Episodes

Is it okay to be hard on yourself? Well, yes … with provisions! Let me explain: While Grady was at a golf lesson, I watched a man get a bucket of 100 balls and drive them one by one down the range. I’m a golf beginner, but it looked like he really knew what he was doing. The shots had beautiful, straight arcs. And yet after each one, he dropped his shoulders, cursed at himself under his breath, kicked the grass, and would get the next ball. I kept watching him, and all 100, he was mad at himsel...

“Okay Kelly, what’s with the spooky title?” Well, let’s talk about this. If you had a rough time in your childhood, you may have bad memories of a parent or guardian, a family member, a teacher, or perhaps bad memories from a combination of these people. One of the “default settings’ you experience as a parent is that, the instant one of your children manifests a behavior you dislike — it could be not sharing toys, crying in Target, taking candy from a store as a 3-year-old child — your brain w...

If you’ve followed my recent episodes, we’ve been talking about your blueprint for love which you absorbed as a child, as well as why you might want to alter your blueprint and how to do that. Sometimes, when you become a parent yourself, you feel lost because you don’t have that framework. So, in this episode, I’d like to offer some tips for reparenting yourself — giving yourself that missing framework of a healthy parent-child dynamic as a reference for parenting your children. In this contex...

In this episode, you’re going to learn a few important truths that made a big difference in my parenting journey. I hope that, as you learn from my experiences, you will be able to stress less and lean into the joy of being a conscious parent more. Imagine a ceramic piggy bank full of coins. These coins represent your perception of your worthiness, a small stream of day-to-day psychological rewards, and you receive one each time you feel good about yourself. (You can imagine that the power of t...

How can I combine the “blueprint for love” I had growing up with the one I want for my family now? Children often forget the exact words used, but they don’t usually forget how their parents and teachers made them FEEL. What happens when, in stressful parenting situations, you find yourself resorting to tactics your caregivers used on you in your four walls as a child? How much of putting Tabasco sauce on the tongue, spanking, name-calling, and so on renders authentically good results? How muc...

How can I design my own blueprint for love? Last week we talked about the formation of your own “blueprint” for love, which is derived from the way you experienced life as a child and teenager. Most of the components of your blueprint come from the interactions you had with your parents and other family members. In this episode, I want to talk in more detail about the new and exciting opportunity offered to you (now that you’ve become the care-giver) to form a blueprint for love to pass on to ...

How can I have a loving family without falling into bad patterns? — Well, here are some of my thoughts. Think about your childhood family environment — not just your parents, but your siblings, your aunts and uncles, your cousins, your grandparents, friends of the family. You had a totally different “Saturn” growing up, with different people and different power dynamics orbiting your family. As a child you learned what love means, what it feels like to give and receive; you had some positive ex...

How can you clear the clutter of your inner voice? Do you feel like the voice inside your head is preventing you from being your best self? Well, I have some tools that you can use to take control of your thoughts. First, let’s talk about junk thoughts. I also like to call them ANTs, Automatic Negative Thoughts, because most of the time these debilitating thought patterns come completely automatically. You see, the “animal” part of the brain, the part with the triple directive to (1) seek plea...

How can you help people in your house put things where they’re supposed to go? Okay, bear with me here. Remember how all the toys in Toy Story moved and talked when the kids were gone? Well, in my house, sometimes lots of objects talk! When I would leave cabinets open in the kitchen, David used to leave little sticky notes on the cabinet, from the perspective of the cabinet door, that said things like “Hi Kelly! I get kind of scared and lonely when I’m open like this! Can you close me when you’...

What’s the most demanding workout you’ve ever experienced? I’ve been through some really grueling physical training, both while playing soccer and for personal fitness purposes. But I think the workout that has kicked my butt the hardest is … drumroll please … MEDITATION. Yeah. It’s hard stuff — especially for me and my ADHD brain! Why is meditation so difficult? In this episode, I’ll discuss the motivations you may have for practicing meditation. There are A LOT of good reasons for doing it!...

What are your metrics for success as a parent? How do you know when you’re doing a good job? I’ve had rubrics on the brain. When my kids have school assignments, whether those assignments are projects, written reports, or presentations, the teacher provides a rubric that shows the quality of work necessary to receive a given grade. I was thinking about this recently because I’ve been taking golf lessons with Grady (I have to unlearn a lot of bad habits from other sports I’ve done over the year...

When you’re new to parenting, or even an experienced parent, you may fall into the trap of using other people as your barometer. You may see an experienced parent doing XYZ thing with their kids and feel bad that you’re not doing it the same way. Or perhaps you base your success on how your children act. As I’ve said many times before on our podcast, you only have control over your side of the street. Unfortunately, people easily forget this. They are quick to jump to worrying and putting press...

How can you help your kids deal with anger and frustration? I asked you all on Facebook: what are some of the most difficult emotions for your kids? The results came back overwhelmingly pointing toward anger and frustration. This is totally understandable. Why? Because kids feel the exact same emotions, in the same amounts, that you do! Unfortunately, their circumstances are stacked against them: first, it’s their first time experiencing tricky emotions, so to them it seems worse than it actual...

Do you ever wonder, “why do I lose it over tiny things my kids do?” There’s an idiom for this behavior, which is called “kicking the dog.” This expression can be summed up in this way: a person who has stressful circumstances or injustice foisted upon them will, in turn, lash out at people under their care. It can be summed up even more succinctly if we want: hurt people hurt people! Isn’t it ironic, too, that we often yell the most at the people we love the most? In this episode, I will discu...

Who should I prioritize when deciding where to devote my love and energy? I can’t remember where I heard this analogy, but it’s good enough to share. Imagine a champagne tower: a pyramid of glasses stacked so that when champagne is poured into a glass, the overflow pours into each row of glasses below it. Just like placing your relationships on metaphorical rings around Saturn (listen to episode 9!), and just like adults are instructed to put on oxygen before children in airplane cabin pressur...

How do you know when you’re actually doing a good job as a parent? I was recently at a sporting event with my sister and her husband. David, the kids, and I had seen a professional photographer to get some nice photos done. I got a notification that the pictures were available to view, and right there watching the game, my inner “mean girl” kicked into overdrive. I started picking myself apart, focusing on how bad I thought I looked and ignoring the other three beautiful people in the pictures,...

Have you ever asked yourself, “When should I start addressing problematic behavior I see in myself or others in my home?” I know I have! Here are some thoughts for your consideration. I love to stop and assess: “is this an event, or is this a pattern?” If you miss a day on your workout regimen, or if your child forgets to attend to a responsibility for one day or once in a long while, I PROMISE it is okay to approach this situation using my two best friends, grace and compassion. Meanwhile, if ...

How do I get my kids to listen?! It’s no secret: getting kids to listen the first time is a huge point of interest for parents. It’s the topic that most often brings people to me. Now, while there is no single good answer, there are a lot of things you can and should try, and I’ll be introducing you to some ideas that I hope will help you on your quest for attentive children! I’ve sourced the title of this week’s episode from Foster Cline and Jim Fay’s book Parenting with Love and Logic, since...

Just how do you deal with the incessant, insufferable noise from your inner critic?! Everybody has a “mean girl” or “mean guy” inside of them. It is often a voice of profound negativity — not of deliberately malicious intent, it just constantly reminds you that you’re Not Good Enough. The voice of the inner critic keeps you operating in your comfort zone and out of what it perceives as dangerous circumstances. But the comfort zone is the last place you should be if you are intent on growing and...

I keep getting into funny title territory! This episode is no different. You may think “well, which sport is it, baseball or basketball?” And my answer to you is … either. Let me explain. It may be difficult getting your kids to listen. I know I have LOTS of trouble listening to my kids sometimes, and I’m all grown up. But your children need to have real attentive listening modeled for them every day! It could be sports, music, books, animals, it could be ANYTHING. So here’s an exercise for yo...

You’re probably thinking, what are you talking about with these random titles? Well, this title is not original. Someone told me this idea when the kids were very little, something that I’ve kind of mentioned in passing, but I decided to dedicate an entire episode to it because this helps me so much to stay present and focused and engage with my kids. Basically, from birth to age 18, your child will be under your care for about 940 weeks. If we assume the average lifespan of a human being is 10...

I often get asked, how do I deal with temper tantrums? Probably one of the hardest parts of parenting is working through your child’s temper tantrum. When I was a teacher and counselor, I dealt with a lot of tantrums, but the kids were generally able to keep it in during the day. I wasn’t privy to the post-school, in-car meltdowns, and I either had support, or I WAS the support. But as a parent, I was not prepared for the overwhelming amount of anger, screaming, hitting, and crying accompanying...

First off: no, I’m not announcing a sponsor partnership with Kodak! But I am going to wax a little nostalgic for a second. I promise this is building to a point. Years ago, when we had to use film cameras, we’d take our film roll and get it developed at the store and then we’d be able to look at it and pick the shots we wanted printed. Kodak did a whole marketing campaign about the “Kodak moments,” those incomparable slivers of joy found in the little moments documented on film, it was a whole ...

I assure you, though it may seem like I’ve gone crazy with these episode titles, I haven’t gone crazy! Let me explain how people are like bananas. In my household, we (and by we I mean Lily and Grady) have a rapidly-changing palette for snack foods, and what they like comes in funny little waves. One phase was vegetable straws; I bought a massive pack of 50 bags of veggie straws, and then just a couple days later they said “nah, we’re good.” Another was bananas — and, getting wise to the cyclic...