Ready to make 2025 the year positive parenting truly takes root in your home? In this episode of the Fresh Start Family Show, Wendy explores four powerful strategies to ensure your parenting goals stickโnot just for a season, but for a lifetime.
Through heartwarming stories and practical insights, Wendy dives into the real challenges of staying consistent, the myths that hold us back, and the mindset shifts that create lasting change. Youโll learn how to replace frustration with connection, move from reaction to response, and lean into the messy-yet-rewarding journey of breaking old patterns.
Whether youโre navigating toddler tantrums or teenage resistance, this episode is packed with tools, inspiration, and encouragement to keep you moving forward with courage and grace. Donโt miss this chance to create a legacy of love, growth, and compassion in your family!
Ready for a FRESH START in your parenting walk?
Itโs time to expand your heart, learn new tools & strengthen your family with this FREE 5-Day Mini-Course, startingย January 27th!
Episode Highlights:
- Embrace the complexity of transitioning to positive parenting by understanding it takes practice and is not a linear path.
- Self-regulation is crucial in modeling calmness and patience; it is more about progress than perfection.
- Prioritize building trust and empathy with your child by focusing on connection over correction, thereby reducing misbehavior.
- Celebrate small wins and sustain motivation; participating in communities can diminish the weight of shame in parenting struggles.
- Continuous learning and adaptation are necessary to effectively shift paradigms and break generational cycles.
Resources Mentioned:
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Not able to listen, or prefer to read along? Here’s the transcript!
0:00:25 – (Wendy): Hello, families, and welcome back to a new episode. I’m so happy you’re here. Today we are going to be talking about four ways to make positive parenting stick in 2025 and where you might get stuck. So have you ever felt like no matter how many positive parenting tools you learn or books you read or PODC podcast, you listen to that, you learn all these strategies and then maybe you try them, you might even have success a few times, but they just don’t stick.
0:03:19 – (Wendy): Like, maybe for a few days you are in the groove and you’re remembering how to do X, Y and Z and you’re feeling good and confident and then bam, something happens and you’re back to yelling, bribing, threatening, or just feeling totally overwhelmed. As a parent, yes, I know many of you can relate to that because we have so many students inside of our Fresh Start Experience program that are really honest about how this happens.
0:03:52 – (Wendy): And we get to support parents through this. This normal thing that happens when you’re learning something new. And I thought I would take some of the. The things that we focus on inside, inside of our first year experience program and kind of share them here on the pod just to help you know that there’s nothing wrong with you if you have a tendency to revert back to old ways sometimes. And also just give you some real tactical tips on how to not let that derail you so you don’t end up giving up on upgrading your family legacy because it’s just such an important desire that I want you to listen to and honor within your own heart, body, mind, mind and soul. Okay?
0:04:41 – (Wendy): So when this happens, what we end up doing is say, you know, we swore we weren’t going to yell, right? So say you were like, you know what? 2025 is going to be the year that I don’t yell anymore. And maybe you read it. Read a how I stopped yelling book or, you know, maybe have listened to some podcast, maybe you listened to some interviews that I’ve done here on the show or even done one of our smaller programs.
0:05:05 – (Wendy): And you’re like, great, you’re in this groove and then one morning comes along and you realize that you’ve already screamed at your children and it’s not even 8am and what happens a lot of times for parents is instead of slowing down and saying, you know, kind of all the things that I’m going to teach you to say to yourself today, which has to do with self compassion and learning about how mistakes are just opportunities to learn and how growth is not a linear path for anybody.
0:05:36 – (Wendy): But what a lot of parents end up doing is they just end up moving into blame and justification and defense. So they end up trying to prove to themselves in an effort to feel better about themselves, that they had to yell or they had to grab that wrist or they had to go back to punishing or shaming or intimidating, whatever it may be, because otherwise it’s just not working. And we will tell ourselves many, many things when we’re triggered and it makes the cycle keep going. And then a lot of times what happens is that’ll happen in like this very heated moment and we’ll justify, defend, blame our kids. And then later at night, we end up when we go to bed.
0:06:24 – (Wendy): Or a lot of times I find it’s when you wake up in the morning and you have this kind of fresh perspective and you realize, like, dang it, I kind of freaked out a little bit or I got really triggered there and I overreacted or maybe I didn’t need to yell at them in that moment, or maybe I didn’t need to jump to punishment. But now here I am. I already told them that I’m going to take away their favorite Minecraft video game for the weekend. And now I can’t go back because they’re going to think I’m weak and permissive. Like all of this happens for families.
0:07:00 – (Wendy): And I just really need you to know that it’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. We were, most of us were raised in families where defensiveness, blame and justification for behaviors like this by parents was just, just the way it was. And so we, surprise, surprise, learned how to do the same things when we do something that we said we wanted to stop doing, but in, in reality is really, often feels really hard to the body and the nervous system to stop doing.
0:07:33 – (Wendy): And so when the challenge comes and we don’t reach that Perfection like we dreamed we would have then, instead of just taking responsibility and doing that with grace and compassion, which we’re going to talk about is really the secret to creating the long term, you know, results that you want. And they just move into those kind of protection behaviors that we call them or close down behaviors. So the thing is though, that this work takes practice.
0:08:04 – (Wendy): So all of you who listen to this show, I’d say, I’d say probably. I mean, if I had. If I was in Las Vegas and I was betting on the roulette table, I would put a lot of money down. I guess a roulette wouldn’t be blackjack or something. I would put a lot of money down to bet that most of you who listen to this show are first time painful generational cycle breakers. And you’re the ones who are like, boom, I’m gonna put a stake in the ground and just decide that I’m not gonna pass on a lot of the unhealthy stuff to my kids.
0:08:38 – (Wendy): And so what you need to know is just, it’s going to take practice. As I mentioned, it’s not a linear path. And a lot of times we’ll go forward and then backward two steps and then forward five steps and then backwards three. And it just takes practice and time and support. And this is lifetime work. That’s why I’m always telling my students that I. At Fresh Start Family, we always want to do what we can to create an environment of fun and community and, you know, feeling like you are together with other people in this who care about the same things, who give a damn, who get lit up when they see legacy patterns changing within their family lineage. Like, it is so important that you find joy in the journey because if you’re just focused on the destination, it’s often an un. Like it just feels like you never get there and you miss out on a lot of joy and really, honestly, fascinating, faster results that come if you can just find joy in the journey.
0:09:45 – (Wendy): Because it will take time. It just takes time to unravel the learnings that we had the first two decades of our life. The nervous system conditioning and, and just know that that that’s okay. That’s normal. So just like learning to eat healthy if you were raised in a family that didn’t necessarily eat the rainbow or, you know, we were just actually talking on a coaching call today about how many families we had.
0:10:13 – (Wendy): So the story is we had a mama share a hashtag success in our private group of how she was so excited to celebrate the Fact that she just realized that she was not passing down unhealthy eating patterns to her child. And she has this little girl, and she attached this picture of a donut that was left. Like it looked like a quarter of the donut was left. And she was saying, holy smokes. I just realized that I may still be working on a lot of areas that I’m. I’m not totally there with as far as changing the patterns in her family lineage and just changing all of the dynamics in her home. This particular mama has had massive success in her home with so many different things. I mean, as a team, we are just in awe as we watch her heal, grow, evolve, learn, be the change she wants to see in her family.
0:11:03 – (Wendy): But she. She said, you know, I haven’t. I haven’t done it all yet. I’m not perfect by any means. She said, but I saw this so clearly this morning. My little girl at six is starting to say, I am full and I don’t want the rest of my food. And she’s just leaving food on her plate. And her mom was saying, this was very different than how I was raised. I was raised with, like, basically the. The expectation that you would finish everything on your plate, and if you didn’t, it was disrespectful.
0:11:34 – (Wendy): And I’m pretty sure, knowing this mama’s upbringing, that if that, you know, you’d probably be threatened or there might be a punishment if you didn’t finish your food, probably definitely shame involved because, you know, there are starving people in Africa and how dare you not finish your food? It’s disrespectful to your mom, and it’s just the requirement you don’t get up from the table until you finish your.
0:11:58 – (Wendy): And what we’re realizing now, if you’ve ever studied mindful eating and done any type of healing for yourself when it comes to food, if you have any type of, you know, desire for growth there healing. What we realized is that it’s actually so wise for the body to decide when it’s full and then learn to adjust how much it puts on its plate versus having this expectation that you have to finish what you’re. What’s been put on your plate. And then a lot of people end up overeating and they end up having guilt and pressure associated with food.
0:12:33 – (Wendy): And it just. It just equates to a lot of suffering and hardship in human beings. And so this particular mama was saying, so I raised. Was raised in this home where we were forced to finish our plate, and I Ended up having an eating disorder and just such an unhealthy relationship with food. And, and, and now I’m seeing that I have successfully not passed that down to my daughter because she’s now leaving. And she said what’ coolest is that she’s not only just leaving food like her vegetables, she’s actually leaving the sweets.
0:13:07 – (Wendy): So she’s leaving the sugary thing, and she’s actually choosing to eat like her healthy stuff first, the vegetables on the plate. She said, my mind is blown. And I just wanted to celebrate the fact that I did break this cycle and I’m not passing down the disordered eating or the, you know, you have to be forced to finish your food or you’re a disrespectful person. To my children, they’re really learning to honor their bodies. I know for me, over the last few years, as I’ve learned to honor my body, heal my body, lose some weight that had come on in my 40s, that was really uncomfortable for me and causing suffering, really, I learned about in Japan. I know this is a total, total side rant, but I, I do think it’s interesting.
0:13:54 – (Wendy): I. When I was going through the process to no longer emotionally eat and lose the weight that I wanted to. To lose, I started studying the Blue Z are zones where the most amount of people live to be a hundred years old or longer. And one of the areas is Okinawa, Japan. And they, you know, this actually ended up reading the book and then watching this show. I think it’s on Netflix. And they were sharing how they actually say a prayer in Japan before every single meal to only eat up to 70% of their food.
0:14:28 – (Wendy): And, and that way they eat and then they let it settle and then they’re perfectly full and they’re never over full. So they learn to honor their bodies, they learn to work with their bodies. And so I just love that. And I’ve been incorporating that into my own life. And it has helped me so much to not overeat because I had actually gotten into a pretty heavy pattern of overeating and then having like an uncomfortable belly. I think your body changes so much in your 40s, but that’s a conversation for another day.
0:14:59 – (Wendy): And so I just was listening to this mama share this success today, thinking, wow, I wish I would have learned that when I was six years old. And this mama has decided that she is going to teach her child that. Right? But that takes a long time to, to really, especially for those of us who didn’t learn it till later in life. Because you have to first unlearn the things you were taught as a kid, and then you have to keep practicing and focusing. Because this mama did say this. This success made her even happier because she’s not even completely healed from her emotional eating and the struggle she has with food. But she said, my little girl, I can see is receiving a legacy upgrade.
0:15:44 – (Wendy): And so the point being is this is like lifetime work. And when you find joy in being that legacy upgrader, then all of a sudden it doesn’t feel like work anymore, right? Like, who is, you know, famous quote out there of like, if you love your work, you’ll never work a day in your life? It’s kind of like that with personal development work. If you fall in love with being a legacy upgrade, or even though it takes an incredible amount of work and effort, no matter what part you’re looking at, it becomes very joyful to do things like you learn to positive parent instead of autocratic parent.
0:16:21 – (Wendy): To take care of your body, to build muscle mass, to anything to do, to do social justice work, to nurture your faith, to pour into a marriage, whatever it be. Like, this is the kind of stuff that is lifelong work. And when we find joy in it, it helps us to feel like we want to do these things. We want to learn a new way. We want to understand how to discipline versus punish versus we have to or we need to. That is one that I often correct with so much love when my students say it inside the freshro experience is they’ll say, I need to or I have to change this. And I’ll lovingly say, you want to. You don’t need to do anything.
0:17:04 – (Wendy): You don’t have to do anything. You are not breaking the law, it is not illegal, and you’re not failing. You want to do X, y and Z. Okay, so we’re going to cover four steps today that can really help you have this work stick so you no longer going into that cycle of, like, going for it and then going backward and feeling like you’re a failure and giving up, and then six months later trying again and being like, yes, I’m gonna do this, and then reverting back and then eventually just giving up. We don’t want you to do that.
0:17:38 – (Wendy): So let’s start with number one, and that is just focus on really becoming fluent at changing your paradigm when it comes to seeing your kids in their worst moment. And this is done by deepening your basic human development education and your psychology understanding. And this, you know, human development and psychology. It may sound so Complex and like, you’d have to go get a degree, but you really don’t.
0:18:12 – (Wendy): The things that we teach our students are very basic and they have to do with human needs, simply understanding what human needs drive behavior, both great behavior and not so great behavior. And also just, just what psychology looks like and how to understand, you know, even the science of the body and the nervous system and how that all is intertwined. It gives you so much power to understand what’s actually going on.
0:18:41 – (Wendy): Because there has been this incredible lie that has spread like wildfire in our society over the last, you know, since the beginning, really, but definitely over the last few hundred years that kids are bad when they misbehave, that they are naughty, they are selfish, they are disobedient, they are, you know, trying to get away with things and know how to push our buttons. And it’s really, it’s just not what’s happening.
0:19:09 – (Wendy): Our kids are human. They’re trying to figure out this thing we call life. And yes, they’re gonna make mistakes. They’re gonna make so many mistakes, especially if you have a strong willed child. But once you start to understand that misbehavior is just communication, your kids are trying to communicate that they have unmet needs. This is something we’re going to teach you extensively about in our New Year Kickstart Challenge.
0:19:38 – (Wendy): But they do have a deep need to belong, by the way, so do we as adults. They have a deep need to feel powerful. And I want you to start practicing looking at where it makes sense for them to misbehave. And once you start to look for like, oh, yes, it makes sense that child is trying to feel powerful. They’re a strong willed child, or it makes sense that they’re trying to belong. They have a new baby sister in the home. And they were our center of our universe before this baby came. And now this baby came that drools all over the place, knocks over their Lego towers and is like always in my arms or on my boob, why I’m breastfeeding and I can’t get up to help them. At any moment, it makes sense why they are looking desperately for a way to belong.
0:20:29 – (Wendy): And yes, kids will get that need met on in an unhealthy way if they need to. Because all a human body cares about, essentially, which, by the way, a human body is wired for survival. But the human body cares about getting its needs met, met, and it cares about staying alive. And yes, we have this beautiful center, moral compass, which is our heart, where you get to Bring in all these beautiful things about being human. But at the forefront is survival.
0:21:00 – (Wendy): And we have these basic human needs. And so kids will get it met in an unhealthy way. So a kid who is arguing with their parents is getting their need to feel powerful, their need to feel powerful. Need, need. It’s a lot of needs. They’re like their basic human requirement, the need to feel powerful. They’re getting that met by the arguing, by the pushing back. And so this is why when we teach parents to remove themselves from the dance and step to the side and start handling conflict in a different way, rather than just fighting, bickering, going back and forth, trying to force a child into compliance, all of a sudden you start to see massive change happen within the home because the child has to learn a new way to feel powerful in the home.
0:21:50 – (Wendy): Okay, So a potential place where you might get stuck with this is where you feel like it’s frustrated or if it isn’t, like you might say to yourself, well, I’ve tried these things and it doesn’t work when your child pushes back. And again, I need you to understand change takes time. Paradigm shifts don’t happen overnight. But for every small mindset tweak, it adds up to huge transformation because your children start to believe the same things that you believe.
0:22:22 – (Wendy): And it sounds like voodoo or some woo woo stuff, but I’m telling you, I’ve helped thousands and thousands of parents at this point. I have gone through my own transformation. And when I believe something about my my kids, they believe that about themselves. When I work on healing my belief systems, seeing the world in a different way, expecting things to happen from my kids and my family and the world, I start to be able to see those things more and they actually happen more, especially when it comes to my children.
0:22:56 – (Wendy): So start looking for the good in your kids and line it up with simple shifts. Like this means my child is communicating versus the old school paradigm is this means my child is being bad and I’m a bad parent. And instead start playing around with the idea of this is just my child trying to communicate and I am capable of seeking to understand and using creativity, compassion and firm kindness to teach and see how that feels different in your body.
0:23:25 – (Wendy): And that is going to guide you in the next step when you choose to redirect the misbehavior. Okay, Remember that shame reduces your ability to create positive change in your home. So if you are holding on to shame about not being able to create the change you want in your home or feeling like you’re failing. That will make a difference too. Okay, so we want to let go of that paradigm of like, oh, I tried that and it didn’t work. Or, you know, I’ve been learning to not yell for years and I still lose my cool all the time. And so that means I’m failing. That means I’m doing something wrong. We do so much work within our programs to help parents heal from that type of like, like deep shame, which I will tell you first hand, has been a huge part of my journey. I just came back from right now a retreat in Utah where I had, even after 14 years, still had so much shame that I needed to still get unstuck and move out. And I do feel like I’ve created leap years of healing and transformation just even from five days of being at a retreat where I worked on uprooting the shame.
0:24:40 – (Wendy): But shame, as Brene Brown says, corrodes the very part of us that believes we are capable of change. So if you have that thought, it’s not working, or this is too hard, I can’t do this, or I’m failing. Just remember, you’re not failing. You’re a normal human parent who is upgrading a family legacy and ending painful generational cycles. And it’s going to take time. Okay. Number two, the tactical way that you can really get positive parenting to stick is to focus on your own self regulation as a parent before you try to fix your kids.
0:25:19 – (Wendy): Okay. So modeling calmness and patience by regulating your own nervous system has to come first. I actually just watched a movie, a new movie with Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni. Oh my gosh. There’s so much drama out there in the world with these two involved. That is really interesting to see what’s kind of shaking out in the public eye based on Blake Lively’s basically call to awareness around some unhealthy behavior that was going on in the movie set.
0:25:52 – (Wendy): And for. I am very inspired by her willingness and courage to speak out. But that’s not why I bring this up. I just think it’s interesting because the whole movie is in essence around women learning to speak up and end painful generational cycles, which what she came out about is an example of ending a painful generational cycles. But that is a little different than what the movie is about. The movie is actually about domestic abuse.
0:26:22 – (Wendy): And it’s a beautiful movie. It’s really well done. And basically it’s called It Ends with Us. And in the end, she makes a really bold move to not pass a generational cycle down to her child. And so that’s beautiful, right? Like you, you have to be the one to decide that you’re going to be the one. Like somebody’s got to break the chain. And so when it comes to those generational cycle breaking things, be the one that breaks the chain. But then realize that it ends with us and it starts with us.
0:26:54 – (Wendy): So a lot of people think that in order for a child to be really self regulated when they’re, if they are someone who feels really deeply or gets really angry at a sibling or has trouble staying quiet in a classroom or sitting still, whatever it may be, a lot of times the parent thinks that, well, the child has to calm down for me to be able to calm down. Or the child has to keep their hands to themselves in order for me to keep my hands to myself. And it’s backwards, it’s just backwards.
0:27:25 – (Wendy): So we have to be the ones to go first. First. It starts with us, it ends with us. We are the firm, kind leaders of our home. And so we want to really learn what a pause button is. And we also call it a heart connector. We’re going to be teaching this in the new year Kickstart challenge, which is going to be so, so good. But that has to become a daily practice where we are looking at our kids and especially the moments where they are not regulated and using it as a mirror to just remind ourselves that 99.9% of the time, it’s an invitation for us to go deeper with our own healing. Because many of us, when we feel triggered, I mean, I would say most of us, like almost all of us when we feel triggered, we have our go to protection behaviors.
0:28:14 – (Wendy): And so for the grand majority of our students in the fresh start experience, that is the reactive house habits. So yelling, slamming doors, grabbing wrists too tight, sham shaming, jumping to punishment, those type of things. And then there is a certain section too that you know, moves their knee jerk is more the permissive things, shutting down people pleasing, just letting their kids have the extra candy or not wear the helmet. Right. There’s definitely that side. It happens. It tends to be a little bit less in our community. But those parents, their healing journey is just as important and pivotal as the parents who are learning to, to be responsive versus reactive with like more aggressive kind of intimidating behaviors.
0:28:59 – (Wendy): But the key for this is to resist the temptation to blame our kids. We do so much work to step out of blame cycles and our freedom to be retreat weekend, which happens in March, March 21st through 23rd, you can learn more fresh start family online.com/freedomcourse. And my gosh, that. That work we do with, like, bringing awareness to how much we blame as human beings is so beautiful because it gives you true power once you step out of that pattern.
0:29:33 – (Wendy): And in the beginning, I think I know the reason why a lot of parents can’t get positive parenting to stick is because when they revert, they blame it on their kids. Kids. And so this will send you right back down into a disempowered victim mindset. And then you will keep going towards the overpowering strategies because you feel like your back’s up against the wall and you have no other way. And this in essence is just teaching kids how to do the same behavior when they feel powerless. So any type of that, like puffing up behavior is. Is in essence a way to feel like, you know, it’s like a pseudo way to feel powerful. It’s like a false form of power. It makes you look like you’re powerful when really you’re not. You know, you’re really. It’s. It’s like that exact moment where you feel like you are actually failing and powerless, but you put on this.
0:30:33 – (Wendy): I’m. I’m so powerful. And really it’s just false because you feel very powerless inside. But what you have to remember is that as a parent, you hold massive power. Massive power. But you want to tap into true power, which takes learning, healing, awareness, humility, vulnerability. Work. Work. And modeling. Modeling is your biggest form of power as a parent. That’s why two years ago, when I had a teenager who was starting to experiment with drinking alcohol, and I did not want to pass down any type of like, for. In my family, it was really just more cultural, passed down of like, oh, you become a teenager, you start like having this kind of unhealthy relationship with alcohol, and then you use it to numb your whole life. And.
0:31:30 – (Wendy): And then it becomes very socially accepted. But then you realize later in life that, that you relied too much on it to relax and like binge drinking for teenagers and colleges and all that stuff. And Terri and I were like, we do not want our child to learn that. And so we chose to model what it looks like to be alcohol free, where this February will be. Two years of giving up alcohol never felt better.
0:31:57 – (Wendy): And so happy that we did that and especially cause we did it together. But it’s just an example of modeling, right? Like we watch Stella and the way she operates in the world, and it feels so different than if we were modeling the behavior that we were teaching her. Not to partake in. Right. And back when we were drinking, there was definitely nights when we’d hang out with friends and we’d go out of our way to make sure we had an Uber so we could like have three or four glasses of wine instead of just one. Right. Like we weren’t practicing moderation. It had become really, really hard for us. And then we were trying to teach our kid to practice moderation when she got into college or, you know, turned 21 and it just wasn’t. It just didn’t feel right.
0:32:41 – (Wendy): So modeling is always going to be the best way for you to teach your kids. And it is always going to be this beautiful, you know, I think desire that. I just want you to always believe that you can do whatever you set your heart to. I think drinking is one of those ones for me that is like I really thought for a solid, I want to say five years, that it was impossible. It was going to be impossible for me to start stop drinking because I loved chardonnay and wine so much. Like the thought of not having it and not having that connection point with Terry. We’ve been together for 30 years, have had so much fun together our whole life. A lot of it revolved around partying.
0:33:22 – (Wendy): It just felt like this impossible feat to have self regulation in that department. And then we did it and I realized, no, we can actually do anything we set our minds to and so can you. So modeling is always going to be the best way for you to model, Model. And if you see something that is out of alignment, which you can also call hypocrisy, then lean into that, Go there. Because I promise you, the rewards are so great on the other side. Okay?
0:33:50 – (Wendy): And when you mess up, when you revert, just remember that messy moments are opportunities to grow. And self regulation is not about perfection, it is about progress. And the grand majority of us are unlearning so many things we learned growing up that makes it double hard, so to speak, to develop the self regulation or self control that we want. I think it’s much easier for our kids who are being raised in this kind of work.
0:34:20 – (Wendy): They’re learning how to self regulate themselves at, you know, 2, 3, 4, 5 years old. And if you come into this work later, that’s okay too. If you come in with teenagers, it is never too late. But even learning how to self regulate, listen to your body, have peaceful conflict resolution, see mistakes as opportunities to learn, even having that in your second decade of life is holy smokes. Can you imagine most of us are getting These memos and unlearning, reconditioning our nervous system. All these things in our 30s and 40s where we’ve had decades of the neural pathway being paved. So kudos to all of you who are teaching your kids this really young.
0:34:58 – (Wendy): Okay? Number three, if we want positive parenting to stick in the new year, is we want to prioritize, prioritize connection over correction. Okay? This means we’re gonna wanna build trust and empathy by leading with connection instead of jumping straight to correction, punishment, those reactive patterns that we’re working to change. And so I want you all to remember that this can come in just small pieces throughout your day.
0:35:30 – (Wendy): Gems is something we teach inside of our foundations course. And it is a very easy way to just take one to two minutes of your time each day to give your kid a focused attention that is deeply connecting and reminds you the joy of being a parent. And the steps are very easy. You. When your kid comes to you, it’s not when you go to them, not when you have a free moment, but when they come to you and they’re like, mama, Mama, look at this. Like this butterfly, this dead butterfly I found in the backyard.
0:36:02 – (Wendy): And you get to actually turn off the pasta from cooking, put down the phone or the text that you were sending, look in their eyes, get on their level, and actually engage with them in a way where they get to share with you about this dead moth or this beautiful rock that they found in the backyard or whatever it may be. And you just get to have a real connecting moment with your child. And I know your brain’s probably going off. Well, Wendy, I’m too busy. I have five kids.
0:36:33 – (Wendy): I get it. We’ll handle all those questions inside the New Year Kickstart challenge. Cause I know you have them. I’m going to be hosting daily live sessions every single day to answer your questions. But I just want you to know that it is so beautiful when you have the ability to build these connections. It brings you so close with your kids, and it just. It just brings that trust up and it brings the belonging up and back. Back to the paradigm shifting.
0:36:59 – (Wendy): That first step I covered. If you really want to have positive parenting stick in your home. A positive. A paradigm shift of really being able to see that it is possible to connect all throughout your day. And even in the hard moments, I find is really, really important. A lot of times we have this idea. Stephen Covey says the world is not as it is, but as we have been conditioned to see it. And a lot of times people think Positive parenting is like this, like gentle, like you all. You ask your kid 10 times nicely and you tiptoe and you make sure you don’t hurt their feelings.
0:37:38 – (Wendy): And you spend 20 minutes of quality time with each child every day. And it’s actually a really false paradigm. It’s not true. It’s not the way it is true. Connection comes in a million little micro moments of connection where you’re looking to see the good in your child. You’re finding ways to have empathy for what they’re going through, even when they’re being a real stinker. You’re actually taking moments that in the past might have been been really disconnecting and wreaked havoc in your home and turning them into moments of compassionate discipline where you come and you teach your child how to make a different decision tomorrow versus punishing them for the bad behavior that they had today and making them pay the price.
0:38:26 – (Wendy): But all of those little things, they work. They work to deepen connection. And gems is something, it’s a great example. It doesn’t take very long and it just builds that trust that your child can really feel like you care about them. And then when it comes to the discipline thing, it’s, it’s really just, it builds the trust, which builds the belonging. And when kids have a greater sense of belonging in the home, that need to feel belonging bucket, when it gets filled up, misbehavior goes down.
0:38:58 – (Wendy): And so that potential stuck point for you might be like, well, there’s no time for connection, right? And as I said, gems as we teach them can be one to two minutes and your kids go scurrying back to their play time because you actually pause to connect with them versus like one minute, one minute or I can’t help you right now. You know, I’ll talk to you later, whatever it may be. And again, you can’t do gems all the time, so do not think that you can.
0:39:27 – (Wendy): But they actually end up going back to what they were doing much faster because they feel that deep connection with you. And it just gives. Gives you the also the juice to keep going because you get reminded why you had kids in the first place. And so I know like when you think about the hard moments too, once you start to learn how to compassionately discipline, which we’re going to teach you inside of the New York Kickstart challenge. So make sure you’re registered for that fresh start familyonline.com/kickstart
0:39:55 – (Wendy): but those moments come really can become these beautiful moments of connection. So I was actually Just telling a story at the retreat that I was at. We had to bring an item of clothing that was really meaningful to us. And I brought this cheetah jacket that I’ve had for so long. It’s like this glorious free people bomber, fuzzy cheetah jacket. And I was telling the story of how, you know, I want my kids to feel deeply connected to me. Even in the moments of hardship or strife or disagree, those moments where I lose my cool or they’ve made a mistake. Like I want that, that connection to be there because I oftentimes didn’t have that as a kid.
0:40:43 – (Wendy): And I had this one memory that I was sharing with the group that I was with where my dad and I got into a fight. I was a teenager and he was trying to take away my TV at the time as a punishment. I probably was disrespectful and I don’t know who even knows I did something that he didn’t like. And I have no memory by the way of what I did wrong. Which is what happens with traditional punishment. A lot of times kids down the road, they don’t remember the frickin life skill that their parent wants them to learn. All they remember is that, you know, they think that their parents an a hole, that they don’t get them, that life’s not fair, like all that kind of stuff, right? Like that’s kind of my core memory from this event.
0:41:24 – (Wendy): But we got into this fight, he was trying to take away my TV. TVs were huge back then. They were were not little flat screens. And I fell and like ended up cutting the back of my leg on my chair or something. And it was a pretty bad cut. Like it was, it was painful. I was hurt. I was so upset and bitter and resentful. And we were doing this exercise about, you know, it’s been 14 years since I started learning positive parenting and one of the original classes that I was in, I was actually wearing that cheetah jacket.
0:41:57 – (Wendy): When the teacher was having us do an assuming integr exercise. It’s actually an exercise that we now do inside the Fresh start experience in one of our lessons that is life changing for parents. But we go through basically an event where you wish your parent would have assumed integrity instead of jumping to shaming or punishment or like reaming you for something you did wrong. And we did this exercise and afterwards I was like, okay, cool.
0:42:27 – (Wendy): I’ve, you know, I have like a bit of a challenger heart. Not a bit. I have a, I am just a bit of A challenger. I keep saying a bit, I’m gonna own it. I am. I have a challenger heart. So I just recently learned that I’m an enneagram8 and I ask a lot of questions. I clearly challenge status, like the status quo and systems, the definitely oppressive systems. And I’ve just always been an question asker and like a bit of a skeptic with things. And so I remember in class that day we did the exercise, it was cool, but I raised my hand and I, I said, Susie, that was awesome. My teacher Susie.
0:43:01 – (Wendy): I was like, that was really cool. I love that exercise. But I also just don’t see the big deal between what happened that day with my dad and like my life now because I just feel like I’m fine and it just didn’t affect me. Like life went on. I got into a fight with my dad. I don’t really remember that much about what it was about, but it just wasn’t that big of a deal. Like, like what do we do with that? You know? And she just looked straight at me and she was, was like oh really? She goes, how’s your like. Because I said I’m, I’m fine now. I, I just feel like it didn’t affect me.
0:43:34 – (Wendy): And she just looked straight at me and she goes, oh really? She goes, how’s your self confidence? And my knee jerk reaction was just very fast and I was like, it’s great. And I kind of looked down and I was like, I look, I wear cheetah jackets. Like I’m one of the most confident people that you’ll meet. Eat. And she just kind of like smiled and was like, oh, okay, cool. And that’s all she said. And I remember going home that night and that like, like very quickly after she said that it, I dropped down into my body. It’s like I feel like I could have been sitting in that room right now as I tell this story.
0:44:11 – (Wendy): I dropped into my body and I realized that that answer was bullshit. I actually didn’t have high self confidence. I was constantly second guessing myself. I had this inner critic that was so strong within me. I did have paranoia. When I was in social settings, I was often concerned about how I looked or if people liked me. And like all this stuff came, started to come into awareness in that classroom that day. And I had this cheetah jacket on. I referenced the cheetah jacket.
0:44:41 – (Wendy): And when I was at the retreat this weekend, I was telling this story. And as we did four days of like deep inner work and healing work and intention setting for 2025, one of my biggest intention was to continue to shed shame that I had lingering from for a lot of reasons. And I just continue to unpack those layers of shame. And I had told the group that story, and I said, this jacket represents really being able to actually say, I am a fully confident person. And I want to hand down this jacket to my little girl, who’s again, 17 now. She probably won’t appreciate and appreciate it until she’s older, but it’s a really cool jacket, and I’m going to hand this down to her, and it’s going to represent a confidence in her, an inner cheerleader instead of an inner critic.
0:45:33 – (Wendy): And that’s going to come through us being connected, even in the moments of hardship and disconnection and me losing my cool and her making mistakes and her losing her cool and us having imperfection in our relationship. And through that, we’re gonna. We’re gonna grow closer, which we already have, right? She’s been in my. We’ve been doing this work together for 14 years. She’s 17 now. We started when she was 3, and that has come true.
0:45:59 – (Wendy): We have prioritized connection over correction. But that’s been something that has helped us make this work stick. Because even when we do revert or go backwards, which doesn’t happen as more anymore, but it definitely happened the first five, ten years we were doing this work. Then you just. It’s not the end of the world because you remember it’s lifelong work, and you keep going back to, okay, we can come together and see the good in each other, assume the integrity in each other, and we don’t have to be perfect to show up and be incredibly connected.
0:46:35 – (Wendy): And for me as a parent, to be able to prioritize that connection and relationship in our life over. Over the correction. Okay? And then the last tip to help you really make positive parenting stick in 2025 is you are going to want to stay consistent and celebrate small wins. So this is crucial with anything. This, you know, probably comes as no surprise, but. But when you. What you bring attention to grows, right? What you focus on grows. And when you are in an environment where that is normal to celebrate wins, to bring attention to what is working, to the small little glimmers, those moments where you’re like, gosh, it is working, and I am seeing a change, and I am noticing a difference in how I feel when I go to bed at night or, you know, all the difference, different things that happen once you start to practice this work in a consistent basis, you start to see that it shows up more and more in your life. Okay, so starting to write down just simple things and you’ll have an opportunity to do this in our New York Kickstart Challenge. We actually have a private non social media based group for this challenge, you guys, we have invested in a new platform that is a very easy to access app on your phone that is not on social media and we could not be more excited about it. It was a big investment for Fresh Start Family and we did it because I was feeling an incredibly strong calling desire to have my communities get off of social media and we kept getting requests for that and I was feeling it in my gut and now we have it in place and we’re actually going to be able to offer it for all the families who are doing the New York Kickstart Challenge with us. So please invite your friends and family if you haven’t yet, if you haven’t registered, make sure you register. Because to have this sacred space where you can gather but not get sucked into the world of social media, it really in my opinion is becoming more and more divisive and really hard to not get distracted and sucked into some negativity or comparison.
0:49:05 – (Wendy): I’m looking at the data that is coming forward about what it’s doing to the youth and children, especially teenagers. And science in my opinion does not lie. Like when you look at the data. If you’ve ever read if, if you haven’t yet, I highly recommend it. Jonathan Hates new book the Anxious Generation the data is just so, so clear that we’re going to need to make a change. And so we’re really excited. All of our community groups are now off of social media and and again, when you get into the New York Kickstart Challenge, you’re going to get to experience that.
0:49:43 – (Wendy): But we will prompt you to really to call out and take note of the successes that you experience when you do the free challenge with us. So you’re going to have five days of small but mighty mini positive parenting lessons delivered right to your email inbox each morning. There is no need to be there live for anything. If you want to attend the live Q and A sessions that I’ll host daily, great. But but if you don’t, you don’t have to do anything. Live just 15 to 20 minutes a day is all you need to make time for.
0:50:16 – (Wendy): And then to drop yourself into a community of like minded parents from all over the world who have similar wants, desires and who really have courage like you do to be a Legacy upgrader, painful generational cycle breaker. It’s just the best feeling in the world. And, and you’ll also shed shame. So shame. So I, I love layering the work that we do at Fresh Dirt Family with all different types of support.
0:50:48 – (Wendy): And so we encourage parents if you feel called to get a private therapist, get a private therapist. Get, go to healing retreats, right? Like go to a life coach, go to an acupuncturist, go to a faith counselor, you know, spend time with your pastor. Like do all these things that are often in one on one sessions, you alone with somebody. And I will say that there, in my experience of doing this for 14 years now, there is nothing like being in a group that helps you shed shame so fast because you realize that you’re not alone. I think that’s the only downfall of the private work is we start to feel like we have to hide the truth about how parenting feels hard or our child misbehavior in this area feels really scary to us because it’s not getting better. And we’ve tried so many things or the disconnection we feel with our spouse because we’re not on the same page.
0:51:49 – (Wendy): And whatever it may be, we, we start to feel like we have to hide these things because you know, I know from experience it felt like I was the only one that was experiencing some such hardship with my little girl. And once I got into a group setting I realized it was so untrue. There was nothing wrong with me. I wasn’t crazy. I didn’t have a little girl that was out of control or nothing was wrong with her. I just needed to be in a community where I was going to be held accountable.
0:52:22 – (Wendy): Meaning there was going to be people who lifted me up and reminded me me why I wanted to push play on lessons, why I wanted to ask questions, why I wanted to do different things, different for my own kids and help me stay motivated and inspired to keep doing that. And what happens when you are in the group environment of any sort and maybe you in your own town have a Bible study group that is like this or a women’s circle or you have a playgroup or a music class or you know, your get together with your best girlfriends or you have a men’s group that you meet with and so you could absolutely create this in your own life too where you’re actually just being real with each other, bringing attention to the wins that are happening in your life.
0:53:15 – (Wendy): Talking about your visions and what you want. I think that’s such an important Part of finding success long term with this work and having positive parenting stick is staying focused on what you want instead of falling into the common practice of pointing out what you don’t have yet. Right. Like I, I do think that is a common cultural thing to focus on what you don’t have yet. Right. So maybe you, you know, lost 10 pounds, but you really want to loss, lose 15 and so you focus on how you’re not to 15 yet instead of just celebrating how you started eating whole nutritious, nutritious foods and working out again and you lost ten pounds and how much effort and courage that took.
0:54:00 – (Wendy): Or if your kids are, you know, normal siblings that fight and you know, aren’t perfect yet. Parents have a tendency to focus on how they still are fighting or putting hands on each other versus looking at all the ways in which they have grown and they are walking away from each other now and working out their differences. Differences in an ex, you know, expanded, peaceful way. Yes, it’s not perfect yet, but the more focus you put on here’s where it is working, here’s where you know, this, this has been successful or this did help, it’s just going to help you bring more of that into your life. Okay, so celebrating the small wins, shedding that shame that happens and remembering, you know, in that group environment which you, you do realize, you start to learn the difference between guilt and shame. Right? That happens a lot in our frustrate family groups where we’ll have parents come in and share either hashtag like they’ll share a question or they’ll, they’ll share a success and that the questions usually look like, okay, so this didn’t go as planned and I freaked out. My kid was doing this, I lost my cool, I yelled or you know, grabbed your wrist too tight or reverted back to spanking when I didn’t want to help me see what I could have done differently and do things differently. And even by sharing that in itself, by getting help that that person needs because they were able, they were willing to admit that the, the journey has not been perfectly linear to where they want to be. To be this like calm, cool, responsive parent who uses fur firm, kind, you know, authority in their home and is consistently focusing on connection over correction, using compassion, discipline, like most of our parents are not hitting that nail on the head perfectly within the first few months of being in our programs. Right. Like of course there’s going to be failure.
0:56:06 – (Wendy): Failure is just unfinished success. And so of course there’s going to be those moments. And the less you hide it. And the more you’re just like, okay, well, this really didn’t go as planned. Planned makes me think of Anchorman when they get into a fight in the alley, and, like, they get back and they’re like, ooh. So that got crazy fast. And they look at Brick Hamlin and they’re like, brick, you killed a guy.
0:56:32 – (Wendy): He’s, like, laughing, and he’s like, yeah, I did. I love that character. But it’s kind of the same thing within the private group sometimes, you know, not necessarily our free challenge groups, because our free challenge groups, you’re really there to learn and solidify your learning. Right, right. The. The deeper levels of humble vulnerability and question asking happen more in our frustrated experience community, where we always tell parents that if you really want to create the change, you gotta be real with what’s actually happening.
0:57:04 – (Wendy): And I feel like one of my superpowers as a coach, and I know my team has this too, because they were trained with me in the fresh start family approach, is we have the ability to lovingly call someone into honesty and out of hypocrisy and to be able to shine a light on where is this same behavior being modeled or taught. Even in your home. Right. Like, and if a parent is willing to see where they maybe, just maybe, are having a similar behavior, thought pattern, even with things like anxiety, we see that it’s often in, you know, something that the parent is being called to heal from before the child can be healed from it.
0:57:51 – (Wendy): If a parent is willing to go there with it and just admit that they’re not perfect and that they’re human, boom, Their rate of success skyrockets because then we can actually come in with the coaching that they need to get them to higher ground. But it’s, like, hard to imagine how that melts away shame when it feels like the most humble thing. Like, most. Feels like the most vulnerable thing on the planet to admit that you swore you weren’t going to yell in 2025, and then it’s like, 10 days in and you’ve already screamed so hard that you made your kid cry.
0:58:26 – (Wendy): That’s a story from my own journey. I may. I yelled at Taryn so bad when he was in the bath once at 3 years old that he just instantly started crying. Has it ever happened to you? He then went on to say, when I came back to apologize, he came. We went on to say, mama, it’s okay. Everybody makes mistakes. I think he was three and a half years old, almost four years old. He was raised with this work he was born into, like, he’s never known anything other than positive parenting. And in that moment, I could tell.
0:58:55 – (Wendy): I could tell that that little boy really understood the concepts of this work. Because even though I had made a big mistake and freaked out over bubble bath, Freaking bubble bath, yes, he clearly was my teacher in that moment. Just, mama, it’s okay. Everybody makes mistakes. But there is a difference between guilt and shame. So guilt is where you are just like, whoops, made a mistake. I don’t like that behavior I had and I’d like to change.
0:59:23 – (Wendy): Shame is like, what the hell is wrong with me? Like, I should know better. I’m ruining my kids. I’m failing. What’s wrong with me? Right? Like, shame is very different. And shame melts away when you’re in a community where other people are willing to admit that being the black sheep, painful generational cycle, legacy upgrader, especially when you were raised with a different type of parenting, is hard AF sometimes. Okay?
0:59:52 – (Wendy): So just remember it is important to celebrate everyone. That’s why we have the pattern of hashtag success stories in our group. When you celebrate every win, you are giving your nervous system proof that it is safe to do things in a new way. Remember, the nervous system will always choose the comfortable hell over the uncomfortable heaven. So even though you hate. I’m just using yelling as an example here. You might not be a yeller, but even though you hate screaming at your kids and always feeling like you have to yell in order to get them to listen, you hate that it feels hard, it feels stressful, you feel rattled afterwards, your blood pressure feels like it’s spiked, your heart beats faster, you feel annoyed, irritated, frustrated. Like all the things that feel so hard, it still feels safe to you to some extent because you just know what to expect.
1:00:50 – (Wendy): You know how to do that, right? It might have been modeled to you for 18 years growing up, and then now that you do it, you know how to do it. And. And so there is this safety. And doing things differently takes so much courage because your nervous system registers it as a threat. And so that’s where resistance comes in. That’s when it’s like, this will never work. Or, I’ve tried that before. And my kid doesn’t respond to empathy. My kid doesn’t respond.
1:01:18 – (Wendy): You know, all the excuses we come up with to make ourselves believe that our family legacy is not worthy or capable of being upgraded, and it’s just not true. It’s just not true. Okay? No one is going to change your family legacy but you and you are the chosen one. You are the chosen one. You are the beautiful black sheep. And I again feel like I’m really leaning into that this year of 2025 of like just owning my black sheep as I’ve found out that I’m an enneagram8 that I’m really starting to realize that being fully authentic to myself and in line with my moral compass, even amidst a world that is incredibly divided and never felt so abrasive and willing to throw daggers, it has felt so much better for me to become fully who I am, which is a black sheaf in all these beautiful ways.
1:02:19 – (Wendy): What I stand for, who I am, how I operate in the world, what I teach, teach. It is very countercultural. And so the desires that have been put on your heart to change things within your home, they matter and they’re not by mistake. And there’s a reason why you are here. And by being in community and creating the consistency of celebrating the small wins as you go, as you learn, as you expand your heart, learn new tools, strengthen your family with us, especially during the the New Year Kickstart five day free challenge.
1:02:52 – (Wendy): That is what’s going to make positive parenting stick for you. Okay, doing it alone is possible, but it is the long hard route and it will just, you’ll just get the results that you’re looking for so much faster when you’re willing to be in community while you’re doing that. Okay, so make sure you get registered for the free five day challenge. Fresh startfamilyonline.com/kickstart. As soon as you get registered, we will get you into our free private non social media based app which is going to be a community where you can get to know like minded families from all over the world.
1:03:28 – (Wendy): We will have probably over 10 countries represented, probably maybe even more than that in this free challenge and you’ll get to introduce yourself, tell us what is the reason why you have such a heart to learn and grow different ways than maybe the way you were raised. Or just learn about powerful parenting strategies, learn about compassionate discipline, all the things that we’re going to teach you in this new year Kickstart challenge. But you can get yourself introduced.
1:03:53 – (Wendy): You can start reading other people’s introductions and just get to know people and and be part of this incredible community that is going to go through these five mini lessons with us. Remember, you do not have to be live for anything. These lessons are delivered right to your email inbox each morning. And so it’s just couldn’t be easier for you to get the education that you need to you change the dynamic in your home and make 2025 the best year ever as a parent.
1:04:20 – (Wendy): All right, families, well, thanks for listening to this episode all around. How what four things you can do to make positive parenting stick in 2025, and I hope covering some of the areas that you might get stuck in as you’re doing that has helped you really create a little bit of a plan and an excitement meant for how you’re going to show up as a parent in the new year. Thanks for listening and I’ll see you in the next episode.
