I can't even believe this, but I have been running my Enjoy coaching community for almost a year! And as I am coming up on the year mark, I really have been looking at it and evaluating what I can do better, what I can improve, and what has really been working well inside of there. And one of the things that I have discovered as a framework that I have been using inside of that community that I didn't even realize is the concept of learn, teach, and live.
And I want to share this concept with you here on the podcast today because I think it is one of those foundational parenting principles that if you follow it, everything else gets easier. It helps us understand why some things work and other things don't. So the basic concept here is that we need to learn the skills first for ourselves before we are able to teach them to our kids.
And then the way we teach is by living differently, by incorporating those things into the way we live. So this is the framework that I use inside of the Enjoy community to guide everything we do. We have a workshop every single month in there where I teach the skills for the mom first. That's the first thing we do.
And then a few weeks later we do a workshop on how to teach your teen that skill. And the things that you learn in that workshop are all about things that you can implement in the way that you live, in the way that you parent, in the way that you react to your child. And so that is the framework that we use in there.
And I wanna share. Really why that matters and why it's so important and how you can apply it right now. So, I don't know if you've ever heard this catchphrase, but there's a saying that says, more is caught than taught, and that is kind of the basis for this learn, teach, live concept. The fundamental principle is that our kids learn more from what we do than what we say.
Our actions always speak louder than our words, the way they feel around us, the way they are validated by us. The way we handle problems and challenges, those are all teaching them more about how to live their life and how we want them to be than the things we tell them. There's another phrase, do as I say, not as I do, and that is just something that does not work when it comes to kids.
We cannot act in a certain way. And then say something different and expect them to value what we say more than our actions, our behavior.
So I wanna break this down and go through each step one at a time. So let's start with learn. First of all, it is really important that we learn emotional health skills, if that is what we want our kids to have.
We did not learn about emotional health growing up in school. Maybe you did. I definitely did not. That was not something that we learned as a class in school. I know since Covid, my kids' schools have actually implemented an emotional health curriculum. They used to do it about once a week. I'm not sure if that's still the way they do it, but it kind of was a joke for all of my kids.
I was like, this is so great. You need to learn these skills. And they all were like, it is the dumbest lesson ever. And the reason why is exactly back to that. Do as I say, not as I do. There is this inconsistency in the expectations and the behavior of administration and staff and how things are handled, and then these emotional health skills that are trying to be taught.
And so listening in a classroom setting is never how our kids are going to learn these skills. Now, I grew up with amazing parents who were very conscientious. They definitely did their best. They tried to teach me everything they could. But the parenting methodology that was popular at the time that they had learned from their parents and their parents before them was all about the parent is in charge.
The parent has the authority and the power, and the child is expected to be submissive and obedient. And that is a great idea in theory. But the truth is that parenting style does not teach kids emotional health skills. In fact, The opposite effect happens, which is why we have so many adults right now who need to learn these emotional health skills because the way they were raised did not foster an environment where they could learn these skills.
So some of the kind of skills we need to learn are coping skills, resilience, emotional intelligence, processing our emotions, conflict resolution, allowing other people to be wrong about us, allowing other people to have a different opinion, and still being able to get along. Feeling empowered to say no and to stand up for ourselves. These are all skills that I see drastically lacking in our world today, and you probably have noticed the same thing.
So we have to learn these skills first if we have any chance of teaching them to our kids. I want you to imagine that you have never baked bread before.
Now, this might not be hard for you to imagine if you've never baked bread, but if you have, imagine you've never baked bread and your child comes to you and they want to learn how to bake bread, and so you find a recipe online, you pull it out, and you start to follow the recipe to make this bread. Now, there is a chance that if you follow that recipe really well, your bread is going to turn out.
But there is also a very good chance that something will go wrong because if you've ever baked bread before, you know that there are a lot of variables: the temperature, the humidity, whether your yeast is super active or not very active. There are so many factors that come into baking bread and experience is very helpful in being able to navigate those. And it is the same when it comes to emotional health and teaching that to our kids.
All right, let's move on to teach. So the best way we can teach our kids, is through our example. And it's not just our example of living emotional health, although I think that is. Something that makes a big difference.
But also there are tweaks in the way we parent. If we parent from that authoritarian style, we are not going to foster the kind of emotional health we want for our children. But if we can make some simple adjustments to the way we parent them, they are going to feel safer with us, which will allow us to influence those skills we want them to develop.
How we handle. Uncomfortable topics, for example, makes a big difference in how our kids approach uncomfortable topics and how they experience shame in their life.
How we handle problems when they come up will determine how our kids are going to feel about mistakes they make in their life and how they're gonna handle that with a future employer, with a future spouse, with their future kids.
How we handle their successes is going to determine whether they feel ownership of that success or whether they give other things credit for their success outside of them.
The approach we take to parenting our teens really does shape their emotional health. We have so much influence on their emotional health because of that.
Another thing that really comes into play here is the idea of emotional co-regulation. Now, this is the way our kids learn how to regulate their emotions. They are constantly looking to us as their parents to see what we are feeling. They are constantly scanning for our emotions, and of course we're exhibiting those emotions externally, by the way, we act, by our facial expressions, by all different things that we're doing.
So they are checking in with our emotions all the time, and based on our emotions, they are determining what their emotions should be. So back when your kids were little, if they were a toddler and they skinned their knee and you automatically jumped down and were like, "are you okay? Are you okay?" The likelihood that they were going to freak out about it was much higher than if you were like, "Oh no, you skinned your knee. Are you all right?" And you handled it from a much more positive emotional state because your child was regulating off of your emotions.
Well, our teenagers do the same thing, and our teenagers are terrible at emotional regulation. That is not a skill that they have developed yet. So if we are able to stay calm while they are dysregulated, while they are not calm, they will be able to match their emotion down to our calm level instead of escalating it if we also get dysregulated. This is why it's so important that we learn the skill first of how to regulate our emotions if we wanna be able to teach them how to do it.
The last point is how you live, how you integrate these emotional health skills into your life and into your parenting.
And I think this is one of the things that really sets what I do, apart from what a lot of other parenting coaches and experts do. My whole purpose is to help you integrate the things that you have learned so that you can teach your teen as you're going about your regular life.
So we're not making a lot of extra work for ourselves. We are just integrating these concepts into what we're already doing. And by just tweaking them a little bit by just making some slight shifts, we make a huge difference in how our teens are learning emotional health. In how they are able to handle conflict. In how they're able to cope with challenges. In how they are able to bounce back when they experience hard things.
One of the things that I have shared over on Instagram is to stop trying to make every moment a teaching moment because so often we get in lecture mode, in nagging mode, in parenting mode, and we are trying to teach our kids all the things they need to know.
But when we do that, our kids start to tune us out. They stop listening to the things we say. So instead of making everything a teaching moment, I want you to remember that everything you do is teaching something in the moment. We don't have to formally teach to teach our kids. They are learning so much more from just how we are navigating our lives.
As I was trying to think of an example for this the one that came to my mind was my garbage can. When I first got married, I put my garbage can in the cupboard underneath my sink. I picked a relatively small garbage can to purchase at the store because I knew it needed to fit underneath my sink. And I was thinking about why I did that.
And it was because at my house growing up, the garbage can was always under the sink, and it was a very small garbage can because my mom hated having garbage in the house. She wanted to take it out more often so that it wasn't stinky and gross in her house. And so she wanted to have a small garbage can.
And it's interesting to me that that is what we do. We just think that's the way it's done because that's the way our parents did it. And so I want you to recognize how much of an influence the things you do every day are having on your child. Based on your example they are learning what they want to do and what they don't want to do.
Now before we end, I just wanna remind you that this does not mean you need to be perfect. Your child knows that you're not perfect. When they see you make mistakes and then own up to those mistakes, it's actually a great way for them to learn that it's okay to make mistakes. I don't want you to feel a lot of pressure or a lot of regret, like you have done things wrong.
I just want you to know this moving forward that you have to learn the skills. If you wanna be able to teach them effectively, you have to teach them by the things that you do and the way that you live. That will be the most effective way to teach your teen how to have strong emotional health.
If you want support with this, that is what we do inside the Enjoy Coaching community, and we would love to have you join us inside. https://client.jenbelltate.com/membership
