Welcome to the Shaline Show. Shaline is a New York Times best-selling author celebrity fitness trainer and obsessed with helping you live your dream life.

Thanks for joining me on this episode of the Shaline Show, which I'm happy to report is going to be a two-parter.

The first part is yours. Truly in the second part will be my handsome husband Brett Johnson back by popular demand.

This episode I wanted to devote specifically to parenting as a united front.

My apologies to those of you who it was not in your plan, it was not in God's plan for you to have children.

But the good news is I can save you some time. You don't need to listen to this episode.

Unless of course there's still a remote possibility that children could be part of your plan, in which case I'm going to encourage you to listen even if you don't have children yet.

But this episode will apply to those of you who are planning on having kids. And to those of you who have children regardless of the age.

I'm hoping that you find this podcast very helpful, whether you are of the more than 50% of Americans who are divorced or happily married with children at home.

This is an episode about providing peace, calm, consistency, predictability, and an optimal environment for producing confident, healthy, productive, respectable, self-sufficient children.

Children who think highly of themselves. I mean, isn't that what we need? Don't we want our own kids to grow up and be incredibly successful and really happy?

I mean, isn't that what you want? Do you really care whether they're a doctor or a lawyer? I know that might sound great.

But at the end of the day, if you had to boil it down to what was most important for your kids, I hope that we can agree that what's most important is that our kids can take care of themselves.

They think highly of themselves and they're happy. I hope at a minimum we can agree that that's our goal.

As always, I want to preface this by saying, we are not parenting experts. Don't pretend to be, but I also adamantly am advocate for kids.

And I see so many of, gosh, so many of the problems that adults have stem from things that happen to them as a kid, things that their parents said and did without intention of ever harming their children, but they didn't mean to, but man, it's done some damage.

And I just think that so much of what we adults have to work through now, some of those issues, were avoidable. And not everything's avoidable, right? But so much of it, if we are conscientiously taking care of our kids and always asking ourselves, is this in their best interest?

Is this going to make them happy and successful and independent? Is this going to give them confidence?

And if we answer and ask ourselves those questions, I think we're just going to do a much better job of it. And I hope that's common sense. It doesn't seem that it is.

And usually that's because our egos take over, right? I just want to reiterate that these are my opinions.

They are based on having worked with literally hundreds of thousands of adults who have the potential to do anything they want. And so many of them struggle with negative messaging.

And things that were said and done to them as children. And I think if we can be more aware of what we are doing as parents at any stage, at any age, what we will be able to do is accomplish our goal.

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