In this podcast, Dr. Tim Jordan describes how parents’ past unresolved issues and emotions can be at the root of why they nag, overparent, and get triggered by their kids. The awareness of these forces will allow people to more consciously and effectively parent their children.
Links to Dr. Jordan’s previous podcasts that are related to this podcast:
Understanding the effects of touch points on children and parents
Are you an unreasonable parent? Perhaps there is a ghost in your nursery.
Find more valuable resources from Dr. Jordan at his website: https://drtimjordan.com
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Listen to the podcast here
What Parents Are Really Saying Underneath Their Nagging
Introduction
I’m back here with a new episode of the show. I want to give a shout-out quickly before I start to all my audience who live in Australia and Ireland in particular because, after the United States, those are the two countries where I have the most readers. Thank you so much. You guys live a long way away, so I appreciate you tuning into this show every week.
I’m going to talk about a topic that a lot of you will resonate with. It’s about nagging, and mostly about why parents nag. Most of us probably know at some level that it’s not very effective. I had a dad in my office not too long ago who was complaining about his daughter. He said, “I have to tell her five times at least. I end up raising my voice, and then she finally responds to what I wanted her to do.” I let him know that he has done an incredible job of training his daughter to need five reminders and hear his octave and his tone go up, and then he means business.
When I hear those kinds of stories from parents, I pretty much have learned over the many years I’ve counseled kids that parents are at fault there. They’ve not been good with their boundaries. They have not followed through in a kind but firm way and immediately. They’ve allowed their kids to learn that they don’t really mean business until the 5th or 6th time.
The other part about the nagging thing is that it’s draining. It makes parenting not feel very fun. You end up having to do more talking and more reminding, and yet, you end up doing more for your kids the things that they should be doing for themselves. I want to talk mostly in this episode about what’s going on for parents that’s causing them to nag.
Nagging is draining. It doesn’t make parenting feel very fun. You end up having to do more talking, reminding, and doing more for your kids than they should be doing for themselves. Share on XWhat Parents Are Really Saying Underneath Their Nagging
Oftentimes, there are stories below the surface that are being triggered or that cause us to be extra worried and extra into our kids’ business, which oftentimes ends up looking like nagging. A lot of times, those stories are below the surface. Meaning, they’re subconscious. You’re not aware of those in those moments. What are your parents really saying underneath their nagging, their upset, or their anger? It’s something below the surface.
Let me give you a quick example. I was giving a talk years ago at an all-girls high school. It was at the beginning of the school year. I was talking to the parents of freshman girls. The girls were there for the beginning part, and then I stayed with the parents and then the girls went with the school counselor to do something. I had the parents for maybe an hour. One of the things we were supposed to do was to come up with some things that were bothering the parents about their daughters and vice versa, things that their parents were doing that irritated or upset their daughters.
I remember one of the days, I asked a question, “What’s something that’s frustrating you with your freshman high school daughter?” One dad raised his hand and said, “I’ve got one. My daughter is always up in her room. She likes to keep the door closed. She’s up there doing God only knows what. She’s on her phone talking to her friends. I don’t like it. She’s up in the room too much.”
I had a mom who was transcribing on a board. We were making a list to show the girls later. She started to write and I said, “Don’t write that yet.” I said to the dad, “It sounds like you’re frustrated because your daughter’s spending a lot of time in her room. Is that right?” He said, “Yes.” I said, “What’s your concern about that?” He said, “The rest of the family is downstairs and we’re playing board games. We’re doing some fun things together and she’s up in her room. She’s not doing stuff with the family. She’s up there all the time talking to her friends.” I said, “Okay.”
The mom started to write and I said, “Don’t write yet.” I said, “It sounds like what I hear you saying is that you’re frustrated because the rest of the family is doing things together and she’s up in a room and she’s missing out on doing family time with you guys. Is that what you’re saying?” He said, “Yes.” I said, “What’s your concern about that?” He then paused and went inside, if you will, and said, “What I’m concerned about is I miss my daughter.” I told the mom, “Write that on the board.”
The nagging, being on her about being in her room, and all that, the real issue wasn’t that she was in a room. The real issue was he felt disconnected from her. That would’ve been a much more valuable lead-in to having a conversation with his daughter than talking about something else. I hope you get the idea. That’s what I’m talking about. Is there something below the surface that might be triggering you to do the nagging and being on your kids too much?
Let me give you several more examples so it will make it more clear. Also, you might find yourself in some of these stories. I have a similar story before I go on. There was a mom in my office not too long ago. She was on her daughter a lot. She was crabbing at her, picking at her, and all this stuff. What they came to realize was this mom also felt disconnected. She felt like the only time she got any kind of connection with her daughter was when she started to nag at her or pick at her. Her daughter didn’t like it and they ended up in arguments, but unconsciously, for the mom, that connection was better than none. That made a lot of sense to me, to the mom, and to the daughter.
I’ve had this story more than once. A mom was pushing her daughter to be more outgoing. In essence, she was saying, “She’s too shy.” This girl at the time was in third grade. She said, “We go to a birthday party with girls who are in her class at school and she’s clinging onto my leg. She doesn’t want me to leave. We go to any new place and she’s doing the same thing. I noticed at school from up there with events in the classroom that she’s off by herself. She’s very quiet.” This mom had been pushing this girl to talk more, to introduce herself, etc., and the girl was shrinking every time her mom did that.
I talked to the mom and asked her about her story a little bit. The mom related that she had been really shy as a little girl as well. She was shy to the point where she said, “I didn’t have many friends in school. I felt so self-conscious about introducing myself to people. I was always worried about what people thought about me, so I stayed quiet. I’m quiet by nature.”
She said, “I felt like I missed out a lot because I didn’t really have a good friend group. Times when I could have gone to things, I didn’t because I was so worried I was too shy. I don’t want that for my daughter.” It was because of her story that she didn’t want her daughter to live through what she had, so she was on her daughter. She was, and I find this a lot, putting her story too much into her daughter’s story. Her daughter was somewhat shy. She was a slow-to-warm kind of kid, but she wasn’t too shy. She was slow to warm.
There were lots of stories that her mom could tell me about, like if given the time, she did warm up, and then she would talk and would integrate with the kids, but the mom was bringing extra energy. She was nagging, reminding, and all this because of her story that was getting intermingled with her daughters. Once she became aware of that and she could take her story out, she wasn’t as concerned anymore, and it gave the girl the space and the room to come forward more. She wasn’t in a power struggle with her mom about it.
I had a girl who came to my office when she was in 7th or 8th grade one time. She was a really high-level soccer player. She was playing club soccer, traveling around. and all that. She came in because of a lot of things. One thing she came in for was that her dad was always on her. He was coaching her from the stands as some parents want to do. He is yelling at the coaches, telling her what to do, and coaching her from the stands. No matter what the score was in the game and no matter how she played, on the car ride home, he coached her all the way home. It was driving her crazy. She had tried to tell him and he said, “I’m trying to make you better.” He wasn’t hearing it.
I asked him about his story one day in the office. His story when he was a kid was this. His parents both worked full-time. They were uber-busy people and never went to his games. All the way through his childhood, even into early high school, they never went to his games. That really bothered him. When he was a sophomore in high school, he was playing football and broke his neck. He was in traction and in the hospital for a while. He was also told he could never play contact sports again, so he felt like he missed out on all of that.
He told himself when he was a kid, “Someday if I ever have kids, I will be at their games. I will be supporting them in their athletics.” By God, he was at the games and he was supporting her too much. You can see why he might have been on her so much, nagging at her about how she was playing and all that. His story got intermingled with hers.
Once he became aware of why he might be triggered and why he might be motivated to do all that, it gave him the ability to then step back a little bit because he realized, “This is not her story. I’ve been there all the time.” He needed reminders from his daughter periodically, like, “Dad, remember. You’re not supposed to be yelling from the stands,” but he got it. He stopped nagging.
I’ve had lots of girls, as a matter of fact, in my counseling practice who have told me stories about how their parents sometimes get on them about their weight. Girls become sensitive to their dad’s comments. I had a girl one time who said her dad came by, pinched her cheeks, and said, “You’re really getting those fat little cheeks now, aren’t you?” This is an eighth-grade girl. That’s devastating. Another dad one time pinched his daughter’s upper arm and said, “You’re adding a little bit of weight there, aren’t you?” It devastated his daughter. Both those dads and others were on them about what they ate. They would give all these lectures about healthy food.
I’ve had some dads who also got really into their kids’ nutrition and diets. It’s okay to talk about things and educate, but this was more than that. This was nagging on them and watching every bite that went into their mouth. If they had a cookie, then their dad was giving them a lecture about how that wasn’t good for them.
Every one of the parents that had that story had been overweight as kids. They were not just a little overweight, but overweight to the point where it affected them. It affected their social life, their dating life, their friendships, and their self-esteem. They always felt like they were less than. They were teased sometimes. It was because of their experience growing up and being overweight.
Some of them were still worried about their weight as adults. They were hyper into working out and nutrition. It’s because of that that they had a hard time not nagging and being too much on their daughters about nutrition and things. Girls are self-conscious enough when they’re in middle school, high school, and beyond about how they look. They’re comparing themselves to other people and all that. The last thing they need is a mom, especially a dad, who’s on them in a negative way.
Girls are self-conscious enough when they're in middle school, high school, and beyond about how they look and how they're compared to other people. The last thing they need is a mom or a dad who's on them negatively. Share on XI’ve also seen in the related stories of a lot of parents who criticize their daughter’s outfits or what they’re wearing, especially the ones who are wearing crop tops or, in the parents’ minds, showing too much cleavage and showing too much midriff. They’re being on them and nagging them about how it’s too sexy and they’re asking to be raped or asking to be harassed by boys. It’s a really tough one for girls to take because they’re 12, 13, 15, or 18. They want to dress how they want to dress.
When I talked to those parents, and I’ve had girls listen to the parents through some mirroring, which I’ll talk about at the end of this episode, oftentimes, what the parents are really saying with the outfits is, “I’m worried about you and your ability to be able to take care of yourself with boys. Are you going to be able to take care of yourself? If you’re wearing an outfit that’s revealing, you’re going to attract boys’ eyes. You’re going to attract boys’ attention whether you like it or not and whatever year it is or not. Even though boys shouldn’t, they are. You’re going to attract boys’ attention in that way. It’s not wrong. Know it and be ready to take care of yourself because you may need to.”
The nagging that comes from parents is them worrying about, “Is my daughter up to it? Can she set boundaries? Can she take care of herself with guys so that she doesn’t get hurt?” We hear all these stories in the news about how many girls get sexually harassed, their boundaries crossed, and raped, especially in high school and college. We’re really scared. I don’t blame parents for having some fear, but we need to understand and have conversations more about, “How are you taking care of yourself?” than criticizing them for what they’re wearing.
Also, along these lines, I’ve had a lot of moms who get on with their daughters not just about what they’re wearing, but how they look. They sometimes get in their daughter’s business about what they’re eating, how they’re not exercising enough, and blah. Also, those girls often will tell me that their daughters talk a lot negatively about their own bodies.
I’ve told this story before in an episode. I’ll repeat it. My wife and I were running a mother-daughter retreat. These were middle school girls and their moms. There were 30 pairs. It was in Lake Como, Italy. We had girls and their moms from all over Europe. It was so awesome. At one point, we did a section on body image with the moms and the daughters together.
At one point, we were talking about the necessity of moms being sensitive to what they say to their daughters about their bodies and also about themselves. All the moms were like, “I would never do that. I would never criticize myself or my daughter. I know better. I understand how hard that is for girls. I would never do that. I got it.” The girls were sitting there with their eyes rolling. We said, “How many of you girls have ever heard your moms talking negatively about their own bodies? Every one of those girls’ hands was up in the air and the moms were shocked. They were like, “I didn’t know that I was saying things like that.”
Sometimes, we don’t realize what comes out of our mouths. That kind of talk, whether it’s about themselves or their daughters, has a lot of effect on how girls might feel about themselves. A girl might look at her mom and think, “My mom’s got a great shape. My mom looks great, but she’s saying that she’s fat, she’s saying she’s ugly, or she doesn’t like the way she looks. If she doesn’t like the way she looks, I wonder what people are thinking about me.” Moms need to be careful about that.
I see a lot of parents of second-semester high school seniors getting on them a lot about all kinds of things. It could be about having a messy room, procrastinating with their homework, and all kinds of stuff. That’s one of those touchpoints I’ve talked about in previous episodes. The girls are approaching a big transition in their life, which is a touchpoint, where they’re going to make a big leap in development by doing something.
They’re going to leave high school and go off into the world in some way. They might go to a trade school. They might go to college. They might join the Military or whatever, but they’re leaving, most of them. That touchpoint for the girls is a lot of uncertainty, some anxiety, and mixed feelings. They’re up and they’re down. They get all stirred up. They’re out of sorts because they’re trying to gather the energy to be able to make that leap.
At the same time, their parents are also going to a touchpoint. They’re like, “The little girl’s going to be leaving the nest. Have we prepared her well enough? Is she going to be able to take care of herself if she’s 1,000 miles away, 500 miles away, or a 2-hour drive away?” There are lots of emotions for both sides, parents and their daughters. A lot of times, those emotions are not expressed in healthy ways, so they end up being anger, struggles, fights, and power struggles. I see that so often because people are not aware of what’s really going on underneath the surface.
I remember one time when my daughter, Kelly, was a high school senior in the second semester. My wife, Anne, was watching Oprah, which back then, was the most popular show. Oprah had a guest who was talking about how women should take care of themselves on college campuses. It was like, “You should never put your drink down and then come back and drink it.” It was a bunch of things.
Anne was watching this and was like, “Kelly, get in here. You need to watch this.” Anne had been giving Kelly lots of talks about things of that sort. She was like, “Remember. Do you know you’re not supposed to ever have a drink and then put it down?” Kelly was like, “Yes, mom, I know that. Plus, you’ve told me 30 times.” Anne was “nagging” here and talking too much about that because of her worries about her going off and whether she would be able to take care of herself.
A lot of times, our concerns and fears about our kids going off into the world end up coming out as being on them and procrastinating about their rooms. Whether or not the room is neat doesn’t really have that much to do with how they’re going to be successful in college or life, but it’s one of those things we feel like we have some control over.
A lot of times, our concerns and fears about our kids going off into the world end up coming out as being on them. Share on XWhen they go off into the world, we don’t have as much control anymore. Sometimes, we’re trying to find some ways to get some sense of control over our kids. It’s not control-control, but helping them and supporting them to be successful. Sometimes, it comes across as nagging about things that aren’t really that important.
I’ve seen some parents who overreact to finding out that their daughter was drinking at a party. They find a can of beer in her bedroom or whatever. The nagging the parents do about that and over-lecturing oftentimes is because there’s a story in their past. They may have had a parent who had an addiction, a parent who was an alcoholic, or a brother or a sister who went through addiction and kinds of problems that caused a whole bunch of anxiety, anger, fighting, and conflict within the family.
This mom or dad watched that and said, “I don’t want to have to go through this again. It was horrible.” When she finds her daughter drinking, she goes right to, “I don’t want my daughter ending up like my sister, my parents, or somebody else in the family.” We end up doing a lot of lecturing, overreacting, and overtalking because of our fear or because of our story.
I did an episode a while back about something called ghosts in the nursery. I hope some of you have read that. Ghosts in the nursery are things that happened to us in our childhoods growing up. They’re unresolved issues and unresolved feelings that we could bring with us that can haunt us in our parenting. Old stories, if you will. Sometimes, those stories will surface around things like the story I told about finding a kid smoking pot, your kid was drinking at a party, or that kind of thing.
I saw a mom who was really pushing her daughter to excel in school. Her daughter was doing fine. She was pretty independent with herself. Her mom was constantly looking at that online portal where she could follow her kids’ progress all the way through the school day where every test grade, every quiz, and every whatever would pop up. If there was a C on a quiz, the mom would immediately nag at her daughter when she walked in the front door after school. She was doing too much and was overworried. Her daughter had it together in my view.
This mother’s story, when I asked her about her past, was that she didn’t do very well in school. She felt like her parents never really encouraged her. They were busy. She was a girl and her parents were much more involved in her brother’s academics than hers. Back in the day, that’s what happened. This mom had never been encouraged and she drifted her way through school.
She tried a semester of college and then dropped out because she wanted some money or something. In her mind, she had feelings about how she shouldn’t have done that. She felt a lot of regret. She felt that because of her lack of education, she had to settle for jobs that she didn’t like. These were jobs that were boring. She didn’t want that for her daughter. She wanted her daughter to have the best opportunities. She wanted her daughter to have more opportunities than she has and she had, so she was on her daughter 24/7, if you will.
The other thing I’ve learned in talking to parents and listening to parents is that it’s hard sometimes for parents to know how to support their kids academically. The world of jobs and things is so much different than our experience. It’s so much different than it was many years ago. Sometimes, it’s hard to know how to support our kids. Sometimes, our support becomes over-support because of our fear about, “Is he or she going to be successful?”
I have one more quick story. I saw this girl about a few months ago. She had a sad story because she was living with her grandparents. Her mom, when she was a little girl when she was 4 or 5, suddenly took off. She had addiction problems or drug problems. She was somewhere on the East Coast for four years with almost no contact with her daughter. There were almost no phone calls. She dropped out of her life, so this girl went and lived with her grandparents. They were pretty elderly too. Her grandfather had early-onset Alzheimer’s.
All of a sudden, when this girl was about ten, her mom partially came back into her life. Her mom moved back when she was in middle school. This mom was nagging a lot and was on her a lot. She was over-parenting because of her guilt. She felt so bad that she had been gone those years. She had a lot of remorse about that.
This girl learned to take care of herself. She had a grandmother who had parented her, but her grandmother was distracted a lot with her husband and all that, so this girl learned to make her own way and take care of herself. All of a sudden, her mom is swooping in and trying to over-parent her. She’s like, “Where have you been for the last six years? I’ve been taking care of myself. I’m not going to listen to you.” I’m not sure if she ever exactly said those words, but that’s what her actions and her attitude were about. It made a lot of sense to me. Her mom was over-parenting because of her guilt. The story under the surface sometimes triggers us to nag, get on our kids too much, and over-parent, if you will.
Encouraging Effective Communication
I work with girls a lot in my counseling practice, retreats, and summer camps to learn how to deal with their parents differently. When their parents are nagging or on them, a lot of times, the girls’ reactions make it worse. They yell at their parents. They get into a power struggle. They shut down. They’re like, “You can’t make me do my homework. You think you can. You can be on me and nag, but I won’t turn it in,” or, “I won’t try on the tests.” A lot of times, the girls end up shooting themselves in the foot as a way of trying to gain some sense of control.
What I encourage them to do instead is to listen to their parents. They need to say, “I hear you’re concerned about me wearing this outfit. I don’t understand. Tell me why.” When the parent says, “Blah,” I tell the girls, “Mirror them. Don’t argue. Don’t interrupt. Give them time to give you a paragraph and then say, “What I heard you say is you’re worried about me because you think this is going to attract boys’ attention and I might end up getting hurt. Is that what you’re saying?” The parents will say, “Yes.” The girls say, “Tell me more. I don’t get it.” The parents are like, “I’ve seen all these stories in the news about college campuses.” If a girl can mirror their parents like that, what ends up happening to the parent’s energy is it usually dissipates. It starts going down.
As they’re unlayering, if you will, they can end up oftentimes getting to, “This is the real issue. I’m worried because my father was an alcoholic. There’s a family history. I went through this with my sister. I was overweight my whole middle school and high school years. I had a hard time with being teased and not having friends. I don’t want the same thing for you.” That helps for girls to go, “I get it. That makes sense why you have so much energy about this, but I don’t think you need to.” It doesn’t mean you agree with them. It means, “I understand you better.”
That’s a huge piece for girls and boys, to learn to understand why their parents might be nagging something more than the obvious. It’s not about your messy room. It’s not about, “You didn’t turn a homework assignment in.” There is oftentimes something a little bit more important and deep underneath the nagging. If they can get that, they can understand better and are less likely to react and be triggered by it.
It also helps if parents can learn before they have the talk with their daughter about, “Your room is so messy,” or, “You’re not turning your homework in,” or, “I don’t like your outfit.” When they can sense they’re being triggered in some way and they’re starting to get some energy up, they take a quick break, check-in, and say, “What’s going on? Why am I so worried about this?”
You can learn to, in a sense, have some self-reflection about, “There might be an issue here that’s causing me to be so upset by this and my daughter is reacting. We’re getting into power struggles. I don’t want that. Let me check in to see if I have an issue about this or anything I can uncover that I can then have some awareness about, and then maybe watch my energy. Self-reflection would be really important.
Sometimes, when I’m working with girls in camps, retreats, or my office, and I used to do this with adults when my wife and I years ago would run weekend retreats for adults, we would say, “Have your daughter in mind,” or, “Have this person who gets under your skin in mind and then fill in the blanks. What I see in my daughter or what I see in the other person that I also see in me is fill in the blanks.”
I used to be triggered by guys who I thought were being cocky or guys who, in my mind, were too out there, cocky, and too assertive. I became aware at a retreat a long time ago that when I was a kid growing up, it wasn’t okay to ask for things. I had seven siblings. There was no extra money. I wore hand-me-downs from my two older brothers for my whole life.
Sometimes, they had holes in the bottom of my football cleats and things. If I asked for a new pair of football shoes, I got lots of stories about, “Who do you think your father is? Nelson Rockefeller? Do you think money grows on trees?” I interpreted that as saying, “If you were a good boy, you wouldn’t ask. You should keep quiet and go along.” I grew up with the scarcity mentality that there’s not enough.
If I saw people as an adult who were really good at asking for what they wanted and were very assertive, sometimes aggressive, or whatever, I interpreted that as being too much. I saw it in those guys who were being assertive and out there, “I wish I was more like that.” I became aware of how sometimes it was holding me back, and I wished I was more like that.
Instead of saying to myself, “I need to work on that issue and I need to start taking care of my scarcity mentality,” what I said was, “What a jerk. I pointed the finger away from me at them until I became aware on a retreat one time of what was going on. I then pointed the finger at me and said, “I need to work at being more assertive. I need to start learning to ask for what I want. It’s okay for me to have some needs.”
The same thing may happen to you. There may be something your daughter is triggering in you. Maybe you wish you were more like them. Your daughter is very outgoing, puts herself out there, and sets boundaries. You sometimes may criticize her for being too bossy when in reality, what you’re saying is, “I wish I was more assertive like that,” or whatever it might be. Try to uncover maybe what is going on that’s triggering you about your daughter in the way they act, the way they behave, the way they look, or whatever. Check-in with yourself and say, “Is this something I need to clean up about myself?”
When I cleaned up the part about asking for what I wanted and started doing a way better job of that, those guys didn’t trigger me anymore because it wasn’t about them. They were mirroring something about me. That’s something that you can do with your daughter. You could be like, “It’s because of my energy around this that she’s mirroring something to me that I might want to learn about myself. Either I might want to be more like that or she’s reminding me of my younger sister who was like that and then got in lots of trouble.” There’s something there that’s about us, and get clear about that.
Also, sometimes, it’s not what we say to our kids. It’s how we say it and how many times we say it. Our tone of voice, our mood, and our range, if you will, are important. I teach parents of kids to adapt to what I call my wife and I’s discipline mantra. It goes like this, “Agreements with immediate, kind, firm follow through with no games.” These are agreements being made with your sons and daughters. You’re giving them input and talking things through until you get a clear agreement. When the time comes, it’s an immediate, kind, firm follow through without games.”
The games is the nagging part or the reminding part. You follow through. You’re like, “We’ve already talked this through. I’m not willing to talk about or argue about it.” You follow through. You avoid all the nagging, the yelling, and the going on and on and on. You leave that out, but you follow through. That’s one way to avoid nagging. You don’t need to because you’ve given yourself the time upfront to get clear about the agreement. The talking’s over. It’s then about following through with your boundaries. That could be an important step for parents to help them avoid the nagging.
I hope this helps you. If you have a lot of energy about some issue around your daughter and you end up over-parenting, talking too much, nagging, reminding, and all that, then besides the discipline part about the ineffectiveness of the nagging and teaching kids about, “It takes six times before I mean it,” sometimes, there’s a deeper issue involved. It is something that’s causing us to be over-worried. It brings up fears about our kids. We tend to sometimes do too much, talk too much, and over-parent because of that. When you catch that energy, check in with yourself, “What’s this about for me?”
The Key Takeaway
It’s like that dad at the talk who realized, “I miss my daughter.” Instead of going to her and saying, “You’re always up in your room and you’re never with the family,” you could sit her down and say, “I miss you. I know you’re a teenager, and I know you want to spend time in your room. I get it. I want some time too. How can we create that?” If you came across in that way, your daughter would listen. You guys could have a conversation about ways you could connect. Take care of your issue. If it’s about how you were overweight as a kid, then handle your self-image issue. Don’t add that to your daughter’s plate. Don’t add the too-shy thing to their plate. Keep your story with you so that it doesn’t cause you to have too much energy about their issue.
I heard a story one time about this mom who wanted her daughter to come into the kitchen for something. She said, “Honey, come into the kitchen. Honey, come into the kitchen. Honey, I said come into the kitchen.” Her little kid walks into the kitchen and says, “I’m sorry, Mom. I didn’t hear you the first two times.” That’s a kid who has been trained to need three reminders. Don’t do that. Stop nagging. Stop reminding. Do more self-reflection. Do more learning about you and what you might be bringing to the party. Take care of that and you’ll find that you won’t need to do all the reminding and the nagging.
Stop nagging, stop reminding, do more self-reflection, and do more learning about yourself and what you might be bringing to the party. Take care of that. You'll find that you won't need to do all the reminding and the nagging. Share on XI hope this helps. This might be a good one to pass on to your friends because we all nag. We all, at different times, do too much talking, too much nagging, over-worry, sometimes over-parent, and micromanage. We’ve talked about that in some previous episodes. The helicopter parent, we’re all sick of hearing about that, but there is some truth to it. Take care of yourself. Take care of your parts. You’ll make your parenting a lot more fun and less draining. You’ll have more quality time instead of nagging time.
I will be back here soon with a brand-new episode. My website is DrTimJordan.com. Also, you’ll find information there about the six books that I’ve written. All the previous episodes are on there. You’ll also see some little short videos about different topics I’ve done. Also, there’s a whole page for summer camps and weekend retreats. All the stuff that we do is on the website, so check it out at DrTimJordan.com. I appreciate you coming by, especially you people who are as far away as Australia, Ireland, and other places around the world. Thanks so much for tuning in. I’ll be back here with another episode.