My Family Song: The Nervous System Lessons I'm Teaching My Kids (and Still Learning Myself)

In today's episode, Amanda shares something she's never shared publicly before — a little bedtime song she wrote for her kids that's become a nightly staple. What started as a spontaneous attempt to teach her children the things she wished she'd known earlier has turned into a fun family song teaching the fundamentals of mental and physical health. Amanda share the song with you, invites you to make it your own, and then breaks down each line of the song and what it means not just for the littles in our lives, but for the adults who are still doing this healing work themselves.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Regulate and Rewire, an anxiety and depression podcast where we discuss the things I wish someone would have taught me earlier in my healing journey. I'm your host, Amanda Armstrong, and I'll be sharing my steps, my missteps, client experiences, and tangible research-based tools to help you regulate your nervous system, rewire your mind, and reclaim your life. Thanks for being here. Now let's dive in. All right, friends, welcome back. Today is gonna be kind of a fun, little personal. I'm really gonna put myself out on a limb. I'm just gonna start there. I'm gonna put myself out on a limb today by sharing with you a little family song that I wrote a couple years ago for my kids. Now, I love to sing to my children. Not just like, oh, they're cute lullabies. Like all throughout the day today, I'm like, it's time to go, let's put on shoes. Let's, let's, let's put on your shoes all day. I just am this way. But I also know that it helps keep me sane. So not only is just this something that I try to do to bring a little bit more levity into what is the chaos of having what feels like a million tiny young children and a million things to do. I also know that singing and humming can help to stimulate my vagus nerve, to help keep me regulated, but it's also a tool that I intentionally turn to in moments where I am feeling really on edge. And so, in moments where I am feeling the urge to yell as a parent, I actually reach for a song instead. So that's just a little backstory on how I interact with my children in a ridiculous way. Now let's come back to the family song that I am going to share with you today. So the origins of this, my oldest, when he was about three, he at bedtime would probably because of my just ridiculous singing throughout the day, he would make special requests for songs. Songs about fishing or feet or whatever he could think of. Well, one day I was just sitting and I was wondering how I could teach my kids. It was kid at the time, maybe my second was a was like baby baby. How can I teach my kids some of the things that I wish I would have known earlier? Some of the things that I wish would have been more ingrained or more obvious to me growing up and then into adulthood that I would have been just like, of I mean, of course, my body gets rest. It doesn't have to earn. Of course, food and exercise make me strong, or I can growl when I'm mad. And so as I was sitting there, I just popped open the notes app on my phone. And about four and a half minutes later, I had what was the first and last draft of what I am about to share with you. And this is a song that I have sung to my children every single night since. And it's not just the song that teaches my kids what I hope they learn, but it is also a reminder to me of each and every one of these things that have become pillars and foundations to the way that I engage in regulated living. So I, in just a moment, I am going to sing you this song exactly the way that I sing it to my kids. And I am gonna give you absolute permission that if it resonates with you and you want to learn this or you want to play this with your kids or your niece or your nephew or whoever and teach it to them too, I would love for this to come out of my home and to come into yours. Now there's one or two lines that are specific to my family. And so after I sing this to you, I will give some suggested edits so that you can make this apply to your unique circumstances. And then I'm gonna follow this up with a little bit of a breakdown about why each of these lines or these phrases is in this song and how I think it impacts our mental health, why each of these lessons are not just important to my kids or your kids, but maybe to you too. So, all right, friends. Here we go. And I will warn you that this song is a little bit long-winded. So when you think it's over, it's probably not. My mind is smart and likes to learn. Food and exercise make me strong. Big deep breaths help to get me calm. I can cry when I'm sad or growl when I'm mad. We say prayers to give thanks for what we have. Mom and dad are always there for me. I stand up against any wrong I see, and always remember I can do hard things. Okay, that's it. That's my family song. Now, in case you want to sing this with your family too, and it looks differently than mine, you can swap out where it says mom and dad. So mom and dad are always there for me to mom and mama or grandmy, my auntie's always there for me, or just generically, my family's always there for me. So you get it. You can customize that part to your needs, to your purposes. And if prayer isn't something that you or your family does, you could very easily swap out that line. So the line that goes, We say prayers to give thanks for what we have. You can say, We remember to give thanks for what we have. Okay, now before I die of embarrassment that I just sang this for thousands of you, I'm gonna shift gears and share a little bit about why each of these lines matters for me, for my kids, for myself, and how they support specifically even my healing. So this first line: I love my eyes, I love my nose, I love my body all the way to its toes. It is really hard to heal something that you hate. It is much easier to heal something that you love. And if loving all of you feels like too much right now, can you love what your body allows you to do? Can you love that it's with this body that you can hear birds, that you can hug babies, that you can laugh with a friend? Is there something that you can love that your body allows you to experience? There is so much out in the world. There are so many companies and products and people that benefit from us looking in the mirror and feeling perpetually dissatisfied with our stretch marks, our wrinkles, the natural parts of ourselves. And there are so many messages about how what our bodies are supposed to look like. I am not immune to that. I see a vastly different body when I look in the mirror post the last five years of growing babies and the things that I've been to. I see lines setting on my face and singing this song to my kids each night also acts as my own conscious and subconscious reminder to look at all that I see with a measure of acceptance, appreciation, and love. The next line, probably the thing I need to hear the most, is my body gets rest, it doesn't have to earn. This line likely stands without explanation. I want my kids to value work, hard work and productivity, but not as a constant precursor to rest. If you need rest, rest. Quit asking yourself more than you have the capacity for. There's always going to be more to do when you need rest, rest. The next line: my mind is smart and likes to learn. Our brains like to learn. They are capable, they are adaptable. We learn things at school academically. That's in a lot of ways how I refer to this line for my kids. You know, your mind is smart, it likes to learn. They're also learning how to tie their shoes and make food for themselves. And so we focus a lot. But we also learn new ways of coping, new ways of being kind. We can learn new hobbies, better ways of communicating with each other. We can learn new beliefs about ourselves, others, or the world. And so this is just the reminder of the fact that your brain is neuroplastic. Every unhelpful habit or coping skill you have, it learned. And your brain can also learn more healthy and more helpful thoughts, beliefs, coping habits. The next line: food and exercise make me strong. I talk a lot about this with my kids. My six-year-old can look at his plate and he'll be like, Mom, I think that's a carb and that's a fat and that's a protein. And we talk about how our bodies need all of them, how all of these different macronutrients have really special jobs for our brain and our body. He knows that we try to eat them in a balanced way. He also knows that food is really fun and it's something to be enjoyed. Exercise as well. Exercise is modeled. It's not just something that we talk about. It is something that I model, that they see me do, that we do together. They watch me lift weights. I tell them I need to go to the gym so that I can be so strong to throw you in the pool. We talk about how exercise is something we do to take care of our bodies, never to punish it. I never tie exercise to food unless it is, hey, I need you to eat enough so you have enough energy to go to soccer practice. I am making sure that I'm getting enough protein so that my muscles can grow big and strong. We also talk about how exercise is one of the most important things that we can do for our brains to be healthy and for our minds to be clear. There are times my two oldest are boys. And if you do not have at least two boys or have had two young boys in your household, at the same time, we are living a different life. It is chaos. And sometimes those kids just need to move. I am so lucky I have a neighbor who has this really steep hill as part of their lawn, and they let me run my kids up that hill. And I will look at my kids some days and I will say, hey, we're having a really hard time listening and focusing right now. I think doing some hill sprints is going to help us clear our mind. The exercise is not punishment for not being able to focus. The exercise is the tool to drive focus. I am teaching them how impactful the way that they feel their body and the way that they move their body, how that impacts how strong they feel, how strong they are, how their brain works, how their emotions work. So food and exercise make me strong mentally, physically, and emotionally. Next line: big deep breaths help to get me calm. And then we take that deep breath together. I want my kids to understand and have experience with the fact that there are physiological levers that they can pull on when they need it. When they need a moment to pause, to settle, to calm. Something I say often to my kids is, hey, hey, friend, we can take a breath or a break right now. What do you want to do? And when inevitably, sometimes they're wiry and they reply, like, I don't want to. I simply repeat it calmly. We can take a breath or a break right now. What do you want to choose? And they usually choose a breath because every single night they hear big deep breaths help to get me calm. They take a deep breath for me. They've had this experience. It's not a regulation tool or a practice they're being introduced to for the first time in a moment of dysregulation. They're familiar with it. And sometimes they don't pick something or they're already so dysregulated, they can't take that breath. So that's when I step in and I make the choice for them and we take a break and we step away from whatever we need to until they can take that breath. And then this next line: I can cry when I'm sad, and we like rub our eyes and kind of act it out, or growl when I'm mad. So my kids, like I've already said, my oldest two are boys, my youngest is a girl. There is some gendered nuance, I think, to this. There's a universal that applies to all of us, but it is so important for my boys to know that it is okay to cry because I think society will tell them contrary the loudest. And for me, it is so important that my daughter knows that she is allowed to be mad because I think society will tell her the loudest that that's not okay. And another layer that I bring to this often with my kids is that while all emotions are okay, all behaviors are not. I also know that emotional regulation is a skill. Being with your emotions long enough to feel them through is a practice. Something I didn't get a lot of support with growing up. So I am doing my best right now to do a little different for my kids. And then again, this acts as that constant reminder for me too that I'm allowed to cry. I am allowed to cry when I'm sad. Things are allowed to feel big and hard for me too as a parent. I am also allowed to be mad. And I'm allowed to make that mad known, whether that's through a growl or my words. I do not need to shrink my experiences to keep somebody else comfortable. While myself and I'm teaching my children, we also need to take accountability for when we inappropriately spew our dysregulated emotions on somebody else in a harmful or hurtful way. Okay, next line. We say prayers to give thanks for what we have. For our family, this touches on the idea that there is something bigger than us that we can turn to, that's there to hold us, that gives to us very generously. And then the importance of gratitude, which there is so much, so, so much research on the positive impacts of priming our minds towards gratitude for our mental health. The next line is mom and dad are always there for me. And the word for me here is always. They need to know this. It is so important that my kids know that I am always there for them. And it is a reminder for me that I will have to continue to show them the ways that I am a trusted space in a way that each of my kids uniquely need as they grow up. And so this is a call for me to own my own healing, to own my own regulation so that I can be a calm and anchored parent for them in the moments that they need it most. So I don't project my hurt, my pain, my past, my fear, my anxiety on the moments where they need me to be steady and calm, to celebrate with them, or to help hold them accountable, to help them know how to repair ruptures that they've done. All of it. Then this next line, second to last one, we're almost there. I stand up against any wrong I see. And this is because for me, this is a family value. We do not see harm and stay quiet about it. We keep our eyes open to the people and the world around us, and we do good. We are helpers, we are here for each other, and that's just about the most important thing that there is. And then this final line, and I always remember that I can do hard things. This is to teach my children resilience, to remind myself of resilience. It is this nightly reminder that even on my toughest days in work or motherhood or life, that I too, I too can do hard things. In fact, I have done 100% of the hard things that life has handed me so far. And I echo this in practice throughout the day when my kids are getting frustrated or they don't want to do something hard that I've asked them to do or they ask me to do it for them. Again, I'm not just throwing this line out arbitrarily at them. This is a line that they hear me sing to them, that they sing with me every single night. And I just remind them, hey, you can do this hard thing. You are capable. I will help you, but I need you to try to help yourself first. And it's my job to let them learn how to do the hard thing. It's my job to let them be in the frustration, to be in the discomfort of that hard thing. It takes a lot of consistent effort on my part to let my kids stay in their struggles. And of course, it's in an age-appropriate way, but not only am I okay with my kids being frustrated and doing hard things, I intentionally create scenarios in their life where they have to face that because resilience through hard things is a skill. And it is one of the skills that is most correlated to traumatic imprinting, to mental health outcomes, to success outcomes in almost every single domain of somebody's well-being in life. I think this is maybe this and that we take care of other people. Both of those things. And the hard thing sometimes is standing up, standing up for the wrong thing you see. But this is such an important skill that I need to instill in my children and remember in myself. So ultimately, this little family song was again something that I came up with just one day. And it was a way that I could teach my son some things that I thought would be important for him. I didn't know if it was just going to be this little ditty that I sang for a few nights and then we moved on to songs about fishing and feet, but it has stuck. It is a song now that my sister knows and can sing to my kids. My husband's brother knows. Anybody who has come or babysat or been around our kids, they have learned this song. I've sung this song to my friends' kids, and they now know it. I have come to deeply love and cherish the way that this balances out the importance of being with hard feelings, asking for help, knowing that you're supported, digging deep, doing the things you know you need to do when you need to do them. And it is giving them the words and the language for how to care for their bodies, how to work with and how to settle big feelings when things show up in their lives. In between the lines is a lot of calls to self-accountability. And then I take each and every one of these things and I do my best to model it into their daily life, to embody it within my own life. And so my hope is that this just starts to lay a foundation for them, to live more regulated lives, for them to have some of these things that I had to learn the hard way later in life, just feel like a no brainer default foundational way of living for them. And as I was singing it to my kids last night, I had the thought that maybe, maybe somebody here needed it too. All right, friends, that is it for today. Until next week, I am sending so much hope and healing your way.