How to Love Parenting (5 Reasons Why You HATE Being Mom)

Hey Parenting Junkies! Present Play is coming up! Find out more by visiting the link below this video. The Parenting Junkie Hey guys! Welcome back to The Parenting Junkie, the place to go to love parenting and for parenting from love. If you ever feel like you really don't enjoy parenting, you don't love parenting and maybe that leads you to not be able to parent from love, chances are that you're suffering from one of the five C's that cause a lot of stress and tension. I'm going to break down these five C's for you in this video and I'm going to tell you what you need to do about each one and provide you with further resources so that you can actually start to solve these problems. I just want to tell you, you do not have to live in a place of stress while you're parenting. You can come into joy, love and presence with your children. It is entirely possible. You are the creator of this experience. You are the curator, the creator and the craftsman of what these years are going to look like. For your children and for yourself. So claim that power now and create the type of childhood that you want for your kids and for yourself because here's the thing, all of the ideas in the world are absolutely great but if you don't actually take action to make changes to your life, they won't work for you. They'll only work when you actually start to take steps to make a change in your home. Number one is chaos. Many parents around the world feel that this time with their children is chaotic. Busy, busy schedules, activity creep, overstimulated days, rushed bedtimes and clumsy mornings. It can feel chaotic as though nothing is orderly. This is not the type of flexible fluidity that we're looking for when we talk about flow. Flow feels good. Chaos feels stressful. It feels out of control and like we're scrambling. If you feel like your days are haphazard and you're more in survival mode than thriving mode, then you might be suffering from a chaotic feeling. One of the best ways to combat chaos is to become a busy slayer. We live in a culture that glorifies busy. The more you're doing, the better. But in fact, that can lead to a very high level of chaos because here's the thing, all of us need downtime. We need time to decompress. We need time to process. That includes children and adults. And sometimes we need that downtime to be alone or away. We need to be in nature or at yoga or in sleep. So if you're in this chaotic busy schedule, you need to become a busy slayer and you need to come down from that rat race and from the hamster wheel. Number two is conflict. Conflict often is very prevalent in many of our homes. Maybe there's a lot of sibling rivalry going on between your children and that's hugely triggering for you. Or maybe you and your child aren't getting along and you keep getting into spats and power struggles. Or maybe it's you and your significant other and marital stress is causing the whole foundation of the family to feel like it's crumbling and like there's no peace and clarity there. If the members of your family don't know how to get along in a reasonable way most of the time and repair when things go off kilter, then it can feel really terrible to be living that family life. It can feel like a nightmare. What we need to do is to become what I call a play coach and a peaceful partner. It's not enough to be a peaceful parent. If you have a significant other, you have to be a peaceful partner too. I can teach you how to do that in the link below this video. You'll find directions for that. But when it comes to being a play coach, we also need to learn how to help siblings solve problems together, become win-win seekers rather than win-lose seekers and address any sense of competition and superiority, teasing and bullying that might be going on within our family walls. To do this, we really need to learn the skills of non-violent communication, of problem solving, of setting limits with empathy and of helping siblings to get along. Number three of the C's is clutter. Many of us feel extremely physically overwhelmed with just managing the stuff that is in our homes, our kitchen stuff, our toys, our clothes, all of the things that keep flooding up and bubbling to the surface. All of those toys that we spent money on and thought our kids would love end up just being glorified mountains of clutter. And it can take more time to tidy up than they ever did spend playing with them. Clutter has been proven again and again and again to induce stress, particularly in women. And yet, our culture is shoving clutter down our throats. Even if you go on a no-spend binge and you don't buy anything, you'll find the clutter still pours in from the dentists, from the festivals, from the schools, from the birthday parties, from the mail. There's so much stuff in our weird cultures. Rather than benefiting from the abundance in our lives, we're actually being buried in it. The answer to this is to become a declutter gangster. You've got to get your gangster on and go to war against the war that's being waged on you. Someone out there is designing it this way that you should buy more and more things, get more and more things, have much more than you need or could possibly manage. Start to value the value of white space, the value of less, and you will see yourself relax and your shoulders calm down as you can come into a room and not feel a desperate urge to start tidying up and shoving things in drawers, but rather feeling a sense of serenity as you would when you go to the beach or a spa. Number four is clinginess. The sense that rather than having a healthy interdependency with our children, rather than them developing a healthy sense of independence, they are overly dependent and codependent with us and that we're somehow feeding into that cycle too in an unhealthy way. If you feel like your children are overly clingy and needy of you, it's extremely stressful because after all there is no village in your home. There aren't other adults to be there and be available to your children and often many of the fears that we have in our culture don't allow us to let them go out and play in the streets with other kids as kids used to do and so we feel over-touched and over-used almost by the end of the day. By clingy, needy children. If you feel like your children need you every single moment or they need a screen on to entertain them, then that's because what hasn't yet developed in your home but that needs to is a play-inducing environment. An environment that soothes, that promotes focus, that promotes intrinsic independence and motivation. I have an entire video and many videos in fact dedicated to this which I will link below but the solution here is to become a play architect and a strew pro. Someone who knows how to set up an environment to really induce a sense of flow and presence in children and in adults. Someone who knows how to manipulate the environment rather than the child and of course how to fill the child's cup up with love and attention so that they feel full enough to go out and do the work that they need to do which is play and exploration. And the final C is confusion. We live in a time where abundance is not only in the stuff that we have but also in the information that we're exposed to. So many conflicting pieces of advice in the parenting world. Science, spirituality, psychology, philosophy. They all come at us with different opinions and different ideas. People say to let a baby cry out so that everyone gets the sleep they need or other people say that's abusive and you have to go the entire opposite route and co-sleep until they're seven. Sometimes these conflicting worlds of advice just leave us so confused and so out of touch with our own intuition and how we want to do things and what feels good to us as a family. It means that we are constantly in monkey mind running through all the different fears, anxieties and scenarios and not knowing which way to turn. When we have no clear vision. When we are unaligned on our family values and goals. When we don't have a strong sense of community and judgment-free parenting support system in place it can feel like we're swimming upstream in an icy cold river. The solution here is to gain mindful peace. You deserve to reclaim your mind through the practice of mindfulness, through the practice of non-judgment, through the practice of support and community and through reclaiming your intuition and listening to your inner voice and finding the voices and communities that resonate with you and that make you feel great. Those ones that you leave the interactions with them or the content that they create feeling empowered and like you've got this and like you are good enough. If someone's making you feel not good enough, like you don't measure up or like you're messing this whole thing up then that's a clear sign that you should put that book down or switch that video off. You need peace of mind and to gain this mindful peace that brings with it joy and a real sense of connectedness and aliveness as we go through this crazy wacky parenting challenge. You do not have to go through parenting in a haze of depression and anxiety. You are the creator of your reality. You have everything that it takes to craft and design your day, your environment and even your thoughts in a way that supports your highest good and that will inevitably support your children's highest good as well. You get to follow your bliss and your joy and move away from those five C's. When you do, you'll experience an abundance of presence, play and peace. If you think there are other parents out there who would benefit from this message, give this video a thumbs up and give me a peace in the comments below if you are ready to move away from those five C's into a state of peace. If you're looking for a supportive community of like-minded parents, I warmly invite you to join our Love Parenting with Avital Facebook group. Plus, head on over to theparentingjunkie.com and sign up for email updates so I can gift you my free PDF guide, 10 Easy Steps to Transform Your Home into a Play-Inducing Haven. Keep on loving parenting and parenting from love because your kids need you almost as much as you need them. The Parenting Junkie.