Our kids face bigger challenges than ever before. How do we equip them in faith, in their emotions, and in their outlooks to navigate the world? School psychologist and author Lauren Gaines joins AllMomDoes host Julie Lyles Carr for a look at not only what we need to do as parents but who we need to be in order to help our kids become unshakable.
Show Notes:
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- Book: Unshakable Kids
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Transcription:
Lauren Gaines:
Starting around eight, nine, 10, we can start to say to our kids that our thoughts are connected to our feelings and our actions. And so sometimes it’s easy to identify the behavior like what we did or… we’re pacing the room. We feel a lot of times kids are able to do this. They’re like, “My belly hurts,” or “I have a headache,” or “I just feel tight.” They’re able to identify the physical symptoms they feel, but they don’t know necessarily what that means for a feeling like, “Well, maybe you’re feeling anxious,” or “Maybe you’re feeling worried or stressed or overwhelmed.” And so if we can kind of connect those dots for them and see even when you are feeling overwhelmed or stressed, there’s a thought in your head.
Julie Lyles Carr:
You’re listening to the AllMomDoes Podcast, and I’m your host, Julie Lyles Carr. We are here to encourage you in all things in your life, including your marriage and how God is leading you and things with your work, and especially with your kids. And so I’m so excited to have Lauren Gaines on today because she’s going to have some great insight for us on what it means to be raising kids who have resilience and really know how to stand in today’s world. So Lauren, thanks so much for being with me today.
Lauren Gaines:
Thank you, Julie, for having me. I’m so excited to chat with you.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Oh, it’s great to have you. So where in the world are you? Where do you live?
Lauren Gaines:
So I am in Pennsylvania about 45 minutes north of Philadelphia. So I have lived here most of my life, but went away for college, of course.
Julie Lyles Carr:
That’s amazing because I actually lived in that area when I was in early elementary school. I lived in Yardley.
Lauren Gaines:
Oh, really?
Julie Lyles Carr:
Yeah, Yardley, Pennsylvania, for a little bit.
Lauren Gaines:
Cool.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Very close to Valley Forge, so I know that area of the country. And tell me about your family life, hobbies, cats, dogs, all the things?
Lauren Gaines:
Well, it’s so funny because I have a 4-year-old and at preschool… like for Thanksgiving was like, “What are you thankful for?” And she put a dog and I was like, “People probably think we have a dog.” We do not have a dog. But she has lots of little stuffed animals that she believes are her little animals, and so she has a little dog stuffed animal. She is begging for a real one. But I have three kids. They are 10, eight and four. And my husband and I have been married for 13 years and consider myself, I guess, a stay-at-home mom. Even though now with trying to build an online ministry and writing books and starting to speak at places, it’s more than that. But I think I identify as that because I was that little girl who just could not wait to be a mom. It was just like my dream. My mom was a stay-at-home mom, and so I just thought that that was the best thing ever. And it is so much harder than my little naive self thought it would be, but it is really fun and a blessing.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Oh, yeah, friend. Yeah. And you are really uniquely qualified in the parenting space, I think, because you’ve worked in school settings in psychology, you have your master’s degree in psych. One of my degrees is in psych with an emphasis in child psychology, but I earned it long, long, long time ago. And one of the things that I find really fascinating today is yes, there are things that I learned and were part of my academic experience in that arena that still apply, but nobody was talking about the world the way it is now and what our kids are living in. I mean, we had some ideas about what future technologies might bring, what some of those things might do in terms of changing our parenting and on and on, but there are many ways in which we did not envision a world that was going to be tending more toward chaos and trying to guide kids through some of those things.
So I’m really fascinated with your experience today that you have this academic background, but you’ve also really been in it in terms of the school setting for kids today along with being a mom. So I just really appreciate you being here and sharing some insight. I really wanted to dive in with you about this idea of how we raise kids who can be unshakeable in a very quickly changing and unpredictable world. So how did you begin to arrive at thinking about this arena for kids? Because when you’re talking child psychology, there’s so many ways that you can go. What was it about the idea of trying to help equip parents to find that place to make our kids more resilient? What was it for you that you really began to see, “Hey, this is something I want to really explore?”
Lauren Gaines:
Yeah, I mean, I think there’s definitely layers to this. And I was always that person who babysat. I helped in children’s ministry since we were married. Wednesday night I taught all the preschool kids. I always loved kids. And I think partly it was self-reflection. So I grew up in a Christian home and the Bible was taught. We went to church. But truthfully, I don’t think there was a lot of depth there. And I really just kind of relied on my parents’ faith to pull me through. I didn’t really do a lot of reading or praying on my own. I only ever prayed in my head. I was afraid to pray out loud. There wasn’t that depth. And then I went to college and did the traditional thing, I guess, that’s happening in churches and walked away from it all. And I never stopped believing in God.
I never stopped believing that He was real, but I was not living a godly life. And then in grad school, I feel like God brought me back to a friend from high school and she’s like, “Hey, you should come to church with me.” And I was like, “You know what? Maybe I should do that.” And I feel like ever since then I’ve just been on fire for God. And I don’t want to blame all of it on this, but I think I didn’t have that depth. I didn’t have that strong foundation as a child. And who knows, God maybe wanted me to walk through some of that? I don’t know. I don’t want to live in the past. But as I started having my own kids, I was like, “There are some things I want to do differently.”
And in one of my chapters I talk about, I was a swimmer, and so swimming was my life. Swimming is a year-round sport. I would get up before high school and swim in the morning, then I would swim after school, and it just consumed my life. And while it gave me some awesome opportunities, and I even won a gold medal at states, which was super cool, I feel like that didn’t really help me with some of the life and spiritual foundation that I wanted. And so I started looking at my own kids and then also reflecting on myself as a parent, because that’s a twist in the book. If we want emotionally healthy and spiritually healthy kids, we have to be that first, because if we’re not and we don’t know how to control our thoughts, it’s going to bleed into our parenting. And our kids sometimes feel the tension that we’re having and they’re going to feed off of it. And if we are anxious all the time, guess what? They might be too.
And so that’s kind of… like I said, there’s many layers to it, but I feel like God just kept nudging me and bringing me back to looking back at my old notes, studying human development again and saying, “We’re in a different world than when we grew up, and where does God want me? Where does God want me to be putting my kids and to imparting into them?” And I felt like this is something relevant. As I talk to other moms, they’re asking these same questions like, “I want to shelter my kids forever, but I know at some point they have to go out in the real world, so how do we prepare them to do that and they don’t lose their faith when they go out?”
Julie Lyles Carr:
Right. I love that you really bring up this idea that we have to get really healthy as parents. Not to say that we aren’t at the same time growing. I mean, yeah, they’ve never been humans before our kids, but we haven’t been parents before. And so to give ourselves some grace to be figuring that out. But it was interesting, when I wrote my book Raising an Original, it was this template for helping parents understand the individuality in their children. And Lauren, to your point, when I would get out and speak and had opportunity to interact with people, people were so great about that book, but I had a lot of moms going, “I really get it. I want my kids to be originals, but I don’t know how to do that.” And it really created some unique opportunity for conversation around that, to really make sure that that piece was solid in order to be able to help our kids understand the beautiful way in which they were created. But we have to embrace it for ourselves.
So this idea that we need to be people who are unshakeable, we need to be people who are resilient in order for our kids to see that. What are some things that you find today that moms are grappling with when it comes to their own sense of resilience and strength and knowing how to stand? Where have we gotten wobbly that could impact where our kids are going to go, “Oh, mom’s kind of wobbly. I’m feeling a little wobbly?”
Lauren Gaines:
I mean, I think the first whole section of my book is on the mind, and that’s something that whether people are aware of it or not, because sometimes we have thoughts running through our heads and we don’t realize they’re not helpful or that they’re triggering us. And I think so many… As moms, we’re so busy. There are so many things on our plate. It’s so easy to let that thought slip through, and we don’t realize that we’re feeling a certain way until we explode and yell at our kids. And then it’s like, “Oh man, there’s some tension here. What’s going on?” And then we kind of reflect. But it’s like if we could stop that before it gets to that point of explosion or meltdown or like, “No one ever helps me clean up. I’m the only one,” and just feeling overwhelmed with life, I think we’d be better off.
And so that’s something I’m really passionate about because it’s something… For me too as a mom, my first response could be worry or could be like, “Oh no, this is too much. I don’t know how to deal with this.” And if we can catch that early, we can say, “No, this is not a thought from God.” Because the enemy can plant a thought in our head. He can’t read our minds, but he can throw things out there and he can see how we respond. And if he sees that it makes us spiral and it makes us anxious and it makes us ineffective in our parenting, he’s going to keep throwing that at us.
And so I think as moms, if we can really just pause… Again, we’re so busy. If we can pause and just stop and say, “What am I thinking about and what is running through my head? And is this life giving? Does this line up with what God says about me and about my children?” Because as I said, we’re constantly listening to podcasts, we’re watching TV, there’s never a quiet moment. And so as moms, I think it’s so invaluable for us to understand the power of the mind and to know how to reframe things, to know how to reel that thought in that isn’t helpful. I’m like, “So I know I’m not thinking good thoughts. What do I do now?” I think that’s really helpful to teach moms so that they can teach their kids.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Right, because if you don’t have the skill, it’s awfully hard to pass it on. Lauren, walk me through, as you look at human development… It is really fascinating to me. I’m glad we’ve made the gains in understanding the way the brain develops, how there are portions of the brain that don’t develop until maybe later than we would’ve thought, late teens, early twenties, that kind of thing. But I contrast that with where children were in generations past. Now, we have such a desire in our generation to protect our kids and to really buffer them from things. We don’t want them seeing certain things, on and on. And I’m not just talking from a moral standpoint, I’m just talking from a life and death and stuff happens kind of place. We’re trying to buffer them all the time in certain ways. Yet, I look at kids in the past who were expected to be doing certain things, to have strengths in certain ways, who were exposed very early to the fact that life can be really tough, life can be unfair, life can be gritty.
What are we doing now? And as a generation, are we sort of sabotaging a little bit some of the strength that our kids would have by assuming they can’t handle certain things? I mean, how do we do all of that? Because it just feels so instinctive to want to protect them. But when I look at what previous generations were able to do and how much younger and how much stronger in many ways they seem to be, some of this protectiveness seems to have an end-around that’s leaving our kids feeling not quite as prepared as they begin to launch from our homes. How does all that work out in the pale of human development?
Lauren Gaines:
Such a good question. So good. Because I do notice that too. And I think partly it’s happening because emotional health was not something that was talked about in my generation. It was not… We maybe swung the pendulum too far the other way, and it was like, “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.” And so now my generation has all this knowledge of the mind and feelings and emotions, and maybe we’ve swung the pendulum too far the other way and we’re carrying too much about feelings and we’re never wanting our kids. Because, I mean, let’s just face it, it’s not fun or comfortable to see your child upset or to struggle. That doesn’t feel good. Like you said, that mama bear instinct is so strong. And so to see our kids in pain, nobody wants that. But we have to really take a step back.
And I’m not saying throw your kids to the wolves and just hope they turn out okay, but we need to let them maybe sit in that middle a little longer and work out and see that God is with them, that God will show up, that when they pray and they rely on Him, He is there. And instead of us being their savior and us just saving them, they need to see that they can go to Jesus and He will uphold them and He’ll guide them. Just last night, my daughter was struggling with some anxious thoughts and we were like, “Okay, well, have you prayed?” And she was like, “Well, no.” And I’m like, “Well, let’s ask God.” Because she was like, “I don’t know exactly what’s happening. I feel kind of uncomfortable and I don’t really know why.” And it’s like, “Well, let’s ask God.” And so we prayed together, and then after we realized she’s a much more introverted child. And we have been doing so much with the holidays, and she just hasn’t had that time to be alone with herself. And God brought that to our attention after we prayed.
And so I think that it’s okay to let them struggle because that’s how they learn about themselves. That’s how they learn what works and who they are and how God created them to be. And maybe she needs a little more rest than my other kids, a little more time alone. And that’s okay, that’s a beautiful thing. But if we just save them and never teach them to walk that out… They’re going to go out and the bottom’s going to fall out at some point, they’re not going to know, “If I’m struggling, what do I do?” So we can point them in that direction and say, “I’m not going to just let you figure it out yourself. I’m going to stand with you. And so is God. He’s walking with you through this situation.” But I mean, the Bible says over and over again that we should be joyful when we face hard things. And I read that to my kids and they’re like, “What?” But that’s how our endurance is built. That is how our faith is strengthened, is when we walk through things that are hard.
Julie Lyles Carr:
You are doing such a beautiful job giving her this toolkit of self-regulation and beginning that with prayer because I feel like we’re living in a world right now with kids, at least what I tend to observe, in which we are helping kids identify what they’re unhappy about, but we’re almost making it the responsibility of the others around them to create an environment in which then that feeling will be addressed instead of understanding there are going to be people who disagree with you. There are going to be people who don’t do things the way that you want. There are going to be situations that, yes, based on the way that you’re wired together, makes you a little itchy, but there is something to be said for learning how to self-regulate, and starting that with prayer and then helping her identify what it is in the schedule that’s been going on or whatever, and how she can take steps, that’s just a gorgeous thing, Lauren, I really love that.
You talk in your book Unshakeable Kids about the idea of metacognition. Now that’s a big word, and there may be a listener out there who’s like, “I have no idea what that is.” So talk to me about metacognition and what role it plays in our parenting, how we can become equipped to recognize and understand and help develop tools around this concept in the way that our minds develop?
Lauren Gaines:
Yeah, so metacognition is just thinking about what we’re thinking about. And so a really young child… my four-year old’s not quite there. She just doesn’t have the self-awareness to really realize… and maybe sometimes she’ll say things like, “Oh, I was thinking this” or “that,” and she’ll share some part of her thought life, but she might not have that awareness. But starting around eight, nine, 10, we can start to say to our kids that our thoughts are connected to our feelings and our actions. And so sometimes it’s easy to identify the behavior, like what we did, or… we’re pacing the room. We feel a lot of times kids are able to do this. They’re like, “My belly hurts,” or “I have a headache,” or “I just feel tight.” They’re able to identify the physical symptoms they feel, but they don’t know necessarily what that means for a feeling.
Like, “Well, maybe you’re feeling anxious” or “Maybe you’re feeling worried or stressed or overwhelmed.” And so if we can connect those dots for them and see even when you are feeling overwhelmed or stressed, there’s a thought in your head. You may be thinking, “This math homework is so hard. It’s always so hard. I’m never going to get it.” And that’s going to affect how you feel and that’s going to affect how you act. And so pausing and teaching our kids to think about what they’re thinking about is going to be so helpful, because often we think, “Well, the situation needs to change,” or “They need to stop doing this because they’re the ones who are annoying me,” and it’s like, your situation doesn’t have to change for you to be happy or for you to have peace. You just need to know what your thoughts are and get ahold of them.
And so one exercise in my book that I have, they’re called brain builders, which is a real practical thing you can do with your child in that moment. Now, again, this is not for a 4-year-old. But for an late elementary child, set a timer for two to three minutes and say, “You’re just going to write down everything that comes to your mind.” And it’s kind of like a brain dump. And adults do this too. But it just gets them to think about what they’re thinking about. And if they’re not good at handwriting, they could just verbally tell you. And sometimes they’ll see, “Wow, I thought about something so random and then it connected to this thought,” and you just see how your brain works, which is kind of a beautiful thing.
Julie Lyles Carr:
I love that because for a lot of us… I mean, even in adult ages and stages, sometimes we forget to think about what we’re thinking about. We’re just letting our brains kind of lead us around. My youngest child, one of my twins, we have a hilarious video of him, Lauren, because we’re sitting at a soccer practice, he’s sitting… We were parked, and so he’s sitting up front with me just randomly talking. I started filming him and he turns to me and he goes… he was probably about four, maybe, at the time, and he said, “My brain just keeps making me do stuff. My brain just keeps telling me to hit my brother. And I know I’m not supposed to hit my brother, but then my brain, it’s like… it just makes me like a robot and I just do it.” And we had the most wild conversation about metacognition.
He didn’t even realize that’s what he was doing. And I reflected on that and I thought, “Man, but how often is it that I’m kind of doing the same thing, just being led around by my brain, not even thinking about what I’m thinking about?” And so this place of being really intentional to help our kids be aware and to notice, what an amazing thing for them to learn early on how to be able to do that. Now, I have a question for you about parenting styles, because a lot of us may have been raised in parenting styles, particularly in faith homes because there were some really interesting books and approaches back in the day that were extremely kind of under the thumb. You got to break a kid’s spirit in order to make sure that they are going to walk in the way in which they should walk, some things like that.
And so there were a lot of us that in response to that went, “Well, I’m not doing it that way. I don’t know exactly how I’m going to do it, but I’m not doing it that way.” In the process of putting this book together, you ran across some research in which what you are calling “authoritative parenting style” seems to be the most effective. I wanted you to unpack that for me because I’ve got to be honest, Lauren, when I hear the words “authoritative parenting style,” I understand there’s one way that could be defined, but there’s a whole other way that I’m like, “Ooh, are we trying to squish the individuality out of our children? Are we not honoring who God created them to be because now we’re putting them on our agenda?” So unpack all that for me, how you define that and why you find that that style can be so effective? Unpack all that mystery for me.
Lauren Gaines:
Yeah. And I think there are different interpretations of this because I’ve seen different movements. Take the textbook… This was in my human development textbook, some of the research I cite in my book about how people have better outcomes socially, emotionally, physically with parents who use this approach. So there is an interpretation, but the way I interpret it is that we have this balance, this beautiful balance of love and control and respect and discipline. And so we give our kids choices, but they’re developmentally appropriate. And instead of kind of letting the kid rule the roost, we’re letting them decide, “Hey, between these two outfits, which one do you want to wear to preschool?” And giving them things that… I don’t want to say that they don’t matter, but they’re not as big decisions like, “Hey…” I think when my kids were younger, we kind of asked them, “What do you want to try? Do you want to try soccer or gymnastics?”
But my son… here’s one example… wanted to do baseball, and he was five and the baseball was three to four times a week, which is crazy to me because I am really protective of our family time and everything. And I’m like, “I don’t know, bud. I just don’t know. Maybe we should hold off a year.” And so we made that decision as his parent. But there are decisions he can make that are developmentally appropriate. And so you want to have that heart-to-heart connection where you’re valuing their thoughts and their feelings, but ultimately, you are the one who’s in control. You know better as a parent, you have more wisdom, you have more life experience, and so you’re going to be kind of navigating and showing them the path and giving them choices when it is appropriate.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Right. And that really makes a lot of sense to me because I think we have experienced those families, probably a lot of us, where kids are just running amuck and those kids actually have a sense of insecurity because they don’t know where the floor is, they just don’t know what baseline is. And then we’ve also seen kids too, I’m sure, who the parents have them so under the thumb that they really struggle with a sense of insecurity because they don’t know how to make decisions, they don’t know how to trust their own ability to make some choices. And so somewhere in that middle… I see what you’re talking about… that there is that line that really is appropriate for us to think about in our parenting and how we are navigating with our kids. How do we work past some of the things in our own experiences as children that our tendency can be to go 180 degrees?
So like I was using in the previous topic we were just discussing, if we were raised in something that was extremely authoritative… and I’m going to use that word in the most extreme sense… and then we tend to want to go fully the other way. Or I’ve also seen people who were raised in homes in which they felt like there wasn’t enough structure. They felt like they got into all kinds of stuff they shouldn’t have gotten into because things felt so loosey goosey. How do we do the work within ourselves to really come up with a strategy and an approach in our parenting that makes sense, that is not simply reactive? Because wow, there’s something in parenting in which we can either just continue the pattern in which we were raised, even if it was something we thought was positive, we can still continue something that might not have a place in our home, or we can react so strongly to something that we really disliked that we’re not trying to be modulated in it, we’re just sweeping it all the way to the other side. So how do we do that?
Lauren Gaines:
It’s such a great question because I think this is a real thing. And here’s a really kind of not silly example, but not life altering example. But my mom grew up with a very strict father, and it was like, if you miss… There were four girls, so she had to mow the grass, and if you miss one blade of grass, she said… You would be yelled at. And so she was like, “I’m not going to do this to my kids.” But then my mom really didn’t make us ever make our beds. There was not a lot of teaching or instructing on kind of organization, and now me and my brother and sister are not the best at that. And so I think it was totally like, “Well, I don’t want to be like that as my dad was, so I’m going to be the opposite.” And so I always feel like the middle is the best, right?
Julie Lyles Carr:
Right.
Lauren Gaines:
And I talk about this in my book, a chapter on wounds, and wounds sounds like a big scary word. And there are some wounds that are really heavy, and maybe we were physically, sexually, emotionally abused as kids, and so we need to work with a counselor to walk through that and see how that’s affecting our parenting. But there’s also smaller wounds or nicks, things that maybe our parents did that we didn’t like or things at school that happened that made us feel uncomfortable, and sometimes we parent out of those wounds. And so it is so valuable, I think, to sit with Jesus and just ask him, “Lord, is there anything in my life that is still like an open wound that you want healed up? And is there anything that I’m parenting out of that is not in line with you, but it’s maybe from a hurt or for something I experienced?”
And we have to invite the Holy Spirit in and just allow time for reflection and a pause. Because in the Bible… and I don’t remember the exact scripture, but it says, we might not always be able to discern the intents of the heart. And so we need God and we need His word to do that for us. And that’s why I think it’s so valuable for us to be connected with a community or connected in Bible study and have our own time of devotion because God’s word and his Holy Spirit are going to point out to us areas where we’re maybe overreacting or maybe we’re not doing enough because something happened to us as a child. And I don’t think we need to beat ourselves up for that, but just thank Him that he brought it to our attention and ask Him how to move forward.
Julie Lyles Carr:
How do we… because again, this idea of being in a faith community, we’ve talked about what we want home to be more like and what we want parenting to be more like, and yet we’re seeing a lot of people in our time who are trying to figure out what to do with their kids because they felt like they carried some wounds from their faith communities. So what do we need to be aware of as parents looking toward to make sure that we are engaged in a faith community that is really going to help our kids experience this place of feeling unshakeable instead of really rocked when they get out into the world? What are the things that you look for in a healthy faith community?
Lauren Gaines:
Another great question, because we actually ended up, through a lot of prayer and confirmation from God, changing churches through the pandemic because we felt like there was not support for our kids in our previous church. And it was really important to us that our kids had a community, and it kind of felt like everything just fell out and there was nothing. And so we looked for churches… obviously we wanted sound doctrine and all that… but that had a thriving community. And I think something that is really important in all areas of life, whether it’s watching a movie or your kids were at a friend’s house, checking in with them and saying like, “Hey, did anything happen?” Or “How does that make you feel when you see this or when you hear that?” Because unfortunately, we are all living in a fallen world and we’re imperfect.
And so there are going to be things… Maybe someone said something, and it was in a faith community, and it wasn’t meant to be hurtful, but it did hurt us. And so I think we need to check in with our kids, but also, it’s okay to… I talked with the children’s pastor and was like, “Hey, what curriculum are you using and what are you teaching? And what is your heart? What do you use your vision for the kids in this ministry?” And I think it’s okay to do that. As parents, if we’re going to put our kids in their care, we have the right to ask those questions.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Right, right. And I think sometimes we don’t want to be that parent who’s questioning everything or whatever. But I can tell you, it’s interesting that I definitely have had conversations with my kids who are now adults about a couple of things that they experienced, some comments that were made from someone in a leadership perspective in a youth group they were in, or something like that, that very negatively impacted… And again, I’m not in all suggesting that we should not be in faith communities. I think we should be in faith communities, but the importance of listening to what our kids’ experiences are in those faith communities, that it’s not a resistance to being in church. It’s not a resistance to the gospel that there are… Because churches are made of humans and humans are going to mess up. There are going to be times that our kids are going to experience some stuff, even within a faith community, that is hurtful.
And so our willingness as parents to talk about that, I think leads to a place where they’re going to have a greater opportunity to be more unshakeable in their faith as they face things, as they launch from our homes, rather than feeling like they weren’t listened to or kind of ganged up on or whatever the thing is. So the wisdom in really helping and listening to them about the experience they’re having, I really love that.
Lauren Gaines:
Yeah, and I think too, one thing when I talk to parents, it’s like they didn’t learn conflict resolution, maybe, growing up in their home, and so they don’t know how to handle it with kids, with siblings or friends, or maybe even someone at church. And so if we can walk our kids through that, what a beautiful thing to learn. What a great skill to have to say, “Hey, that hurt my feelings.” And we can say it in loving ways, but… and we need to use the sermon, whether it’s a confrontational moment or not, but I think if we can talk to our kids and talk them through that, that’s only going to help them as they get older.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Right, right. Oh, you’re so right. That’s just… That conflict resolution piece, so often, for many of us, it was either “Avoid, avoid, avoid,” or “Fight, fight, fight,” and leave it all dangling. So to really learn how to do that well, I think, is a tool that we definitely want our kids to have. Well, Lauren, we could go on and on because you have so many great topics and insight when it comes to helping our kids be resilient and learn how to navigate their emotions and how to think about what they’re thinking, so tell the listener where they can find out more about you, find more of your content, find your book, all this stuff?
Lauren Gaines:
Yeah. So my book Unshakable Kids is on Amazon and wherever books are sold. And I have a website that is inspired-motherhood.com. And on Instagram, I hang out the most, inspired.motherhood. And I have prayer guides, I have one-sheets on how to talk to your kids about certain topics or how to help them process emotions and feelings. And so I just love connecting with moms and want to provide biblical truths on how to raise kids in today’s world. Because sometimes it’s hard to know whether like, “Does this match up a scripture?” There’s so many parenting styles out there, it’s hard to know which one is true. So hopefully I can help parents navigate that.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Awesome. Well, Lauren, thank you again for your time. I really appreciate you being here today.
Lauren Gaines:
Thank you so much, Julie.
Julie Lyles Carr:
And you’ll be able to find all of those links that Lauren mentioned in the show notes that Rebecca puts together each and every week, so be sure and check that out. And I love to connect with you too on allmomdoes.com, AllMomDoes does on the socials. And I’m Julie Lyles Carr, usually the most on Instagram, like Lauren would say, and she is usually the most on Instagram. You can find me there. Hey, do us a solid, and if this episode has been helpful to you, be sure and grab that link and send it to somebody who you think would really benefit by hearing the things that we’ve been talking about today. That really is the best way that you can come alongside us with the podcast and help get the word out about all these great people who are on and all the amazing things that they have to say. And I’ll see you next time on the AllMomDoes Podcast.
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