Family-focused topics from Jason and Kim. We'll talk about empowering your kids to manage their own self-care. Things like showering schedule, physical activity, grooming (haircuts, nail trims), and keeping their room tidy. We'll also debrief the success of our first family trip in over 2 years and some tricks we used to manage anxiety and schedules.

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Transcript: Season 2, Episode 12

Welcome back to that talking thing. I'm Kim I'm Jason. This is episode 12, season two. We have some life family topics, life topics, family topics, same thing. I wrote this topic a few weeks ago. I'm vague on what I meant with it. So we're going to peel back the layers of this onion and try to understand what I meant, but it's probably related to our kids.

They're 10 they're 13, they're getting older and the topic is empowering. Your. To care for themselves. When I think of this topic, I think it must relate to hygiene because I'm the kind of a hygiene, I'm the protein police and I'm the hygiene police in our home. And by hygiene, it's trimming your nails, getting a haircut, keeping your room kind of clean washing well and not smelling using deodorant.

Did I say using Q-tips so you don't have ear wax kind of just falling out onto your AirPods? Yeah. All of those things. It's probably rooted in this fear that people will at school will say my kids, the smelly kid, or the gross kid that the dirty kid or the kid covered in dog and cat hair. I don't know.

Hygiene is important to me to put on. Not that I'm like fancy and well put together, but I'm clean. Yeah. How does the topic of empowering kids to care for yourself? Translate as a mysterious topic? Yeah, that is a challenge. I think it's interesting. Your word choice, empowering the kids to care for themselves.

Cause it makes it seem like the kind of thing that we should like facilitate. Um, but like what you're also like for themselves or like yeah, empowering them. Like they have a toothbrush, you know, like what other sort of empowering, um, receiving reminders from us that your nails are getting too long. Your wax is in, you're hanging out right here, or it is time for that shower.

So empowerment to me means handing off the job of doing it, of communicating that it must be done to somebody else and putting them in charge that's empowerment. Yeah. I think the two of finding a way to get them to care about these things that they maybe don't care about. And sometimes other parents or books will tell us like, well, just wait, when they go through purity, they'll get interested in significant others and start to care about these things when they don't.

And you're like, I know some like 20 year olds that don't seem to care that they stank. So I don't want one of them

but that's like, yeah, how do we get that? So it's weird that trust as a lot of parenting is kind of like it's okay. Just love your kid and trust that it'll be okay. But if we care about this, we got to talk about it. Like, I guess we could care about ourselves if we're always like, yo your breast Mao's dude, or like making fun of them, um, or something, or like commenting, like, but it's so rude.

And like that one guy who, uh, there was some interview. Uh, a guy was talking, he studies like super successful people, become presidents and stuff like that. And he said like the formula is to have one parent that loves you unconditionally, no matter what. And another parent, that's like a hard ass and you can never please, and is like barely there.

And like, you know, you always want their affection and you re. And then I think the interview was like, oh, so how do you do that with your kids? He was like, oh no, we both loved them unconditionally. Like, you're not going to like, just yell at your kid. So like, if you really want them to care about that, you could yell at them a lot.

I often say that I hear my dad literally in my head when I leave a light on or I leave a door open and it that's kind of harmless thing, but it's just that he kind of yelled at me about those things. So often. So I'm sure if we yelled at them all the time, I don't know. Sometimes it seems not, like I said, it's like every day you brush your teeth by.

Yeah. I don't know. There's things that we've tried. We've tried a very hands-off approach for a short period of time. We've said I don't, I don't know, play as long as you want eat as much snacks as you want. I give up. Our children haven't put boundaries of their own in place through that. But I think something that we are doing, we did it today with our son.

We involved him in setting his own schedule cause he's, he's off Scalia's spring break this week. So we were on a trip. Our trip ended yesterday today through Monday, including Monday he's home and he can set his own schedule within boundaries. He operates well within a schedule. It's a quality of his that we've recognized.

But maybe that's a version of empowering him to take care of himself involving him in setting the schedule for his time. Yeah. Rather than say, do what you think you should do this vague, uh, no schedule schedule that's he can't live that way. He needs a schedule. So the Virgin today was, and mom set your schedule.

It was, we collaborated. That's a good answer. I often I would bring that out on Marin when I was, uh, I don't know if I like punishing her or doing something, but I would say, well, I was like, what would you do? Like if your daughter was doing this, you know, and she's like, yeah, that'd be hard. I was like, yeah, like, I kinda like, if I let you stay up really late, like, I won't be a good dad, so what am I supposed to do?

And so like involving them that way helps a lot. Um, I had another thought here. I don't come back. I'm still, I mean, they're kind of pre-puberty puberty age. Maybe that will still happen. Maybe they'll still be paper D and start to care. You see it at some things, you know, I think Marin brushes, like sometimes she does burst long enough, but like she does all those things.

Would that be unprompted and like, it's getting better. So it's good to see it getting better. Um, I find myself often thinking back to when I was a kid and maybe I think too romantically about who I was as a kid, but I think I was. A kid that was always compliant and kept clean. And I learned to cook at a young age.

I took care of myself. I kept my room really tidy and not because my parents were forcing me to, or not because the opposite that they were unclean or untidy or didn't make meals, it was like my nature. And I developed that value. Yeah. I don't know how we can. I feel like all of the above are true.

Aligned with your parents and become that adult. You are the opposite of them become that adult or you've kind of formulate your own variation of it. Yeah. Good luck. Okay. It's like our cough. Here's incredibly difficult thing. I don't have the answers. Good luck, everyone. It will be a slow process to translating what it means to empower our kids, to take care of themselves.

But I think handing over the responsibility of remembering self care to a degree. Yeah, you have to give them the chance to fail. Oh, I remember I was gonna say, there's a story where we made pizza while you were away like a frozen pizza. It came out the oven. It was crazy hot. And I cut it up and I told Marin like, watch out it's hot.

And she said, I don't care. And took a bite, like burn the roof of her mouth. And then like the next few days, She was like, oh, it really hurts every time she beats. Oh, I'm really sorry, babe. But honestly, but in my head I was like, oh, she kind of learned a lesson, like to not eat hot food, but when you got back then like the next week we had pizza, I think it was pizza or something else that was really hot.

And I was like, watch, I was really hot. And I was like, oh, she, like, she knows. She's just like, she's like, I don't care. And ADA, it didn't burn her this time. But I was like, I guess she didn't really learn that lesson. So sometimes yeah, like how many times? I don't know, but definitely saying stuff over and over.

Do you remember that used to run? They were oppositional so I can see why she didn't care. Just because you said it. Yeah, she must've learned something from burning her mouth. Um, but maybe it takes more than one time touching a hot stove. They used to run down the hill to the bus, stop. The bus, picks them up at the bottom of the hill and they were run on.

And like, every time I was with them, I'd be like, don't run, don't run walk. And it was like every day, not because they were running on a flat surface because they were running on like river rocks. Yeah. Um, I was mixing up my thing, my chair, cause I was like, how many times do I got to tell him also like with the kids, like, um, waking the dog up with their face when the sleeping and you're right in her face, like, Ugh.

And I'm like talk to a break. You and then one time I said, And I was like, I was like, I don't know, every day, every single day, at least like 10 times a day. So let me think. Like, that's like 3,650 times in the past year. My whole life I'm spending like 1% of my time telling you not to put your face in front of the dog when it's sleeping, but it, obviously it doesn't stick in.

So I don't care get bit by the dog. I kind of flipped. I did exactly that. I don't know if that was in the moment we talked last week about, you know, uh, staying calm. I, you stay calm. There's been a couple of cases, but it's been better. S