Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
There is one day each month that can change your relationship,
change your family, change almost everything for your child. We're
going to tell you about that in just a sec.
Stay with us. Hello and welcome to The Happy Family's podcast,
Real Parenting Solutions. Every day on Australia's most downloaded parenting podcast,
we are Justin and Kylie Courson and every Friday we
(00:28):
get I was going to say down and dirty, but
that's not really what this podcast is about. We get
it into the details, the nitty gretaya. I'm so funny
that I made you snort? Was that a snort? Maybe
we get into the detail of how our family is going,
what we're doing right, what we're doing wrong, how we
can do things better, and we introspect because we want
(00:51):
to be intentional parents. Today. I'm going to go first
because my one is really, really, really short. Over the
course of this past week, I've been doing a lot
of staff development seminars and sessions professional development for teachers.
This last week being away, it's reminded me of how
bad hotel pillows are, no matter what hotel you're staying at,
and it's reminded me of how much I missed my
(01:13):
family when I travel. It's the hardest part of my job.
The best part is making a difference in people's lives,
but the hardest part, without question, is being away from
you and the kids on whatever day. It was a
couple of days ago I got back from having been
away for two nights, and when I got home, I
walked into the kitchen to find you having made a delicious, healthy,
(01:34):
gluten free bananaca cake, and our two teenage daughters, and
they were just delighting in one another. They were laughing,
they were telling stories, they were Do you ever remember
what they were talking about. I mean, it was just stuff, right,
just teenage girls being fun, teenage girls, two sisters having
a laugh.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Well, the fact that one of them had been away
for nearly two weeks made the reunion delightful.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
Having a really great catch up. But the thing is,
I had a really big headache because I hadn't slept
because of a bad pillow in a hotel room. But
walking in and hearing these two girls catching up and
spending time together and laughing their heads off, I don't
know what's happening to me. I guess I've kind of
always done this. We do it all the way through
but at the moment, there's something happening where I feel
(02:21):
like these experiences are richer than they've ever been. We're
dealing with daughters four and five in their teens now
only daughter to number six is still to hit hers,
and there's something about it. I just I want to
reach out and capture the moment. I don't want the
moment to disappear. It almost brings me to tears. As
I stood in the kitchen and spread butter, probably too
(02:43):
much butter on my healthy, gluten free banana cake that
you had made, and listen to the girls, I thought,
I want this moment to last forever. This is heaven.
My old do better tomorrow is how can we have
number one more of those moments then number two? How
can we be in those moments and inhaled them. How
(03:05):
can we absorb them? How can we emblaze them on
our memories? And I think the only way that you
can do it is to be absolutely present. I wasn't
interested in checking my emails, even though I hadn't looked
at them all day. Didn't really care if I had
any social media notifications.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
The fact that you had delicious banana bread in your hands,
it may have sweetened the moment it just.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
Said to me. It did certainly keep me really present
and right there, but it was just this, I mean intention, mindfulness.
I want to do a quick experiment with you. You
might have done this with me before, and if you have,
then try not to try not to ruin it. I
want to do some quick maths with you. What's a
thousand plus forty.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
One thousand and forty plus one thousand, two thousand and
forty plus thirty two thousand and seventy plus one thousand,
three thousand and seventy plus twenty three thousand and nineteen
plus one thousand, four thousand and ninety plus ten four
thousand and one hundred.
Speaker 1 (04:08):
I think I've done this with you before. You were
paying too much attention. You knew what was coming. But
I'm going to know.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
I'm not good at math so I needed to make
sure I wasn't going to make a fool of myself.
You've got the record, but none.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Well, I guess there's two things here. First, first thing,
you're saying you're not good at maths, so therefore you
had to pay attention on the same day that I
had this beautiful interaction with our daughters. I ran that
puzzle by a room of educators, probably one hundred school
teachers are sitting in the room, and the opening exercise,
(04:38):
the opening conversation piece for my keynote presentation for them
was let's do some simple maths and wake up your brain.
And when you get to four thousand and nine and
I say plus ten, the whole room and I've done
this with hundreds, No, I've done this with thousands of
people over the years. The whole room and maybe whoever's
listening to the podcast felt the same way. Everyone just
says five thousand. They go their mind lessly because you're
(05:01):
not good at maths. You are trying really hard to
be in the moment. Quite often they're in the room
and they're not so much in the moment, they're just
sort of on autopilot. And really, my take home messages
when it comes to our kids, we can't be on autopilot,
or maybe a better term for it would be we
can't be on auto parent. We need to be there
in the moment with them, paying attention. When we do it,
(05:24):
the moments are just so much richer. That's my I'll
do better tomorrow, be in the moment soak it up
because one day they're not going to be three, or seven,
or eleven or fourteen and seventeen. Again, Kylie, what's your
(05:48):
I'll do better tomorrow? We've teased it at the top
of the podcast. There's one day each month that will
make a bigger difference in your family's life and your
kid's life than just about anything else.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
And beautifully from your message in that you have to
be intentional. I would love to attribute this to.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
Our genius and prowess and brilliance as parents.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
But this actually has to go to one of our listeners,
and I wish that I had taken note of their
name when I read their comment because it has stuck
with me. But they suggested that one of the things
they do in their home is they have a date
night with each of their children on the birth date
(06:32):
of each of them.
Speaker 1 (06:33):
Right, So basically, if your child is born on the
second of May, every month January through December, on the second,
you have a date night or an outing of some kind.
Maybe it's a brecky, but you go and do something
to celebrate their birth day each month.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
So it's not about celebrating their birthday, it's actually about
being intentional about making time.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
Together break clariticase.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
So I attempted to do it last year with moderate success.
It's a little bit tricky. There's six of them, and
our lives were very, very busy last year.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
That is a lot of date nights or date days,
or mornings out or whatever. It's a lot.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
But at the beginning of the year I recommitted that
this was something I really wanted to try. I sat
down and looked at my calendar. I actually marked out
the days that I would be required, and then I
worked out exactly what would make a meaningful experience for
each of our children. If we leave it to chance,
if we leave it to the last minute, we're going
(07:31):
to have a substandard experience. But if we are actually
really intentional, do you know what, this is something that
either my child's been dying to do forever and we
just have never got around to it, or this is
something that's going to light my child up. You are
going to build memories with your children in ways that
you won't otherwise do so because you are willing to
(07:53):
be so in the moment with them.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
There's a podcast that I really like listening to who
says something along the lines of the definition of love
is bearing witness to one another's lives, and I love
that idea. It's about to get this, you have to
be together. You have to be considered and affectionate towards
one another and watch and participate and spend time in
one another's lives. That's how you show that you love them.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
So the other day I took one of our girls
out for an early morning walk. She doesn't love getting
up too early, so this was a little.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
Bit of a stretch for the statement of the month.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
But I did sweeten the deal with an Assaiah bowl.
I don't know whoever came up with the idea or concept,
but to me, it is sunshine in a cup and
it is the best way to start a day.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
I love that. I can't stand this stuff. I don't
know how you eat it. You've you've tried to force
feed it to me, and every time it's just like wow.
That is so especially.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
When you put some payin nuts in there and you've
got the crunch and the sweet. Oh, it's just a
awesome I love it, but so does she, so she
doesn't want to pay for it though. So going on
a little date, have.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
You noticed that none of our kids want to pay
for anything. It's always on us all the time. I
wonder if we were like that with our parents. Think so.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
But part of the sunshine in a cup is being
able to sit down on the water's edge and to
just soak in the sun's rays and just that beautiful
positive energy from the ocean and lap it up. And
what's beautiful about that is sitting side by side and
being in that beautiful setting. Conversations that would not happen
(09:27):
any other way start to flow. And as I listened
to her share the things that she was really excited about,
I was blowing away how much growth has taken place,
even in the last six months.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
Tangent on this, and it's a really important tangent for
any parent who has got a child who says, this
is what I want to do or this is the
path that I want to take. Some research that came
out some years ago from a researcher named Laura King.
She looked at this concept known as the best Possible
Future Self. Essentially, what it is is it's a projecting
yourself into the future and imagining in five or ten
years all the things that you want to have happened
(10:00):
having happened, so that you can see not just the
kind of life you're living, but the kind of person
you've become. It's really much more about character than career
and finances and aspiration. But what's fascinating about her research
is I can't remember it was her or some career researchers.
They took on this idea and said, well, that's great
if you've got a clear idea of what you want
to do, but there's potentially a whole lot of different
(10:23):
best possible future selves. What they found was when they
got people to do this experiment where they would imagine
themselves doing the thing that they dreamed of, but also
doing one or two other things that they hadn't really
dreamed of, but they might really like to do or
really like to try, things that are completely different to
their dream career or dream goal. They found that people
were much more balanced and much more relaxed about the future,
(10:44):
and their well being was higher, and their life satisfaction
was higher because they weren't so boldly completely wedded to
this one true path. What they started to understand was,
I can take the pressure off a bit because there
are a multitude of different things that I could do
that could still help me to be who I wanted
to be, develop how I wanted to develop, and make
(11:05):
a difference in the way that I'd like to do it.
So when I hear you tell that story, that sparks
joy and satisfaction and optimism for me because it makes
me think our daughter was initially rigidly fixed to a
specific career path, and now she's going there's any number
of options that might be suitable for me.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
We were also able to talk about the things that
she was anxious about, the things that were worrying her
at the moment, the things that she was fearful of,
and just being able to sit there in again, without
the agenda, without the stress of everybody else in the
house moving and getting on with things. That intentional time
(11:47):
that's taken away from everything else meant that we could
sit there and I could actually listen here, offer support
and we could work through those challenges. You know, the
best thing to say to you kid when they're struggling
like that, what's the worst thing that could happen if
that happens. What's going to happen if you fail that class?
(12:08):
What's the worst thing is someone going to die? Is
it going to you know, like, is the world going
to erupt? No, You're going to have to do another class.
It's not the end of the world. Your teacher might
be able to give you an extension assignment, or you know,
like there's so many other possibilities, but they always we
human nature, we go to the worst possible case scenario.
So it's just it was just a really lovely, lovely
(12:32):
opportunity to have that moment, and I want more of them.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
So to take our message for your old do better tomorrow.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
Be intentional about finding moments that you can spend with
your child. It might be the structure that we've been
shared by one of our wonderful listeners if you're out there,
but it might be another way. You might do it
each weekend, or it might be a Sunday thing, whatever,
whatever works for your family. It is about making time
for each of your.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
Children, one on one love A spelled T. I M
to our kids. We really hope that there's some helpful
take my message and inspiration from our older better tomorrow,
have a great weekend. The Happy Families podcast is produced
by Justin Roland. For more information and resources that will
make your family happier. We'd love for you to visit
us at happy families dot com dot au