How to Be a Better Mom: 7 Things You Can Do To Better Your Relationship With Your Kids

Do you want to learn how to be a better mom? Heather will share ONE secret ingredient and 7 actions you can take TODAY with your children. How to not let LIFE get in the way of you being the AWESOME mom you want to be. Above photo by Dawid Sobolewski on Unsplash

Welcome to Mommy Me Time with love and relationship coach Heather Hundhausen! On the surface, we think we are pulling off mommy hood pretty well, but deep down, we know we don’t know what the heck we are doing.

Yes or Yes?

You know how I know you feel like this? Because I have my MASTERS in Marriage and Family, and have been teaching a parenting class for 5 years and I still feel like this! But don’t worry about it! You are doing GREAT as a mom! You know how I know? Because you ARE HERE!

WELCOME TO MONDAY MOMMY ME TIME!!

I want to acknowledge you for taking a few minutes today for yourself! I know that moms, probably more than anyone else, need ME TIME most of all. So GREAT JOB! You’re on the right track and you’re going to learn REALLY VALUABLE information today on how easy it is to be an awesome mom and feel really good about it.

Today’s Topic is How to Be A Better Mom and the NUMBER ONE Super Ingredient to be the AWESOME MOM you want to be and 7 Easy Activities to Implement today.

In my video about how to be a better mom, I’m addressing:

• Inappropriate attention seeking
• How to punish without feeling like a jerk
• What to do when they’re being little poops
• How to take care of yourself
• And the exact road map for YOU to parent the way it feels best for YOU!

Just to clarify, MOMS – aren’t just women with children. It’s all of us.

Your Inner Child

It takes all of us. We all have an INNER CHILD who has wounds that we are healing. And many of us hope to be mothers in the future, and many of us are caretaking little ones, as teachers, aunties, etc… So… if you’re a woman who experiences the nurturing qualities of a mother, if you intend to become a mother, if you’re mothering someone else, or if you need to mother yourself, Monday Me Times are for YOU!

I’m Love Coach Heather Hundhausen! I help guide powerful world changing women, INCLUDING MOMS, who are struggling between SURRENDER and Being in Control to create their OWN LIGHT, which then of course, influences the world around them. Who influences the next generation more than us??

How to not let LIFE get in the way of you being the AWESOME mom you want to be, with ONE secret ingredient and 7 immediately applicable actions you can take TODAY with your children for How to Be a Better Mom.

If you think your mother did a terrible job with her parenting skills, you are SURELY NOT going to do it the way she did it?

True or True?

If your mother did an AMAZING job, you are going to do your very best to try to do it as WELL as she did it? Correct?

I know you don’t know what you’re doing as a mother. You know that you don’t want to do it the way your mother did it, or maybe you want to do it exactly how she did it, depending on whether or not you think you had a good mother.

Who can relate to this?

The troubling part is, what the heck is a good mother?

• Is a good mother one who is there all the time, or is that a smothering mother and a helicopter mother?
• Is a good mother one who has strict boundaries and punishments, or is that going to cause an inability to produce money in the future because your child is operating out of a fear mentality?
• If your parents were to smothering, and maybe you shouldn’t be so smothering with your kids and give them more freedom?
• But how much Freedom Is Enough freedom?
• And if your parents gave you too much freedom and you feel abandonment, maybe you want to give your kids extra attention, and then they end up feeling smothered?

I’m telling you, you can’t get it right.

How to Be a Better Mom with this ONE Key Ingredient

I’m also here to tell you… You really can’t get it wrong if you focus on ONE key ingredient. LOVE.

Your kids THRIVING depends on how LOVED they feel. It’s your RELATIONSHIP with them that will get them through their life. They will hit bumps, and mess up. We all do. But do they have you there to depend on when they fall, or do they avoid you because they are afraid of your punishment or judgment?

I asked my kids and some of my kids friends this week what they thought about their parents. The kids with the strict parents were happy that they had strict parents. The kids with the more permissive parents were happy that their parents were more permissive.

What??

Feeling Loved

It ends up that the most important thing, is that your kids feel loved.

It doesn’t matter if you’re taking them to all the after-school activities, if you’re making them do extra homework, if they’re playing video games all day long, if they’re hanging out with the good kids, the bad kids, they have a good influence, a bad influence… It really doesn’t matter.

Your Relationship with Your Child

At the end of the day what really matters is your relationship with your kid.

• Did you create a relationship full of love?
• Did you do the right thing according to your heart?
• Is your kid doing the right thing according to their heart?

They’re truly really isn’t a right or wrong way to do this.

We Come Here to Earth to Learn Stuff …

My spiritual outlook on this is that we pick our parents, and we come here to learn stuff.

So if they chose me to be the kind of person I am, it’s exactly the kind of parent they needed. They’ll have the experience they need to have in order to learn the things they need to learn, and we will both learn, and we will both grow, we will both expand, and we will both learn how to love…

Hopefully.

Every Action is Either Love, or a Call for Love

Ask yourself, are my kids loving me, or are they asking me for love? AND… this is my PERSONAL opinion, not everyone will agree… but based on the research and all of the years of experience I have in this field, I would argue that if YOU NEED love… going to your kids to get it is UNHEALTHY. But we aren’t covering that in this talk. If you want me to cover it, write it in the comments!

Photo by Janko Ferlič on Unsplash

Children misbehave because they need attention. I teach a parenting course on this so I’m not going to go into all of it now, but here are the main pointers

#1 – SPEND TIME WITH YOUR KIDS! 

There are some really great exercises in the parenting course that I used to teach that show you exactly why this works. But you can literally take your house from being total chaos and a wreck, to being peace and love and happiness and the kids doing their chores and things for you.

Just simply spend 5 to 10 minutes with each one of them, one on one, doing something really special, everyday. You don’t have to respond to them everyday all day long and everything that they need all the time, just one little thing every day to make them feel special.

Example: I made Gabriel’s bed the other day and he cleaned the entire kitchen.
IF YOU DO THIS – you will BOOST your child’s sense of self-esteem, and you will feel better as a parent.

# 2 Parent with Love and Logic

Don’t punish them with consequences that have nothing to do with whatever their wrong doing was.

That makes no sense and seems unfair. We aren’t drill sergeants.

Why do we think that scaring them will make them behave?

That doesn’t work. What works is when things are logical, and they can understand why NOT to do something again.

My Son Wants to Have Long Hair …

For instance, my son wants to have long hair, so we made an agreement with him that he gets to wash it everyday, and comb it every morning and every night.

The consequence for him not doing that is we get to set up an appointment for him to get it cut the next day.

He agreed to this, and now he combs his hair every morning and every night, and if he forgets he runs and does it if we remind him.

What wouldn’t make sense is if I said I’m going to cut your hair because you didn’t do your homework …

I Don’t Like Him Having Long Hair LOL

Maybe I don’t like him having long hair, and so I’m looking for some reason to cut it.

But it’s not fair to cut his hair because he doesn’t do his homework, or he does some other behavior wrong.

1. Make a clear agreement
2. Confirm the logical consequence
3. Follow through with what you say you’re going to do

Punishment Won’t Be Arbitrary

IF YOU DO THIS, punishment will not be arbitrary, and your kids will understand the natural and logical consequences of their BEHAVIOR.

Instead of thinking there is something wrong with them, that they can’t get it right.

They will begin to make the logical associations between their behavior and the outcome of their behavior.

#3 Repair The Relationship

Repair the relationship. It’s always worth it. If my kids are mad at me, there’s probably a reason. I probably did something to really piss them off. Don’t be afraid to ask yourself what you did that hurt your kids if they’re trying to hurt you.

Especially the ones Under 12. If your kid Under 12 is trying to hurt you, you probably hurt them first. Be willing to take a look at what you might have done that hurt them.

My son will yell at me sometimes. Many parents would yell back at their kid, or punish them if that happened. I choose not to do that.

When I sit down and ask him what’s going on, he usually gets very expressive and emotional with me, and tells me about his bad day, the pressure I’ve put on him, etc…

Being Able to Connect

We are able to connect and love each other, and then he is easily able to say sorry for yelling at me, and spends the rest of the night following me around trying to make up for it with hugs or helping.

This is the natural course of action when you operate in LOVE. This happens with our spouses too. We all just want to be seen and heard. Photo by Bruno Nascimento on Unsplash

#4 Have The Intention Of How You Want Them To Be As An Adult

For example with my boys I always think about that I want them to be contributing, providing, generous men. So when I deal with them when they have been misbehaving, I want to make sure that my intention is to raise them to become men who are like that. I don’t punish them, instead I attempt to give them the opportunity to step into contributing, providing, being generous, being loving, following their hearts. When I asked them what it looks like to do that, they generally know, and then they do it. Because all of us deep down want to be loved and do the right thing.

When you do this, it INSTANTLY changes YOUR behavior. If your kids are screaming and hitting each other, and you walk in the room thinking, I’m going to kill them… guess what… lol. If you think, what can I say to have them be contributing members of society? Guess what… you talk to them VERY differently. Photo by Danny Pesta.

#5 Acknowledge Your Children

Part of learning how to be a better mom is if they do something great, tell them. If they do something wrong, show them how to do it the right way, don’t criticize them. You’re their greatest teacher. So teach them, don’t criticize them. By the way this works with your husband’s too. If you need something, just simply let the people around you know what you need.

Don’t be a martyr and a victim, just simply ask in an empowered way for what you need. If they don’t do it right, just simply teach them what you need.

For instance if my son cleans the toilet but there’s still hairs all over it, I get to say thank you so much for cleaning the toilet. Let me show you something. This is how we get the hairs off. Do you want to try? That way they’re being empowered, not criticized.

• If you acknowledge the good behavior, you will very likely see much more of it.
• If you criticize the bad behavior, you’re really not changing behavior, you’re just affecting their sense of self-esteem.

So as you can see there is no right or wrong way to do this. It’s about;

• Staying in the intention of love.
• Staying in the intention of what you want to create.
• Using your imagination and creativity to create the family of your dreams.

#6 Use Your Imagination

You can literally spend time in meditation, or visualization, or with your Journal, creating and imagining exactly what you want your family life to look like.

Too often we focus on what’s not working.

The stronger you make that picture the more of a reality it will become.

Start focusing on what you want to have working.

For example this week I was working with a client who said I know that the rest of the day is going to be crap so I prepare myself for the crap. I said well you’re powerful so guess what your day is going to look like. Pretty crappy. Cut that out. Instead, think about the amazing day that you’re going to be having and how things are going to go exactly the way you want them to go. Stop focusing on what’s not working.

When you use visualization for what you want your family (or relationship, or business or whatever) to LOOK LIKE

and you FEEL INTO IT…

you are already creating it.

Make a road map for yourself on how to be a better mom. You see how it works, and you simply follow that.

#7 Drop The Bat

Stop beating yourself up.

You’re not screwed up. Your kids love you and think you’re the greatest thing on earth. If they’re under 12.

Just spend time with them and love them. Spend time looking in their eyes. Spend time loving them.

Spending time beating yourself up is draining. And it makes you spiral downward. Before you know it, you think you’re terrible at everything.

Take charge of your mind.

Focus on what’s working. Do more of that.

A lot of the times we are not able to do these things with our children because our parents didn’t do it for us.

This is how loving yourself comes into play.

You have to take care of your inner child first.

Or she’s going to be pissed off that you’re giving this attention to your kids, and not her.

Do you have any questions!? Write them in the comment box!

Who wants homework?

PICK ONE THING right now, from the list, that you will do TODAY to learn how to be a better mom!

1. Spend 5 mins with each kid
2. Don’t punish with unrelated consequences – it makes you an asshole and they don’t learn anything.
3. Hurt people hurt people. If your kid is acting out, you probably pissed him or her off. REPAIR the relationship.
4. Hold your intention of who you want them to be when they’re grown up
5. Acknowledge them and TEACH them, don’t criticize them.
6. Visualize your day with your kids before it starts.
7. Don’t beat yourself up. Stop that crap. Love your inner child first.
8. Write it in the comments! Include which one you liked the best, what you will do, when you will do it

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

When Parents Feel Ashamed to Ask For Help …

I was a kid who’s parents desperately needed help, and they were too ashamed or cheap to reach out for it.

I’ve spend 25 years undoing that damage.

It’s much more expensive than getting the support you need now, so that you feel confident in your parenting and your relationship, and know that your child is being raised in a healthy, loving environment.

I promise you can change the chaotic, sabotaging lifestyle into one of peace and learn how to be a better mom. It took me 25 years to learn it… and I can usually teach it in less than 6 months one-on-one. Let me know if you’re ready. I’m Ready!

I appreciate you!! THANK YOU for spending time here today. Your kids will thank you. You will thank you. If you experience trouble implementing this, let me know. I’m here to support you.

I want to know! Other than the topic how to be a better mom, What other topics are you interested in LEARNING MORE about? Leave that in the comment box or reach out to me. I am here to support you in creating a peaceful home!

Photo by Aziz Acharki on Unsplash

If you watched this video about how to be a better mom today and realize you are REALLY not feeling good about your self love or your parenting, please reach out to me for a one-on-one breakthrough session. They are complimentary. During the call, we will explore all of the places you are stuck in parenting and self love, and I will help to give you a road map for how to get unstuck!