Eating, Sleeping & Potty Training Challenges? Get Real Help! #448
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So do you have picky eaters at home? Do you have kids who resist just about everything you want them to do? So there are power struggles over food. And sometimes dinner time is one of the parents getting upset. Like, you need to sit still at the dinner table. We're going to enjoy dinner together as a family. And apparently you're not. Do you have kids who are struggling with potty training, who are resisting that?

And maybe you have a new baby who is coming along, so your toddler is regressing. What about kids who sneak food at night? And then we've got sleep issues because you've got kids who have very busy brains. They've got anxiety. Some of you have kids who have night terrors, kids who get out of the bed 18 times, or kids who want to sleep in your bed. And it's exhausting. And sleep is tough sometimes.

Because it is a time of day when you are most exhausted and least patient. So it just devolves into all of these power struggles. So if you struggle with those things, you are normal. So that is what we're going to discuss on today's episode of the Calm Parenting Podcast. So welcome. This is Kirk Martin, founder of Celebrate Calm. You can find us in our winter sale at CelebrateCalm.com. So I just recorded a brand new program.

on eating, potty training, and sleeping. It's a couple hours long. And so I just want to give you some insight into strong will kids here. So Casey and I are talking about this, and I'm like, this is a really good program. Parents struggle with this. We could sell this as a separate program. And what I love, here's what I didn't love about Casey when he was younger. He always spoke up. These kids are very assertive. They tell you bluntly what they think.

But the beautiful thing is when they get older is they're the same way, but they have so much more wisdom. And so he's not afraid to speak up to me. I'm his dad. I'm his boss in some ways, right? Like,

And so he will speak up. And we were talking, he said, Dad, here are a couple of things you have taught me throughout life. One is you under promise and you over deliver. People have invested money in our programs. Why don't we just give this for free to people who've always invested in our programs?

And he said, you've always taught us that generosity is always a good thing. And he said, so I'm not. Now, here's the cool part. He said, I refuse to sell this to people who've already invested in our programs. And so here's the thing with a strong willed child. This is my company. It's my organization. I can do whatever I want.

But Casey will dig in on principle and say, I, he gets this look in his face on his face when we're, cause we occasionally like argue over things, right? We're having debates over what are we going to do? Not on this one so much.

But his face changes and it gets kind of rigid and he's like, dad, dad. And you can see he's like a, he is born in May. He is a Taurus. You can see like the, remember the old cartoons where the smoke comes out of the bull's nostrils? That's our son. And that's why I love our son. So here's what we decided. Casey decided. But we decided is for those of you who already have our program, say the Get Everything Package or one of the bundles, younger kids or older kids bundle,

We have already put this into your app. It's downloaded there. So if you go into the app, this new program is there and you just go listen to the whole thing. So on this podcast...

I wanted to try to fit in as much as I can. And maybe I'll do an extra podcast on it if you like this one. But let's just jump into this. I'm not going to be able to go in as much detail as I do on the programs, but I'll try to give you some highlights of this. So you know the number one thing you can do in every situation with a strong willed child is to control your own anxiety.

Look, when it comes, who, who, who, when will it ever work? If someone followed you around like, hey, do you need to pee? Do you need to poop? Do you have to go? Is it time now? You want to try? You want to try? You'd be constipated too. The same thing with pushing kids with

sleep with eating it doesn't work and and part of the beautiful part of this is I want you to prepare yourself and know hey sleep bedtime is going to be a struggle and so I know that going in so I can prepare for that and I know potty training is going to be hard and so when there's an accident I'm not freaked out by it because your kids are very sensitive and they pick up on your disappointment

on any negativity. If you and your spouse are irritated at each other during these times and disagree, oh, they will pick up on that. And so it will work against you, but you have control over that. I love this part, working with human nature. One of my favorite podcasts ever was called something like, you can't force your kids to eat your ideas or your food because your kids by nature are

almost always reject what you want first before they can own it themselves. So one of my favorite things that we ever did with food, I was working with his family and their son just wouldn't slow down to eat. I was like, get some protein bars or make your own. Leave them all over different parts of the house, out by the swing set, by his fort,

and let your child, when he's hungry, he'll just be able to grab that. And it worked. You know how they knew it worked? Because they found his wrappers on the ground and on the floor in the house because you know that's how your kids are. But that's an idea of working with their nature to get them to eat. So a few things with food real quickly. One is I don't want you to feel guilty. You can be the best parent ever, and you can have a very picky child, and I don't care about your judgmental relatives anymore.

This is very common with our kids because a lot of our kids have anxiety issues. Well, anxiety causes your stomach to be upset and some of your kids have gut issues. And so I want you to see a naturopath, a functional medicine doctor, someone who can get to the root of this. But I don't want you to feel guilty because I see it on Instagram all the time.

Oh, if you really cared about your children, you wouldn't feed them X or Y. Look, some of you are just very, very busy. You have a hard enough time just getting your kids up in the morning, putting their shoes on and going to school. So to fight over this constantly, I don't want you to do it. Do I want your kids and you to eat healthy? Of course. And I go through that in the program a lot of how to do that. But I don't want you to feel guilty for this.

So a couple practical things I would do. If you have younger kids, feed them early. I understand the beautiful part of like, we have family dinner time and it's our bonding opportunity and we talk and it's great. Well, for some of you, that's not your experience. Your experience is,

I'll just put it how it was in our home. I would get up, sit still at the table, sit up, eat all of your food. And I was just correcting him all the time. And now my wife had to jump in and manage the emotions of the home and of the dinner table. And so if your child struggles...

Younger kids, feed them early. Just let them eat early. Then you and your spouse can eat dinner in peace and enjoy it while the kids are playing. It's with strong-willed kids. I want to free you, liberate you to do what works for your kids and don't try to do what everybody else is supposedly doing.

Big thing with your kids, teach them how to cook. I don't want to make separate meals for your kids all the time. If you do that and it makes it easier for you, good, no judgment. But I want to, from an early age, teach these kids how to cook. Are ADHD kids and stronghold kids actually really, really good at cooking and they like it because they get to take all these varied ingredients and mix it

There's a sensory aspect to it and there's a creativity. There's an immediate benefit to a gratification of I took these ingredients and I put them together and now I can taste it. Just know that they're not going to follow a recipe and they're probably not going to clean up

but teach them that life skill and say, hey, you don't have to eat this meal, but I'm not fixing you something separate, so I'll teach you how to cook. You know what's the most important thing for me with food? Besides modeling it, just model it, model it, model it. If you eat healthy, if you are a grateful person, if you're generous and kind to other people, if you exercise and take care of yourself, your kids will inherit your DNA in that way and replicate that one day, just not your own timeline.

But I really want to teach my kids how food affects their bodies. See, rather than like, well, I'm just going to give you another lecture about how important it is to eat. They don't care about those lectures. And they're never going to say like, man, I'm glad you mentioned that again, mom. Because now the 18th time you said it, the light bulb went off and I realized how smart you are.

What I want to teach them is, "Hey, recognize how your body feels, how your brain feels when you eat certain foods." Because over time, I want them to know, "You know what? I'm not going to eat that because I don't feel good when I eat that. But I do feel good when I eat this." See, that's your ultimate win.

But remember, I do want to go for gut issues. I mentioned that a little bit in the programs. We go through kids who sneak food at night. And we go through a lot more on teaching your kids how to own food themselves without creating a lot of stress. By the way, teens and tweens...

This one may be your experience. They come home from school. They open up the refrigerator and stand there, let all the cold air out. It's going to frustrate you. And then they may grab a bottle of milk or orange juice and drink right from the jug and it's gross to you. And then they're going to grab a snack and throw the wrapper down on the counter and go up to their room. And then they'll come down for dinner. They might eat quickly and say, can I be excused to go back up to my room? And then later that night, way after bedtime, they come down, do the same thing at the fridge.

very very normal you know what I like doing with teens bond with them over food because these kids I like going out and grabbing heard me say when they're upset let's go grab a couple tacos let's go get a smoothie sometimes taking them out to do their homework and get a meal late at night why they like staying up late and they're always hungry and it's a fantastic time to bond with them over food

Okay, potty training. Let me just throw in a few things. And again, you know I'm going fast 'cause I wanna fit a lot in here is this. Wait, you have to wait until your child is ready. You can't force potty training. Throw away all those stupid arbitrary things that everybody else tells you like, well, by this certain age, they should be able to potty train. Every human is different, every kid is different.

You will know when they are ready because they start getting kind of like, oh, they want their diaper changed and they start moving toward the potty right by themselves. But wait until they're ready. Control your anxiety over this. I want you to normalize the accidents. The accidents are going to happen. So expect it. Because if you react with, oh, I don't know why that happened. Why couldn't you wait? Why did you pee on the floor? Well, now all that stress is going to cause them to stop up.

I would have a private place, create a private, try it. Try creating a private place for them to do their business because these are kids who don't like to be watched all the time. They want to figure it out on their own. I would even consider putting like a little potty in a closet somewhere. A lot of our kids like confined spaces. See, can you hear you're working with their nature instead of just trying to read a book and doing it like all the other kids did it.

So let them take a closet and you can hang up like little fairy lights, little lights, and you can hang things on the wall and you can have books in there and puzzles. Make it a place that they want to be. And here's the thing. When your kids do start to be successful with potty training, don't make too big of a deal out of it. I know you're going to read that in all the books like, oh, we're going to throw a celebration because you went potty.

Do that with your compliant EasyKids, but the StrongWillKids...

I would go very low key, almost like you expected, like, hey, nice job with that. But if you make it too big a deal, oh, buddy, I'm so proud of you, I'm out. They're going to shut down because that is too much pressure for them. So I would relieve the pressure off of your kids and off of yourself with those things. I'll throw this one out, and it's probably a dumb idea, but I like dumb ideas because for one person out there, it'll probably work.

little boys like at night, especially if you live out somewhere in the country, just let them pee outside, right? Dad can go out and you can see who can pee further. Look, it's very normal. Like out where we live, we hike a lot in the summer. We probably pee more outside than we do indoors in the summer. So don't be afraid to do very different things. Now, you're also going to have issues where if you've got a toddler and then a new baby comes along,

Oh, now your toddler's going to regress and be back in his diapers. And we go through that in the program because that's a really, really tough one. Okay, what about sleep issues? So a mom emailed, I have two picky eaters at home. One is eight and the other is 38, her husband. What I love about Hungry Root is that I can order meals tailored to our needs without going down 14 different aisles.

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That's HungryRoot.com slash Calm, code CALM. So guess who's been stealing my AG1? Mrs. Calm. She's trying to make that transition from so much caffeine or smoothies in the morning to starting her day with AG1. And she said, I feel good knowing I'm starting my day putting really healthy ingredients in my body.

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Man, I am talking really fast. I usually talk fast, but I have this sheet written down and I was trying, I was like, maybe on the podcast I can get down food and potty training and then we'll do a separate one on sleep. But I think I get all three in this one, just not as deep as I would want to go. But think about this. Here's the hard thing about sleep. There's so many different variables involved.

going on inside your child's brain and the dynamic in the home. Again, it's the time of day when you are the most exhausted, the least patient. You just want to get your kids to bed so you can have some downtime or alone time, some time with your spouse, or realistically to complete the 43 other things that you haven't gotten done yet.

And so there's all this pressure. So number one, expect it to be hard. If you have a child who has always struggled with sleep, expect it to be hard. I would kind of plan in your brain like, hey, I think this is going to take like an hour and a half or two hours because then if it only takes 45 minutes, well, that was better than two hours. And it just helps a little bit. But be very stoic during bedtime because your kids are picking up on everything that's going on inside of you.

So think about this. I really like this idea because watch kind of how modern day life is, which is, hey, go, go, go, go, go, go, go. Because we've got school and then I pick you up from school and then we've got extracurriculars or maybe a doctor's appointment. And then we've got to get home and we've got to do homework and then we've got to do dinner time and then bath time. And so it's go, go, go, go. And then all of a sudden it's like, stop, go to sleep.

And you have kids who have very busy brains. They have a lot of anxiety. They are slow processors of information. They absorb and feel things all day long. And because we're so busy, when do they start to process? When we both, all of us finally stop and slow down. And so when we lay them down in bed,

Now, I want to talk and all of this comes up and you're like, I don't want to talk. I just want you to go to sleep. I put some Benadryl or some Jack Daniels in your sippy cup or in your drink at dinner to hopefully knock you out. It didn't work. And at one, it'll just do the opposite with these kids. The Benadryl does the opposite, keeps them up all night. So here's what I would encourage you to do sometime in the late afternoon, if you can, or early evening.

Maybe go into the living room, turn the lights off, throw a blanket on the floor, and then lie down there and invite them next to you. It is a time when you arbitrarily or artificially just lie.

Stop and let them do the brain dump, all the stuff that happened at school that day, their anxiety about the next day. Or if the weather's nice, put a blanket down in the backyard and go lay out underneath the stars. Give them an opportunity to dump all of that before you get to bedtime. That little pre-bed thing that you could do for even seven or eight minutes, that's

may just save you 30 or 45 minutes or an hour later. But I love doing that. Sensory kids, sleeping bag, you've heard me say, sleeping bag on the floor. Let go of all of our arbitrary things. Well, you have to sleep in a bed. Why? You don't have to sleep in a bed. Some of your kids will feel much safer

On a sleeping bag, on the floor, some of your kids, you can make it a tent. We've had success with that. Like put up a tent in their room. They could have a fort. They could be like the army ranger who's got to sleep on the ground. Some of your kids like that.

Have them wedged in, say, between the bed and a wall. Many of your kids like confined spaces. That sensory pressure feels very settling for them. Many of your kids are going to struggle with fear of missing out.

They don't want to go to bed because they're like old souls. They have a lot of energy. And so they'll just keep getting up like a million times. In the program, I go through three things that I don't have time for here. That fear of missing out, just continually getting up.

Moving kids, if they've gotten used to sleeping in your bedroom or your bed, how do we move them away from there? And then also the kids who are getting out of bed all the time, I have this really cool, cool strategy for younger kids that works a lot of the time. So make sure you listen to the programs.

So here's a cool one. And I've only got time for a couple more. Kids acting crazy at bedtime. So you've got two or three kids. Maybe you've got four. If you've got more than that, then your life is just going to be chaos all the time. And that's okay. That's what you signed up for.

And so, but you've got, say you've got a couple kids, two or three kids, and at bedtime, sometimes they feed off of each other's kind of nervous energy. And what happens? We're like, guys, guys, guys, settle down. Listen, if you don't get in bed right now, I am not reading your story. And you know how that goes. It's just constant, like, if then, if.

And it just amps them up even more. So I want you to try this next time. Kids are running around. They've got all this energy. You and if you're with your spouse, both do this together. Lie down on the floor somewhere in the hallway, in a bedroom. Lie down and start reading something or start working on a puzzle or something where you're really focused on it.

and like intently focused and you're kind of ignoring them because you're focused on your own thing or you can lay on the floor and just start laughing with each other. I guarantee you those kids will stop and they will come over because they're like, what are you doing? What are you interested in? What are you working on? What are you laughing about? But if you try to chase them down, they'll just run away from you more.

You draw kids to you strong-willed kids. You don't push they you have to learn how to draw these kids to you and then they will pick up on Your energy when you do that so and I have one more that's really kind of cool. I

Teens, I'll get into another time with this. But here's a really cool kind of thing to do. Because you know how we like to read with our kids at bed tonight? This isn't directly related to all this, but I really love this.

sometimes with kids when they're misbehaving or they're struggling with a behavior you know we want to go we want to correct them and talk to them about it and say like well we need to talk about your behavior what are you gonna start doing differently but it makes it too personal and they get too defensive about it but say your kids like a certain book or a movie and there's a character that they love you know what's cool to say hey you know Sarah in your book

What do you think Sarah would do in this situation? What do you think your favorite character, how would they handle this situation at school with a sibling, with a teacher? Because now they get to get out of their defensiveness.

defensive nature and now they get to problem solve from another perspective it's a really cool thing to do so there's so much more I could cover but I try to keep these around 22 minutes so

Let's review. Control your anxiety. Know that this is all normal. Do what works for you and your family. Don't worry about what everybody else is doing. If you have a strong willed child, life is going to look different for you. Do what works. Model it for them and relax and know that one day when you get done with one of these issues, you'll just move on to other ones. It never really ends.

But if you relax into it, I want you to be able to enjoy your kids. So if you do have our programs, look in your app. This program is there now, and you can go through that. If you don't have our programs, we'll get them through our winter sale. Reach out to our son. We can help you with those. But thank you for listening. Thank you for doing the hard work. Potty training, food stuff, sleep is really, really hard. And you're going to come face-to-face with us.

with your own childhood issues. And it's all causing us to grow up. You're really good parents. I have a lot of respect for you. Love you all. And we'll talk to you next time. Bye-bye.