;16 - 00;14;31;08
Lisa
And this is another opportunity to do something that might feel scary for you. But ultimately, you know, Jake knows his mind and he decided he didn't want to do it. He was going to snorkel. And that was and that was how he put his foot down. So I asked the guide, you know, if he changes his mind, can you do it?

00;14;31;08 - 00;15;06;04
Lisa
Of course. They're very accommodating here. And everything was fine. So we went out, we do the thing, and I was really witnessing Jake's anxiety around making this decision like that. I was giving him the power to make this decision, and he was struggling to make the decision. I could see him wrestling with his anxiety and fear. And I know that all of us have been in that position where we know we want to do something, and the fear is absolutely crippling, and sometimes we can't get ourselves across the line.

00;15;06;04 - 00;15;26;22
Lisa
Sometimes we need to abort mission and reset and then say, okay, I'm going to go do this. But how often do we force our kids to do things that they're afraid of instead of letting them have their process and their their journey? And I was remembering a time when I was young where my uncle came to pick me up at my grandmother's house to take me on this, like, bobsled thing.

00;15;26;22 - 00;15;52;29
Lisa
It's like the cement bobsled thing. You write down the snow. And I was terrified. I did not want to go. I was I remember screaming and crying and begging and pleading my grandmother not to send me and she sent me. I remember crying the whole way there, which says a lot because I don't have a ton of childhood memories, and I just remember feeling like I had no power and I had no say, and nobody cared about how I felt.

00;15;53;01 - 00;16;10;26
Lisa
And I don't want to do that to my kids. I don't want to make them do stuff. And in the past I have, I've been that mom that is just like, suck it up, buttercup. We're going to do it and you're going to be fine on the other side. And now I can see how that may or may not have had impacted them on a certain level.

00;16;10;28 - 00;16;31;23
Lisa
And not forcing you to do this is also having an impact, right? Like I'm telling you this because there is no right or wrong way. You get to decide as a parent, but it's about not becoming critical or judging yourself for however you're navigating this because none of our kids came with a manual. So anyways, my friend and I go down, we do this thing.

00;16;31;23 - 00;16;55;08
Lisa
It was pretty cool. I will say that, for my I really it's somebody who could get claustrophobic and, I'm still working on some control stuff. It felt it. It was. It made me very nervous. I had some anxiety and I had to really stay out of my head, because the only way to get to the surface was to have the diver bring you up.

00;16;55;10 - 00;17;13;07
Lisa
So when you're scuba diving, you've got the freedom to, you know, surface. You are kind of your own entity. But this was like a super heavy helmet and you just had to remain calm. It was safe, you know, the air was being pumped in. So when we came up, you know, Jake had been snorkeling around above us.

00;17;13;07 - 00;17;30;19
Lisa
And when we came up, he got on the boat with us and was just tell. He was just so struggling with his decision. And it like he didn't want to miss out. He didn't want to not have the experience. And at the same time.

00;17;30;22 - 00;17;50;20
Lisa
He was so in a place now of anxiety and fear. It was also not the right time to have the experience. And it was just it was gut wrenching for me to witness in wanting to do it and not wanting to do it.

00;17;50;22 - 00;18;33;09
Lisa
And wanting to do it out of that fear of missing out versus what his gut was calling him and and what his, you know, whether it was his gut or fear or whatever. Right. Again, like, he gets to determine that. And I had to sit with him in his disappointment and his disappointment with himself, his sadness, all of it, and not fix it for him because there are so many lessons to learn in the moments where we don't get what we want, we choose fear over face, where we say, no, not right now.

00;18;33;12 - 00;18;51;15
Lisa
And you know, I explained to him that my fear of heights I often like, I've been, I have spent and I probably spent an hour and a half on a cliff in Jamaica once before I jumped, and it took somebody taking my hand and saying, we're going to jump. I'm doing it with me.

00;18;51;18 - 00;19;20;10
Lisa
But man, like as a 12 year old kid, he doesn't have all the tools yet to navigate that fear and anxiety. So again, my point is I wanted to allow him to have his experience. I also wanted him to have that experience of disappointment, of letting his fear stop him, because that is something that we can debrief and have a conversation about, and there's always an opportunity to go back and try it again.

00;19;20;10 - 00;19;43;08
Lisa
Like, I don't ever believe opportunities completely disappear. I believe that what's meant for us won't miss us. So, you know, he may or may not want to go back and try this again. I don't know, and if he does, that's cool. We can make that happen. And this might be a lesson in him just learning that something is like, it's okay for him to just say no to himself.

00;19;43;11 - 00;19;58;01
Lisa
And it was okay for me as a mom to just be present to, you know, she we just needed someone to say, like, you're going to be okay either way. So.

00;19;58;04 - 00;20;24;06
Lisa
I'm sharing this with you because one from a parenting standpoint, right? Allow your kids to have their experience and stay present and witness your own emotional experience, because changing how your kids are feeling doesn't actually change what you're experiencing. And what I said, we do that. We use our kids to bypass our own stuff so that we can fix in ourselves.

00;20;24;09 - 00;20;47;08
Lisa
You know, we're trying to fix in ourselves what we've been unwilling to look at. And, you know, in witnessing him, I got to honor that little girl in me that wish that somebody had just said, you don't have to do that bobsled. And again, like, whether or not that was right was about me having my experience, him having his experience and just being that safe, supportive space for him.

00;20;47;08 - 00;21;13;09
Lisa
And that's really what our jobs are as parents. Our job is to create that emotionally safe environment for our kids to thrive in. Our job is to help them create higher levels of resiliency, to navigate discomfort, to navigate disappointment. So when we're always trying to fix their feelings, we rob them of these moments of heartbreak and hurt, and we don't give them the tools to say, you know what?

00;21;13;09 - 00;21;35;11
Lisa
It doesn't matter what you choose, because either way, you're going to be okay. And feelings are facts, and how you feel today might be different than how you feel tomorrow. And that moment where we feel disappointed or we feel like we let ourselves down. How might that that be the thing that, you know, maybe next time when he's given an opportunity to try something he's afraid of, you might remember this one and go, you know what?

00;21;35;12 - 00;22;02;10
Lisa
Like, I know I'm afraid, but what felt worse was not doing the thing last time, and maybe he'll do the same. I don't know, I don't know what his journey is going to be. All I know is that we cannot screw up our journeys. All we can do is make choices. And as parents, we must start to let go of micromanaging our kids emotional experience because we are robbing them.

00;22;02;13 - 00;22;25;15
Lisa
Like I said, we're robbing them of that ability to be resilient, of that ability to be with their negative emotions. And we're missing the opportunity to heal this stuff inside us, to be present with our negative emotions. So I have a saying, don't pass the Kleenex, because when you pass the Kleenex right, you pull that person out of that emotional state that they're in.

00;22;25;15 - 00;22;47;15
Lisa
And really, it's not about making them feel better. It's about you trying to make yourself feel better. And if more of us could learn how to sit in the discomfort of others, what a what an empowering place to be in, to be able to hold space. And this is a big part of what I do. I can sit with people in their garbage.

00;22;47;18 - 00;23;13;28
Lisa
And not run away. That's why coaching spaces with me are so safe. Because everybody always sees, always feel seen and heard and acknowledged and empowered to be with whatever is coming up with them. Right? So I hold space to teach other people how to deal with themselves, and that's what most of us have been avoiding our whole lives.

00;23;13;28 - 00;23;38;01
Lisa
So, so again, you know, like there is no right or wrong here. Some days we have to push our kids, you know, like when it came to the swing and I'm like, Jake, I really want to do this with you. And we did it together. And it was a beautiful thing. Only you can assess the level of anxiety that your child is feeling and decide whether or not it's the time to work through it.

00;23;38;01 - 00;23;56;22
Lisa
Or maybe it's better to work through it after, Jake and I will be having a conversation about this today, and we'll we'll see where it lands. But I want to give him permission to be able to make decisions in his life. And you adults don't always know best.

00;23;56;25 - 00;24;05;27
Lisa
Because, again, a lot of that pushing kids, you know, that,

00;24;05;29 - 00;24;18;21
Lisa
That is a given. That's learned behavior. We learned that from parents and stuff that, yeah, we were kind of indoctrinated into as children. So anyways, that's what I got for you today.

00;24;18;23 - 00;24;47;23
Lisa
Parenting is like it, it is it is something. It is something maintaining your own peaceful parenting. It is something. And, it takes practice letting your kids have their emotions, know when you need to draw that boundary. And I've had to draw some boundaries with Jake and say, hey, that's not okay. This doesn't feel good for me. And also knowing like he's a 12 year old boy and his experience, oh, it's really his experience is going to be radically different from mine.

00;24;47;23 - 00;24;59;02
Lisa
And I can't expect him to be having the experience that I'm having at 51. And that's okay too. So.

00;24;59;04 - 00;25;22;12
Lisa
Bottom line, be kind to yourself as a parent. Really consider where you're projecting your stuff onto your kids, where you're trying to heal your childhood wounds through your children. And please remember that you know your kids are not your property. They don't belong to you. They are here as sovereign beings. They are here. They have their unique experience of life.

00;25;22;14 - 00;25;55;13
Lisa
And most importantly, I truly believe that our kids are here to teach us more than we're here to teach them. And when we pay attention to those lessons, there's so much growth there, right? Relationships, the relationships in our lives are always here to mirror things back to us, to show us parts of ourselves that need healing and, you know, overcompensating and trying to fix everything for your kids is not going to heal the stuff that you've been unwilling to do with or help me release the feelings that you haven't wanted to heal.

00;25;55;16 - 00;26;18;28
Lisa
On that note, I am going to get organized and head off to breakfast. Thank you for spending this morning with me. Just to let you know, I am booking clients, for reclamation and for April. So reclamation is 1 to 1 coaching, but it also has an element of a group. And when I say group, I'm not doing a bunch of PDFs or anything like that.

00;26;19;01 - 00;26;54;04
Lisa
It's literally I bring all my high level clients together to have deep conversations about topics that impact all of us, where we get to roundtable and do hot hockey coaching and open up our perspectives. And, you know, as leaders as, you know, ambitious, driven women who are often responsible for many, many things in our lives, it is so important to be in other rooms with like minded women, because it can often feel very, very lonely when you're the one juggling all the balls and that most people don't get you.

00;26;54;04 - 00;26;58;25
Lisa
So if that sounds like you,

00;26;58;27 - 00;27;19;18
Lisa
I will put the link in the show notes to reach out. Or you can go to, Lisa Carpenter dot c forward slash. There's a, form there you can fill out. Why do I have to fill out a form? Because I'm really only interested in talking to people who are serious about being responsible for the garbage in their lives and creating better.

00;27;19;18 - 00;27;37;00
Lisa
And that's one thing about my clients that I know. And it's it's true about me as well. I don't put up with my own garbage for very long. I just I don't have a lot of tolerance for sitting in my own self-pity or my own limiting beliefs, because I know so much more is possible, and that's how my clients are as well.

00;27;37;00 - 00;28;13;09
Lisa
Like when they hit the bottom of the barrel and they're done, they're they know they need to take action. So only you can decide how long you want to sit in your own suffering versus getting the support that you need. So you can really create the life of peace and possibility that you want, which also includes a much healthier relationship with your children and your partners, where you're not constantly reactive, try to control all things, manipulate everything, in your favor and, you know, let go so that you can enjoy life more because it's exhausting trying to manage everybody.

00;28;13;16 - 00;28;21;29
Lisa
So anyways, on that note, have a wonderful, wonderful day. Thanks for joining me at The Amelia.

00;28;22;01 - 00;28;24;17
Lisa
And I will talk to you again all very, very soon.