Calm Parenting Podcast - Parenting is Hard. 2 Ways to Keep Your Sanity in 2019.

Episode Date: January 1, 2019

You had children. Why? What were your expectations? I bet life has turned out very different than you have envisioned it. That can either cause you to resent your strong-willed child or break generational patterns so your kids don’t struggle with the same issues. So let’s reframe what we really want so we can have curious, confident kids. Want Kirk to speak at your school or church in 2019? Get 20% OFF for your organization if you email [e-mail] with the subject line CALM2019. Take advantage of our New Years Clearance Sale here: https://www.celebratecalm.com/calm-new-year/ Questions? Email [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Calm Parenting Podcast listeners get an exclusive 20% off an IXL membership when you sign up today at ixl.com slash kirk. Visit ixl.com slash kirk to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price. Hey everyone, this is Kirk Martin, founder of Celebrate Calm. You can find us at CelebrateCalm.com. You can contact us anytime. Call or email my son Casey. It's C-A-S-E-Y, Casey at CelebrateCalm.com or you can call it 888-506-1871. If you ever need help with anything, you know, we get people all the time. Hey, I need help financially with your products.

Good, email us. We're good at working with people. We're a small family run organization and we help people out. So if you need something, we like assertive people ask for it. We've got a Facebook page, Celebrate Calm. But I'm glad you're here today.

We're beginning the new year. And so I want to reset some expectations of maybe a couple, not maybe, I've got a Facebook page, Celebrate Calm. But I'm glad you're here today. We're beginning the new year. And so I want to reset some expectations of maybe a couple, not maybe, a couple, two goals for the new year. And so I want to ask you a question that I want you to wrestle with a little bit, which is, why did you become a parent and have kids in the first place? It's a good question to ask. What were your expectations? I can tell you, I got married, we got married, we were really young.

I mean, I had Casey when he was 26. He's 25 now. I cannot imagine Casey having a child now. I certainly was not ready at the time. And I think we just did it because that was the expectation. We were a nice young couple. What do nice young couples do? They start having children, right? And then, but what were your expectations?

This is important because I want to come back to this and get very foundational. Were you picturing like, oh, got a little home with a white picket fence and we're going to have these obedient kids and this happy family. We're going to do things together and we're going to play and it's going to be awesome. Our kids are going to do well in school and they're going to grow up and they're going to have grandkids. It's going to be family. It's going to be family's awesome. No, it's not. Family is hard. It's really hard. And here's why. Just think about the first thing. Just think about marriage. It's the union of two selfish people living together in a confined space that we call home, hashing out life. And then what do we do? Oh, let's start adding some

other selfish little people to this house. It adds a lot of stress and expense. And now we've got, now there's four selfish people in the home and we each have our own agenda. It's awesome. No, it's not. It's hard. And here's the thing. It's supposed to be difficult. Look, the purpose of relationships is not happiness.

It is transformation. It changes you. It changes you as a person because you have to become gracious and patient and you have to learn to serve other people and put other people's interests ahead of yours. And you have to learn how to negotiate and you've got to learn how to compromise and do all these things that we don't want to do. And if you can start reorienting your brain to the fact that these strong-willed kids have been given to you as a gift to root out your immaturity, to root out your anxiety, your control issues, right? All your childhood issues that you haven't dealt with yet

start to come out. It's hard. A quick thing for my Christian friends, right? Because I want to free you and liberate you. And this is my Christian religious friends. Here's the thinking that many of us had. Well, if you just raise your kids according to biblical principles and you pray for your children, they'll be obedient. Who told you that? Where did you get that idea? Because it certainly didn't come from scripture. I want you sometime to really do this and think about it. Go look through scripture. Go look through the Old Testament. Tell me one family that was not completely messed up. Start with the first one. Adam and Eve have two kids, Cain and Abel. One of the first two kids was a murderer. I always like

to joke at our live presentations, if you have two kids and they haven't murdered each other, at least you're doing a good job. Historically speaking, right? If you're doing better than a 50% murder rate among your children, you're doing a good job. What about Joseph and his brothers? What about Jacob and Esau? What about Jacob and his mom teaming up to deceive their father? That was right. Where do you want? What did Abraham? Well, Abraham was a good man, of course, but he also went and had relations with another woman who was not his wife. So did King David, who we all love. I'm just saying, if you take a fresh look at history, at scripture, whatever it is, and you will find that it doesn't work that way. It's hard. And you're going to find one other thing for my religious friends out there,

Christian friends, is this. How do you view God? I wasn't intending to do this, but it's a really good question. Because if you grew up with parents who are kind of legalistic and all they cared about was you being obedient, following the rules and doing exactly what you were told. Many of you had parents like that and they grew up in a faith tradition that was all about adherence to the rules. Right. Adherence to it's kind of a law based religion. Right. Of like we have a strict adherence to the law and that proves your own righteousness. And right. And there's a certain safety in that, right? Because, well, if I just, if I just do all these things like God tells me to do, then my life will go really well because he will have favor and he'll love me and like me for that.

And that's not the way that it works, right? And I guarantee you, if you grew up like that, you will start to impose that same kind of law-based approach on your children. They will become pawns to you. They will no longer be like your children. It's not about a relationship anymore. It's not about that. It's just, well, your job is to raise these kids to do exactly what you say because that's

what your parents did. And I'll tell you, you will have so much pushback from kids and you will have rules, but you will not have a relationship. And so I want you to step back and think two things. What are your goals? What do you want from your kids, right? Think about that because we don't even write it down. We just sort of fall into this thing like,

well, they have to do well in school and I have to do this. So I'll tell you the two goals. And the reason I'm doing this is I found a piece of paper that I'd written. And this was probably, I don't know, 13, 14 years ago. I found a piece of paper in which we had wrestled with these issues. And here's what we had written down. We want a curious child who loves to learn. Ah, it's pretty good. We want a confident, positive child who uses his natural, for some of you to say God-given gifts, talents, and passions to serve other people. That's all we did. Two goals, a curious child who loves to learn. Now, the reason I want you to do it

at the beginning of the new year is that will change how you begin to raise your child, how you view them. Are grades important? I don't know, honestly. I really don't because some of your kids are never going to get good grades until they finally go to college and they have a vision of what they want to do in life. And then they'll get good grades because they care about it.

But you don't have to get good grades to do well in life. You do need to be a curious person who loves to learn. Because you show me a person like that, they're going to do fine in life. Is that not true? If they're a curious person who loves to learn, and that's what we set our focus on. Grades, in many ways, I hate saying this stuff because we have all kinds of tools, and we have a whole program on how to help your kids get better grades. And if you get the special, our New Year's special, it will include the ADHD University Series,

the Strong Willed Child, Discipline series, everything else, and all these things to help your kids do well in school. But the truth is I'm not really after good grades because grades are sometimes arbitrary. But what I do want is a curious child who loves to learn. I don't want that snuffed out. Here's the other one. I want a confident, positive child. I love that.

You know why? Because that's a child who's doing what he loves and he's curious and he's good at doing things. See, a confident kid doesn't really need to pick on his siblings so much anymore. Why? He's too busy going after things in his own life. He feels too good about himself. A confident child can handle adversity and disappointment. He's resilient. He can handle challenges. He can handle adversity and disappointment he's resilient he can handle challenges he can handle failure he can do things that are different why because he's confident and positive when a confident positive child who uses his natural gifts talents and passions to serve other people look we get our kids we spend their whole childhood trying to get them to do things they're not good at doing. No wonder they're not confident. You're going to have to balance out

school. For some of your kids, you're going to have to balance out school. And instead of spending 85% of your time trying to fix what's wrong with your kids, you have to spend 85% of their time giving them opportunities to use their natural gifts, talents, and passions, what they're good at, what they love doing to serve other people. Because happy, confident, fulfilled adults have really one thing in common. They're doing what they love and they're usually serving other people in some capacity, whether it's creating a product for them, running a business, whatever it is, they're using their gifts, talents, and passions to serve other people. And that's what I want. And sometimes that comes into conflict with all the other things we want

as parents, what society wants. And you're going to have to have a lot of courage to say, I know society. I know all of our neighbors have their kids doing X, Y, and Z, but we're not doing that because here's what I'm raising. I'm not raising a kid. I'm raising an adult and I know what an adult needs. They need to be curious. They need to love to learn. They need to use their natural gifts, talents, and passions to be confident and positive. And they have to serve other people. You get your kids doing that and they're going to be fine in life. So two things I want you to encourage you to work on. Number one, change your goals. Set your goals for your kids. What do you want as you begin this new year? What do you want? And you're going to have to eliminate

certain things that come into conflict with those goals. It will give you perspective when your child sometimes isn't doing his homework so well or isn't always getting good grades, but you see him out with other people at someone else's house and he comes alive and he's awesome for other people. And that helps you to know, okay, he may not always be getting the best grades, but he loves to learn and he loves to build and he's doing all these great things. Number two, you've got to change yourself. That phrase before that we talked about, the purpose of relationships is transformation. Celebrate Calm was founded, really it was founded for one reason, to break generational patterns, to be different than your mom and dad, to break that my way or the highway approach, right? Or maybe it was for some of you, it's the guilt manipulation. It's always lecturing,

micromanaging your kids, whatever you got from your parents, you have the ability to completely change and break those generational patterns so that your child doesn't grow up and continue to do the same things that you did and your parents did and the grandparents did. It's a really cool thing. And if you embrace this, you will become a new person. It will root out your immaturity, your control issues, your anxiety. You will be free to enjoy life. You will be free to enjoy your kids again. So I encourage you, change yourself, change your goals. If we can help you with that, we will. It is why I want you listening to the CDs and the downloads over and over again, because this takes a different kind of thinking, and it takes some courage,

and it takes a different perspective. If you get the package, we'll go through, there's a program called 30 Days to Calm. And here's what we do. We go through all of your triggers. What are your triggers? What irritates you most? What causes you to react to your kids and yell at them? What is that? Look, I guarantee you if you spend that time dealing with your own triggers, we will identify them. We will identify why it irritates you. And then we go through a different way to respond so that your kids aren't controlling you anymore, but so that you can control yourself and you can give them tools to succeed. And they're not irritating you all the time because

you can actually control yourself. It is a really, really cool thing. So go to our website at CelebrateCalm.com. You will see a special there. Email Casey at CelebrateCalm.com. We will help you out. Thank you for being a good parent. Thank you for being open to new ideas. I know this is challenging, but I thank you for being open to new ideas. But I don't want these things to be like, oh, yeah, because here's what parents do. We'll get around to that. But we're so busy with school and extracurriculars. No, sometimes you need to forget some of that other stuff and do what's really important. But it's going to run against culture and against what other people want you to do. And you're going to have to be courageous enough to say,

no, I'm doing what is best for my child, even if other people don't like it or if they don't understand it. If you want some time, email me. Tell me what your new goals are for your kids. What do you really want? And what are your goals for yourself? What do you want to change about yourself internally? What are the triggers that you want to overcome?

What is that? And I guarantee you at the end of this year, even quicker than that, if you really embrace this and go for it, you will find that you're a new person and you have broken generational patterns. And your kids won't have to wrestle and struggle with the same things that you've had to. And you'll be free. And it's going to be a big theme this year to enjoy your kids. I want you to enjoy being a parent. I want you to enjoy your strong-willed child. I want you just to enjoy life without all the stress and anxiety. So thank you so much for listening to this, and we'll be back next week with a new podcast. Thanks

so much. Bye-bye.