Solving Parenting Problems through Limiting Beliefs—Mighty Parenting 232 with Kim Muench

It’s a constant around the world that nobody knows what they’re getting into when they first become parents. Parenting problems pop up everywhere and it’s exhausting at times, trying to maintain a decent relationship with your teen while still being an authority figure. So when our teens are struggling or lashing out or having issues, we tend to assume that they’re the problem. Sometimes they are—but sometimes they’re not. Parenting coach Kim Muench joins Mighty Parenting podcast host Sandy Fowler to discuss how our own limiting beliefs about ourselves may have influenced how we parent our children, how focusing solely on behavior can create power struggles, and how we can alter our parenting style to parent with our kids instead of over them.

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A Favorite Quote from the Show: 

The way we parent impacts our children so deeply in their emotional responses and their emotional intelligence.

High Points From Our Conversation on Parenting Problems and Limiting Beliefs:

Today we’ re discussing how limiting beliefs can cause parenting problems and issues in our relationships with our kids. What is a limiting belief? It’s a state of mind or thought process that we believe about ourselves that limits us in some way.

Typically we take on limiting beliefs unconsciously, often in childhood. Relationships with primary caretakers, teachers, coaches influence us as we are dependent on these people when we’re young. 

One of the limiting beliefs that Kim picked up is that she wasn’t worthy of being heard:

• • She didn’t feel heard or respected by her kids
  • After realizing this, Kim asked herself, what do I believe about myself? 
  • She’d picked up the belief that there were times where she wasn’t worth listening to when she was young—her kids not listening triggered her 
  • When triggered, we remember feeling a similar way even if we don’t remember the incident and it makes us more likely to react than to respond to our kids

For many generations we were (as a society) in a dominant parenting paradigm—our childhoods involved varying levels of ‘children should be seen and not heard’. This dominant parenting is where parents know the answers, where behavior is more important than building connections with our kids. 

Only in the last twenty years are we starting to understand how emotions develop and just how deeply parents impact how emotional intelligence and responses grow and change in our children. 

Parenting problems pop up when there’s emotional disconnects between us and our kids; part of our difficulties is that we weren’t raised to be overly focused on validating our feelings. Our own parents were focused on behavior and we felt we had to perform to certain expected standards to get love and acceptance.

We are in a time of evolution and we need to be listening to our kids’ behavior.

We know that adolescence is turbulent and emotionally challenging, and there’s a lot of growth going on that we didn’t necessarily know when we were growing up. So we take the fact that we know much more about adolescents and how kids grow emotionally, and we know that we have to come at it a different way rather than just focusing on the behavior.

Focusing on behavior creates power struggles and other parenting problems; some parents might grit their teeth and get through it until their kid’s a legal adult or moving out—but then the kid doesn’t want to stay in touch or spend any time with their parents after that.

Focusing on intentional parenting creates a connective relationship. We need to work on switching over from dominant to intentional parenting, where we work with our kids to understand their feelings rather than trying to control them to produce specific desired behaviors.

Parent with your children, not over them.

You want to try to guide your kids, listen to them and support them, which includes validating their feelings. This does not mean you have to agree with (or try to justify) those feelings or the resulting behaviors. 

We have to do more listening than talking during the teen years, but it’s listening to understand (again, you don’t necessarily have to agree) so we have better ideas of how our kids are living and learning outside our influence.

Our beliefs play out in our actions and our words with our kids, including limiting beliefs. If you’ve run across some situations where you’ve been triggered and discovered a possible limiting belief, dig a little deeper:

• • Q1: What do I believe about myself?

  • Q2: Is it true (and where did it come from)?

  • Q3: If that’s not true, what is?

Kim worked herself through this, and came to a place of, I am worth listening to, therefore at times if her kids have an opinion or don’t want to follow something she’s asked them to do, or they’re in a situation where she could feel disrespected—she can hold space for her kids’ thoughts and feelings without taking it personally.

When we just look at and work to come to a place of not taking our kids’ words and actions as a personal attack on the way we’re parenting, it is much, much easier and healthier to get them through. We don’t have to agree, but we do need to see them for who they are, not who we want or need them to be based on expectations that we may not even know that we have.

Our children are our greatest teachers, and parenting can be a fantastic opportunity for us to keep growing up and (sometimes) fix some things inside ourselves.

One last thing to think about: our children come through us, not for us, except for the lessons they reflect to us during their journey in an effort to grow us up along the way.

Resources:

How Beliefs Affect Behavior—Mighty Parenting 220 with Shelly Lefkoe

Tips for Powerful Parenting Strategies That Help You Stop Overparenting | Kim Muench | Episode 55

Parenting An Addicted Child Through Recovery | Kim Muench | Episode 84

Resolving Differences | Jude Bijou | Episode 132

Our Guest Kim Muench:

Kim Muench is a Jai Institute for Parenting Certified Conscious Parenting Coach who specializes in working with mothers of adolescents (ages 10+). Knowing moms are the emotional barometer in their families, Kim is passionate about educating, supporting and encouraging her clients to raise their children with intention and guidance rather than fear and control. Kim’s three plus decades raising five children and years of coaching other parents empowers her to lead her clients with compassion and without judgment into healthier, happier, more functional relationships.

Kim works under the umbrella title of Becoming Me While Raising You – a mother’s journey to her self. This title includes a #1 New Release in Parenting/Adult Child Relationships available on Amazon, a digital t.v. show Kim hosts which can be found on her YouTube channel, and a parent coaching program she leads moms through 1:1 and in small groups.

You can find out more about her mission and services at www.reallifeparentguide.com. She is on Facebook at Real Life Parent Guide, Instagram, TikTok and on LinkedIn as well. Kim appears regularly on television news, radio, and podcasts on topics related to conscious parenting.

From Sandy:

Are you stressed but don’t have time to deal with it? Grab Sandy Fowler’s complimentary lesson at http://sandyfowler.com/notime to find out how to start feeling better today.

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