Ep #272: From Chaos to Calm — One Mom’s Co-Regulation Transformation

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. I am honored. Be with you here today, and one of the reasons I’m honored is because today’s episode is special. For the past few weeks we’ve been talking about meltdowns. We’ve been talking about emotional regulation, and we’ve been talking about the mistakes parents make, and we’ve been talking about our nervous system Over the last two weeks, we’ve been building something together.
In episode two 70. We talked about what emotional regulation actually is. The kids aren’t born knowing how to handle big feelings. The behavior is communication and that your kids literally borrow calm from you. Then in episode 2 71, we busted the four biggest mistakes parents make when they think they’re doing emotional regulation, but it’s actually backfiring and today.
Today is episode 2 72, and this is the one where all of that comes to life because today you’re going to hear what three years of this work actually looks like in a real home with a real kid on hard days. Because I have one of our longtime Hive members with me here today, Dina, and.
Her daughter didn’t suddenly become easy. Life didn’t suddenly become smooth. Isn’t that the truth? And there wasn’t some magical overnight fixed. What changed was drum roll, please, Dina. And when she changed, everything shifted. If you’re parenting a strong-willed. Kid or an A DHD kid, or a dyslexic kid, or a highly sensitive kid.
If mornings feel like a battlefield, if you feel like you’re bracing for impact before your feet even hit the floor, today’s episode is for you. So join me and welcoming Dina. Dina, welcome. Thank you so much. I am happy to be here. I’m excited again to be able to share with everyone. Yes, I am. We’re just so grateful.
For your contribution and your willingness to share your story and pay it forward. So Dina, let’s jump in here. Take us back to the beginning. I think it’s been about three years, and you can correct me if I have the number wrong, but take us back what were mornings like in your house before you joined the hots.
All right, I’m gonna take you back ’cause it’s actually been more like close to six years. I found you back in 2020. I joined a three day challenge in 2021. That’s when I joined the Hive, and that’s when I started getting a lot of my coaching from the get go. Mornings were such a struggle. I can’t even tell you how much I did not like mornings with my daughter.
As much as I am a structured type a person, follow routine and stuff, my daughter is not. She’s also, as you say, very often a full context for it and I with the different in our personalities. I was not finding a way through my mornings. They were meltdowns, couldn’t move forward, couldn’t follow direction, and I didn’t even know where to start.
And when I came on with you and started getting coaching right away, I’ll never forget this, you suggested a checklist and I was like, Hmm. Because that brought some buy-in from her. And we did. We started a checklist, and this was really for me, the first, um, empowering moment. I kept all of these checklists.
For, I don’t know how long, but I had over a hundred. I did them every day with her, and she got so excited that before I knew it, things were just getting done and I couldn’t believe it. And it was just simple getting her excited about it, having her engagement in it. It was just unbelievable. That’s awesome.
And as I remember. There was yelling in the beginning and power struggles and constant negotiating and maybe a little bit of anxiety and urgency, and I remember you saying every meltdown felt like the end of the world. When you think back to that season, what did it feel like inside your body every morning de.
I was a nervous wreck and the thought I always had, and I do wanna share in case anybody else has this thought is, my thought was, this is so hard. Mm-hmm. This is so hard. And I, it wasn’t till a little later in my journey with you, but that was one of the biggest things that held me back from moving forward with her and being able to change my mindset and how I approached mornings and I finally got rid of that.
Thought, threw it out and replaced it with something different. And today, so many years later, mornings are still messy at times. Don’t get me wrong, she’s 11 now. Okay. However, the things that I thought she could never do, like get herself dressed, brush her teeth, you know, basic things are just like a no brainer now.
That’s awesome. Yeah. So I want listeners, I want you to hear this. Dina wasn’t a bad mom. She was someone who was reinforcing every day a nervous system in survival mode. By thinking the thought, this is hard. It was almost pret triggering the trigger to go into a dysregulated nervous system every morning.
And when we’re parenting a strong-willed kid, which Dina’s daughter has officially. You know, where’s the title of Full Contact Sport? Our nervous system goes into overdrive. We brace, we anticipate, we overexplain, we over-function. We try to control the outcome because we’re terrified of what happens if we don’t.
Right. And this is something good to recognize if you, the listener, are relating to this right now. Right. So let’s have Dina share with us. At what point did you realize this wasn’t about controlling your daughter’s behavior, it was about regulating yourself first? I don’t remember the exact moment, but I think it became more of when I was having trouble with my own emotions and besides just the yelling, I was so.
I don’t wanna say down on myself, but just so depleted after engagements with her and these meltdowns. And I was exhausted. And I was exhausted every day at the end of the day, and I’m like, I can’t keep functioning like this. I can’t have a household like this. I have a husband. I’m a daugh daughter. I’m a sister.
I can’t keep doing this every day. And so. At the depletion point, I said, this isn’t about her anymore. This is about me looking at me, because we’re just butting heads, you know? We’re responding to one another. She does something. I come back at it. I’m talking too much. She’s like, just negotiating
as defiance, but as a skill, needing to be learned. As a superpower. So one of her superpowers is she is a great negotiator, man. She’s good. And right now it’s just diff, you know, it’s a challenge to parent, but I want her to have those skills when she’s older. So I just had to come at things differently. So now when she’s constantly come back to me with different talks or we wanna negotiate this, but now I’ve learned boundaries and I’ve learned how to set up boundaries to begin with being very clear.
What I’ve also learned the skill of is I can. Rework those boundaries if they don’t fit us. But we don’t do it at that moment in time. And I feel more empowered now than before where I felt like everything was a reaction. Nothing was proactive. It was all reactive. And for me, I can’t live in that reactive world too long.
Yes, there are reactive things you have to get, you know, you have to do. Like is somebody, is she in danger? Is there something that needs to be addressed right away? But. I got thinking about myself and preparing and being more proactive. Beautiful. Now listener, listen to what Dina said. She didn’t say her daughter changed.
First she said that Dina, the mom talked less. She paused. She stopped over explaining. She started using when. Then she stopped chasing behavior. She put up boundaries. She stopped trying to fix every uncomfortable feeling. What does that mean? All that translates into Dina worked on regulating herself first, and we worked a lot on this in the hive, and it is a skill within ourselves.
Regulating is is not just a skill our kids need to learn. Most of us come into parenting. Not knowing how to regulate ourselves, because we grew up in a time when it wasn’t modeled for us for a whole host of reasons that we don’t need to get into. But talk to us about the process, Dena, day to day, of regulating yourself first and just kind of what that looked like.
The messy middle. The messy middle. We talk about all the that all the time in the hive, right? Yes. What I learned about myself is regulating myself, is giving me enough time to have a moment to myself again. I just talked about being reactive, right? I wanted to fix everything. I wanted to be in the middle.
I wanted to explain everything, and I had to start catching myself. And in one of your podcasts, I believe you talked about the CEO and the Castle Guards. So the Castle Guards are the ones that are reactive and they run around, they bump into each other when something’s going on, and the CEO is the one that’s like, Hey, let’s, let’s, let’s slow this down.
And for me, I, I got this picture in my head, so every time I want to just. I get triggered or I get surprised or I get unexpected from her, or she’s has a reaction I’m not expecting. I think of my castle guards like running around and I’m like, okay, they’re just running around. I don’t have to respond to that, and I just take a deep breath and I say, okay, now I’m going to actively talk to her or actively listen to her before I.
Just blurt something out, and it’s messy still because there are times that I will just still, I go back into old, old habits and I will blurt something out. The thing now is I catch myself so fast and I’m like, okay, hey, I’m sorry you didn’t deserve that. I needed a minute. So let me take that back. Let me have my minute and then we can talk about it.
Because I, I’m not a hundred percent there, and there are some times when I’m tired, I’m hungry, I’ve had a rough day, and whatever goes on with her, I react to and I need to slow myself down. Yeah. Does that kind of answer your question? It, it does. And, and the CEO is the one who pauses in response, and the castle guards are the reactive.
And you’ve done a great job promoting yourself to CEO. I think, I mean, you’re an example to all of us really of what’s possible. And in the same breath, no CEO, no parent, no human is perfect and it’s never, our goal inside the hive is to be perfect. It’s progress, not perfection. We all lose it sometimes,
sometimes. And what I always say is when we lose it, we’re showing our kids that we’re human, we make mistakes, and then the goal shifts like a good CEO into recover and repair. And I think you also do that beautifully. You’ve really transformed from a parent into a calm leader of your household, don’t you think?
Absolutely. And that’s actually something I keep reminding myself. I’m the calm leader, and so before I approach a situation, I’m like, I’m the calm leader. It’s like a little mantra. I have my other mantra, which I’ll share that I, I say every day. It’s one day at a time, one week at a time, one quarter at a time, and one thing at a time.
And I say that every morning so that my brain gets wrapped around how I’m approaching everything that I’m doing. That gives me like something to solidify. But I also do say I’m the calm leader. Mm-hmm. And when that thought of like, this is hard or it’s gonna be a rough day, floats in, I let it float in, but then I push it out because my next mantra is I got this.
And that took me a long time to get there. So listener don’t think this happened like overnight. A lot of reflection had to happen for me to see what was going on and what I could work on. Yeah. And, and, and I think that I, I wish that we could all understand even on those really rough days, what our kids need is to rest in the safety of a calm leader.
When our kids are being at their absolute best, they need a calm leader. And when they’re showing us their, you know, absolute most storming. High feeling, high energy side. They need a calm leader. And what I know about your family, Dina, is just how much your daughter benefits from your calm leadership. And I want you to tell us the orthodontic story because it exemplifies this so beautifully.
So tell us what happened and tell us what that also would’ve looked like three years ago. Quick background. My daughter has two expanders, upper and lower if you don’t know, and it’s also called the Herps device, which is some arms in her her mouth. So basically she’s got a lot of metal in her mouth and the herps device is a modern version of headgear for anybody that wants to understand so you can get a mental picture from wherever you are from a listener.
So I was working, she knocked on the door and she goes, mom, I have a problem. I said, what’s up? And she goes. Look, and part of her device had popped off well since everything’s connected. Part of it popped off, meaning she couldn’t close her mouth. She now couldn’t eat, she couldn’t open her mouth. And I’m like, oh dear.
Like, and my castle guard started running around and I was like, I gotta get this fixed. It’s 5 0 5 Eastern time, so the office is closed. And I’m like, never been in this one so far. And she’s just extremely hungry. So I make my phone calls. I’m trying to talk to the on-call person. My husband comes home and we get some direction to try to disconnect some of this stuff in her mouth.
Mind you, her mouth is small. This is not something we’ve done. So she loses it, I mean, loses it beyond losing it and. My husband and I are trying to un loosen this thing to get her and the on-call person’s on the phone with me hearing all of this too, which is stressful enough. You’ve got a screaming kid.
We’re trying to get into her mouth. It’s not working. We don’t have anything. And your daughter is very sensitive? Yes. Very emotional and very scared in this moment. Correct. She was all over the place like. I don’t even know how, it’s like a volcano exploded and that is it. Everything was all over between tears and screaming.
She just wanted it out of her mouth. She literally wanted us to rip the whole thing out of her mouth. That’s, she was to that point, and she’s getting it out, but that at the same time, we’re trying to, she’s fighting us, so at the same time, help, help, help. We’re fighting against everything. So everything is just, you know, and we’re doing our best.
Finally the on-call person’s like, Hey, bring her into the office, and she is like flat out, no, she wants nothing. She just wants it out of her mouth. But at the moment we got to a point, I said, no enough. We just need to go into the office. I said it very calmly and she was. Freaking out and I simply got myself up, got the stuff I needed, moved into the car, poked her into the car.
Even though she is thrown on the pit, she didn’t wanna get in the car, nothing. Got her into the car and we started driving. And the beauty of all the work that we just had been doing is that this meltdown would’ve continued in the car and screaming and everything, but the two of us were able to breathe.
And I was able to start to just break it down for her. And the first question I said to her is, Hey, I understand you don’t wanna go to the office. I understand you’re really scared. I said, what do you need right now? And she’s like, I just need, I just need a quiet, quiet for a minute. Can I just look at my phone?
And that’s just her way of like just decompressing per a minute. And she did it for a few minutes and then we started to talk about the whole process. What had happened, what we were gonna do. I explained to her, she did nothing wrong. ’cause that was the other thing is my daughter always thinks she did something wrong.
And I was like, you did nothing wrong. It, it just popped out. I said, what we’re gonna go do is get this handle. We’re gonna get this so you get it out of your mouth so you can close your mouth so we can get, um, you able to eat. He goes, yeah, I’m really hungry. I said, I get that. And I said, that’s why we’re gonna solve this together.
I said, we’re gonna go and we’re gonna take that. So we get there. She’s pretty calm, but I know better. Mm-hmm. That was just the surface cover. We get to this office, this lovely lady is there to help us, and Kenzie lost it all over again. All over again. It went beyond what I, you know, luckily there was three of us only in the office, but it, you know, I was like, oh my goodness.
And the lady was very nice. She’s like. Don’t worry about it, mom. This happens all the time. I said, I understand and I’m trying to keep Kenzie calm to try to, so she can get into her mouth. Well then the lady offered, she got it all out, cleaned it up, then she offered to put it all back in. Well that just sent off another true alarm.
And the reality was I didn’t wanna pull her outta school to bring her for an appointment tomorrow where there she can do everything. I just very calmly looked at Kenzie and I said, honey, I understand you don’t wanna do this, but we are gonna get this done tonight. And she very simply turned around and she goes, I hate you, mom.
And the lady goes, I think she might hate me a little bit more. It was kind of comical. And I looked at Kenzie and I said, I understand that right now, honey, but we are still gonna move forward and get this done. We got it done. She was very upset. We walked out, we got into the car. I asked her if she was still hungry, and she said yes.
We went up to a restaurant and within 10 minutes everything was calm again. And I don’t believe we ever would’ve gotten there if I hadn’t been able to stay calm myself. And in the past I would’ve been like, stop that. Why are you doing that? Just, just.
She’s fighting against us. We would’ve been like, we’re, we’re trying to help you, but you’re not helping yourself. Right. And I would’ve been in a whole different state. Yep. And in the meantime, I was letting her just have her emotions and just being there because just being there was what she needed. By me being calm, as you say, it’s co-regulation.
She was able to pull from my being calm through at home, the car ride at the office, leaving the office, going to the restaurant. And I didn’t have to say a lot. I just needed to be there, but be very calm and be very firm about what was happening. Right. And explain things to her that she needed to know.
Listen, I.
The example it is Dina didn’t give in. She had a strong spine and a soft heart, and that’s the definition of calm leadership. Dina, you didn’t get embarrassed. You weren’t worried about being embarrassed. You weren’t worried about the I hate you in the moment. You weren’t telling her she was being difficult.
You weren’t attacking her character. You walked in and expected the second explosion. Which happened, right? The woman, the, the orthodontist said, we can put it back in. You guided your daughter through that because you were, and, and you know, the idea that you were able to say, I don’t wanna pull her outta school.
She’s in an intense school. There’s a lot of work. It’s not good for her to get behind in homework. I know this, but the fact that you could stay in your higher brain. Not be triggered with rage, embarrassment, frustration in your middle brain. You were able to stay in your higher brain and say, this orthodontist is offering to put it back in, which it has to go back in.
We can’t progress. We’re not gonna suddenly get rid of this. And if I let her put it in, now I don’t have to miss work. Take her outta school because you were the CEO, the calm leader. You’re able to use your logical prefrontal cortex to sort through all that and say, yes, we’re going to do that, and then calm Kenzie down enough to allow it to happen.
And that is a regulated parent who then turns around and co-regulate with her daughter even in a really protracted, long, stressful experience. Yeah, and I’ll tell you in the past when I would’ve gotten dysregulated by all this and been all in a a storm myself. I couldn’t have thought of all those steps.
Like I just would’ve been trying to pick up the pieces the next day and the ability for in her being all upset in that moment, I was able to put pieces together and think is only like the true reason of being in my frontal court, you know, executive functioning right there. Because in the past it’s like when things like this, it’s like it set the tone for the rest of my evening or just threw me completely off and it’s like.
I didn’t mean that she’s allowed to feel, be scared, do exactly what she wants to do. I just need to stay calm so I can think for us, set the boundaries and be very connected to her too. I knew she was uncomfortable. I knew this was an awful experience. But at the end too, I told her, I said, Hey, you did a good job.
We got it done. And I said, and we talked about too, like, okay, now the orthodontist told you not to do some of this with your mouth. Be so that it doesn’t pop up. You didn’t do anything wrong, but let’s make sure, ’cause we really don’t wanna do this again, do we? And she’s like, no. I was like, okay, good. We got a little progress.
Now that’s not to say it won’t happen again, but the thing is, is we have the experience of it now to know what we. You know, like how we can move forward. I learned something from the orthodontist too, so that I could disconnect it next time, you know? So we all learned. So I was even able to learn something at the same time while she was really upset there at the office.
It’s beautiful. It’s beautiful and you know, real world peaceful parent listener. I really want you to sink in and hear Dina didn’t try to eliminate the big feelings. Her daughter. That was never the goal. The goal was to shorten the recovery time in between the storms and offer her daughter the co-regulation.
And we can only do that when we’re regulated ourselves first. So I’m pretty sure Dina, that many times you took a quick pause, checked in, regulated yourself. I know you told me the story that you said something. Like it’s imperfect, but I’ve still got this right. You, yeah. You found a mantra that was your regulator, which is what you do a lot and it’s very impressive.
I used to do this too, and you, I still do it with Malcolm outcome. Having a mantra that is like a guiding post and setting an intention and a regulator that you repeat over and over and over again. Talk to us about what that does for you. Well, it, it started, and I’m going to go back is it started with, one of your suggestions on coaching was to start journaling.
And I was like, I don’t have time to journal. Right. That was the first thing in my head and I was like, I don’t have time. Well, I went and found something called the Five Minute Journal. Mm-hmm. Okay. Literally five minutes. Yep, yep. Okay. And I, I just said, okay, I’m gonna commit to doing this. This is five minutes of my day.
You do it in the morning, you do it at night. I started doing this and it was such, I, I found a newfound like relax and calming in this. And I was like, you and I came up with a saying and I, and my saying was, I can, and I will be a calm leader today and do the job I’m supposed to do because one of my other thoughts was this was a really tough job to be.
My daughter’s parent. And I didn’t like that thought. It wasn’t helping me. It wasn’t serving me. Just like, you know, this is hard. So I got rid of it. So I changed the mantra around and every day I would change it just a little bit to tweak the day. You know what I mean? But I can, and I will be a calm leader.
Today was one of the ones I really started with, and that was kind of my guiding. To start doing that. And then, like I said, now I’ve got this one day at a time, one week at a time, and it morphed. So I didn’t, you know, I didn’t feel like I had to be structured into one thing, but what I found for me is it’s kind of like everybody has a different little thing, but it’s like maybe you hold onto something, maybe you look at a picture or something.
But for me to say out loud, and my mantra is, I don’t even just write it down. I say it out loud too because I hear it come back to me and then it actually solidifies for me. I love it. I do it too. And you know, it counteracts the negative thoughts. Mm-hmm. Right. We, I don’t for sure don’t think we realize how often we’re setting negative intentions by saying things like, oh, this is hard, or I can’t handle this.
Or, what is she gonna throw at me today? That is a lot of negative self-talk. That then, you know, sets the direction of, it’s almost like we’re pret triggering ourselves before the trigger comes. Right? If listener, if you are saying, you know, your feet hit the floor in the morning and you’re like, Ugh, what is he or she gonna throw at me today?
Parenting is so hard. You’re walking yourself into pret trigger, then you go to the kitchen and you’ve made the toast and you’ve cut it in half. In squares and suddenly your kid wants triangles and they make a little peep about it. Suddenly you’re dysregulated because you pret triggered yourself into the dysregulation.
And I would say, Dina, this was a lot of what was happening in your home and you recognized it and you worked on it faithfully, diligently with intention. Right. And I would wrap this up to say. You tell me if you agree with this. You’re not bracing anymore. You’re not parenting from fear, you’re not scanning for disaster.
You’re not yelling, you’re not over-functioning. You become steady, calm. You’re a leader and your daughter is. She feeds off of it moment to moment. You’re modeling that for her. She borrows your regulation. You guys even talk about it in your home and it’s really been transformative for you, her, your relationship, and your entire family, right?
Yeah, absolutely. Bracing is a good way to put it, but like, I like the pret trigger. I hadn’t really thought of that that term, but yes, I had pret triggered myself. Constantly, constantly, because I’m a planner, so I, I wanted to, I, I wanted to know everything beforehand, so I was pret triggering every situation, and it wasn’t helpful.
Yeah. I get up in the morning and some days I’m like, okay, I’m tired, so I need to be more gentle with myself. I need to just have some more grace this morning. So my whole mindset of that positivity versus the negative of thoughts. Is definitely transformational for me because that is what I carry with me as I am.
Whatever may come my way. And I also use the mantra, I’ve got this, I, I got tools, I, I’ve got it. It may not be smooth every day. It could be very messy. It could be very noisy, but I’ve got this and the biggest tool I know is that. Whatever happens when I look back on it and reflect later, I’ll be able to learn what other tools I could have used so that the next time something like this comes around, I’m even more prepared and I talk to myself about that so that I am prepared the next time and it’s in my brain in a positive way.
Beautiful. Okay. There are parents right now listening to this who feel completely overwhelmed by their kids’ big emissions. Intense reactions in daily power struggles. What do you want them to know or hear? You’re not alone. When I stepped into the hive back in 20 21, 1 of the things I felt, the biggest feeling I felt was I was alone.
And I said I, I couldn’t be when all of this was going down and my daughter was just over the top, that’s the way I used to think of it. I was like, I’m so alone. But I said, I can’t be. That’s why I got into listening to your podcast. Then I got into the Hive. You’re not alone. There are tools out there, there are people, and there’s a wonderful support group in the Hive.
I would not be where I am now without listening to the podcast, going to the workshops, working with you. I, I’ve totally, in six years, I, I can’t even, it, it’s, I, I, I giggle a little bit because of where I was, but it’s all because I’ve taken the time to really look internally to myself and want to improve, and I’m seeing the benefits.
It’s not every day. It’s still very messy. It’s still changing and stuff like that, but I can calm, and the, the one most important thing is, I know it may seem overwhelming. To you out there as a listener, but learning how to calm yourself first and being calm will set the whole tone for anything that’s thrown at you.
It is hard to remain calm in the moment. I know it. Finding your mantra of finding your thing that helps you stay there is just something I’d say work on because that will help you. Yeah, it is hard, but it is possible. Very much so. And if Dina can do it, you can do it. You know, Dina didn’t become calm because life got easier.
Life got easier because Dina became calm. That’s the order. Calm doesn’t land on you. It’s an intention that we set. Mm-hmm. And I know it may seem like if you think I’m too busy, I don’t know how to, it’s just five minutes a day. And that’s all I started with is just finding five minutes. It’s like the five minute journal.
It’s making one sentence, it’s writing down One note, I didn’t get to being calm overnight. This, like I said, I’ve been doing the, the Hive here for almost five, six years, and there were many times in many of the coaching calls that I was not calm. Dina, what you’ve shared. Today is just solid gold, and I know you are incredibly motivated to pay it forward, and my heart is just filled with gratitude for your willingness to share your transformation.
And I’m really grateful and I know the listeners have enjoyed hearing your story today. So thank you from the bottom of my heart. You’re welcome. I’m, and as you said, I, I wanna pay this forward because if I can do it and I know how messy my life was prior to, I just want somebody else to feel the feeling of hope and know you’re not alone and get to the place, but just understanding it doesn’t happen overnight and it takes work.
Yep. I always say it’s simple, but not easy. The tools are simple. But you have to implement them day in and day out. When you falter, you’ve gotta regroup and try again. Right? And the number one goal always. Is to regulate ourselves first. It is the rising tide that lifts all boats. Right. I say that all the time inside the hive.
Yep, absolutely. It’s regulating ourselves. Yeah, and it’s, it’s something you say all the time and. It took a couple years for it to really hit home as to what you were talking about. You know, it’s nice when you think there’s just tools and you could just use them and things will get better. But No, it’s, it’s talking about looking into your inner yourself.
Yeah. And to help the whole situation. So, yeah. And you know, I even find having a 21-year-old that self-regulation, working on myself, you know, it’s, it’s like an onion. There’s layers that give peel back. New things show up. We move into new phases and I evolve, my son evolves. Times are evolving. There’s new things out there to tackle as the child or the kid progresses through different ages.
Right? And it’s really, really, really work worth doing. So to the listener, I wanna speak directly to you. If mornings feel chaotic, if you feel like you’re constantly putting out fires, if you’ve yelled at your kid and then cried in your car afterwards, if you feel uncomfortable, or even dare I say, ashamed of how reactive you’ve become, hopefully today showed you that you’re not broken.
You’re not broken, I promise you, you’re not missing a parenting gene. What’s going on is your nervous system is overloaded. It’s easy to understand how it gets overloaded in this world we live in, in this current environment, and you know, in the year of 2026. But here’s what I also know, and hopefully you heard this from Dina today.
When you regulate first yourself, when you lower your urgency, when you stop over explaining, when you hold boundaries calmly, when you allow big emotions and discomfort. From that calm place, everything shifts, everything. I promise you, it’s not perfect. Tina showed us that it’s not instant. It’s been a journey and it’s beautifully messy, but it’s steady and steady calm.
Leadership changes families, and inside the hive, that’s exactly what we work on. I teach you how to regulate yourself first, how to hold boundaries without yelling. How to use simple language, like when then how to create personalized strategies. I’m not gonna give you scripts together. We’re going to create personalized strategies for your unique child, like an 11-year-old Kenzie with mouth gear and big emotions and a lot of homework that she doesn’t always wanna do.
And Dina found her personalized strategy for herself and for Kinzie. That’s why I don’t offer cookie cutter solutions. You listener need real, practical, nervous system-based leadership that you can bring into your home. So if Dina can move from a hundred checklists and daily yelling to calm, connected CEO leadership, you can too.
And if this feels like your moment, come meet Dina, come join me, and all the other Dina’s inside the hive. Come join your village because we’re waiting for you and we can’t wait to welcome you. Help you transform into the calm, peaceful leader in your home. Until we meet again, I’m wishing you peaceful parenting.
Thanks for listening to Real World Peaceful Parenting. If you want more info on how you can transform your parenting, visit the peaceful parent.com. See you soon.