Family-focused topics from Jason and Kim. We’ll talk about empowering your kids to manage their own self-care. Things like showering schedule, physical activity, grooming (haircuts, nail trims), and keeping their room tidy. We’ll also debrief the success of our first family trip in over 2 years and some tricks we used to manage anxiety and schedules.
Follow Jason on Twitter, Follow Kim on Twitter, Follow Stranger Studios on Twitter
Transcript: Season 2, Episode 12
Welcome back to that talking thing. I’m Kim I’m Jason. This is episode 12, season two. We have some life family topics, life topics, family topics, same thing. I wrote this topic a few weeks ago. I’m vague on what I meant with it. So we’re going to peel back the layers of this onion and try to understand what I meant, but it’s probably related to our kids.
They’re 10 they’re 13, they’re getting older and the topic is empowering. Your. To care for themselves. When I think of this topic, I think it must relate to hygiene because I’m the kind of a hygiene, I’m the protein police and I’m the hygiene police in our home. And by hygiene, it’s trimming your nails, getting a haircut, keeping your room kind of clean washing well and not smelling using deodorant.
Did I say using Q-tips so you don’t have ear wax kind of just falling out onto your AirPods? Yeah. All of those things. It’s probably rooted in this fear that people will at school will say my kids, the smelly kid, or the gross kid that the dirty kid or the kid covered in dog and cat hair. I don’t know.
Hygiene is important to me to put on. Not that I’m like fancy and well put together, but I’m clean. Yeah. How does the topic of empowering kids to care for yourself? Translate as a mysterious topic? Yeah, that is a challenge. I think it’s interesting. Your word choice, empowering the kids to care for themselves.
Cause it makes it seem like the kind of thing that we should like facilitate. Um, but like what you’re also like for themselves or like yeah, empowering them. Like they have a toothbrush, you know, like what other sort of empowering, um, receiving reminders from us that your nails are getting too long. Your wax is in, you’re hanging out right here, or it is time for that shower.
So empowerment to me means handing off the job of doing it, of communicating that it must be done to somebody else and putting them in charge that’s empowerment. Yeah. I think the two of finding a way to get them to care about these things that they maybe don’t care about. And sometimes other parents or books will tell us like, well, just wait, when they go through purity, they’ll get interested in significant others and start to care about these things when they don’t.
And you’re like, I know some like 20 year olds that don’t seem to care that they stank. So I don’t want one of them
but that’s like, yeah, how do we get that? So it’s weird that trust as a lot of parenting is kind of like it’s okay. Just love your kid and trust that it’ll be okay. But if we care about this, we got to talk about it. Like, I guess we could care about ourselves if we’re always like, yo your breast Mao’s dude, or like making fun of them, um, or something, or like commenting, like, but it’s so rude.
And like that one guy who, uh, there was some interview. Uh, a guy was talking, he studies like super successful people, become presidents and stuff like that. And he said like the formula is to have one parent that loves you unconditionally, no matter what. And another parent, that’s like a hard ass and you can never please, and is like barely there.
And like, you know, you always want their affection and you re. And then I think the interview was like, oh, so how do you do that with your kids? He was like, oh no, we both loved them unconditionally. Like, you’re not going to like, just yell at your kid. So like, if you really want them to care about that, you could yell at them a lot.
I often say that I hear my dad literally in my head when I leave a light on or I leave a door open and it that’s kind of harmless thing, but it’s just that he kind of yelled at me about those things. So often. So I’m sure if we yelled at them all the time, I don’t know. Sometimes it seems not, like I said, it’s like every day you brush your teeth by.
Yeah. I don’t know. There’s things that we’ve tried. We’ve tried a very hands-off approach for a short period of time. We’ve said I don’t, I don’t know, play as long as you want eat as much snacks as you want. I give up. Our children haven’t put boundaries of their own in place through that. But I think something that we are doing, we did it today with our son.
We involved him in setting his own schedule cause he’s, he’s off Scalia’s spring break this week. So we were on a trip. Our trip ended yesterday today through Monday, including Monday he’s home and he can set his own schedule within boundaries. He operates well within a schedule. It’s a quality of his that we’ve recognized.
But maybe that’s a version of empowering him to take care of himself involving him in setting the schedule for his time. Yeah. Rather than say, do what you think you should do this vague, uh, no schedule schedule that’s he can’t live that way. He needs a schedule. So the Virgin today was, and mom set your schedule.
It was, we collaborated. That’s a good answer. I often I would bring that out on Marin when I was, uh, I don’t know if I like punishing her or doing something, but I would say, well, I was like, what would you do? Like if your daughter was doing this, you know, and she’s like, yeah, that’d be hard. I was like, yeah, like, I kinda like, if I let you stay up really late, like, I won’t be a good dad, so what am I supposed to do?
And so like involving them that way helps a lot. Um, I had another thought here. I don’t come back. I’m still, I mean, they’re kind of pre-puberty puberty age. Maybe that will still happen. Maybe they’ll still be paper D and start to care. You see it at some things, you know, I think Marin brushes, like sometimes she does burst long enough, but like she does all those things.
Would that be unprompted and like, it’s getting better. So it’s good to see it getting better. Um, I find myself often thinking back to when I was a kid and maybe I think too romantically about who I was as a kid, but I think I was. A kid that was always compliant and kept clean. And I learned to cook at a young age.
I took care of myself. I kept my room really tidy and not because my parents were forcing me to, or not because the opposite that they were unclean or untidy or didn’t make meals, it was like my nature. And I developed that value. Yeah. I don’t know how we can. I feel like all of the above are true.
Aligned with your parents and become that adult. You are the opposite of them become that adult or you’ve kind of formulate your own variation of it. Yeah. Good luck. Okay. It’s like our cough. Here’s incredibly difficult thing. I don’t have the answers. Good luck, everyone. It will be a slow process to translating what it means to empower our kids, to take care of themselves.
But I think handing over the responsibility of remembering self care to a degree. Yeah, you have to give them the chance to fail. Oh, I remember I was gonna say, there’s a story where we made pizza while you were away like a frozen pizza. It came out the oven. It was crazy hot. And I cut it up and I told Marin like, watch out it’s hot.
And she said, I don’t care. And took a bite, like burn the roof of her mouth. And then like the next few days, She was like, oh, it really hurts every time she beats. Oh, I’m really sorry, babe. But honestly, but in my head I was like, oh, she kind of learned a lesson, like to not eat hot food, but when you got back then like the next week we had pizza, I think it was pizza or something else that was really hot.
And I was like, watch, I was really hot. And I was like, oh, she, like, she knows. She’s just like, she’s like, I don’t care. And ADA, it didn’t burn her this time. But I was like, I guess she didn’t really learn that lesson. So sometimes yeah, like how many times? I don’t know, but definitely saying stuff over and over.
Do you remember that used to run? They were oppositional so I can see why she didn’t care. Just because you said it. Yeah, she must’ve learned something from burning her mouth. Um, but maybe it takes more than one time touching a hot stove. They used to run down the hill to the bus, stop. The bus, picks them up at the bottom of the hill and they were run on.
And like, every time I was with them, I’d be like, don’t run, don’t run walk. And it was like every day, not because they were running on a flat surface because they were running on like river rocks. Yeah. Um, I was mixing up my thing, my chair, cause I was like, how many times do I got to tell him also like with the kids, like, um, waking the dog up with their face when the sleeping and you’re right in her face, like, Ugh.
And I’m like talk to a break. You and then one time I said, And I was like, I was like, I don’t know, every day, every single day, at least like 10 times a day. So let me think. Like, that’s like 3,650 times in the past year. My whole life I’m spending like 1% of my time telling you not to put your face in front of the dog when it’s sleeping, but it, obviously it doesn’t stick in.
So I don’t care get bit by the dog. I kind of flipped. I did exactly that. I don’t know if that was in the moment we talked last week about, you know, uh, staying calm. I, you stay calm. There’s been a couple of cases, but it’s been better. So it’s kind of like, I don’t know, maybe like the outburst work, it kind of like, it’s like it stuck in their head or like, like that.
I don’t know, like that helped, but I don’t think it always, I used to just say like, you know, I was, I was kind of beat as a kid and I was like, I remember being beat, but I don’t ever remember the lesson. There was always a lesson, which is, here’s why I’m hitting you. And it’s like, um, I don’t remember. I was like, yeah, just so I always think of that as like, well, if you’re, you know, you could think like I’m doing this to kind of get their attention, you know, a hundred percent get their attention, but they’re not listening anymore, but maybe like my anger was wasn’t directed as forced with them or something.
I don’t know. But that did seem to help a little bit since that, or maybe I, yeah. How different the parenting style was in that moment was. Yeah. Yeah. You can only use it like every once in a while. Yeah. Don’t overuse the data freaks out moment. Yeah. Yeah. It, yeah. It’s hit or miss when I, when I do that.
Yeah. Yeah. I’ll try it again. This week. I’ll be out my kids. I’ll let you report back. I don’t know. Is it empowering? Your children to care for themselves is not like a model. Good behavior thing. We talked about modeling good behavior before, but I mean, we shower regular. We try to eat healthy. Yeah, on the topic of eating healthy, we should transition to our next topic, which is that we took our first family vacation, the first family vacation, where we took a plane.
Since COVID, since COVID, we’ve traveled by car and had kind of a modest, modest vacation, we flew to Puerto Rico or Jason’s father and stepmom and extended family live. We took the kids and we did a lot of planning and advance because we know that our kids are kind of introverted slash have been affected by COVID differently than us.
Um, and that was a, it was a big change for them to take this trip, but all the pre-planning worked. It went really well. I was kind of worried. We, we, we had some. Vacations in the past, last time we went to Disney world, I was like, I’ll never come here. Like the whole family hates everyone. Like why did we put ourselves through this?
And, um, there’s kind of times when we were, we’re doing a lot with our kids, but they just want to be home like vegging or something. And so it’s. Screens and things and getting them away from them could be a challenge. And it was kind of like, man, it’s like weird to like spend all this time and money and effort to get them somewhere.
And then are we going to have like a challenge, like getting them involved? But, so I was a little worried about that, but it went well. Like I said, it was, it was kind of planning, I think, like we know like our son in particular and our, our daughter to like need a schedule. So like we were on top of that every morning, this.
Message to the family slack list is what the schedule is. So they could expect things which really helps. I feel like I said, I told you also that we, um, like watch ourselves with the kids. We didn’t what I just said, like freak out on the kids, right? Yeah. We were like, no, no, we caught her. There was moments where like, it was a little fight and I could see like, man on a different day, we were like, I’m not going to let her talk to me that way.
Or like, or I’m going to like, Um, I don’t know. We just knew like, we’re like, oh, like we were egging our kids on or kind of like annoying them or do you mean teachable moments? We didn’t embrace any choosing battles and ignoring teachable moments. So we cut it off at the past. Like we didn’t allow it to, oh, what was the one?
My, my son kind of had his phone out in a moment when he wasn’t supposed to. And like, normally there’d be some kind of like parental tone of, like I told you not to have that here, you know, we were gonna put away and he was, oh, I’m sorry. And we’re like, no, it’s okay. You’re like, what were you tracking?
Like, like, so we kind of like affected that like, oh, okay. Yeah. Um, like let him slide on that. And weren’t as, and his phone out, we were like in the security line at the airport and. I didn’t just say, please put your phone away. I said, please keep your phone in your pocket until we’re sitting at our gate.
So I like got very granular as like for now, until this long, we made sure they were fed on time. Kind of like monitor. Although I gave them a lot of sugar at one time, like Jason gave our kids so much. They did at the bakery. So had they got something I can walk away? You can say no grass. Yes. Adios. No, post-race it was a vacation, but you know what?
Even then we had that thought, I don’t know if you express it out loud, but some of you were just kinda like sugar again and more sugar. But even that could have been like a weird February. We handled it. And then we talked and we said, yeah, that’s vacation. And then we had a conversation with like, the kids were like, well, Hey, this is like some more sugar, but it’s okay to do this.
This is not like, what are we worried about? We’re worried that you might get out. So like, as long as you guys are cooperative and as good as you have been, like, you can eat a donut and you’ll be okay, like, okay. And we almost got like that, like tacit contract with them, which works on this vacation. I dunno.
And we, you know, we scheduled time for them to have free time, even though. No. I was really worried because our daughter is a very deep sense of fairness and equality. I was really worried that because she was waking up two, three hours later than Isaac. Every morning, he’ll be up with me by seven. Yeah.
She might not get up until 8 30, 9, 9 30. He would have already had that much time playing his computer, playing on his phone. I think she just didn’t notice. We talked about at a meeting recently, too, so maybe. But maybe yeah, we said, we were talking about, I was worried that she would squeeze back those hours, but even when we would get home from events to the Airbnb, our Airbnb had a simple kidney pool instead of getting showered and going to play on her iPad, he would shower right away, go play on his computer.
She would jump in the pool and play more. And then the one day she was like, oh really? I just want to like lay in bed and. And we figured it out and we were like, oh, but you’ll get this time here. Like on the schedule. It’s like, okay. Yeah. So I think, I think building in that time, like, I know I need to realize you asked me, should we invite friends over tonight?
And I was like, nah, like, I’m kinda like, like socialized out, even if it was just our family. And like, I haven’t had like a long time. They were also on vacation. They had a pet pass away while they were traveling and some other things in their family were chaotic. So I know they’re not, they didn’t want to, but I, I felt like that was the thing I could offer because I know getting back from a trip for the mom is like grocery shop, crazy time, clean up, put stuff away, laundry city.
It’s there’s a lot that happens. Your house is chaotic. Cause whoever was watching. Your pets at home left things in disarray. Like there’s so much work involved on vacation for me before, during and after that. And you were helpful with unpacking, but I just thought when we woke up at three in the morning, so I had a great nap.
I slept for two hours. Just thanks for letting me sleep. I just got up at eight o’clock last night. So I watched. Oh, cool. All that talk about Isaac’s returning to the sea. I was like, I quit my ass. That was a good trip where do want to go next? Oh, okay. Um, Hm. She been Hawaii. It’s on the bucket list for kids.
And I talked about that for that, but I also, I mean, we bought the river house and I kind of want to go there and use it instead of. Um, and it’s apparently the home of a former nudists. So if you wanted to enter your forties and a clothing optional way, it would be, I feel like I’m due for a big change. I thought it would be like, go on a diet or something, but you had new glasses or a solid pair.
I’d kind of like, I’m going to end up with glasses. Maybe I’ll just stop wearing clothes. No. Stay tuned for episode 13.
I don’t know. Julie was when I was doing work on our river house with Julie. She was, um, reflecting on travel and all the places she wants to go. And I don’t have a list like that. Oh, I really don’t. My favorite thing is. Doing nothing. We haven’t been to like a resort in Mexico for a while, so it’d be fun tracking Caribbean.
Oh, so that’s what you want it to be something new? I don’t know. I mean, we’re all little crazy. Now. The kids are getting to the age where we could go to like Europe and look at museums and stuff. And as long as we have a skill set in some free time, um, keep them all fed. Like we could probably do stuff like.
We should have good, like, you know, some old buildings, Isaac school schedule for 20 22, 23. It’s published. So we know our weeks. Yeah. Alaska was fun when I went to therapy. Cool. For the kids. Hmm. Yeah. I don’t think big enough, but I’ll try to, yeah, we never get comments on our podcasts, but if somebody did have a comment of where it was scrambled to that you went to that.
The only place on my list is New Zealand. Oh yeah. I want to go where they filmed Lord of the rings. Okay. Yeah. I think there’s like a park or something. There’s just like a thing it’s probably just like one mound of a plaque. Bilbo Baggins house. Can you stay in the little Hobbit house? That’d be great. I, they must have something like that somewhere.
You’re very tall. You’d be the Gandalf. I’ll be the Hobbit. You’d be an Isaac’s tall also. Oh, well you guys stay in the habit house. We’ll go. I’m going to keep thinking about where to travel next. We should book stuff. Wow. Right? Yeah. It’s good to be planning. That’s a great thing. It’s like to have a trip on the horizon is like a life hack to be happier.
You get something to look forward to. So we’ll get all of that. Give us your ideas. Thanks. Happy travels. Thanks.