Welcome to the first episode in a new series that I’m calling Sharing Your Parenting Mojo, where I interview listeners about what they’ve learned from the show as well as the parenting challenges they’re facing.  Today we talk with Ontario, Canada-based listener https://www.jessicabarnes.ca/wp-content/endurance-page-cache/_index.html (Jess Barnes), a registered social worker and parent of almost-two about a mindfulness tool that can help us to stay calm when our children push our buttons.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Sharing Your Parenting Mojo, https://forms.gle/xDWkGUUr4QvYS3UG9 (please complete the form located here) and I’ll be in touch if there’s a fit…



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Jen: 00:57 Hello and welcome to this new segment of the Your Parenting Mojo podcast, which we're calling Sharing Your Parenting Mojo. I'm here today with listener Jess and we're going to talk about what she's learned from the show about having developmentally appropriate expectations for our children and also white privilege and we'll chat about how mindfulness can help us to be better parents. Stay tuned if you need some help with that to learn about a challenge that I'm going to run on exactly this topic in just a few weeks. Hey Jess, do you want to tell us a bit about yourself and your family?
Jess: 01:25 Hi. Yeah, sure. Thanks so much for having me. My name is Jess. My husband is Taylor. He is a marketer of an IT company. We are the parents of a very busy, almost two-year-old son and we have another baby on the way due in October, so we're very busy.
Jen: 01:39 Congratulations.
Jess: 01:41 Thank you. It's very exciting. I'm a Maternal Mental Health therapist, so I work with moms who are either pregnant or have new babes and are struggling with kind of a variety of things from birth, relating to birth and postpartum, but I've been a social worker for about 10 years, so that's us.
Jen: 01:59 All right. And you have a business as well, don't you?
Jess: 02:02 Yes. Yes. So, I work in private practice as a Maternal Mental Health therapist and a postpartum doula. I worked in a couple clinics here where we live in Southwestern Ontario. And then I offer some online counseling as well, again, geared towards moms who are pregnant or have new babes and are struggling maybe with those postpartum adjustment challenges as well as pregnancy and infant loss.
Jen: 02:25 Uh-huh. Wow! That's some heavy stuff. So, let's talk about the show. You’ve been listening for a while now. Is that right?
Jess: 02:35 Yeah. I think I came across you probably when my son was just little. I was actually a follower of Janet Lansbury and the RIE approach and through my searching for other resources I found you.
Jen: 02:46 Well, welcome. What have you learned from some of the episodes that you've enjoyed?
Jess: 02:52 Most recently I think, your White Privilege and Racism ones have really struck a chord with me. As a social worker, it’s something that's been at the forefront of my mind, but I think it's really driven home for me how important it is for my husband and I that our son is raised with this awareness and knowledge of the privilege that he has and what that gives him and what he needs to do to kind of offset that and help others as he grows. I think it's really made me realized how important that is. And your last couple of episodes have given me some really great hands-on tools in terms of the conversations I can have with him. I love the conversation you had about kind of balancing the child-led approach to development that RIE really encourages, but also how do you manage that wanting to cultivate certain values within your family.
Jen: 03:46 Yes. It has been such a challenge for me.
Jess: 03:49 Yes. So, I found that conversation really helpful. And again, I think just being aware that I need to figure out how we're going to implement this in our family and what those conversations are going to look like, and...