Your Greatest Parenting Resource

Hi everyone, it's Sam. And John. Welcome to part two of the Mindful Parenting Course: Lessons to Bring Into Your Parenting. In the first section, we focused on lessons and activities for you, the parent, to become a more mindful family leader. In this section, we'll bring you lessons and activities that are designed to help you implement mindfulness into your everyday parenting. We begin with a lesson to help you discover and tap into your most valuable resource as a parent. It's something we all have control over and it's completely free. John, what is this magical tool? Attention. The answer is attention. What you attend to and bring your focus on, your children notice. This is an important realization. It means that what you notice and what you attend to is the sort of things that your child will want to repeat. Like every time they make a clicking noise with their pen, I stop, whatever I'm doing. Say, please don't click your pen and then it keeps happening. Right? How does that happen? Well, actually you turned to face them and you delivered your attention. And so instead you could direct your attention towards something that we wanna see more of. We could say, oh, I noticed that you're reading that book. What book? Yeah. What I'm hearing too is that you don't know how things are gonna change as you call attention to the positive behavior and how that might be a relief to hear that from your parent, and that might stop the nervousness or mitigate it in some way. So you mentioned praise, and I'm wondering if there are do's and don'ts around praising our kids and what advice you have on that. I like to think about the concept sort of productive praise. So our praise should be really purposeful about the core element that we wanna see more of. Is it the kindness? Is it the patience? Is it the curiosity? We're showing our child and using our parent power to teach them internally what is worth celebrating and there we can do more of. Yeah. Yeah. But it also got me thinking about stating things in the positive. When your instinct is to say, stop teasing your sister, right? How can we frame that in the positive? Well, please be kind to your sister. So that's such a lovely example, right? The sibling interaction, right? Don't tease your sister. We want to snuff and control, but instead we've actually directed all our attention there. In that same interaction, we could turn to the sibling, great job not listening to what he has to say, right? So let's notice that behavior, that they're showing fortitude and that they're trying not to escalate or using negative coping strategies of like hitting back or saying a mean thing. And that teasing child at that moment is left with, do I double down? Do I just keep going even though it's clearly not getting noticed?...