Mindfulness for parents

So many parents find themselves flying through the day, constantly running through a mental to-do list. It seems there is always room to squeeze in more. To be focused on one moment in time feels next to impossible, but there are ways to get present, even with with all this mental clutter.

Jessica Rolph welcomes Hunter Clarke-Fields to today’s episode. She’s the Mindful Mama Mentor, author of Raising Good Humans: A Mindful Guide to Breaking the Cycle of Reactive Parenting and Raising Kind, Confident Kids, parenting coach, and host of the podcast Mindful Mama.

Key Takeaways:

[1:51] How did Hunter become the Mindful Mama?

[4:28] Hunter shares two important steps that are backed by research to stop yelling.

[11:09] Why does taking breaths actually help? What is the science behind it?

[13:30] How can parents bring themselves back to the present moment?

Transcript:

Jessica: Welcome, Hunter.

Hunter Clarke-Fields: Thanks, Jessica. So happy to be here.

Practicing mindfulness 

Jessica: So how did you become the Mindful Mama, what led you to this practice of mindfulness? 

Hunter: I think I became the Mindful Mama because I was failing at being a mama, at least that’s what I thought. But what led me to mindfulness in general was… It really… I come to all of it through desperate need. And when I was… Really my whole life, I was very… I had a roller coaster of emotions and I just found… I was a highly sensitive person, found it hard to handle things. My dad told me, “This is just how life is for you, you’ve got this artistic temperament.” I was like, “Oh God, great, thanks.” And so I discovered mindfulness out of wanting, needing something to help me get more equanimity in my life. And it really, really helped me enormously.

And then when I got to parenting, and my life was turned upside down by this small child, and then she’s also highly sensitive, and she just was not happy with the way I was parenting her and I was kind of recreating some patterns from my parents, and I was yelling, and I could see I was scaring her, I could see… I really felt like I was failing. And I just kind of dove into this learning about how to parent better. But what I… I was so frustrated with it, because there… I couldn’t do and implement any of it when I was losing it, none of it.

And so I really had to go back to the mindfulness and really dive deeper into the mindfulness to help. And because what it really does is it helps us to regulate our own nervous system, helps us to literally access our whole brain, it helps us to be able to communicate better, it helps us to be able to do everything with more clarity, and because when we’re losing it, we’re not able to use our whole brain. I may have learned something nice to say hours earlier, but I couldn’t access it when I was losing it and so I really needed to be able to regulate my own reactivity, calm my reactivity… That had to be a part of the picture or else the rest was useless. And so that’s what really drew me to bringing this to the parenting conversation.

How to stop yelling 

Jessica: So what do you say to us parents who’ve read all the parenting books, but we still can find our… We still find ourselves losing it occasionally in our children, and when this happens to me, I just feel bad. And you call this reactive parenting that really resonates, and on your podcast, Mindful Mama, you mentioned two important steps that are backed by research to stop yelling. Can you share these with us? 

Hunter: Sure. Well, I think that just to address your first point, Jessica, is that no one’s going to get it exactly right and perfect, and it wouldn’t do your kids a good service if you did. If they had their every single need met in life, and they were perfectly happy all the time, they’d be like helpless little puppies that couldn’t handle the world, right? They need to have disappointment, they need to see you mess up and repair a relationship, like that… All that stuff needs to happen. It’s okay for you to be human. Honestly, there’s a concept that I write about a bit that DW Winnicott studied in the ‘50s, a psychoanalyst in… And it was this idea of the good enough. He said, “The good enough mother,” I say “The good enough parent,” and because honestly, the very, very best we can do is good enough, there’s no place for perfection in parenting, we have to have a little grace for ourselves. And we have to model that for our kids. That’s really, really important. So now I’ve forgotten the second part of your question. 

Jessica: The second part of my question was…

Hunter: Oh, the yelling.

Jessica: Yeah, how do you… What are these steps? What do we do if we’re finding ourselves yelling? We really… We’ve read all the books. We’ve got all the intentions. We’ve got all the information, but it’s not… We’re not able to consistently put it in practice. What do we do? 

Calm your reactivity

Hunter: Well, I think that we have to lower… We have to lower our reactivity overall. The two things we’re talking about are lowering our overall muscle of reactivity, and then having kind of a plan in that moment. So you could read all the books you want about being a good tennis player, but unless you practice, unless you get out on the court, your game is never really going to improve, right? You really have to do the action. [chuckle] And it’s the same with our reactivity, and that’s why I’m a big proponent of parents having at least a tiny… Just maybe a five-minute mindfulness practice it’s so, so, so helpful.

I think that in the future, we’re going to start to see that as the way we look at going to the gym and taking care of our bodies now, taking care of our minds. But it has such enormous benefits to be able to… Because it helps us to… It helps change the brain to literally make the reactive parts of our brain, the fight, flight, or freeze parts of our brain, an eight-week course of mindfulness can literally shrink that, literally make it less dense in gray matter and make your prefrontal cortex, which is the higher-order thinking area associated with the brain, more dense in gray matter. So it’s about… I like to think of it as building a muscle, and we’re building a muscle of a pause muscle. We’re building the muscle to be able to step into that space between stimulus and response and make a choice, rather than just be enacting the old patterns of the past, right? And just yelling, or react, or whatever our habitual, unskillful reaction is. It’s the thing that gives us that ability. So I really encourage an overall practice of calming your reactivity, but then, in the moment, we can… There’s a bunch of things we can do to calm our reactivity in the moment.

Acknowledge what is happening

We can start to just… One of the things we can do is just start to acknowledge. Just start to say what we see, acknowledge what’s happening for ourselves, for our kids. “I am starting to feel frustrated here. I feel my jaw are getting tight. I feel my muscles getting tense. There’s a lot of noise. It’s starting to feel like too much. I’m feeling like I need a break.” And as you say these things out loud, it’s really, really does a lot of great things. It teaches your kids healthy emotional intelligence because they’re learning names for different emotions, they’re learning how their on… Their behavior is affecting you, which because they care about you, that may help them calm down their behavior. But it’s also what you’re doing is you’re acknowledging for yourself. You’re saying… When you say, “I am feeling frustrated.” It’s like ding, ding, ding. It’s like a little bell of mindfulness for yourself that you’re on this road of losing it. You’re there, and maybe this time you’ll be able to say, “And I need a break.” [chuckle] And you won’t yell something unskillful to your kid. “And I’m going to take a break right now because I’m feeling like I’m about to lose it,” right? You might say that and go, step into the kitchen, put both hands on the counter, take those deep, slow breaths that are cliche because they work. Dig, deep, slow breaths.

Choose a mantra

You may have a mantra. I encourage my students to have a mantra. They write down like, “I am safe. This is not an emergency.” Sometimes like, “The louder they get, the calmer I get.” We can have a sort of a menu of things that help to calm our reactivity in the moment. But it all starts with being aware of it, right? So we have to become aware of it. And just saying that out loud, it interrupts the pattern right there, and it helps you start on a new more… A new healthier habit to respond with.

Jessica: That’s all so helpful to hear. And can you tell me about the science of why taking those breaths matter? 

Hunter: It’s really very simple. We all inherited this nervous system, right? That’s just primed for survival, and so did our kids, really important to remember too, and it’s like the one… It’s like one of the bodily systems that is fully developed at birth, is this our stress response, fight, flight, or freeze nervous system response. And it’s very much kind of like on or off, you’re either having a stress response, or you’re having the opposite, rest and relax response. And so the stress response, we know our muscles get tense, our jaw gets tight, blood flows to our extremities, we don’t… [chuckle] Blood flows out of the thinking parts of the brain, [chuckle] But in the opposite response, the rest and relax response, we get to digest again, we get to access our whole brain again, so that’s what we really want. And so a way to do that, you can do that through the body, you can do that through the mind.

Through the mind, I’d talked about telling yourself with a mantra, “I am safe,” that tells the nervous system, “Calm down nervous system. We don’t have a threat right here,” [chuckle] but also the breath is so crucial because, if you’re… If you’re in a life and death situation, you’re not going to be taking some deep, slow, calming breaths but if you do that, and they’re really teaching this, they’re teaching mindfulness and they’re teaching these breathing practices to soldiers in the field, take a deep, deep, slow breath in, maybe even a longer, slower exhale, and it just switches the body into that rest and relax response. So you’re calming that stress response. If you do six of those it’s really a big difference.

Tips for mindfulness 

Jessica: I love that. It’s really helpful and I really, I want to zero in when I’m being present. Do you have any tips for how we can do this more often as parents? Sometimes it’s tricky when we have little ones, they’re not talking at our level, and it’s hard to… Your mind is sort of having a whole another conversation or thoughts around what you need to do that day, or what’s happening or a friend that you’re thinking about, and you can kinda go on auto-pilot, but we can do that with our toddlers.

Hunter: Oh, yeah.

Jessica: Can you talk about how we can bring back the present moment? 

Hunter: I think a regular practice builds that muscle, that ability to attend. Our attention is really our most valuable resource, and it really, really, really helps to be able to be more the master of our attention rather than pushed and pulled by it, and to practice and all it is is practice. Sometimes people think, oh, I can’t meditate or I can’t practice mindfulness, I can’t clear my mind, but just like the ears hear and the eyes see, the mind thinks and that’s just what it does, but we want to be able to take that attention and be able to direct it can we be with our child and notice, oh, I’m thinking about dinner later. Oh, okay, and then re-direct our attention back to our child, and it may be, you focus your eyes on their face, you listen to the sound of the words, it’s just about… It really is just about redirecting our attention, and sometimes we feel like, oh, what’s wrong with me? I can’t even listen to my kid for three minutes without thinking about 10,000 other things, but I just want to normalize that, that’s what happens for everyone, that’s how everyone’s minds work, and to be able to realize that is really a win and really… because the only place we can love our children is in the present moment, we’re not going to love them now for the future, and not love them retrospectively. This isn’t it. Our attention is really how we show our love, and it doesn’t mean we have to be attentive 100% of the time, no, but when we choose to, it’d be nice to be able to do that. And so the way we do it is we just bring the attention back, we can use our child as the object of our meditation, as the object of our mindfulness, meaning, our child is like an anchor, when a ship gets pulled by waves and wind it has an anchor that pulls it back to that same spot, and we can use our child to be an anchor for us, bringing that mindfulness, we bring an attitude of kindness and curiosity, so bringing that attitude of who are you right now? If I were an alien beamed down into this moment, what would I see? Can I be curious about who you are and what you’re passionate about in this moment, ‘cause it’s probably different from yesterday.

Jessica: This is so, so wise and so inspiring. I love this quote from you, “Our attention is how we show our love,” its just… It’s beautiful. It’s really thoughtful. Hunter, it’s been wonderful having you here with us today. Thank you so much.

Hunter: Thank you so much, Jessica. I really, really appreciate it.

Learn additional mindfulness techniques at MindfulMamaMentor.com. To hear more on mindfulness and parenting, tune into the My New Life episode with Dr. Zelana Montminy: How To Be Resilient & Set Boundaries. You can find more tips and information on the Lovevery blog.