Family-focused topics from Jason and Kim. We'll talk about a parenting hack: staying calm to diffuse reactive kids. Easier said than done! We'll also touch on the concept of "tending to the part of the garden you can touch" and how it is a good metaphor for how to get through crises in life, whether within your family, friends, community, and extending into problems throughout the world.

Follow Jason on Twitter, Follow Kim on Twitter, Follow Stranger Studios on Twitter

Welcome back to that talking thing. I'm Kim I'm Jason. This is episode 10, season two, and we're talking about life topics. The first we need to wind to talk about our life. Uh, the first topic is as a parent, staying calm to diffuse anger and reactive behaviors. So this is something I think I wish I was better at when my daughter was two.

I'm getting better at now that she's 10. I found my self getting calmer and calmer and calmer. The more angry or reactive a child is when you talk to them about something and using calm words, using sympathetic empathetic language, it's not always easy, but it's interesting. I think as a parenting tactic to think about.

Yeah, it's so hard. And

one thing I noticed too, is sometimes the other parent can see, you know, like if our daughter, for example, is getting defensive about something she shouldn't like, why do I have to whatever do do this thing that I, or what shower it's like, you know? And we're like every day, everyone, everyone in the whole world showers about once a day, You have like 3000 times already.

Now this is like, why is it a surprise that you have to take a bath every day? Um, so she gets really defensive. Like I got to take a bath. And then if say you act defensively to that and you get engaged in this kind of like emotional conflict with the child. Like as an outsider, if I just haven't walked in, I'm like, I can see what's going on and tell like, oh, you let it get to you.

Or like you're taking it personally. And you shouldn't, but it's so easy as an outsider, or like when you see like another parent, like my brother with his kids and you're like, well, obviously he should X, Y, Z. And no, but the one I always say like in the shit, almost like when you're in the shit with your kids.

Cause that's what it is, is like, you're just like busy doing things. Yeah. So how do you cultivate that? You know, I don't know the attitude and the persona, like the, you know, the ability to. Wait and be calm and take it sometimes for me, it's like a sense of humor about it. It helps. It's like, oh, like, it's funny, like on some of it's funny that she's so like, it's like, this is crazy from the outside.

Looking in that is horrible to me to observe because I feel that you're minimizing their, how frustrated they are, how sad they are with laughter. Then I think they have something that they are justified in being upset about it's being laughed at her being upset. Yeah. So if you let that laughter get out, then it's just a different problem of you're laughing at them.

And then they're mad about that. And you're like egging them on. We re we were just on vacation. And so it was kind of really, it was a little easier. I mean, it was skipping ahead to future topics, but maybe one reason was that we were really self-conscious of like, no. You know, agitating the kids and it's like, why is it?

Like you have to walk on eggshells around your kids or whatever. They're like, I don't know. You kind of do. It's like respectful. Like they can't handle it. They're, you know, they're like, you don't have to stop playing video games. Is eternity that's forever. Um, we kind of recognize this with some of our customers not to make this business topic ori...