She Parented 27 Kids — The Unexpected Pattern She Found

Raising kids with a history of trauma requires a shift from standard parenting to an operational, safety-first mindset. In this episode, we break down the tactical playbook for managing children from traumatic backgrounds when you don't have their full history. If you are fostering, adopting, or parenting kids who need a structured, stable environment, this conversation is your guide.

We cover:

• How to establish immediate, non-negotiable safety boundaries.
• Why 'trauma-informed' isn't just a buzzword—it’s an operational necessity.
• Identifying the subtle patterns that signal a need for stability.

Stop winging it. Follow The Parent Tap for the full playbook.

Transcript

Intro: Parenting 10 Kids and Fostering 17

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So one of the things that we learned, and you've been with your kids from day one, right? So the experiences that your kids have had, you're familiar with. So something that scares your child, you know why that scares your child. You know what happened and you know the background there. So you can work with them to kind of soothe that, calm that down, and help them to feel safe, right? But with kids who come into your home from traumatic backgrounds, you may or may not know what happened to them. And most of the time you won't know everything because even the social workers don't know the full story. So things will start happening and you're like, what the heck? You know, this little tiny thing happened and we have this massive explosion over it. But it triggers that in them. And so one of the things that works well with that is staying calm yourself, right? And so if you feel yourself really starting to get stressed because I've got a meeting, we have got to get out of here, right? We cannot deal with this. I can't sit here and listen to you scream about your shoes or not put them on, right? So then you have to decide, number one, how to stay calm yourself. So deep breathing may help, right? Also, is it critical that they have the shoes on before they get in the car? Can you get them to the car and they can put the shoes on in the car? So if you're calm enough to say, okay, we're not gonna get them on before we get in the car, but let's, you know, I'll scoop you up, I'll carry you out to the car, put you there, and then you can put your shoes on in the car. Sometimes if you have somebody, I mean, if they're just absolutely being defiant because they're stubborn, and there are kids that have, I have a few that have a stubborn streak a mile wide, and they're just not gonna do what you tell them to do. At five, you can put the shoes on them, right? And so they'll kick, they'll fight you, but you can get the shoes on them and you have to, at some point, it has to be okay. This is necessary, whether you like it or not. The shoes have to go on. So you can put them on yourself, or I can help you put them on, you choose. One of the things that will help is allowing the kids to have as much choice as possible. And that's age-appropriate choice, right?

You Can’t Fully Control Your Household

SPEAKER_00 2:19

But the more the kids have a choice in what's happening, the more they feel like they have some control over their life. So if you set them up to so that you can say yes as much as possible versus no all the time, then you're gonna get a better working relationship with them because they're gonna learn to trust that you'll say yes when it's appropriate and you'll say no when it's not. Right. So if you can set the circumstances up for them, for you to say yes as often as possible. Like with the kids cleaning their rooms, you know, to a certain extent, I let things go. But after a while, it's like your room is in my house. It's got to be clean. This is becoming a health hazard, right? But I would tell them, okay, you can choose how long it takes you to clean your room. You can go and get it clean and done in 30 minutes, you got the rest of your day free. Or you can fuss about this and fight and argue and rebel and choose not to clean your room. And that's okay too. But you're not coming out of your room until the room is clean. And so sometimes, I mean, my youngest son had oppositional defiance disorder, and he was determined that I was not gonna control him and tell him when and how to clean his room. So I that ended up working really well with him. I'd say, I'm not trying to control you. I'm just telling you the room has to be

Bedtime Transitions and Reducing Chaos

SPEAKER_00 3:47

done today, and you can decide how long it's gonna take you. That is entirely in your control how much time it takes you to clean this room. You make that choice for yourself. So when you can find ways to give them control, then it helps them be calmer because they feel like they have some say in things. And that was, I mean, even with our biological kids, we would sit down with them and work things out. You know, you're this age, what's the curfew? You're this age, you're this age. You know, what what level is the freedom given? And how much freedom is given, right? Where are the fences built? And then we had to completely readapt where those fences go with kids who are traumatized because they cannot have all of that for they just don't know how to manage it and they can't keep themselves safe because they haven't been taught how to keep themselves safe. So most of us learn safety things just by osmosis, watching our parents, right? And we learn not to touch the burner and we learn not to run across the street, and we learn these things that are just inherent going to keep us safe. These kids don't. They're in survival mode from morning till night. They can't even start to think about that stuff. They just need to stay alive. So they may be stressing

Trauma-Informed Parenting: Understanding Hidden Triggers

SPEAKER_00 5:01

about where food is gonna come from because there's no food in the house and they don't know where their next meal is coming from. They don't know if they're gonna get hit if they step out of line, right? And so depending on what the trauma has been, they don't have any of those innate skills. And so the boundaries are tighter in the beginning. And as they grow and as you learn and you learn what works with them and what doesn't work with them, then you can adjust boundaries. And we were constantly, okay, well, they're this age, let's move the boundary out here. Oh, no, let's pull the boundary back, right? And one of the we worked with a top psychologist for a little while and when we were living in Nevada, and she said, because of everything they've been through, and mom had been doing drugs and drinking during pregnancies, she said, you can count on them being anywhere from five to seven years behind developmentally behind their chronological age. And we saw that play out time and time and time again because I've got a 17-year-old daughter who's functioning more like a 12 to 13-year-old. And so then you can't give her the freedoms that you would give a 17-year-old that knows how to keep themselves safe in social situations. So it's a constant just balancing, right? And sitting down with the kids and saying, okay, this is what this is going to look like. And and even with our biological kids, right? You give them the freedom that you feel that they are capable of managing. And if they show you they're not, then you readdress and pull some of that back. And I really appreciate it because we had pretty open conversations with our kids. Um, as our biological kids got older and they started to feel like, you know, I'm 16 or 17, why do I have a 10 o'clock curfew? Right. But that was something we had put in place, we're comfortable with. As parents, it's yeah, we're totally comfortable that you're home by 10 o'clock. But they wanted later curfew. So they felt like they could just come to us and

Stop Feeding the Behavior with Attention

SPEAKER_00 7:03

say, hey, can we discuss this? We're older now. We don't feel like we need to be in by 10 o'clock. And I'm like, okay, well, what curfew would they would you like? The one or two in the morning? No, let's go midnight. Let's meet in the middle, right? And just, I don't know if it's negotiations or if it's just give and take, right? Because you as a parent, if you can look at it as collaborating with your children so that everybody is on the same page and everybody's happy, versus looking at it that you're having to compromise, right? Because you're not compromising, but you are working together with your children to establish patterns that are gonna keep them safe and help them learn because you want to be able to trust that when they go out in the world as an adult on their own, they're gonna be okay. And that I don't care how well prepared they are, they're gonna stumble, they're gonna fall, but they have to know how to pick themselves up. And they have to know that when they fall hard, you're there as a backup plan, right? And you're gonna be there to help them get up, but you have to teach them those skills or they're not gonna be functioning adults. And so sitting down together and collaborating on what things need to look like, right? How is our household gonna run? And what are you responsible for? What are we responsible for? How many, you know, how often can you be gone with friends? How late can you stay out? And all those things are just a fluctuating thing as they grow and go through grade school to middle school to high school, things change. You know, you've got a five-year-old right now, you're not gonna give them the freedom that you would give a 17-year-old. And by the same token, you're not gonna keep the 17-year-old restricted to the five-year-old boundaries. So it's just this constant ebb and flow with the kids, being willing to talk to them. And there are times, I mean, where you just have to lay down the law, this is it. And for the most part, if you have to do that, if you can explain why and help them understand why it has to be this way, they will generally buy in a little bit better, but not always. I mean, there are gonna be things that they teenagers all think they know everything. And they all think, oh, my parents grew up in a different age and dime, things are so different now, right? And so you just know going in that that's the situation. The other thing that nobody warns you about is that 18 to 25 is harder than 13 to 18. And you just don't even have a clue that that's gonna happen. It does. Because you're used to being a little bit more involved, and now from 18 to 25, you have to step back and they're not gonna want as much input from you. And you have to let them fall and you have to let them pick themselves up. And as parents, that's so hard. It's so hard to watch them struggle and have those pain points and not fix it for them. But if we continually rescue and fix, they don't learn those skills, and then they get out in the adult world and they can't function because they don't know how to rescue themselves. They don't know how to fix things, they don't know how to work through things. So yeah, it's a fun journey.

SPEAKER_02 10:12

It is, yeah. And there's so many great tips there, a lot to unpack there. But I can tell you it's true. What you just said, that the freedom and the choices has changed my life. Just giving my kids choices of what they want to wear or what, you know, like you said, putting the shoes on in the car for my terrible two-year-old right now, that is a game changer because he would throw a fit, temper, it'd be this power struggle, it would ruin my day, you know, that kind of thing. And it's like, who cares? Like, we'll put it in the car seat when he's when he's happier or

Consistency, Emotional Regulation, and Calm Authority

SPEAKER_02 10:45

whatever. And my daughter, you know, I've literally had to change her at school in the trunk because she would not get dressed. You know what I mean? Because it was like, oh, this is what you're wearing, and we're going out the door. But it's like letting her pick up her outfit, like you know, giving her some time to sort of like have a choice and that freedom really changes her mentality. And she has autism, so it's very like she gets very fixated on certain things, and that was one of the things we struggled with was like, oh, she doesn't have a choice, so it feels like we're forcing her to do this, and she would fight us constantly. So I just wanted to say that that has changed my life. Just that little tweak and approach of giving kids choices, it's a very simple change, but it has long-lasting impact, and it's just something that I've continued to learn. And I know you said other great things on there, but I just wanted to point that out in particular because that's just personally for me, that has been the game changer approach in my own parenting.

SPEAKER_00 11:43

And doesn't bring you so much peace, right? She's happier, you're happier, the house is calmer, all because she gets to choose her own shirt.

SPEAKER_02 11:51

Exactly. And it's it's a very simple implementation of of of a practice, but it's also like, man, why didn't I do that earlier? You know what I mean? Like it's like it's like these cut, like these very, you know what

Defiance vs. a Triggered Nervous System

SPEAKER_02 12:04

I mean? Like when you say it, it's like, oh yeah, I mean that no dub. Like, but it's like when you're in the fire, when you're in the chaos, sometimes it does, it's not very clear, obvious what you should do. Um, and like you said, you want to take control, you want to just get them off to school, you want to just kind of like extinguish that fire. So sometimes you feel like, oh, I'm gonna make this decision for them, or I'm just gonna like, you know, like kind of just put put them in the car kicking and screaming, and and it's not always the best approach. And so I I love how you said that. And I want to talk a little bit about the high performing professional because I I think that you it seems like you work with a lot of different clientele, and and you know, so when they come to you overwhelmed, let's say they have half the kids you do, five or or less. Um, you know, even even one kid can be overwhelming, balancing a career, balancing relationships, right? Balancing all that life has to throw at us. So even just one kid. So how do you how do you, you know, maybe they've lost their confidence, maybe they've lost their I've dealt with this too, where my time is constantly under attack. It feels like I cannot get enough done in a day. And I work remotely, so I I have an advantage on some people because I can put laundry in or I can, you know, do what I have to do during the workday at times. But yeah, so what do people what's your blueprint for giving uh your clients, you know, how do you like help them regain their confidence, maybe after having a kid and how they maybe just don't feel like they have a as much of a grip on their career or their relationships or their time or their their self-care or anything that comes along with that?

SPEAKER_00 13:41

So the key really for emotional hygiene and emotional regulation, that is the key to being peaceful in life, right? And if you can learn and understand what is emotional regulation, what does it look like, what does it feel like, right? Then as you practice the tools that I teach and you become regulated, no one can stay regulated 100% of the time. You just can't. We're human beings, things happen, we have gut reactions to things, right? So the goal is not 100% regulation. The goal is to understand and recognize when you're dysregulated and then use the tools that I teach you to get back to a regulated state. And the more you practice that, the quicker you start to notice. And generally you'll notice the feeling more than the thought, right? And I'll go over that thought chain in just a second.

Giving Kids Choices and Age-Appropriate Control

SPEAKER_00 14:40

But when you notice the feeling that you're feeling off, something's not quite right, you don't feel calm or you you just feel off, right? So then, right then, if you catch that, then you stop and you okay, what are my thoughts? Right. Because realistically, our thoughts create our emotions, our emotions drive our actions, our actions create our results, and our results feed our thoughts. So if we're stuck in a negative thought cycle, and we may not even notice it, one of the most profound experiences I ever had in my life was being shown the negative thought cycle that I was in the middle of. And I probably had been in that thought cycle for months and just not even recognized that's where I was. But when it was brought to my attention, I was like, holy cow, no wonder. No wonder I'm stressed all the time. No wonder I'm no wonder I'm anxious and on the verge of tears and my shoulders are up like this all the time, right? But so many of us don't understand that our thoughts are not facts, they're just thoughts, right? And so learning the difference between thoughts and facts, because we can't change the circumstances or the fact that happened. But it's a totally neutral thing until we wrap a story around it and give it meaning. So I often use the example of a flat tire. Let's say you've got a meeting coming up, you're on your way to the meeting, you get a flat tire, you've got to pull over to the side of the road, and now you're either gonna be late or you're gonna miss the meeting entirely. Is that a positive or a negative thing in your life?

SPEAKER_02 16:26

That is very negative. That will ruin my day.

SPEAKER_00 16:30

It's actually neither. It's just a flat tire. That's all it is, is a flat tire, right? However, if you need to be to that meeting and that meeting is important to you, and now you're gonna be late, and then the story you're gonna tell yourself is exactly that, it's gonna be a negative experience because it went wrong. This went wrong, right? But what if you didn't really want to go to that meeting? What if that flat tire got you out of something you didn't want to do in the first place? Yeah, that's a good way to think about it. Right? It could be the happiest thing that happened to you all day long was getting a flat tire. So the flat tire itself is just a neutral circumstance that happened. And it's not positive or negative until you tell yourself a story about it. And even if it is keeping you from that meeting, right, you can allow yourself to feel that frustration, the annoyance, the anger,

Trauma Can Delay Development by Years

SPEAKER_00 17:31

all of those things that come up, right? Let yourself feel it. It's okay. It's okay to feel those emotions. What's not okay is to get stuck there and to stay there all day long, right? Because we can use deep breathing tools to calm our nervous system down, to slow our heart rate down. When you breathe in slowly through your nose to a count of four, pause for a count of two and breathe out through your mouth to a count of four, pause and breathe in, that actually calms your nervous system down. Most of the time, like we get that flat tire, it's a stressful thing. Like you said, it would ruin your whole day, right? So then you're stressed about this flat tire and you don't even notice that you're not breathing. You're holding your breath and you don't even know it, right? And we cannot make logical choices without oxygen to our brain. So the first step is just take some deep, calming breaths, calm your nervous system down. If you put your hand on your chest and feel your heart beat, ultimately what helps the most is if you can get your breathing rate in line with your heart rate and you can just calm that down. It's called being in coherence. That gets oxygen into your brain, and then you can step back and go, okay, what's the first thing I need to do to deal with this situation? And you can make a choice and choose an action from a calm state versus from a gut reaction out of anger, out of frustration, losing control,

Parenting as Collaboration, Not Constant Rescue

SPEAKER_00 19:09

right? And you're gonna have a completely different experience if you just breathe through that a little bit, allow yourself to feel those feelings, and then make an intentional choice about how you're gonna move forward, right? And so learning to catch your thoughts because negative thoughts create negative emotions, and then that drives negative actions, which create negative results, which feed more. See, I told you it wasn't gonna work, right? So this morning, coming into this call, you had some frustration with getting things set up, right?

SPEAKER_02 19:44

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 19:44

So then you have to choose the story you're gonna tell yourself about that. Did that ruin your day? Are you gonna let that ruin your day? Or are you gonna say, well, it wasn't fun. Now it's kind of a rough start to that, but we got through it and I learned some things from it. So next time around, I'm gonna be a little bit better prepared, right? So it doesn't have to be this, oh my word, the whole thing got totally screwed up, and then she couldn't get into the studio, and then it was this and that, right? And then we spend. So helping them understand thoughts are not facts, they're just thoughts, they're stories, and we can change them. We can't change the flat tire, we can't change abuse, we can't change the circumstance itself, but we can change the story we tell ourselves about the circumstance. And when we change the story, we change our lives.

SPEAKER_02 20:41

That's powerful. That definitely is. I love how you phrase that. And um, for for the viewers out there who want to talk to you, it sounds like from what I've gathered, you offer a free 30-minute discovery call for parents who need help finding clarity in all the chaos that we've that we've mentioned. That's awesome. Where can the audience find you, book that call, and start rebuilding their boundaries?

SPEAKER_00 21:03

So the best place to book the call is from my website, which is bonnybutlercoaching.com. And there's a button on there. You just click that button, it'll take you to my calendar. However, you

Why Rescuing Kids Can Hurt Them Long-Term

SPEAKER_00 21:14

can message me off of Facebook, off of Instagram, or LinkedIn, send me a direct message through any of those social media platforms, and I can get you the link and we can set it up, or you can directly email me. And everything is streamlined, literally. Bonnie ButlerCoaching.com is my website. Bonnie at Bonnie ButlerCoaching.com is my email. So you can email me directly. Bonnie Butler Coaching on Facebook, Bonnie Butler Coaching on Instagram, and Bonnie Butler Coaching on LinkedIn. So I'm pretty easy to find if you can just remember my name.

SPEAKER_02 21:47

Yeah, no, absolutely. Bonnie Butler, B-O-N, B-O-N-N-I-E, or for those out there listening in their car. So Bonnie Butler. I appreciate this. This I really appreciate you coming on, sharing your expertise. I know we barely just kind of scratched the surface. There's so much, especially with your background and and what you've um, you know, faced and what you continue to face in in terms of raising kids, especially from the background that you've raised. There's a lot of, you know, I was surprised to learn that there's a lot of transferable advice, you know, even that works. If that worked in your situation, that can work in my situation with my terrible two son. I'll call him terrible two son. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:30

He's literally gonna one time he was just acting up and acting up and acting up, and I just I hit that frustration point. And I looked at him and I said, Stop acting like a two-year-old. And the words were no sooner out of my mouth than I realized he is a two-year-old, right? So, what was my expectation of my two-year-old? And so that really was one of those moments of clarity of like, okay, I need to put the expectations aside because he's two. Yeah, and this is typical two-year-old behavior.

SPEAKER_02 23:02

A lot of people don't admit that they actually like make mistakes or say something that they shouldn't have said. And I do that all like honestly, like it's a daily thing for me. I'll say something and I'm like, oh, why did I say that? Like, you know, I don't want to, you know, I've I've had a lot of parenting experts on lately. And so now I'm learning. I'm like, you don't want to shame, you don't want to like call out their bad behavior, you do you don't you want to get the attention to the good behaviors and like so? I'm definitely learning a lot from having people like yourself on the show and you know, being a better father, but also hopefully the audience can learn from this too, and you know, take this with them and use this in their household and and jump on that discovery call and really uh you know dive into fixing the the chaos in their life, build rebuild their boundaries, you know, just learn from someone who's literally done it all.

SPEAKER_00 23:54

Yeah. When you understand your own emotional hygiene and your regulation and you can get back to a regulated state, that's where your confidence comes in. And that's how you rebuild your confidence, is because you start to understand that no matter what's happening, you can handle it. And it's, you know, you'll find a way to handle it through being calm and centered and breathing and using. I mean, I've probably got 20 some tools that I teach. So you start to learn which tool is most effective in which situation. But that's where you gain your confidence in knowing that you've got this. You've got this.

SPEAKER_01 24:34

That's perfect.