Ep #121: Why You’re the Best Authority on Your Family

Welcome to Real World Peaceful Parenting, a podcast for parents that are tired of yelling, threatening, and punishing their kids. Join mom and master certified parent coach Lisa Smith as she gives you actionable step-by-step strategies that’ll help you transform your household from chaos to cooperation. Let’s dive in. 

Welcome, welcome, welcome. Welcome to today’s episode. Let me ask you if this statement resonates with you. Imagine saying something like, “Lisa, I feel like I’m suddenly hyper aware of my ignorance, of my mistakes when it comes to parenting, and I’m overwhelmed by how much I need to learn, heal, and change.” 

Have you thought something like this? Something close to it? This is often the thought that motivates parents to see advice on how to be a so-called good parent. Maybe you fall under this category. Maybe that’s why you’re here every week listening to the podcast.

I think when we’re seeking expert advice, we read all the books. We listen to all the podcasts. We watch videos on YouTube. You find me, the peaceful parent. I get it. A common thread that I see in these parents is a desperate willingness to do what any expert tells them to do because sometimes this group of parents lack confidence that they have everything within themselves. They already have all the tools they need to keep their kids safe and raise them in an environment that helps our kids feel safe, heard, and valued.

Now, here’s what I know. If you fall into that category looking for the expert, doing all the things, it’s very easy to become overwhelmed with all of the information, tools, techniques, psychology, and how-tos that are available at your fingertips. It’s easy especially for parents who have been conditioned to be people pleasers, to feel overwhelmed, and at the mercy of all the experts because you’re trying to do everything they tell you to do. Yeah?

Well, in today’s episode what I want to encourage you to do is to become your own authority, to become your own expert. You might going, “What Lisa? What? Listen, Lisa, if I was my own authority, I wouldn’t be here.” Maybe, but maybe not. Let me explain.

Information and tools are valuable, no question. That’s why I’m here every week meeting with you. The most important piece of the puzzle is your own intuition, your own experience, your own temperament, your own knowledge of your child, and how you take the valuable information and tools and apply them to your own unique situation.

That is exactly why I am a coach, not an author of a step by step how-to book. I make suggestions for you in the moment of day to day living, but I never tell you exactly what to do because then I become the authority of your family instead of you.

What I really want, really, truly, deep down is I want you to feel empowered to become the authority in your own household. Yeah, with my tools, support, and coaching. But at the end of the day, I want you to take what I offer whether it’s here or in my membership community The Hive or in one on one coaching. Where you have the biggest transformation is when you take the coaching, tips, tools, and support I offer, and you become the authority on you, your kids, your family, and your parenting.

So good, right? I know. That’s because the truth is every kid is different, every parent is different, every family is different. Every family has different beliefs and different values and comes from different histories and has different cultures. Every moment in parenting comes with a different set of circumstances. Part of the human experience, part of our free will, is that everyone gets to and should run their own family their own way.

Now, what happens sometimes is our brain seeks out people or resources to follow sometimes for input, ideas, support, and sometimes as an authority. The difference is sometimes our brain seeks out people as an authority because we don’t have the confidence in ourselves to be the authority.

Let me give you an example. So, for instance, it is very helpful to search out and find a chart on early childhood development. I often supply a chart to my clients, to my Hive members. It is valuable to your relationship to your kids to know what they are developmentally capable of. To know what they’re capable of knowing, understanding, and doing.

Because if our expectations of our kids, remember, they have underdeveloped brains. So if our expectations with these underdeveloped brains are out of alignment with their capabilities, we will get triggered every time. We may lose opportunities to connect with our kids. Frustration is when there’s a gap between expectation and reality. 

So if you’re expecting something more than your kid is capable of, frustration is going to rise up every time. Then there’s a high probability of us getting triggered and moving into command and compliance instead of cooperation and connection.

Since connection promotes cooperation from our kids, it’s important to recognize when we are expecting too much from them developmentally. Yeah? I mean, this is one of the biggest things I work with parents on is understanding what your kid, the ceiling of what your kid is capable of based on their brain development. Let me give you an example.

The human brain does not achieve full development until the age of 25. That is proven. That is scientific. We know that through things like PET scans, positive emission tomography. We know that from studying the brain for many years and looking at how the brain works that it is not fully developed until the age of 25.

Now, let’s put that into perspective. This means that your five-year-old’s brain is one 20% of the way to being fully developed. 20%. Oh my gosh, 20%. So it’s really important for parents of five-year-olds to understand the ceiling that their five-year-old can developmentally grasp.

I mean think about this. If you’re 20% of the way there, what are five-year-olds capable of and what aren’t they capable of? Parents often get bamboozled, I love that word. Parents often get bamboozled by the thought that their child is advanced in their development because they’re quick to learn numbers or letters or they have a large vocabulary or they can read easily.

But, and this is a big but, really hear this, please. Just because a child is academically advanced does not, capital N-O-T, mean the child is socially or emotionally advanced. IQ and EQ are very, very, very different things. Let me say that again. Just because a child at any age is academically advanced, that does not mean that the child is socially or emotionally advanced.

IQ and EQ are very different things. That’s why if you put a 16-year-old Doogie Howser or a Sheldon Cooper in college, they will likely not do well socially. They might do fine academically, but socially they just cannot relate to 18, 19, 22-year-olds. Because at age 16, they may not be capable of reading cues of older people and understanding things like sarcasm and teasing. They’re just not there on the IQ developmental path yet. 

Now, here’s another thought. A kid, a nine-year-old or a 10-year-old with a very high IQ or even a 14-year-old, may still need to be reminded to brush their teeth every night because they don’t have the executive function yet. They’re not deducing that if they brush their teeth every night, they’ll have a higher probability of not having cavities. They’re not remembering. They’re not planning from their executive function. They’re not connecting all the dots. 

Doing all of that, the reminder, the follow through, the projecting takes executive function, and they don’t have it yet. So as parents, one of the most important things we can do is learn the ceiling of developmental ability of our kid’s age or ages. 

Another mistake we sometimes make as parents is making our three-year-old equivalent in development to our five-year-old because in our minds, they’re both just littles. I mean come on Lisa. They’re not just that far off. It’s just two years. 

Let me tell you something. There is a huge difference developmentally, brain developmentally, between a three-year-old and a five-year-old. A five-year-old is capable of so much more than a three-year-old on the scale. Even an 18-year-old, which I currently have, cannot be expected to think and do as a 25 or a 30-year-old. You can see this in the difference between a freshman in college and a senior in college. Even though it’s only four years apart, developmentally, brain developmental wise, it’s huge. It’s like an ocean between a freshman and a senior.

This is another trap we fall into. At 18, young adults can enlist in the military, leave home, and even fight wars, but that does not mean their brain is fully developed, let alone as developed as a 30-year-old’s. In this case, knowledge is power. 

In all these examples in understanding brain development, it does serve a parent to seek out information about well-proven science and about childhood development and what a child is and is not capable of doing and understanding. The information is valuable because a parent can then weigh that knowledge against their own expectations and values and formulate limits and rules and expectations that build connection with their kids that work for the parents, the kids, and the family. 

What happens then when the parent learns the information, like in this case of the ceiling of developmental capability of a five-year-old, and the parent weighs it against their own values to formulate age appropriate expectations and limits.

When this is all happening, when I take the information, I learn it, and I compare it against what I want, and I manage the understanding myself of what my kid is capable of, that parent builds confidence in themselves. Confidence. That confidence then manifests as an air of authority. You become the authority on your family.

At the end of the day, you and your children will be far better served by your having an energy of authority rather than having a head full of knowledge. There is a big difference. The key piece to the puzzle is marrying your own experiences and your own intuition with knowledge about yourself and your kids. It’s a mashup or a blending of all this. It’s not just leaning on the expert.

The late, great Maya Angelou says when we know better, we do better. So we take the know better from the developmental chart, from listening to this podcast, from gathering information. We take the know better and then we do better. When we do better, we’re becoming the authority on our parenting, on our kids, and our family.

Knowledge from a book or a chart or another person is only beneficial when you couple it with the experiential knowledge sprinkled in with a few mistakes here and there. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. A flawed parent is far better than a perfect parent because they model for their children how to accept mistakes, course correct, learn, and grow.

When we get stuck in some sort of system set up by someone else, even a so-called expert, we get disillusioned when it doesn’t work or it doesn’t explain what to do in a particular circumstance. At the end of the day, the goal here is to connect with your kids, not implement a bunch of hard core systems. 

Now, that doesn’t mean I’m not here to give you some guidelines and information to some ideas. I meet you here each week, and I give you tools, support, and coaching on the path to real world peaceful parenting. I believe in that 1,000%. I’ve seen the difference it can make when you use these tools, support, and coaching on the path to becoming the authority or the expert on your particular family.

It’s very different when we’re seeking ideas versus someone telling you exactly what to do so you go out and do it like a robot. The same parent who shared that opening thought at the beginning of this episode, we were talking about this inside The Hive, my membership community, which you can learn more about theHiveCoaching.com. 

She said to me very matter of factly, “Lisa, I’ve proven to myself that I can’t be trusted to be a good parent.” Sound familiar? Now, if you’ve had this thought, something similar to it, something like it, you mirror it, you relate to it. Please, please, please hear me. I am here to tell you that that thought or anything close to it is 100% not true. You have not proven anything to yourself. It is not a fact that you cannot trust yourself to be a good parent. That is not a fact at all, and it is not true.

What’s happened is that you’ve had a random thought, and you think it over and over and over again. It creates what we call a belief. A belief is a thought that you’ve had over and over and over again that feels true. It’s not true. It feels true. 

Your brain is then given the task of finding evidence to support your belief. Here’s the kicker. Whatever your belief is, whatever it is. If you believe the world is flat, if you believe the world is round, your brain will find evidence to support it 100% of the time. It’s how the brain works. This is a scientific fact. The human brain is designed to seek evidence that our beliefs are true, and it finds it 100% of the time. Then that evidence reinforces the belief. So it just feels more and more and more true. 

But at the end of the day, beliefs are just thoughts. Beliefs are thoughts we think over and over and over again, and they feel like they’re true. If you think I have proven to myself that I’m an amazing parent, or I am an amazing parent to my kids, your brain will seek and find evidence to prove that’s true. It will find it 100% of the time. 

This literally changed my life when I learned this. Thoughts are just thoughts. You, yes you, right now you, I am talking to you. You have the power to choose which thoughts you want to believe and which thoughts you want to assign your brain to look for evidence. You have that power right now. If that just scrambled your brain and you’re hungry to know more about that, come join The Hive. Because we study this. We work on it. We put it into action in great detail inside The Hive.

What I want you to take away from today’s episode is that you have the power to become your own authority on your family, your kids, and your parenting. You don’t need an expert. You have the power to learn new information and tools that work for you, your kids, and your family. I’m here every week to support you in that mission. That is my job. 

I meet you here every Wednesday. I bring you the tools, the support, and the coaching for you to become the authority on you, your parenting, your kids, and your family. What happens is when you find what works for you, your confidence grows. Your kids rest in the security of that newfound authority. When that happens, your connection with your kids grows. When connection grows, cooperation follows. So good, right?

So your homework this week is to find what works for you, your kids, your family so your confidence can grow. So you can become the authority. Not someone else, not an author, not an influencer, not another family, you. You are the authority on you, your kids, your parenting, your family. Becoming the authority is one of the greatest things you can do because it creates connection, and where there’s connection, cooperation follows.

Now, remember. 2023 is the year of upleveling our parenting. We’re doing this together, you and I. When we uplevel our parenting, this is where small changes can lead to big results. I want big results for you. How do you get big results? You find what works for you, your kids, your family. When that happens, your confidence grows. When your confidence grows, you become your own authority on you, your parenting, your kids, your family.

So this week, think about hey, what am I doing that’s working? What are my thoughts I tell myself about my parenting? Do I say to myself things like I’ve proven that I can’t be trusted? Or do I say to myself I’ve proven that I am an amazing parent to these kids? I was meant to parent these kids. Your thoughts matter because they guide what your brain looks for evidence.

So my invitation to you, my homework, my goal for you is I want you to feel empowered to become the authority in your own household. Ah, I want this for you. Yes, you. Right now. So do your homework and really commit to the thought that I am the authority of my own household. With Lisa’s help and assistance, I will continue to grow in the path to real world peaceful parenting, but I am the leader. I am the one that is doing this.

Ah, so good. Yeah? I want it for you. I want it for your kids. I want it for your whole family. Okay. Until we meet again, I’m wishing you peaceful parenting. 

Thank you so much for listening today. I want to personally invite you to head over to thepeacefulparent.com/welcome and sign up for my free peaceful parenting minicourse. You’ll find everything you need to get started on the path to peaceful parenting just waiting for you over there at www.thepeacefulparent.com/welcome. I can’t wait for you to get started. 

Thanks for listening to Real World Peaceful Parenting. If you want more info on how you can transform your parenting, visit thepeacefulparent.com. See you soon.