Parenting Your Sensitive Child – Details, episodes & analysis

This isn’t a typical podcast, but then, this hasn’t been a typical month for us.

I took an unplanned break from recording new episodes, and I want to take the time today to share a little bit about what’s been going on for us and why a break was necessary.

Going forward, I will publish occasional podcast episodes, but they definitely won’t be weekly. Make sure you are subscribed to the podcast and receiving notifications for new episodes so you don’t miss out when I do release one.

You can also stay connected by subscribing to the Lifeline, my weekly-ish email list. You can do that here.

I mentioned in the episode that we recently signed my daughter up for tapouts. Tapouts offers weekly group coaching sessions for kids at a very reasonable price. If you’re interested in exploring this option for your child, you can sign up for a free consult here AND get 50% off your first month. It is an affiliate link, so if you use it we both win - you get 50% off, and I get a referral bonus.

Finally, even though I won’t be podcasting as often, I will still be coaching. You can schedule your free consultation (and learn more about my tiered pricing options) right here. If you’re even remotely considering it, I’d encourage you to get the process started as soon as possible. With my renewed homeschooling commitments, I am very close to fully booked and needing to start a waitlist.

In the spirit of reflection, I want to offer you my own reflections, my own lessons learned over the past year of life with my almost nine year old daughter.

We’ve had a lot of ups and downs this year. Our biggest challenges, in retrospect, have been breaking through negativity bias and navigating evolving friendships. Both of these things have created a lot of stress in our lives and have led to a lot of resistance and a big attachment to personal time. So, without diving too deep into any of the details, here are some of my takeaways from this season of our life.

As I mentioned in the episode, my calendar is once again open for consultations. Here's the link to my website: https://juliamcgarey.com/#work

It's happened to all of us. We're right on track for bedtime, or the morning routine is lined up just right to get to school on time, and then... they get stuck. They're dancing in the bathroom and watching themselves in the mirror. They're picking at scabs instead of putting on shoes. They are pulling out the markers to start a drawing instead of grabbing their backpack. Or maybe you've agreed to lie down with them at bedtime but they just won't stop talking and go to sleep...

There are a number of reasons why this might be happening, but we're not going to go there today. Whether it's developmental or a stalling technique, I want to talk a little bit about how this is landing for us as parents, and what we can do about that.

This has been happening a lot around our house lately, so I'm speaking from my own experience, but it happens with my client's and their kids, too. And I know that for many of us, when our child is moving at a turtle's pace and we think they should be moving faster, it sparks frustration. We get irritated, and it becomes very difficult to stay calm.

I'm going to give you a few questions to ask yourself when you find yourself in this situation, but first, I want to posit that whatever your child is doing, whatever the reason, it's exactly what they should be doing at this particular moment in time. Take a moment to consider that and consider what it would mean if it were true. I can imagine there might be some resistance to allowing this as a possibility, especially if you already believe that your child knows what they should be doing, they just aren't. I want you to consider this and allow for the possibility that it might be true, and consider what that might mean for you. Could it be true, then, that this is a part of their progression towards independence? Could it be true that this behavior, while annoying, is communicating something other than defiance or resistance? Could it be true that this behavior is a sign post directing you towards skills that are still under construction, that they need more support with in order to be truly independent and efficient in this area?

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To get started with coaching, follow this link to schedule your consultation. The only "hidden" step is that there's a brief questionnaire to complete (which includes a breakdown of the pricing structure). This is to help you get clear about why you're reaching out, and to help me go into our time together with a sense of who you are and what's challenging at the moment.

Prospective Client Consultation - Partnered Path Portal (coachaccountable.com)

Sleep has never been easy for us. It's been one of my biggest challenges as a parent, and it's a challenge for so many of us parenting sensitive children.

This week, I'm sharing our sleep journey and the mindset that has helped us get to a place where we're sleeping well more often than not. To be clear, I'm not sharing answers here. Every child is different, and every family has different comfort zones for what they are willing to try. My path will look different from yours, and that's okay. The key is how I approached the problem, not how I solved it.

In today's episode, we're discussing rhythms, with particular attention to the way our family rhythms are influenced by the seasons, the

environment, and our own personal rhythms. Creating a predictable rhythm for your family gives your child the structure that they need to feel secure and prepared for what's coming next, without the rigidity of a traditional schedule. A rhythm allows for so much more flexibility, so you can give them space to keep going when they're absorbed in a book or a project, while still helping them makes sense of transitions.

We'll take a look at the way our environment and our hormones affect our personal rhythms so you can use that information to inform how you approach the daily rhythm you're establishing intentionally with your family. And when all of your rhythms are synced up, everything flows much more smoothly.

Do you ever find yourself avoiding hard conversations because you don't want to rock the boat? Or asking your kids to share their toys because you feel pressured and you just want to keep the peace?

In this episode, we're looking at what happens when you prioritize other people's emotions and work hard to keep the peace, particularly the reasons why we do this in the first place, how it impacts your kids, and steps you can take to start changing this pattern today.

This episode is part of a series on frequently coached topics that seem like they have nothing to do with parenting but make a world of impact. I hope you enjoy it.

Over the past few weeks, I've been sharing some of the topics I coach my clients on that seem like they have nothing to do with parenting (but actually impact the way we parent A TON). This week we're looking at time management.

Time management is another one of those things that sounds separate from parenting. But if it's not becoming clear through this series, the way we do one thing is the way we do everything, and if we can get to the root of these things that have often been long-term challenges, we see how that same root cause is contributing to challenges we face in other areas of life.

So if you are someone who has always struggled with time scarcity and time management, this episode is for you.

This episode is part of a series about topics I frequently coach my clients on that seem like they have nothing to do with parenting. In the last episode, we talked about people-pleasing. If that episode resonated with you, you definitely want to listen to this one, too, because boundaries can be quite challenging if you have any people-pleasing tendencies.

It's not uncommon to hear parents talk about boundaries. More often than not, though, they are talking about creating expectations or rules for their child's behavior. They're talking about defining the edges of what counts as acceptable behavior.

That's not what we're talking about here.

Today we are going to talk about boundaries as a means of ensuring that you are tending to your own needs.

Over the next few weeks, I'm doing a series on some of the challenges my clients face that seem like they have nothing to do with parenting, but actually have a huge impact on the relationship you have with your child and the parenting legacy you're creating. We're starting off this week with people-pleasing: what is it, and how does it affect the way you show up with and for your child?

Last week we talked about what it means to be parenting in the gap. We talked about signs you can look for to help you recognize when you're living in the gap between the way people parented when you were young, and the way you want to be parenting your child. We even talked a bit about what you can do to start closing that gap, to start stepping into the vision you hold for your family.

In this episode, we're focusing on what I consider to be the top skills to cultivate to bring you closer to that vision, and help you start establishing an intentional legacy for your family.

I'm focusing on skills because they translate from one stage to another. I'm NOT feeding you strategies or tips and tricks because A) those are easy to find - most parents don't lack strategies, they struggle with implementation, especially when it seems like the strategies they're following aren't working, and B) ultimately, the strategy that works for one family might not work for your family.