We are approaching the last MudRoom episode of 2020!
Something every family has been affected by is that their team was completely devastated and they are now struggling to put their team back together. As the parents, you’re the captains of the team! You get to decide who is on your team, and who needs to leave. Many families have grandparents on their team, but what positions they play for the team vary widely. You might have a childcare provider, a Nanny, a babysitter- they’re someone on your team. Their position is to look after the kids and ensure their safety and education while the captains are off dealing with other stuff. If your child has a diagnosis, your team likely includes doctors who play the position of monitoring their health, ordering tests, prescribing medication. Or therapists. Or coaches. Your team is the people you rely on to shoulder some of the burden of raising your kids.
2020 kind of ruined a lot of teams.
We as the captains are feeling the pinch. We either lost access to the people we relied on, or they’re no longer able to play a position on our team. This has led us to have to find new teammates. This is hard for a lot of parents, as expanding your team is scary. Trusting others with our kids is scary. Introducing a new team member is also a lot of work! It takes a lot of energy to hire and train someone.
Part of my job as a parenting coach is to help you determine when it’s time to expand your team, when you need to pull in a new player, and who, and what kind of team member do you need to support you through this? Often it feels like by expanding your team you’re admitting weakness. You’re indirectly saying “I need help!” and in Western culture it’s seen as a sign of weakness to admit that you need help. We’ve been taught that people will prey on your weaknesses, and the last place we want to seem weak is when it comes to our children. Actively seeking out new team members doesn’t sound to appealing, it’s labor-intensive, it makes you feel weak, and there’s a possibility that you’ll do all this work only for that person to leave your team- either because they aren’t available to you anymore, or because adding them didn’t actually get the results you were hoping to get so now they’re dead weight.
If you have a strong team to who you can delegate, you’ll have more brain space.
You’ll have more time. Things will get done faster. Even if it’s still you that has to do them, you won’t be wasting time throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping it sticks. Now someone on your team can advise you what to do to get the best results fastest. It’s not just about having team members- it’s about having the RIGHT team members! Team members should be brought on to enhance what’s already working for you.
I know I’m biased, but I really think a parenting coach is the first team member a family should bring on – whether that’s me or someone else. It’s hard to bring on the right team members if you don’t have a framework, a structure. For some families they might already have a structure of some kind- from a therapy that’s working well for them, or a religion even. But if you’re like most families, you’re still looking for your structure. Or COVID decimated your structure because it relied heavily on logistical support. So now you’re feeling lost when it comes to rebuilding your team- because hands-on support isn’t really available to you in the same way anymore. And what happens to so many families is they start building a team- and each member is leading them in separate directions- so they end up feeling MORE burnt out, because you’re only able to give any one direction a bit of energy. You stop feeling like the captain, and more like a lacky. Whereas a parenting coach gives you a structure, and if you need to expand your team they help you find team members that will keep you going in the direction you’re making progress with so that you get further with less effort.
I’ve decided to do something I haven’t done in over a year and run a LIVE class next week on November 25th at 8:30pm ET and November 27th at 11am ET. In this class I’m going to give you my entire framework, the exact same structure my ParentAbility clients use. We’re going to cover the 3 common mistakes that literally every parent I’ve ever worked with makes; these mistakes are actually causing your kids to misbehave more. Knowing how your child is highly likely to misbehave BEFORE it happens is game changing! Being able to anticipate behaivour means you’re no longer running around behind your kids trying to clean up their messes. You’re able to stay a step ahead and guide them. And then I’m going to go through my entire 3-piece framework with you- so that whether you decide to join us in ParentAbility or not- you have a structure you can start organizing your team around going forward.
ParentAbility will be open for registration also! If you want more support going forward, implementing the framework, and getting your foundation solid after a very destabilizing year- you’ll have the opportunity to do so then. And you can register for the live class at prnt.link/register
I think re-organizing our parenting teams and structuring them so that they support our goals and are sustainable is really going to be a huge part of our healing as families from the unrest and discombobulating of 2020. We’re all so very tired of feeling blindsided. We’re all so exhausted by solving the same problems over and over again. We’re all so frustrated by feeling like we’re perpetually failing when we’re doing the best we can. I really hope that by sharing my process with you, it’ll help put you on the path towards that healing and get you feeling more stable moving into 2021.
