You’ve landed on Mars and have been there for over a month now. You’ve gathered your samples, taken videos of the various crimson views, earth and surrounding stars from that unique viewpoint. You’ve also had some pretty harrowing situations as you’ve discovered Martians do exist!

You’re tired now and you just want to go home… to Earth… when you find that you need the help of the Martians in order to be released from the atmosphere of Mars. Here’s the problem. The Martians don’t speak your language but you keep saying the same thing over and over and over again to them as if doing that will somehow make them understand! Insane huh?

That’s what it like for some parents who find themselves saying the same training lines to their child(ren) over and over and over again. Some people call it nagging. I call it insane. Children are from Mars, parents are from Venus.

Hello, I’m Rowena Starling welcoming you to the Save Your Breath Show where we help parents eliminate the stress and aggravation of parenting. Our show today is about having Integrity and ease in the communications you have with your children, be they wee ones or adults. We are heroes and as such, we need to perform our tasks with finesse and ease. Why? Because that’s what heroes do.

Many parents think that if they say ‘it’, whatever it is, over and over and over again that somehow and eventually, it will get through to their child (or whomever they’re nagging) and the recipient of this badgering will adhere and start to behave the way the parent wants without them having to say it again. But it’s really deeper than that, obviously, because the nagging is not working. If they would just realize that their long-term happiness and health and their child’s current and long-term happiness and health are at stake, they would look for more sane ways to get the resultant behavior they seek. I have a Family System that I’ve developed for my clients that helps eliminate a substantial amount of this need to nag.

Of course, there is some repetition required in training our children or relating to adults. What is saying ‘it’ over and over again meant to accomplish? It’s meant to instill a value and/or an element crucial to healthy survival. For example, when my Son was a little boy, he had this horrible (to me) habit of leaving his toys all over the floor, all over the house.

Have you ever gotten up in the middle of the night in a dark house to go pee and stepped on one of those tiny little sharp toys in your bare feet?!! NOT a pleasant experience. I can’t remember how many times I nagged him to pick up his toys before he goes to bed!

SO, one day when I came home from work and found myself starring at toys all over the floor, I grabbed one of those large black heavy duty trash bags and picked them ALL up, Legos and all and put them into that bag. It was QUITE the haul as this was a 33 gallon bag! I looked like Santa Claus as I swung it over my shoulder and carried it out to the woodshed.

Now, my intention was to have him earn the toys back piece by piece as he showed he would be responsible and pick them up. When he got home from his afterschool program, I waited and waited for him to start to miss his toys and inquire as to where they were… at least, certain ones of them that I thought were his favorites, like the Legos. Days passed. Before I knew it, months had passed! After all, a pretty penny had been paid for all of those toys! The least he could do would be to miss them out loud!!!

Do you know he NEVER asked me where his toys went? Do you also know that I never had to ask him twice to pick up any of his things again? Here’s what I learned: when you promise you’ll enforce a discipline if certain rules are not followed, do it… the first time. I had been threatening to do it for too long… causing myself all kinds of stress and grief.

Why did I want him to learn to pick up his toys without being asked to do so? Well, aside from stepping on them and hurting my feet, he needed to learn to be neat and maintain that kind of living environment from a societal and health standpoint. Being neat trains the mind/brain to be orderly and uncluttered. An uncluttered mind thinks clearly and faster.

From a societal standpoint, an uncluttered mind would help him learn his school assignments efficiently and he’d be easier to live with once he found the right girl in adulthood. From a health standpoint, he would avoid getting his or some other person’s feet hurt and the habit of being neat would carry over into other areas of his life that would eventually require it… like thorough and proper cleanliness in grooming. He’d be in the habit of picking up loose ends and details.

Why else do we engage in the nagging behavior? We do it many times to avoid hitting them. Are you one to threaten corporeal punishment if your instructions are not carried out in a timely manner? Do you threaten and threaten and threaten? There is no integrity in that. You are out of integrity with your word and in the eyes of your child (or your adult offspring) if this is the way YOU behave!

[As an aside here, let me say that corporeal punishment aka spanking and whooping (derivative word is ‘whipping’) are a betrayal of our intelligence. When we are reduced to striking a person (or animal for that matter), it is an insult to our intelligence and a sign of utter dismay. It shows no faith in our thinking abilities and capacities to adapt, regroup and solve a problem.

I know we get tired. I’ve been there… but do you really think violence is the answer? It begets resentment and hatred. Bring Joy to the challenge, make a project of solving a problem rather than exacerbating it!!!

The parent brain is bigger and has more experience here on the planet. Let’s bring our magnificent minds and hearts to bear on problem solving in disciplinary issues. Do the parenting assessment at SaveYourBreath101.com/parenting-assessment if patience and Joy are an issue for you. I’m here to help.]

When we engage nagging, it teaches the other person that we are weak in our word. There’s no strength in it. There’s no integrity and therefore, they lose respect for us. They lose respect for us because we are not telling the truth, threat after threat after threat equals lie after life after lie. Is there any wonder then why you find yourself disrespected not only by your child but by others? The result of the energy of our actions is not limited to individual situations.

How do you stop the need to have to say it over and over again? Make a note of this: Repetition requires review. First of all, make it easy on yourself. Within the context of the Family System I’ve developed, here are a few simple steps that help:

Stop in the moment and breathe. Be easy on yourself and them. Save your breath.Review your instructions and check for, the age appropriateness of them, the clarity of it, the attention span of the child/person at the time (Were they reoccupied?) and your attitude in delivery (the 93% of non-verbal communicated).After finding where the communication broke down from what you discovered in step 2, adjust instructions accordingly, reissue them in the same or another way andHave the offspring repeat to you what they heard you say and why it’s important to do the instruction.

Conversation may ensue. This kind of review opens the door to communication. This a good thing for integrity is built on the moment to moment trust and honesty of our intentions. Our moment to moment trust and honesty is conveyed by demonstrating our respect of THEIR opinion and process as discovered through caring to engage in conversation, however elementary it may seem. Do you know that patience has its own reward?

Stopping in the moment is the initiation of ‘patience’. We like to talk about ‘mindfulness’ as the gateway to stress relief and it is. However, I personally take issue with using the word ‘mindful’ because it feels like an oxymoron. When we think of our minds as ‘full’, we think of it being full of noise, crazy-making, planning, nagging us, complaining, judging and so on. I much prefer ‘mindless’ but still, even THAT suggests being inconsiderate or stupid. ‘Quiet mind’ says it best.

Stopping in the moment initiates the chance to be patient, to stop the mind, have it be quiet, pause, breathe… which promotes the opportunity to relax, a health break. Stress is killing us. Doing this helps kill stress! Marianne Williamson reminds us that “the #1 root of all illness is stress”. Constant repetition slowly (or not so slowly) puts pressure on the brain and raises blood pressure until we blow!!! We blow our health. It prematurely ages us. Do you want to head the uglies off at the pass!

Let me tell you about Hana. Hana’s children are now grown, a man 28 and woman 25. She and their father divorced after 12 years of marriage and co-parented thereafter. When I met her 2 years ago, she was 55, tired, haggard and had basically given up on the joie de vie of life. She looked much older than she was.

As someone successful and considering retirement, she felt she didn’t really have anything to look forward to because her adult children were still giving her grief, worrying her to death with their 20 year old behaviors, i.e. adventures with drugs and random bouts with the law. She and her ex-husband took turns bailing the son out of jail.

Worry and anxiety showed on her face and body. She was argumentative with her now adult children and upon deeper conversation with her she told me that she was often too tired to talk with her kids on their level when they were younger. She spent a significant amount of time when home TRYING to relax with a glass of wine in front of the TV.

She and her then husband argued and fought in front of the kids, argued with the kids… just generally yelling and screaming empty threats continuously right up until the time I met her. Her kids had little respect for her or their dad. Both of them were out of integrity in their dealing with the kids due to guilt on quite a number of fronts.

The truly sad part is, today, THESE days, Hana LONGS for a loving close relationship with her kids. We’ve made SOME progress. We’ve been able to work through her anger and pain with her own father. She’s stopped the yelling matches with her kids, her health is much, much better and her goods looks have come back. The physically ugly effects of the stress she created in her home for a couple of decades due to her lack of disciplinary integrity have subsided.

Now it just a matter of seeing when her kids will come around to the degree she would like. Things are MUCH better now, the lines of communication are open. What she wants now is to receive the deep affection she sees other parents have with their adult progeny. She’s concerned that she’ll die alone and longing still for that connection. They’re coming around, just not as fast as she’d like. After all, the kids need to process two decades of abuse and neglect.

They now have their own set of ‘special circumstances’ to overcome and because they are still comparatively young, they don’t see the need or want to engage the help they so desperately need.

If you find you have trouble wading through what’s necessary to cultivate patience, do the parenting assessment I have at saveyourbreath101.com/parenting-assessment. It starts the process for our complimentary session. This a $250 value for free for a limited time only!

What if you choose to continue the nagging? Well, it’s tiring, stressful, detrimental to your health AND unnecessary. It’s unnecessary because they do hear you! They just don’t care for what you have to say OR how you’re saying it. Save your breath!

Do you choose to continue nagging? Then you get to engage more crazy-making behavior. You get to cultivate a significant amount of resentment from your offspring because you’re talking at them rather than with them and you get to miss awesome opportunities to expand their brains/minds due to missed conversations with them.

You also get to lose something that benefits you that you would have learned from THEM!!! Do you understand that we are not the be all and end all of all conscious knowledge here. Our offspring come here to teach us something also. They bring the future into our homes. They’re the cosmic wisdom of consciousness incarnate as are we. We are to respect each other accordingly.

Do you find your ease and finesse difficult to access? If you were to expand on that part of yourself, how would you go about doing it? Ease and finesse are harbingers of Joy. Let’s have some fun and develop our capacity for them.

Consider this, like our story at the beginning about talking to Martians, our children, other people, are really in their own world. Children, especially, are fresh on the planet from the hinterlands of heaven. They’re having to learn our language. WE are the Martians to them as well.