Rethink Your Rules

When Your Kid is Angry at You: Feelings First

• Jenny Hobbs

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In this episode, I’m sharing a simple yet powerful strategy to  respond when your neurodiverse kids are upset: “Feelings First.”

This response may be simple, but it is not easy. It requires us to allow and accept our child’s emotions WITHOUT trying to solve or fix their pain. And when they are blaming us for that pain, it also requires that we set aside our own defensiveness so we can respond to their feelings with true compassion and empathy.

Using the example of my daughter’s anger when I had to work on her birthday, I’ll demonstrate why this matters so much. Well talk about how “Feelings First” creates connection with our kids and helps them calm down faster. We’ll also talk about how this strategy makes it easy to model emotional maturity to our kids.

“Feelings First” is part of the “C” in the CALM method (Connecting with compassion). Once you take this pivotal first step,  you can then use the rest of CALM (Assessing thoughts, Loosening your grip on unhelpful beliefs, Making intentional decisions) to manage your OWN emotional health.

This CALM method is how you can feel less stressed and more peaceful and self-confident as a parent.

If you’re struggling with mom burnout,  guilt, or feeling like a failure, do not miss this episode! I guarantee this is the piece you’re missing.

Mentioned in this episode:

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Need help applying this to your life? Ready for more strategies like this, but personalized to YOU? Set up your free consult and let’s talk about your unique situation and how coaching can help:
https://getcoached.jennyhobbsmd.com/consult
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Everything on this podcast and website is for informational purposes only and should not be used as medical advice. Views are our own, and do not necessarily represent those of our past or present employers or colleagues.

Kevin:

Welcome to Rethink your Rules with Jenny Hobbs MD. A fresh perspective on relationships, success and happiness for high achieving moms.

Jenny:

Hey, there it's Jenny. Welcome back to another episode of Rethink your Rules. I hope you are having a wonderful summer. I absolutely love this season. It's my favorite.

Jenny:

I am a sun seeker. I love it warm or even hot. I've almost never been too hot in my entire life, and particularly here in Seattle. The summer is just absolutely perfect because it's like 85 to max of 90 degrees, sometimes very rarely even hits 90. And it's not humid. It's just this gorgeous heat with a nice breeze off the water and gorgeous views everywhere, and it's such a nice contrast to the rest of the year. So a little plug if you've never been here, you should definitely visit, because everyone thinks it's just constantly gray and rainy and terrible, which it is much of the year, but in the summer it's beautiful, especially if you come after July 4th, um, into August. That's just the best weather in the country, I really think anyway. So we've been enjoying that.

Jenny:

My husband's done a bunch of work on our yard, uh, which is amazing. It's so nice to be back there right now, and for mother's day he actually got me this big heat lamp, kind of like the ones they have in restaurants. So when it does get a little on the cold side in the evenings, because we still have that cool breeze here in Seattle even when it's hot outside during the day. So that happens. We turn on my heat lamp and I can still enjoy being out there, which is just so nice. So, best husband ever and he's probably listening to this. So hi, podcast editor husband, you're amazing to this. So hi, podcast editor husband, you're amazing. Anyway, I also love summer because July is my daughter's birthday and she actually turned eight last Friday, which is crazy and I had this conversation with her around her birthday that I wanted to share with you today on the podcast, because I think so many working moms will be able to relate to this, and particularly if you are a working mom who has kids who are neurodiverse, with ADHD or autism, which we have in our family, or even if you just have kids who have really big, strong feelings for whatever reason maybe you don't know if they have a diagnosis of something, but you just know that they have big, strong emotional reactions so I think you'll really be able to relate to this conversation that I had with my daughter and what I'm going to do is tell you a little bit about what happened, but then I'm actually going to break it down and give you some practical tips for how you can respond in the moment when your kid is really upset and dysregulated and it's directed at you because they're blaming you and maybe you're feeling guilt or shame or frustration in that moment too. Okay, so I think this is going to be really useful for really any parent.

Jenny:

So, as a bit of background, I am a physician and I work nights, and for many years I had a job where I would just put in my vacation requests, you know, a year ahead of time, and I could usually almost always get it, particularly if it was like my kid's birthday, because they're not really on any holidays that everybody else wants off right. However, this year I'm in a new job which overall, is much better in many, many ways for me and my family and my mental health. But the downside of this particular job is that my schedule is such that I just can't easily ask for specific days off like that, because it kind of messes up the flow. And maybe with more advanced planning I could, but I'm kind of newer at this job, so I just didn't have the ability to request my daughter's birthday off, and so what that meant was that I was actually going to be working my stretch of night shifts and when I do that I sleep in a different place, about two hours away from home. So I was going to be working those night shifts and sleeping away from home and then I was going to finish up and drive home the day after her birthday. And we actually talked about this earlier in the year when we kind of saw this was going to happen and so we thought she was aware of that.

Jenny:

But about five days before her birthday I'm getting ready to leave on my stretch of work and she realizes and knew that I'm actually leaving, right, and she kind of does the math and realizes I'm not going to be there on her eighth birthday, which is something that hasn't happened before, and and she was very upset. So she immediately began, you know, yelling at me and saying very harsh things. You know that I didn't care about her at all and that you know it wasn't really fair that my patients got to have me on my birthday, you know, and she didn't. She's my daughter, she should matter more. I should be here in case something happens to her. You know, those patients in the hospital are sick and you're taking care of them, but what if I get sick and you're gone? And she was saying, you know you need to just quit your job and all these things, very, very upset.

Jenny:

And this occurred after. You know, not only had I told her far ahead of time that I wasn't going to be home on her birthday, but then I had basically spent the last couple weeks leading up to this planning a really great birthday party for her. That's going to happen. When I was home, when she was so mad at me, I dedicated that entire day, like my day off of free time, to letting her design her invitation, change it multiple times, you know, add lots of different people, kind of work on the details. I really spent a ton of time helping her with all the details of this party, which was really important to her and we. It was fine, I was happy to do it.

Jenny:

But so I'm sure you can imagine in that moment at the end of that day, having, you know, really put off a lot of things on my list that I would have liked to do, like read my book, and you know, you know there's always a long list as a working mom of things you like to do with your day off, right, but instead I had spent the time with her because it was important to me that she had a special experience for her birthday at this party. I just, you know, figured out, we all agreed it wasn't going to be happening on the actual day. Okay, so I'm going to pause the story there for a second and we're going to walk through this and I'm going to give you some thoughts about how I handled it and how you can handle something like this, cause I am sure I'm not the only person to have this experience. So I like to think about this in the framework of the calm method that I've described before. If you haven't heard that, it's fine, I'll show how it applies here and I can link up one of the podcast episodes where I spoke about it in the past, but it's just a nice mnemonic to have in the moment. So your first step, the C of calm, is to connect with compassion, and when I say connect with compassion, I mean connect with your feelings, your emotions, your body. Okay, how are you feeling? And I've talked on and on in this podcast Feelings and emotions are incredibly powerful, and so, as a grown adult, who's a busy mom, who, you know, many of my clients are in these very STEM type careers, right?

Jenny:

So we're very logical and cerebral and cognitive. We want to get out of our head for a minute and just sink into our body and notice how we're feeling. It's a simple step we're often skipping. So connect with how you're feeling, with self-compassion. Now, as a parent in this moment you're kind of doing that at the same time as you are connecting with your child with compassion. And, again, the connecting with your child is connecting with how they're feeling.

Jenny:

Okay, and if you don't want to think about all that in the moment, you can really simplify it. When you have this happen, you literally want to remind yourself feelings first, feelings first. Okay, like over and over, it should just be a knee, knee jerk response Feelings first, how is she feeling? How am I feeling? What's going on here? What's the matter here? Okay, and I want you to just trust me and believe me that you can come back to all the things your brain is telling you you need to do and say and solve about this later. But I promise you it will all work better if you put the feelings first, because the emotions are what's driving her in the moment. The emotions are actually what's driving you in the moment, even if you don't realize it. Okay, and nothing is going to work until you do this stuff. Okay, and other things you can be thinking in this moment and go back to my podcast about the power and paradox of emotions I talked about.

Jenny:

Emotions are 100% real and valid and true for that individual in that moment, even if they are not based in the true reality of the situation. So my daughter's anger is 100% real and valid for her, even if it's based on some mistaken beliefs and understandings about me and about my job, right. Even if it's kind of like missing the point of all these other things, she still gets to have that feeling and have it be real and valid, even if, logically, we could all argue about whether or not she should or shouldn't feel that way in that moment or whether or not her reason for feeling that way is valid, right. So her feeling is a hundred percent real and valid, no matter what, and it does actually feel terrible Like it's going to kill her, even though it's not. It is very powerful and affecting everything about how she's showing up right now, even though we kind of want to ignore it and say you know it's illogical and shouldn't. It does feel like it's going to last forever, even though we know it's not right.

Jenny:

And we know that the best way to deal with an emotion is actually to allow it and validate it and hear it, and by speaking it and allowing all that to happen it actually loses some of that power and actually diminishes right, even though our instinct in that moment is to try to solve for it and explain it away or tell her not to do that because it's rude or all the things Okay. So in that moment I'm thinking, okay, feelings first. Her feelings are a hundred percent true and really valid, and this is the key, though that is also true for your feelings, because you have feelings in the moment too, and all those things I just said about my kids' feelings about anger it's all true about my feelings too. Now, for most of us adults, it's going to be a little harder to really articulate how we feel in this moment, because it may be more nuanced or complicated, or we just aren't out of the habit of even paying attention to feelings and we have so many other mechanisms for reacting and responding and pushing those aside. So that is a very large topic that we work on when we do a lot of coaching time.

Jenny:

But in this moment, with your kid, the point that is most important is that you just recognize these truths. Feelings first, the most important thing. The first step here is to connect with compassion to how we're both feeling and that means her and that means me and you want to notice that the two of you are aligned here. This is the same for both of you. There's a negative emotion that's coming up for each of you and it wants to be acknowledged and validated, no matter what.

Jenny:

Okay, practically what you can do here is you can literally take a pause or a deep breath and you can say something to your kid like it makes sense that you feel this way now, if that's hard to get to, because you just think their logic doesn't make sense. Like I told them before, this is why I wasn't, that I wasn't going to be here, and she should know that my job is more important. Like if your brain really has a hard time with that one, you could simply just repeat back what she said. Like you really feel like I don't care about you right now, right, or some kids? They freak out every word you say they don't want you to put words in their mouth, you could just give a hug. You can say I hear you. Sometimes they need you to just literally take a pause in some space and if they, if you try that and they're just getting mad or madder, you can just be like I love you, I'm so sorry you're upset. Let me know when you want to talk or I'm here if you need me, something like that. Right, so you're going to have to play this by ear with your own kid, but the point is, if you're in, this mindset of their feelings are valid, they are real. I want to respond to them with empathy and compassion and it's okay for them to feel however. They feel you're going to have the right words at the moment. Okay, so you take that pause.

Jenny:

Now maybe, depending on how that goes with your kid, you have a minute to even just notice for yourself what's wrong and you can ask yourself some of the questions from that connect step of the calm method, like what do I need here? What's the matter? You can even say like a term of endearment to yourself, like what do I need here? What's the matter? You can even say like a term of endearment to yourself. Like what's the matter, sweetie? Like what's going on? Just noticing and naming what's going on. Or you can use I've talked about the how we feel app. We have that app on our phones. It's free.

Jenny:

I'll also put that in the show notes and you can literally go to it and just try to like get better at naming what emotion you're actually feeling, to like get better at naming what emotion you're actually feeling, okay. But if you don't have time for that, that's actually okay, right, you just want to get to that core point of like my kid's having a big feeling. It's hurting, you know, and I have some big feelings here too, and so we're going to take a pause and a deep breath and give that some space first before we move on, okay, so I'm going to have you go through this exercise actually for yourself. So put yourself into my shoes as if you were the mom here and your daughter saying these things to you, and go through this first step of connecting with compassion and remember it's connecting with self-compassion. All my feelings are valid and they are there and they matter right and compassion for your kid. All their feelings are there and their feelings are valid and they matter, even if I don't agree with them. Right, and we're going to deal with the feelings first. We're going to give them some space and validation before we move on to solving anything, and I want you to.

Jenny:

If you need to, you can ask yourself a few questions as you do this, to kind of get at your emotional states. You'd be like what's the matter? What am I feeling? What's in my body, just whatever it takes to kind of settle in a bit and practice naming your emotion. Okay, so pause the podcast here and do that. Okay, I hope you actually paused and did it and maybe you wrote some things down, if not, jot some notes. It's really important to just practice this, whether it's a hypothetical scenario like the one I'm doing, or just to practice it as it kind of comes up in little ways throughout your days with your family, because your brain is going to have a specific set of patterns and thoughts and feelings that it tends to go to more often. I call those like our unspoken rules. I did a podcast fleshing some of that out last week, so take a listen.

Jenny:

But you kind of want to start getting to know your own brain and noticing and recognizing what your brain's most common unspoken rules and patterns and feelings are. The reason for this is that it can be difficult when you haven't done it a lot, when you're in the moment and you're triggered and stressed and trying to parent, it just can be hard to articulate this. But if you've done it in a practice setting, like if we've done a coaching session and you've discovered these thoughts or feelings, or if you've done this exercise here, it's going to be easier to recognize when it comes up in the moment, right, because it's like your brain has already been primed to kind of be looking for it. So it's really important. Also, your brain is different than mine, so I can talk a lot about my experiences or my clients' experiences, but you have a unique brain, so you want to really start getting a sense of what patterns and challenges your brain brings up. The other thing I want to say about this is that if what came up for you when you tried to do this was a sense of urgency, like I don't want to pause and sit with this emotion, I don't really think that these feelings make sense. I want to just like I have an urgency to solve for it, to explain it away, to convince her to you know, whatever change the change my work schedule. So this isn't a problem. If you felt a really strong urgency to move past this first step of sitting with the emotion and letting it be okay and valid, that urgency is your sign, that you are making it about you some way. So when we make things about ourselves, we feel much more pressure to solve for them, because we don't like feeling bad about it and we're trying to solve for our own bad feeling.

Jenny:

And I'll show you an example. So let's say your kid stubs their toe. You hear them crying and they sound miserable, and so your mama heart says oh my gosh, my kid is hurting. Right, you go in. And what would you do? You would be in pure compassion and empathy mode. Right, you might give them a hug. You ask what's wrong, what happened? Oh, that's so terrible. You would sit with them through the pain that I think most of us would agree.

Jenny:

Stubbing your toe pain is really terrible and it's a part of life that's not entirely avoidable. Right, it's painful, it's bad and we I don't think most of us spend a lot of time thinking it's like a big problem we need to solve or prevent. Right, and most of us wouldn't go in that moment to thinking like how we should have prevented our kid from stubbing their toe, or we should figure out a way to teach them to never stub their toe right, or that it's our fault that they stubbed their toe because we weren't watching, or whatever. I think for most of us that's true and I think most of us wouldn't even spend a lot of time stressing about we need to make this pain go away faster. Right, we might get some eyes, but we know it's not going to kill them and it's not going to last forever. Maybe they're even being a little dramatic about it. They're like my kids.

Jenny:

Even though all that's true, it's relatively, I think, easy for most of us to genuinely feel empathy, because that does suck. Right, it sucks and it's part of life. However, if we think about the example of my daughter's emotional pain, which also is a part of life, that does happen. Right, you love someone. They can't come to your birthday. It's disappointing, you're angry, you're sad, right, we can understand that it sucks and it's part of life. Right, it's a human emotion. She's going to have to deal with a lot, unfortunately.

Jenny:

I mean I don't love that my kids have pain, but that's part of life and part of my job is to help them navigate those painful moments. And if I am purely treating it just like I would treat a subtoe, it's not that hard for me to pause and allow that pain to be there and run its course and be in pure compassion support mode. But if I am making her emotions and her words mean that I'm a bad mom, that I should be able to fix this, that I should be able to always keep my daughter happy, that I should be able to have the career I want and always be home for my kids' events, that I should have planned better, all that stuff Notice how I'm now creating all this guilt and shame for myself because I'm making her pain mean something about me. I'm making her pain my problem, my responsibility, my fault, okay. And when I do that now I've got negative emotions of guilt and shame and blame and defensiveness and maybe even anger coming up. And now I'm believing that the only way for me to feel okay is for her to stop feeling bad or for her to stop saying these things to me. And when I'm believing I can only feel good or okay. If my kids are happy with my choices, I can only feel good or okay if my kids are happy with my choices.

Jenny:

My daughter stops saying these words to me, then what happens is I feel an urgency to get rid of my own guilt and shame and pain, and I'm thinking the only way to do that is to make her stop feeling what she's feeling or stop saying what she's saying, and my actions that come from that are an urgency to shut down her expression of her legitimate emotion or change it or talk her out of it. So now I have made it about me had all these thoughts generated a bunch of bad feelings about her pain, guilt and shame and obligation and anxiety and defensiveness, and I don't like those feelings on my body and I don't know what to do with them. And I haven't mastered the skill of regulating my emotions and allowing them and sitting there, all those things we talked about in the connect step. I haven't mastered all that. So my tendency is going to be to then have this urgency to make what triggered it go away, which is my daughter's experience, and then that doesn't allow me to show up and allow her to experience her emotions. So we're kind of stuck and what's interesting is that we are now stuck doing the same thing to one another.

Jenny:

My urgency here comes from this idea that I can't feel good unless she changes something, and her whole argument to me in the first place was that she couldn't feel good unless I changed something. Right, the thing I want her to change is how she's feeling and what she's saying to me, and the thing that she wants me to change is my work schedule. Right, but the concept is the same, which is both of us are saying listen, I cannot feel okay unless something that that other person is doing changes. And so this is really the heart of emotional immaturity, right? Both people in that scenario are being emotionally immature. They're both saying, hey, I've got a really bad feeling and I don't like it and I don't know what to do with it, so you need to change, and then I won't have to learn to handle it. So how do you get unstuck from this? What do you do? Right? I think we can all see this is not a great situation for a number of reasons, but how do you get out of it?

Jenny:

The best way is for one person to stop being emotionally immature first, and in this case, you are the adult in the room, so that is going to be you. It is developmentally appropriate for your kid to be emotionally immature, okay, and they will slowly grow to that as their frontal lobe develops and they get older and you are going to help them learn that skill. But for right now, if you're a parent, it's you. You have to prioritize learning to be emotionally mature, to stop this cycle and get you guys unstuck, and in so doing, that is how you are going to model for them what that looks like, so that they can get better at it over time, slowly, but in the beginning it over time, slowly, okay, but in the beginning it's really up to you. You're the leader, you're the grownup, you set the stage and the way that you do that is by practicing these skills I'm talking about in the calm method, over and over again. So again, that first step connecting with compassion.

Jenny:

While you're sitting there and you're responding to your kid, you're also noticing all this stuff coming up for you where you're thinking that they need to change so you can feel better, where you're feeling like that people-pleasing twinge, that perfectionist twinge, that guilt whatever. And as you're noticing those things instead of just sort of knee-jerking and reacting to them, you're noticing, there it is. You're recognizing it and you're acknowledging that that stuff is your stuff to deal with. And I want to point out here that just because it's your stuff to deal with doesn't mean it's not important or real or valid, right? If in that moment, you're like angry because you spent all day doing all these great things for your kid and you work so hard for your family to earn money and they still aren't happy, like you want to have that twinge and notice it and say, oh my gosh, aren't happy. Like you want to have that twinge and notice it and say, oh my gosh, like I am super annoyed about this. This is not fair, right? And then, okay, that's my stuff to deal with, because I am the emotionally mature adult here and I can, I can handle that emotion, it's not going to kill me, right? And that's like a flicker in your mind.

Jenny:

And then you get back to focusing on your kid a hundred percent, just as if they stubbed their toe and they were hurting. And then you get back to focusing on your kid a hundred percent, just as if they stubbed their toe and they were hurting. And then there are the other steps of the calm method which are really for you to use in whatever fashion you need to, to understand your own brain better and regulate yourself better. Okay, and I'm going to kind of go through these quickly, just because this isn't the main focus here, but so you understand, as you, the grownup, are working on learning to regulate yourself. These are the things you need to be doing, right?

Jenny:

So the second step of the calm method assess your thoughts is really to figure out why this is a problem for me, right. What am I making this mean about me? A lot of this will fall into the unspoken rules which I outlined in the last episode. So if you listen to that and then you're in a situation with your kid where you're feeling triggered, you can literally think, okay, connect, what am I feeling? Deep breath and then think, why is this such a problem for me, right? And you might find, oh, like one of those unspoken rules pops in your mind and it'll make a lot of sense.

Jenny:

The third step is to loosen your grip. So now that you understand what's going on in your brain, then you're going to practice sort of being the skeptic of that loosening up on it. What if that's not really true? Kind of what are some other things that might be true, you know, softening up your hold on everything. And then the fourth step is to make a decision.

Jenny:

That's the M in the calm method. This is where you say, okay, knowing that I have all these options and I've loosened up my grip on all the things and habits and I've rethought my rules, what do I want to do? What do I want most? What's the most aligned for me? And let's be honest, we're always all making a decision right, like something happens and you make a split second decision and you show up the way you show up, you respond the way you respond, and that's fine sometimes. But if you are doing this whole process, the whole calm method, when you get down to the make a decision point, you are going to feel so much better about your decisions. You're going to have this calm and confidence and you're going to just know that you like your reasons and it's going to help you show up in a much more sturdy, calm way with your kid. In the moment You're not going to feel so wishy-washy and so likely to question yourself or get defensive.

Jenny:

So I want to wrap this up by talking about how this played out for me and my daughter the other night. So when she first started saying these things to me, I did kind of reflexively discuss the logic behind her feelings before I went to the connect step. So I think she had said no one told me about this and I was like, well, we did tell you. And then I think she said I should quit my job, you know. And I think I offered her some logical information about how I can't just quit my job and I'm supporting the family, etc. But pretty quickly after that she just kept escalating.

Jenny:

I did remember, okay, feelings first connect with compassion. This is totally legit and I was able to really empathize with her. And while I was interacting with her in that way, I was also able to notice and allow what was coming up for me. Right, the emotions of frustration and disappointment and guilt and whatever notice them. I didn't make myself feel bad about them, I didn't bring them up to her, I just let them be there and notice them.

Jenny:

And because I've done the, assess my thoughts and loosen my grip and make decision steps over and over before I was even able to say like, yeah, of course it makes sense that I feel this way, it makes sense that I feel guilty. I feel bad, that I feel, you know, defensive, because I'm thinking that, uh, because these are the rules I have. But I have thought this through before and I know that, even though she's offering me the blame and the responsibility here, that I don't actually believe that it's my responsibility to please her all the time. I don't believe that it's my role as a mom to take away all of her pain. And it's also okay that I feel badly that I can't do that, and I wish I could do that.

Jenny:

All those things are true and valid, but I have thought this through and I've made a decision about my role here and I've decided that my role here is to respond to her with empathy, while also not believing the story that she's telling me, that I have to solve it Right, and I believe that my role as a mom is to help her navigate this bad feeling, not to prevent it or make it go away. And I was also able to remind myself that, you know, I have used the calm method to make the decision about changing jobs and all these different things. And because I did that, I have already thought this through and I made the best decision I could, knowing it wouldn't be perfect and there'd be pain, would be different pain potentially than the one I had at my other job. But all things have their pluses and minuses and I thought all that through and I liked my reasons for the decision I made and that now we were just experiencing one of those pain points that we knew was going to be part of the change, and that is a universal human experience of negative emotion that is inevitable part of life and that both my daughter and I can connect around, right, and so that really just took me right back to the C in that model that connect with compassion.

Jenny:

It totally makes sense that she feels this way. It totally makes sense that I feel this way. Nothing's gone wrong here. This is expected, this is part of the pain and we can agree on that. We don't have to be blaming each other for the pain and telling each other we need to fix the pain. We can sit in it together and we can both practice our emotional regulation together. And so when you're in that mindset, it takes so much pressure off you. It took so much pressure off me in that moment, right, because also I can acknowledge how I'm feeling in that moment and I can hear how she's feeling and it doesn't have to be one or the other. And so what I said to her, when she kind of circled back to me and gave me a hug, I said hey, like I get that you're sad and mad about this, I am sad and mad about this too. I'm really disappointed, sucks. But maybe instead of being mad and sad at each other, we could just be mad and sad together about this.

Jenny:

I think that did help her a lot and I really wanted to leave that concept here because I think it bookends really nicely with the idea of feelings first. And as you run into these situations with your kids, even if you take nothing else from this overly long episode where I geeked out a little bit about my method if you take nothing else, remember this in that moment your kids upset, they're blaming you. Two things are true their feelings are valid and real and you've got to focus on them first before you do anything else. And just because those feelings are real and valid and important does not mean that you are obligated to solve them or that they are your fault. You can sit with them in the difficult emotion. You can be mad and sad together. You don't have to be mad and sad at each other. So I hope you found that really helpful and relatable. Maybe you came away with a few specific strategies you can use in the moment when things are tough with your kids, and also some concepts to mull over If you are a working mom who is feeling like a failure, overwhelmed, struggling, stressed, dealing with difficult kids who maybe have ADHD or autism or aren't diagnosed yet, but you think they might.

Jenny:

If that is you and you are just feeling totally burned out, please reach out and set up a free consult with me. We will go through your exact situation. We'll walk through situations just like the one I just described with my daughter. We'll walk through situations just like the one I just described with my daughter and we'll talk about how the calm method and my coaching can help you get better at regulating your emotions and parenting your kids from a calm place, so you can actually get to the point of enjoying your time with your kids again. I promise you it's possible. I've done it, my clients have done it and I'd absolutely love to talk about how this could look for you. With that, I hope you have an amazing week and I'll be back here next time.

Kevin:

Thanks for listening to Rethink your Rules with Jenny Hobbs MD. Would you like to learn more about how to apply this to your own life through personalized coaching with Jenny? Visit us on the web at JennyHobbsMDcom to schedulea free consultation. If you found value in what you heard today, please consider subscribing to the podcast and giving us a five-star rating so we can reach even more women like you.