#1218 - Room Resets, Dust Bunnies & Waste Witches

In this episode of the Happy Families podcast, Justin and Kylie Coulson reflect on the challenges of parenting, from managing big emotions to keeping the household running smoothly. They discuss the importance of family meetings, handling difficult conversations with kids, and creative ways to encourage household contributions.

KEY POINTS:

• Navigating difficult emotional conversations with children.

• The power of apologizing and reconnecting after conflict.

• Establishing family meetings for better communication and teamwork.

• Encouraging kids to contribute to the household with fun, creative chore names.

• The importance of consistency in family meetings and accountability.

 

QUOTE OF THE EPISODE:
"The hardest thing as a parent is sitting in a place when your child is having big emotions that generally speaking, are pointed directly at you." – Kylie Coulson

 

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

• Happy Families website

ACTION STEPS FOR PARENTS:

1. Practice active listening when your child shares their emotions.

2. If you mishandle a situation, revisit it later and apologize if needed.

3. Introduce family meetings with a simple format: What's working? What's not? What can we improve?

4. Make chores more appealing by adding fun names or gamifying the process.

5. Stay consistent with family discussions and follow-ups to build trust and accountability.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Every Friday on the Happy Families podcast, we review the
week that was, what worked, what didn't, how we can
be better parents. So glad you could join us for
today's Friday edition of the Happy Families podcast, where we
share real parenting solutions. Every day on Australia's most downloaded
parenting podcast, we are Justin and Kylie Coulson and Kylie

(00:26):
your King's off today with a story about our fifteen
year old daughter.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
I can't believe you dubbed her in.

Speaker 1 (00:33):
Oh, you weren't going to say who it was. I
was going to say, Okay, And Kylie, you're sharing a
story today about one of our six daughters, which one Oh, no,
we won't say.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
A few nights ago, we decided that we needed to
revisit some of the house rules.

Speaker 1 (00:50):
Sorry, Willie, this particular child.

Speaker 2 (00:53):
I can't believe you just named her.

Speaker 1 (00:54):
Oh we're already there, now, carry on? What happened? Was
I there or was I trying there?

Speaker 2 (00:59):
I was there, You were there, and she knew that
it was coming. So she was already feeling a little
bit heightened and she wanted to justify her behavior. And
as we got talking, she came out with a doozy,
and she said, remember, Mom, we had that conversation last year,

(01:20):
last year, a whole year ago, last year, when I
told you that you ignore me and Annie's your favorite.
And after a pretty emotional day that I'd had, I
was not prepared to have that conversation. And I looked
at you and I said, I'm leaving. You can deal
with this. I'm not dealing with this right now. And

(01:42):
I left the room. Well after I had gone, I
was thinking about how I dealt with this.

Speaker 1 (01:51):
Why are you looking at me like that? Because I
don't remember this conversation. Was I even there? I know
that you said that you left her with me. Did
I talk to her after this? Yeah, Oh my goodness.
Did I have a good converse with me?

Speaker 2 (02:00):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (02:01):
I have no recollection. I have been pretty wiped out.
I've been doing so much travel on so many speaking engagements.
But I'm genuinely I don't remember it. Anyway, you took
some time out, you came back, apparently I don't recall.

Speaker 2 (02:16):
Well, no, I didn't come back.

Speaker 1 (02:17):
It took me a few days.

Speaker 2 (02:18):
I was really really frustrated. When you're doing the very
best you can do and somebody tells you you're not
doing enough. Yeah, it feels like an absolute personal attached
I'm so.

Speaker 1 (02:28):
Glad it wasn't me that said it.

Speaker 2 (02:30):
At your integrity and just you're very being like So here,
I have this child who takes so much of my time,
and after yesterday's conversation all about favoritism, my child was
essentially telling me I had a favorite and it wasn't her,
and I felt really attacked. And so it took me

(02:52):
a few days as I sat in that place and
kind of was mulling over everything, and I clearly recognized
that I hadn't handled the situation very well, and that
in that moment when she was trying to express how
she was feeling, I had actually turned it into something
about me, as opposed to being able to sit in

(03:13):
her hard place and hear her and allow her to
share her feelings without taking it personally. So a few
days later we were doing some work in her room.
She's been waiting to have a bookshelf hung. I hung
a bookshelf.

Speaker 1 (03:29):
I hung a bookshelf and it's still hanging back where
it's me. If it had been me, I would never
have been hung in the first place. But it certainly
would be on the floor by now.

Speaker 2 (03:40):
So we were spending a bit of time decorating her
room and spending time just you know, having a bit
of a chat, and it occurred to me that now
was probably a really good time to reconnect with that conversation,
and so I just suggested to her that the other
day she tried to share some really important and big
emotions with me, and I wasn't I didn't have the
capacity to hear her the way that she needed to

(04:03):
be heard. And I said, one of the things that
I've struggled with in the past is often when I
have tried to share my big emotions with important people
in my lives, they've made it about them. And in
that moment, I made it about me. And I apologized
to her, and I just said to her that I
really wanted her to know that even though as a
parent sometimes it's really hard to hear and have the

(04:25):
mirror turned on yourself and recognize the parts of you
that you'd prefer not to have to look at, that
it gives us an opportunity to learn and grow together.
And it was just this beautiful moment of connection. You know,
she was completely I think shocked. Number one, that I
was able to revisit it, but that I was able

(04:47):
to acknowledge my mistake in that moment, my weakness, my
inability in that moment to connect with her in the
way that she needed to be connected with. And it
was just this moment of realness that we got to
share together, and I was so grateful for it. She
came and gave me a really big cargon. We were
able to have this beautiful conversation that flowed from that,

(05:09):
just because I was willing to apologize.

Speaker 1 (05:12):
So when you look at that, what would you say
is the take home message of the conversations that you
had with her.

Speaker 2 (05:20):
That you don't remember being good?

Speaker 1 (05:21):
No, they were clearly quite challenging.

Speaker 2 (05:25):
The hardest thing as a parent is sitting in a
place when your child is having big emotions that generally speaking,
are pointed directly at you. It's really easy to take
it personally, but it really is an opportunity for us
to actually connect more deeply with our child. The very
fact that she felt comfortable and safe to share that

(05:47):
with me specifically in that moment, speaks volumes about her
desire for deeper connection, but her trust that I'm a
safe place for her to share that. And the biggest
challenge we have as parents is in honoring in honoring
them and their emotions.

Speaker 1 (06:08):
Yeah, trust believing that the other person's going to acting
your best interests. Really hard to get your kids to
really believe that sometimes so important. Okay, Kylie, this is
my old do better tomorrow. We had a family meeting
on them and it was back on Sunday. Now it

(06:29):
feels like forever ago and things. I've been traveling a lot,
you've been under the pump, and you've been complaining to
me a lot about our children. They don't pull their
own weight, they don't pull anyone else's. Wait, either, you're
pulling the whole family. You're keeping the family afloat while
I'm out and working and helping everybody else to have
a happy family. And so we sat down and we said,

(06:50):
we're not going to talk about what's going well, what's not,
and what we can focus on this week. We're just
going to get back to a couple of foundational basics.
So I looked at the kids and said to them,
what do you want have family to feel like? And
instantly the walls went up. So when we talk about
these family meetings. Sometimes people think, oh, we just must

(07:13):
have these glorious conversations where the kids sit around and
smile and we talk about what's good and what's not
so good, and we figure. It was challenging, it was confrontational,
and we had a couple of kids in particular who
were reluctant to participate.

Speaker 2 (07:31):
Might be an understatement, well, there was contension between them,
which meant that their reluctance to participate was heightened.

Speaker 1 (07:38):
And whenevere, whenever one of them tried to participate, the
other one would go whatever, I roll their eyes. I'm like, oh,
my goodness, so much contempt. It's just terrible. So eventually
one of the kids refused, refused to say what she
wanted the family to feel like, and you stepped in
and said, well, rather than using words to describe what

(07:58):
I want the family to feel like, maybe I can
paint a picture. And so you talked about what matters
to you sitting around the table, playing games and telling
jokes and having fun. And I talked about being a
little bit more physically active and wrestling and playing and
going to the beach. And so there's words like we
want kindness, or there's word pictures like we've just described.

(08:20):
And eventually, I mean, it took us way too long.
I reckon twenty minutes, maybe thirty. And finally she began
to participate and we really started to put together some
ideas about how we can work together as a team
to make our family function better. It was great. Then
we stepped into part two. I want the kids to
do hard things. I believe that doing hard things is

(08:41):
necessary so that you can enjoy life and feel happy
about life. And it was about that point that you
fell asleep on the couch.

Speaker 2 (08:49):
Hey, I'm just saying.

Speaker 1 (08:50):
In the middle of our family meeting. For years, about.

Speaker 2 (08:55):
Four years, this was you to force.

Speaker 1 (09:00):
Team all the time.

Speaker 2 (09:02):
And now I would run the meeting the meeting, but
now you're running the meat are supposed to go for
ten to twenty minutes. You can't do anything at ten
or twenty minute.

Speaker 1 (09:11):
Kids are just such hard work. Oh my goodness. So
you're snoring on the couch with your mouth open, your
head tills and back. The kids are like, if we
don't want to do anything hard, I'm like, no, you've
got to do hard things. Look, we're doing hard things
all the time in our family. Mum and then you're asleep,
and I'm like, Mum's trying to do a hard thing
by getting through this meeting. So we finally got that
part done. I said, all right, we need to talk
about contribution. We've had this sort of We've gone through

(09:34):
periods over the years of having a chort chart and
not having a chor chart, and we certainly don't do
rewards and things, but just having do we let people
just pick their responsibilities on a day to day basis
and invite them to contribute to the house wherever they
can or do we have specified tasks. The last six
to nine months we've had just help out and nobody's
doing anything. You and I are doing all of it.

(09:56):
I shouldn't say they're doing stuff, but they're not very sporadic.
We're not getting what we need. And so I pulled
out the old chour charts and I said, all right,
let's make a list. Let's make a list and you
woke up for this. Let's make a list of every
chore that needs to be done.

Speaker 2 (10:12):
I think I was woken.

Speaker 1 (10:14):
We wrote down the chores and then I said, who's
going to volunteer for what? And within about ten minutes
fifteen minutes. There was a lot of doing and throwing.
The kids had essentially said, yep, got it, we're onto it.
We can do the chores. And I decided that I
was going to be creative because we do have some
challenges with the kids and their chores. So I jumped

(10:34):
into my AI and said, I need some fun names
for the chores that the kids are going to be doing.
I just feel like with these jobs that they're doing,
if we just say dishes, that's boring. So let me
share these with you. I think they're really really fun.
They're cheesy, but they're fun, and the kids seem to
be buying it first off. And he is going to

(10:57):
be doing the folding, but we're calling that garment geometry.
And all the kids have to reset their rooms. That's
what we're calling it. It's a room reset. The one
daughter who wasn't there, we gave her the job of dusting.
She's the dust bunny, although the following day when I
told her she was the dust bunny, she said, I
don't have time. I'm just helping out where I can
when I can. And well, we have the clothesline, command

(11:20):
center and the puppy restaurant manager and my favorite for
Miss Emily. She is the waste Witch and she loves.

Speaker 2 (11:30):
It when you put it into AI. It actually came
up with the waste Wizard, and she was like, oh,
that sounds awesome. Actually, can I be a wast Witch?

Speaker 1 (11:38):
And I was like, you can be whatever you want
so long as you empty the bins. I don't care.
So she's the wist Witch and she's also the Dining
Surface superhero and she goes on plate patrol every day
as well. It's working.

Speaker 2 (11:51):
She's been amazing.

Speaker 1 (11:52):
Yeah, we're only weekend. She's like, I just want to
get it done so I can tick all of these boxes.
So good. The other kids are doing it. They're doing
it without come plane. We're a weekend. There are also
being kind to each other. The family meeting is I'm
going to say, I'm going to say it's working. We'll
sit down again on Sunday and we'll talk about how
well it's gone, and we'll do our normal three questions

(12:12):
what's going well, what's not, and what can we work on?
But generally speaking, at this point, I'm pretty satisfied that
the kids are having a good crack.

Speaker 2 (12:19):
The real magic of family meetings. Isn't the one off,
it's the consistency. It's the weekend week out meeting together
and holding everybody accountable for the things that we've agreed
upon the previous week. That's where the magic comes.

Speaker 1 (12:33):
We really hope that there's some insbo here, either in
apologizing to your kids and having the big conversations or
having the family meetings getting stuff nailed down, recognizing that
sometimes you do have to push through, you do have
to do the hard stuff. That's the reality of family life.
But it's worth it when you get there. We promise,
thanks so much for listening, and have a wonderful, wonderful weekend.

(12:56):
The Happy Famili's podcast is produced by Justin Rulan for
Bridge Media and if you more information about making your
family happy at visitors at happy families dot com dot
you