Carrie
Host
00:00
sometimes when we had to process what we were going through, we wonder do other families live like this? Do other families have negotiations for two hours on an airplane because they wanted to watch Bluey for two hours versus looking at the awesome, amazing Grand Canyon? Is this what other people look like? Do other people have moments where they wanted to go skiing and then their kid laid on the ground and cried for like two hours? Is this what other people go through? I think that there's a lot of people that are going through these things. Maybe we don't talk about it because either we're fear based and we're wondering like what is this person going to look like as a giant human?
00:40
Welcome to Heart to Heart Parents. Let's connect with our kids and learn together. I'm Carrie. I was a former teacher and speech therapist. I'm also a parent of two spirited, gifted, highly sensitive kids. I was quickly brought to my knees as a parent when I thought that I would see a rosy lens version of parenting just as they present on Instagram, but I quickly learned that's not real life. I will provide real life experiences and transform them into moments for connections and change for you to use in your house, with tips that work for our family and how to implement them in your family. Connect to heart to heart with your child, with your partners and other parents, as we learn that we are not alone. We have a community and, although maybe we feel different from other families, there are many of us out there and we are creating the next era of deep thinkers and change makers. Come along with me on this journey with Heart to Heart Parents. Hello and welcome back to another day of fun.
01:46
I'm Carrie and I'm here today to talk about how parents are not alone and how we can work together to learn from each other and grow with that. So let's start off today. Parents are not alone. We know that we have the other person in our house with us, but obviously I mean, we're not alone in our parenting. We have neighbors, we have friends, we have those online connections we make.
02:12
There are many of us that had kids that were born so bright and so spirited, so sensitive. There are a lot of things that I use to describe my kids, and those are the main ones spirited, bright and sensitive. So they came with a lot of energy, a lot of zest for life and then also a lot of sensitivities to the world around them. So when I talk about spirited, I mean that they came wanting to change the world. They were upset that their tiny human bodies were not get up and walk right away. They were upset that they couldn't wear their sunglasses because they felt weird on their ears. Or mom wanted them to wear this hat because it was cold outside, but they didn't want to wear that funky hat because it felt weird on their ears as well. So sensitivity was a huge piece to the puzzle for my family, as well as the energy that they brought. They came with more energy than a normal kid.
03:18
I was a teacher and a speech therapist so I know that, like little kids have a lot more energy than us. But the energy and the spirit that we saw with our kids was kind of unmarked and not something that I had really seen a whole ton. I know that there are a lot of parents out there with kids like this and I really want to work with other parents and help to figure out how we can help these kids. So there are things that I have learned, one of the things that my husband and I recently learned the hard way with our kids actually, it wasn't recently, because our son is almost turning nine, but it feels like a blink of an eye. As they say, the days are long but the years are short. That's pretty much life with kids like these, or any kids, just being a parent. I think, in general, changing our expectations was a huge key piece for my husband and I, and it looked like allowing us to feel a little bit of sadness, maybe a little bit of grief and pain for not having the exact parenting journey that we had expected.
04:27
I am a huge visual person, so I had visualized exactly what I thought parenting would look like. I had created Pinterest boards and seen the perfect Instagram photos. You all know them. They have that like really lovely, iridescent, golden sunlight. I don't even know how they do that, because I look like this every day. I don't know, but they're like the picture, perfect, right? The mom has the great hair. The kids are looking lovingly into their mom's eyes, oh, and, by the way, they're following every single request that the mom is asking, because that's real life, right? That's everyday life. So I had these expectations of what parenting was going to look like. I thought it's going to be so easy for me to teach my kids to read. My kids are going to be so well-rounded and I'm going to be able to keep up with my house. If you guys could see my house right now, there's like this giant giraffe in the middle of the floor with monster trucks, oh, and all the leftover Valentine's Day things all over the floor because that's life and so a huge thing for my husband and I was accepting our reality.
05:36
I learned quickly, quickly into parenthood, that I could have the perfect house, that I could have the perfect house, live the perfect life, be the perfect mama, perfect wifey, all of these pieces. But I would lose my head. Sometimes it would bubble up and I would have these moments where I just didn't have patience for my children. Sometimes I didn't have patience for my husband. It was even more intensified when I was nursing and I had all those hormones going. I did not realize it until I weaned my second kiddo and I just felt so happy and so energized and I didn't realize how much my hormones had really affected me. That's another tangent.
06:21
But I wanted everybody to know right now that when we let go of certain expectations having the perfect, clean house then we can recharge ourselves and we can be there more for our kids and emotionally there for our husbands if they're having a rough day, or for our friends if they're having a rough day, sometimes our parents having a rough day. When we are able to recharge ourselves and we don't have to live in this perfect cookie cutter image that we see on Instagram with the loving child, then we can be true to ourselves and we have a better life. We have these better connections and we're living through our souls instead of living through our minds and what we picture as to be the perfect version. So I had All of those big ideas which manifested into real life once the child was born the first child and the second time. It was easier because I knew I already had things in place, but I did always daydream about teaching my children to read. I had no clue that, hey, these kids might not want to do this, they might not want to sit in the seat and learn all these fun teaching games that you had learned. Well, sometimes the games were fun, but some of the real teaching stuff right.
07:40
I had to learn to be flexible, which was hard for me and also very hard for my children as well, and my husband too. So we're not really flexible in our house. That's just how it goes. He's probably the most flexible out of us. All Love you.
07:52
So we had to create these new visions of peacefully living with our children. What was that going to look like for us? We had to create these new versions. We had to alter the mindset of how we were going to parent. Traditional parenting was not going to be something that was going to work with our children. It worked well with us when we were kids. My husband and I both grew up in very traditional families, and traditional worked for us. That's what we were as kids, what we needed as kids.
08:25
But this new era of kids that are being born, like my two children, they need a little bit something different. They are perfectionists, just like I was as a kid, and my husband and I are trying to maintain their self of self-esteem, while we also try to mold them into the human that society needs them to be. So I try to keep that fierceness, that spiritual, that spirit that comes out in my kids. I'm trying to keep that. I'm trying not to squelch that, but I'm also trying to help them become a human that we need in today's society. So I want to. My husband and I have always or we've learned. We haven't always, but we've learned to try to think about the positives. We think about the changes that we can make to help our children become the best versions of themselves and to also be whole and to have that spirit. We don't want to squelch that.
09:24
One example of our expectations versus reality was when we were traveling home from Legoland. Hurrah, it was awesome, by the way, check out Legoland, it's awesome. We were traveling from San Diego and we were on a plane trip of doom. We were flying with United, which we normally fly Southwest. We had a flight attendant who handed us some headphones. Dun dun, dun. That's where it escalated. The headphones were to plug into the seat with the movie screens.
09:53
We have always been device free in our family, so we allow them to listen to music and audio books, but we don't allow to watch movies. Yet that's just something that my husband and I had to make, a choice on which we come together and we make our choices. And we've learned that we have to be mindful in our choices because our two kids who are gifted, spirited, sensitive they have learned if we try something once, it's a pattern, because if we did it today, then that means we get to do it every day from here on out for the next 365 days. Right, right, it's a pattern. So that's what it looks like with our two kids. So here's this headset and my kids are going. Dad, dad, they give us these headphones. Can we plug them in? Do we get to watch a movie today? There's a screen here. Look, dad, there's a screen, there's a screen, there's a screen.
10:46
And this went on for about two and a half hours. No, it was like an hour of negotiating. Okay, you get one show, you give an inch. They try to take a mile, right, because they're like 10 steps ahead of us. We went through all of the negotiations and we almost missed the Grand Canyon. Yes, that's right, we were able to see the Grand Canyon from the air. We started at like the west side of it and we flew all the way over to the east side. At that moment, it was really cool because my husband and I were able to share with the kids.
11:17
This is why we don't plug into our devices. We are the only family on this airplane looking outside right now and watching this amazing natural wonder from the sky. We have not taken our children there yet, and now they are so excited to go. So it was all this negotiations, but we got them to see the reason why we don't plug in on the planes. We are also learning that, hey, we have this really, really strict rule no devices on the planes.
11:49
But if we want to go to Hawaii, here's what we need to do. So my husband and I are looking at how can we take what we have and not live in the fear or the sadness of oh, this is not what we expected. We wanted to be going to Europe when our kids were like almost 10. No, we can't do that. Oh man, are we going to? Even like it was hard to go to California, can we make it to Hawaii? It's our 10 year wedding anniversary. We really want to go to Hawaii and we do have to take our kids because they're spirited, sensitive and gifted. Yes, so we are planning to go to Hawaii and my husband and I have decided let's change what our plan of our 10 year anniversary look like. We're going to take the kids with us. We can find a place that has a low tide so that way our kids can sit in the water and they love the ocean. You and I can connect. While the kids are in the ocean, we will still be watching them, of course, but also when we are flying there, we will have a computer that is going to play the movies when we go on long flights. So we have to come up, we have to be 10 steps ahead. We are going to have this computer that we pull out on flights that are this amount of time and we set those rules. We've learned that we have to have these boundaries with our kids, but we've also learned that, hey, it doesn't look exactly as we had planned in our minds when we were on our Pinterest and Instagram boards. As I was pregnant, these things look different Sometimes, when we had to process what we were going through, we wonder do other families live like this?
13:25
Do other families have negotiations for two hours on an airplane because they wanted to watch Bluey for two hours versus looking at the awesome, amazing Grand Canyon? Is this what other people look like? Do other people have moments where they wanted to go skiing and then their kid laid on the ground and cried for like two hours? Is this what other people go through? I think that there's a lot of people that are going through these things. Maybe we don't talk about it because either we're fear-based and we're wondering, like, like, what is this person going to look like as a giant human? Or, you know, am I going to totally mess them up? Is this child going to be able to make it through grad school? We always say that passion, persistence, that's what's going to get us through grad school. That's how my husband and I survive each day is trying to turn it into a positive mindset. But I think we have similar things as parents. We just don't talk about them. One of those huge pieces is trying to shift our fear about what can happen to our kids to how do we best support our kids, how do we best help our children grow emotionally, physically, spiritually, mentally All of those pieces. Spiritually is a huge piece. Emotionally, mentally, those are all such key factors. And guess what? Most of our schools what are they looking at? Mentally? Physically, more mentally, they're looking at test scores. Right, they're looking at English and math. Those are the ones. What are the ones that the testing test formalized testing're looking at? English and math? Those are the ones. What are the ones that the testing test formalized testing are looking at? Those are, unfortunately, what we're focusing on.
15:01
When our two kids went to school. I had. I was a teacher, first grade teacher and speech therapist, so I had these views. I'm very passionate about good education. I had these views of what school was going to look like. My kids were going to love school as much as I did. And my heart broke when my son went to kindergarten and after the first year he said I hate it. I hate it, mom. I want to go back to mommy school, which we did during the pandemic. I hate school. I hate worksheets. I hate this pressure. They make me finish these worksheets. I have to do like four to five a day and if I don't get them done on time then I miss out on my playtime. What is this world? Why are we creating this for our kids? Why are we giving our kids all this fear when they're five and six years old?
15:44
So our daughter started to go through this when she went into kindergarten this year and we decided this is not the version of what we wanted for our kids. We had this huge fear if we leave Our son's in second grade now and our daughter's in kindergarten, if we leave, what's going to happen? They could die. They could lose all these friendships that they've made in this amazing community that we live in. We are in this awesome community. We're so proud of being here, we love it so much and we've been through a lot as a community. We've had some natural disasters come through and just we've made so many amazing friends.
16:22
We didn't want to leave that we were so fearful, like what's going to come, what is it going to be like? But then we also thought about it in the other way. Let's change that thought. We also have fear about staying. What is their development going to look like if we stay in this place? That our hearts are not happy in? The children's hearts are not happy. My heart wasn't happy. I used to come home from volunteering and cry because it was not what I had expected for my children. So we changed our kids to a different type of school. It was very hard to decide and it turned out very positive. So we were given this amazing opportunity and we had to make that tough decision in are we going to stay in this traditional setting? Are we going to leave? And we decided to leave and it was a hard transition. My kids made friends very quickly. My husband and I are making friends too.
17:17
One important thing that came out of that was that our children saw that it is okay to make a big change. It is okay to be fearful about the change, but we weigh both sides. We approach it with our heart and we are resilient and brave and strong and we can get through this. So those are things that we had discussed with our kids before making the change. Like I know you can do this, I know it's going to be better. Yes, it's going to feel hard, but you are brave and strong, and we discussed it all the time as we went through it.
17:51
What can help us to live peacefully? Those are things. That is what we need to ask ourselves when we have these kids that are gifted, sensitive, spirited and energized. So those are things, or what we need to think about is what can help us to live peacefully together as a family? How can I help my child to grow up more peacefully? How can I help them to be the best version of themselves? How can we bring love instead of fear or sadness?
18:25
You can have a moment to process all of that sadness when you say goodbye to the life that you thought you were going to lead. We're not doing our European trips that we were, like, so excited about, because travel is a huge passion of my husband and I my travel and we didn't have the money to travel. When we first met, we were paying off grad school loans for me, not him, he was lucky. So these are things that we think about. Is this life that we thought we were going to lead? We have moments where it bubbles up and we think about those sad moments. We release them and then we focus on the love, the gifts that our kids brought in with them and who these amazing humans are going to become. So when I feel these moments of sadness that bubble up, I take a moment to breathe. I cry out what I expected or imagine. Sometimes I do like a mental meditation with it or a mental visual pattern of seeing that moment, picturing it going into a cloud and floating up to the universe.
19:28
Because why do I need to focus on something that I cannot control? Why do I need to bring that energy into something that makes me stuck? I don't need to bring it into that stuck energy. I want to bring it into how I can fix it. What can I change to make this better? I'm going to lead with love, which is going to bring me so many more opportunities. When I use my heart and I expand from my heart, I am guided to so many better paths. That story that I told you with the school and how I was stuck for two years of okay, maybe I can make this better, maybe I can try to help with this or that, maybe I can help with my children's mindset. We can discuss it, we can look at options do, do, do things like that. But when we're stuck in that, the energy is stuck and it's going in around in circles like a mouse and a mouse, hamster wheel, hamster and a hamster wheel, we're doing circles. We are not moving that energy and opening those doors to so many things that are options for us. So this week I want you to think about processing these feelings that we have as parents. Let's process those emotions. Let's not become stagnant in that energy that we need to release. Process those emotions. Know that you're not alone.
20:49
There are so many of us with these gifted, talented, sensitive, spirited oh my gosh. There are so many adjectives we can use for these kiddos that are coming out. They're amazing and they're going to do wonderful things. We don't want to take the spirit out of them. All we want to do is try to hone it in a little bit so that way they can function in today's schools.
21:15
Maybe we need to find different schools, that's your say. It depends on your kiddo. When we are able to hone it in, we can help our child to function in everyday living, because it's still a traditional world and we need to be able to mold ourselves into the environment we are in. But we can also bring in our tools that we have learned, tools that help us to guide them in the best direction, to teach them resilience, to teach them love, listening to their hearts and honing in some of that amazing spiritual or spirit that they came with, so that they can be guided in the best direction. So we're going to lead with our hearts, lead with love this week. Happy week, thank you.