“With parenting, we’re often overestimating how much control we have. We need to recognise that our child is going to be exposed to different choices or different information. And think about how we help our child process, what’s going on, how do we help our child make decisions about their behaviour.”
– Jodie Thornton | Parent Coach
Buy the book
Today we’re starting right at the beginning by asking the question, what is a good parent anyway? Is there really such a thing?
Because of course, before we have kids we all have pretty strong ideas about how we’re going to parent our child.
But then reality and our businesses get in the way.
So how do you maintain a great relationship with your kids while running your business?
We’ll dig into the different parenting styles, nature versus nurture, historical parenting styles, and understanding how little control we have.
We’ll also cover how to set boundaries and give your kids the emotional intelligence to handle life’s challenges.
It’s a deep dive that really helps you examine why you parent how you parent and how to forgive yourself for not having all the answers.
Tune in to learn:
- How to discover your parenting style
- The history of parenting as a concept
- How to set healthy boundaries with your kids
- Communication tips and advice
- What to do if you and your partner have different parenting styles
- Balancing your business why with parenting
- Why Jodie isn’t giving up on being a perfect parent
Listen to the podcast
Share the love
If you like what you’re hearing on Six Figures in School Hours, support the show by taking a few seconds to leave a rating and/or comment on iTunes or Spotify. Thanks.
Share the meme
About Jodie Thornton
Jodie Thornton helps parents teach their kids the emotional awareness skills and communication skills they need to have a deep sense of who they are, healthy relationships and create a life that is uniquely their own and that they love. Jodie knows there is always another way to get the same outcome so no need to do things that are impractical or unrealistic for your family. Her approach helps parents build the kind of relationship that will have them close with their kids throughout their lives. Jodie lives on Ngunnawal Country with her husband, four kids, and one grandkid.
Fun fact: When Jodie was in Year 7 she forged her mum’s signature on a letter asking to transfer to a new school and to skip year 8. Her mum was a tad shocked when the school rang to ask why she was taking me out of the school and why she thought it was appropriate for me to skip a grade, having not made said request.
Connect with Jodie Thornton
Buy the book
Transcript
Kate Toon:
Today we’re starting right at the beginning by asking the question, what is a good parent anyway? Is there really such a thing?
Because of course, before we have kids we all have pretty strong ideas about how we’re going to parent our child.
But then reality and our businesses get in the way.
So how do you maintain a great relationship with your kids while running your business?
We’ll dig into the different parenting styles, nature versus nurture, historical parenting styles, and understanding how little control we have.
We’ll also cover how to set boundaries and give your kids the emotional intelligence to handle life’s challenges.
It’s a deep dive that really helps you examine why you parent how you parent and how to forgive yourself for not having all the answers.
My name is Kate Toon. I am the founder of Stay Tooned, a busy business owner and an okay-ish parent. Today, I’m talking with Jodie Thornton. Hello, Jodie.
Jodie Thornton:
Hello, Kate.
Kate Toon:
Hello. Now, transparency here. Why did I ask Jodi on the podcast? Because actually a couple of years ago, she really helped me and my ex-partner chat through some worries we had about our parenting styles with our son, got us on the same page. She was amazing. So, I think she’s going to be super helpful for us today. But let me first introduce her, if you don’t know who Jodie is.
Jodie helps parents teach their kids the emotional awareness skills and communication methods. They need to have a deep sense of who they are. She helps them build healthy relationships and create a life that is uniquely their own and that they love. Jodie knows there is always another way to get the same outcome, so you don’t need to do things that are impractical or unrealistic for your family. Her approach helps parents build relationships with their children that keep them close throughout their lives. Ain’t that the dream?
Jodie lives on Ngunnawal Country with her husband, four kids, and one grandkid. She doesn’t look old enough. Fun fact, when she was in year seven, she forged her mom’s signature on a letter asking to transfer to a new school and skip year eight. Mom was a tad shocked when the school rang to ask why she was taking me out of the school and why she thought it was appropriate for me to script grade having not made said request. How did that turn out? What did your mom say?
Jodie Thornton:
Well, I don’t actually remember what she said about it, but it worked. I transferred schools and I skipped the grade.
Kate Toon:
Really?
Jodie Thornton:
Well, they said, “Well, you’ll have to take a test.” And I’m like, “Okay.” And then, I did it. Yeah.
Kate Toon:
I love the self-confidence there. Wow, amazing.
Jodie Thornton:
I don’t remember the thought process that went into it, but clearly, it was like, “I could have a conversation about this or I could just get it done.” Yeah.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. I like it. Action taker.
Jodie Thornton:
Yeah, I just made it happen.
Kate Toon:
I love that. Look, today, the topic of this podcast is what makes a good parent. Now, we know that, as I said in the intro, there’s no such good thing as a good parent, and I’m doing air fingers for those listening to the podcast. And that really it’s more about establishing how you want a parent and feeling good about that as well, because there’s a lot of external pressure on that. But also, there is a whole school of child psychology. People have put a lot of time into studying the different effects of parenting. So, I wondered if we could start there and talk about different parenting style, and why is understanding your parenting style important?
Jodie Thornton:
Yeah. It’s kind of fascinating when we look at… I heard something said recently that parenting was not a verb until very recently. The act of parenting was not a verb until recently. I think it’s fascinating when we think about how little thought was going into parenting previously. I’m not sure that that was always the case, but certainly for many decades prior to the current time, that was how little thought was going into parenting and now how much almost obsessive thought is going in.
I think there’s a lot of people who would say that we spend too much time thinking about parenting. I think that it is the way we change something. We go from not being aware of something to having to think about what is it that we’re trying to do here, how are we going to change, what is the process of change. And so, I think that this generation of parents are going to be overthinking and overanalyzing and overworking because we have to get through to something that becomes more natural and easy.
Kate Toon:
It’s like the pendulum has to swing. As I mentioned in the book in the 1960s, Philippe Ariès, who was a French historian, argued that the concept of childhood did not exist until fairly recently. Up until the ’60 and ’80s, children were not considered children. They were considered mini adults. Now, I don’t think that’s to say that parents didn’t love their children. We read a lot about people having eight children and child mortality rate was really high, and it sounds like they just didn’t care. But the idea wasn’t so much that children would have special treatment, special language, education wasn’t open to all, and most children were sent out to work at a very early age.
Charles Dickens was sent to work in a bottle factory or something when he was 12. My granddad, which is only 60, 70 years ago, went into the coal mine at 14. While I’m not advocating stuffing children up chimneys again, we have to be aware that really even in the 1970s, parenting was not what it is now. I mean, that’s in my living memory and probably yours, Jodie, I’m going to assume, if you’re a grandma. In the ’70s, we were very much just go out and play until tea time, climb that tree, fall out, but it’s your fault, whatever, move on. Not a lot of love and a lot of care for me, but there wasn’t this kind of watchfulness. Was that the same for you? Were your parents like that?
Jodie Thornton:
Yeah. I mean, my parents were also very, very young as well. They hadn’t had a chance to watch their peers do any parenting, and also they hadn’t had a chance to really think about what kind of parent they were going to be. They just got started. And so, it really was a case of we are just doing what we’re doing. I When I talk to my parents now, I definitely think that they had a lot of thought going into it, but it was very, very different to how it is now. It appears as an obsession for us at the moment. And as I say, I don’t mean to say that that is inappropriate, because I think that is this change that’s going underway, and I think that is an important change for us to go through culturally.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. I mean, I think my parents would’ve taken a lot from their own parents and thought, “I don’t want to be like this, I want to be like that.” But I just don’t know if there was the sheer wealth of reading material, podcasts, everything that there is now. That can be overwhelming and put a lot of pressure on. I think that’s where this whole good thing comes into play because we’re not judging ourselves, we’re judging ourselves against everybody else, which is really challenging. But let’s talk about it in kind of child psychologist terms.
In the book, when I was studying this, I discovered a lady called Diana Baumrind who talked about the four different styles of parenting. She felt like there were two pivot points, responsiveness and demandingness, I think it is. Let me have a look at my little notes here. Yeah. Demandingness and being undemanding, being responsive and unresponsive. She used those to come up with four different styles. Authoritative, really annoyingly. The next one is authoritarian, which gets me confused. Permissive, and then uninvolved or neglectful. Do you think these metrics are useful? She seems to favour one in particular, but do you think they’re useful? Do you think they’re true? Do you think they stand up? I mean, obviously, this is from the ’70s again. Do you think they’re valid?
Jodie Thornton:
I definitely think they’re a step in the right direction, but where I take issue is, when she talks about demandingness, some of the words she uses are around having expectations for your children. I always have to concentrate when I say whether it’s authoritative or authoritarian because there’s the authoritative parenting is the one where we have high expectations but we’re also highly responsive. The idea being that you’re quite attuned to your child, but you do expect that there’ll be certain levels of behaviour or certain values or there’ll be some expectations that you have of your child. You’re not just saying do whatever. There’s a level of expectation.
I do think that that is a step up from where we’ve come from, because if we think about authoritarian parenting, which is basically I will have high expectations but I’m not going to be attuned or responsive to you, that is tough. What I call my parents’ style with me was I call sweetly authoritarian, because there wasn’t drama. Day-to-day, obviously, we all have our blocks, but day-to-day, there wasn’t drama, but there was a very clear message of you rise to that level of expectation.
Kate Toon:
And you will do as you’re told because I am your parent and this is the way it goes. Yeah?
Jodie Thornton:
For my parents, there was very much on the current of, because you are capable and so you must. Because you are capable and you are an amazing person, you must rise to that level. Now, where I take issue with this is that when we think about what high expectations means, in my view, there isn’t a way to say to somebody you’re not meeting the expectations without an inherent message of-
Kate Toon:
There are expectations.
Jodie Thornton:
And you’re not good enough. Maybe this moment rather than overall, but ultimately, the message you’re saying is what you just did or what you are being or how you are behaving is not good enough. So then, we essentially are, even if we do it sweetly, even if we do it supportively, even if it comes with a message of because you’re such a good person, it comes with this undercurrent of you’re not good enough. I think the alternative view is to when we see our children not doing something that we might like to have an expectation around, what we want to look for is how did they get to this behaviour. Because once you can see why are they choosing this behaviour, then it becomes easy to go, “Okay, well, that’s the bit I have to change.”
Is it a self-belief of on their part? Is it that they haven’t built a habit? Is it that actually they don’t want to do what you want them to do? That’s a really good place for us to realise how much our expectations or our vision for our children or our desires for our children, how much of that is actually either us using our own cultural expectations. We’re putting them onto our children just as they were put onto us. Or it’s us having worries about the future, so we think if we can just get them to get good grades, then they’ll have a great life. Maybe not.
Kate Toon:
Probably not. Life proves that that’s not true. I guess the thing is, while though on the flip of that is we don’t want to have no expectations and no boundaries for our children, I think that falls into the kind of could be neglectful or the permissive style that the kind of parent that never pulls their child to account and says, “That behaviour isn’t appropriate. I expect better of you.” Or the classic line, “I’m not angry. I’m disappointed.” So, it’s such a fine line between the two, isn’t it? Because we don’t want to be those parents that have that kid that’s running screaming around the restaurant, putting jammy hands on people. But equally, we want our kids to be kids. On the flip side, how do we have… Maybe expectations is the wrong word, but boundaries with our children without them not feeling good enough.
Jodie Thornton:
For me, I really love this phrase that I got from a guy called Marshall Rosenberg, which is the protective use of force. What he’s basically saying is that a boundary in essence is using force. Obviously, it might be verbal, emotional, all of that, rather than physical. Or if it’s jammy hands, maybe it is physical, but it’s protective. If we think about what that means, say for example, your child is using disrespectful language with you, if you can withstand the disrespectful language and help them to unpack what is going on, what are they trying to communicate and how could they get that across without using that language. If you have the calm, if it’s not pushing on your buttons, if you’re able to do that, then we don’t need to protect you. We can just unpack where is this coming from and build up the respectful way to communicate.
However, say for example, the particular words your child is using are pushing right on all of the buttons, you do need some protection in that instance because… Well, and also your child does, because if they push enough of your buttons, you are going to do something. If you don’t lash out, you might withdraw and become more emotionally numb, even if it’s just for that moment. So, there is some protection required there. And so then, I think that’s the way we decide when is it a boundary and when is it we are just going to work through what’s going on. Is there a need for protection in this moment?
Kate Toon:
I like that protection rather than boundaries. I think that’s really interesting. I think as well, obviously, the age of your child massively influences that. There’s no point trying to sit down with a two year old and trying to break down why they just said bum, if you don’t want them to say bum. I mean, you can try but it’s challenging. Whereas with a teenager, obviously, you might let them say bum, but it has its all unique challenges as well. How does communication change over the years?
Jodie Thornton:
I would say for very, very young children, we underestimate how much they can communicate with us. One of the things that we don’t recognise in our culture is that children’s capacity to verbalise what they are thinking is much lower than their capacity to understand what we’re saying. That’s one thing, is we want to always assume they can understand more than we realise because we assume that they can’t. And so, you can talk with… I would say with a two-year old, you absolutely can talk with them about it, but their-
Kate Toon:
Responses might not be what you… I think that’s true of a lot of adults, Jodie. They understand what you’re saying, but they can’t articulate how they feel about that because they haven’t been given that language. I like that. I want to continue with some more. I mean, I could talk to you all day about this. One of the things I think is super challenging is if you do identify that you have a particular parenting style and you can dig into Baumrin’s styles or you can look at other ones. You could say for example that you really want to talk to your children about boundaries and you want to be protective, but your partner is completely other way. Maybe they believe in tough love, maybe they want to be quite strict with your child. And if you don’t, how do you accommodate that in a relationship? Because I think that’s a huge, other than money, I think that’s probably one of the biggest things couples argue about. Is there any short tips that we can give people to accommodate that?
Jodie Thornton:
Yeah. Number one, do not send them any articles.
Kate Toon:
Oh damnit!
Jodie Thornton:
I’ll tell you why. It’s not because the articles aren’t valuable. It’s because the articles that you think explain the issue are written to speak to you.
Kate Toon:
To you, exactly. They resonate with you. I’m a terrible meme sender, and that meme has popped up in a moment of crisis for me and it just seems like the answer to my dreams. To someone else, it’s like, “What? This is crap.” So, I love that. Okay, don’t send articles. It’s tip number one.
Jodie Thornton:
I think the root of that is that when we are disagreeing on parenting, 99 times out of 100, it’s because we have different baggage that we are trying to protect our children from. Our baggage is different to our partners, and each of us are trying to protect our children from the baggage that we think is the most urgent. And so then, what resonates for you doesn’t resonate for them, which is also the reason where you can end up on the same page with your partner, but the path you need to take to get there is very likely to be extremely different. So then, step number one is actually not getting them on the same page. Step number one is recognising that this idea of being on the same page in parenting, I don’t like, again, if we think about where did this come from, who of any of us had parents that said the same thing to us?
Kate Toon:
I know.
Jodie Thornton:
Everyone will say, “Dad was like this. Mom was like this. Mom was like that. Mama was like this.” Everyone will say that they had different parents, they had different personalities, different values. So then, instead of thinking about we have to be on the same page, where that comes from is that if you’re getting… The idea is that if your child’s getting the same message from two parents, they will take it to be true. Here’s the thing, soon enough, they’re going to be looking at the million different ways of living in this world. They need the skills to be able to decide is what someone else doing, is that what I want for my life or not? And so, instead of worrying about giving them the same message so they don’t question it, we want to look for, “Why is my child not taking on what I’m saying?”
And then, we look at, “Is it the way I’m communicating it? Is it that I’m actually trying to put something?” There’s a lot of stuff in our culture that we say, as adults, we want to unpack from ourselves, but then we find ourselves giving our children those same messages, that we’re saying we now need to unpack. So, we want to look at, are we just putting cultural expectations on them or is it a communication issue? Is it a skill gap? What is it that’s preventing my child from taking on? Because if you give your child something that will work for them, it doesn’t matter if they’re getting a different message from someone else. They’re going to choose what works.
Kate Toon:
I think we underestimate how able our kids are to be diplomats and adapt to different parenting styles. Actually, that’s an important life skill. Everyone in your world is not going to be uniform and are not going to treat you the same. So I think, as well, I think it’s important to sit down with your partner and unpack that baggage of, why do you care so much about grades? Well, because my parents didn’t. And then also to go to the fundamentals that you fundamentally want your child to be well, you want them to feel loved, you want them to succeed, and both of you want the same outcome. You’re just travelling in different directions. I love that. Thank you very much.
Now, we’re talking about parenting styles. You mentioned there’re cultural differences. Obviously, cultural differences and ethnic differences have a huge play into it. My Asian friends, their parenting style, there’s generally associated with Asian parents sweeping stereotype, tiger parenting, very much more demanding and high expectations. Again, we live in a cultural mix. My partner is French Arabic. My new partner is Australian. The difference in the way that they approach things is huge. I guess, what do you have to say about cultural differences? It’s a big topic, but let’s sum it up. How does that play into how you raise your kids?
Jodie Thornton:
Yeah. I think, again, for me, there’s two pieces to it. One is it comes down to our children are going into a world where there are mini cultures everywhere. So, there’s like… If you look at Australian culture versus another country or another area, but there’s also culture in a workplace, and culture in a place of education, culture in a family, your in-law’s family. There’s all these little cultures. And so, it’s this idea of when am I wanting to participate in a culture and when do I need to listen to what’s important to me? I think rather than giving our children this is our culture and you will adhere to it, which is much easier if both parents have the same culture, we need to be looking at that idea of identifying what’s cultural and then identifying what works for us and what doesn’t. And then, that becomes even more important when we have cultural differences within the family. Because then, they do have choice.
I think there’s this interesting idea that we like to think of our children like we have total control, and then at some point, they’re going to be ready to take the reins. But in reality, we have so little control. The sooner we allow our children to start making those choices and identifying how to make those choices, the better. And so, I think then, if we are looking at in a family, if we’ve got two different cultures to wrestle with, the idea becomes what is the outcome with that part of our culture is trying to achieve and recognising that there’s a million ways to get that outcome.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, the different routes to the same success. I mean, it’s all about really unpacking why you have the beliefs about parenting that you do. Is it cultural? Is it to do with your religion? Is it to do with your parents or some negative experience you’ve had as a teen or an adult that wasn’t even to do with your parents, and working out whether that is something you want to counter, whether you want to keep it? It’s like whether you want to put it to one site, or you think it’s genuinely valid. We need to, but we… I think you said it. It’s thinking about your parenting style but maybe not thinking about it too much, because again, another thing with style is that you may think to yourself, “Okay. I’m the good one. Yeah, Baumrind’s good one, which is I’m an authoritative parent, not an authoritarian parent. Couldn’t she have been a bit… Geez, Baumrind. I can’t have words with you.
Jodie Thornton:
There’s so many words.
Kate Toon:
I know. If you feel that you’re being responsive, you’re listening to your child, you are communicating well with them. Even if you do that, there’s a huge range of that. I’ve always been very open with my son, I’ve always talked to him as an adult. And very early on, I think even when he was five, I told him roughly how babies were made. I talked about penises and vaginas, and how long it was in your tummy and how it came out. I didn’t go into glorious technical detail about sex, but I explained it to him. Obviously then, he goes straight to school and tells all his friends, and other people’s parents who I thought were similar to me were like, “That’s too much. You’ve been too communicative and too open.” So, even if you fall into similar style to other people, your practise might be different, right?
Jodie Thornton:
Yeah. This is a perfect example of making that case around, we think we have control but we don’t. Because those are the parents, I’ve decided how much my child is going to know. But then they go to school, with other people’s children and you just don’t have control. I don’t know what happened in your case, but in a lot of cases, there will be people who will say that you need to atone for that. This is something that you have crossed me. But in the reality is, and another example that I absolutely love was, I can’t remember the person, but it was somebody on Facebook who said, “If your first child is best friends with my third child, I am sorry,” because the third child in the family is exposed to so much more because they’ve got older siblings. If it’s your first child, you think you’ve controlled the environment and you’re not exposing them to all of these things. But the reality is they can’t control that, right?
It’s one of those things of recognising what are we going to do when our child is exposed to different choices or different information in this case. There’s always a way to process it. I’m not saying we shouldn’t try and control anything, but not overestimating how much control we have. And instead, looking at how do we help our child process, what’s going on, how do we help our child make decisions about their behaviour, because they are.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, they are. Even from a very early age, I think the classes is Christmas and Father Christmas, and whether you believe in that and when your child is toned, people get furious when other children… It’s how do you then taught our child about that and how they feel about that now, someone said this today. I remember distinctly saying to my son, “Well, do you want to believe in Father Christmas?” And he’s like, “Yes.” And I’m like, “Well, there you go. If you want to do that, you do that. That’s up to you. That’s your call.”
So, styles can be different, but then obviously, we come into the whole nature versus nurture debate. There was a study, fairly recent done in Queensland Brain Institute by Dr. Beben Benyamin. Great name. He did a huge study for twins over a long period. His quote that I have here is, “When visiting the nature versus nurture debate, there is overwhelming evidence that both genetic and environmental factors can influence traits and diseases. What is comforting is that, on average, about 50% of individual differences are genetic and 50% are environmental.”
Again, that level of control of thinking, I raise my child this way, I set these boundaries, they are going to turn out like this. We’ve got nature playing against us there. They are born with certain attributes that we cannot overcome. What do you think about the nature versus nurture debate?
Jodie Thornton:
I think, for me, the most important thing or the most interesting thing about this is actually how much you ask an adult who is in maybe their 30s, but definitely their 40s, 50s, and 60s, how much they are discovering who they are, unpacking what they were told about who they are, what they were told about who they need to be. And yet, we still turn around and try and tell our children or even have hopes and aspirations of how they will turn out. I think it’s healthy to hope that they are physically healthy, that they are mentally well, that they have the skills.
But anything more than that, if we really want to give our children what we didn’t get, which is the ability to really explore who we are and not have to put on a personality and then unpack it and really discover who we are later in life, then I think we’re going to have to wrestle more with this nature versus nurture thing. We’re going to have to wrestle with the idea that our children are inherently going to be something that we may not see coming because they’ve come from generations of people who’ve been told who they have to be. And so, that then becomes this interesting exercise in not having certainty.
Kate Toon:
It does, which is unnerving. In this unnerving world, we desperately want to protect our children. We can think that doing that is restricting them, limiting their access to certain things and that we’re saving them. At least, I got into 12 before he looked at this, or at least, I got them to 14 before they did this. But it’s a challenging one, isn’t it?
Jodie Thornton:
What world we’re putting them into.
Kate Toon:
Say that again?
Jodie Thornton:
Who knows what world we’re putting them into.
Kate Toon:
Yes.
Jodie Thornton:
The world that I am in is my parents could not have known.
Kate Toon:
No, no, it’s all changing all the time.
Jodie Thornton:
The career I have right now, they wouldn’t have known existed, let alone online business. We think we definitely do want to do what we can, but we do need to recognise that we do not… The world is in accelerating change right now. We just don’t know. And so, it’s more about those skillsets than it is about any particular, “Did I do this? Did I do that? Have I ticked all these boxes? Have we done all the extracurriculars?”
Kate Toon:
Yes, exactly. That’s it. Again, the pressure on parents to make their children rounded individuals who read, play an instrument, do sport, because that’s the guarantee for success. We know that that’s just not true. We know it as adults. For me, for example, very much the idea that I would go study well, go to university, get a job, do all the things. And no, I went to university, I did English history and poetry. I know all the Roman emperors. What use has that been? It was great going to university. Do not think that it wasn’t.
But now, I work for myself and blah blah blah, and my academic achievements don’t really count for much. So, I think we do come back to that life skills and values that we kind of hope to instil being a kind person, being patient, being honest. And then skills, communication skills and relationship building. I think that’s where we can… Is it helpful to create a checklist? No. But is it helpful to think about what’s important to you and articulate that? Yes, I think it is. I think it’s valuable.
Jodie Thornton:
I agree. I think when you said there’s so many podcasts and books and things to become aware of in parenting, I think that a lot of the advice and a lot of how we talk about parenting is like, “We should decide and then implement.” Whereas, I think that it’s much easier and more effective to look at what is currently coming up, what does that tell me I need. So, if your child is struggling to get to karate, and because of that, you’re spending so much time in the tantrums and so much time in the I don’t want to go, and there’s so much time in all of this, are they actually getting the benefit of the karate or not? Sometimes the answer is yes, and sometimes the answer is no. But instead of going, “I’m going to make sure my child has positive self-discipline and is physically healthy, so therefore we’re going to do karate,” if we take a step back and go, “Does my child actually have any positive self-discipline issue right now?”
Kate Toon:
Yep. Also, what my other values, I want my child to feel listened to and I don’t want to put pressure on my kid to do something that he’s not enjoying because that’s… No, that’s not… So, it’s always balancing that out, isn’t it? I do think it’s interesting to sit down and think about what values are important to you. But as you said, it’s about being flexible in the moment and not just being rigid on this rule that you made when they were three, that they have to do a sport because that’s super important, and kind of examining that on a case by case basis and allowing your relationship to evolve and your parenting style to evolve. The parent I was when my son was three, I’m completely different now. I’m a different person. So, how would I expect him to be a… It’s so full on.
I mean, I feel like the overarching messages are, it’s not helpful to compare yourself with others. You have to be flexible. We have to accept that there is a degree of lack of control, that we can only do what we can do. To kind of unpack why we think the way we think, I think that’s really helpful. I think obviously, the book is about balancing the relationship between parenthood and running a business. You run a business, you’ll know the challenges there, because we can set ourselves up with these great parenting ideals. But then, business comes in and ruins them. I want to be the kind of parent that reads to my kid every night, but I’ve got a Zoom call and it’s worth money to my family and we need the money. How do I balance that and not just feel crap about myself? Any advice there for us, Jodie?
Jodie Thornton:
Yes. Let’s use that exact example. Why do you need to read every single night to get the outcome? Part of it is if we get down to it, there can be different reasons, but part of it might be, for example, that my child feels important. And then we say, “Well then, it’s a problem because I’m really saying that the Zoom call is more important than my child.” And instead, if we can say to our children that you are important to me in so many different ways, it doesn’t have to be that we make hard and fast commitments, and then we always stick up to them. Well, how would someone demonstrate to you as your partner that they’re important to you even though they have work commitments? They might say, “I’m so sorry. I’m not going to get a chance to be with you tonight. We’re not going to get to sit down and watch our show,” or, “We’re not going to sit down and watch and play cards or something. I’m so sorry that’s happening.”
But the reason is because if I miss this opportunity, there’s not really a better one coming up soon. I don’t like to use the word – It makes sense for me to make this choice, but what we’re going to do is X, Y, and Z. The same goes for your child. Instead of even saying, “I would love to read to you every night,” even that, it’s not even true when you get down to it. Some nights, you are tired, or some nights, you had a terrible day and you don’t actually want to read every night. What you want is for your child to feel important.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, it’s the symptom, not the cause. It’s the vibe that you’re wanting to give. I want you to feel loved, and one way I can do that is to read to you, but life isn’t perfect and I won’t be able to do that all the time. You’re going to sometimes not have that, and that’s okay. I think as parents, we will have a great day. This is a whole mom guilt thing, which I cover in the book that we’ll have a parent guilt because it is not unique to mothers. We’ll have a great day where we get the child up, we feed them, we clothe them, we go to the park, we watch a show together, and then, we have to spend two hours working and then we get the guilt. We look at the one thing we didn’t do rather than the 97 micro things that we did do.
It’s because the kid will wander in and say, “Mom, why are you always on your phone? Mom, why are you always working?” To them, it’s like dogs. It’s not like dogs, but when you leave the house, the dog doesn’t know whether you’ve left for seven minutes or seven hours. It’s always exciting to see you. And kids don’t have a great sense of time. So, you being on the phone for 15 minutes when they want you feels like two hours. But if you’re on the phone for 15 minutes when they’re absorbed in something, it feels like no time at all. But we treat it all the same and we beat ourselves up. How do you respond to a child that says, “Mom, you’re always working all the time”?
Jodie Thornton:
This is something I shifted, because at some point, I was essentially saying that I need to have a business because we need to have the income for our family. That’s a good message, that everybody needs to be employed themselves and all of that. But I realised that that’s actually not why I have this business. I know this is not true for every single person, but this business that I run, it is part of who I am. It is how I want to spend my time. And me, being a person who can show up as a parent and can show up as a partner and can show up as a friend, needs me to have, wouldn’t necessarily need to be precisely this, but it needs me to have this outlet where I get to build the skills that I love and I get to use them and I get to help people.
Now, I have this, but if we had… I’ve started saying this to my children. There isn’t an amount of money that I could have that would make me retire. There isn’t. I will retire if I physically don’t enjoy the work anymore. And that is it. My business may evolve, but I’m not. And so when they say, “Why are you always working?” Because I love it. We don’t want to say that because what does that mean, I don’t love you?
Kate Toon:
Yeah. I think-
Jodie Thornton:
It doesn’t mean that.
Kate Toon:
It doesn’t mean that. I think it’s really important to say to yourself, “I am allowed to have something for me, and I can have both.” Because we don’t want to go down the line if you can have everything because you can’t, and I don’t believe there’s a perfect balance. I think there’ll be some days when, yes, you probably do work a bit too much and you are on your phone a bit much. There’ll be other days where you’re totally focused on your kids. It’s never going to be perfect. We can’t look at a single day or a single week or a single month even. We have to look at the overall.
But I think the message of money is important and making your kids understand, one of the things I’m talking about in the communication section is with young children pointing out people who have jobs. This lady who’s serving us at the checkout, this man who’s serving us at the checkout, this is their job. This is how they make money to buy food and things for their family. They’re helping their family. And that’s what I do. I just do it differently. I’m at home. And then, also kind of saying, “Yeah, I love what I do. It gives me joy. It makes me happy. You know how you love playing with your Lego? That’s how I feel when I do my job. So, I enjoy it. I enjoy spending time with you, but I enjoy that too, and that’s okay.” I think that’s a great message.
Jodie Thornton:
If they do come up with, “Well, does that mean you don’t love me?” No, of course. Not being afraid to have that conversation, because a lot of us, when that comes up, their question of, “Do I matter to you? Do you love me? All of those things,” it’s touching on our baggage. So, we assume that they have baggage, they don’t have the baggage.
Kate Toon:
Not yet.
Jodie Thornton:
So then, we just need to answer the question. Well, does that mean you don’t love me because you don’t want to play with me? I’m like, “No, there is nobody in this world that I want to play with all day every day.” The people that I love, I love to spend time with, but I don’t… We want to be really honest. You might say, “I love you, and I play Barbies or Transformers with you because you love it. I hate it, but do it because I love you and you love to do that with me.” We want to be honest. Obviously, we’re not saying things that aren’t true.
If a business owner is in a case where they would retire if they had $10 million, then we just want to say it’s because I’m putting food on the table. But we want to not shy away from having honest answers and helping out. A lot of times, when we think about why does a child desperately want our attention, we assume there’s this thing of, it’s not attention seeking, it’s connection seeking. I’m like, “Sometimes.” Sometimes it’s because they haven’t yet learned how to play on their own.
Kate Toon:
And they haven’t learned to self sooth. It’s funny. Actually, it’s true in adult relationships because I’m a wretched attention seeker. My partner’s very kind and always says, “Oh, you’re not seeking attention, just want a connection.” I’m like, “No, I just want some attention. I just want you to say nice things. It’s that it.” That’s because I never learned how to get that as a kid. Sometimes, it bubbles up, then I try and find that within myself, but sometimes I can’t. So, I need you to say, “You are a kid today.” It’s literally not about connection. I mean, I do think honesty is so important. I’m not sure I could ever dare say to my child, “I play Barbies because you like it and I hate it.” That’s brutal, Jodie. Geez. But my husband’s is much-
Jodie Thornton:
It is brutal, or is it loving to say they would hate something I hate with you because I love you.
Kate Toon:
Yeah.
Jodie Thornton:
That’s so beautiful.
Kate Toon:
I’ll work on that one. It’s funny because my partner is… I hope you won’t mind me saying this, but he’s very much the kind of… He enjoys doing stuff with my son that he enjoys. So, bike riding, whatever, but he doesn’t like computers. He will never in any way pay any interest. Therefore, I feel I have to overcompensate. I built myself a Minecraft account and a Fortnite account, and I played, and I did actually. The thing as well I would say is that sometimes we think we don’t enjoy things, but once we actually do them again with our own child, we do. But that’s a perfect example of where I’m doing something that I don’t love because you love it. I think, as my son is older, I have been able to say that, but I’m not sure I could have said that to him when he was little. There we go. There’s me unpacking some stuff.
Look, we could talk about this all day. It’s a big topic and obviously we’ve covered a lot of this in the book. You’ll find some great quotes from Jodie in the book as well and ways to contact her, and on the show notes for this episode. I’m going to include links to all Jodie’s bits and bobs so that you can get in touch with her. I’m going to ask you the question at the end, which is, it’s the impossible question, but what does make a good parent, Jodie?
Jodie Thornton:
People say, “You shouldn’t want to be a perfect parent.” I am not giving up on that. I know it’s a funny thing to say, but what my definition of perfection has changed. I’m not ticking boxes anymore. I’m not wondering if I’ve put them enough about money or if I’ve gotten them enough physical activity or if I’ve gotten this happen. What my definition of perfection now is, do they understand their own emotions? Do they know how to talk to somebody else about anything, what’s going on for them, what’s going on for the other person? Do they have any ways to get a single need met?
If we think about an unhealthy relationship where you stay in it because you have no other way to get that attention, I’m not suggesting that this is your relationship, but as in an example. If we have no other way to get that attention, we’re more likely to sacrifice things we shouldn’t sacrifice because we have no other way. Do my children know that they have multiple ways to get their needs met? Do they know how to analyse for themselves what baggage am I carrying and do I have the skills to get rid of it? Do I have the skills to unpack that and let it go so that this idea of, “One day I will pass and they need to have everything that they need in order to have a life for themselves and raise their children without me being there”? That now is my definition of perfection.
Kate Toon:
I like that. I mean, I think that’s not too far evolved from our 1950s, 1960s counterpart. Your parents in those times were trying to imbue with life skills that they felt were important. Here’s how you make a fire. Here’s how you cook a cake, because these are important life skills. You want those tools in your toolbox. And now, as parents, we’re trying to give kids the emotional tools in their toolbox. So, they have lots of different ways to understand their feelings, express them, and resolve them. Because if you’re left with one tool in your toolbox, it can lead to things like addiction and all these problems because you don’t have an outlet. I think with my son, I often try and talk to him about thinking about why you are thinking that. The think, feel, act cycle. That is just the thought. You made it up. It’s not true, it’s a belief, it’s a thought, but it is going to influence how you feel, and the feelings are going to influence how you act.
The big one for him is he always says he’s not good at English, for example. I’m like, “But if you decide to tell yourself that story, guess what? You won’t be good at English. If you say, I don’t like English very much, but I’m okay at it, it’s going to be a completely different outcome. So, look at your thoughts and feelings.” I love that. I think… Not sure the word perfect is one that I would use, but the fact that we are kind of… The quote… I think the thing that I summed up when I finished the chapter is like, “If you are worrying about some of this, you’re probably all a pretty good parent already.” And then there was a great meme that I saw on Instagram. As I said, I live my life through memes. It was like my child just went out and got a neck tattoo. Bottle feed your babies, it doesn’t matter.
Jodie Thornton:
I love that one so much. That made me laugh.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. They’re going to be who they’re going to be to some degree. There’s a Philip Larkin poem that says, “We swear word them up, our kids, we don’t mean to, but we do.” It’s some degree that no matter what we do, they are going to turn out who they’re going to turn out. As you said, it’s not about giving up and abandoning all your ideals, but it’s also about understanding that you can’t control everything. I think that’s super important, and that’s a pressure off, right?
Jodie Thornton:
Exactly. I think it’s that idea of when you were saying the think, feel, act, it’s like if we understand what our decision-making process is, then our children get to recognise what they can and can’t control and what decisions they’re going to make for themselves. If your son doesn’t like English, does he want to like it?
Kate Toon:
Yeah.
Jodie Thornton:
Because he’s allowed…
Kate Toon:
You’re allowed not to. That’s been one of the biggest things for me to let go of, because I love English and I’m a writer. And to have a son who doesn’t want to read books, it’s really for me kind of going, “Well, that’s okay. You do you, dude. There’s loads of aspects of you that are brilliant I don’t have.” We can’t all be little cookie cutter versions, so I love that. Well, look, Jodie, thank you so much for joining us today. Where can we find out more about you? I’m going to include links, but for people listening, where’s the best place to learn more about you?
Jodie Thornton:
I’m a Facebooker. I’m always on Facebook, and that’s the best place to find me. I’m Jodie Thornton, Parent Coach on Facebook. You’ll find everything there, all the links, all the ways to keep in touch.
Kate Toon:
Fantastic. All right. Well, Jodie, thanks so much for coming on today.
Jodie Thornton:
You’re so welcome. Thank you so much for having me.
