Ep #158: Stronger Together: Supporting Your Kids by Supporting Yourself

Welcome to Co-Parenting with Confidence, a podcast for those courageous moms out there who want to move past the conflict and frustration of divorce and show up as the mom they truly want to be. My name's Mikki Gardner. I'm a certified life and conscious parenting coach with my own personal dose of co-parenting experience. Throughout my co-parenting journey, I have learned to become confident in who I am as a woman and a mother, and I'm here to help you do the same. If you're ready to learn what it takes to become a great co-parent and an amazing example to your children, we'll get ready and let's dive into today's episode.

Hello and welcome back to the podcast. Today we're talking about something really, really important, and I'm just going to give you a little bit of a spoiler alert here or a warning in that some of what I'm going to talk about is pretty sobering research about how parent mental health really impacts their children. But what I want you to walk away with is hope, ideas and the knowledge that you are the number one person in your child's life that matters and has a huge impact on their life and their future and how they handle what's being given to them. And so what I want you to do is just stick with me here. I wanted to be honest about that upfront because some of this information might make us feel really like, well, how can I even help? It's sort of doom and gloom, but it's not because by understanding the truth, by understanding the research, by understanding the science, we actually can move forward in a much more empowering way.

And that's what I want for this episode today. So one thing that I see so often, and certainly I'm going to raise my hand to so many of these things, and maybe you will too as you're listening, but I see so many parents come to me and they are so highly stressed and in a state of almost panic because their kids are stressed out, their kids are showing signs of struggle, transition days are disasters. They're clearly having emotional issues as it relates to the divorce. And the first reaction of so many parents is to jump in and fix it, to go into that panic mode. But what this actually does is signal to your kids that they're not okay and things aren't okay. So while we're trying to fix it, we're actually reinforcing their experience of everything not being okay. Another thing that I see so often is continued conflict.

And the other person, the other co-parent might actually be sort of the poster child for bad behavior. But when I'm talking to so many parents, when we start to really look at it, we can't blame everything on the other person. We're not even looking to blame. But it's about understanding of how are we contributing to the dynamic? How are we contributing to the problem? How are we contributing? Maybe just by not doing anything. So when we start to actually look at what's going on, we can find a way forward, but only when we are able to step out of the conflict, drop the rope and start choosing differently. I was just on with a client the other day and they've been divorced a really long time, and there is still conflict. There are still court dates, there is still all of this going on. And this mom was so committed to the story that the other co-parent was the problem.

And listen, absolutely the other co-parent is too, but where all of her power lies is really understanding how is she contributing to it and how does she want to do things differently. If we don't want what's happening in our lives, we have to do things differently. But that continued conflict really negatively impacts our children. It just does. That's actually the predictor of how kids experience divorce is the level and time of conflict that they experience through the parents. So when they experience all of this conflict, they don't have any choice in it. But what they do have to do is find coping mechanisms to deal with it. And everybody does it differently. They might numb, they might distract, they might have a lot of anxiety, hypervigilance, people pleasing, just like adults. They take on and learn all of these things through the experiences that they're going through.

And when parents are chronically stressed out with more on their plate than they can handle, oftentimes the last thing they do is slow down. It's just they keep adding and adding and adding and adding to the stress and saying yes to all the things and putting off, taking care and changing until another time. But unfortunately, that time won't come or it'll come when everything hits the fan, and we don't want that. And another thing that I see so often is just this commitment. And listen, please know that from the depths of my being, I understand wanting to sort of be the bigger person, but so many times we get so wrapped up from the emotional pain, from the stress, from everything going on that we blame everybody around us for our reactions or our overreactions and not really taking the self-responsibility to move forward and do it differently.

So maybe you saw yourself in one or a couple or all of those. I know that I can identify on some level with so many of those things. And frankly, life is stressful. It and co-parenting sucks, right? Spoiler alert, it sucks at times. And divorce is sad and it's messy and it's difficult, and you have so much power to choose how you are going to navigate it, how you're going to respond to it, and ultimately how you are going to impact your child's experience. You are the most powerful influence for your children, and it begins with you modeling the change that you want to see, modeling the behavior that you want them to ultimately do when they're older. We all say we want our kids to be happy, but really we want our kids to be successful and resilient and empowered and kind and respectful.

There’re so many things we want for them, but you know how we do that? We teach them that by modeling. There’re things in our brain called mirror neurons. It actually picks up what we are seeing and then we will mirror it back to them. So that's why it's actually really important to every time your child walks into the room, have a big genuine smile on your face, be happy to see them right? Each morning when they get up and they come in, they might come in all grumpy and their hair all a mess, but that big smile and genuine love on your face, they actually will start to mirror that back. They will start to feel that inside themselves. And so we want to be able to do that more and more, but we have to be present and noticing and in the moment to be able to do that when you realize how much and how powerful you are, well, this is when we start to actually change.

And that's what I want to talk about today. So let's first get a little bit real on the sobering statistics in the research. So research has shown that children often learn emotional regulation and coping strategies by observing their parents. That is our first relationship where we start to see what's going on. Most of this is actually already imprinted by the time we're seven years old. And so what we have to think about is that really parental anxiety, depression, mental illness, stress can actually, it is modeling those maladaptive behaviors for our children. And here's another thing, kids are amazing readers of energy. All kids are some, if you have a highly sensitive kid or a really emotionally intune kid, they even more have this ability, but they can read the energy and they can read our energy and sense our mood. So when we're stressed and we're angry and we're sad, but we say, I'm fine, I'm fine, Nope, I'm okay, right?

When we're clearly not. What it actually does is create self-doubt in our child, right? Because they're feeling this energy inside of them, but we're saying, Nope, not true. And it creates this dissonance for them where they start to really doubt themselves. I feel this. But then she says she's this way and it's very confusing. Research has also shown that children of parents that are experiencing high emotional challenges are at greater risk for emotional and behavioral problems themselves. This is from Goodman and Gott, and they're really finding that children, especially of depressed parents, that's the study it was looking at depression specifically often experience higher rates of anxiety, depression and poor social functioning, the emotional withdrawal that comes from depression, and the inconsistency actually exacerbates those maladaptive behaviors in the children. And another thing that there's so much research going on right now about this, but stress and the parent child relationship post pandemic and certainly before that, but definitely post pandemic, we have seen stress just skyrocket and people are understanding that they are feeling more and more stress being able to put food on the table to all the worries that we have in parenting, and then you couple co-parenting on top of that, right?

And it's that much more complicated. But the impact really shows that high level of parental stress can negatively affect the parent child interactions, which creates attachment issues. So once Sonian American psychologist showed that the high parental stress can lead to developmental delays and emotional dysregulation in children, so the chronic stress of the parent is actually affecting their caregiving behaviors, which increases the cortisol level in the child impacting their brain development. So did you follow that? I want to say it again because it's so important. Chronic stress in the parent affects their ability to care, right? Impacts our behaviors. Yes, because we're human, it impacts our behaviors, but what it also does is increase the cortisol levels in our children's brains, which actually then impact their brain development. This is huge. Children are actually four times more likely to have emotional, behavioral, and physical symptoms when their parent is under chronic stress.

That's from Dr. Aditi Nerurkar, who is a Harvard trained medical lecturer and one of the top experts on stress. When we start to see that stress is not only impacting ourselves, but it's impacting our children and on the level of their brain, the chemistry happening in their brain and their development, this is a sobering statistic. This is sobering research. What I really wanted to bring to you, because why am I telling you this? Because you matter to your child, and I see so many parents working so hard to take care of their children, to make life better after divorce, but are not taking care of the one person who has the power to make the biggest impact, and that is themselves. We have to learn to address the stress. And I might be stressing you out right now, and again, I don't want to do that.

But what I want to do is help you create, help the small tangible ways to move forward and actually support yourself, which in turn will support your children in positive ways. What I want you to hear once again is that you are so powerful, so powerful in your child's life. You have so much ability to change things for the better, and you are doing that in ways already. I know today because you're listening to this, I already know that you're an amazing parent. I already know that you deeply love your kids. I already know that you're working so hard to be a better co-parent and a better parent. And what I also know is that we need tools, we need help, and we need support to do that. And that's what I wanted to lay out for you today is some ways that you can start to continue to build on the successes that you're already having.

I know you're having successes. You might not feel like it, but I know that you are because you're here and you're listening and you're trying, okay, so what can we do? What can you do? Well, you can do a lot. And so we're going to talk about some practical ways to move forward. Okay? So number one, communication. Everything starts with communication When we're talking about family dynamics, relationship dynamics, dynamic, and it's really about normalizing the discussion with your children and other people in your life, other relationships around emotions. Again, remember how I said that our kids actually can pick up more than we think? Well, let's use this to our advantage and start to normalize having conversations around emotions. Our kids need us to model that skill for them, and we can only do that if we have the skill ourselves. So what does this look like?

It might look like a day, you might wake up and feel really sad or maybe angry and things are going on. And I'm not saying that we unload everything off on our children. Nope, I'm not saying that at all. But what we can say is that when we are feeling that to actually say, you know what? I'm feeling really sad today, and here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to call a friend. I'm going to go for a walk. But letting our kids know that it's not their responsibility to fix our emotions, but that we can verbalize this is how I'm feeling and this is how I'm taking care of myself to move forward. It might look like I'm actually really angry with some things that are going on, and so that I'm able to take care of myself and you. I am going to go to the gym later and work out so that I can get rid of some of this energy.

Or I'm going to turn on some music right now and we're going to have a dance party because mom needs to dance it out. This might sound ridiculous, but try it. A super fun morning dance party, I think always starts things off on a better foot, especially when we have all of that negative energy inside that we need to offload. Okay? So that's communication. Number two, finding small actions forward. So I'm not talking about just complaining about the stress or reliving it or lamenting or ignoring it, but what we are talking about is how do we find small steps to move forward to help ourselves feel better today? So when it comes to stress, and I'm going to get to prioritizing you, and a lot of these will be in there, but we actually don't need to change everything in our lives. We actually just need to start to move forward in small, doable steps.

So that might look like mornings are really hard to get out the door and you're super stressed. So how can you make it just a little bit easier? Maybe transition days are a train wreck. Okay, no problem. How can we start to make that a little bit easier? That might look like just organizing yourself, having things ready to go, having less to do so that you have a little bit more space and time. Maybe transitions aren't going well because the other co-parent is coming to your house and trying to extract the children is actually not going well. So we actually might need to shift and do transitions somewhere else or in a neutral place to make it easier on your children and lower the stress. This is where we really have to start to get really creative and figure out what will work and what won't work, and having the support of a coach, having support of a community to figure those things out.

Game changer, right? Okay. Number three, consistency. Consistency matters. So this is what I hear so often is I know consistency matters, Mickey. I know I want the same routine at both houses. I know it's crucially important for my children, but the other co-parent does it or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And I'm not saying blah, blah, blah in a disrespectful way, but here's where we don't want to get focused on what can't work, and we do want to start getting focused on what can, which is you maintaining consistency, routines and S in your home. So many times I get clients coming to their sessions and they're multitasking and they're in between, and they're doing this and they're doing that, and all that is is just lack of focus. So we actually need to slow down, pull back, and remove some of the chaos. The older our kids get, the more the schedules become more and more and more.

But there are times when you just need to choose what can you do and what can't you do? How can you make things a little bit easier, and how can you slow down so that you can actually be present to what is happening? When we are multitasking, as much as we love to believe that we are really good at it, it actually is not a thing. Multitasking is just spreading your energy and your focus and your attention on several things which dilute your attention, dilutes your ability to make decisions, dilutes your ability to be really impactful. So what we want to do is learn to slow down, take one step at a time, because those small doable steps actually lead to huge results in the long-term where multitasking, hurrying, all of that just creates more and more chaos, which creates more and more stress, which adds to more cortisol levels increasing in ourselves and as we talked about our children.

Okay, so what can you do practically for yourself? Well, it really looks like prioritizing and know if you've listened to this podcast, I'm not talking about bubble baths, I'm not talking of glasses, wine in the backyard. What I'm talking about is really prioritize taking care of you so that you can be the best influence, the best parent, the best person for your children and yourself. First and foremost, when we are talking about chronic stress, when we are talking about things that lead to mental illness, prioritizing sleep is hugely important. Our brain needs rest. Rest is not a luxury. It is a necessity. I was just reminding a client the other day, sleep deprivation is actually a tool that is used to torture people, and it doesn't actually take that long. I should have looked up the research, but I don't know it offhand. It does not take long to severely impact somebody's mood, ability to think clearly and to manage stress.

It's like 24 to 48 hours of lack of sleep and boom, you are in the cycle. So sleep is huge, and prioritizing sleep is most important. So that looks like if you stay up late or Netflix, distractions doing work late at night, all of these things, listen, I understand there is a time when we have to power through, but prioritizing your sleep day to day is one of the biggest ways to manage your stress and to take care and create more mental health and stability for yourself. Movement. Talk about movement all the time, right? Moving our body to keep ourselves healthy. If you have the ability to move your body, use it, right? As we say in yoga, use it or lose it. So we actually need to prioritize movement. That could just be stretching in the morning. That could be a walk around the block that could be going to the gym for some weight training.

It could look like yoga. It could look like a run. There's so many things, but moving our bodies. And then the one that I want to offer because I'm sort of doing mind, body, and spirit here, is really prioritizing your wellbeing by strengthening your spirit. How do we do that? Well, one simple way. You've heard it on this podcast, and I work with clients and I do this in my own life and pausing. When we are highly stressed, when we are moving through so many challenges, learning how to pause and allow ourselves to take a breath, breathing is the only voluntary and involuntary nervous system function that we have. We can control our breathing, and it happens without us even thinking about it. But by pausing, taking a deep breath in and out, it actually connects our mind and our body to strengthen us. It allows us to stop, get out of that reaction, and step into responsiveness and deciding what is next.

So what that looks like, the power of the pause. As soon as we realize that we're escalated, that we're triggered, that we're super stressed, that we're sort of feeling super scattered, or that we're really overwhelmed with emotion, maybe it's our child having a really big emotional moment and we don't know what to do with it. Stop in that moment. Tell yourself, stop, pause, and take a deep breath in through your nose, out through your mouth, and allow yourself that moment. If you need another breath, you give yourself another one. But the more and more you intentionally pause, you actually are strengthening the muscle to give yourself more ability to move forward in the direction that you actually want, right? Whether that's not yelling, not getting triggered, not engaging in an argument, not continuing to rush and be stressed, just that pause is so important. And the last thing I want to say is get support.

Please get support. Maybe it's family therapy, maybe it's co-parenting therapy or co-parenting coaching that you need to address the dynamics and improve understanding. But we've got to normalize getting support for you, for your children, and for your relationships, right? Whether that is therapy, support, group coaching, whatever it is, we need support. We are not meant to do this alone. We do not know all the things that we need. Parenting doesn't just come naturally. It's actually a learned skill, and we have to normalize and prioritize that support that we need. And if you are in the Detroit area, I want you to know that we're doing last call on our Intentional Collective, which is a three month program for women in the Detroit area where we are really working on so much of this, really choosing how we want to move forward in life. And if you want to get in on that, please send me a message.

There's a link in the bio but see if you would be a good fit for this and if it would be a good fit for you. And lastly, there's also a link for a breakthrough call with me. Please, if you are at all wanting support, whatever that looks like, let's jump on a call because I'm happy to walk through what's going on and a good direction forward for you that might not be working with me. It might be working with me. It might look like therapy, it might look like a support group, it might look like something else. But if we jump on a call, we can sort of chat through what those next steps are and then create the roadmap for you to get there. But I hope what you are taking away from this entire conversation is that you matter, your mental health, your stress level impacts not only you but your children.

And so now is the time to take care of you because you are the one who is going to make the most powerful difference in your children's life, and that begins with you making a huge difference in your own. So that's the episode for today, and I just want you to know that you are seen, you are important, you matter, and you are loved. And if no one tells you that today, just know that you are and that I'm here for you and that I believe in you, and I know that you are going to make the most profound, positive impact on your kids and your own life and create so much beauty moving forward, you can do it. You have the capability of doing it, and I believe in you. So until next time, just know that I'm here. If you need anything, use the link in the show notes, and I can't wait to see you soon.

Oh, and one more thing, the legal stuff. This podcast is solely intended for informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be a substitute for any medical advice. Please consult your physician or the qualified medical professional for personalized medical advice. Thanks for listening to Co-Parenting with Confidence. If you want more information or resources from this podcast, visit coparentingwithconfidence.com . I'll see you next week.