The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Raising Good Humans Every Day: 50 Simple Ways to Press Pause, Stay Present, and Connect with Your Kids by Hunter Clarke-Fields MSAE

Episode Date: July 23, 2023

Raising Good Humans Every Day: 50 Simple Ways to Press Pause, Stay Present, and Connect with Your Kids by Hunter Clarke-Fields MSAE https://amzn.to/3Y7ib9Q Little ways to stay mindful, be present, and raise good humans—every day! As a parent, it’s the little things you do each and every day that can help your kids grow up to be kind, confident, and conscientious human beings. But if you’re like many parents, you’re probably feeling overwhelmed by the daily rush of getting to school on time, helping your kid finish their homework, planning meals, and all the seemingly endless tasks that pile up and steal the fun out of just being with your child. That’s why you need quick, effective tools to stay present and manage emotions—both your child’s and your own! From the author of Raising Good Humans, this “go-to” daily guide offers 50 simple ways to press pause, stop reacting, and start parenting with intention. You’ll also find mindfulness skills for calming your own stress when difficult emotions arise; and tips for cultivating respectful communication, effective conflict resolution, and reflective listening. Most importantly, by following these daily techniques, you’ll learn to break the unhelpful patterns and ingrained reactions that reflect the generational habits shaped by your parents, so you can respond to your children in more skillful ways. Busy parents will discover: Self-compassion practices for those days when you feel like a “terrible parent” Breathing and meditation exercises for calming emotions in the moment Tips for “unhooking” from negative thoughts and self-criticism Mindfulness skills for staying present with your kids You’ll also learn how to develop a “teaching mindset” when faced with difficult behavior, and find tons of creative and playful activities to increase cooperation in your child. Being a parent is a lot of work, but it can also be joyful and fun. Let this daily guide help you enjoy those little moments—they mean so much!

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from the chrisvossshow.com, the chrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate you guys being here.

Thanks for tuning in. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the big podcast circus tent in the sky. We're bringing you the most brilliant minds, the brilliant thought leaders, the thinkers, the doers, all those sort of folks. And then, of course, I'm just the host over here doing whatever it is that I do every day. For 14 years and going on now 1500 episodes we've been here and we appreciate you but as always that's our lead-in to ask you to beg for the plugs please please remember the show to your family friends and relatives go to goodreads.com fortune's christmas linkedin.com fortune's christmas uh youtube.com

fortune's christmas and all those crazy places that we are on the internet. Today, once again, we have a brilliant mind on the show. Hunter Clark Fields, an MSAE, joins us on the show. She is the author of the newest book that just comes out August 1st, 2023, Raising Good Humans Every Day, 50 Simple Ways to Press Pause, Stay Present, and connect with your kids. She joins us on the show and she'll be talking to us about how to become a more mindful parent. And speaking of mindfulness, Hunter is a Mindful Mama mentor. She is the creator of Mindful Parenting Course and host of the Mindful Mama podcast and widely followed author of raising good humans

a mindful guide to breaking the cycle of reactive parenting and raising kids and kind confident kids as well the kind is important i think uh she's an msae and an ryt uh and she helps people or she helps people and parents sometimes people too people parents that same thing i don't know we're just having fun here uh bring more calm and peace into the daily lives she's got 20 years of experience in meditation practices and it taught and has taught mindfulness to thousands worldwide she's writings appeared on cnbc nbc the huffington post tiny buddha mobs elephant journal mothering and a number of other online magazines and websites. And she's the mother of two active daughters who challenge her every day to hone her craft. I love it. Welcome to the show, Hunter. How are you? Great. Thank you for having

me, Chris. There you go. It sounds like you're living the experience in the life too of what you're writing about. Indeed. Yes. Indeed. Every it's it's a never-ending fun carnival uh so give us your dot com of uh where people can find you in the interwebs please sure mindful mama mentor.com there you go so you've written a couple books now uh how many books have you written this is number two uh yeah you go. Yeah. There you go. Number one did very well. It really surprised me. And then I was like, okay, I'm sure I can write another book. And it was fun and exciting because I got to do it in this, like, fun format with these tiny little chapters that just make you feel like you've accomplished something. When you read, like, three to four pages and you're like, ah, I get the ideas in three to four pages.

And if you're, you know, you're busy, that's like such a relief. You feel like you can accomplish something. So that's my aim. And it did really well on Amazon. Got lots of great reviews. And probably, you know, moms are busy. They're doing all the nurturing mom stuff. And, you know, it's good they have time.

But it's good to know that moms still care. And they want to be the best moms they can be because anytime whenever moms decide they're just not going to give a crap anymore well then we're in for we're in for a world of hurt so we're in trouble then there you go so what motivated you to add on to it and write this book well i you know i i wrote raising good humans initially because of my temper. That was my motivation. I was doing terribly. I wasn't naturally an expert at any of this. I had a bad temper and I was really struggling. to study and become less reactive and to just dial it down a bit and then like figure out how to talk to my kids because all I learned from my parents was, you know, like, you know, barking orders and commands and threats, right? Like, that's kind of like my natural, that's my like home, my native parenting language. So, I had to learn a new language, right? That was more effective and

for a new generation. And so, yeah, so it's really about these essential skills. And then with this book, with Raising Good Humans Every Day, it was about, you know, I've been doing the Mindful Mama podcast for 10 years. And I've had so many guests, we've talked about so many different things. And so I really got to, with this book, with the 50 short chapters, I get to like expand on, you know, mindfulness and skillful communication and just like go into lots of other areas, like our schedules, our lives, and all these different things that really affect our parenting and our experience raising kids. There you go. Have you ever thought about in the future doing a book called Raising

Horrible Human Beings? I think that should be up next, like Raising Terrible Mean People. It would be a really good idea you know i think someone's written that book because there seems to be a lot of them operating uh but uh no this is this is really important and i love how you talk about being present too give us a 30 000 overview of the book and then we'll get into some of the details sure um so i think we're at our worst when we're parenting, right? Like, if we go to like, where we're suffering the most is like, when we're, when we're reactive, when we're just like, we're saying, like, if you hit your brother again, I'm gonna hit you,

right? Like, saying things like that, right? Like, and it just, that's, that's kind of when we're at our worst. So we have to, as parents, we want to think about like, what can we do to do better in those circumstances? And I think of it like I actually have an acronym for it, I have the CLEAR method. And the whole idea is to calm our reactivity, because we may hear like good ways to respond from well meaning parenting coaches, and say, like, respond to your kids this way, it's better. And then then when you're reactive when your nervous system's like on overdrive you're stressed you just that you can't even access that like literally you're you know the the stress response is bypassing that slower part of your brain where all that knowledge is is kept so we have to calming our stress response becoming less reactive has to be the foundation for anything else we want to, calming our stress response, becoming less reactive has to be the foundation

for anything else we want to do. If we want to actually make a choice in how we want to respond, rather than just respond out of autopilot, we have to work with calming our nervous system. It has to be the foundation. There you go. And probably all of what you described doesn't work well if you're not getting any sleep. Most of my friends that I know that have kids, I don't have any. I think legally it's against the law or something for me to have children.

They've seen me and I've seen them. But basically, if you don't have sleep, you know, my friends will tell me. They'll be like, I haven't slept in 14 years, Chris. And I'm like, what? I mean, that's the whole reason I didn't have kids i really enjoy sleep but it's hard it's hard if you don't have sleep to you know deal deal with all the stuff that you talked about as well yeah yeah i mean that's it's definitely a foundation and part of that like not getting enough sleep especially for moms is this whole mindset that we have in our culture of like the self-sacrificing mom being so wonderful,

but it really leads to, it's actually like a really toxic idea because it leads to this idea that, oh, I don't need any sleep, but we don't, none of us functions well on no sleep. None of us functions well if our needs aren't being met, if we aren't, if we don't have like time with supportive family and friends, if we don't get our, with supportive family and friends if we don't get our you know we're always putting ourselves last we don't get exercise we don't get sleep and part of what feeds into that is that that mindset of like oh i'm always going to put my children first but actually like taking care of ourselves our own self-care taking you know and valuing our own needs as as much as our kids needs right like they're when when you have an infant their needs as much as our kids' needs, right? Like, when you have an infant, their needs are much more urgent, right? But that changes. When we value our needs,

and we start to, then we start to say, okay, I am not getting enough sleep, but my sleep is really important. What can, you know, it's the foundation for me being able to respond as like a, you know, a kind, conscious human being to my to my kids so what can we do about it right like this is actually rather than being a martyr and saying oh this is this is what the great self-sacrificing mom does like don't do that bs instead say i deserve that and get make go find ways to get your needs met there you go i love it if i mean if you don't take care of yourself you can't share with other people i've've seen this with mothers, you know, mothers will eat last. Sometimes, you know, she'll feed the children first. Sometimes she won't eat at all. She'll

just eat whatever is left over. You know, I see lots of examples of mothers that take care of their family first and God bless them. But you're right. It's hard to share and give to people if you're empty. You know, you can't fill a gas tank with an empty container of gas. It leads to burnout and resentment, ultimately. You know, and that's, so, you know, and plus you're modeling for your kids. The best parenting is in modeling. What are you, you know, if you want your kids to speak respectfully to you, you've got to speak respectfully to them. If you want them to, you know, they're watching every moment, right, for 18 years.

So, like, you, if you want them to turn into people who don't value their own needs and sacrifice themselves for everybody else first, like, then maybe you should go ahead. But if that's not what you want for your kids, maybe you should start to value your own needs too. There you go. Let's hear a little bit of your origin story. How did you get down this road? And what guided you kind of into this practice? I understand that you have the title of MSAE. Expand on that and what that is

and kind of how you got down this road of focusing on this. It was kind of a surprise, sort of twist in my journey for me. My MSAE stands for Master of Science in Art Education. And so I was briefly a high school art teacher and it felt like it was killing my soul. It was the first time I ever had panic attacks in my life was in that parking lot. And then I, when I did a yoga teacher training so that i could like get free yoga and then i as i got into that the that helped me like kind of follow my my mindfulness practice a little bit more that was the mindfulness practice was something i'd started learning about when i

was a teenager just desperate for some relief for the like intense sort of ups and downs of being a highly sensitive person. And so then, as I moved away from teaching, and then I had my first child, I that was when I started to sort of pursue, you know, follow this other line of, of blogging and writing. And then from that eventually came a lot of learning, a lot of different trainings and learning to then bring myself to this place where I can offer these practical tools, but also with this standpoint of, like, no, this wasn't something I was naturally good at. It was something I was naturally kind of like, I kind of sucked at it. I was good at a lot of other things. But I was, I I really felt like I was failing at this.

And so I wanted to know what actually works. How do you do these things? So everything I write is very, very practical. I really want to help parents in a very easy, practical way. There you go. And you talk about staying present. And I really love this concept of staying present. I was going through a very hard time and I couldn't control my mind

and things were out of control and my dogs, which are my children, would come up to me and I just felt like they were passing me by in life and I couldn't connect to them. I just sit there and look at them. I was like, why can't I feel like I'm connecting? And then I read Eckhart Tolle's book, Under Recommendation, from a friend. And it sounds like you use some different techniques like meditation and yoga. Tell us a little bit about that and why it's important to be present. And, you know, a lot of people, they go through raising kids and it's over before they know it. I hear a lot of my parent friends complain about that. Like, geez, where did the time go?

Yeah, I mean, there's so many reasons to be present. I mean, for parents, I think, you know, for me initially as a high schooler, I was like struggling with intense ups and downs kind of my whole life. I felt things very deeply. And the mindfulness practices, they really helped me to recover more quickly, to interrupt negative thought cycles, and to bring myself back to the present moment. And what that does beautifully is like when we're always kind of, our brains are in these, you know, black boxes in our skull, right? They're just trying to keep us alive and keep us safe. So they're always predicting the future. And so our brains sometimes, you know,

are delving into the past, but a lot of time, it's into the future, it our our brains sometimes you know are are delving into the past but a lot of time it's into the future it's planning it's worrying you know that's what the natural human tendency towards anxiety comes from is like kind of keeping us alive and when we can practice you know a mindfulness practice what's beautiful about it is it helps us to interrupt that and it's not like it goes away like you know you it's not like you stop thinking about you have to have like a lobotomy or something like we don't want that right i've got one scheduled next week the brain thinks just as the ears hear and the eyes see so we we practice to come back to the present and it just provides this relief from the constant foreshadowing

and going in the future and then for parents it's it's a shame because so many of us we want to be good parents so we go into it in this like kind of achievement mode maybe that we've had for a lot of our lives so we've been trained in from school and things like that where we want to get the good grade we want to get do the extra credit right so we plan the big blowout vacation, we have all the different classes and things, everything's lined up. And but then what happens is our brain is then in constant autopilot mode, where we're planning, we're on logistics for dinner and next week and tomorrow and getting to the class and getting to this and doing all these different things and the thing is that when we get we get when we plan in such a way like that when we finally get to that Cancun vacation right where we think oh I'm

gonna be really present and with my kids your brain can't do it because you have practiced being in the future and being on autopilot all the time and the only place we can love our children is in the present moment exactly that's it that's the only thing and so the thing they want most from us that is to be seen to be heard they want that expression of delight in seeing them and accepting them just for who they are just for existing and that is this incredible gift we can give another human our children and we can't do it if we're always moving forward in the future for when we're always in autopilot mode so it is imperative if we want to actually experience this experience of life of of being of being with these humans, right, that maybe, you know, likely came out of our bodies,

right? Like, we have to practice a little bit every day to interrupt that autopilot and come back to being present. I see you. I hear you. I am here in this moment with you. There you go. Hi, Voxers.

Voss here with a little station break. Hope you're enjoying the show so far. We'll resume here in a second. There you go. find all the different stuff that we do for speaking engagements if you'd like to hire me training courses that we offer and coaching for leadership management entrepreneur ism podcasting corporate stuff with over 35 years of experience in business and running companies as ceo and be sure to check out chris foss leadership institute.com Now back to the show. You know, it's so important, especially because life goes so fast by you. And sometimes, you know, we don't have a full run with the people that are in and out of our lives. Or maybe we're the person who's not going to be the full run. You know, maybe a parent passes away beforehand. The imprint that parents leave on children is like so important.

You mentioned earlier about, you know, you're setting example for them. In my book, I wrote about how even parents are leaders. You know, we don't, people think of leaders as, oh, CEO, you know, a guy who runs Apple computers. And I talk about how parents are leaders too. You're leading, but you're also setting example and showing how to be number one like you talk about a good human being um or you know some people might be showing something different i've seen it on cops um but uh uh you know and and also the relationship you have between a masculine and feminine in the household you you show how that dynamic works and and raises and all that gets

representation and imprint into their brain and if they don't have good imprint imprints of you know what a good person is someone who operates good morals honesty integrity etc etc they're going to grow up and have some problems i think i don't know i could be wrong no absolutely i mean and that's the thing is like you know that modeling piece is so huge and it's funny because we kind of have, you know, and this kind of goes into sort of that communication piece, right? Like there's that piece about being less reactive. And then how do we communicate? A lot of us just kind of, we replay the same things that our parents did, you know, did with us.

And just, you know, that's our model, right? We're not taking any classes. A lot of us, we're not, our model right we're not taking any classes a lot of us we're not you know we're not learning and that we think that you know we have these ideas of like well if i'm gonna i'm gonna bark orders at my kid and i'm gonna threaten my kid and then i'm gonna expect them to be very respectful to me except we're not modeling it we're not modeling it we're modeling the one with the most power wins and then we then we have then if we're lucky modeling it we're not modeling it we're modeling the one with the most power wins and then we then we have then if we're lucky maybe we have a second child and we start to see

the first child say well this is what happened to me anyway saw the first child barking orders and and you know yelling at the younger child and i was like oh wow that's what I sound like. Uh-oh. You know, and that's a great gift because then we can say, oh, okay. You know, like I think parents, we're going to repeat ourselves with our kids a bazillion times because that's just the nature of human beings and that's how we learn is we learn through repetition. All human beings do.

Adults do. If you think you want your kid to do something the first time you say it think of imagine an adult just like getting something the number one time you say it and then kind of shift those expectations but we're going to repeat ourselves a lot so we might as well be practicing to repeat the kind of language we want spoken back to us, the kind of interest and tone and respect that we want given back to us, we have to give what we want to receive. We have to model that for our kids. It's not like we speak to some people in the world in one language and then we speak to kids in a totally different language. That actually doesn't work.

So it's not very effective. Yeah. One thing I noticed when I was growing up in high school is that most of my bullies, when I got to get some knowledge of what their home life was like, their home life was really ugly. And usually their parent was a bully. And I think we've kind of grown through these different ages of where it used to be really about survivalship and people just surviving. So it's like suck it up and maybe take a pill to a kid or whatever. And maybe punishment was a little harsh.

And then, of course, the examples that were set for us probably weren't always so great. So I think it's important that there are resources like yours now where parents can get some more education. As you mentioned before, a lot of people don't spend a lot of pre-education time being parents there's i wish i i've often joked as a single guy that i'm like they really should make people go to college for two years before they allow them to be parents but you know i don't make the rules clearly um but but you know there's always those people that say my kids will never be like that and like some of what you said alluded to that you know i i remember one time i had a girlfriend she said you know my girlfriend said never be the people screaming in the in the grocery store and i look remember looking at her thinking damn your kids are gonna be the ones well it's funny too because the thing is like

before we have kids and i did this too like I would look at like the mom, like losing it at this kid. And I'd be like, oh, my God, I will never do that. Right. And I made like conscious choices. Like that's not how I want to parent. And then that's what why it goes back to, you know, calming down the nervous system and calming our reactivity and understanding how that works. Because then I got myself in parenting of this adorable two-year-old with the cheeks and just so cute like it's amazing and my temper came out like crazy and it was so

frustrating because it wasn't something I chose nobody is consciously choosing to lose it at their kids no one wakes up in the morning and says oh I, I think I'm going to scream at, you know, Skylar at three o'clock today. No, like it's not a conscious choice that we're making. It's our nervous system reactivity. It's our fight, flight, or freeze stress response, feeling under threat that leads us to, you know, get escalated and yell. It's and we're not even using our whole brain. Right. So that's what's beautiful about a mindfulness practice,

as well as getting enough sleep, is that a mindfulness practice, they've actually shown in MRI scans that it actually, there's the amygdala, which are kind of the, oh crap, centers of the brain, the seed of the fight, flight, or freeze stress response. It actually shrinks those and makes those less dense. It actually shrinks the connectivity between the amygdala and the rest of the brain.

And an eight-week practice of mindfulness actually makes more dense the prefrontal cortex, which is the seat of our verbal ability, problem-solving ability, creativity, but impulse control. Impulse control, right? It actually increases that in the brain so this thing then it can feel like i'm just sitting here and i'm i'm not doing anything except i'm thinking the whole time and oh i can't do this and whatever all this stuff but this awareness that we build it actually changes literally changes the brain so that we can be ultimately over time calmer less reactive and use our whole brain to make choices more often and I think correct

me if I'm wrong because obviously I'm not the professional in this field but I think when parents are calm it present it makes the children more calm and secure there's a secure element like i've seen people and and of course i'm just the theorist here um but i've seen people that you know you go in the store and they are completely ignoring their kids and their kids are just you know have they're climbing the shelves they're they're you know throwing things all over you know they're complete out of control and the and the parents seem oblivious sometimes these cases and it's almost like the kids are just demanding attention and they're not getting it and and so i don't know it seems like maybe being calm and being uh secure can can mirror that the children mirror that i guess what i'm trying to say maybe

oh for sure and i mean that's the thing about us like it's very especially true with kids and especially true with young kids but it's true with all of us that we feel each other's emotions we inter are with each other you know like if I'm in a room with you even like over the zoom in some cases right like if I was feeling really anxious and you could probably see that in me you might start to feel some of those feelings. We have all those mirror neurons. If we're in a room with each other, we start to we start to feel each other's emotions. It's not our our our pores are we are porous, right? Especially emotionally, we we tend to feel each other's emotions. That's really a great gift of human beings.

And it's a great challenge of us but with kids they don't have the ability to you know they don't know how to regulate their nervous system telling them to stop crying doesn't work telling them you're okay when they're not okay doesn't work you know telling them to go to the room and do it by themselves that doesn't work it actually makes them more you know dysregulated so how do they get regulated it's through the process of a when they're infants soothing them again and again and again and again and again and then later as they're you know toddlers and smaller kids like yeah you that's why us taking care of our own taking care of our needs taking care of our own stress response that whole

foundation is so important because that's what kids, little kids need from us, they need to borrow our calm. We need to practice to become steady and to practice some ease and to slow down a little as best we can and under the circumstances that aren't easy for parents because parents don't have, especially in the United States, have zero support, you know, systems, like, and we're all separated from our tribes, right? Like, so it's very hard. But as best we can, we have to, you know, our job is to, you know, if we want our kids to calm down,

we have to calm ourselves down. We have to, you know, use the breath, because it's cliche. We have to remind our nervous system that this isn't an emergency right that I'm helping my child and all of these things and and that takes some practice it takes some work it's not like you're gonna remember it in the tough moment right you have to kind of be intentional and practice it in the calm moments and then that's when it's accessible to you when you really need it definitely should we should mothers be taking time out uh once a day to do yoga meditate do some of these things and and kind of maybe step away and separate themselves absolutely sure i mean i think

mothers and fathers like anyone in a caregiving role, because kids, caregiving kids so hard, it's so demanding. But yeah, you should be taking a break and taking the time, you know, for what works for you, you know, to regulate your nervous system and to practice that calm and maybe yoga, maybe meditation, and maybe something else, maybe just walking slowly through like that wooded path near your house, if you have that, right. There are a lot of different and in raising good humans every day offer a lot a lot of different tools for that but but parents we have these expectations and especially moms have this expectation especially if maybe we've left the workforce or something that oh now I'm I have to be mom 24

hours a day all the time. And that's what my child needs from me best. But that's a misguided thinking because, yeah, it's great. It's wonderful to be with your child. But if you're with your child so often that you're being driven bonkers by the experience of being with a three-year-old for 24 hours a day, multiple days a week, like who wouldn't be driven bonkers by that? Then how can you get breaks? How can you just be you outside of the role of mom, right? Like all of that ultimately makes you a better parent, but

you know, you should do it just for you anyway. Like you don't have to, back to that thing, you don't have to be a martyr. It's not good for you. It's not good for your kids. It leads to burnout and resentment and bad parenting. There you go. And I think mothers feel guilty sometimes about trying, taking care of themselves over their kids. I mean, is that something, a challenge that they have? Oh, definitely. Definitely. I mean, there's so much, you know, to, you know, we live in a culture that's been patriarchal for a long time, right, where women were not valued except in their caregiving roles. So in that, that mindset kind of lives on, right? We know that lives on and that, that if, you know, mothers who are assertive, you know, are not valued and mothers who are nurturing are, right?

So we know that that exists. So that mom guilt comes up. And I think it's important to, that's why I think it's important for moms, especially to sort of surround themselves with some media and things like, I do the Mindful Mama podcast, this idea of like surround yourself with voices

who are saying, no, that's BS. This is not good for you. It's not good for your kids. Like, because otherwise, it's kind of like the water we're swimming in. Otherwise, you know, and we need to remind ourselves that no, our, our needs are very important. Our needs matter. And, and it's not helpful, ultimately, for our kids to always be putting ourselves last. Like that's not going to do the trick. And I imagine going to the gym is good too, you know, doing the self-work. And of course, there's a lot of elements of the gym. I know a lot of mothers go to the gym too as well. And that can be, you know, for me, the gym is almost a place of meditation. And I kind of find myself being present.

And even though my dog kids don't like it when I leave the house or go to the gym is almost a place of meditation and and i kind of find myself being present and and even though my dog kids don't like it when i leave the house or go to the gym they're kind of upset sometimes but uh you know it helps reset me too you're a better dog parent when you get back there's this yelling and screaming no i mean that was one of the first things i did when i when my daughter was little was that i took her to the ymca child care and she didn't like the ymca child care my second daughter did like it but my first daughter did not like it and so they would come get me after 10 minutes and say she's crying you have to come get her and i'd be like oh god and so i'd go back and so we did that for like two weeks where it had to go incrementally longer amounts of time. And a lot of moms would give up at that point and say, oh, my goodness, my child is unhappy, doesn't love this place.

I will sacrifice my gym time for my child. where your child is maybe not in their happiest spot but that gives you time to you know to burn off your anxieties to feel good in your body to get energy to relax to shower by yourself this is you know it's worth your child having one hour where they're in one a non-optimal hour for them. Right. And then my second child loved childcare, so she was fine. But like, it's, you know, we have to consider, you know, we have to be waiting parents, parents needs and values a little higher in the scale, you know, and then that is ultimately better for kids.

There you go. I think you alluded to too, were you a first child? Me? No, I was a baby of the family. Okay. You were talking about your first child and the paradigm between the first and second. So I took a guess there, but I was a first child. Is there any stuff that you talk about? I imagine you've covered a lot in 10 years on the podcast about how maybe we should be a little easier on the first child. It's hard though, because we're so anxious, right? We're worried about doing it, right? I know, I know.

We're going to be so, like, the first child ends up birth order. You know, we did have a podcast on birth order. We talked about how the first child is often more responsible. Well, they're the best. They're the responsible one. But, yeah, it's hard because like i feel a little you know my oldest child my second child by the time she came around i was like so much more relaxed i wasn't afraid i was gonna kill her all the time i was like it's like okay i can just chill i had

started all these practices more so i wasn't like i wasn't so anxious and on edge and it's hard because parents have so much pressure on them and we know like that that attachment style and styles of relating they're like kind of they're really honed in in this first three years of life and that's when you don't know at all what you're doing so So it's like, it's incredibly hard for parents. But yeah, they, sure, we should definitely be easier on first children. And then give them a little more. One of the things that we could do to be easier on them is give them more space and time to just play and be kids. To not have so many, when they're little kids, so many adult directed activities. To have time for free free play this

is so so important and it's something kids are like losing nowadays that they don't have time to go outside they don't have time to do risky play like climbing trees there are no merry-go-rounds left in the world i have it was like amazed i found one once in pennsylvania i was like oh my god look my children this is this thing and and all of these things like are it's hurting kids like do you know that there are um there are occupational therapists right who i've talked to on the podcast who told me how kids are falling out of their seats in schools really cuz yes because they don't have time to develop their vestibular system through swinging swinging around and jumping up and down like those things right like that's what

maybe a merry-go-round round does is like it swings you around and the kids need that to develop their vestibular system their sense of balance so these, you know, we know there's all these other reasons, right? But like, this is something that we could give to oldest children and second children and third children is a little more time to slow down, have some down days and just be kids, just play outside. Like it doesn't have to be elaborate. It can be super simple. And you don't have to be their entertainer either.

Just let them be in your environment. There you go. Unless you don't hear anything. And then there you know the problem, right? Then check it out. That's a secret step down. You know, as a first child, I do think we need to have laws on first children

that, uh, they get to get away with as much murder as the, as the baby people do. I've seen it so many times, you know, like the first child sitting there going, I can't, I can't do anything right. And this, this kid's over here committing murder and robbing banks. And the mother's just like, yeah, that's fine. Whatever. We love that one. And you're just like, but, uh's fine, whatever. We love that one. And you're just like, I want to wear that one.

But no, I'm kidding around. Nothing we need to talk to the therapist about. Yeah, there might be some issues there. He's seen me and I've seen him. But no, it's something parents need to think about. And you mentioned a good thing about letting children explore and play. You know, us Gen Xers, we, I don't know if it's the same Mary Gorn on you're referring to. You might be referring to the one with the rope, right?

And the bar. I had like, ours had like metal bars. I was going to say. For dear life. Exactly. That's the ones I was referring to or leading up to with the Gen X thing. That thing was a death trap. A wheel of death was what that was.

Especially if like some 17 year olds got there and started to like spit it so fast yeah and and uh you know i i sadly knew people who didn't make it off that thing or who they made it off and and didn't land well but you know it was it was a it was a myriad it was a death trap of broken bones but you learn survival it was a form of darwinism i think and you learn balance like you mentioned earlier it develops your vestibular system it definitely did which is probably why i have good fight or flight mechanisms to this day uh a few more plugs i'd like to get in here for some of the stuff you have on your website i think it's really cool you have the ultimate mindful parenting conference that you do

do you want to get a plug in about that sure yeah so i've i've done interviews with incredible experts over the years and this is a collection of some of my favorite interviews um like a virtual conference of sorts that uh can be accessed by anyone and and uh some of my favorite favorite teachers and you can learn a lot there you go and then you even have a course on, and you can learn a lot. There you go. And then you even have a course on teacher training. My mom was a teacher for 20, 25 years, and so was my sister. So I know how challenging that is, too, on top of being a parent. Yeah, well, it's the Mindful Parenting Teacher Training. So it's to teach people to teach the mindful parenting course that I developed

in their communities or wherever they want to teach it in like schools, institutions for parents. And it teaches the method of calming reactivity and then how to communicate. And it can be for it could be just for parents who are passionate and want to have extra, you know, extra income or work to do. Or maybe sometimes like there have been therapists who take it to add on to their offerings as a therapist, et cetera. Definitely, definitely helpful notes. So anything more you want to tease out or tell us before we go out? Sure. I mean, I guess the only thing I want to mention here is that if you're a parent and listening to this, I just want, it's so hard. It's not easy. And one of the big things that I talk about in

raising good humans every day is the real practicality and importance of self-compassion. That when we want to do right for our kids and we're going to mess up, we're human, we are going to be human and mess up. It's inevitable. And when we're harsh to ourselves when we mess up when we're we berate ourselves that just kind of leaves us incapacitated it's harder to start again and what we really need to do is to be able to begin anew again and again every day and so when we start to even if it feels uncomfortable for us it isn't our native language if we start to practice self compassion using kind words to ourselves when we make mistakes, etc., it's actually a very practical thing to do because you can get up, you know, you give yourself a soft landing, you can get up and begin anew again.

And it's okay. I give you permission. You have permission to be human. Just give yourself some compassion and keep beginning anew. Try again. There you go. We're human. We're going to make mistakes and it's okay. I don't think anyone has a perfect run through life. I think a lot of people think about perfection. I'm going to be the perfect parent. Maybe people think about, I don't know. I thought it'd be the perfect dog parent. Boy, was I wrong. And I'm still working on but you know some of the stuff you talked about being

present and stuff is so important and uh you know this life goes by so fast if you don't stop to turn take a stop to take a look around every now and then i think someone said you're gonna miss it uh thank you very much uh for coming on the show with us hunter we really appreciate it thank you so much chris i really really enjoyed talking to you. Thank you. And thanks, Manish, for tuning in. Let's get a.com, actually, Hunter, for you as people go out so they can check you out in the podcast. Sure. Everything is at MindfulMamaMentor.com. There you go.

Order up the book, folks. Wherever fine books are sold, only go to those fine bookstores because the alleyway bookstores, you might get mugged. Check it out. Raising Good humans every day. 50 simple ways to press pause, stay present and connect with your kids. Always important that better parenting can just make a better world in my mind.

I'll endorse that any day of the week. August 1st, 2023. You can order wherever fine books are sold. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time.

And that should have us out.