Hi, this is Janet Landsbury. Welcome to Unruffled. I recently received an email from a parent

who I thought had a great suggestion for me, and I'm going to follow that suggestion now

or do my best to at least. She asked if I could do an episode on general reminders as you

start your parenting day. She said she wishes she could cut snippets out of episodes to

listen to on repeat. So she thought it would be great for me to do a daily snippet. That's what I'm

going to do. I actually have seven, so that's one for each day of the week, but they're all for all

days of the week, of course. And I'm going to be explaining why these are recommendations of mine,

and I'll probably make a list up in the transcript or somewhere where you can easily copy paste or

put it on your refrigerator. But first, so again, thank you to this parent for your brilliant idea

for these daily reminders. You'll notice as we go that these seven reminders overlap, complement,

and support each other. I'm going to start with let the feelings be. If you listen here, you hear

me say this all the time because it's really a lifelong challenge for a lot of us. And the reason we

do this is because feelings come and go, we don't control them. And what we want our children to learn

is that it's okay to feel whatever they feel. We're not going to let them act on a lot of those

feelings, of course. That's our job. But we want our child to share. We want to know what's going

on with them, even if it's something painful for us to hear. It's better that they share it

than not share it. Better not only for the quality of our relationship and our child's sense of

self and acceptance of self, but even in a practical sense, it helps us because when children

can't express the feeling, they're more likely to do so through concerning behavior,

hitting, lashing out, throwing things, saying things in really unkind ways, escalating. Or on

the other hand, they might start to suppress these feelings that they have because they feel that

these are unacceptable and that there's something wrong with them. And that creates a lot of issues

...