MOMENT | The one tool to transform your parenting with Dr. Kristin Neff

Welcome back to Moment. Your moment for calm and connection for the week ahead. This week’s Moment is from Ep 27 June 2018 and in it, the world-renowned psychologist Dr. Kristin Neff shares the one tool that has transformed her parenting. And it can help transform yours too.

What if I told you there was one tool that is proven to make you stronger, reduce anxiety, and even make you happier. That tool is self-compassion. Self-compassion is treating yourself with the same kindness, care, and understanding that you would show to a friend.

Isn’t it just a truism that we often treat ourselves radically differently from how we treat those we care about?

As Dr. Neff says it isn’t what we face in life that determines how we cope but how we are with ourselves when we face difficult moments. And, aren’t there many difficult moments in parenting that we must face. As she explains in the clip we can either have an enemy or an inner ally.

Having an inner ally, a kinder voice inside, actually makes us stronger.

She also explains about mirror neurons. This is absolutely fascinating. I like to think about this as emotions being contagious. If we are stressed out and anxious our children will pick up on that and mirror it back on us. The opposite is also true. If they are anxious or tantrumming and we can find some calm and ease within ourselves, as hard as that is, then that will help them quicker than any words that we can say because of these mirror neurons.

This is absolutely incredible and I wish that every single parent knew about this. The quickest way to help our children is to calm ourselves first.

Here is this week’s clip. I hope you really enjoy it. Please do let me know what you thought. You can listen to the full episode here.

For more on Dr. Kristin Neff, please see:

• Test how self-compassionate you are here

• The fantastic books she has authored including ‘Self-compassion

• @self_compassion on Twitter

• Kristin’s inspirational Tedx Talk

About Dr. Kristin Neff

Kristin Neff received her doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley, and is currently an Associate Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. As always, we continue the conversation over on Instagram, so come and join us there.

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