Self-Love Parenting; Taking care of yourself before your kids tell you to! with Special Guest Reverand Betsy Scott

Welcome to the No Problem Parenting Podcast. Turn behavior problems into no problem with Jackie Fineman. Are you ready to become the confident leader your kids crave you to be? Do you want to learn how to make parenting easier and more fulfilling?

Whether you are at your wit's end or you want to have more fun as a parent, you're definitely in the right place. Now here's your host, Jackie Fineman. Hey, welcome back No Problem Parents. Have your kids said things to you like, you just want everyone to think you're a perfect parent or believe that we have a perfect family?

Maybe they're telling you to back off or that they're sick of you always telling them what to do and to get a life of your own. Maybe you feel as though you're sacrificing so much for your kids and they don't seem grateful. In fact, they might even be resentful. Well, in today's episode, my special guest, Reverend Betsy Scott, author, coach, minister, grandmother, and eventual self-love parent, shares how growing up as a good girl caused her to parent from ego rather than love. Her children discovered her lack of self-love even before she did, and they called her out on it.

In her recently published book, Journey to Safe Harbor, a three-generational memoir that narrates her family history, giving different paradigms of parenting, and coming to the conclusion that only when one learns self-love can one truly love another. She's an ordained interfaith minister and clinical social worker with many years of experience, and from the book she's created Journey to Safe Harbor Courses and Coaching. Aiming to do good in the world, this book covers three generations of family where the personal and emotional sacrifices that were made in the name of mission, commitment, and duty ended with unintended tragic consequences for their children.

It's about a professional family, educated, religious, and idealistic, but did they understand love? Her memoir chronicles the journey of healing through the ups and downs of life, resulting in reconnecting with her family and their community. Betsy lives with her husband in New York and Maine, and together they have four children and eight grandchildren. Oh, this is such a great book. Betsy, I'm so excited to have you here with us today. Thank you so much, Jackie.

It's just a great pleasure to come and talk to you today. We all say we don't want to parent just exactly like our parents, or there's certain things that we're never going to do that our parents did. And even when we're well-intentioned and we don't mean to, it creeps in, right? It comes out. And so I'd really, I'm curious, and I hope you can share with our listeners today, this new paradigm in self-love parenting. And I think in order for us to kind of get to that point, we need to hear a little bit of your history and your journey to self-love parenting.

I am so happy to have a chance to talk about this because I have, I've come to this after a lifetime of struggle. And my hope is that others hearing this new kind of parenting will get it sooner than I did. We struggled. But I call my book Journey to Safe Harbor because that's what I see it is. It's a journey to the safe harbor within ourselves. And out of that safe harbor, we can be an anchor for our family. But how did I come to this? Well, I was a really good girl all my life. And I've learned slowly that that's not the greatest thing to be. Because when you're being good, it means you're really looking for approval for somebody else. And I eventually ended up at seminary. And they taught me, we're not called to be good, we're called to be loving.

And loving is an act of giving, where being good is an act of trying to receive something, approval. You're a good girl. And so I learned this. And it's one thing to learn something intellectually. It's another thing to put it into your life. And so I was this very good parent, you know, sacrificing whatever I had to give to my children and try to do for them everything I could think of to doing. And it was a great shock to me in sort of my midlife, quite a few years into my life that I became aware that my children didn't feel very close to me. And I kept thinking, how can this be? How can it possibly be after all I've done? And one time, I was supposed to be going to this party with my sister-in-law, and I didn't feel very loved by her, and I didn't want to go. And my daughter came to me, and she said, Mother, you're the one that's wrong. You are ridiculous. And, you know, you might think that's mean, but it really was kind of her. It's sort of like Nathan in the Bible, who finally tells King David, you know, you're the one that's wrong.

So I listened to my daughter after being mad. And I thought, wow, what is she trying to tell me? And so in my case, I don't think everyone else has to do this. But I went into a psychoanalytic training, because I'm in the mental health field anyway, I spent a lot of time having to feel my feelings. I never, as being a good person, I was always looking outward. What do those people want from me? But when you have to feel your own feelings, which was excruciating for me since I never had done it, you begin to say, well, who am I? I mean, I actually felt terrible about myself.

I actually was always looking for someone else's approval because I didn't have my own approval. and when I finally began to get to that place and feel that pain none of us can run it we we all try to but eventually we have to feel what's inside of us and once we do that we get to a new place in our life which is a center of happiness and peace within ourselves it's just a miracle that this is true but it's true we're not called to just give everything away to everybody else, and we're called to, out of our own self-love, out of our ability to have compassion on ourselves for who we are and how we felt, then we can actually be merciful and compassionate to others, and this is true of our children, that I didn't realize it, but I was parenting out of that old self of not liking myself, and so I probably didn't like what they did. I kept criticizing them. Why can't you do this better or that better? And they found this extremely painful. But once I came and realized having compassion on myself, and then began to open my eyes and see who my children really are. I didn't really see them before that.

My daughter then told me later on, she said, Mother, you've become a stance for unconditional love in our life and we want you around. And it was just an amazing, it brings tears to my eyes right now. Yeah, me too. I can feel that because here as they're growing, you're just doing all you can to provide for them, to be a good mother, make sure you look like a good mother, right? Make sure people can tell that you're doing these things for your children. You're raising these good kids, but behind closed doors, your kids found you to be critical and domineering maybe, or nitpicky or, you know, what, what kinds of things would they say? You know, I just, I think they kept a lot from me. Kids always tune into your unconscious. So they knew I was unhappy,

even though I didn't know I was unhappy. And so they were always tiptoe around me. But now that my daughter feels more capable of speaking freely to me, she'll say that she and her brother, I have these two children, a son and a daughter, would talk to each other all the time and try to say, how are they going to change mother? How are they going to get her to stop being critical and judgmental and just see who they are? It was a huge issue in their lives, but I didn't know it.

It's just extraordinary what we don't know. So you basically had a good relationship with your kids, although there was this wedge in that relationship that they weren't willing to share with you. Maybe they didn't want to hurt your feelings at the time. And or if they tried, you weren't able to hear them.

That's probably, I'm sure I would have been defensive. How can you go after me and all that kind of thing. Right. Look at all I'm doing and sacrificing for you.

Look at all that I'm giving up to make sure that you have a good life and you get to do all these things, right? That's the thing that's so, something that everyone has to learn. If you're in that kind of state of just sacrificing everything for your children, then you're also going to get to the point of, but why don't you appreciate me more? You know, why don't you visit me more? And that just leads down a spiral of hurting this relationship. But this other kind of life, where you really have compassion on yourself and on your children and see who they are, then what they do is okay, and you just have a relationship with them. It's very different than this expecting them to do all kinds of things. Of course, depending upon the age, I mean, as a parent,

you obviously have the responsibility to set values and boundaries and all of those kinds of things. That's not really what I'm talking about here. I'm really talking about a transparent relationship with your children. We're now asking for parents to begin to monitor themselves so that you could call it monitoring their temperature.

Like, are they peaceful and happy or have they suddenly been triggered and are angry and furious or sad? Or are they in control or out of control? Where are they? so that when a parent suddenly finds them triggered by maybe something the child has done, just spilled their milk all over the table or whatever they've done, we want them first to say, well, wait a minute.

Why am I so angry? I'd better calm down before I yell at my child. And then once you calm down and in a peaceful, happy place, then you can go deal with the child. You know, sweetheart, I see that you spilled your milk all over the place.

Let's clean it up together. And so the important thing is the relationship with the child and obviously slowly teaching the child according to where they are developmentally. But it's not yelling at them based on your anger. Right.

Because if you take it out on your children the way you feel, that's really very damaging to children. So that's what we call this new paradigm of parenting, is that we want the parents to monitor themselves and take care of themselves and to figure out what they need to do to calm themselves down. Part of it is, you know, what are my triggers? What makes me angry? And two, once I'm angry, do I need to take a walk? Do I need to say to my child, you know, honey, just give me 10 minutes and I'll come back and talk to you.

I'm angry right now, and this is not a good time for us to talk. And so it's a transparency with a child where you're telling them how you feel. And therefore, they're going to be much more open to telling you how they feel. I didn't know that I could actually feel grounded, that I could feel happy in myself, that I could live with myself.

I could, my creativity returned. I love to paint. I like to write. I love to walk in nature. I like to sail. I like to do lots of things, and that all of these loves of mine came pouring forth and made my life so, just a joy, abundant, versus I always was feeling unhappy before and not knowing it. So I just thought, wow, you could actually change in this world. It's possible. And that's why I wrote the book. And I tried to say how I had done it to give other people clues of what they might do. It's meant as an example of the universal journey we're all meant to take.

And kids are forgiving. Kids are forgiving. You know, I have great kids. They're just really, really wonderful children. I gave this book to my children before I published it. I wanted to see what they would think. And my son said to me, mother, thank you for writing all this down.

It's brought us closer together. I think maybe he, by reading my book, could understand how hard I had tried and that I had my own struggles and he probably saw me more as a human being than just as a mother. And since that time, we've had a much, you know, we're very close together. Children are forgiving. And I think they, and I think they appreciate knowing more about their parents. I wish my mother, grandmother had written me books. I'd know more about that.

We can learn a lot from that. It's, it's not even the, the biggest drill sergeant parents, the most demanding and frustrated and angry and bitter parents. Most of those parents that it's not that they intended to be that way. They didn't know another way or, you know, they were parenting by example again. I think that is such an important thing to say. We all do what's been done to us unless we become conscious, as the psychologists say, you need to make the unconscious conscious before you could even have a choice to do something differently. And also, I love what you said to look at your history. I call my book a memoir of three generations because I went back into my history and did a lot of research. I took an oral history of my father before he died. I think that's a very good thing to do if you have a parent that's alive. Ask them about their lives and record it. And I'm actually the granddaughter of missionaries in India. And I went back to India several times to try to figure out what had gone on there. And I finally figured out that my particular grandparents put the mission before the well-being of their family. And with great tragic consequences for the children. And I think from my point of view today, I think we're called to have a balance in families. We're called to take care of our families and ourselves,

and then out of our abundance, take care of our communities. We feel like we can't let them in on who we are sometimes, right? We won't tell them what we're thinking, what we're worried about, what we're fearful of, what we want them to caution them, why we want to caution them. And oftentimes, if you just have the conversation about that, rather than trying to dole out a consequence or, you know, forewarn your kids, you learn some, the kids learn so much about that and you prevent an argument. Jackie, I love what you say. I think that's just exactly right. It's just what I've spent this life of mine learning. I just appreciate that you wrote a book about this because I think it is so important and too often in today's world we're caught up in all of you know all of what everybody else is doing or how we should be doing things we should do this I call it stop shitting on ourselves to just pause take a look at ourselves what do we want what do we need how do how do parents even begin definitely that is such a good question I think that that is the very first question what do I want and you could start practicing that in simple ways. Begin to tune into who you really are. I mean, every philosopher,

actually every religion, has exhorted us to do this. To thy own self be true above all else. To thy own self be true. Or Eleanor Roosevelt said you have an obligation to be yourself.

Or all religions talk about coming back to the true self. I think it's very important. I love to every morning, take a little time. I go stretch, and then I actually spend time quietly thinking, meditating. I spend just a few minutes thinking, what's important for me to do today? What do I really, what's my top priority? And I learn to listen to that and say, no, I'm going to, today, this is important to me. And if someone else in my life says, I want you to do these following other 10 things, I'll say, well, let me first do what I have to do. And then I will try to help you with what you want done. So I think taking yourself seriously, and getting to the point that you not only have self-care, but are listening to your own emotional self, out of that practice, you'll find yourself getting more peaceful.

Give us some examples of how you did handle some things and what you would have done different, knowing what you know now. There was a wonderful scene when my children were little. I remember saying to them one time, I'm cold, put on your sweater. And my daughter said, Mother, if you're the one that's cold, you put on your sweater.

Now that's kind of an amazing example, but true. I was cold, so I was telling them to put on their sweater. Obviously, I should have said, are you cold? Would you like to put on your sweater? So not assuming that what I like or do not like or what's important to me is what they like.

When it came to colleges, I mean, I guess I had my heart set on my kids going to certain Ivy League school and they went to some other schools. And I kept saying, well, that's okay, but you know, I wish you'd gone here. And I think it just made them furious. And now that I've, I think about it, I think, well, where they went was much better for them.

What, what, what good did it do me to sit constantly wish that they had done something else when it really wasn't as right for them. It was just my ego that wanted that name plastered on by. Well, because then like you were, you were the good girl all the time, right? And you wanted to look like the good parent and you wanted to have this, it's this facade.

if other people you were getting your you were getting your um affirmations and your acknowledgement by what other people thought of you which then again it's what other people thought of your children well they'll think i'm such a great parent if my child goes to this ivy league school you know then i've really made it and so again it's seeking external approval uh and at what cost at the cost of relationship with your children.

Right. And the ultimate goal here is the relationship with your children. They say that all children need to be seen and soothed and secure and safe. It's so important that we see our children.

We see that they're perfectly happy without their coat. They are warm and running around and they don't need their coat. You don't need to say, I'm cold. So you put on your coat.

I can see where that just makes a child furious and it takes away your relationship. Absolutely. And often our kids, if we take the time to listen to their thoughts, sometimes their thoughts or their way of handling a situation, we can predict it's not going to go well. As long as it's not a safety concern, we need to allow our kids to handle it the way they think they should handle it, figure it out that it didn't work out, right?

Experience that and then be able to come to us and say that didn't work. And then maybe they'll say, I need your help. But if we're jumping in and cutting out the whole experience for them and just getting right to, I know this is how this is going to work because I have experience doing it. and I learned this long ago and you know and so you're just directing it for them and telling what they need you're creating resistance there's defensiveness they don't want to do it they definitely don't want to do it because that you said so right they're probably going to rebel eventually yeah and they will rebel and then they they like purposefully won't do what you said to do just because they don't want to do it your way and they have they're not given the opportunity to be right themselves. It's, you know, and learn those things and feel empowerment for themselves,

right? It's always external. They're always only feeling good. What they did is good because mom or dad, it was mom or dad's idea. They need to know that they can make good decisions and that they can recover from poor decisions. All the new research now into parenting, a lot, there's a lot of research going on into brain pair to brains and how they develop. And they're all saying that what we really need to do is give our children practice within limits and boundaries based on their age and what's safe and making decisions on their own they need that develops the brain it it creates a connection um and we need and that the more we have a relationship with our children and they're seen and they themselves tune into who they if we see if we see them they will then see themselves and they'll get to know themselves and they'll begin to develop a little self within within them it can grow if we don't see our children but we always are imposing on them do it the way i tell you to do it and it doesn't have that inner self doesn't have a chance to grow and and that's what we our goal for our children is to have their own personality their own soul, their own sense and self grow up to be a decision-making, creative, responsible human being.

And that only comes as you give them that chance all the way growing up. Oh, I wholeheartedly agree. Sometimes as parents, we have our kids' elementary years and high school years and college, we have an idea and we have it all mapped out. and it's okay to have some sort of a plan or an idea of what you want for your kiddos and when things don't work out that way life throws us curveballs kids have their own independence and their own mind and their own beliefs at some point you got to allow your kids to make some of those decisions for themselves as hard as that might be sometimes it's a loss of dream for parents right when kids take a different avenue or go a different track and that's our stuff the hardest part of parenting yeah you know they always say give your children roots and give your children wings and it's the giving them the wings these these young people who you know have are so much a part of our lives that we love beyond any words we could describe to let them go, to let them fly, I think has to be the mark of being the most loving parent,

because it's the hardest thing to do. And yet, we've all heard a thousand stories of children going away that the parents don't want them to. There's a wonderful musician living near me up here, who talked as a child, just wanting to play the cello day and night. And his parents said, but you've got to do other things. You've got to go outside and play. You've got to, I don't know what all. And so they said he couldn't play the cello more than whatever it was, two hours a day or something. So then when he got to be 18, he got a scholarship to Juilliard. He was behind, he said, and had to work extra hard. And he is a cellist today. Well, I could just see those parents thinking that they needed to get this child to do what they wanted him to do. And yet the child really knew what he wanted to do. We hear similar stories all the time of children wanting to do something that the parents don't understand. Bill Gates, I heard his story where his parents were always trying to get him out of his room, stop studying, come down, join the family.

Right. Well, you hear that with even, you know, sports. Maybe mom and dad want him to be a football player and they want to be a tennis player or they're interested in theater or they're interested in music or whatever. And it's, it's, you know, parents loss of dreams that they're not going to have this all-star football player because the kid wasn't interested in it. And, um, and sadly, we hear stories where parents are, you know, almost forcing their kids to do those sports or those extracurricular activities that they, you know, had the hope and the dream that the child would do. And it's to me, just, it's super sad. Um, we need to be letting our kids pave that way. And then also for the kids, as they get older, you know, if they're interested in something that the parent isn't familiar with, just because we don't know how to help them navigate a future in that, you know, in music or in singing or in sports, the child, we, that we say to the child,

well, we don't know how to help you with that. So if you're going to make, if you want that to happen, you you need to figure it out and we're here to support you tell us what you need but that's hard for parents too sometimes we just parent and we want them to do these activities or these things because it's what we know but what happens when your child's interested in something that you don't know anything about it's like well you can't do that because we don't know how to help you to do that I think the bottom line is it's very hard to let your children go but it's But when we think of our own lives and the decisions we've made that maybe our parents didn't approve at the time, but we're glad we've made them.

We have to make our own decisions. We're talking about self-love parenting, making sure that parents aren't just getting caught up in all the to-dos and all the busyness and all the demands and raising these good kids. And, you know, that that you forget about paying attention to your own interests and the things that fill you up, because kids will learn way more from that than they will from your demanding parenting.

When they see a parent taking good care of themselves, when you take good care of yourselves, you become more confident and more capable. And in no problem parenting, that's what we're all about, creating confident parents, because I say your kids crave that. They crave your leadership, but they see the action more than they hear the words. They learn more from the action more than they learn from the words.

And so no problem parenting says, hey, problem, I see you over there trying to put a wedge in my relationship with my child. I've got this, no problem. And really that aligns a lot with your Journey to Safe Harbor book. It's really about paying attention to ourselves and nurturing and taking care of ourselves so that we can lead our children confidently.

Actually, my daughter was young. She put a little note on my dresser mirror and she said, mother, please do today whatever you need to do to make yourself happy. See, out of the mouths of babes. Say no more.

We need to stop and pay attention to our kids. And when we're struggling, it's okay to ask our kids, hey, what am I doing wrong? Or what do you need? I don't know how to help you.

I think that's what having the relationship and the conversation with your children. I think it's exactly what we want. Of course, at some point, they're going to developmentally go off in their college in the early 20s because they have to become independent, but they will come back eventually. but it is the relationship you're nurturing I couldn't agree more and we're not raising little machines that make them do everything right you every moment we're raising human beings with their own souls their own life journeys oh I appreciate that thank you so much for being here today and I want to make sure that people go out and get your book they can go to www.journeytosafeharbor.com and they can actually download the first two chapters.

So I'm going to encourage everyone to do that. Any parting words for us? Raising children is one of the greatest gifts that will ever be in your life. Treasure the relationship and just find the joy and the peace and the happiness in this process.

I love it. Well, thanks so much for being with me today, Reverend Scott. It's been a great pleasure talking to you. I think what you're doing with your podcast is just wonderful and I applaud you.

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