178. Don’t water the weeds (intentional parenting for proactive connection)

Giving your child extra attention might seem like a great idea, but if it’s the wrong type of attention it could do more harm than good. Let’s learn what it means to parent intentionally and make proactive connections with your family.    Products recommended here may include referral links to Amazon. If you click through and buy something I may earn a commission, at no cost to you.    In this episode I discuss:  Why we get stuck in the negative Our negativity bias as parents Your experience of motherhood The Nurtured Heart approach How to use this approach on 'difficult' kids   All the fun links you might enjoy:  Is momlife unfun? How to be a more fun mom, to stop withholding fun from yourself  More on the negativity bias When I stopped enjoying my kids Change your motherhood experience by changing how you make memories Why you aren’t thriving in motherhood (stress and surviving) Conscious parenting through the struggles, and letting go of perfectionism in motherhood Transforming the Difficult Child: the Nurtured Heart Approach  Article on Nurtured Heart Approach  Do you typecast your kids? (Labels and how they impact our parenting and our kids) Check out the episode playlists for your topic of interest right here   Simple pleasure links The wordle (also search wordle unlimited for more) The heardle (also search heardle unlimited) Spot the difference site (click explorer games for more variety and levels) Highlights hidden pictures book Spot the difference brain games book  Sign up for the the Simple Saturdays email (a fun email, twice a month)   Full transcript (unedited) 0:18 So friends around here, I like to talk about all the ways that we can turn off the autopilot living, just living reactively by default for me, it looked like a lot of complacency and step into doing things on purpose with intention, getting clear and focused on where we want to go and taking steps to get there. Today we're going to talk about intentional parenting, just parenting in general, but doing it with intention. And the topic of focus can come up in parenting, when we start thinking, what are we focusing on? What gets the most attention, what gets our most attention in a single day, what gets our attention as a parent. And I don't know if you're like me, but it can go to demands and the urgency who needs to be aware what needs to happen, what needs to be cooked, who's eating one of the eating, where the eating, and it's like, we're just directors of all of this. And of course, as our kids get older, we can start to give them ownership of this and they can start self directing. But our attention in a given day, it can really be given mostly to the problems at hand, stop shouting Sydney, clean up your mess, put that away. And I know that there are seasons of my own motherhood, where I don't even want to talk anymore, because I'm just sick of hearing myself talk. And then I start to think, man, my kids aren't really listening to me, I don't really want to listen to me either. 1:38 They don't have such a bad idea about this, after all. Anyways, this is a really common place that we can find ourselves in as parents, a season of no a season of constant correction, a season of constant discipline. And then instead of motherhood, feeling like this enjoyable experience, it feels like a perpetual power struggle. And there's this urgency and every day is just full of problems that we feel we cannot solve. So if you are here, welcome. Yeah, we are all here. Sometimes, some of us get stuck here. And we get stuck here for a few good reasons. Actually, we get stuck here, we start to live in this story. And this becomes the emotional habit we operate from. And I'll tell you why it kind of makes sense. We get stuck here because on one hand, the more we're thinking this the stories, the more we're feeling these emotions,