Welcome And Guest Introduction

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Welcome back to Healthy Mind, Healthy Life, the show where we have honest, grounded conversations about what it really takes to live well. I'm Yusuf, and today I'm joined by Dr. Linsei Imugsen. Linsei holds a PhD in clinical psychology and has spent years translating real behavioral research into something parents can actually use in the heated moments of real life. She is the creator of the Better Behavior Blueprint and the 5Cs framework. Communication, consistency, choices, checkpoints, consequences, and check yourself. Her work bridges the gap between academic psychology and the beautifully messy reality of raising kids. And today, we're talking about the part of parenting. Nobody wants to admit out loud the stress of it and how we can actually support parents instead of handing them poor advice. So with that, I welcome my guest Dr. Lindsay to the show.

SPEAKER_00 1:14

Well, thank you, Yusuf, and that was a wonderful introduction. So happy to be here.

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Thank

When Parenting Stress Turns Overwhelming

SPEAKER_02 1:20

you so much. So before we dive into the deeper stuff, I'd love to start somewhere real. When you think about a moment in your life that made you realize parenting stress is not a small problem, that it is a serious, layered, under-supported issue. What comes to your mind?

SPEAKER_01 1:43

If you want a personal anecdote, well, I'll share that I have four children, which most people pause at and are shocked. Wow, you actually have four children. That's quite a bit. And having more and more children adds an incremental amount of stress to your life. Some might say it's a little harder to manage more kids than one or two. But I love kids and I'm so happy to have all my four kids. Despite that, there were many times in their early years in particular when I felt that the stress was overwhelming. And I felt exactly what parents come to me with. And it's you gave some great examples in the introduction. You know, it can be anything from the daily, oh, this huge pile of laundry has to get done, and I'm the only one doing it to we've got to get to school one time, to the behaviorals that are so frustrating, and you don't necessarily feel equipped to manage them. And I have had many of my own moments where I lost my cool, raised my voice, parented in a way that I didn't want to parent, and then had to bring back my focus on how do I want to interact with my kids? What am I going to do to change my perspective so that I can then actually engage with them and honor that goal in my daily parenting practice?

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And there's a misconception out there that parenting stress is just a part of the deal, something every parent signs up for and should be able to handle. But the level of exhaustion most parents are quietly carrying is something else entirely.

The Big Myth About Parenting

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So, from your work, what is the biggest misunderstanding people, even parents themselves, have about what parenting stress actually is?

SPEAKER_01 3:36

That's a great question. And so to your point, parenting stress is a real phenomenon. Even just two years ago, the US Surgeon General cited parenting stress as a national concern and issued an advisory showing that parents truly are experiencing more stress than your average adult in the US. And so it's something that we all need to take seriously, and we all need to understand that something needs to change in order to improve that situation. And so part of it, if I had to say the most important thing, Yusuf, that's a great question. If I had to say the most important thing is to bring awareness to parents that parenting is a learned skill. And any activity that you want to do well in your life, whether it's playing the piano, becoming a lawyer, learning how to drive, any of those activities involve training. And in all other roles of our life, we understand, hey, if I want to get good at this, I need to get trained. I shouldn't naturally be a perfect pianist. I need to learn how to play the piano. But somehow in parenting, there's this mental hiccup where we think, no, I should just be good at this. This is a biological thing. I birthed this child if you're their mother. I created this child if you're their father. And so somehow people think that this should all just come naturally and that it's not a learned skill. So the biggest misconception is I should just figure this out and I don't need any extra training.

SPEAKER_02 5:25

Yeah. You know, that reframes matter so much. They have been treating parent parenting stress like a personal weakness instead of what it actually is. You know, it is a predictable response to an under-supported, overinformed, completely overwhelmed environment.

SPEAKER_01 5:49

Very true. Yes, and then that added sense of guilt that I should know how to do this, that's a partly responsible for that level of stress. Yes, parenting is stressful. You're you're literally responsible for somebody else's life. But there are so many joys that we get out of parenting

Routines That Lower Daily Friction

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that can help to offset that sort of negative stress. When you think of stress, there's kind of negative stress and there's positive stress or youth stress. And so all of those wonderful things you get from parenting can help to buffer the very real stressors, but you have to know how to manage the very real stressors. And sometimes it's just time management, things like figuring out, hey, do laundry once a week. Don't do it every day and let get overwhelmed by laundry every day. Little time management things. But the bigger thing is just how do I deal with the daily routines? You know, I've got to get my kid ready in the morning, I've got to get them to bed in the evening, we've got to get food served. And those daily routines, if you can make them more run more smoothly, if you can get your kids to cooperate more, if you can get your kids to listen the first time you ask them to do something, those are the things that make very substantial change in your daily enjoyment of your parenting practice. And that's something that can really markedly reduce that experience of parental stress. And those are subtle nuances in communication, subtle nuances in creating a consistent schedule for your kids. And again, they're not things that we just know how to do, but with a small amount of instruction, you can really master those skills quickly and they can become a real important part of your weekly routine.

SPEAKER_02 7:34

You know,

Regulate Yourself Before Correcting Kids

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the behaviors we see in our kids are really the real conversations. The real conversation is happening in the parents' own nervous systems, and almost nobody is helping them see that.

SPEAKER_01 7:50

That's a great point. And a lot of what I do with the parents I coach is to help them to become more aware of how their interaction style affects their child's behavior, and it affects the relationship that they're forming with their child, which then goes on to affect their child's long-term trajectory on a number of important variables from academic success to social success to emotional, mental health. And so it all comes back to the parent. And in the five C's parenting framework that I developed, we call this check yourself. So it's taking a moment to check how is what I'm doing, what I'm saying, the body language I'm using, the timing I'm using, the choices I'm making about what strategy to use here, how is what I'm doing affecting this interaction with my child? And how does that in turn affect their behavior and our long-term relationship together? And so that's a really important thing, that one of the five C's, really the five core areas of your parenting where you can make small changes that end up making meaningful, lasting change for your child and your relationship with them. So it's one of the five C's, and it and a lot of it comes down to problem solving, doing some coping skills training, working on anger management if you find that you're triggered and yelling, which is very common, nothing to be ashamed of. And so if you can take that moment to really internalize and say, okay, what do I want my parenting practice to look like? How is that mesh not meshing up with what I'm doing right now? And what skills do I need to learn to get to that point? That's what check yourself is all about.

SPEAKER_02 9:30

Yes. You briefly mentioned your five C's.

Communication Without Shame Or Blame

SPEAKER_02 9:35

I want to ask you, can you please explain that to us in detail?

SPEAKER_01 9:41

Sure. So when I became a parent, I had all this background in psychology. And so I knew a lot of fundamental strategies that I wanted to integrate into my parenting. And so I started doing that. And then I started thinking, well, what are really the core elements here in my day with my kids that are making the difference? You know, where do I need to put my effort? And it's not in having the perfect outfits for them to wear to school. It's not in having the cleanest home. Where it really matters is in how you communicate to your child. And if I had to distill that down into just a couple really important points, things like the tone that you use with them and the word choice that you use with them. For example, there's a concept called unconditional positive regard that I love to talk with parents about. And it's it's a we can distill it down to this simple concept of correcting a behavior, not correcting your child's personality. So instead of saying, I'm so disappointed in you, you would say, Oh dear, it looks like that cereal spilled. Let's clean it up together. And so it's it's as simple as taking the blame away from the child and putting it on that behavior was not desirable. Let's let's focus on the behavior. And that simple concept of unconditional positive regard is one of the things that's at the core of that communication um category. So we've got communication, we've got consistency. Consistency is so important for kids when they have consistent schedules throughout the day, consistent sleep schedules, consistent eating schedules, their lives become then that much more just controlled at a calm baseline. And they don't then have to um fight everything. You know, why do we, why are we eating this now? Well, because it's it's our schedule. We always eat now. And so it just becomes so much easier. And then they can focus their energy instead of worrying about when are we gonna eat, when are we gonna go to bed, instead of worrying about all that, they can actually focus on all the new information they're supposed to be learning every day. So consistency is a core concept. And then choices and checkpoints. So choices are literally that, the choices that you give your children. So if you have a child who is having a hard time getting dressed and you say, just pick out an outfit, that's not going to go very well. But if you have a child who's having a hard time getting dressed, and you say, let's either wear the blue shirt or the red shirt, which one would you like to wear? And so, as simple as narrowing down, especially for our under five kids, narrowing down the choices and

Consistency Plus Better Choices By Age

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understanding that they now have parameters to work within and that they know they have to choose one of those. And that, you know, the shirts is one example, but this applies to so many concepts. And it's a way of giving them autonomy. And so they are allowed to make any choices they want as long as they don't have to do with safety, uh, respect, or responsibility for those, then you're going to step in and say, okay, this is our choice right now. You may not hit your brother. You can choose to play with him and not hit him, or I can move you over here. Which would you like? And so you give them a choice. And then as kids get older, you want to give them more and more choices and use more of those open-end questions. And that's where the concept of checkpoints comes into. So I pair choices and checkpoints into this category. The checkpoints are the developmental stages that kids work through. And so what I do with parents is I help them do with get a little basic understanding of developmental psychology and what's going on in the brain at different times. And so it helps them to understand: okay, when my child's this age, I want to give them choices like this. When they're that age, it should look different. Um, we already touched on check yourself. So the last thing that we'll cover is consequences. So, consequences, I think, are a very important part of parenting. They're not harsh punishments, they are a cause and effect relationship. So, going back to that example of choices. So, if you're hitting your brother, I'm going to give you a choice. You can sit here and try to play nicely without hitting, or I can move you. That's a consequence. And so, consequence is integral in parenting. And kids need to learn that there's a cause and effect. They need to learn that their actions have consequences. And I go with parents into much detail using different kinds of consequences. There are different kinds of reinforcement, different kinds of punishment. And you can use them in a gentle, warm, loving approach. They're done to teach, not to threaten, shame, blame. So very different than the traditional authoritarian punishments that people sometimes think of when they hear the word consequences. And so that's the gist of it. That's the five C. So when I work with parents, I help them to focus their efforts on those five categories and to learn specific strategies within those categories to feel really confident and capable in their parenting.

SPEAKER_02 14:46

You know, that that is such an important framework where you not only give them an entirely unique perspective,

Consequences That Teach Cause And Effect

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and you give them exactly the antidote they need. Because when parenting a young child, and if multiple, you lack a system, and you giving them a whole system is I think will be one of the foundations that they can rely on and build a stable life for themselves and for their child.

SPEAKER_01 15:21

Yes, absolutely. And so you mentioned earlier parents often do this. They see parenting real, they save it, they put it in a folder, and A, they never come back to it, or they try it out, but it only works once or doesn't work at all, and they move on to the next tip. And so that is a real mistake that parents very commonly make, is just grabbing at different approaches. And there's research to show you that that actually leads to more confusion and less confidence in your parenting. Now, of course, I would love everybody to use my 5C system, but it doesn't have to be mine. Just picking a system with a trusted advisor can markedly increase confidence and decrease that parental stress that we came, we started talking about earlier. And then just coming full circle, Yusuf, I told you in the beginning I've had times where I lost my cool. And so the five C's came about not to create perfect parents, what it creates what I call amazing parents. And so amazing parents are doing the best they

Why A Single System Beats Random Tips

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can with the information they have at that present moment. And the more you learn new strategies, and I teach psychology-backed strategies, the more capable you feel. And it wasn't until I added that fifth C, the check yourself phase to my parenting practice, that I really started to feel that calm confidence. You know, I had all the behavioral strategies down that I'd learned in graduate school, but it wasn't until I paired the check yourself strategies with that 5C system that it really became this overarching framework that I use in my own family and now I teach to parents. And it truly creates that calm confidence that parents really enjoy, and it's so beneficial for the kids.

unknown 17:06

Dr.

SPEAKER_02 17:07

Lindsay, for people who want to connect with you or just want to learn more about your where can oh, thanks for asking.

SPEAKER_01 17:15

So my website is dr lindsayemerson.com, and I have a brand new workshop that goes over a lot of what we touched on today in more detail. And that's dr lindsayemerson.com forward slash workshop. So that's a great place to start if this concept is resonating with you.

SPEAKER_02 17:33

Perfect. And to everyone listening, this but the yeast, this and all the links relevant are in the show notes. So just go and check those out. Is there any last message that you want to leave us with?

SPEAKER_01 17:48

I would just say to all the parents out there, you are doing an amazing job already. You're doing the best you can with the

Workshop Link And Closing Takeaways

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information you have, and parenting is stressful. There's an advisory telling us that. So you're in good company, but you don't have to go through this alone and think of it as any other skill. It takes practice, it takes training, and then you can get there to feeling a lot more confident and a lot less stressed in your parenting.

SPEAKER_02 18:17

Thank you so much for coming. And you know, this is the kind of conversation that we look forward to in this show. And I am pretty, pretty confident and I'm sure about it that a lot of people that will hear it they'll take something from it, and it'll make their life for sure better.

SPEAKER_01 18:40

Ah, thank you, Yusuf. That makes me feel one. I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for giving me this opportunity.

SPEAKER_02 18:48

And to everyone listening, your child does not need a perfect parent, they need a regulated one, a grounded one, a real one. And the kindest thing you can do for the family you are raising is to stop trying to outwork the exhaustion and start letting yourself be supported too. Thank you all for reading here. I'll see you in the next conversation.