How can we best instill confidence in our children? How can stressed out parents take care of themselves? What’s the connection between our emotions and our confidence?
Find out in this week’s episode of The Learn to Love Podcast, where your host Zach Beach interviews educator, author, and illustrator, Jennifer Miller, about Raising Confident Kids.
Below is the transcript for the episode, to go to the episode page, click here.
Zach Beach 0:03
Welcome to the Learn to love podcast everyone. I am your host, Zach Beach, and I’m here with the incredible educator and author Jennifer Miller. Hello, Jennifer and welcome to the show.
Jennifer Miller 0:50
Hi, Zack. I’m really excited about our conversation today.
Zach Beach 0:54
Me too. And today we are going to be talking about raising confident kids. And for those that don’t know, for 25 years, Jennifer Miller has worked with educators and families to help them become more effective with children through social and emotional learning. Jennifer is the author and illustrator of the book, confident parents confident kids, and she runs a blog of the same name, which has more than 23,000 followers in 152 countries around the world. She writes for numerous publications such as the Huffington Post, and parent magazine. She frequently speaks at conferences, offers coaching, conducts workshops, and is a regular expert contributor to the NBC today parenting and PBS parenting minutes. How are you today, Jennifer,
Jennifer Miller 1:45
I’m great. I’m looking forward to talking about love and raising children.
Zach Beach 1:50
Me too. And you’ve been working in this world of education and children and social emotional learning for a long time. So I’m curious because I often envision a world where we teach kids just as much about love and communication and relationships and forgiveness just as we do like chemistry and math and history. So I’m curious, in your years of experience, how much are people warming up to the idea of teaching our children emotional intelligence?
Jennifer Miller 2:26
That’s a great question. And I envision the same kind of world where we are nourishing children’s hearts and spirits in school as well as their bodies and minds. The field of social and emotional learning has been around for several decades. And there has been this swell of research that has been built up to show that it really does when you integrate children’s hearts and minds and spirits into the academic curriculum. Not only do they have less emotional distress, get along better socially, are more engaged in their schooling. But they also improve in academics. And so there’s there’s really a nice, solid research base to show that now. There are many schools who take a focused, intentional concentrated effort in preparing their teachers to teach social and emotional skills right alongside the academic curriculum. But not enough every single school should be teaching children about their emotions and how to manage their big feelings. What happens is, it’s often called the hidden curriculum. Children do learn about emotions when there’s not a focus on it through modeling. And often what they learn our lessons we don’t want them to learn, like anxiety is not permitted at testing time. And you have to repress it and bury it in order to get through standardized test. And joy can only be expressed or love on the playground, but not in the classroom. So there are inadvertent lessons that we teach when we don’t become intentional about teaching social and emotional skills in the classroom.
Zach Beach 4:37
That’s so important because obviously if you don’t teach kids certain things, and this comes up a lot with like sex education, for example, that if you don’t teach kids certain things, they’re going to pick it up and other places and often less desirable places.
Jennifer Miller 4:50
That’s exactly right. So we are we are constantly communicating and teaching social interactions through our social media. So teachers who collaborate teach collaboration as they, as they collaborate with their colleagues, those who do not who shut the door also shut the door to teaching their children collaboration. So we often forget that children are keen observers of our behavior, and that the first teacher of social and emotional skills is through modeling.
Zach Beach 5:29
So it’s really wonderful to hear that schools are one opening up to the idea. And also to that there’s a lot of robust research about the benefits of emotional intelligence. As you mentioned, children are more engaged, their academics improved, and they experienced less emotional distress. And I’m curious if you could just give us maybe a few examples of what it looks like to teach our kids to be emotionally intelligent, because I’m thinking about when I was in school, and I would take these tests, right. And of course, you do a test and you’re doing it by yourself, you’re not allowed to talk to anybody else. It’s a measure of your intelligence. And then once I went to college, and once I went to the workforce, it was not about my own abilities. It was about my ability to collaborate with others, to share with others to speak up to somebody else if I didn’t know how to do something, and to get guidance and to get advice from them. And I was thinking, wow, I really wish I had kind of a different form of education that taught me to work in a team that taught me to collaborate with others, because that’s actually the skills that help later on in life. So I’m curious about what are some exercises or things or ideas that you bring in to children to help them better their emotional worlds?
Jennifer Miller 6:44
Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think an important one, because, in theory, it sounds good. But then you want to be able to envision what it looks like. So for example, if you were in a third grade math class, a teacher could begin the math class, say we’re learning fractions. I don’t remember a fractions are in third grade, but we’ll pretend. So the teacher could work with the class to set a math goal for that class period, and talk about what their challenge will be in figuring out fractions. And simultaneously, they could also set a collaboration goal. And they would break into small groups. And they would talk about what collaboration would mean in this particular instance, and maybe even practice some skills like active listening or reflective listening, or brainstorming ideas. And then at the end of the lesson, after they’ve, they’ve gone through fractions together, and they’ve worked on collaborating, then they’d reflect on it, how did we do on the fractions problem? Did we solve the problem, and were we able to solve it together, and then they would look at the the collaboration or social and emotional goals as well. So that’s really one very simple way to incorporate social and emotional skill building into a traditional academic lesson. Another one would be to do a morning meeting or a closing circle, where kids get a chance to get to know each other on a more personal basis. So sometimes there are games where they they get to learn about one another or collaborate or connect. And it also creates a safe space for discussing difficult issues like bullying. Or it could be that there are world issues going on, and it creates a safe space to talk about, well, what about racial justice? Or what about the capital insurrection. So if you have this regular, safe space, where you talk about sensitive issues, then you can bring those hot topics or difficult subjects to light in that safe space and children have had the practice of being sensitive of listening well, of asking good questions of empathizing with others. So that that’s a really important tool for schools to use. As we grapple with some hard topics in the world.
Zach Beach 9:42
That sounds really wonderful. I’m not gonna lie. I like that it’s a lot less kind of top down, like the teacher saying, this is what we’re learning and you have to learn it, too. We’re gonna sit in circle who can explore we’re gonna listen to each other. We’re gonna focus a lot more on like divergent thinking and thinking about what’s possible rather than specifically what’s right. I also appreciate just the vulnerability in dealing with whatever emotional issues are real for the children.
Jennifer Miller 10:11
Exactly, it really is critical. And if you think about it in traditional schooling, there isn’t a place for children to talk about, typically their feelings or sensitive topics that that are bothering them yet, if they’re dealing with bullying in the hallway, we know they’re not going to learn. So what I’ve noticed in schools that do morning meetings in particular, is that if a teacher is is busy one day and feels like skipping it, children will remind them, they will, they will insist on it, because it really creates that sense of safety and community in a classroom that that children crave and desperately need.
Zach Beach 10:59
It’s so true children encounter all sorts of emotional issues with current events, with family with other children and bullying, and you cannot learn if you’re worried about those other things.
Jennifer Miller 11:10
No, you can’t, and it becomes the elephant in the room. And if you think about it, from a teacher standpoint, teachers are so pressured for so many reasons. And expectations are so huge on teachers now and the pandemic more than ever before. But always they’re dealing with lots of expectations. But really, it relieves them. Because they really aren’t going to get through their lesson plan. If children are feeling unsafe, and right now with with the pandemic, and with so many issues politically, economically, socially, this is a daily topic of concern. Adults and children are alike are dealing with anxiety, they’re dealing with feelings of overwhelm, fear, uncertainty. And so feelings need to be a daily conversation, in order to really get to the learning at hand.
Zach Beach 12:13
That’s just a good motto, in general that feelings need to be a daily conversation
Jennifer Miller 12:17
they do and it can be really simple as simple as, as a daily feelings check in how are you doing really, and we are not used to expressing feeling words. So students really need to learn and in our children, we do this in our household too. They need to have some practice and using feeling words, instead of just sharing thoughts, which are safer and require less vulnerability. But, but saying, I’m tired today, and and I’m I’m worried about getting through my work and, and I’m anxious about what’s going on modeling that as adults, that that emotional honesty, and then offering it to our children, the language of feelings is really important for them to feel like they have access to a feelings, vocabulary, and are safe to communicate it.
Zach Beach 13:17
So I’d love to get into today’s topic about confidence, because I’m hearing you talk about all the challenges that we’re encountering right now. People feel anxious people feel overwhelmed, people feel uncertain about the future. And I do feel like confidence would be a really a nice thing to have, but seems really hard. Right? So before we talk about what competence is and how to cultivate it, let’s just talk about the why of confidence because you’ve kind of devoted much of your work to raising confident children raising confidence, not raising confident parents, but having confident parents. So I’m curious if you could tell us why you’ve focused on confidence rather than say, raising smart kids or raising loving kids or strong kids?
Jennifer Miller 14:05
Well, honestly, I decided when my child was a toddler, that that’s what I needed most was confidence. So I you know, I think I pursued confident parents confident kids first, out of a need for myself to figure it out to learn about what does that mean, and what does that look like? And then I started doing research and serving parents and over and again, what I found is that, among other issues, confidence rises to the top. When you ask parents what they really want for their children. Confidence encompasses so many hopes and dreams that we have as parents, for our children, that we don’t hope for an average life or an average existence we want our children to really love who they are, and love who they are becoming in the world. And we want to feel like, we can do the best job in supporting that. And so, so really, after I decided that’s what I needed for myself, I discovered that it was really a common theme among parents.
Zach Beach 15:21
indeed it is. I know many parents who like return home from the hospital, and they’re like, they’re just giving us this like, baby. We’re on our own now
Jennifer Miller 15:32
yeah, we went back, we actually went back we brought we did that we brought our baby home and said, You’ve got to be kidding me. And after many sleepless nights, we went back and said, We need help. We don’t, we clearly don’t know what we’re doing. And they were so kind and, and send us home with some with some support supportive words, mostly. But, but it’s true, you are there is no instruction manual, and you really are left on your own. And what’s interesting is the baby books prepare you for the physical experience. For my book, I reviewed the Bible kind of, of having a baby What to Expect When You’re Expecting, and I went through and I looked for guidance on dealing with the big feelings you have, as a parents, having a new baby in the household, how to deal with their crying and how to deal with your own major emotions during that that very emotional time. And I found one little box on one page, talking about postpartum depression. And that was it. Mostly the baby books prepare us for the physical experience. But truly day to day, we are managing our emotions. And that is one of the biggest pieces of becoming a new parent. So that was something that I wanted to accomplish with my book, is to talk about, how do you deal with that huge life change, and all the emotions that come along with it?
Zach Beach 17:12
Yeah, I really love your emphasis on not only helping the children, but on also helping the parents. And one of the things I loved in your book was that you did write about 10 ways to soothe the baby, which again, many people need, because they don’t have that instruction manual that comes with the baby doesn’t also come out, you know, but then you also write 10 ways to sue the parents as well. So I’m curious for the parents that are stressed out, they haven’t slept in weeks, they’re tempted to go back to the hospital, like you did, you know, give it back are asking for some help. What are the strategies that we can use to suit the parents?
Jennifer Miller 17:48
Well, I I think that we can first of all, repeat as a parenting mantra that there is no such thing as perfect parenting. There is no such thing as perfect. We put huge expectations on ourselves. And I think some of the pressure that we put on ourselves to be perfect contributes to our anxiety and feelings of overwhelm, especially when we’re sleep deprived and we can’t get a baby to stop crying. One thing that’s important to know is that babies cry, no matter what parents do, they’re going to cry two to three hours a day. It’s difficult to be born into the world and be separated from your mother, physically, and they are acclimating themselves to the world. So the fact that you can’t get your baby to stop crying is not a failure, but truly, biologically sounds that the baby needs to cry. And so coping with your own stress, your own reactions is critical. So I offer some strategies for you know, holding the baby and, and trying to feel its heart rate and calm your own heart rate. Because your heart does serve as a regulator or can if you can get it to slow down with your deep slow breathing. So working on that deep breathing and holding your baby to help slow their heart rate can make a big difference. Sometimes though, it’s important to remove yourself to get your baby in a safe place. And, and either stay in the room and go inside by closing your eyes. Or to to hand baby off to grandma or partner and have some time to to breathe, to walk to get fresh air to connect with a friend to journal But we need those breaks, in order to have the patience that we require in order to soothe an upset child.
Zach Beach 20:10
That’s such a wonderful mantra that there’s no such thing as perfect parenting because we can also apply that to our own parents, you know, many people, I think, lament that they didn’t get the perfect childhood. And it works both ways, right, as a parent, we don’t have to put so much pressure on ourselves to be perfect. And we don’t have to put so much pressure on our parent also to be perfect,
Jennifer Miller 20:32
it is really true. And it starts to come up as as you become a parent those habits that we either want to repeat or don’t want to repeat from our own parents. And it can be very frustrating when you say, I just sounded like my mother, and you clearly don’t want to sound like your mother. But that’s also the gift of parenting that, that it brings about that self awareness. That was our training. So we have to have grace for own training. That was how we were taught that was how we were raised. So of course, it’s a part of us, and all the assets that our parents gave us, all the love and care and kindness and and core values that they gave us are also inherently a part of who we will be as parents, but then for the unlearning that we need to do for the aspects of the way that we were parented that we don’t want to repeat our role as parents calls it up, it puts it in our face to look at, and examine. And if we are willing to step forward and have the courage to examine it, then we can unpack it and and be aware of our triggers, and manage it in ways where we don’t have to repeat the past.
Zach Beach 21:57
It’s so hopeful to realize that truth, right, that we don’t have to repeat the patterns of our parents. And right now we can cultivate the skills to raise the children that we want to raise and put confidence within them. And let’s talk about those strategies. Because earlier you said that we want our children to love who they are and who they are becoming in this world. Which to me sounds like the essence of the confidence that we’re trying to instill. And you started out your book by defining what confidence is, and what confidence is not. So could you tell our listeners what confidence means to you?
Jennifer Miller 22:34
Sure. I think first confidence is a belief in learning, both for ourselves and our children. And that is that in every thing that we do, and in all that we are expressing of who we are, we are a work in progress we are we are not a finished piece. And as parents, we are honing our social and emotional skills for a lifetime, and any adults, not just parents, and our children give us a unique opportunity to hone those social and emotional skills as they develop, we also have to realize that our children are in a constant learning process and learning requires mistakes. It requires messiness, accidents, failures, on our part, and on their part. And that can be really difficult to accept. But our acceptance of that can really lead to our sense of confidence as we support their learning. And as we offer ourselves grace as we’re learning. So, you know, in one sense, there’s a belief. And then the other part of having a learning mindset is working on honing your social and emotional skills. As parents, we always have this opportunity to advance our skills and ask, especially in moments of challenge, our child has drawn black sharpie marker all over the wall and our temperature is through the roof. What social and emotional skills do we need at that moment? Well, we need self awareness that we’re incredibly angry and have been triggered. We need self management, how can we manage that great anger at the moment? We need perspective taking how do we understand that they’re not trying to ruin our home, but but they’re they’re actually artistically expressing themselves and don’t realize that the wall is an inappropriate place. So our children offer us these chances to really hone our own skill while we are suffering. There’s,
Zach Beach 25:01
I feel very much like you’re putting parents and children in the same boat in a very good way. Because I think parents think that they have to be perfect, so that their children learn from their perfection, so to speak, and that when they fail, I mean that they’ve failed the child. But I love your emphasis that parents are still learning, still growing, still human, still imperfect, and still honing their own emotional skills, still making mistakes and learning from them. And as a result, like the mistakes that the parents make, by acknowledging it, taking responsibility for it, perhaps even communicating, hey, mommy or daddy, we messed up, and that’s part of life puts the family in a very empathic container for each other.
Jennifer Miller 25:50
It’s so true, we, we often think about child development and our children, our children’s growth is so obvious because they are physically changing. And even socially and emotionally, we can see witness the changes. But when we get to be adults, we kind of decide, and culturally, we decide that we’re done, where we should be all finished. By the end of college, we’re a finished product, and we should be producers now. But truly, adults are developing through every age and stage and decade of life. And if we are considering how we’re developing as adults, we can really nurture our own transitions, and better understand and empathize and offer grace to ourselves as we deal with our own learning and development, and be better supports for our children who are in a very different developmental place.
Zach Beach 26:54
I’m wondering if you could draw a bit more of a connection between confidence and our emotions, because so far, I feel like you’ve really developed a really awesome picture of how important emotional awarenesses how important it is to develop a vocabulary in our children to describe to share their emotions, how important empathy is, and reflecting emotions back and forth. And how does that relationship with our emotions influence and change our own confidence?
Jennifer Miller 27:27
So I’d like to ask you a question in order to give you an example. So if I could ask you can you imagine one challenge that a parent might have with a child just any any challenge?
Zach Beach 27:43
I’m imagining a tantrum, like you’re at the grocery store, and the kid wants candy? And you say no, and they throw food on the floor and start kicking the floor and screaming that’s the first thing comes to my mind.
Jennifer Miller 27:57
That’s a perfect one because every single parent on the planet has encountered some version of that scenario, and mine was a target but yeah, so that is a common parenting challenge. So when your child throws a tantrum, they want candy candy, you’ve said no, they have a fit in the line, there are a bunch of people lined up behind you judging you. As your child kicks and screams your own and temperature can go through the roof and there’s there are different reactions of course that different parents are going to have some might feel humiliated by the judgment of others in the line and shrink in that humiliation. Some might be incredibly angry at the the embarrassment or at their child’s explosion. Some might have an empathetic response and and be feeling hurt for their child who’s hurting. Or whatever your parenting response is going to be. It’s going to be filled with emotion. And the truth is when our emotions run high, we get into that caveman part cave person, I should say part of the brain that only thinks about fight flight or freeze. That’s that’s the only thing we can consider when we are in that place. Daniel Goleman, author of emotional intelligence calls it emotional hijacking. Literally the language and the problem solving and the the creative parts of our brain are shut off a chemical washes over them and does not allow us access. And all we can think about is fight flight or freeze well with our children. Fight flight or freeze doesn’t typically work as as a constructive, healthy response. We can’t run away from them in that moment. We certainly don’t want to fight them. If we do, it will escalate. And right, so our end freezing is going to take us nowhere. We have to figure out what how are we? How are we going to deal with those situations that is emotionally intelligent. And often when we’re caught off guard, and that happens, it can be a tremendous challenge. But when we pull away from it, in our calmer moments, we can think, okay, if that happens again, what will I do? Well, I could, I could bundle them up and head to the car and calm down in the car. Or I could ask the cashier for some grace, and we can move over to the side. And we could spend some time calming down. But the the point of this long example is that it will involve our emotional competence, in order to feel confident in that situation. And, and any challenge that you could have named, will involve our emotional competence in order to feel confident and supporting our child.
Zach Beach 31:24
I love that we want to involve our emotional competence in order to feel confident. And your story reminds me of the emotional capacity that we want to cultivate in any situation in their life and being able to respond from a place of say, love or understanding or compassion. Rather than react in the moment with that limbic system hijacking with that emotional hijacking that you described, we want to not be activated in our stress response, just thinking the flight fright, freeze trying to do you know, none of those are going to work with the child.
Jennifer Miller 32:02
Right, exactly.
Zach Beach 32:04
And then we have a kind of greater option of choices available to us when we’re not in that stress response.
Jennifer Miller 32:13
That’s exactly right. And when I work with parents, I encourage them to create what I call a family emotional safety plan. And it is very simply to to sit down and figure out when my child has escalated and gotten incredibly upset. And I’m feeling upset as well. What am I going to say? And it better be short and sweet, right? Like Mommy needs five minutes. And then where am I going to go and maybe it’s in the same room, because if I leave the room, my young child will be more upset. So we have to determine where we can go. And then how will we calm down to return our brains to full functioning with our deep breathing, some reflection? And then how can I re enter in ways that will be constructive for the child? The truth is, we don’t tend to plan for our emotional fires in family life. But the reality is they happen and they’re going to happen. And so if we plan ahead and think about our strategy, we can be much more confident in how we react.
Zach Beach 33:31
So I love this idea of the family emotional safety plan. And I’m curious how you start it like is there a safe word?
Jennifer Miller 33:39
Yeah, well, it’s, it could be for you and that there is a safe word. Some of the parents that I work with choose a safe word like time out, I know a mom and her teenager used code read. They would say code read. And and they knew that it was time for both of them to calm down. So I think it’s wonderful, especially when you have tweens or teens to agree on a word that you’re going to use with one another so that you can both snap into self management mode. But for young children, using just a few words and indicating what you need to do is really helpful and being consistent using it time and again so that they become rehearsed and what mom or dad is going to do when they we get hijacked
Zach Beach 34:37
such a wonderful tool. It reminds me even in relationships, they recommend having a time like a an argument break. Right when you’re because when your stress response is high, you’re not able to listen, you’re not able to empathize and see the other person’s point of view.
Jennifer Miller 34:51
That’s exactly right. So it is a tool that you can use with your partner and I I encourage parents to Try it out for themselves to develop their own plan, and then share it with their family members and encourage family members to create one for themselves, too.
Zach Beach 35:10
That’s so wonderful, Jennifer, I really appreciate your honest and authentic look at parenting. And I hope any parent listening to this podcast is able to breathe out a sigh of relief, that they don’t need to be perfect that it’s okay to make mistakes, and that they are still on this path of being human of learning and growing. And figuring out the best way to keep our heart open to everyone. And even our child when they’re throwing a temper tantrum and middle of target
Jennifer Miller 35:42
right on we need constant reminders, we tend to be really hard on ourselves as parents.
Zach Beach 35:49
So thank you so much, Jennifer, for coming on to the show. And I want to finish by asking you a question. I love to ask all of my guests, which is quite simply, what do you wish everyone knew about love?
Jennifer Miller 36:02
That is such a beautiful question. And I think that in order to express the love that we feel inside for our children, for our family members, we need to constantly work on our skill building, and that specifically our social and emotional skill building, in order to express ourselves in authentic and unconditional ways that that show the love that we feel it really does require hard work, and intentionality. We can’t leave it to chance to be able to daily show and express through our daily practices, the love that we feel.
Zach Beach 36:51
Absolutely. That’s a huge reason we have this podcast is so our listeners recognize that love is a skill. It can be developed, it can be worked on. And the more we develop it, the more love we can bring into all of our relationships with our family with our kids. The more we’re able to, as you mentioned, express our love in unconditional ways.
Jennifer Miller 37:15
Exactly.
Zach Beach 37:16
So thanks again for coming on, Jennifer, for our listeners who want to learn more about you How can they find you?
Jennifer Miller 37:22
I have a website. It’s confident parents confident kids.org and the book confident parents confident kids, raising emotional intelligence in ourselves and our kids from toddlers to teenagers is available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Wonderful.
Zach Beach 37:41
So thank you, Jennifer for coming on to the show. And thank you listeners for listening to the show. We hope you recognize that no matter where you are in your life path. We are all still growing still learning still making mistakes and learning from them. And the key to confidence is not some foolhardy, “I’m the best person most perfect person ever.” But vulnerability, emotional awareness, emotional intelligence, and a willingness to listen and to reflect. If you want to learn more about me, you can head to Zach Beach calm and learn more about the show at the heart center calm. Thanks again. Jennifer Miller.
Jennifer Miller 38:22
Thank you, Zach.
Outro 38:26
Thanks again for listening to the Learn to love podcast. To learn more about the show and your host, head over to Zachbeach.com or the heart center.com. You can also follow Zach on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
