The Awesome Mom Event: Parenting Tweens and Teens with Carrie Baquie

Hey there, parents. Thanks for listening to the No Problem Parenting Podcast. Are you ready to become the confident leader your kids crave you to be? Are you losing your crap on your kids, yelling, giving in, and exhausted at the end of every day? You can start building confidence in your parenting immediately, whether your child is a toddler or all grown up and still living in your house. Don't make this parenting gig harder than it needs to be. Register to become a No Problem Parent. It comes with an app so you can listen to the tips and tools just like you're listening to this podcast. Click the link in the show notes or go to NoProblemParents.com. Become a No Problem Parent today. Hey parents, welcome back to the No Problem Parenting Podcast where we choose to deal with and overcome the emotional and behavioral challenges within our homes. And I have a guest today that's going to help us do just that. Meet Carrie Bakke. She's a spunky mom of three awesome teens who specializes in helping moms of tweens and teens feel more calm, clear, and confident as they build stronger, happier, healthier relationships with their teens and themselves. She knows that parenting is the most important,

challenging, and joyful work we will ever experience. And using her 19 years of experience and ICF accredited holistic coaching experience, Carrie guides moms in breaking through outdated patterns and unhealthy behaviors so that they can be more present, communicate more effectively, and connect more deeply with their teens. And she loves to add a little dash of humor in her coaching with parents as well. Carrie, I'm so excited to have you on the show.

Welcome. Thank you. I'm so glad to be here. Where would we be without the humor?

Exactly. My dad says, without a sense of humor, tough is hard to live. And I couldn't agree more. He is always throwing in a little wisecrack or something to lighten the mood, especially in tense situations.

And so, yeah, I'm a big fan of humor as well, Carrie. You are hosting an event coming up here real soon in June of 2024, the Awesome Mom Online Event for Mamas. Tell us a little bit about why you created that and why you even got into coaching with tweens and teens. Oh my gosh, where do I start? You know, I have, it often starts with what happens in our own life, right? And I have three teens that are 15, 17, and 19.

And I just marvel after all the times I was warned about how hard and how awful and how turbulent it was going to be that they have turned out so well in terms of how they communicate. They're thriving and they are doing really, really well. We have great, strong relationships. And I know that's because 20 years ago, when I was getting ready to have kids, I decided to go deep for about 18 months.

And I did all the inner work to break the patterns that I know were not healthy for raising kids. And so I really did it. And I think that set the foundation. I want to bring that kind of foundation to parents out there who are struggling because you didn't have to do the work 20 years ago.

Now is the best day to start if you haven't started already. Right. I was just going to say, I just commend you for the fact that you even thought, okay, I want to be a mom. I got some baggage.

I got some stuff that could get in the way of parenting, just that foresight and that willingness to like, Hey, I should really kind of work through some things before I start bringing kids into the world. That's amazing. Yeah, I feel so blessed that I had that awareness. And it was like, oh, heck no.

There's no way I can go forward and bring kids into this world if I don't change things up. So that awareness has just been the foundation for such goodness in our relationships. Now, that's not to say it hasn't been challenging at times, because that's inherent in parenting. But it doesn't always have to be hard.

It doesn't always have to be challenging. And there's tools and techniques and strategies for being a mom to your kids, showing up and being present for them in a way that fosters the relationship, that fosters connection and healthy communication. Without you losing yourself, without yelling, without getting frustrated, it is possible. And that's why I have put together and I'm hosting the Awesome Mom online event.

This event is all about helping moms feel calm and confident while they are building these stronger, happier, healthier relationships. It's all about things like peaceful parenting and breaking generational patterns. And, you know, how do you navigate the transitions between middle school to high school or high school to college? these are just such great topics that we're not talking about enough in a focused way.

I think you can go Google and you might find a little tip here, a little tip there, but this brings it all together with 25 incredible panel experts who are sharing their knowledge and insights and strategies. And I'm just so excited. It is so cool. And I was honored that you asked me to be a part of this event. So I'm super thrilled to have done a little segment and to be able to share No Problem Parenting with your awesome mom audience. And I think one of the things I love about it the most, Carrie, that you're putting this all together, you've got a really diverse, wide range of topics that pertain to raising tweens and teens and really center around that connection and building relationship. And, you know, in step one of No Problem Parenting,

we seek first to understand step two, prepare for the worst. You definitely prepared before even having children, which helped you navigate some of the challenging times, right? And then step three is to change the conversation. You're definitely changing the conversation with the awesome mom virtual summit. So I just, I love everything about that. The other thing is I, I just have to share, you know, people talk about as a parenting coach, I'm sure you get this too.

Like what's your guarantee. You got to have a guarantee. My only guarantee is you're going to have problems raising kids. It's a matter, it's just, it's, it's a fact of life. And so it's how we respond to the challenges and the problems and how we help our kids to overcome challenges and problems and adversity mistakes and all that, that really makes or breaks it. Right. So you really are focusing on that relationship with your teen. And I love that you say, you know, like in preparation for even having kids, people really talk negatively about the teen years. It's like this doom and gloom and oh well wait till they're a teenager yeah and it's like just you wait just you know yeah just you wait and then once you have three three teens like you're sharing I'm a mom of three teens and people are like oh you know my prayers are with you oh that must be so right wait it's actually pretty awesome yes there's challenging times but so talk a little bit with us about some of those key things like communication wise or you know how to not take your kids' behavior or mood personally? I think really it's so much about who we are and how we show up. So who we are, are we present? Are we listening? Communication, we tend to miss the biggest piece about communication and that's listening. And in the parent-teen role, we can get into this place of assuming that because we've been with the team for all their lives,

that we know who they are, what they feel, what their tells are. We feel like we know them and we make these assumptions. And so we don't listen. We're not present. We're jumping to conclusions.

And all of those really form big barriers to connecting in a meaningful way so that the team feels heard, seen, and valued. Absolutely. Very key. I think as parents, oftentimes we want to teach the lesson. We want to make the road easier for kids, right? We've been there, we've done that, we've experienced things. And so we want to share all of that so that they don't have to go through the hard things we went through, but we're actually robbing our kids of opportunities when we try to pave that road so smooth for them, right? And part of it too, is that we're assuming our experience is the same as their experience. Things have changed a lot since we were teens.

we can't assume we have to be curious the other big thing so there's listening and there's curiosity it must be the foundation of how you communicate asking open-ended questions you know I saw you quiet at the dinner table tonight it feels like maybe you're mad are you mad or what's going on for you how are you feeling you know rather than ah yeah why are you so quiet at dinner Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's interesting, too, when you say feels like Dr. J.J. Kelly of Dr. J.J. Kelly dot com.

She wrote the Holy S series and she talks a lot about emotional intelligence and how often when we say feels like it's really not a feeling. When you say feels like oftentimes the word that follows that is a thought. And I think now today with the amazingness that, you know, mental health is more, more talked about and more known. And sometimes we go a little bit too extreme into the feeling. Sometimes kids aren't having a feeling. It's a thought.

She teaches the difference between the feeling and the thought. So just FYI, when you say feels like, and I do it all the time, the statement or the word following that is typically not a feeling. Anyway, that's a, that's a cue. I really appreciate that awareness rather than saying, oh, they're being quiet at dinner and they're just pushing their food around the plate.

They must be mad at me. It probably has nothing to do with you. Right. Absolutely.

We take things so personally, don't we? We do. And it's not all about us. And that's really hard because it's a very human thing to believe it's about us.

But most of the world isn't paying attention to us. And the teens have so much pressure. They have classes, they have social, they have hormones, their body is wreaking chaos. And so it's so often not about us. And if we can just have the presence to understand that and be open that they might need support in other ways than just us.

it's not support when we assume right what they do need is support and curiosity and open-ended questions and letting them know that even if now is not the right time I'm here for you if you need to talk right or when you're ready I absolutely love that starts with listening then curiosity and being curious is super key wondering I wonder if or I noticed that and then just being silent and quiet. It's okay to just have, have quiet. You know, yesterday afternoon, I was working in the living room and my kids both came home at the same time and they sat down in the living room and one of them got on their phone and one of them got on their iPad and we were just hanging together in total silence. And it was awesome. So cool that you can just kind of coexist and be, and that doesn't always have to be that we're doing something active when we're hanging out or when we're around. So give us a little summary of what's to come with the Awesome Mom online event and some of the topics that we're going to cover. Yeah. So it's really a great way to listen and learn because it's audio only. So there are about 30 to 40 minute audio sessions that will begin being released starting June 25th, but you want to register now. So you make sure you get that access to the recordings. So two a day. And they're super easy to listen to audio only,

and they'll be available for seven days. And along with them comes a free gift. Every speaker has an amazing free gift that will help you continue to up level your parenting and how you show up as a mom beyond the awesome mom events. And so topics, you know, I mentioned earlier, we've got things like breaking generational cycles. That's what I did 20 years ago. I broke generational cycles.

And that is something that can be really pivotal in moving forward with your team in a healthy way. We've got reclaiming your inner sparkle, the path to releasing mom guilt and finding time for you. We have three core principles of peaceful parenting. We have your topic, parenting as a confident leader, three steps, no problem parenting mindset shift. You know, these are great. I I actually have one that's, there's a couple, there's some about finances, how to normalize money to build a stronger relationship with your teen.

There's another one, a fantastic interview, talking about toxins in the home and what we can do because toxins are hormone disruptors. And we know the last thing we need to do is have our teens hormones further disrupted. So there's a whole range of topics that we're covering. I mentioned transitioning into high school and beyond and transitioning into college.

Six keys to an unbreakable bond with your adolescent. It just is so good and so rich. I'm so excited to offer this to listeners. The freebies that each of your guests are giving away are actual like tangible things that parents can gain benefit from without doing anything else, right?

I love that you're introducing this variety of resources because we don't know what we don't know. And every one of the resources that you're sharing for the event, parents have access to right from the comfort of their home, which, of course, love that we're partnering with that because that's what I'm all about. Yes, we love shopping local and we don't have every resource in our local community when it comes to raising kids.

And so the fact that you're bringing all of these resources together and just sharing that the that they're out there. And real quick, speaking of great resources that you have access to right from the comfort of your home, today's podcast sponsor is Dr. JJ Kelly at drjjkelly.com and her Get Real program, an emotional skills training program based on dialectical behavioral therapy.

If you have a teen or young adult experiencing ongoing conflicts in relationships, intense and rapid mood changes, the inability to relax, trouble recognizing choice, holding in your anger and then blowing up at others, or numbing out in response to fear, Dr. J.J. Kelly's Get Real program is going to help.

So go to drjjkelly.com for more information. And thanks again, Dr. J.J., for being a sponsor of the No Problem Parenting podcast.

I want to talk to you a little bit about your parenting method and you call it the art of parenting method. So let's break that down a little bit. Yeah. So it's an acronym. It's the art of parenting and it is about aligning. So first you really need to connect in with what your values are, what's important to you and are your actions, are your words, are your thoughts lining up with those core values? Often we're out of alignment and we're frustrated and we don't understand that it's because we're out of alignment. The way we're showing up, the way we're talking to our team, the way we're listening or not listening, all of those things are about alignment. The next piece is about releasing. It's about releasing old patterns that no longer serve you or your team. It's about managing your triggers. You know, the truth is we all have triggers and the triggers have nothing to do with our tween or teen. And if we can learn to become aware of our triggers and manage them, the best thing we can do is release them, right?

But if we can't yet release them, we need to learn how to manage them so that they don't interfere with the relationship. And then the last piece is the T, which is trust. And this is super important starting with yourself, trusting yourself, trusting your intuition, what I call your inner wisdom. And so when you trust yourself and you don't flip back and forth, you create consistency and you role model what it looks like to trust yourself. And our kids need that. They need that role modeling. The next piece is to trust your team. There's so much, like we talked about earlier that is taught at us that we shouldn't trust our teens. They're unreliable.

They're lazy. They're this, they're that, all these horrible things to be saying about our kids. And trust is about believing. And so we need to believe our kids when they say something.

I got a call the other day from the principal and the principal was like, Hey, you know, this is happening with your child. And I just wanted to make sure you're aware. My trust, I trusted the principal, but I needed to verify. I needed to talk to my kid first, find out what their story is, what their version is, and really connect in and help them see that I was turning to them first and that I believe them.

And the next part is trusting your support, whether your support is your spouse, your partner or that pivotal person or pivotal faith, because it can be faith too, that creates support in your world that you're going to be okay. You're going to get through this. It's all good, right? And that sounds simplistic, but one of the hardest things to do is trust that you're going to be okay, that you're going to get through this. So that's why the trust pillar is so important. Trusting yourself, trusting your teen and trusting your support. I just absolutely love everything about this and it makes perfect sense. And it really focuses on us as parents first. So it's not just about teaching lessons. It's not just about making sure our kids follow the rules and,

you know, walk the certain path or meet the milestones or all of that. It's really about, let's start with us first and model what it is to be in alignment with yourself, but also releasing, like you said, some of those, some of those past things. Let's put this into action or into practice. You have, I love your Instagram posts and your, your community. I think it was just recently, maybe this past spring, you were on spring break. And I saw a post of yours talking about how your teen had stepped up and decided to run an errand and take care of something that you guys needed and gotten to a little bit of a accident. The two teens that were with us, they backed into the dumpster. And so the back window absolutely exploded. Like it did exactly what I was supposed to do. And my daughter was, my daughter and son, they're both like scared because it was such a loud, shocking noise. And then my daughter was terrified that she was going to get yelled at. And she was going to, you know, all of those things were going to be really,

really bad but what she needed what we knew she needed what I knew she needed she needed to know it was going to be okay it's just a window it was a mistake and anyone could have done it because the dumpster was like right behind the parking spot it was and and had a bar that was sticking out of it so it was totally understandable and she just needed the love and support rather than the yelling and finger pointing. So walk us through this.

So walk us through this. So she comes back to wherever it was that you were staying and she's got to announce that, hey, mom, the windshield is shattered. I had an accident. Like, what do you as a parent in that moment say and do?

And how do you not let your ingrained reactionary, you know, fight or flight kick in? I, you know, over time, I've come to this place where it's really about taking a deep breath and being like, OK, what's important here? And that's the question. What's important here? The window is not important.

And it wasn't her that came to me. It was my son saying. I don't think you want to know this, but Jules just, you know, and but he didn't do it in a ratting out kind of way. He was trying to help us to understand why our daughter was hiding in the bathroom, you know, and crying.

Right. And so he had good intent. I knew that she was in a bad place. And what was important here was for her to feel secure and that the love was still there for her, regardless of what happened to the window.

And so it's taking that breath and not jumping to conclusions, allowing myself to be present for her and getting curious for how she's experiencing it. Yeah. Yeah, I love that. And and and it's, you know, it's first, are you OK?

I mean, thinking about in that moment, if you put yourself in her shoes because it could have happened to you. Right. Me backing up and having that happen. And then the panic and the like, first, you're shocked, you're scared.

You don't know what in the heck just happened. And then to have to think about this isn't even my car. Now I have to go and, you know, tell mom about this. And even though here's another thing, even though she's been raised by you and she's, it's been modeled to her that you're going to be there for her.

She's you've always got her back. It's still that muscle memory of our brain. Sometimes that will kick into flight mode and be like, oh crap. Now what do I do?

And you just want to run and you just want to, you know, it's you're shocked. so I think that's a really good message for parents that even when we're doing all the things right when we're raising them and we're stuff like this will still happen and so time again we get that experience of proving to them which again builds trust right that when bad things happen and you get all freaked out we're there for you you are more important than the thing. Yeah, absolutely. And that can be so hard. You know, it may not be your back window. It may be your grand grandmother's, your deceased grandmother's favorite mug, coffee mug, right?

That shatters on the floor and you have that deep emotional attachment to your grandmother's mug. And yet it's just a mug. Right. Right. Yeah, absolutely. In those moments, we can be completely caught off guard and we can be triggered. Like you talked about in the beginning, there are things that can set us off and we're not always going to handle it so beautifully in the moment. I do teach about the pause. That's the first thing to get yourself to be able to pause and kind of step back. But I mean, realistically, when we're, when we're caught off guard, when we're triggered, when we're shocked, it doesn't happen that, that beautifully, right? It doesn't happen all that, you know, that we can always just stop and pause and take that breath. And so that's okay. Even, you know, later you can go back to your kid and say, oh my gosh,

I, I totally freaked out or I, I was thrown off or I didn't handle that correctly. And you know, here's, and that's where like my make it right technique comes in. How can I make it up to you? How can I make it right? So yeah, it doesn't mean we have to do perfect parent, positive parenting isn't perfect parenting. Yeah. And, and what positive parenting means when you do have to go back and say, I'm sorry, or say, I didn't do that right. It takes courage. We need to be brave and humble enough to say, Hey, I screwed up. Right. And that too is a trust building effort.

Carrie, you have so many great, realistic, practical ideas for parents. I encourage parents to follow you on Instagram, Facebook, all the socials, but also to attend the Awesome Mom online virtual event, which they have seven days to listen to all the different recordings, pick and choose the ones that they want to listen to. Yeah. Yeah. And it's meant to be really easy and really accessible for moms on the go because we live busy lives, right? And so this is getting a deep, powerful collection of insights and strategies to you, delivered to you in a concentrated way so that you can really take your momming, if you will, to the next level.

yeah absolutely I love it and if you're listening to this episode and it's you know months later a year later and you missed the awesome mom online event you can go to Carrie's website c-a-r-r-i-e-b-a-q-u-i-e.com and learn more about future events other events how to work with her and you can book a call just to get to know Carrie a little bit more and see if she is the right parent coach for you and your family. I would love to connect with you and just really know where you're struggling and how we can move forward together. It is possible. It doesn't have to be hard. Absolutely. And I would encourage people to prepare for the worst, right? Step two of no problem parenting. And as your child is maybe eight, nine, 10 years old, you know, get a leg up on the game, reach out and,

and make some plans and learn some things about the potential, you know, emotions and behavior challenges that might come out when your kiddos turn to, to those teenage years and do a little bit of work on yourself. Parent coaching is one of the most proactive resources or ways to help you on your parenting journey. And I'm just, I'm going to sing your praises, Carrie, and send people your way. Well, thank you so much because Jackie, I had so much fun with our interview and I can't wait for your listeners to, and more listeners to actually get a chance to listen to that along with all the other speakers. So thank you so much for being a part of this. I'm so thrilled. Oh, you're welcome. And I'm super happy that we've been connected and we'll be staying connected, I think, for years to come here. Thank you so much for being on the show today.

Absolutely. You're amazing. All right. That's it for today's episode of the No Problem Parenting Podcast. Hey, thanks, guys, for tuning in. If you found value in today's episode, click the subscribe button and share it with other parents who might need a little boost.

Stay connected on our socials by following at No Problem Parents for more parenting tips and get your free download of the 60 ways to respond to your kids without losing your cool. Go to NoProblemParents.com. Until next time, remember, your confidence comes from embracing both successes and setbacks.

So take a deep breath, embrace the chaos, and remember, you got this.